Best of the Program | Guests: Dave Isay & Michael Shellenberger | 7/9/19

Hey podcasters, great show for you.

Today

we have a little look at how well things are going in New Zealand with their gun grab.

You remember, only one person in their house and their parliament decided, no, no, no, we shouldn't do this.

Only one person out of all the representatives said they shouldn't because it was the voice of the people.

Well, how are the people doing with turning in their guns?

1.5 million guns estimated to be in the hands of New Zealanders.

How many have been turned in since this began?

The number will astound you.

Also, some other things that might just astound you today.

We also have an expert on in nuclear energy and somebody who has really done his research on Chernobyl and says pretty much the entire Chernobyl story on HBO is a lie.

He goes further.

He says it's a very dangerous lie.

And you'll understand all on today's podcast.

You're listening to the best of the Blenbeck program.

So we know that Google and YouTube aren't just silencing conservatives online.

They are also manipulating their algorithms to interfere now with the 2020 election.

This is not me saying this.

This is a guy from Harvard who has been studying it and is actually a Clinton supporter and saw how Google is manipulating algorithms in a very dangerous way.

Also, companies like Verizon and ATT are taking the proceeds from your mobile phone bill and they are funding things like Planned Parenthood, et cetera, et cetera.

The private company, it's their right to do it.

It's also my right to say, I don't want my money going there.

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So years ago, a couple of friends of mine here in New York started something called a conspiracy dinner.

And it was only called a conspiracy dinner because at the time we were all called

conspirators and conspiracy theorists.

Even though,

looks like almost everything we said has come true now, so it's not really a conspiracy.

In fact, we had videotape of it, but anyway, that's a different story.

So, last night, now it's kind of a joke that these, these, that it's called a conspiracy dinner, and it's

super smart people

that

want to get together and just talk frankly about the world.

And

it was fascinating to me last night because

there were two people at the table that were

former liberals that are no longer liberals, a lot of libertarians, and I would say most of them.

In fact, I think the libertarians would consider themselves now

conservatives because they're so tired of libertarians, you know.

Just being

just being worthless on being able to win.

They're just not willing to win, I think.

Anyway, we were talking last night, and

the Republicans better wake up because the Republicans, there was no love at this table at all for the Democrats, for sure.

A lot of love at that table for Donald Trump and zero love for the Republicans.

The Republicans are seen as

useless, totally and completely useless.

And at some point, that thing is going to catch up to them.

Because really, honestly, what are they good for?

I don't know anybody who's even talking about Republicans anymore.

I don't know anybody who's really talking about Congress and excited about this congressman or that congressman or we got to get the congressman.

They all feel that we have done so much in the last 15 years and all of it for

relatively

no payback.

We didn't really get any payback on that.

We didn't get anything

for our hard-earned effort of getting these guys in.

Most of them just kind of flip or wishy-washy or have no power.

So

what's going to happen to the Democratic Party?

Well, I think you could say what's going to happen to both parties.

And the Jeffrey Epstein

scandal,

I think, is really

interesting and important.

Here's a guy that in 2002 had enough political clout to be able to have this thing swept under the rug.

Now,

if you're paying attention to this story,

you will think that there is a possibility that this is all about Donald Trump.

And I think there is that possibility.

I think the media thinks that.

I think they're hoping that they can just make this about Donald Trump and his Secretary of Labor, who was actually the prosecuting attorney down in Florida back in the early 2000s, that kind of made a sweetheart deal unlike any other sweetheart deal I've ever seen.

It was an absolute miscarriage of justice.

And so I think they're trying to make it about him.

But when Nancy Pelosi's daughter comes out and tweets, and I want to get this exactly right, quite likely some of our faves will be implicated in this case.

When Nancy Pelosi's daughter is signaling,

hey,

Democrats, better wake up because some of our favorite people may be implicated.

Yeah.

Yeah, it looks like they might be.

And this, I don't know how this guy survives.

Yesterday, he was in court and he was trying to strike a plea bargain, and they're negotiating very, very tough with him.

They're trying to get him to

flip evidence on the people that he,

who were the people that he was servicing with underage girls.

I'm not sure what's going to happen, but if you're Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton came out yesterday.

Let me give the exact quote from Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton said yesterday,

quote,

this is from his office, President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago or those of which he has been recently charged in New York.

In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Epstein's plane, one to Europe, one to Asia, two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation.

Staff supporters of the foundation and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg of the trip.

Now, this is Clinton's office saying this.

He had one meeting with Epstein in his Harlem office in 2002.

Around the same time, he made a brief visit to Epstein's New York apartment with a staff member and his security detail.

He has not spoken to Epstein in over a decade and has never been to Little St.

James Island, Epstein's ranch in New Mexico, or his residence in Florida.

Okay, so the statement that's going to cause him problem

is staff, supporters of the foundation, and Secret Service detail went along on every leg of those trips.

The problem is, is that Clinton went on at least 26 trips on the plane that was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Now, when you've got a plane and it's called the Lolita Express, I think this is an open secret, don't you?

I think when that's the nickname of the plane.

Between 2003, he said between 2001 and 2003,

I just went on a few of these trips.

Well, 26, according to the FAA logs.

The listed destination of those trips were the Azores, Singapore, Brunei, Norway,

Russia, among others.

On at least five of those excursions, remember,

when you get on a plane, there's a record of it because of your ticket.

When you're on a private plane, you have to have a manifest.

You have to know the names and see the IDs of every single person on board, and it's logged with the FAA.

You can't just bring a friend on the plane.

It's against the law.

You have to have them on the manifest.

So he said that, you know, my Secret Service was with me every time.

But on five of those flights, the flight logs denote that Clinton was not accompanied by any Secret Service personnel.

The former president did occasionally travel in the company of the woman Maxwell.

This is the New York socialite, the one who looks like she's the pimp,

and also Epstein's former assistant, both women previously investigated by the FBI, Florida law enforcement, over concerns they help recruit the underage victims.

Clinton claimed he had one meeting in his Harlem office in 2002 around the same time he made a brief visit to the New York apartment with a staff member and security detail.

The former president stated he had not spoken in well over a decade, never been in many of the locations.

Okay, the problem is

he didn't travel with his security detail on five of the 26

flights that he took with Epstein.

Why did he dismiss the security detail?

Why didn't they go with him?

Could be perfectly innocent, but when you have a guy like Clinton traveling 26 times with a guy like Epstein, you kind of wonder.

I wonder.

Now they're using this to go after Donald Trump with

a line that he gave to,

I'm trying to remember where it was.

See if it says it here.

It doesn't.

Yeah, here it is.

In New York magazine, they did a profile in 2002 of Epstein.

And

this is what Donald Trump said.

I've known Jeff for 15 years.

He's a terrific guy.

He's a lot of fun to be with.

It's even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do.

And many of them are on the younger side.

No doubt about it.

Jeffrey enjoys his social life.

Well, I mean, that's pretty clear.

I mean, he's got a plane called the Lolita Express, and Donald Trump is like, hey, I just want you to know, he likes them young.

That's a problem.

But is it a problem for the president?

Did he get involved at all?

Well, I will tell you this.

Mar-lago, according to a court filing, Mar-a-Lago dumped Epstein from its roster of members because he approached an underage girl there.

She filed a protest, and Trump immediately had him removed from the members list

that's a really good point in his favor is it not

now

here's what this all boils down to an affidavit in New York

her name is Sarah Ransom and she says I'm currently over the age of 18 I reside in the country of Spain.

In 2006, I was 22 years old.

I was living in New York, and I was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by a girl that I had met.

Shortly after meeting Jeffrey, he invited me to fly on his private island to the U.S.

Virgin Islands, which I did.

After that first trip, I traveled to the islands several more times, usually on one of his private planes, always at his direction.

I'm told that my name appears on the flight logs of one or more of those trips.

On a few occasions, Jeffrey also arranged to have me flown to the island on commercial flights.

As it turns out, the primary purpose of those visits

was to

have me have sexual relations

with Jeffrey, Nadia Mikova, and various other girls and guests he brought to the island.

During one of my visits, I met Maxwell.

This is the woman who is

currently...

currently the the madam watching her interact with other girls, it became clear to me she recruited all or many of them to the island.

Once they were there, she appeared to be in charge of their activities, including what they did, who they did it with, and how they were supposed to stay in line.

She assumed the same supervisory role with me as soon as I arrived.

Some of the girls appeared to be 18 or older, but many appeared to be young teenagers.

I recalled seeing a particularly young, thin girl who looked well under 18, and I recall asking her age.

I later learned she was a ballerina, but she refused to tell me her age or let me see her passport.

In addition to spending time with Jeffrey on his island, I spent time with him in New York City.

At his townhouse, I was also, listen to this, I was also lent out by him to his friends and associates to have sex.

Among the people he lent me to was his friend, Alan Dershowitz.

On one occasion, I was in a bedroom at Jeffrey's New York townhouse with Jeffrey and Nadia Makanova.

After a short time, Alan Dershowitz entered the room, after which Jeffrey left the room and Nadia and I had sex with Dershowitz.

I recall specific key details of his person and the sex acts and can describe them in an event it becomes necessary to do so.

I affirm under the penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.

Ah,

wow, that's going to hurt Alan Dershowitz.

Now, Alan Dershowitz says that

I can prove that I was never there.

I don't know how you prove something didn't happen, but he says he can prove that

this is a lie.

Although, you know what this makes me think of was,

isn't there a

I'll have to ask my Scottish friend, but I believe there's a dish

from England that I it's called Spotted Dick.

And I think that is an actual food item.

Don't know why I'm bringing that up because what I'm really thinking about is Michael Jackson.

You remember what happened with Michael?

Michael Jackson?

I'm just saying.

They photographed him, right?

They photographed me.

They photographed me.

They photographed my penis they they photographed it and and they they drew lines around it and um they swatted it around and and i didn't like it what kind of freak would do that what kind of freak

was horrifying it was horrifying

they made me pull my pants maybe with alan dershowitz which yeah that'd be bad thank you that's bad yeah it would be very bad uh now

what they found what they released monday is that they went into Epstein's house and they found at least hundreds, I'm quoting the FBI,

at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of sexually suggestive photographs of fully or partially nude females that appear to be underage.

They were in a locked safe.

He's a sex offender.

He's not supposed to have any of these.

So

he is now saying he will turn evidence, a rumor is, that he will turn evidence

if they just kind of

let him go.

I won't do any more than a year in jail and I'll tell you all of the names involved.

How's this going to work out?

This seems like, doesn't this seem like a mob movie where that guy is the guy who gets the shiv in the eye someplace towards the end of the movie?

Especially when you're dealing with the royal family and American royalty

of both sides of the aisle.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

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Did you see the girl that was licking the ice cream?

Yeah, the blue belt.

And then

put it back in the, in the

it's just the.

What did you think of that?

You know, it's disgusting.

And, and it creates another weird thing that we're going to have to worry about because somebody licked my ice cream.

It got so bad that in some parts of Texas, they've actually got people guarding.

They've locked down the ice cream and you have to go seek out one of the employees to unlock the ice cream so you can buy, you know, half a gallon of ice cream.

Am I the only one that has to take that plastic wrap around

the lid off?

Do they have that on Bluebell?

Because I think

wasn't that one of the things that they were yelling about is, why don't you have one of those plastic wrappers around a top?

I'm trying to think if

you have to.

I don't know.

I usually am not the one that opens the bluebell.

Right, I'm just the one that finishes.

I'm the one.

Yeah, almost everyone.

I'm the one who finishes.

I never open it, but I know if it had something to do with that empty container going into the garbage can after it's been almost licked clean, I can answer that.

So there was a guy, did you see the guy with a scope mouthwash?

Did the same thing?

No.

What do you got?

Spit it back into the jar.

Oh, yeah, and he was just so obnoxious.

Now, here's the thing: one of them,

one of them actually

has the

receipt for the ice cream, and they have her on tape going back.

She licked it, put it away, and then walked off camera.

Then they have her on the store camera going back in, getting that ice cream, and taking it up front and buying it and taking it out of the store.

Which,

you know, is nice to think that they

did.

That they didn't leave.

Right.

We don't know this suspect that has been arrested, but she faces 20 years in prison.

Which for the licking?

That's a little stiff.

That's a little.

I think.

A little severe.

You think?

I think maybe a fine, you know, a public health safety issue fine of some sort, $100 or whatever.

$10,000.

$10,000

are on the table for committing second-degree felony of tampering with a consumer product.

Wow.

Now, this is the Texas code, so I don't know what you get.

I mean, you're lucky you're not hung in Texas.

You screw with bluebell ice cream.

That's true.

I think they can hang you in Texas.

But

20 years in prison, and I'll bet you, Pat, that this comes from the Tylenol scare.

Do you remember that?

Yes.

Yeah.

And I was trying to remember the other day.

The Tylenol scare happened because, well, it was real in one case, I think.

Somebody opened up a Tylenol and

I don't know, laced it with cyanide or something.

Do you remember what was it?

Something like that.

It was definitely tempered with.

Right.

And Tylenol, most people don't know this.

Tylenol should be out of business.

This is the most remarkable recovery of any consumer product I have ever seen.

It was marked as poisonous.

They said, throw all your Tylenol away.

So everybody got rid of their Tylenol because it was poison.

Remember, we've all been x-raying our candy for things that never happened on Halloween.

This actually happened.

They had to get rid of all of it, but it is because of Tylenol that we have the tamper-proof, that we have the seal

on the outside, that we have the foil seal on the inside.

Still no explanation for the cotton.

But that's why we have that.

And I'll bet you she gets 20 years or she's charged with something that could end up with 20 years because of the Tylenol issue.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hey, it's Glenn, and if you like what you hear on the program, you should check out Pat Gray Unleashed.

His podcast is available wherever you download your favorite podcast.

Dave Isse is a friend of ours.

He's the founder and president of StoryCorps.

StoryCorps, if you listen to NPR, you are very well aware of it.

It's something that has been running for a very long time, and it's one of the things I just love listening to.

And Dave came into my office, I don't know, about a year ago.

Less than that, I think.

Less than that.

And said,

we're going to do something new, one small step, and try to bring people together

and have them find their way back to each other and just staying away from politics.

Yeah.

I mean, I think what one small step is about is this.

I mean, when I stepped in,

is this a new studio?

No, these are our, yeah, these are new studios for the Blaze here, yeah.

So, you know, we were talking about how bananas the country is going, right?

And it's about a culture of contempt.

And it's taking the, you know, it's taking the temperature down on this culture of this incredibly dangerous culture of contempt that we have in the country.

Now, I was thinking

as I walked in, I was at

one of the big social media companies last week.

And I was saying that, you know, when we call each other, you know, morons or racists or Nazis, like you can't bully someone into changing their mind, right?

When you call someone a name, it doesn't change them.

It actually hardens their beliefs, right?

And

makes them more extreme.

And I said to this person

at the social media company, we've created a way for billions of times a day, 24 hours a day, we're telling each other we're morons, right?

And it's just dividing us in these ways that are, you know, an existential threat.

It's so funny, Dave, because I...

I don't think people are like that in real life.

When I travel America, that's not the way they are.

They're still living neighbor to neighbor.

But we go inside our house and all of a sudden we become an animal online.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think, I mean, what you saw when I, I mean, you've been thinking about this, obviously.

And when I came in, I mean, it was incredibly generous of you to invite me in, but you said, like, I totally get it.

Like,

and, you know, and it's just, it's, in the last year, it's just gotten, it's just gotten worse.

You know, and we have to, it's enough already.

You know, we've got to figure this thing out or, you know,

the very fabric of our democracy is at risk, I think.

I agree with you.

I think that there is a

you're not, again, we're all involved in it, but there are catalysts on both sides that are really interested in keeping us divided.

You know, we have a political system that learned long ago, the more I divide,

the stronger I get.

And And until we solve that, I don't know how, or until we just reject that, until we say, I'm just not going to play that game anymore.

And I think more and more people are doing that.

Yeah.

Well, I hope so.

And, you know, it's really,

it's tilting at windmills to some extent, you know?

And

I mean, there is definitely a, you know, there's a fear-industrial complex.

And, you know,

the truth is, as you all know, like the only truth is love, right?

Full stop.

That's it.

You know, and that's getting buried.

We have to just start telling the truth.

It's weird because, you know, you say there's a truth,

what did you call it?

A fear-industrial complex.

Fear industrial industrial complex.

Okay, but you know, that's it, right?

That's what you're talking about with politics, right?

But it is, but it is strange because there are things to be concerned about.

So it's this weird thing that

you say there's a fear-industrial complex, which I absolutely agree with.

But because of that,

there are real problems that are enormous.

Absolutely.

You know, we are, you started with, you know, we could lose the Republic.

We absolutely could, and I think we're really close to that if we don't turn around soon.

But that's not fear-mongering.

That's telling the truth.

It's because of

a lot of the fear-mongering.

I read something

from somebody right after the election of Donald Trump, and it was from a Democratic operative, and he said,

you know, in some ways we have to blame ourselves because we took men like Mitt Romney and said he was the Antichrist.

That's right.

And when I say, I mean, obviously there are, of course, there are things to be afraid of, but the fear industrial complex is about making us hate each other.

And that's not the answer.

That's never the answer.

You know, we have to, you know, the story core, which you mentioned earlier, which I run, which is this

project that just brings people together to talk to each other, have these conversations that go to the Library of Congress.

It's built on the idea that, you know, none of us are the worst thing that we've ever done.

You know, assume the best intentions in other.

And if you have these kind of golden rules undergirding, the country can move ahead.

And if not, we just, we, we, you know, it's, it's, this is, you look at the last week, the last two weeks, some of the things that happened, it's like, it's like Vladimir Putin's like dream.

Oh, it is.

It is absolutely.

It's like, like, he couldn't imagine things going better

for this country from his perspective.

But one of the things that Story Court does is

as we get rid of the golden rule, as we get rid of church or God or whatever it is that

has been the governor on us, you've replaced that with history.

So when people enter the booth, they're not willing to say,

I think if people really understood your tweets will never go away.

So your children and great-grandchildren, those are all being put in the National Archives as well.

Those things will be able to be seen forever.

When you go into a Story Corps booth, you know this is being recorded for the National Archives.

And people are on their best behavior.

It's that governor that we seem to have lost.

That's right.

I mean, it's the, you know, if we live in this world of complete impermanence, everything, nothing matters, right?

You write to it, you don't think about it.

But when you come into a Story Corps booth, your great-great-great-grandchildren are going to listen to you.

So, you know, when I was at the social media company, I said, you know, half a million people have participated in StoryCorps, which is nothing in social media numbers, but nothing's ever got, like no one has ever behaved badly.

And the person I was talking to said, that really like strains the boundaries of belief.

Yeah.

But it's true, you know, and, you know, I think we just have to.

We have to remember who we are as people.

And that truth that, I mean, I know, that you know, that, you know, all of our lives, all of our stories matter equally and infinitely.

And that's all that matters.

So tell me what you brought us today.

So I I have a couple of stories.

Do we have time for two?

I think we might have time for two, yes.

Okay.

So

this first one is

Story Corps does do a lot of history.

And this passed a week ago was the anniversary.

And I have a personal story associated with this we can talk about.

My dad was, I found out when I was when I was in my 20s, was gay.

And he, and I was, it totally took me by surprise.

And as my brother said, our nuclear family blew up.

And

he ended up becoming like a guy, he was a psychiatrist.

He was an amazing, amazing guy.

And when he told me about that he was gay, he mentioned the Stonewall riots.

Do you know what that is?

Okay, so 50 years ago, last week, there was a riot at a bar in Greenwich Village that led to the beginning of the gay rights movement.

It used to be illegal to have gay bars.

And he told me about this, and I went out and I interviewed the people who had been there 30 years ago.

And then my dad actually ended up dying very quickly of cancer on the anniversary of Stonewall a few years ago.

And this year's the 50th anniversary.

So we did a bunch of stories about what it was like to be gay before.

1969.

So this is one of those stories.

It's a dairy farmer, the kid of a dairy farmer in rural Washington in the 1950s, who came to Storycorps with his daughter to talk about a school assembly he performed at when he was a teenager.

Okay, here it is.

I'm riding to school with my oldest brother, and on the way to school, I'm putting glitter all over my face.

And my brother said, what in the hell are you doing?

I said, I'm putting on my costume.

He said, well, I wouldn't be caught dead wearing that.

So he dropped me off at the school, and he called my dad up, and he said, dad, I think you better get up there.

This is not going to look good.

So my dad drove up to the high school, and he had his farmer jeans on, and they they had cow crap on him and he had his clodhopper boots on.

And when I saw him coming, I ducked around the hall and hid from him.

And it wasn't because of what I was wearing.

It was because of what he was wearing.

So the assembly goes well and I climb in the car and I'm riding home with my father.

And my father says to me,

I was walking down the hall this morning and I saw a kid that looked a lot like you ducking around the hall to avoid his dad, but I know it wasn't you because you would never do that to your dad.

And I squirmed in my seat and I finally busted out and I said, well, dad, did you have to wear your cow crap jeans to my assembly?

And he said, look, everybody knows I'm a dairy farmer.

This is who I am.

And he looked me square in the eye.

And then he said, now, how about you?

When you're a full-grown man, who are you going to go out with at night?

And I said, I don't know.

And he said, I think you do know.

And it's not going to be that McLaughlin girl that's been making goo-goo eyes at you, but you won't even pick up the damn telephone.

Now, I'm going to tell you something today, and you might not know what to think of it now, but you're going to remember when you're an adult, don't sneak.

Because if you sneak like you did today, it means you think you're doing the wrong thing.

And if you run around and spending your whole life thinking that you're doing the wrong thing, then you'll ruin your immortal soul.

And out of all the things a father in 1959 could have told his gay son, my father tells me to be proud of myself and not sneak.

My reaction at the time was to get out in the hayfield and pretend like I was as much of a man as I could be.

And I remember flipping 50-pound bales three feet up into the air going, I'm not a queer.

What's he talking about?

But he knew where I was headed.

And he he knew that making me feel bad about it anyway was the wrong thing do.

I had the patron saint of dads for sissies.

And no, I didn't know it at the time, but I know it now.

So, Dave, tell me what else you brought.

So we, you know, a lot of people are thinking about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing this month.

This is a space story, and it speaks to what happens when you have an archive as big as StoryCorps.

So when it was the 25th anniversary of the shuttle disaster, we went to see if anybody had come in to talk about it.

And the brother of one of the astronauts had come to StoryCorps Corps to remember Ron McNair, who was the second African American to fly in space and one of the seven astronauts to die when the Challenger exploded in 1986.

So this is his brother?

This is his brother coming to talk about growing up with Ron in Lake City, South Carolina.

Here you go.

When he was nine years old, Ron, without my parents or myself knowing his whereabouts, decided to take a mile walk from our home down to the library, which was, of course, public library, but not so public for black folks when you're talking about 1959.

so as he was walking in there all these folks were staring at him because they were white folk only and they were looking at him saying you know who's this negro

so he politely positioned himself in line to check out his books well this old librarian she says this library is not for colored

he said well i would like to check out these books she says young man if you don't leave this library right now I'm going to call the police.

So he just propped himself up on the counter and sat there and said, I'll wait.

So she called the police and subsequently called my mother.

Police came down, two burly guys come in and say, well, where's the disturbance?

And she pointed to the little nine-year-old boy sitting up on the counter.

He says, man, what's the problem?

So my mother, in the meanwhile, she was called.

She comes down there praying the whole way there.

Lord, Jesus, please don't let them put my child in jail.

And my mother asked the library, what's the problem?

Well, he wanted to check out the books.

And you know, your son shouldn't be down here.

And the police officer said, you know, why don't you just give the kid the books?

And my mother said, he'll take good care of them.

And reluctantly, the librarian gave Ron the books.

And my mother said, what did you say?

He said, thank you, ma'am.

Later on, as youngsters, a show came on TV called Star Trek.

Now, Star Trek showed the future where there were black folk and white folk working together.

And I looked at it as science fiction because that wasn't going to happen really.

But Ronald saw it as science possibility.

You know, he came up during a time when there was Neil Armstrong and all of those guys.

So how was a colored boy from South Carolina wearing glasses, never flew a plane, how was he going to become an astronaut?

But Ron was the one who didn't accept societal norms as being his norm.

I mean, that was for other people.

And

he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise.

You know what's amazing?

Both of those stories are 1959.

They both start 1959.

Yep.

And how much we have changed.

And

that's the frustrating thing, I think, for so many people is we're not those people anymore.

We're just not those people.

And

we can't step back far enough to recognize, look at the progress we've made.

Some real good progress.

Yeah.

And I should say, just just with

when you talk about progress, that library ended up being named for Ron McNair.

So now that is the Ron McNair library.

Yeah, I mean, there's that great line also, you know, from Maya Angelou from Clinton's first inauguration, that history, despite its wrenching pain, you know, can't be unlived, but it faced with courage need not be lived again.

We have to look at what it was and face it and make sure that it never happens again.

And that's the country moving forward.

It's the, you know, tell the truth.

You

Just tell the truth.

I've had a problem.

One of my favorite, one of my heroes is Winston Churchill.

Yeah.

Unless you read about him in India.

Right.

And then you're like, whoa, who is this guy?

He's both.

He's both.

It's the trajectory that people are on.

Are they getting better?

Are they getting worse?

And that's what we need to do.

To be able to come together, we have to say, look, We were here.

We're now here.

We still have a lot of work to do,

but we're on the right trajectory.

We have to keep moving in the right direction.

Dave, thank you so much.

God bless.

Good to see you.

StoryCorps,

if you want to be involved with some of these stories, just go to storycore.org or one small step.

Yeah, slash one small step.

Okay.

And this is about having conversations across the divides.

And we want to get as many, like, we're going to start scaling in next year

and really try and have this be everywhere across the country.

But, you know, we'd love

the Glenn Bechel audience to be pioneers in this.

And really start with us.

Thank you.

Good.

It is

storycore.org.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

There was a story today.

You know who Steve Wozniak is?

Oh, yeah.

Co-founder of Apple.

Okay.

So Steve, yeah, co-founder of Apple.

So Steve Wozniak came out

just

this week, and he said, everybody has to cancel Facebook.

He said, you know,

some people can't because it's their business, et cetera, et cetera.

He said, but the average person can, and you have to find a way to get off of Facebook.

Get off of Facebook.

He did.

He got off a year ago.

It is.

You did?

He did.

Wozniak did.

Yeah, he did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would get off.

If it wasn't for business,

I would get off as well.

He says there are many different kinds of people, and some of the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy.

But to many like myself, my recommendation is to most people, you should figure out a way to get off of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg buys all the houses around his for privacy.

He buys extra lots in Hawaii around his house for privacy.

But oh, our privacy hasn't been respected and watched over.

He says they are listening to you, they are watching.

He says, People think they have a level of privacy that they no longer have.

Why don't they give people a choice?

Let me pay a certain amount, and

you'll keep my data more secure and private than everyone else handling it for handing it over to advertisers.

He said, Everything, everything about you, they can measure your heartbeat with lasers now.

They can listen to you with a lot of different devices.

Who knows if my cell phone is listening right now?

But I know Alexa has already been in the news a lot.

You should worry.

You're having conversations that you think are private or think are to yourself.

You're saying words that really shouldn't be listened to because you're not expecting them to be listened to by other ears.

There's almost no way to stop it.

That's Steve Wozniak.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hey, it's Glenn, and you're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

If you like what you're hearing on this show, make sure you check out Pat Gray Unleashed.

It's available wherever you download your favorite podcasts.

Michael Schellenberger is a guy who on paper should not be on this program.

He shouldn't want to come on this program and I shouldn't want to have him.

But I think he's an honest broker of information.

He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress.

He has been an environmental and social justice advocate for over 25 years.

Again, not something that I look for in a resume on people that I have on the program.

He is also Time Magazine's Hero of the Environment, Green Book Award winner, founder, and president, as I said, of Environmental Progress.

But he is not just a climate guru, he's an honest climate guru.

And I can't have a conversation with people if they claim to be for the planet and against global warming and they're crying catastrophe unless you do at least one of these two things.

You're a vegan or you understand that nuclear power is the only option that we really have that would be able to replace the energy that we would lose.

Michael Schellenberger is a strong advocate for nuclear energy.

Welcome to the program, Michael.

How are you?

Good.

Thanks so much for having me on, Glenn.

You bet.

So did you think twice when we called?

No, not

at this point.

No, I mean,

I like talking to people that I don't agree with on everything.

That's what America's all about, isn't it?

I mean, I think we've lost sight of that.

But it takes, Michael, you know, for to have a conversation like this, it takes somebody that is willing to

be honest, at least with their self.

And if you hear something that

you agree with that disagrees with your point, you have to be honest enough to go, huh, I didn't know that.

I have to look into that more.

And if that's true, I might be wrong.

And I don't think a lot of people are willing to do that, especially when it comes to nuclear energy.

It's crazy how people are just zealots against it.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, I was anti-nuclear for most of my life.

You know, I didn't I wasn't a deep thinker in my opposition to it.

But, yeah, when you start doing the arithmetic, very simple math of how do you transition away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy, there's just no way to do it without nuclear power.

And that became clear to me about 10 years ago.

And ever since then, honestly, when people ask me if I'm concerned about climate change, what I say is, well, tell me whether or not we're expanding or shrinking nuclear, because if we were doing a lot of nuclear around the world and expanding it in the United States, I probably wouldn't be as concerned about climate change.

So for me, the relationship is quite direct.

The more nuclear power,

the cooler the planet, the

less nuclear power,

the more heat we're going to have.

I have to tell you, Michael, 10, 11 years ago, GM lent me one of their hydrogen cars, which was one of the first things the Obama administration did was make sure that that was shelved.

And I thought this was great only because the power,

just by leaving the rods out at night, all of the hydrogen we could possibly want, which is clean, could be made in a nuclear power plant while everybody is asleep.

We'd have almost an endless supply of hydrogen, Where the way we have these electric cars, you're still burning coal to make

the little thing in your walls, not a little magic box.

That power is coming from something.

Yeah, I mean, what I worry about, I mean, basically the trend over time has been to have lighter and lighter vehicles.

So there's a process called dematerialization where we just use less natural resource as we become wealthier in the society, and that's a really positive trend for the environment.

So yeah, what I worry about, because I live in California and there's just a lot of Teslas, they're really heavy cars, so there's a huge amount of material throughput, a lot of mining, a lot of resource extraction for those cars.

Hydrogen fuel cells, totally different, much lighter.

They can travel much farther.

There's a bunch of barriers to getting there, but for sure, I think over the next century, we're going to be moving towards some amount of hydrogen fuel cells.

All right.

So I want to come back to nuclear energy, but the reason why I wanted to have you on today is I heard an interview with you talking about HBO's Chernobyl.

Now, I watched that thing and like a dope

took it to be...

I mean, how could they possibly say, no, no, no, no, there are some things that we changed and there are some things that aren't exactly right, but it's really only like that one scientist represents a group of scientists.

No, when I'm listening to you, almost everything that I saw was not right in Chernobyl.

Anything that counted.

Can you take us through this?

Yeah, I mean, it's a very terrifying show.

I think it's understandable that anybody would watch it, would be anti-nuclear by the end of it.

And what was so galling about it is that the creator of it, NHBO, repeatedly claimed that it was based on science, based on facts, and that they only embellished some kind of character details, things that were really unimportant.

Well, so and I was honestly, I've written so much on Chernobyl because Chernobyl just terrified me when it occurred.

I was about 15 at the time, 1986, and it was actually one of the main when I changed my mind about nuclear,

what really changed it was when I went and read the actual science about Chernobyl from the World Health Organization.

The United Nations has done many studies.

And the first thing you discover when you read the science is just how few people died.

So three people were killed in the fire, the night, the fire and the explosion the night of the accident.

And then 28 firefighters died several weeks later from acute radiation syndrome.

Although one of the most interesting findings when you read the material is that it's not clear how many of the firefighters died from acute radiation syndrome and how many of them may have died just from being burned from exposure to the fire.

They may have survived if they hadn't had

hadn't been burned by the fire as well because that opened up their immune systems to

made them more vulnerable to acute radiation syndrome.

And then after that,

all we know is that there will be an estimated sixteen thousand cases of thyroid cancer.

And while that may sound like a lot, the mortality rate from thyroid cancer is about one percent.

So very few people die from it.

It's easy to treat.

So that brings you to about 160 deaths over an eighty year lifetime.

So you're looking at something around two hundred deaths total, which is just I mean, in any comparison to anything, is nothing.

I mean, we estimate that somewhere around seven million people die every year from ordinary air pollution, smoke, not just fossil fuels, but burning wood and dung in poor countries.

The number of deaths from from people looking at their smartphones while walking or driving in their car, it appears to be somewhere around 4,000.

In fact, the death rate from pedestrian deaths and automobile accidents has gone up.

That's just annually in the United States.

So, I mean, 200 deaths total, and meanwhile, no deaths from radiation from Three Mile Island, no deaths from radiation from Fukushima.

It turns out that nuclear is not only the safest way to make electricity, it's literally one of the safest technologies in our society.

I mean, it's so shocking.

It's sort of so shocking, it's understandable that nobody believes it because when you watch the HBO special, you think that thousands of people must have died, and the reality is just very different from that.

So

first, let me just get this out of the way, and then I'd like to take you through the movie step by step.

The obvious thing to say when you hear what you just said was, well, the Russians hid it all.

The Russians didn't track it.

Because HBO says about the Bridge of Death, which I know you'll get into,

that they didn't track it, so we don't know for sure.

But the Russians weren't the only ones interested in tracking this,

right?

It was the international community.

Yeah, I mean, this is really outrageous.

This is a very easy fact to check.

There were many, many studies, dozens, hundreds of studies published in peer-reviewed journals done by foreign scientists going to Chernobyl within days of the accident.

For many years afterwards, I interviewed many of the top radiation scientists in the world, including the founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, which collects tissue samples so that we can really carefully track how many people were injured or harmed.

I mean, it's literally one of the best studied industrial accidents in human history.

And the the people who studied it were our academics with no association with the Russian or the Soviet government at the time, you know, incredibly prestigious experts.

Sometimes people say things like, well, we really don't know.

Radiation is so mysterious.

That's complete nonsense.

We've been studying radiation's effect on health since 1900.

Marie Curie and her husband

studied it, you know, 120 years ago.

So we know a huge amount about the impacts of radiation.

So the idea that there's all this uncertainty or that there was some sort of a cover-up is just complete nonsense.

So

let's take one of the big things, and that is the firefighter that's in the hospital and his wife comes.

There's a couple of things that are completely flipped upside down.

For instance,

the nurses are warning her.

Don't get close to him.

Don't go beyond that plastic

cover because the radiation will kill you when indeed the truth is the exact opposite.

She was probably killing him by going past that plastic sheet.

That's right.

It's pretty outrageous, this part of it, which is this depiction of radiation as contagious, as a kind of virus.

And on the one hand, you kind of go, you know, I have some people kind of go, hey, it's just a TV show.

But here's the problem.

The fears of radiation and the fears of the people who were exposed to radiation are deadly.

In fact,

in all the public health reports,

it's really sad how many people's lives were hurt.

People slipped into depression, anxiety.

It turns out that it's really bad for your health to have doctors or others tell you that you've been contaminated, that you're poisonous, to be ostracized from your community, which is what happened both in Chernobyl and in Japan.

We know it's just horrible to be stigmatized, to be

ostracized.

And so we see huge mental health consequences of that.

So yeah, I mean, basically,

if you have acute radiation syndrome,

you

know, those firefighters that were exposed to the radiation, once their clothes are removed and they are cleaned, there is no risk of any radioactive particles affecting anybody.

So, yeah,

so hang on just a second.

Yeah, go ahead.

I need to take a break and then I'm going to come back because this is fascinating, especially when it gets down all the way down to the baby.

You'll see, you'll begin to see how off this special really is.

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