Ep 32 | Arthur Brooks | The Glenn Beck Podcast

This is going to be a podcast you will want to listen to all the way to the end.

For 12 years, our guest was a professional French hornist, which I don't even know if that's what you call it.

He's a guy who played the French horn.

Is that a hornist?

Because it sounds bad.

Anyway, he was with the Annapolis Brass Quintet, then at City Orchestra of Barcelona.

Then he was a professor of French horn.

After that, he worked as a professor at Syracuse University, where he taught economics and social entrepreneurship.

I guess the horn thing didn't work out.

Currently, he is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, but he is leaving that position this summer, and he's going to begin teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.

His latest book is Love Your Enemy, How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt.

It came out in early March.

It's a bestseller on the USA Today and New York Times list.

He's also a a columnist for The Washington Post, host of the podcast The Arthur Brooks Show, best-selling author of 11 books on topics including the role of government, fairness, economic opportunity, happiness, and the morality of free enterprise.

Don't miss a minute of this episode with Arthur Brooks.

What's happened to us?

Who are we today?

We're the Americans we always were.

But it's a hard time.

It's a hard time because

after a financial crisis and all the stresses and strains, the belief that people in Washington, people who are in charge, have left us behind, we get a dignity gap.

There's a lot of despair when you travel around this country, and that despair is metastasized into something really dangerous, which is contempt, the belief that somebody who disagrees with you is utterly worthless.

The populism in Washington, the despair in the country,

the fact that economic growth has largely been focused on just the top 20% of the income distribution, this is kind of made-up nasty mix of circumstances, an ecosystem that's really dangerous.

Now put in social media and anonymity.

All this together has created this environment that that we see today where we're still Americans.

We're just not our best selves.

Are we misjudging each other?

For instance, the border.

I'm convinced that the cry for a border wall is not really a cry for a border wall.

It's a cry, it's a,

I have trusted you to take care of our problems.

I've trusted you that you cared about somebody coming in with illitent, somebody coming in with drugs,

people coming in and doing nefarious things.

I trusted you for so long and you keep telling me you want to fix it and then you don't.

I want a wall, not because I'm afraid of America, because of Mexicans.

I want a wall because I don't believe you actually mean this.

And if I don't have a permanent wall, you can do whatever you want.

But when the next guy comes in, or when you don't have to be re-elected, you're going to stop taking care of these things.

And I think a lot of the frustration that's happening that is

being made into, oh, you're a racist,

is actually,

I don't trust the government anymore.

I don't trust...

people in power anymore.

And I want something fixed that used to be common sense.

You know, there are a lot of issues like this that happen in times of real political polarization, where it's not about the specific political case at hand.

These are avatar issues.

You know, you'll see, by the way, the left on the political left in America, we're talking effectively about open borders.

You know, the Democratic Party doesn't want open borders.

They've never talked about open borders before, but the reason they are is to be in contrast to what they think Trump is talking about.

And the people who support Donald Trump are saying what they're saying about the wall to be in contrast to what they believe the other side believes.

And, you know, in these times of incredible polarization, we do theater.

This is kind of, and again, I understand it's important to have sovereignty.

I understand it's important to have rule of law.

But a lot of the times in the discussions that we have, we're trying to set ourselves apart from the other side.

We're actually making issues that have traditionally not been at the center of the American conversation into those that are because we can get the daylight, the maximum amount of daylight between the two sides.

And I think that's a perfect example.

Is that just politics?

It's not just politics, it's culture.

We're more polarized as a country than we've been at any time since the Civil War.

A lot of data show this.

One in six Americans have stopped talking to a family member or close friend because of politics since the 2016 election.

And here's the kicker, Glenn: 93% of Americans hate it.

93% of us say it's not the best country.

We are not who we're supposed to be, and we hate how divided we become.

So I say this: I mean, you and I are

on the same,

I mean, I think not just the same book, but the same page of the book.

Personal values and public values.

Right.

And

lift yourself up above this and encourage people.

By having courage, that's contagious.

And encourage others to do the same.

But you'll, I know it.

I don't need a poll to tell me, I know people in America are tired of this.

They don't want to feel this way.

But when you talk to them, they will all say, well, they're not going to stop.

They're just not going to stop.

And I look at the two sides and I think they're right.

They're not going to stop.

Neither side's going to stop.

Neither side's going to stop.

But most of us are kind of weirdly in the middle on this.

So when I say 93% of Americans hate how divided we become as a country, that's true.

That doesn't mean 93% of us don't have opinions.

Correct.

Look, I'm a political conservative, so are you.

I have strong opinions.

I go hammer and tongs after the stuff that I think about.

But I don't think that people who disagree with me are stupid and evil.

On the contrary, I mean, everybody listening to us, everybody watching us on YouTube right now, they love somebody with whom they disagree politically.

And they're bitter and they're angry about the fact that they're being told that they have to repudiate their mother-in-law or somebody who, you know, somebody, their mother, their sister, they don't like it, right?

The problem is they have no team.

And furthermore, there is a little bit of a culprit here.

The 7%

that don't hate how divided we become as a country are dining out on it.

We have a whole outrage industrial complex and politics and media on campuses.

People who are basically getting rich and powerful and famous saying the other side is stupid and evil.

Look, I disagree strongly

with other people, because disagreement is the essence of the competition of ideas, makes America great.

Disagreement's good.

We shouldn't agree because agreement leads to stagnation and mediocrity and one candidate elections and terrible.

you know one product in the stores we don't want that

I don't want to live that way but I don't want to hate the people who disagree with me because I don't hate the people who disagree with me I want to compete on these ideas with them and basically when we have seven percent or whatever minority ginning up the hatred between the two sides then you can be in this disequilibrium where 93 percent of the people say they don't like how the country is is is acting don't like how we're fighting each other all the time and hating each other all the time treating each other with contempt but at the same time they don't know what to do.

And so they're on one side or the other.

So what do they do?

The first thing to remember is that it's really not about just getting a better president or Congress or

changing.

It's not.

What's going to happen is we need an interior revolution, Glenn.

This is interesting.

You know, I was thinking about this for a long time.

You know, I'm an institutional guy.

You know, I live in Washington, D.C.

I run a big think tank.

You know, I talk to politicians like you.

You know, I talk to, I've known presidents of the United States.

It's a great life.

And I always think there's got to be an institutional answer, but there isn't.

Whenever it comes to hatred, whenever it comes to relationship problems, that's an interior revolution.

That's a social movement that starts inside each person's heart.

And here's basically how it works.

Look, nobody in history has ever been insulted into agreement.

Ever.

And that means when we're saying that I'm right and you're stupid and evil, that's a counterproductive,

it's an ineffective way of arguing.

Now, there are people getting rich making those arguments, but we will never prosper on the basis of that.

So we're not persuasive.

Nobody's persuading anybody.

Number two, we're unhappy.

We find that actually the current climate where we treat each other with contempt in this country with a bitter polarization is leading to higher levels of depression, higher levels of loneliness, higher levels of anger.

higher levels of stress.

In other words, when we are treated with contempt and we treat other people with contempt, we're not as happy as we could be.

And number three, we hate how it's tearing the country apart.

Lose, lose, lose.

The answer to that is not that I am going to change the whole country.

The answer to that is that Arthur's going to change Arthur.

So I wrote Love Your Enemies as a way to say, this is my declaration of independence, man.

I'm not declaring bankruptcy.

I'm declaring independence.

Independence from the outrage industrial complex.

Independence from the contempt that's ripping my country apart because I refuse not to love my fellow Americans.

I want to be more persuasive.

I want to be happier.

I want to do something good for America.

So I've, you know, after I left Fox,

the year I joined Fox,

I was at.

It was a great year, by the way.

We watched it.

It's like, guys, we're at Fox at 5 p.m.

every day.

So in 2008, I'm voted the

third or fourth most admired man in the world.

You know, that stupid poll that comes out shows how stupid America really is.

It was in between Nelson Mandela and the Pope.

I was tied with one of them.

I don't remember.

And

we just had a laugh.

We were like, this is ridiculous.

Go to Fox.

In a year, I'm hated by half of the country, saying the same things that I said on CNN, just a different megaphone now.

And hated by half the country.

So I'm there for a couple of years, and I leave.

And

I really do some soul-searching on, okay, so if you had to do it all over again, because you see the result.

What would you do?

And if I had the same knowledge, exactly the same thing.

I did my best.

But if I I had today's knowledge, if I knew now,

or then what I know now, I would do it differently.

How would you do it differently?

I would

I would never

point the finger.

I would never

make declarative broad statements on movements or people.

Ah.

Okay.

So let me see if I'm stating this right.

You would separate more ideas that you disagree with with the people who hold them.

I would try everything I could to not talk about people, but ideas.

Right.

That's really hard to do when you're talking about the news, but that's where we go wrong.

So

I say to people, because I've really reflected, and I thought, okay, I spent two years

talking about the things that were coming, right on a lot of them,

talking about what is happening, how this system works, and it didn't make a dent with anyone who is except on my team.

Okay,

that's not a winning strategy.

That's not a persuasive strategy.

And now the left is doing the same.

The right is still doing it.

And I'm watching it and I'm saying, guys, this doesn't work.

We're locked down.

We're totally locked down.

Totally locked down.

So when I say this to people, they say, but you have to, and I say, you don't have to do anything.

Convince, you don't have to convince me, convince somebody that pretend I'm that person who says, you can't do that.

Somebody on the, let's say somebody who agrees with us in politics, somebody on the right.

And they say, look, the people who say these things on the left, they are evil people.

They're wicked.

They're not just wrong.

They want something that's bad for America.

And I'm going to stand up and I'm going to say it.

I've heard this many times.

I've heard this many times.

And my answer to that is, okay, what's your objective?

Do you want to live in a one-party state?

Are you grateful to not live in a one-party state?

Then you just told me you're grateful for the other party.

Are you grateful that you live in a place where there can be a competition of ideas?

Then you're grateful for the other side on that competition of ideas.

Furthermore, what if you could do anything you wanted and there were wicked people?

Do you want to kick them out of America?

Do you want to put them in jail?

Do you want to hurt them?

I'm going to say no.

I know what you really want, I bet.

I bet you want to persuade them.

I bet that you really, in your heart of hearts, don't hate them.

You want them to think differently because you love your ideas so much and you think they're so good for America.

Okay, let's talk about persuasion.

How many people have you persuaded this week, this month, this year, this decade?

How many people?

You're stupid and evil.

It has never persuaded anybody in the history of humanity.

And by the way, it's morally bereft because you love people with whom you disagree politically.

So to say that people on the other side are stupid and evil, you're talking about your mom.

And furthermore, you're putting up with some talk show host saying that about your mom.

Shame on you.

Fight for your mom.

So if it's impractical and it's immoral, it's time to change.

Let's be persuasive for a while.

Don't agree.

I mean, agreements for chumps.

Agreements for mediocre places and mediocre people, unless you really are in agreement.

But if you're not, don't give in.

But if you can't actually disagree with respect and love, look, we're not talking about terrorists kicking down your door.

You're talking about Americans who disagree with you and maybe strongly disagree with you.

But this is the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the world, built by people who risk their lives running away from the jack-booted thug in the knock in the night so that they could have a competition of ideas.

Shame on us if we can't pursue that competition.

Don't you understand that these are the jack-booted thugs that are coming?

They're talking about ending the free market.

They're talking about

getting into bed with people like Google and monitoring everybody and taking away our health care and our choices.

They actually are talking now about killing children right after they're born.

Don't you see?

These are those guys.

You know, the problem that we have, when I talk to people on the hard left, they can't tell the difference between an average Trump supporter and a Nazi.

They can't.

And And the reason is because they're in their silos and they have been hearing from their media figures and from their college professors and they've been hearing from the politicians and the extreme wing of their party that there's no real difference between people who have strong views with which they disagree and historically murderous, tyrannical regimes around the world.

And you know what?

It's happening on the right, too.

You know, we're saying that any run-of-the-mill Bernie Sanders

supporters are no different than a Stalinist.

Well, man, we've got to get out of the house more.

We've got to remember that that is just a, that's a, that, it's a, it's a huge distinction between Americans who disagree with us.

We are very far away from these extremes.

Now, again, it's okay that we strongly disagree.

It's okay to say on anything from the border to abortion and say, no, no, you're, I believe that your ideas are completely wrong, but that's different than saying, so therefore you're a Stalinist or a Nazi, because you've foreclosed any possibility of making any progress, and you basically said, I got, I got basically only two scenarios, either I lose or you lose.

And in America, we can't make progress when we have that Manichaean situation.

When we have that black and white situation, it just won't work.

That was another problem I think I would do differently.

I don't know how, though.

Is I talked about the Nazis a lot.

Right.

But I wasn't calling people Nazis.

I was saying these are the seeds.

And if it's not, if it's planted,

the next party will just water that too.

It's whoever in the end end grabs the pendulum because of so much chaos that has been created on the ground by all this arguing.

Yeah, no,

this is the perfect ecosystem for us to actually lose

our ability to have a competition of ideas in the first place because somebody will say, look, this is chaos.

And sooner or later, people will throw up their hands and say, all right.

All right.

This is a mess.

We can't do anything.

We go, you know, the Democrats are in charge, nothing gets done.

Then the Republicans are in, they take everything and make these wild promises and nothing gets done.

And it goes goes back and forth.

And, you know, I don't know.

I'm not so sure about the democracy thing anymore.

That's a threat to democracy.

It's interesting because you talk about you wish you had, when you were at Fox in those Fox years,

that you had separated people from their ideas more.

And, you know, I wish I'd done that too.

You know, it's the same thing.

It's like none of us is without blame.

I know.

And, you know, I saw

none of us.

I mean, I don't mean just the people.

I mean people who have never spoken on television or radio, just in their own home, all of us.

Treating people with contempt.

And, you know, contempt is the conviction of the utter worthlessness of another person.

Anger is not problematic.

You know, anger, according to specialists in marital reconciliation, anger is uncorrelated with separation and divorce.

You know, thank God I'm married to a Spaniard, so, you know, this looks.

But it's contempt where you take anger and you mix it with disgust that becomes a toxic compound.

It's kind of like, you know, chlorine and bleach.

You put it together, you get

chlorine gas, and it kills you.

There's a guy named John Gottman who teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle.

He's the world's leading expert on bringing couples together.

He's a hero.

And he has a marriage laboratory, and he can predict with 94% accuracy if a couple will be divorced within three years with one session.

And what he's looking for is contempt.

He's looking for these expressions like eye rolling, sarcastic jokes, derision, dismissal of another person.

That's how people are talking on television.

That's how people are talking about the Thanksgiving table around the Thanksgiving table.

That's how they talk to family members.

It's not right.

And so the big problem, if we want to declare war on this, we actually have to declare war on the communications habits that have been cultivated within us, such that we can listen to other people, really listen to what their moral principles are and engage them at that level.

And then

disagree.

If you listen,

really listen, not trying to win, not trying to, not listen while thinking, okay, I got to remember that because I have to say this.

Just listen, put your shield down.

I have found

that both the right and the left, I'm not talking about the fringe crazies, both the right and the left generally outside of Washington are saying the same thing.

We're frustrated with exactly the same things.

And we're being told, It's them on each side.

No, no, no.

It might be you guys.

It might be Washington that is that we're all saying this isn't working because we're not following certain principles.

And we've lost the mooring of those principles in our own self, in our own home.

Yes.

That we can't recognize when somebody, when the system has lost it.

So it's not just them.

No, it's us.

It's us.

Yes.

It starts with us.

Jordan Peterson is super popular these days.

He probably had him on your show.

If you've had him on your show, yeah, yeah.

He's phenomenal.

The reason that Jordan Peterson is so, in my view, is is such a big phenomenon right now, particularly among young men, is because he calls people to personal revolution.

This is the point of my book, is calling people to personal revolution.

Jordan Peterson basically says, you know that evil out there over the other guys, the other guys, the other guys?

It's in your heart too.

If you want to take on evil and you want progress, if you want things to be better, be the master of yourself.

Conquer yourself.

And people are like, can I do it?

Can I do that?

Can I do that?

Is that possible for me to do that?

Yes.

No, no, no.

It's not just possible.

You must do that.

You must be the master of yourself.

Take your happiness.

Grab your happiness.

Grab the love to which you're entitled.

And the only way that you do that is willing the good of the other, even if you disagree with the other.

And so that's the key.

I mean, yeah, it's true.

We haven't been represented well with leaders in Washington.

It's true they have not listened enough.

But you know what else?

There are people all over this country that have lost the frontier spirit, the entrepreneurial startup life that basically says that when things aren't right, I got to do something about it.

You know, it's, we, it's, it's, and the United States goes through phases like this.

You see this all throughout history.

Every 50 years or so, we go through a phase like this, where we have, you know, a bad economic circumstance, people who are demobilized, people who blame leaders, we get populism, and the whole thing falls apart and we start again.

And this is not the first time that this has happened.

So let's watch to the end of the movie and say, what is the personal revolution I need with that?

How can I grab my happiness?

How can I show more love?

How can I be more persuasive, happier, more successful, and help my country?

And if we can start that social movement, Glenn,

I actually am more optimistic than I've been in a long, long time.

Okay, so how?

It starts with the revolution within.

Asking ourselves, what am I trying to do?

You know, what is the outcome that I want to see?

Do I actually want people to be more bitter, angrier, more hostile?

Do I want more hatred?

Or do I want more love?

Now, for most of us, that's a question that answers itself.

I want more love.

I want to experience more love, and I want other people to experience more love.

Can I push back on this?

Please do.

I have found, and what's amazing to me, I have found so many die-hard Christians

who say

the Jesus stuff won't work.

I'm like,

I think that's what Judas said.

It worked then.

It worked for Lincoln.

It worked for Gandhi.

It worked for Martin Luther King.

What makes you say it won't work?

People of faith

have lost their faith that love is the most revolutionary.

Now, most of the people who are making that argument, it's one of two things happening.

The first is that they're in a very short-term time horizon.

If you've only got three weeks, then you'll get out the negative power tools all day long.

But if you're playing the long game, if you're playing for five years, 10 years,

the rest of my life, eternity.

They'll say, I know, but they'll say, we don't have that.

Yeah, well, okay.

We don't have that time.

So

I got that.

But I also recognize that, you know, the people who were most effective were the people who were playing the long game.

You know, Martin Luther King, it was, you know, he was playing.

Look, when he died, when he was assassinated, he was at 33% popularity of his ideas.

Today, 95%.

He won.

What are we trying to do?

Are we trying to have satisfaction in the next four weeks?

Or are we actually trying to save America?

What are we trying to do?

Try to convince people, because I've tried to do it, that Von Hoefer won.

Absolutely.

He was hung in the woods alone.

Yeah.

Killed.

I know.

I mean,

if you read the second letter of St.

Paul to Corinthians, it's got that desperate language, and you can tell St.

Paul is going, like, I don't know if this is working.

I don't know.

And he's frustrated and he's angry.

And he created Christian theology.

Christianity, as we understand it as a religion, comes out of the way that St.

Paul taught.

We can't expect to win in the time horizon that we are going to most enjoy.

The question is, what are we trying to do?

Do I want to have more love in the world?

Do I want a better country?

Do I want America to continue to be a gift to the world or not?

Look, you and I have talked many times about capitalism.

Capitalism is a long game.

The reason I came into the free enterprise movement is because poverty is the thing that I care about the most, because I recognize that since 1970, 2 billion of my brothers and sisters have been pulled out of poverty by one thing, which is the American free enterprise system spreading around the world.

If I had gone three weeks to three weeks or four weeks to four weeks or even year to year, I would have said, yeah, big government programs and socialism, they work better.

They work better as the short-term power tools.

But I'm saying, dude, I want, I got a 50-year time horizon because I want 2 billion fewer people who are earning their success.

If that's our gift to the world, you have to think on a long timeframe.

And if you want more love in the world, hating on the short term is not going to get you there.

And if you're actually trying to practice the gospel of Jesus Christ, then short-term hatred is not going to get you to that goal either.

It just isn't.

It's not compatible with what he taught.

He did get angry.

He turned over the tables of the money changers.

But at the same time, he was working.

What he wanted was to change the hearts of the other people.

Why?

Because he had love for everybody, including his tormentors.

And he said Matthew 5, 44, love your enemies.

He didn't say kill your enemies, hate your enemies.

He said, love your enemies.

Do good to those who harm you.

Because that was the ultimate long-term strategy.

I can tell you that I have a hard time relating to Christ.

You know what I mean?

It's a pretty hard figure to

like, love your enemies.

Well, yeah, but you're Jesus.

I'm nowhere close to Jesus.

All right.

But

I read

Paul and I read

just

reading

or just reading

the opening of Acts, the first two chapters, where he lays out, you got to be together.

You have to be of one mind.

Then you're going to be influenced.

You all come together.

Make sure you're going to be influenced and things are going to happen, but they're going to say horrible things.

Miracles are going to happen.

They're going to see it.

They're going to deny it.

They're going to tear you down, but love them.

Love them.

And you see Paul all the way through.

He lays out.

He's more calculated.

Jesus was just Jesus.

Paul's more calculated.

You know what I mean?

He's waiting to be taken to the steps to be whipped.

And he's like, hey, hang on just a second.

I just want to talk to these people for a second.

And

he's amazing because

he has the same pattern over and over again.

You know, I really, like when he's on Mars Hill, you know, I come here.

They got all these gods.

Yeah.

Come here.

I think it's in the scripture where it says, you're too religious.

That's not what, that's not right.

He didn't mean you're too religious.

He meant, you guys, man, I've come here.

I see all these gods everywhere.

You guys are really super religious.

I even found a god.

I even found a temple dedicated to a god with no name.

Right.

And he used, he used, he talks, I read it even in your poetry.

Yeah.

He knows them.

He's found a way to love them.

He admires what they've done.

Then he finds the door of the unknown God and says, by the way, I know who that one is.

And they listen.

Yeah, yeah.

Why?

Because he made moral common cause with them.

But Glenn, there's also, you know, people listening to us are going to be like, yeah, Glenn and Arthur, you know, those guys, they're really lucky guys.

They've got a really good platform.

Easy for those guys to stand up there and say, love your enemies, right?

But you know what?

It's an incredibly practical, self-interested argument that I'm making too.

Because the one thing that I know is that you'll never persuade anybody who doesn't already agree with you.

if you treat other people with hate.

You will be more stressed out, more frustrated, and more lonely if you do that.

And so will the other people.

And you're getting a country that if you're like the 93% of the rest of us, we don't like the way the country is going.

So this is a very self-interested argument.

If you turn it around, if when people treat you with contempt, which they're going to, if you go on social media,

you and I go on Twitter, 20 seconds from now, we post a picture of Glenn and Arthur doing a podcast, right?

We're going to get just reigned on with contempt.

We have a choice of how we're going to react.

Now, you can be, you know, just like react like if you stimulated a slug with

an electrode, it'll react, right?

If you can react to that, you can react to that contempt with contempt.

Or you can choose your action because you're the master of yourself and choose to react with kindness and respect.

People who are watching that interaction, they're going to say, huh, I think I know which person in that exchange I like better.

That's how persuasion works, man.

Especially with social media now, where we could make a group statement by being individuals.

You know what I mean?

It's like if you're walking in, you're invited to this ball, party, whatever, and you walk into a giant ballroom and there's 70 people over on one side and they're just yelling and screaming at each other, taking both sides, all sides.

It's just awful.

And there are five people on the other side and they're laughing.

And they're they might even be going, these guys are crazy and laughing about how crazy they are.

And they're all getting along.

I guarantee you, you walk into that room, you do not go to the 70 people, you go to the five.

And you at least observe what's happening in that safe area.

And yet,

on social media.

Right.

You go to the 70s.

It's crazy.

It's craziness.

If we were just five,

eventually,

those 70, those numbers would dwindle down because they'd either kill each other or some people would just go, I'm tired of this, man.

It's crummy.

I don't like it.

I don't want to be be a real boy.

It doesn't feel like fun.

Yeah.

And you know, that's what a lot of people are actually starting to figure out about social media.

They're starting to figure out that it's not neat, they don't enjoy it.

It's not fun.

They're not persuading anybody.

And we're starting to actually see that bleed.

So let's create a movement.

Like the people who are watching us, I've made a public commitment that I'm going to say five nice and loving things for every criticism I put out on Twitter.

That's my five-to-one rule.

By the way, I didn't make that up.

John Gottman, the guy I talked about before, the marriage counselor, he makes his couples do a five-to-one thing so they can't criticize each other until they've said five loving things.

It makes them write it down in a notebook.

So I've made a commitment to doing that.

I've made a commitment.

I wrote a book called Love Your Enemies.

So if I'm ever a jerk, boy, am I ever going to hear about it fast, right?

When you write a book and it's on the bestseller list and it's called Love Your Enemies, well,

you know, like, you know, you know that if 10 years from now I'm acting like a jerk, I'm going to hear it.

Why?

Because I want that.

Call me out.

Because I haven't been right in the past

consistently.

I want to be better.

I want to be a force for good.

And the interesting thing about this is it's not just about me as a public figure.

Glenn Beck is a a public figure.

It's about every single person watching us who is a leader.

And says, what kind of leader do I want to be?

Do I want to be a coercive, divisive leader who goes anonymously into a forum and hates on somebody else and persuades no one and winds up more stressed out?

No.

For a little tiny bit of dopamine, for a little bit of this neurotransmitter, this like smoking a cigarette?

Or do I want to be the guy that people are watching and saying, huh?

That's actually the kind of person I want to be.

Am I the kind of person I would want my kids to be?

And when we do that, by the way, we coalesce around a philosophy that Americans like the best, which is, frankly, kind of a center-right philosophy, pro-capitalist philosophy.

So let's do that on the basis of love, as opposed to trying to pretend that we're going to browbeat the whole country into it, because it's not going to work.

Speak directly to somebody, left, right, doesn't matter, that

they're afraid.

They're afraid.

They see what's on the horizon.

And I want to talk to you about tech in a minute, but they see what's on the horizon.

They feel insignificant.

They feel left behind.

They feel

whichever side, they feel like they no longer matter.

Right.

Okay.

And

the one thing that they can do to matter

is to pick a side and be part of a team because you're even more ostracized when you won't pick a team, when you won't, and I don't mean pick a team, I mean when you won't slam.

Right, because then everybody's going after you at that point.

Right.

And so, and I hear this from people all the time.

They'll say, I can't say anything.

I'm glad you say something because I can't say anything.

I'd lose my job.

And I think all the time, you know, that's a very big possibility for me too.

Look, it's happened to you.

It's happened to you.

You've gone from thing to thing.

It's not like, you know, you stayed in one job for your whole life.

Correct.

You've had disagreements with employers.

Why?

because you glenn beck lives a startup life and that's the answer to this whole conundrum where people are afraid right we live in a climate of fear we have a culture of fear the big what you know it's like love drives out fear saint john the apostle why because the fear is the ultimate negative emotion it's the opposite of love people think hate is the opposite of love it's not fear is the opposite of love when you feel fear that's crowding out love and so what do you need to do if you want to have more love in your life take on the fear look you you confronted fear in your life.

I did too.

We all do.

We have to confront it head on.

But when we have a culture where our leaders on right and left are telling us to be afraid of the other side,

and it's endemic across our culture.

You know, I'm looking at a lot of data these days about people in the 20s.

They're a third less likely to be in love than we were when we were that age.

They're less likely, they don't date.

It's like, I asked my,

one of my sons, a junior in college, is this true?

He's like, no one dates.

They're less likely to,

they don't have relationships.

And the reason for this is because there's a culture of fear, of personal rejection.

That's a non-entrepreneurial culture.

So when people are afraid, they're afraid of being rejected, they're afraid of being, of being ostracized because of politics,

you got to stand up.

You got to live a startup life.

You got to say, this is what I believe.

I reject fear.

I will live with love.

There is no other way.

And if we do that, that's the interior revolution within.

To love your enemies is the ultimate subversive tactic.

it's the ultimate toughness.

It's funny, I mean, I tell a lot of stuff in this book about the Dalai Lama because I've been working with the Dalai Lama for seven years.

It's the weirdest relationship because, you know, the president of the American Enterprise Institute with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist, you know, the most respected religious leader in the world.

And people sort of associate him with the political left, but what he is, is he's a man fully alive because

he has stood up ultimately to fear.

We talk about this all the time.

And we talk about how ultimately

you're responsible for living your one life.

And when you do that, then it's the ultimate satisfaction.

I mean, look, if you need to, don't look at Twitter.

Delete the app on your phone.

It's no big deal.

And if you want to, if you're really willing to take a big bite out of life, then stand up and say, I refuse to hate.

I refuse to hate people just because they disagree with me.

I refuse to be afraid.

I refuse to have people in my own political party telling me that I'm one step away from a a jackbooted thug.

Because I don't believe it.

I don't actually believe it.

I think that it's still a great country.

I still believe it's a fair.

It doesn't mean I'm going to get everything I want.

We're going to get a bunch of laws that are going to get taxes are going to be all screwed up.

And, you know, abortion laws are never going to be what I like or they're not going to be for a long time.

But for Pete's sake, this is not Nazi Germany.

It's not, you know, we're not about to have a knock in the night in this country.

So we have to stop being afraid and we have to stop, start living our lives as people who are not afraid.

That's why Jordan Peterson right now is so popular.

because Jordan Peterson is telling particularly young men, take control, be the master, stop being afraid, recognize what you have within you, good and bad, and maybe you can actually start

being as alive as you're supposed to be.

Just spent a weekend with Tony Robbins a couple weeks ago.

Same message.

See your coach?

Yeah, the same message.

Same message.

Just

who are you?

Who are you?

You decide who you are.

So what's what's blocking you?

Yeah.

You.

Take it out.

Go.

That's exactly right.

I mean, Tony Robbins has an incredible ministry.

What Tony Robbins has been able to do, I mean, finding the giant within.

I mean, that's just like, he's actually literally a giant.

I know he is.

It's amazing that you use that word because he is so deeply spiritual.

All the stuff he talks about.

We just all use different language.

You know what I mean?

It's all the same truth.

It's all the the same truth.

And what we are doing in public life when we talk about public policy and politics to hurt this country is by telling people that they're victims, to telling people that

their master should be their grievance, that they need to band together to fight somebody as opposed to being able to stand up on their own.

Tony Robbins,

when you see him and he's talking to people who feel that they've been oppressed and they've been held down, he says, throw off your chains, man.

I know.

I mean, stand up up because you can.

And it's the ultimate freeing experience that that's what Americans need to do, too.

We are not victims.

We're the ultimate non-victim country.

Like the Becks and the Brookses came to this country as ambitious riffraff.

Run it away from some.

We're still ambitious riffraff.

At least I am.

Totally.

My family is still just riffraff.

So riffraff, it's time to unite.

That's the point of love your enemies.

The ultimate act of subversive riffraff is to stand up against the outrage industrial complex and say, I refuse to hate because I refuse to live in fear.

That's the ultimate message and it's the how-to guide on how to get past the fear.

I have a,

my assistant is Scottish.

Yeah.

He was with the Royal Marines and some elite, you know, kill you with a toothpick and a spoon

deal.

And

like murderous MacIvory.

Yeah, yeah.

And he was,

we were talking about

curse words because, you know, you watch British television and they can use the C word like there.

It's running out of style.

And it's so jarring to America.

And I said, what is your deal with that?

And he said, it doesn't mean it.

It doesn't mean the same thing over there.

You know,

it's just, it carries a different connotation over here.

And he said, I learned that real fast.

He said, but you guys have a word.

that I cannot get used to.

What's that?

He said, you guys will

call each other, oh, yeah, bastard.

He said, you don't ever say that over there.

Note to solve.

Right.

But I, but it makes sense that it means nothing here, but over there, where it's all hierarchy, it's all who are you related to?

What family did you come from?

Here, it's like, we're all bastards.

We're all the riffraff.

We're all the scum.

And we made it.

There, it means something.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And, and, you you know it's for us to remember it's funny you know glenn when i when i talk to americans and ask them about their families they always brag about how poor their ancestors were

that's like a point of pride there's no country in the world except maybe israel where that it's also a point of pride that your family came from nothing and built itself up and and what that is is the in the time in in american life that's so inspirational where this really became a thing was after the civil war after this time of incredible polarization in the united states and the country had to come together and it did spontaneously around the self-improvement movement, where the Baptists and the Methodists and the Tent revivals and the abolitionists who before had gotten rid of slavery, then they were talking about

temperance.

And others like Andrew Carnegie building English-speaking libraries and Dale Carnegie, no relation that I'm aware of, was writing how to win friends and influence people.

This was the civic religion of what?

Of Riffraff being his or her own CEO.

There was no grievance.

There was no victimization.

And it's time for Americans to get that back.

I just performed at a Carnegie theater.

You do?

Yeah.

In Pittsburgh.

And it was adjoined to a library.

And I'm sitting in this library.

I read a lot.

I'm sure you do too.

I have a pretty big library, but bigger than most people because nobody reads anymore.

But

it's not some wealthy, crazy library full of books.

And my library library is probably bigger than that original library.

Okay.

And he said, I have to build this.

He built these libraries

all over the country.

English-speaking libraries all over there.

2,509 of them.

It's crazy.

Yeah, crazy.

Crazy.

And we don't know this.

And what he said about why he built them, do you remember this?

So that every man, so that every man can lift himself up?

Yeah.

He said, not everyone will use the ladder, but there is a ladder to pull yourself out.

And it's all in a king's library.

So he wanted these libraries to be fit for a king.

So if you had the desire to pull yourself out, you had the capability.

So the shoeshine boy has equal opportunity with the son of a wealthy man.

Yes.

And, you know, that is the American spirit.

Now, is it always going to be true?

Is it always going to be perfect?

Are the pathways to earn success always going to be perfect?

Of course not.

We want them to be.

And in point of fact, they've been blocked too much over

the past few decades.

It's been too hard to do that.

There's not been enough income mobility, both going up and also, frankly, coming down.

People create moats around their castles, and we have to fight against that all the time.

But to basically throw in the towel and say, and have populists tell us,

somebody's got your stuff and I'm going to get it back.

Whether it's a foreigner or a banker or a capitalist or an immigrant, it's not right to say that somebody's got your stuff and I'm going going to get it back.

And the reason that things are not right in your life is entirely because of somebody else's culpability.

That's an anti-American sentiment.

And look, I get it.

Things are hard.

Things have been hard in my life at times.

Things are hard in the lives of people who are listening to us.

And there is skepticism about this.

But I tell you, one thing that will never get the job done is complaining about it and banding together and saying that some other side that disagrees with us is inherently stupid and evil.

All we're going to get after that is a cold civil war.

And a cold civil war is in a country that's weak, and a Cold Civil War is in a country that's vulnerable to people who wish us ill, and we can't afford that.

Can you help me solve a problem I've never been able to answer?

Free market is

fantastic.

Free market, not what we have.

Not crony capitalism.

Not prony capitalism, okay?

And that's really part of the question.

I look at

two examples.

Let me start with Rockefeller.

When Rockefeller was building Rockefeller Center, I don't know if you've ever noticed, really looked, I'm very into

art and the architecture of Rockefeller Center.

And I used to drive drive to Radio City Music Hall every day.

That was where my studios were.

And it's all designed for a reason.

Everything has a reason.

It's almost a temple to man.

And as I'm driving up, I notice one day

that building is an old 1800s building.

And there's another one on the other side of 30 Rock that's part of 30 Rock now.

That's this old 1800s building.

Out of all these blocks of these perfect Art Deco, there's two buildings that stand alone and they don't match.

So I looked up

what happened.

Yeah, what is it?

So he bought blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks, like 12 blocks, okay?

Bought everybody out.

There were two owners that wouldn't sell out.

One was a guy who was greedy.

He offered him, I think, a million dollars during the Depression.

Sell it.

He thought Rockefeller was going to keep going up.

And so he said, nope.

And Rockefeller's top was a million.

He said, screw him.

The other guy was a guy who owned an Irish bar.

It was his family's Irish bar since the 1800s.

He knew that prohibition was going to end, and he said, this is going to be my family's bar again.

I'm not selling.

I don't care what the price is.

So Rockefeller said, build around.

Okay?

That wouldn't happen now.

Those guys would have eminent domain.

They would have lost those places immediately.

somewhere along the line

America loses its to toqueville that at some point people get powerful enough and rich enough that they kick the door behind them right, okay

only when and this I can't believe I'm saying this in the 1930s, but only when things like eminent domain I'm sorry, man, that's his property.

He can do whatever he wants with it.

When that's strong enough, we're okay.

But when you have people like Google, when you have Apple, when you have these gigantic corporations with all this money and they spend all of that money in Washington to write laws,

they're closing the opportunity, kicking the door behind them.

So I don't want to ever live in a place where

I would say, well, there's only so much money you can make.

Oh, there's only only so much this you can make.

Oh, we've got to break these people up.

How do you stop

these,

and not everybody's like this.

Carnegie is a good example.

How do you stop people who are that wealthy

from

dictating the terms for everybody else?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So the problem with corny capitalism, forget particular companies, the problem with corny capitalism is that the really, really rich guys have a lot of power.

Right.

And they have power not just to add to their own wealth, but to protect themselves from startups, to protect themselves from new companies.

That's usually what happens.

So the way that we need to

generate better policy, to engineer policies in this country, is to block that.

We don't need to break up any companies.

We don't need to prohibit any supply.

The fact that they can buy another company?

No, no, block the fact that they can actually generate regulations.

They have perfect capability with their

vast armies of lawyers and accountants and specialists and consultants to cope with, but that the little guys can't.

See, that's the problem.

I mean we have an over-regulated economy and huge companies like an over-regulated economy because it doesn't hurt them.

They can afford it.

It's a barrier.

It becomes a barrier to entry effectively.

So we need fewer barriers to entry in an economy that's more capitalistic.

And then capitalism will take care of itself.

Doesn't that require a

public that is educated enough to know we don't have anybody that really understands high-tech, maybe five people in the Congress, maybe five people.

We are on the verge of something entirely different.

And when I talk to people in Congress, they'll say, I'll tell them about something that's on the horizon in the next two years.

And they'll be completely new to that.

Yeah, it'd be a completely new.

And they'll be like, well, we've got to pass a law.

And I'm like, you don't understand.

It's moving so fast.

By the time you get your head out of your butt, it's totally different again.

So there's no way to keep up with it.

They then go and look, you know, like FDR did.

Hey, you're the big four automakers.

What would be fair?

How can we make this right for everybody?

And they develop all these rules because the guys in Washington don't know.

So they just go to the experts and they close all the doors for everybody.

Well, that's always the problem is is when there's more regulation, start to get suspicious.

When there's more regulation, particularly that's being proposed by business, get twice as suspicious.

That's what we need to do.

I mean, one of the beautiful things about capitalism is you don't have to know everything, you only have to know your thing.

And one of the things that we need to do is to take barriers away from people in productive activity.

It's the same thing, Glenn, is barriers away from people to doing what they need to do in their own lives.

You know, the big problem that we have in the United States of happiness is that faith, family, family, friends, and work.

And so we don't need government to actually create regulations, a pro-religion bureaucracy that's the worst thing ever, or pro-the Department of Families or something.

And we certainly don't need the friends bureaucracy.

What we need is to take away the disincentives for people to do those things.

And that means getting out of the way of those things.

And the government is in the way of faith, family, community, and work.

The government is in the way of productive activity and in the way of entrepreneurship all the time.

So that's what the president needs to do.

But they will say that, for instance, it's not scalable.

For instance,

Facebook,

you know this.

Once you have a company over 150 employees, it changes.

It just changes.

You found that.

We as individuals,

we're built to have 30 maybe really good friends, okay, in our life.

We are not capable of having, you know, a thousand followers and a thousand friends on Facebook.

It doesn't work.

It's actually bad for us.

Right, right.

It doesn't work at scale.

So that's the problem that they'll say because it's coming now.

The internet has been great.

We haven't really regulated the internet until recently.

It's been a wild west, and look what it's done.

But now you're starting to have problems because now, who do I trust?

What do I do?

So now they're starting to come in.

And the argument will be,

it's out of control.

People are allowed to do just anything, just say anything.

And I say, yeah.

You have to choose to get over it.

Right.

Or you have to choose not to participate in it, which is exactly what we're talking about here is protecting ourselves by opting out.

In a lot of cases, opting out of that part of the economy in the same way that I opt out of cigarettes.

I opt out of alcohol.

I opt out of pornography because those things are are bad for me.

And so what we need to do as individuals, like all progress, I mean, institutional solutions, fine, right?

I'm glad that there are some institutional solutions, but all progress comes from the heart of the individual.

There is no other way.

You know, when we, and what we're talking about with antitrust, with very large tech firms, for example, these are sophisticated problems, to be sure.

But to the extent that we are victimized by the internet, this is really because we're abusing the product.

And to basically say, you know, you know what we need, Clan, man, I just can't stay off Twitter.

So I need more regulation of Twitter.

Don't get off Twitter.

Get off Twitter.

It's very simple.

It's very simple.

Be the master of yourself.

You know, it's like, there's too much hatred in my life.

So what am I going to do?

I'm going to make hatred illegal.

No.

Stop hating.

Start loving.

You know, this is the key.

Whenever we get into a very bad place in the United States, whether it's in the Civil War or whether it's today, we must follow it with a self-improvement revolution.

There is no other way.

That's how we're ⁇ if anybody who's watching us wants to save America, start by acting in a different way personally.

That's where it comes from.

That's where the social movement starts.

We need a million social movements that will come together.

You know, the politicians, you know, the outrage industrial complex that are ginning up this hatred, it's not because they're awful people.

It's because they're followers and they're demand signals that are coming from us.

There's a parade going down the street.

They're like, I got to get in front of that parade.

It needs a leader.

In democratic capitalist societies, there are no true leaders they're only followers who look like leaders so each one of us has to be the true leader and and and each one of us who wants to make it better to say basically i'm just not i'm not part of that parade man i'm going down this alley and then if enough people start doing it i want to i don't want to be the 70 people yelling at the other side of the ballroom i want to be the five people laughing over here And that's

when the politicians and the media and the

academics and all the people who are part of the outrage industrial complex, they go, huh, okay, I guess this direction we're going.

Do you know any leaders like this?

Do you know anybody who's

I know a lot of people who want to do this?

Everybody I talk to, look, it's the weirdest thing.

I'm writing, if I had written a book, I would be, you know, mega bestseller.

You know, Republicans are stupid or liberals are evil.

Yeah.

If I had written that book, you know, mega bestseller, right?

No.

So I said, you know, as a calculator risk, I spent the last two years praying and writing and thinking about how to write a book called Love Your Enemies, a self-improvement personal revolution book.

For me, and for people who want to think this way I thought you know maybe it sells 10 copies I don't know you know and and and the weirdest thing is this book has been out for a couple of weeks now and it sold tens of thousands of copies a week and this is selling better than any book I've ever read I've ever written read ever

this is selling better

really

selling better than the book

you heard it right here

this is selling better than any book I've ever written right and what that means is it doesn't mean that this is the best book ever written.

No, there's an encoding.

There's a zeitgeist.

There is a demand.

There is a desire for this.

And if we grab it, I mean, then

there's a lot of politicians that you and I love, that we really like.

Then they'll be set free too.

And it's time for us to set our leaders free.

Let me change to tech.

Yeah.

You think a lot about tech.

A lot.

And you like tech.

I love tech.

To be sure.

So

I want to make sure that our audience understands.

McGlenn Beck, conservative guy,

thinks that the tech economy is interesting and is promising and is optimistic and is fun.

It gives me,

it's like going to Silicon Valley.

But that's countercultural, man, because, you know, conservators are always like, ah, no, it's all bad.

It's all terrible.

It's dystopian.

You know what it is?

The Constitution and the Declaration.

You take the Declaration out, but the Constitution is just a system, and it's going to be based on moral sentiments.

The Internet, good, bad, it's both based on moral sentiments.

Same thing with tech.

It's going to be the worst or the best, but it's all going to be up to us.

Right.

Okay.

It's going to be a reflection.

It's going to be a mirror.

Yeah, it's going to be an amplification.

Right.

I got it.

Okay.

And the amplification,

like

a giant mirror out in the sun, it'll vaporize things if we're bad.

The internet, the ultimate karma.

It is.

Okay, so

I look at tech and

I see the

unlimited potential ahead of us.

I also see

1984 will look like child's play.

You know, They're already doing it in China or headed that direction.

I see a world of no disease.

I see a world where we can pursue the things that we want to pursue.

Freedom like we've never...

The one time I could ever say the founders never envisioned this

would be what's on the horizon with tech.

All good ways.

Some bad.

I was going to say then there is the darker side of the prison that it could build.

But I think the first one, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, the first

trouble that will come is unemployment.

And

we have a disconnect from Washington and Silicon Valley and the American people.

Washington is saying, we're going to get the unemployment rate to zero.

And that's good.

While the people who are building the next economy are saying, we're going to get unemployment to 100%.

Because we don't have to work anymore.

Right.

Okay.

Disconnect.

And the American people who are not involved in this and really don't see

that the Industrial Revolution that took 100 years is going to happen in the next 10.

Yes.

And when that happens, the pressure is going to come down.

The politicians are going to do one of two things.

We know they're going to do this.

I'll bring those jobs back.

No, they're not.

No, they're not.

When they start to say that, and they really realize those jobs aren't coming back, we have Silicon Valley here.

They have

really only one thing to do, and that is to team up with Silicon Valley.

Otherwise, we're going to go with torches and kill those evil scientists that are making all these spooky machines.

You know what I mean?

And no one is talking about things, and I don't agree with this.

This is what I want an answer on.

I do not agree with basic universal income.

Right.

Okay.

However,

in a time where we would have 30%,

according to Bain Capital, 30% permanent unemployment by 2030,

you got to have something.

in that transition because you got a lot of people like me that

wait Twitter's no longer cool

and what is this snapchat thing right that just do not adapt real fast they won't be able to shift and it will cause all kinds of strife how do we

solve the up that 10-year upheaval as a bridge

to the answer i mean the obvious answer is we don't know right or we don't know i mean we're we're we're we're it's gonna happen and we're gonna get through it Right.

Right.

The question is how much pain and what the pain looked like and how can we attenuate that.

It's a threshold before total chaos.

And that's a big reason why some people are pushing for

socialism and a UBI.

UBI, unlimited basic income.

Okay, so to begin with,

I actually don't agree entirely with the premise that we're going to get to this 30% unemployment.

Why?

Because what traditionally happens is that when there's a technological revolution, and all that technology means is that we use inputs differently.

Inputs are simple: there's labor, there's land, there's capital, and there's entrepreneurship.

Those are the only inputs into any production process in the whole economy.

And the way that those things work together differently, that's a change in technology.

You know, it might be a machine or it might be, you know, a new way of thinking or, you know, something, right?

It might be college, you know, whatever it happens to be.

Okay.

So when there's a technological revolution that changes the way that we do things, generally speaking, it doesn't destroy jobs, it changes jobs.

Every job is 22 or 25 or 40 things.

I mean, Glenn Beck's job is like 700,000 things, right?

Because you run this big company.

But most people's jobs are literally like 25 things that they know how to do that require expertise.

What technology does is

it pulls all of those 25 things apart and puts them in a box and then mixes in everybody else's 25 things, shakes the box and takes out handfuls of 25 new things and passes them out and those are the new jobs.

The reason that young people do better, because they're trained up in the new bundles of 25.

And so that's the challenge is not because we have become overtaken by events that we've become obsolete.

We basically only know how to do eight of the 22 things in our jobs.

And so that's what we need to do, is we need to disintermediate those and learn how to train people in different parts of what the new collection of jobs happen to be.

That's not just VoTech.

That's not just career and technical education or

technical school, vocational school.

That's not what we're talking about.

We're training people in new individual tasks.

And that's a much smaller job.

That's a much easier job than saying, you used to be a driver, and now there's driverless trucks.

And so now we're going to teach you how to fix air conditioning systems when you're 60.

Well, it's not going to happen, man.

But that's not actually how the job is going to change.

The job is going to change in many different ways.

And so you're going to have to learn how to do this with a computer slightly differently while you continue to do this as part of your old job.

And that's how we need to be thinking about it.

That's how the best,

the best research that I've seen says that that's the challenge.

And that's a less daunting challenge.

It's a challenge.

Yeah, it's a challenge.

And I think part of that challenge is getting people to realize that nothing will be the same tomorrow and being comfortable with that.

Nobody's ever going to be really comfortable with it, but if we had a more entrepreneurial culture, we could be much more comfortable than we currently are.

If we didn't have leaders on both parties that were telling people to be afraid of the future and afraid of each other,

it would be a lot better.

We shouldn't be afraid of each other and we shouldn't be afraid of the future because this is America and we're a strong country that has dealt with a lot worse.

Okay, when you said that there's

only five things that happen

for

jobs,

Okay.

What were the five again?

It was

the five things that happened for...

Yeah, for

a market to work.

I don't remember what they were doing.

Okay, so the inputs are the inputs.

Yeah, they're labor.

Labor.

Capital.

Okay, stop.

Capital?

Yes.

Right.

Labor.

Right.

Robotics.

Next one.

Well, and that's a substitution of capital for labor.

But it changes the relationship of labor to capital because you're still going to need people that are just doing different things in relation to capital.

We won't need as many.

Yeah.

Well, you'll need it.

You'll actually, in a weird way, you know, it's a funny thing.

In the Industrial Revolution, everybody thought that

capital was going to substitute for labor and labor was going to be just like overtaken by events and never do anything.

And it turns out we needed more labor.

And then we needed more people, more people doing more stuff because the whole economy, that was the miracle of capitalism.

It's not a zero sum.

It's a bigger and bigger and bigger pie.

But we have to make sure that people have expertise such that they can work with this expanded capital in a way that they can't currently do it.

So, you see what I mean, right?

Yeah, I think I do.

I think I do.

The problem is, you read Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

You know, he talked about there will be a time when all of this will be Latin to the average person.

Yeah.

And so they'll just be going to the high priest of tech and going,

make this work.

You know what I mean?

We are not learning.

We are not expanding.

We are becoming calcified.

That's the threat.

See, that's the threat.

See, if we were actually expanding our knowledge and we were expanding our confidence and we were less fearful, then we could actually have expanding human capital, education, skills, jobs, that would match with the changing physical capital, which is the machines and the software that are coming into our world, such that labor could be appropriate to it and up to the task.

You know, we have way more people working.

I mean, right now, I I mean, there are seven and a half billion people alive.

Only a hundred billion people have ever lived and died before the current humanity that we see on Earth.

And, you know, all those people that are alive today,

their workforces are so much bigger than they used to be.

And yet, everything's automated, particularly compared to what it was 200 years ago.

And that's because when you're more productive, you have more productive capacity, you have more capital, you actually need more labor, and everybody gets richer, and more stuff gets done if you're you're not calcified, if you're actually willing to learn and change.

And that's the main task of our leadership today.

Look, we have,

you and I have both railed against education systems that are appropriate to the 1950s, that are teaching the same stuff that you and I learned in the 1970s as school kids in the 1970s.

I mean, not exactly, but for all intents and purposes, that's actually

rigid and doesn't have any choice.

And is, you know, the way that the structure, it's kind of like the education systems a lot for the benefit of

the educators as opposed to the students and the future of the country.

I mean,

that's the problem, you know, to a certain, and unless we can modernize that, then we can't improve the human capital.

If we can't improve the human capital, then we're stuck in the dystopian future you described.

Do you believe

in AGI and ASI?

That's coming.

I mean, these things are coming.

I do believe that these things are coming.

It's funny.

I was talking to a guy.

The guy

was in my hometown, Seattle, and I was back there for

some speeches I was giving a night meeting.

Did you grow up in Seattle?

In Queen Anne Hill.

Really?

Queen Anne Hill, north side of Queen Anne Hill, yeah.

Born in Everett and lived in Mount Lake Terrace and then moved to Mount Vernon.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

This may be why.

That's why we connect, man.

It is.

And it may be why we connect with our heart because there's something different in the position.

It's gone nuts now, but there's something different.

I know.

Anyway.

I was talking to this guy, and we were driving, it was at night, and he was driving me up

one south past the old Sears building.

This is now the Starbucks building.

And I said, oh, you know, we're near Boeing Field.

And I said, go over there because I saw, I said, let's go get on the I-5 and let's go up the freeway instead because I want to see if I can see from the freeway into the, it was at night, the open hangar where they're building the 787 because it's such a beautiful plane.

And so we were doing it, we were talking about it.

It turns out he's really into innovation and tech.

And I said, I just read an article and said, give me your impression of this.

He was a very, very pious, religious Muslim guy.

Tell me this.

I just read an article since you're really into tech that in 40 years, you'll be able to download your mind, right?

And this is basically some combination of AGI and ASI, right?

What do you think about that?

He says, oh, it doesn't make sense.

And I said, why not?

He says, because you can't download the soul.

And that's how people see it.

And so this is the key difference.

frontiers of technology are vast.

We don't know where they go.

But humans are fundamentally different.

I can disagree with you more.

I totally agree with you myself.

Right.

But the way it's going to be perceived, and here's why.

You know who Stephen Hawking is?

Of course.

Okay.

So

I've talked to him several times, and this is one of the main things.

It scares the hell out of me with Stephen Hawking.

Not Stephen Hawking.

Oh, shoot.

Dawkins, Richard Dawkins.

No, no, no.

He's a high-tech guy, Silicon Valley, started the University of

Peter Thiel?

No.

I can't remember now.

Oh, my gosh.

Wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines.

Oh,

yeah.

He was the guy.

He was at Microsoft.

What is it?

Yes, Ray Kurzweil.

Yeah, okay, so Ray Kurzweil.

Yeah, right for sure.

So Ray is leading this, and I think in a kind of a creepy way, he's, you know, he's looking for the singularity, and I think he's trying to recreate his dad, quite honestly, which is a whole nother subject.

He's basically that, that was behind this whole concept of downloading the mind.

Correct.

Right.

He says it'll happen by 2030.

Okay.

But he sees the mind just as, or the person, just as

a map of how you think.

He's a complete materialist.

He basically says the mind exists inside the brain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's

different.

Well, I mean, not only that, he doesn't believe in the soul.

Correct.

He doesn't believe the soul exists.

Correct.

Right.

Correct.

Okay.

So I've had some, I've had some interesting experiences.

I so respect him, and I believe him that he can accomplish some of the things that he talks about, but he also scares the hell out of me.

Yeah.

Why?

Because

he looks at humanity differently than I do.

He believes we'll come to a time when if you get cancer, we'll just download you into a computer.

Well, that's not me, Ray.

That's a copy of me.

That's not my soul.

And he doesn't believe in a soul.

So, you know,

that's a distinction without a difference to him.

Yeah, but hang on.

And for you.

Okay, but hang on.

When you pass the Turing test, when you get AI, look at how people already will treat basic AI.

Right now,

you have people, just with Siri, you have people like me who are like, shut up, Siri.

Shut up.

Actually, Siri makes you a little mad or some irritating.

And you don't mind, you know it's a machine.

There are others who are like, don't, don't, don't talk to Siri.

And they're serious.

Don't talk to Siri.

That's very low level.

I talked to a research psychologist, a sexual psychologist,

and she said, I heard her on a podcast say, you know, we should get, we can get AI

and we can put that into a body and maybe a body of a robot of a child and give them to pedophiles to see if they can take out their aggression on those because it'll be a lifelike experience.

And so they know they can get it out there and not on real children.

And I'm thinking to myself, A, that sounds nuts too.

The minute that that machine claims to be conscious, because it will,

and it will not be human but it will be convincing enough to a human that you will start to have compassion for it okay a I don't want to be enslaving something that claims to be alive B

you and I know it's not alive but when it becomes convincing enough to be alive then what happens

so here's why I'm not worried about it okay

People anthropomorphize their pets.

People attribute human characteristics to animals all the time.

And yet, we haven't gotten to the point where we give equal human rights to animals.

There are some people who want to, but it's not going to work.

It's never going to get to the point where we say it is.

I mean, we might get to the point where we can grow animal protein in the laboratory such that we don't have to factory farm animals.

And we decide that that's not the most ethical thing to do.

But we're still not saying that a chicken is basically a person.

It doesn't have

to relate to a chicken.

They're not in sold in the same way.

We don't believe that they're ensouled as people.

People naturally, not everybody,

not

a lot of atheists and a lot of materialists and a lot of philosophers throughout history, but most of us believe that we are ensouled as people and there's something different about the human soul than any other being living or pseudo-living.

Well, I can't wait.

I can't wait.

20 years, we both have to be alive.

We got to talk about this again, right?

We got to decide whether or not the robot is more like a person or more like a dog.

Yeah.

And that's what I'm telling you.

It's going to be more like a person.

Majority of people because it will become so lifelike and it will be very persuasive.

I think it's Glenn, I think it's going to be more like my dog Chucho.

Why?

I think because that, because

we can distinguish.

You know the fact that it isn't a person.

You know what that is?

No.

Okay, so

you know how pics are when they

any

animation company,

they take the features and they make the eyes really big or they change them so you know it's not human because of something called the uncanny valley.

And you like something that looks human,

and then all of a sudden it gets close enough to where it nose dives and people are like, I don't like that.

And now I don't like it.

I don't like that.

That's creeping me out.

So we're still nose diving.

But they think, and this is a big if, they think if they can really nail it,

it'll come right back up.

That's an empirical question.

It really is.

It's a question we don't know the answer to.

But

again, a part of this is informed by my Christian faith, that

the ensolment is inherently known.

I mean, there are going to be cases in which we become confused.

There are going to be cases in which we confuse ourselves

on purpose because we're too clever by half.

We can't even say it's male and female anymore.

Well, we can because most people still do,

I think.

I think most people do.

But people are afraid to say it.

People are afraid to say it.

But I think that in the end, particularly when we're talking about what is the essence of humanity, that we're not going to cross that line because we can't.

Because the soul is still the soul.

Because the guy who said, you can't download your mind because you can't download the soul, in the end, he recognized, I mean, he inherently knew.

Like, he hadn't been thinking about this.

I presented him with this, and it was just his.

But you started with he is a deeply

you didn't use religious Muslim, deeply

pious Muslim.

So you started with the premise that he's coming from a soul-based point of view.

Right.

The world is going that way.

Unless there's a reconnection to that.

I think that we can get to that.

So therefore, you have just defined what we need to do.

What we don't need to do is to try to put, you know, head the brakes on technology because it's not going to happen.

That's an exercise in futility, right?

And it's

what we need to do is if we really, if the world that I think is going to be and you want to be, even though you're not sure it's going to be, is where we can tell, where we can distinguish the ensolment of a being versus that which is a simulacrum for humanity.

That's what I'm going to pretend.

I, of course, know what a simulacrum is, but there are probably some people in the audience that don't know what it is.

Something that simulates something else, something that looks looks like it but it isn't.

It's a similar acronym.

Okay, so it's a

the

super lifelike, you know.

Dumb it down here.

Well, no.

I'm not a Harvard professor.

Dumb it down.

I have no idea.

Every fifth word, I'm like, I have no idea.

Okay, hey, man,

you were giving me the acronyms AGI and ASI.

I'm like, oh, man.

You're killing me, man.

I'm just an economist.

So

one way or the other,

whether or not I'm right or your fears come to pass or whether or not my confidence is more appropriate, one way or the other, the world's going to be better.

What a way to frame that.

Did you hear that?

Your fears and my confidence.

How about my confidence and your lunatic utopia?

I know my lunatic loving your enemies, man.

And the robots, too.

They're coming to kill us, but it's all good.

Anyway, so

one way or the other, if we don't like the idea where people can't distinguish and where people are no longer fully human because humanity is now manufactured, if we don't want that, then we have to actually fight it.

And the only way that we can fight it is by remembering the one thing that the robot can never have, which is divinity.

The robot can't have divinity.

And if we believe that divinity actually exists, we have to make sure that people continue to understand that.

And that means we need a revolution of faith.

We need a revolution of soul.

We need a revolution of the heart.

Nothing else is going to do it.

You know, tech is not going to take care of us.

If Christians Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and they actually believe that these things are true, then they need a re-evangelization.

We need a new enlightenment.

And the good news is that traditionally throughout American history, these enlightenments, these times of great religious fervor, they come along with self-improvement movements.

The temperance movement was fundamentally religious, and it had to do with evangelical Christianity coming across the United States.

And you know,

the big burst of activity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, your church, was during the self-improvement movement.

It was part and parcel of the self-improvement movement.

And so you can't disentangle, you can't

take apart self-improvement from religious fervor.

Let's not try to do it.

What we need then is we need religious entrepreneurs that are reminding people of the divinity that is within each one of us.

That is our ultimate defense.

Okay, so I 100% agree.

Let me take you then quickly to faith.

I was talking to Billy Graham, and I said,

Where do you see this headed?

How are we going to navigate this?

And he said,

The next great awakening is not going to happen with one guy.

There's not going to be a Billy Graham.

It's going to be individuals, all of the individuals just rising up and doing it themselves.

He did not mean this, but

I do.

I agree with that.

And I think

the church, unless the church, and I say that as a whole body, wakes

up to

reality, you know, what people are really feeling, what people are really struggling with, what they're really afraid of.

And

I got more out of, you know, a couple of hours with Tony Robbins that's deep, that's deep than you get in a lot of churches.

And some of these churches are violating their own principles.

My own church, I'm a Catholic, and it's in crisis.

It's just in crisis.

We are.

I think we all are.

People are, and the Southern Baptists had that terrible report that talked about sexual abuse and, you know, we're not living up to our own standards for sure.

And people are, you know, the biggest rise in religious activity, you know, the category, you know what it is?

Nuns, not N-U-N-S, N-O-N-E-S, the non-affiliated people.

That's a huge crisis because it just means people are walking away.

People are just like bored.

It's inactivity.

It's It's just, it's torpor.

It's, you know, the kind of thing where it's funny.

I was in on Christmas Day, I was in Barcelona, which is where I go a lot because my wife's from Barcelona.

And I went to Christmas Mass in Barcelona.

There were like 12 people in church at Christmas Mass.

It's a formerly

in Spain.

Spain is a formerly Catholic country.

Yeah, he used to torture you if you were.

Turkamato is a long time ago.

A long time ago, yes, I'll give you that.

So, but, but, you know, I 20 years ago, you know, went to the same church and had my son, my oldest son was baptized 21 years ago in that same church.

It was on Christmas Mass.

It was full.

And it's emptied out.

And

that's the real threat that we face.

And that's, you know, what we need is a revolution of interest and of each person actually finding the fire within.

Well, how do we do that?

You know, it's interesting because when you look back at Poland at

the end of the Cold War,

the nine days in Poland when JP2, when John Paul II, he went there.

And, you know, the communists,

they had to let him come.

And there was just nothing that they could do, but

they were trying to keep control.

And a third of the country saw him in person during those nine days.

I mean, he was just like mobbed every place.

And finally, in Warsaw, in the central square, on the last day, when in unison a million people started to chant, we want God.

That wasn't JP2.

That was the heart of each person in unison saying, I demand divinity.

I demand to be fully alive.

I demand to be a human.

What is the ultimate dehumanizing system?

Communism.

Communism is what turns us into the robots.

It makes us into homo economicus, you know, where we're nothing more than an economic unit, right?

It makes us into the dystopian fears that we have about tech, about being able to distinguish between the people and the machines, and the machines substituting for the people.

That communism is a kind of, it's a little, it's like a little demonstration project for that, right?

And how did, how was that beaten?

That was beaten through two things where Ronald Reagan showed the rest of the world.

He said, you know what you want.

You want to be free.

You want to throw off your chains.

And John Paul II said, and you want God because you have the divine within you.

And those two things,

they brought down the iron curtain.

Okay, so maybe the iron curtain is going to be the silicon curtain.

Maybe that's what we're going to be talking about.

Maybe the dystopian future is one where there are these alternatives, but there's still only going to be one future, which is defining the divine within and finding the liberty of what it means to be fully alive and to be living my own life, because I'm a true individual.

I'm not a cog and a machine.

I am somebody who's, you know, who has an incarnated soul.

And, you know, and if we actually, as those of us who are leaders who believe these things, if we're going to do one thing, it's that we have to propagate this and we have to teach people that this is true and we have to show people how to live that.

And then they'll be free.

This has been a blast.

Thank you.

Glenn Beck, every minute with you is a blast.

It's fun.

The name of the book is Love Your Enemies, Arthur C.

Brooks.

Thanks, Arthur.

Thank you, Glenn.

God bless you.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.