Best of the Program | Guests: Ben Shapiro, John Smith & Jason Nobel and Susan Crockford | 3/19/19

Hey, welcome to today's podcast.

It's a pretty good day.

I mean, when Glenn Beck Against Socialism

and Colonel Sanders are trending for the same thing,

it's got to be a good day.

Got to be a good day.

I would agree with that.

And I will say, if you are a millennial and you're stressed out, we have the answers for you today.

We do.

On the podcast.

We can see your pain and we're going to address that.

We feel you.

We feel it.

The The top 20 things that stress millennials out.

Also, Ben Shapiro is going to be on.

The actual people from the movie Breakthrough, which is this unbelievable movie.

True story was happening in St.

Louis when St.

Louis was being burned to the ground about five years ago.

A kid falls through the ice, and he has no heartbeat for an hour.

And he lives, and he was in our studio today, and you would have absolutely no idea.

Plus, Booker on term limits, Elizabeth Warren on health care, and

so much more.

All on today's podcast.

You're listening to The Best of the Blenbeck program.

There's a new study out

and it shows

it shows that three in five millennials say life now is more stressful than ever before.

The survey pointed out numerous causes of the frustration for this young segment.

They feel that their

overall stress and the stress level is caused by the accumulation of daily microaggressions.

Yes, microaggressions, micro stressors that are seemingly trivial experiences to some, but

no, when you put them all together, it's a very, very sad, sad tale.

Like,

well, let me, let me, here, let me give you the, let me give you the list.

And I'm going to start at the least stressful, number 20 on the list, because it's...

I mean, some would say washing the dishes is not really that stressful.

No,

it's not, but

when you couple it with number 19 on the top 20 list of stressors for millennials, I think you can see the damage that it can do.

Washing the dishes and number 19,

choosing what you have to wear.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

They have to do that by themselves, too.

They have to do it by themselves.

I mean, first of all, think of the dishes and the water going down a drain.

Please do to the sensor.

Don't make me

simple scraps of food going down a drain do.

Don't even add that.

I'm just focused on washing the dishes.

Screw the environment.

I'm just

not a very millennial attitude.

Number 20, washing dishes.

We haven't even gotten to the environment yet.

So washing the dishes and picking out the clothes.

Don't add more to their stress.

Right, because you have, you know, that beanie

hat and the

jacket thing, whatever that is, and they put that on.

And there's three or four of them in there.

They need to select which one.

And they also have to worry about job security.

Nobody ever in human history has had to worry about washing the dishes, choosing what to wear, and job security.

That's never happened before.

Never.

Yeah, that's number 18.

These people ate off dirty dishes and went to work naked.

That is how society went to work.

If they even went to work, yeah.

Number 17 is school loan payments.

Number that's that's a good one, although the approach to it is an interesting

solution for millennials, which is you should just give it to me all for free.

That'll solve that stress, right?

You know, another thing, and this, I mean,

well, in my day,

we would just say, you know, we don't take out that student loan.

That's probably, yeah.

Yes, it is exactly what we said.

You know, here's what I said when I was 18 years old.

What college are you going to?

Can't afford one.

That's well, but that's wrong, Glenn.

No, I know.

That's wrong.

Everyone should go to college so that they can spend 95% of their time not doing work.

That's a guaranteed right to all of you.

I mean, if you don't go to college, take it from me.

Kids, you're going to live under a bridge.

You're never going to amount to anything.

You'll just disappear into the darkness.

Anybody who, if you don't go to college, there's no way in America to make it.

No way.

No, definitely not.

No way.

Number 16 of the list of millennial stressors is check engine light comes on.

Number 15 is credit card bills.

Number 14 is phone screen breaking.

Oh, that's a huge one.

Number 13 is job interviews.

Number 12 is paying the bills.

Number 11, now we're not in the top 10 yet.

Number 11, most stressful thing that millennials have to deal with.

They say, and I want to quote, I want to quote.

58%

say life is more stressful now

than ever before.

So number 11 is losing and misplacing keys.

Number 10,

forgetting the phone charger

number nine credit card fraud

number eight forgetting passwords

number seven most stressful thing in a millennial life

phone battery dying every one of these things has already there's already a technological solution for like all of these right

you're you you are not

Really?

I'm just I mean you just said adding more stress

have extra batteries.

They're easy.

They have cases that are.

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Whatever, whatever, whatever.

Yeah, but is there a solution for number six, slow Wi-Fi?

Yeah.

Number five, arriving late to work.

Number four, stressor on millennials.

Number four, losing phone.

Yeah,

where's your technology there?

They have a lot of

iPhone, right?

It's actually built into the software.

Number three,

commute and delays in traffic.

Number two, stressor is arguing with partner.

And the number one most stressful thing on millennials,

losing wallet or credit card.

Wow, that is.

How do they make it?

How do they make it?

Seriously, how do they make it with this?

It's very difficult.

We're not done, Sarah.

Get that music back up.

We're not.

No, no, this is

no.

It's crushing.

It's crushing.

It's crushing.

Now, let me ask you this.

There's not like you know, polio in there anywhere.

I'm noticing.

Yeah, there wasn't, there's no polio there.

You'll notice there is also no global warming.

You would think if we only had 12 years,

that would be pretty stressful, right?

So no global warming.

Also, I'd just like to point out no World War I or World War II or Cold War.

Nowhere is the fear of being vaporized on this list, which is interesting.

You know?

Well, but the keys.

I remember the keys, it's hard to find your keys sometimes.

Right.

And that is a big deal.

Right.

But I would say if we're looking at,

if you're the three out of five that say life is more stressful now than ever before, I mean, I would just say amputation without any kind of medication.

That might be.

A life without antibiotics might be

plowing your own fields and growing your own food and then having a drought or rain might be.

How about so many plagues they started color-coding them?

Right.

The black plague.

Let me make sure you know it's.

There's a lot of other ones.

But don't get the black one.

Yeah, don't get the black one.

That's really bad.

You know, slavery.

That was pretty bad.

Slavery was pretty bad.

That's being picked up in the middle of the night and just uh without charges and just thrown into a prison because uh the government could do it i'm very surprised i did not hear a uh incorrect pronoun uh stressor because that one too that was really rough i mean just let's can we can weigh these

uh slavery oh

incorrect pronoun

I mean, whoa, I'm teeter-tottering on the scale back and forth.

I don't know which one is worse.

I don't know which one is worse.

It's an amazing testament to how good things are.

Maybe that losing my keys to my automobile is a little

bit more.

Is your bigger stress than being scooped up and put into a concentration camp because you're a Jew?

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

It might be an indication that your life is sweet.

What is wrong with you?

And it also shows they obviously do not care about about global warming in real life it is just a it's a an issue to give an ends a means to an end uh well we're gonna say we'll say global warming

inequality that's not gonna stress anybody apparently no uh-uh no no

uh uh dead naming didn't really didn't uh didn't put anything out there how about how about if if if what is it seven out of ten women are raped on campus

that didn't make this

washing the dishes did great point Fear of being raped on campus didn't.

We have a situation that we are told that women are being raped on college campuses at a rate higher than the Rwandan genocide.

Right.

Right.

I think if you would have asked the 20-somethings in Rwanda

during the genocide, might have been in the top five.

I don't know.

Genocide.

I mean, below washing dishes, though, right?

Oh, of course.

Okay, of course.

Oh, that's good.

You know, my whole family being raped and killed in front of me might have made their top 20, you know,

but being raped on campus.

No,

it's not fair.

It's almost as if that statistic isn't near accurate.

Almost.

Almost, almost.

Because it's so amazing.

Like, college debt is the thing they worry about in college.

Now, if more than half of women are being raped at college campuses, you'd think maybe you wouldn't take the debt on to go.

Right.

Like, why go to the place where you're almost definitely going to get raped?

Right.

What's the point of taking on debt to do that?

Right.

And it's almost

all no, right.

In reality, that's not the case.

No, that's not true.

It's not true.

It's almost like we all know that in 12 years we're not all going to die from global warming.

It's almost almost saying it's not.

It's almost true.

By the way, in fact,

I lost my whole family in the Rwandan genocide.

It was horrible.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I lost my iPhone, okay?

Where is it?

That's how bad my life is.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Your mom and everybody raped in front of you, whatever.

I lost my iPhone and the dishes are starting to stack up.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

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There is a new book out, The Right Side of History, How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great by Ben Shapiro.

Ben joins us now.

Hi, Ben.

We can't hear Ben.

How are you?

Oh, there you are.

Hi, Ben.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

How are you?

I'm good.

So, so The Right Side of History.

This really, this book kind of came out of a few conversations that you had with some of the members of the intellectual dark web, did it not?

To a certain extent.

I mean, it came at the very beginning out of the 2016 election and just the generalized feeling that everybody sort of hated each other.

And you looked around and you went, wait a second, everybody is living in the most splendid sort of prosperity in the history of mankind.

People are living to record ages.

People are living in the freest society where they're allowed to do pretty much anything they want, so long as they don't punch somebody else in the face.

And yet we are all really pissed at each other.

And so I started to wonder, why is it that everybody seems so unhappy?

Why are suicide rates going up?

Why are we having this opioid epidemic?

Why is everybody so unhappy in what should be the happiest time?

Yeah, I just read a

headline today.

I think it was maybe the Wall Street Journal

about

the greatest job market in a century.

That's what they're calling this.

The greatest job market in a century.

And you wouldn't know that.

You'd think we were in the Great Depression.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And not just that.

You would think that we are in the worst racial time in our history,

that white supremacy on the one side and

anger on the other side, and that everybody just hates each other.

And you would believe that we are divided by class in a way that we've never been divided before, that it's the 1% against the 99%.

And none of this happens to be true.

We happen to live in the most racially equal time in in the history of mankind.

If you could be born into any time, this would be the time that you would choose.

And so the question becomes, why are we so angry?

And I think that the real reason is because anger fills something that we are missing.

And that is a true sense of what happiness is and what politically we need in order to be happy.

We've sort of redefined happiness to mean feeling joy at a particular time or whatever our subjective emotions tell us at a particular time.

Self-esteem has been mixed up with happiness.

But if you look back to the ancients, if you look back to the Judeo-Christian system, happiness has nothing to do with any of those things.

Happiness has to do with pursuing moral purpose using reason.

That was always the basis of Western civilization.

And so I started thinking about maybe the reason that we're so angry at each other is because we've lost what we used to share.

We've lost what we had in common, which was this common adherence to a set of values that we used to call Western civilized values.

Yeah, we don't, you know, Nietzsche is often misunderstood when he's talking about, you know, God is dead.

Everybody's like, oh, he was declaring God is dead and it's a great thing.

No, he's actually saying it's a warning.

We've just killed God.

Congratulations.

We've just killed God.

Science is reigning.

However,

God is,

he'll be found someplace else.

What are we going to replace him with?

And, you know, it wasn't too many years later that they found National Socialism and Adolf Hitler replacing God.

And that's kind of the same thing now: we've

destroyed God and everything.

We always had Moses and Jesus as

our archetypes.

Well, they're destroyed, so who's our archetype now?

That's exactly right.

I mean, Judeo-Christian values didn't just lay the foundation for our moral system.

They also laid the foundation for science.

They laid the foundation for the idea that reason matters.

Because if you're a scientific materialist, if you're somebody who believes that all of humanity, we're basically just wandering...

balls of meat, firing neurons, wandering through space, then not only is there no morality, but there's also no such thing as reason.

Why should we argue with each other?

We are just, again, wandering balls of meat wandering through space.

Why not use force on one another?

What exactly do we share at that point?

Why not side up with tribes and go to battle with other tribes?

And that's what we're beginning to see: there's this godshaped hole in our heart.

We're filling it with anger.

We feel a sense of meaning and a sense of belonging by getting angry at other groups, whether it's other groups politically or whether it's other groups racially.

And it's really ugly and it's really a problem.

This is a fundamental betrayal of what it was that the West built in the first place.

The West was built on certain principles.

It's kind of fascinating, Glenn, when you look at this manifesto from the shooter in New Zealand, and nobody should read it because we don't want to give it any sort of play.

The one thing that is clear is he keeps using the term the West, and he keeps using it to mean white supremacy.

And on the left, what you see is people who define the West in much the same way.

They'll say Western civilization has to go.

We shouldn't be teaching about it because all it really is, is a system of dominance by people who are more powerful.

It's a system of white hierarchy.

That's not what the West is about at all.

What made the West unique is the fact that it was about the notion of individual rights, the notion that we are all made in God's image on the one hand, on the religious sense, and the notion that we have to use reason to pursue the best outcomes on the other hand, which is a Greek notion.

And the combination of those two notions built America, which I think is the greatest

exposition of Western philosophy in the history of mankind.

And we're losing that.

We're losing that because we've decided that

God should not and does not exist.

And so there is no actual rationale for believing there's a higher morality.

We can sort of craft morality however we want.

And on the other hand, we believe that reason is no longer useful because you can't understand me after all.

You don't come from the same background that I do.

And if you don't come from the same background that I do, then how can we have a common conversation?

So what is the role of the university?

You address this.

What is the role of the university now?

And

how do we get it back to you know diverse thinking and and reason and logic

well I mean I think the only way to do that is is for the American people to actually demand it as always the responsibility lies with us is certainly no question that universities used to be the place where people studied Greek and Latin and actually learned the the ancients in the original language and understood what were the foundational principles of the civilization.

And they've become almost the reverse of that.

They've been taken over by the critical studies genre, which is devoted specifically to the idea that the West is basically just a hierarchy of power that has to be torn out at its roots.

This is something that was done by the Frankfurt School.

It was done by post-structuralist Marxists in the university system.

And it's been seen as

a pseudo-sophisticated argument against Western civilization.

The truth is, of course, that the universities still rest, as all of us do in the West,

we're still working off the fumes of a gas tank that we emptied ourselves.

So, if you think of Western civilization as having these values, and that's the gas and the engine, and then we decide which way we want to steer the car, right now, the car is empty because we haven't actually refilled that gas.

We're just living off the fumes, but we're pretending that we're moving as of our own momentum.

So,

how much longer do we have on those fumes?

I mean, I see, I mean, Ben,

you and I were talking a year ago about how bad things are.

They are so

rapidly changing.

We are running towards socialism.

We are running towards infanticide.

We're running towards our own destruction now.

How much longer

does this car run?

Yeah, I'm not sure that it runs too much longer absent a real re-examination of why exactly America is fantastic.

And that starts with the premise that America is fantastic and that the West is fantastic.

And that itself is a controversial proposition.

But if you really don't believe the West is fantastic, you should visit another civilization.

You should spend some time there because the West is a pretty incredible place.

And

as you say, I feel like

we are running out.

I feel like those of us who are conservative,

we need to become

better representatives of our philosophy.

And it can't just be about we want lower taxes and we want less government intervention.

We have to say, what is it in human nature that demands these things?

What is it in the system that means that human beings are happier under this?

Because the argument that's being made for socialism right now is not, in fact, an argument for prosperity.

It's not that we're all going to be better off and we're all going to be more prosperous.

Nobody believes that.

You read the Green New Deal and you can see that the folks on the left don't believe that.

What they are actually saying is that there's a sense of meaning to be found in some sort of shared quest.

It's why they're constantly referring to sort of these wartime ethics that we're in a war and because we're in a war, therefore we should all mobilize in warlike fashion.

Well, you can mobilize people that way, but you're mobilizing them towards something that's not going to bring them happiness.

The truth is that happiness can only be brought by a social fabric resting on a common frame of morality and by the belief that individuals can make a difference in the world, that we have free will and reason to pursue, and that we are bound to our neighbors not by force of government, but by voluntary belief that these people are our brothers and sisters.

So de Tocqueville said, I looked for the success of America and I couldn't find it anywhere until I went into its churches.

And there I saw it burning on the pulpits.

It was the pulpit.

It was the priests and the pastors and the rabbis and everybody else that were speaking these truths that you're not seeing anymore.

We were losing the Civil War until about the middle of it when Abraham Lincoln said, you know what, we got to make this about the end of slavery and we need a day of fast and prayer and humiliation.

We needed a day of atonement.

We didn't lose.

I think we only lost one more battle after that day.

We lost everything before it, and only one battle after.

You say today,

we have to, I mean, when you can't get the Senate to say we won't kill babies after they're born, when you can't get the Senate,

we have so withdrawn from God, there's just, there's no protection left.

You talk to people and say, hey, we should probably, we should probably turn around and say, hey, forgive us for everything that we've done.

And can you just, can you help heal us?

Nobody's thinking that way.

You can't say that in regular open society.

No, well, I mean, we've become a very secular society.

And here's the thing.

The argument in the book isn't that you have to be a religious person to be a good person.

I know you don't believe that either, Glenn.

What you do have to do is you have to make certain assumptions about human nature that I think are religious in nature.

And if you don't make those assumptions, and if you try to rip away the undergirding for those assumptions in the religious belief system, you're really hurting everybody else.

And you see this for a lot of folks who live on the coast who still have sort of an air stats social fabric created by country clubs or by college or by social groups.

And they live very conservative lifestyles.

And this is a point that Charles Murray has made.

And at the same time, they're ripping on churches.

They're suggesting that Judeo-Christian values are bad.

Well, what do they think is holding up?

the value system that maintains the country in the rest of the country outside of L.A.

and New York.

It really is.

It's not a tendency yale, guys.

Yeah, it's the argument that Ben Franklin made to Thomas Paine, where he's like, you know, you grew up in the system created by these people.

You have a liberty because of that, and you're enjoying those fruits that are allowing you to tear it apart, but it's a suicidal task that you're on.

It's the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution.

Paine, of course, is a huge fan of the French Revolution, and Edmund Burke, of course, is not.

And Paine's basic argument was that we need to get rid of religion.

Religion is what has stood in the way of human progress.

And the Burkean argument is, wait a second, it's religion that has stood behind human progress.

That doesn't mean that Judeo-Christianity has always been free and wonderful or that it's always been interpreted properly in accordance with freedom.

But this value system, the Enlightenment, these values that I hold the same that Sam Harris of militant atheists holds, those values didn't come out of nowhere.

They didn't spring into being in 1760 for no reason at all in one place, in one time, in one segment of history.

They sprang into being because there are foundations to that.

That was the third story.

That was the third story of the philosophy.

The foundations were laid at Athens and they were laid at Sinai.

And ignoring all of that and deriding all of that in favor of, what, tribalism and subjectivism,

it's tearing the country apart.

So we need to get back to our roots because the truth is we still do have more in common than we have apart.

As Lincoln said, we still are brothers rather than enemies.

But the moment that we lose what made us brothers, then we we are enemies.

Ben Shapiro from thedailywire.com.

He's got a new book out.

It's called The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.

Ben Shapiro, thanks so much, Ben.

Talk to you again.

You bet.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hey, it's Glenn, and I want to tell you about something that you should either end your day with or start your morning with, and that is the news and why it matters.

If you like this show, you're going to love the news and why it matters.

It's a bunch of us that all get together at the end of the day and just talk about the stories that matter to you and your life.

The news and why it matters.

Look for it now wherever you download your favorite podcast.

If you've been out in the movie theaters lately, you might have seen a

trailer for a movie that looks really good.

I was at, I don't know, Make Your Dragon Mate or whatever it is,

and I saw a trailer for Breakthrough, and it looks really, really good.

And about a quarter or halfway through the trailer, you realize, wait a minute, they're going to talk about God in this.

And you're like, it can't be because this movie looks really good.

It's a $30 million movie, and it's about a story that happened about five years ago.

Four years ago.

Four Four years ago.

And it may not be a story that you heard, and we'll tell you why here in a minute, because it is an amazing story of John Smith.

He was 14 years old when he was walking over an ice-covered lake

and

he was with two friends.

He broke through the ice.

He was,

they all fell through, but

he went for 15 minutes before paramedics could even come.

He was under the water.

He didn't have a heartbeat for 45 minutes.

And you know, all of the stories on what happens when you're deprived of oxygen and everything else.

John Smith is here in the studio.

How are you, John?

I'm good.

How are you?

That's incredible that you can, I mean, without a pulse for 45 minutes.

Yes, yes.

How?

Only God.

Only God.

So

we also have his pastor, Jason Noble in, and you are portrayed in the movie as well.

Now, let me ask you this.

In the movie,

and only because I've seen another movie like this, and I thought, and they made the pastor look like the guy who was doubting.

Are you a doubting Thomas in?

No way.

No way.

No way.

Not at all.

I mean, after the first night, after John was in the hospital, I walked out to Joyce.

We had some incredible miracles happen in the room, and I walked out to Joyce because not only was he without a pulse for an hour It was over an hour without a pulse

When Joyce walked in the room and prayed Holy Spirit bring my son back to life He came back to life, but the doctor said he was still brain dead every organ and catastrophic failure 1% chance he would make it if he made it overnight.

They were planning organ transplants.

I mean, so it wasn't just hey, I mean we took a group of pastors and we started to pray like crazy.

And so

I walked out that evening after just a series of miracles and we talk about it in the book breakthrough

walked out and said Joyce, he's walking out of the hospital.

And one of the most iconic pictures in the story is after all of the prayer and miracles, he walks out of the hospital 16 days later, 16 days later, completely healed.

Him and I are walking out of the hospital together.

Were there any side effects from this?

No.

None.

None.

I was back playing basketball about two, three months later.

Yeah.

He was totally cleared 40 days.

After.

Incredible.

Do you remember being on the ice?

Do you remember this actually happening?

Yes, you know, I remember, you know, like what the ice kind of breaking.

I remember that.

And, you know, the screams, you know, fighting, you call 911.

I don't want to die.

Call 911.

And then, you know, the water, you know, like the water line, you know, seeing above and below how dirty and brown and green and murky that water was.

You know, it was like getting in a fight with a tiger, you know, the ice just piercing your skin.

I still have scars to this day.

So I do remember a very, very good chunk of it.

We also prayed that he wouldn't remember because it was so traumatic.

And so that's one thing he talks about when he was, because people always ask us, did you go to heaven?

And, you know, whatever.

And we had prayed that he wouldn't remember it because it was so traumatic.

I like I have the 911 calls on my laptop, and I mean, I can barely listen to them.

I mean, they're just so intense.

And we felt like what God said is, it's not about one person experiencing me.

It's about every person that comes in contact with this story experiencing me.

And so that's why we feel like God did it that way.

So you were, were you, how long were you under water?

I was underwater for 15 minutes and without an a pulse for an additional 45.

So a little over an hour without a pulse.

And so you're there and in the movie at least, the fireman that is responding,

he goes underneath the water and he can't find you.

And then he

says later in the movie that, you know, he heard a voice say, go back down one more time.

Is that true?

Yes.

Tell me about him.

Tell me about what happened.

So his name is Tommy Schein.

He's part of the Winnsville Fire Department back home in St.

Louis, Missouri.

And, you know,

he got the call, and they said when he got the call, he sprinted as soon as the truck stopped.

Like, the stuck, the truck hadn't even stopped, and he was running to the scene.

And he gets out in the water, and he has a pike pole, which pike pulls a long pole with a big hook at the end.

You used to tear a drywall down in a fire.

And by now, I'd been underwater for like three minutes.

So it's crucial now.

He's timing it.

I mean, it's do or die.

They actually called the dive team in if he couldn't have found me because I was laying on a cliff.

I was on a rocky bottom that was 10 feet deep.

If I would have went a little bit, maybe an inch over, I would would have fallen into where it was 20, you know, to 25 feet deep with a muddy bottom.

So I'm right on the edge of, you know, this cliff.

And so he gets in the water and he's looking for me and he has this pipe pole and it's do or die.

And he hears a voice, you know, and

in the movie it says go back, but what he's told us is go two feet to the left.

And he does.

You know, he's...

checking he just sticks it down he's like i got to do something so he sticks it down he's like it could be a tire it could be my boot but he realizes it can't be his boot because it's too deep.

So he pulls something up.

He knows it's heavy, but he doesn't know what it is.

And it's me.

He found me.

Right at the last minute.

I mean, literally

one minute from there, they would have sent in divers.

I mean, it was literally within just a moment because they were ready to give up.

You said

when you came in that this movie doesn't even cover half of it.

Oh, yeah.

This is just, I mean,

the thing we talk about is if it really told the whole story, it'd probably be longer than the Titanic.

I mean, it would be a very long movie.

I mean, it was one miracle after another that God just set up.

You know, it was incredible to watch it play out.

Incredible.

And, you know, I think for me and for what, for our, for our, for John and Joyce and all of us, we just want to encourage people that God still does the impossible.

And we've seen it play out.

And that's a good segue to, you had mentioned this off here, and I didn't realize the timing was the same, but this happened in the St.

Louis area in the middle of essentially the Michael Brown Ferguson stuff.

Yeah.

Yes.

This is a time where this city is completely torn apart.

100%.

We'd only lived there for three months, too.

I'd only been there, pastor, for three months.

And so we moved from Washington State and walked into this situation in St.

Louis, and we're going like, oh my goodness.

I mean, the place was just, it was crazy.

And so to see God just do this for John and

it captivated the local media.

It captivated the story, just reached out and touched the city.

The city came together.

Yeah, it's amazing to see how through all that chaos that St.

Louis was coming together as well, behind the scenes as a team and as a community to pray for me and to stand by me and my family.

It's kind of amazing, you know, is the

where in Washington State are you from?

Kind of all over, but I was pastoring in Port Angeles, right outside of Seattle.

Okay, yeah.

So I grew up in Mount Vernon in Bellingham.

Okay.

And

I remember I moved to Phoenix, and I grew up in Pacific Northwest.

Right.

You don't see the sun.

Right.

You're like, what is that?

The sky's on fire.

And I went down, and I remember holding my hand out and it was like I was stoned, but I was sober.

And I was holding the hand out and I was watching the shadows and how sharp they were.

Because, you know, in Seattle, you don't see that.

There's no real shadow.

And

I kind of realized as the light grows stronger.

You know, the shadows are only growing stronger because the light is growing stronger at the same time.

Darkness.

And

you kind of wonder,

you know, which we focus on.

We were focused on the darkness.

Right.

At the same time, same area, this was happening.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not afraid of the darkness.

I think that the darker it is, the lighter we can be.

I can't let that pass without going, you will be.

Oh, yeah.

Straight from Yoda's mouth.

It really is.

What's it like seeing a movie where people are playing you?

Definitely different.

But, you know, it's a little strange at first.

But when you get to,

we had the opportunity to meet them, and they're just super, super nice people.

This cast is just big cast.

Big names.

Like, it's not, you know, it's not like a lot of some of these movies you see, but they have positive messages.

Like, you don't see the big actors and actresses taking part.

This is, I mean, the woman from This Is Us, isn't it?

I mean, this is a business.

Usually, yes, it's just one big name, and then the rest are minor roles.

Stephan Curry is an executive producer.

Oh, really?

Yes.

Oh, wow.

First one that he's done.

Oh, that's really cool.

Yeah.

Isn't that awesome?

Yeah, geez, this is amazing.

So

why why did this happen to you?

There's no real

explanation other than

what God has in store for me.

He had a purpose to save me.

My goal is to just live it out.

I get that question a lot.

It's portrayed in the film of why am I alive and not others.

And truthfully, I don't know.

I'm not perfect.

I'm just an 18-year-old kid from St.

Louis.

I didn't mean it that way.

I can see how people mean it, but

I would think

it would play on you at night, not why don't you save other people, but what am I going to do now with my life?

I've been given a chance.

It could be really uplifting or crippling, depending on how you.

Yes, it was very hard for me at first to deal with all this because, like you said, it was

a lot of pressure, and I had no idea really how to handle it.

But with help from Pastor Jason and

Devon Franklin and Pastor Samuel Rodriguez, them guiding me and helping me, It's just, you know, you remember to stay humble always and try to answer the questions the best you can, but realize that you're not perfect and you don't have all the answers.

Pastor, I mean, theologically, is it okay for him to just sit home and eat Cheetos one night?

I mean, doesn't he have to do something important every minute of every day?

Well, I mean, he is 18.

And so, I mean, I think we all feel very strongly that God's given us this message to share with the world.

I mean, we wrote the book.

We did a movie.

My book just released today where it has all the teaching lessons for people that are walking through breakthrough.

And so it's called Breakthrough Near Miracle.

But the thing that I think is so important is one of the things that is a key in this is John actually was adopted from Guatemala when he was five months old.

So his parents adopted him, and as he was walking through this struggle after the fact, it was like, man, why didn't my mom want me?

And the whole adoption piece was a big thing that he walked through two years after the miracle.

And so I think we definitely, one of the things we told God in the hospital when this was playing out is we will shout this from the mountaintop.

And Joyce will tell you that.

Joyce is an incredible woman, mama bear, who, I mean, is just fierce.

I mean, when she walks into the room, it just, the, the atmosphere changes.

And, you know, um, I think that's a big piece.

We've all been given, given this to share with the world.

I mean, the movie's great.

Love it.

Love the screen.

Love all of that.

But the message, I was in a church and spoke.

We spoke last weekend in a church of about 2,000 people.

And when I gave the altar response at the end of it, I said, how many of you need a breakthrough in your life?

100% of the congregation stood.

And that was in the Northeast.

I mean, you know, the Northeast is a rough place.

And so,

I mean, so just for such a time as this.

Were the doctors skeptical of not at all?

The doctors bonus.

It looks like, again, in the trailer, it looks like the doctor's like, well, I don't know.

I mean, if he lives, we should probably shoot him.

Right.

It's typical doctors, right?

I mean, they're going to give you the worst case scenario.

Yeah.

And that's exactly what they did.

You know, I mean, they gave him the worst case scenario.

I think that's one thing that really plays into breakthrough is that, yes, this was a miracle done by God, but also we have science to back it up.

Yes.

There's 300 plus pages of medical documents to back up that this is a miracle.

They want to say the cold water helped you.

Well, it was too warm.

They want to say, you know, your body froze.

Well, my head would have had to go in first.

Like you said, the doctors doubted, but we had the number one expert in the Midwest or in some, I think the Midwest.

Yeah, Midwest.

He was the number one medical expert in hypothermia and drowning, and he got on secular TV and claimed that this is a modern-day miracle, and he can't even explain it.

I've spoken to a breakfast with some retired medical field doctors, and I told them the story, and a lot of them came up to me and said, I have been doing this my whole life until I, when I graduated high school, you did it, did med school, and done the whole wazoo all my years.

And I said, I can explain just about every case, but yours, I have no idea.

Yeah, I mean, it defies

everything we know about the body.

100%.

You know, especially, I mean, there's no effect.

Looking at you, there's no effect.

And you say there's no, there's nothing, there's nothing that's different.

About six months after this, he had to go to the eye doctor because he was having some trouble with his eyes.

And usually if you've died, all of your blood vessels and your eyes are the first things to kind of show that sign of.

And so the doctor was looking in his eyes and she said, you know, after this episode, and I love what John said, it was an episode.

He said, I died and told the doctor that.

And she looked in his eyes and said, there's no sign.

Your blood vessels are completely normal.

I mean, so it's incredible.

You're absolutely right.

There's no sign.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

It's really crazy.

It's amazing.

It's good to meet you.

It's good to meet you.

Glad you were alive.

Thank you.

Welcome back.

And

the movie, Breakthrough, comes out April 17th.

April 17th.

2019.

The books as well.

They're out now.

They're out now.

You can get them on Amazon.

Breakthrough and Breakthrough to Your Miracle.

Breakthrough.

Is that your book that came out today?

Yes.

Breakthrough to Your Miracle came out today.

Very great.

And so it's just a teaching.

You know, it's all of what we learned.

And Glenn, how long have we been doing the show for a zillion years now?

I think since the beginning, we've asked Hollywood to make movies like stories like this and do them right, which never happens.

And this is when they're really doing it.

This is them taking a big risk.

And it's, you know, it's something we should support.

20th Century Fox.

Yeah.

I mean,

I couldn't believe it.

When I saw it, I was like, shut up.

Which, you know what that means.

It's actually Disney.

It'll be Disney in the next couple of weeks.

That's right.

Which they've never done a faith-based film.

Wow, wow.

All right.

It hits theater.

It's April 17th, guys.

Thank you so much.

God bless.

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

Dr.

Susan Crockford is a zoologist.

She has

been working on the history of Arctic animals.

She is a

polar bear biologist, I believe.

Is that right, Susan?

Are you a polar bear biologist as well?

Well,

I'm really a general biologist,

but I've got a special interest in polar bears for sure.

Okay.

First of all, when did you develop this special interest in polar bears?

When in your life did you go, I want to study polar bears?

Well, it was really probably 20 years ago.

I was really interested in the evolution of polar bears and, you know, like

where did they come from?

And

how did they actually come to be as a separate species?

And so since that time,

I've been looking at the literature on polar bears and, you know, reading it all and examining it in detail.

Okay.

So that's how I got here.

All right.

So

the catastrophic global warming stuff, they have been telling us for years we're killing all of the polar bears because the ice caps are melting.

And you point out that

the ice caps have melted to 20, 50 levels in the summer, and yet the bears don't seem to be decreasing.

Exactly.

And

that was really what the whole hype was about.

Around the turn of this century, like around the year 2000,

you had polar bears really elevated to this icon of global warming, and they were, you know, the epitome of what humans were

doing wrong in destroying the planet and all of that.

And then in 2008, when polar bears were listed in the U.S.

as being threatened with extinction,

in fact, by 2007,

the summer ice levels had already dropped to the levels that they had predicted wouldn't happen until the middle of the century.

Now, the middle of the century was when they said that two-thirds of all the bears were going to disappear because of the lack of ice.

And in fact, since 2007, although there's been a little bit of up and down, those levels, summer sea ice levels, have stayed at that mid-century level ever since, and yet polar bear numbers have actually increased.

And to the point to where, I mean, polar bears, people don't realize polar bears are nasty animals.

They will eat you.

Exactly.

And we saw this just last summer where there were two fatal attacks within two months

in Canada on western Hudson Bay.

And it really has

residents of the Arctic very nervous about the potential for what

a really thriving population of polar bears really means for people who actually have to live and work there year-round.

So this is an amazing thing because

it's like the people who go big game hunting.

And

they'll take a picture with a lion, and everybody will be all up in arms about the lion, except for the people in the community.

They're like, no, lions eat us.

We need to keep their population under control.

It's not that these people hate polar bears or want to wipe out all polar bears.

They just need control of the population because they are...

They're everywhere.

They're around the garbage dump.

They're around

stores or any place where there's lots of garbage or food, correct?

Exactly.

However, what you have to remember is that the two attacks that happened last summer actually occurred away from communities,

and there were no attractants involved.

Both of those attacks were purely predatory attacks where the bears came after those people with the intent to eat them.

Okay, so now,

again, the global warming people say this is only happening because

their food source that they have always had,

whatever,

is just dying and they can't have the food source.

So they're just starving to death and they have to go down into these communities and forage.

Is that the truth or is it lazy bears?

Well, that's what they say, of course, but

what they're doing is

sort of citing a generalized trend.

of what they think they see overall.

But when you look at the specifics of these incidents, what you find is

the one attack actually occurred when the bears were just off the ice.

In fact,

it was a party of three hunters who had,

they were on a boat and they had to go to shore because they had engine trouble.

So they were just waiting to fix their boat and the ice moved in and trapped them.

Wow.

Amazing.

One of them got, they were just having morning tea and this bear came in and attacked them and they couldn't be rescued.

They sat there protecting the body of their friend as more and more bears came in, attracted to all the carnage,

until they could be rescued because there was so much ice.

Now, so that incident cannot be blamed on lack of sea ice.

Now, Susan, I've been following the polar bear thing for a while.

My understanding of it from the media is it used to be that polar bears would basically only sit at the bottom of hills with their children and drink Coca-Cola and then do polar bears first.

Let's clear this up.

Do polar bears share their Coke with

cubs and other animals up in the north?

Well, you know, they sometimes share their seals.

So I

if they had a coke, they would share.

Right, okay.

Maybe they need seal-flavored coke.

That would be something they could do.

Well, you know, what would happen is that they wouldn't have straws now.

Oh, that's right.

That's hard to share.

That's a conjecture, you know.

You are my favorite zoologist.

But we do hear a lot of claims about how the sea ice is melting, and these polar bears are forced to wade into the water and try to swim and find land, and then they just die out in the middle of the ocean searching for a place to stop swimming.

How accurate are those claims?

Well, one of the things that's happened is that it's kind of an ironic repercussion of all of this concern about the polar bear's future is that all of the money that's been poured into polar bear research has

actually

taught us a lot about what polar bears can and can't do when there's less sea ice.

And one of the things that they've learned is that polar bears deal with open water much better than anyone expected.

And that in fact, you know, they can they can take less sea ice in summer in their stride.

It's not really an issue.

It really is amazing because all the claims, I mean, this goes mainly back, I think, to, at least in the public eye, to Al Gore's movie where, you know, he had animation of polar bears dying.

And I mean,

when you say that back in the 60s and 70s, it was between what, 5,000 and 10,000 polar bears on Earth.

And now we're looking at...

I would say between 5 and 15.

So I picked 10 as an average.

10,000.

And then what is the number actually today?

Well,

when I look at

all of the information that we've got, all the recent surveys, and apply those to areas that we don't have information for, the number comes to 39,000.

39, I mean

four times.

How can they be talking about this

creature going extinct when we're talking about a quadrupling of the number of them?

I mean, it just makes no sense to the average person.

Does it make sense to you?

Well, no, it doesn't.

And one of the things that I discovered and the thing that I talk about in my book is that

back in 2006, 2007, when the polar bear experts of the world were sitting down and trying to figure out what would happen to the bears if the sea ice dropped to

the levels that we've got today,

they had really no information about how the bears would cope with less sea ice because it hadn't happened yet.

So they were guessing.

You know, they were using their knowledge about what polar bears did and what they had seen so far and made a guess about what would happen.

And it turned out they were wrong.

What they had done was sold to the public as facts

their guesses.

Are polar bears just northern animals, or can you find them in the South Pole, too?

No, no, they're strictly northern animals because, in fact, you don't get

they come from, they evolved from brown bears, and so brown bears are also a northern hemisphere animal.

And why are they?

You started with, I wanted to know why they were a unique species,

why they came and how they got there, and you know, how they were.

Well, from all we can figure out that it really would have come down to the the ice ages, the response of brown bears to the ice expanding during ice ages.

And

there were brown bears, for example, in Ireland.

So if you had ice coming down and covering England and Ireland, what you're doing is reducing the amount of habitat left for the brown bears there to exist.

And you've got sea ice developing offshore, where there is seals because there has been seals for millions of years longer than there's been bears.

So there's food out there.

So it's an alternative habitat for

brown bears to use during an ice age.

Last question.

Is there a number or a time when you say, okay, there's that's like we're at record-setting numbers of bears, polar bears, or they need we need to thin the herd or anything like that.

Is there a number that how many polar bears are too many polar bears?

Well, I don't know.

I don't think I can answer that question.

But you know, there's,

it's, it's going, it's already a problem for communities in the Arctic.

And

Churchill in Manitoba is sort of

offered as the perfect way of how you deal with large numbers of polar bears coming in in the fall, and this is how you deal with the increased danger.

But that takes a lot of money.

And most of the communities, you know, little isolated communities, hamlets in Greenland and up in northern Canada, they don't have that kind of money.

And

so those are the people who are going to have to decide

how many is too much.

Thank you so much, Susan.

I really appreciate it.

Susan Crockford,

she can be found online at polarbearscience.com.

She is the author of a book called The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened.

Susan, thank you.

God bless.

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