Best of the Program | 1/7/19

Hello podcasters.

It is the first show of 2019 for the Glenn Beck program and what a wild ride it is.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters is kind of the theme, but we actually start with something different.

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So what did we learn from the stories of 2018 that we should apply to 2019?

And what predictions did we get right and wrong?

Last January, I made a buttload of predictions.

Some of them I got really wrong.

Like Stu points out, China landing on the dark side of the moon.

Didn't happen until January 2nd, 2019, so we gave you an F on that one.

But there's a lot in there.

Actually, Politico called one of yours one of the worst predictions of the year.

We did that.

No, I made a couple of bad ones.

Yes.

That was on cryptocurrency, not what they pointed out.

And the meaning of politics and where we're headed for 2019, a bridge over troubled water, all on today's podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenbeck program.

This is the Glenbeck program.

Well, hello, America.

It's good to be back.

It's 2019.

So a review of the 2018 predictions that this program made, that I made.

Where were we right?

Where were we wrong?

It's important because we have new predictions to make, and I believe this is a critical year,

a bridge over troubled water.

And I'll explain that coming up.

Also, what what did we learn in 2018 that can be applied in 2019?

The seven things that I'm going to pay attention to and I need you to pay attention to in the next 12 months.

And a personal goal I'd like to see anybody join me on

All

Begins Right Now.

So I learned a lot in 2018 and I started making notes while I while I was gone on vacation, started thinking about the things that I have learned in 2018 that we need to apply to our thinking in 2019.

2019 I think is a bridge.

This is a bridge from the old world to the new world.

I think it will be remembered in history as that year that people started, it started to dawn on people, oh, wow,

everything will change.

I think by 2025, you will be printing new maps.

I think there will be new borders by 2025.

Everything's about to change.

But

who am I to say?

Let's look at the predictions that we made in 2018 to see if any of them happened.

We got some right, we got some wrong.

Let's go through, Stu.

And maybe we come up with grades of these as we kind of go through them and see how right or wrong they were.

All right.

All right.

You predicted 2018, the Dow will melt up and then crash.

So Dow did hit a high in October.

And then since October, it's, I mean, is crash the right word?

It's definitely come down quite a bit.

12% of its value.

I don't give myself

points on this one.

because I don't think this is what I meant.

Well, I know this isn't what I meant.

A melt-up was not 26,000.

A melt-up was over 30,000.

And a crash was more significant.

So I would say

directionally, it was pretty much right.

Yeah, so I'd give it maybe a C, C plus.

Okay.

Maybe.

Do you think?

I think that's fair.

I think you give a, I mean, you know, the difference between 26 and 30,000 isn't all that dramatic.

I mean, you could probably go...

you know, B minus, maybe.

All right.

I'll give you a B minus on that one.

Economic instability will bring with it powerful and dangerous dangerous nationalists and socialist movements.

Yellow.

I mean, that's.

I think I get an A on that one.

I would say yes.

I mean, that's even if you like some of the elements of some of those movements.

I mean, certainly some people love the socialism as we're seeing in Congress these days.

Yeah.

Trump has called himself a nationalist, which I don't think is the same thing as what I mean by nationalist.

I don't think he thinks of it that way.

But we've seen the neo-nationalist movement,

the rise of neo-nationalists in Italy, in France, in Belgium, in Germany, in India.

Some areas of South America.

There's definitely a lot there to that one.

Governments will crack down on blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

There were some countries that sort of outright ban cryptocurrencies.

And certainly China, there's a big effect.

India.

Colombia, I think, had something.

There's a few of them that cracked down on it.

I mean, the United States didn't, really.

They seem to be open still to these things.

I mean, that's a there.

There's some.

They did begin investigations.

I don't know.

Still, that one's still a question mark.

That's a B.

Yeah, because I mean, some of it definitely happened, right?

But I mean, and obviously, it was a terrible year for cryptocurrencies as well.

Still on that front, we've got blockchain technology will be embraced by companies for hundreds of uses and utilities.

I think I give this a B as well.

15% of companies surveyed by Market Watch

have

a blockchain initiative that is live.

So adoption is coming soon, but it is not adopted yet.

I will say too, at some point, someone has to use this stuff for something useful.

Yes.

You know,

a lot of people like to compare this.

People who like cryptocurrencies like to compare this to the

tech bubble.

And there are, you want to look at charting.

You want to look at all sorts of,

you can definitely make those ties.

However, pets.com blew up into this big thing and then crashed and disappeared.

But we all understand that pets.com, generally speaking, was a useful utility to people, right?

Buying your pet food online, we're all buying, you know, not everybody, but I mean, I know we order a lot of our stuff from Amazon or whatever online.

I mean, pets.com didn't wind up being the one who did it, but at least there was a kernel there of something useful to people.

As of right now, like there's, there does not seem to be, it's all like, well, we can build

exchanges that we can use.

see here's the problem and then we get into blockchain a little bit more but um we should kind of move on but um the the thing is is that blockchain it hasn't gone to zero no by any stretch no no no it's still very valuable yeah it's still very valuable and all of these major companies are making major moves they just haven't put them into place yet they just haven't cut the ribbon on them yet and so when they cut the ribbon but they're all moving all of the big institutional investors and everybody else is moving and spending millions of dollars on

cryptocurrency

desks

and trades.

And some of it's been announced.

Some of it is still speculation, but

it's not capturing because everybody thinks, because

cryptocurrency or Bitcoin looks to the average person like it's a tulip bulb,

it's not a tulip bulb.

These bulbs you plant because they will grow.

This is not just a tulip bulb.

There is something more to this than just tulips.

If I remember right, the tulip bulb thing

was tulips were not worth four times what they were two years earlier after the crash.

Correct.

Right.

Like that's still there.

Correct.

So

there's still an advantage there.

Companies will adopt cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

Yeah, that's kind of the same thing.

Kodak, Overstock, Chase Chase Bank.

Yeah, they're gonna give it a B.

Now, this one is worth doing this entire segment just for this prediction.

If you put $1,000 in the top 10 cryptocurrencies in January 2018, it will be worth $200,000 by January 2019.

No.

I'm going to go ahead and say that one was an F.

I think that's an F.

I think that's an F.

I think that's an F.

But you know what?

At some point, I believe that's going to happen.

I'm with Tika on this one.

It makes no sense other than our over

pessimistic view because of what happened last year.

There's too many good things that have happened with this to have this fall and not move.

It's going to move.

It's going to go up.

And when it does, it will be because of all the things that have already happened.

Right.

I mean, it's hard to believe these big companies are wasting their millions of dollars.

Like there's some reason they're putting this.

Yes.

their cash into that.

Let's go up next here.

Market.

Well, I mean,

cryptocurrencies, That's an F.

We got an F.

Market cap is an F.

All right, let's go to international geopolitics.

Turkey will continue to run towards religious fascism and will continue to make hard turns towards Sharia law.

He just jailed, Eritagon just

jailed a mother and a son who insulted him.

He also announced that he is going to remove the ethnic Kurdish militia over the border of Syria.

He is well on the way.

I say that's an A.

Yeah, that's definitely the way that's moving.

Cultural clashes between immigrants and natives will cause backlash from the public across Western Europe.

Do I need to say anything about that?

That one was widely covered, I think.

Persecution of Christians, homosexuals, non-Muslim religious minorities, and those Muslims not deemed Muslim enough will reach new lows for humanity in the Middle East and Asia.

Didn't do it in the Middle East, per se.

They were new lows.

I mean, they're at the same size lows.

The limbo can only go so low.

I don't know how much lower you can get on that.

Because of Asia and what's happening in China

is, I think that's an A-plus.

A million Muslims, and it's just growing in concentration camps, essentially.

Yeah.

And China is bad, too.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Did you hear that Amazon is making Amazon Air

and it is going to be headquartered at Alliance Airport here in Dallas?

No.

It is?

They're going to be flying there.

Amazon Air.

Is that for the drones?

What is that?

I don't know.

Amazon Air.

Yeah.

I got to think that's the drone program.

I don't think so.

I think it is.

I think it's their shipping.

I can't imagine that it's an airline, but they're calling it Amazon Air, so maybe it is.

Right, given them my entire salary.

Salary, I might as well fly with them, get on the frequent flyer program.

I think it's a combination of the shipping and the drones, but I could be wrong.

I haven't spent any time on it.

Well, Dallas lost out on the headquarters of the HQ2 thing.

Right.

And that went to

New York and Manhattan.

Oh, no, sorry.

Manhattan and Washington.

They really.

I mean, they needed a couple years to figure that one out.

Go to the biggest city in America and the place where all the politicians are.

That was a tough one.

How did Amazon come up with that?

I mean, wow.

There was an article that came out about what a scam that was, how they scammed so many cities because that was apparently,

at least the thought was in the article that that was their plan all along.

Of course it was.

Yeah.

Of course it was.

All of these companies are looking to be political now.

They've got to be in the media center and the political center, which is laughable because I tell you,

I took a 24-hour drive with my kids over the holiday and the dog.

How'd that go?

Oh, my God.

Funny.

Fun.

I'm seeing by your expression that that was fun.

You bet.

With a capital F.

Actually, I had a blast.

The kids did not, but I had a blast.

I do it again in a heartbeat.

I thought it was fun.

But the one thing that I noticed driving the country is that nothing's really changed.

Nothing's really changed.

Politics are changing.

The media is changing dramatically.

The people are just the same.

The towns are just the same.

Everybody, no, no, I didn't stop anywhere where everyone was freaking out about Donald Trump or freaking out about the media or freaking out about any in either direction.

In either direction.

Everybody was just going on with their life.

Do you think it's be, I mean, I think because

to know that you actually have to talk to people, which none of us want to do and increasingly don't, right?

Like you're texting, you're seeing people post horrible things online, but actually talking to people outside of your inner circle gets more and more rare every day.

And so you don't recognize that people are just normal and living normal lives.

You just see their like online profiles freaking out.

I stopped,

you know, not like we were going to stop

because we were going to do a total blackout.

But what I did is I just, if I tweeted or if I Facebook post something, I didn't go back and look at stuff.

No comments.

Yeah, I didn't, you know, after the holidays, or just stayed away and I didn't look at any news.

I feel so good.

Yeah.

I feel so good.

When you're not looking at the comments, it makes a world of difference.

Yeah.

The comments inevitably, whether you're on everything, whether you're looking at a sports story or a political story, the comments are just bludgeoning people.

Yeah.

For no reason.

And

I didn't look at any news.

Like yesterday,

you know, I started looking at the news and I'm like, huh, government's been shut down for three weeks.

That's amazing.

I can't imagine what the media has been saying and how horrible it is to, oh my gosh, the government is shut down.

I didn't notice any different in anybody's life.

The people that are noticing it are the actual employees who aren't getting paid.

And that's mainly it.

And that's it.

And that's a big thing.

And I feel for them.

Yeah.

But it hasn't affected my life at all.

I went through a TSA line and the guy, someone asked, how's your holiday going?

It would be better if I was getting paid.

Like, you know, like, that's real, right?

Like, you're, I mean, that is a real thing for these people and it's an important thing.

No, I mean, beyond,

you know, security should be taken care of.

The military should be taken care of.

Those guys should be, those are not non-essential employees.

And that's why they're forced to be able to do that.

Someone's security.

Like Like a lot of these other people are getting to stay home and don't get paid, which still, if you need your money, you need your money.

Sure.

But to actually be forced, and they're suing over this, and I think they're right.

How can the government force you to go to work without paying you?

How can they do that?

Because it's the government.

Right.

But that's completely, I mean, that's completely everything this country stands for.

I know.

And yet they're doing it anyway.

I know.

But

quite honestly, with an exception of those employees that are showing up and should be paid,

if you're having to show up, you should be paid.

Non-essential employees, other than that,

I don't.

I mean, I think we should kind of concentrate on non-essential employees being non-essential.

Pat, other than BYU winning the Football NCAA championship next year, do you have a 2019 prediction on the Pat Gray Unleashed program that you can bless us with?

You know,

the insanity will continue.

Yeah.

That's my big challenge.

Just generally?

Just generally, the insanity will end get worse.

Oh, okay.

And get worse.

Yeah.

There you go.

Thank you, Pat.

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

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I want to break out some stories that happened last year and say, what happened?

And is there something that we can find useful to be able to decode the stories that are coming our way or to see what's happening politically?

So let's start with Kavanaugh.

I think that

the Kavanaugh story taught us many things, but most of them revolve around 2019 as an election year.

And

it doesn't matter what happens, what anyone anyone says.

It's all positioning now for 2020.

That's all this is.

And that was really the start of the election year.

It was.

It really was.

Because you saw people, I mean, the easiest examples are people like Corey Booker, I am Spartacus, and the ridiculous Kamala Harris stuff.

They're all trying to position themselves as,

I am so against.

Donald Trump and the things he's doing that I will even break the law to do it.

Remember Corey Booker?

Yes.

I'll break the law.

And basically, this is my Spartacus moment.

Which brings me to one of the things specifically that we should learn from last year, and that is that Democrats have no stop on taxes.

I mean, sorry, on tactics.

No stops.

No.

It does not matter anymore.

They accuse a guy of gang rape with no evidence.

Where do you go from there?

Outside of actual physical violence, where do you go outside of that?

But if you look at one of the other big stories of the year, it was school shootings.

Also, no stop.

They had no stop on that.

So what do we take from that?

Well, we take that it's an election year, that the Democrats will say or do anything

to get elected.

They will use any emergency at all, and they will actually stand and claim to be Spartacus when it makes no sense, which

leads me to what we should learn.

And that is

that don't work anymore.

That doesn't really work anymore.

And for a couple of reasons.

We have so unhinged from reality

that people think of those tactics as a joke.

When you're shutting down the government,

We know that the government's not going to default.

We know that the government is still, the airplanes are still going to fly.

We know know all those things.

The scare tactics don't work anymore.

And people are at the end of their tolerance level for this kind of stuff.

The Corey Bookers standing up, I am Spartacus, doesn't work.

The making charges and allegations without any evidence to back it up, it doesn't work.

For a couple of reasons.

One, the Democrats have no stops, and so they overplay their hand.

That will continue.

And two,

the media isn't as powerful as it once was.

Yeah, I think there was a time in which if you made a completely unsubstantiated argument and said Brett Kavanaugh is a gang rapist, there was a time in which that probably does work because it's so far out.

Like, you wouldn't say that if it wasn't true or if you didn't have evidence.

And now I think the American people are at the point where, well, yes, they will say that if there's no evidence.

We've seen them do it 500 times, so I'm not going to believe it.

And what you're talking about, I think, too, when it comes to the election part, is there is these guys are totally incentivized to make this worse.

When you are sitting there and you're Elizabeth Warren and

you're going against Kamala Harris and Corey Booker and Betto O'Rourke and all of these guys who have to get left-wing activists to vote for them and donate money to them, they are just going to be a constant

contest to flop over themselves and move left.

It's going to get crazier and this is is going to be a fun year in that.

If you like watching the nonsense, it's going to be a fun year for it.

The effects on the nation are a whole nother story, but it's going to be

wildly entertaining.

So, here's, let me give you kind of some predictions, a foreshadowing of what I see coming, and we're going to deal with actual predictions here in the next few days.

But

one of the things that, again, you get from Kavanaugh, and you get even from the border wall thing, is that politics is nothing more than a game, period.

And it is devolved into a game whose object is to piss the most amount of Americans off at the other side.

Now, you saw this with Kavanaugh, but you're seeing this with the border wall, the government shutdown.

What has this become about?

What has this become about?

Donald Trump is evil and wants to stop Mexicans from coming in the country.

Right.

And is now torturing federal employees to get to this evil goal.

Right.

And what are the Democrats talking about what they want to do with money?

With the same $5 billion?

Are you talking about...

Talking about the Republicans are charging...

The Democrats are charging that

the Republicans are racist.

And the Republicans are saying, look what Nancy Pelosi has on her list of things to do.

And

she wants to shove this through,

but she won't touch the border wall.

I mean, there's endless stuff.

Abortion, Planned Parenthood, abortion money overseas.

Okay.

Those are two hot buttons,

the border and abortion.

That's all this is.

This is to piss each side off.

Period.

It's not about actually doing anything.

I go back to minimum wage.

I don't believe in a national minimum wage.

It's ridiculous.

The minimum wage to live in New York, I don't even know what that should be.

$50 an hour?

What should it be?

The minimum wage in

Weston

Idaho

is probably $7

an hour.

They're vastly different.

You can't do this.

What you can do

if you don't think like a politician is you could say, all right, well, every area has to set their own.

And I'm not suggesting this.

I'm just saying so you don't ever have to deal with it again.

If we're going to have minimum wages, every area and every state has to set their own.

And it is just fixed to the cost of living.

So the cost of living goes up, the minimum wage goes up.

We don't have to have this argument every five years, every three years, every two years, whatever it is.

They like having it on the menu, though.

Correct.

Why?

Oh,

they can fundraise off of it.

They can get people angry.

They can say how evil the other side is because they don't want their rage increase.

Exactly right.

They want to keep it on the table as a hammer, essentially, to hit the other side with.

So it is a political game just to piss you off.

And nothing actually happens until the run-up of the election.

And who benefits?

Both parties do.

I've seen this before,

and it is the Orrin Hatch

flag-burning amendment conversation that we had with him years ago in the Tea Party movement.

He said, I can get these people to calm down.

All I have to do is introduce a flag-burning amendment, and everybody will fall back in line.

And I remember, do you remember you were sitting there?

I was there.

Sitting there going, this is insane.

He really doesn't get it.

His argument was essentially: if we introduce a flag-burning amendment, then we can get people out to the polls because they'll care about the flag-burning amendment and they'll come vote for our candidates.

It was like using that to get people out to vote for the candidates.

It wasn't a real belief in flag-burning stuff.

It was just a tool to get people to go out and vote.

And I think those days are over.

And I don't think the Democrats or the Republicans, but especially the Democrats, have learned that lesson.

And

what does that mean for the Democratic Party in the next 18 months?

We'll tell you, and also,

what did we learn from Donald Trump this year

that is important to apply in 2019?

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Do you make New Year's resolutions, Stu?

I do occasionally.

Yeah.

I usually don't do like a formal list or anything, but there's usually a couple things I want to try to fix in my screwed up life.

Did you do one this year?

It's still the new year.

Yes, I have a couple.

We had

kind of a scare over the holiday.

Jeffy had a heart attack and a pretty massive heart attack.

Real close call.

A very close call.

In fact, we found out later that the doctor said that,

what is it, like 90% of the people that have this massive of a heart attack don't make it.

Yeah, Jeffy said

they call it the widowmaker for a reason, I guess.

Yes.

Thank you, Jeffy.

And

I called Stu.

I came down from the mountain because I heard.

And so I can't, I don't have phone service up in the mountains.

And so I came down from the mountains and I called Stu right away and we kind of just talked about, you know, what was happening with Jeffy and

what to do and kind of ended the conversation

with Stu saying, we're getting too old to do this to our bodies anymore.

It really is true, isn't it?

Yeah.

You, because it's something, there's something about having, you know, my dad died of a heart attack.

There's a, there's, you know, people around you do it.

And for some reason, it seems like, oh, that's distant.

It's old people.

Right.

Like, yeah, it's distant or something different.

Like, we're like, Jeffy's like, now, Jeffy's probably the oldest person I've ever met in my life, but still, as a, I mean, he's a peer, right?

He's like someone we have worked with for a million years.

He's been with us this entire time.

And, you know, he's our friend.

And especially I hate admitting things like that.

And, you know, to see it happen to him is pretty scary.

Did you get beat up?

Did Tanya maybe give you a little refocusing of life?

No, she actually didn't.

Really?

No, because I had already been there on,

you know, I'm going to eat ice cream every night

during the holidays, but

I've got to lose 50 pounds.

Got to lose 50 pounds.

50 pounds.

50 pounds.

It's a big goal.

Is that the actual goal?

That is the actual goal.

I mean, how do we exploit this for the air?

I mean, can we have

an ongoing weight measurement that's just posted on the website all the time?

That doesn't make me happy.

That's why I'm suggesting it.

Yeah.

Of course.

This is the only way you can get these things can happen is if you get shamed into them.

I know.

You know, I know.

The only way I'll eat a leaf of lettuce.

I know.

But

I have to do it.

So

I haven't started yet,

but I'm going to start in the next few days.

And I wanted to know if you wanted to join me on some sort of a challenge.

If the audience wants to join.

No, I love that.

I'd like to lose 50 pounds in two weeks.

No, I'm kidding.

You're going to be cutting body parts off.

That's right.

I'm fine with that.

I'm fine with it.

Yeah, but doctor, my weight went down.

There you go.

This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

This is the Glenbeck program.

In 1970, Simon and Garfunkel released a song, Bridge Over Troubled Water.

It's a great song title, legendary song, but maybe more importantly, it is a fitting label for this year, a bridge over troubled water.

2019 is, I believe, the bridge year.

Fundamental global transformation is on the other side of the bridge.

And on this

path we just walked is the post-Cold War world.

And it all began to change in 2008.

a year that saw both a Russian invasion of a potential NATO country and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

In fact, they happened within a few weeks of one another.

In a span of just a few weeks, it was not a coincidence.

We've been on this path for quite some while.

We are now entering the bridge over troubled water.

I'll explain the Billboard top four songs of Christmas 1991.

It's going to be a blast from the past.

Brian Adams, Color Me Bad, CNC Music Factory.

Great factory.

And Paula Abdul.

1991, Paula Abdul was still around?

Jeez.

CNC Music Factory.

Nothing.

I mean, nothing.

There was only what they had two or three hits.

I don't even remember.

I feel like you're not going to.

I probably remember things that make you go, hmm.

Yeah.

No, I tried to block out.

Gonna make you sweat, I believe, was one of the others, which is

easier.

It gets easier as you get older.

So

that was the beginning of the journey that we are on now.

That was the soundtrack of our life.

Because on the other side of the globe, the Soviet Union was disintegrating at the time.

Those were the hits while everything else was falling apart.

Is it possible they knew those were the hits that just gave up on their country?

They're like, screw it.

No, they were joining the West.

They were like, the wall was coming down.

They're like, no, wait, maybe we should put the wall back up.

What would the world look like?

In 1991, many in the West just saw this as great.

Capitalism has won against communism,

and everybody's going to be capitalist.

And we're going to be, things are going to be great in Russia.

No.

No.

But we had spent decades preparing for something that now didn't exist.

Cold War, nuclear war, Soviet Union.

And Western Europe united to guarantee, quote, peace and prosperity, right?

And you remember late,

I think it was, was it Putin that wanted to come into NATO?

I know Russia wanted to come in and become a NATO power.

China and the United States had come together to eradicate this communist menace of the Soviet Union.

And everyone had direction.

But now that the Soviet Union was gone, what was everybody coming to the dinner table for?

Well, we went on pretending for over two decades.

And the signs of that change hit us in 2008, that the world was different, 2001 and then again 2008.

We now find ourselves on a bridge to a world that will be as different as the world was between 1914 and 1946.

But it's going to be the difference between the world of 19 or sorry, 2018

and 2025.

We are now at that bridge.

We stand looking at a new direction.

But no politician and no media source is telling you there is a horizon forward.

They're trying to get you to continue to look backward.

They're trying to get you to look at

what is America today.

What is the world today?

This is all going to unravel whether you like it or not.

It's just not going to be the same.

NATO, NATO, and Europe will begin to dissolve, and new alliances will emerge.

I think we're going to talk about a little of this tonight.

Is tonight, is tonight, what are the two topics on tonight's show, 5 o'clock?

Civility and unrest, and then the other one is,

I think it's...

The complete discography of CNC Music Factory will be the other time.

Really?

Yeah, well, we don't have a lot of time, so it'll be perfect

for that.

Politics of meaning.

So we are going to be talking about this.

I'm laying out the seven categories that I'm going to focus on in the next 12 to 18 months because I believe that we have to stop playing the stupid political games and getting wrapped up in the media

and start looking ahead across this bridge.

The way things used to work will seem like a distant memory, and it will all begin to become clear

this year.

I think this time next year, we will be able to have a conversation.

In fact, we should play this break next year at this time

and see if you don't say,

I do see things completely completely differently.

We are on a bridge and troubled waters beneath us, and they are rising.

The waters of chaos are going to put us into uncharted territory.

In 2008, the United States was the catalyst.

And

I don't know what the catalyst is going to be this time,

but recession is coming.

Since 1933, our economic cycle has a recession on average every four years.

It has now been over eight years since the last recession hit.

It is going to happen, and it has nothing to do with politics.

An economic uppercut is coming, and it's coming at a time when global debt is at record numbers.

Consider this.

Consumer confidence began to decline back in November.

Oil prices are now bottoming out.

What what do oil prices bottom out usually tell you?

That the world is on a slowdown.

Credit is beginning to crunch.

Asset prices are beginning to fall.

And for the first time in a decade, interest rates are rising.

All of that adds up to a recession and very soon.

Now when we stop buying, the entire world takes a hit.

It's the same thing that happened in 2008, except we caught a cold, but the rest of the world caught pneumonia.

The rest of the world did not recover.

If you lost money in 2008, you not only recovered that money if you left it in the stock market, you not only recovered that money, but if you left it in the whole time, you've now gained 400%

more

than you had in 2008 before the crash.

That's incredible.

In 2008, we took a 50%

bath.

The rest of the world and China took a 70% bath.

Like I said, you have 400% more money in your 401k if you had money in a 401k at 2008.

In China, they've only made up 20%

of the 70 that they've lost.

So the rest of the world had pneumonia and it has never left the hospital.

And what's happening already

is beginning to

outline some things that the world has not seen for maybe a hundred years.

The UK is exiting the European Union.

Italy and Greece are on the verge of default.

The French yellow vest protests are happening.

They resumed again just this last weekend.

Things are starting to add up.

Russia cannot pay their bills with oil at $50 a barrel.

They need it, I think, to be about $80 a barrel.

It's never going back to $80 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia, I think, needs $90 a barrel just to pay their bills.

You remember when we talked about the Saudi prince and how the Saudi prince

was actually

rounding up all of the big rich princes from Saudi Arabia and taking airplanes,

right?

That's because they have no more money.

They are blowing through all of the Saudi money.

They are collecting it from the family members.

They are blowing through all of this money.

That is major destabilization.

China is dealing with a greater than anticipated GDP slowdown and a trade war.

And meanwhile, the war drums are beating with new military alliances forming and old ones dying.

I spent a day just looking at the global map

and looking at alliances and an Axis and allied powers.

And we're going to talk about this a bit tonight.

It's not going to be the way that we think.

You have to stop thinking like the Cold War and World War II.

Those days are behind us.

The world is changing.

And this is the year that I think we will all look back at and say,

wow, that was the year that we stood on the bridge between those two worlds and we never saw it coming.

Unless you're with us.

Because you will see it coming.

We begin tonight at 5 o'clock, only on the Blaze TV.

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

I want to talk to you about the ghost cities in China.

If you don't know what ghost cities are in China, you need to look them up.

Just Google them.

Pure entertainment reasons.

You should

watch YouTube videos.

You'll be in a wormhole all day long.

All day long.

Fascinating.

Never seen anything like it.

Whole entire cities completely empty of people.

Completely built.

One of the largest malls in the world is a mall built in one of these ghost cities, which has like one store in it.

And it's one of the largest malls in the world.

Everything else is completely empty because there's no people there to buy anything.

They just build these cities with no people.

And they've been doing it for a long time.

It's helped prop up their economy.

And it is, and what they've done to try to finance it is amazing.

So nobody ever talked about how did they finance this.

What are they doing?

We've talked about just how it's bogus,

how it's just, they are just stimulating the economy by dumping all of this money to to pay workers to build these cities because they needed, I think it was 8% growth.

If they didn't, if they have anything less than 8% growth, they're in trouble with their own people.

Well, they don't have 8% growth now.

I think they have 5%, and that's what they say it is.

If they're saying it's 5% growth, there's no way it's 5% growth.

So they built these cities.

And here's what they've done.

They've gone to the Chinese people.

Most of them are working in these factories and have no,

don't even have their own home.

Okay?

And they've shown them pictures of this utopian city that they've never been to.

And they've said, you can own one of these places.

You can own, you're going to, you're going to retire.

You're going to own one of these luxury apartments.

It's a gleaming city and it's waiting for you.

All you have to do is just give us X%

of your salary and we'll just withhold it and we'll put it toward your apartment, your apartment in the sky.

Well, nobody has the money for this.

And by the time you would pay off that apartment in 20 years, nobody's there.

What is that apartment going to be like in 20 years?

Stu and I have been talking about this for the last couple of weeks, and there is another government that did something very, very similar in a court case that was settled in the 1960s.

I mean, Nazi Germany did this with Volkswagen, and they promised the people's car, and they said, hey, here's all you have to do is pay off these...

your coupons, your stamps.

And if you paid off enough of your monthly payments, you would get the car.

So you didn't get the car up front, of course.

But they gave you this nice stamp booklet, and you could pay them off as you went.

And what was really happening is they weren't planning on building the cars.

They were taking that money that was funding their war effort.

So they were essentially getting lots of payments from their own people for something that seemed too good to be true.

It was like a car at an incredible price, this amazing German car.

And they paid all of their money to the government while they were secretly building their own war machine.

Of course, the people didn't get the cars.

They did the same thing with vacation

home.

Yeah, it was this big, beautiful.

It was like a ghost city.

It was this big resort.

I can't remember where it was.

It was all built.

And you could get into your Volkswagen and you could drive to the sea and you're going to be able to have a guaranteed Volkswagen vacation.

And that never happened.

That place was built.

It's just now an empty ghost town, but that place was built.

And it wasn't until the 1960s when the German people could finally sue.

I think they sued Volkswagen and said, we didn't get our car.

We never got our car.

And they got their money back, at least part of their money back.

But that's a, I mean, and that is, you know, certainly don't put anything past the Chinese government or what they're doing with the money.

But right now, we kind of believe that they're just propping up the economy with it and trying to develop things like AI and all of the other things that they believe are the next generation of warfare that we don't seem to be all that concerned about.

That's concerning.

I'm concerned about it.

I know that's one of the things you're going to be talking about this week on the TV show

and looking that sort of forward-looking posture rather than what we're doing now.

I mean, you know, what we're doing now is so irrelevant.

It really is so irrelevant.

This

is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

So, I I guess the big Christmas present for me this year was a Kindle Oasis.

Oh, yeah.

Amazon.

Is that the new version of that?

Yeah, yeah.

And really, really small.

And because I read, I hate it.

I hate reading digitally because you don't remember things the same way.

You can never find them again.

And so I try to

read something and then I'll buy the hardcover if it's important.

But I read so much

and I've been reading on my iPad or on my phone, which I hate because you get distracted easily.

So Kindle does nothing else, at least that I know of, does nothing else

except the books.

Yeah, because I have the Kindle app on my phone and on my iPad and I can read there.

That's what I do too.

But you think it's worth getting the actual stuff?

For me, it was, because

I want to get away from the iPad and all of the other

stuff.

I've been, you mentioned New Year's resolutions.

I've been thinking about that one a lot.

I'm like trying to use that.

Use it less.

I just, I want to get out of it.

I feel like at the end of the day, it's just empty calories.

It is, you know?

It is.

I don't feel like I'm better off because of it.

I don't feel like I've spent my time well.

No.

And then when you start, you know, I've installed one of those

programs that tells you how long you're on.

No, don't.

And how many times you pick it up.

Oh, my gosh.

And it's just like, what am I doing with my life?

I feel like if I could eliminate that, I would have like real opportunities to do things that I find to be important, can never get to.

I mean, that seems like it would be beneficial to be able to cut that down, even if it's in half, you know, from what you from what you're doing.

Now, obviously, there's things at work and there's GPS and there's lots of things that it's really valuable for.

It's obviously great in a lot of ways, but there's so much just time wasting and nothingness on it.

Maybe the Kindle is a good idea because at least you're reading long-form stuff that helps you understand things in a deeper way.

Yeah.

Rafe got one.

He got a regular Kindle for Christmas.

He hated it.

He hates it.

He reads so much, like I do, but he got a book also for Christmas, and it was like 800 and some pages.

It was finished in four days.

And that's why I wanted him to have the Kindle so he could have the library with him all the time.

But he hates it, like me.

It's better to read on paper.

It's just a different experience.

But I personally like the Kindle Oasis.

You're listening to Glenn Beck, the Blaze Radio Network.

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