'Finding More Reason for Optimism?' (Jonathan Bock joins Glenn) - 3/7/18

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Glenn back

normally I begin the program and I'm like hey things suck today

I want to try something new I want to try something different

things don't suck as much as we all think

and if we're going to make it, we have to start looking at the things that are true.

That

things aren't as bad as we think in all categories.

For instance, during the 1960s, it was predicted that hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people would soon die of hunger.

In a report from 2015, Global malnutrition has declined now to the lowest level in history.

Nearly all malnutrition that persists is caused by distribution failures or by government corruption, not by lack of supply.

Hunger may be eliminated in our lifetime.

Resources.

They said they would all be exhausted by in the 1970s.

I remember, well, there'll be no oil.

There'll be no natural gas.

There'll be nothing, no coal.

You'll use it all up.

Petroleum and natural gas, it was supposed to be gone by the year 2000 we were going to be a society desperate for fuel

that's not true they are still abundant resources have not been depleted

there are also no runaway plagues unstoppable outbreaks of super viruses and mutations were said to menace a growing world instead now listen to this nearly all disease rates are in decline, including the rates of cancer.

I don't know, there's something going on.

Cancer is getting so bad, everything's causing cancer.

It's all in decline.

In 2000, the U.S.

Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that infectious diseases have declined so much that obesity is killing far more Americans than germs.

Death rates from infectious disease have fallen in nearly all nations, including the poorest.

In almost all nations, the human family is now living longer while suffering fewer heart attacks and strokes.

Even in the poorest of countries in the world, there is no sign that longevity increases have peaked.

The Western nations are also not choking on pollution.

You remember?

Why do we

see?

Acid rain

a generation ago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego were becoming uninhabitable because of smog.

While air pollution in many areas of the United States and Europe did widespread respiratory damage, that's not the case.

Today, Los Angeles, in Los Angeles, the air quality now has improved so much that the LA Basin goes years between serious air quality alerts.

While in 2014, San Diego had its lowest smog level since record-keeping began.

Nationally, since 1990, winter smog is down 77%,

summer smog down 22%.

By the way, this is all achieved while our population was growing.

As recently as the 1980s, acid rain was expected to destroy the forest in the eastern United States and Central Europe.

Since 1990, sulfur dioxide, the main cause of acid rain, has decreased by 81%

in the United States alone and sharply down in Europe.

The Appalachian Forests in the United States, the Black Forests in Germany, are in the best condition they have been in since the 18th century.

For those who don't know how the century works, that's before our country was founded.

Water pollution.

Water pollution.

In most developing nations, the trend lines are toward less air and water pollution, even as more people are alive, engaging in more economic activity.

The economy is driving everyone nuts.

But can we take a moment and just see how resilient this economy has been?

Yes,

it's been turbulent, and I've been vomiting in an air sickness bag for a while.

But there hasn't been the global crash that we expected.

May it come?

Yes, it might.

But we haven't had a major global crash since the Great Depression 80 years ago.

Living standards keep rising for almost everyone, especially for those to whom the trend is most important, and that is the poor.

Goods and services are now in ample supply, and in almost every year, global per capita GDP sets a record.

Middle class income growth is soft throughout the Western nations, but middle-class buying power, which matters more than pre-tax income, continues to rise.

Yes, there is a shrinking middle class.

But in the United States of America, the number one reason is because the middle is shrinking because large numbers of people are moving up and not down.

The global economy, in one respect, we can't observe it in the United States or in the European Union.

The developing world,

indigence is rapidly beginning to be reduced.

In 1990, 37% of humanity lived in what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty.

Today, that number

is down from 37%

to 10%.

Now,

that may not make us feel good in the American upper Midwest or the northern part of England who has lost manufacturing jobs.

But the same forces that caused a relatively small share in the United States and United Kingdom to experience economic distress also caused a gigantic reduction of suffering in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The decline of developing world poverty should be viewed as the focal story of the last quarter century.

Because we are not observing it ourselves, it's gone unnoticed.

Crime and war, it seems to be everywhere.

Things are more dangerous.

The world is at war.

A generation ago,

As murder rates rose and the superpowers were stocking our arsenals and the horrific future of

acid rain,

smog-filled cities, Philip K.

Dick kind of cities from Blade Runner, violence-ravaged cities, and constant warfare seemed like is where we were headed.

But since 1990, crime rates have declined sharply in the United States and many other nations.

In fact, Central Park after dark

is now as safe as Yellowstone Park at noon.

Let me say that again.

Central Park, New York City after dark

is now as safe as Yellowstone Park at noon.

The crime decline has led to an urban revival that benefits almost everyone, including and maybe especially African Americans, who are today much less likely to be homicide victims than a generation ago,

and also less likely, despite horrific exceptions to this rule, to be harmed by police than in decades past.

Wait, what?

Would you like me to read that again?

Today, African Americans are much less likely to be homicide victims than a generation ago,

and also less likely, despite the horrific exceptions, to be harmed by police than in decades past.

Since 1990, the frequency of combat has gone down worldwide, while global per capita arms spending has entered a cycle of decline.

Rather than adding nuclear bombs, the United States and Russia's Federation has disassembled tens of thousands of these devices and destroyed the parts in the presence of witnesses.

Since 1990, a person's chance of dying because of violence has dropped to a point

where it is the lowest ever recorded in human history, stretching back to the midst of prehistory.

That

holds a pretty powerful punch considering that

in our day today, the wave of Islamic terror attacks in Europe, the mass shootings in America.

It is the lowest since pre-history.

Other than in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria, in 2016, the last of the polls were out, the chance of anyone in any nation dying by violence was at a historic low.

Even under population pressure, the world grows steadily safer.

Despite what we think, dictators are not winning.

Some nations are relapsing, for instance, Turkey and Russia, and others are in disarray owing to what democracy theorist Larry Diamond calls predatory government, Nigeria and Venezuela.

But during the current generation, no nation has gone from freedom to dictatorship, while the largest nation, China, has been dipping its toes into liberty.

The second largest, India, holds on.

Both of them are tenuous, but they are holding on to free expression and free elections.

Despite video games and short attention span, ignorance has not flourished.

Now I am talking globally.

Education levels continue to rise, while in the developing world, schooling for girls has stopped being rare.

Technology has not run amok.

Cars, aircraft, medicine, and weapons have actually grown less dangerous.

Tremendous attention has been paid to the decline of factory jobs.

But scant attention has been paid to the fact that more than 60% of Americans now hold some form of white-collar employment.

White-collar work involves less stress, less boredom, and no back-breaking manual labor or inhalation of factory fumes.

But while all the worrying,

is anyone telling you to be optimistic?

I am today.

We have our issues,

but we live at the greatest time human beings have ever seen.

And because of advancing technology, we are now talking about the possibility of

eradicating all disease

by 2030.

We are much closer to 2030 than we were 9/11.

All disease could be gone by 2030.

We live in extraordinary times.

We have to stop

eating each other

because there's plenty of food to go around now.

If we can,

if we can just do that, if we can stop eating each other, if we can start using reason, fix reason firmly in her seat and question with boldness and listen to each other

and accept, Yes, there are bad guys, and there are people here in our own country that don't like what we have.

And there is a force that is trying to stop this globally, and we have to fight and stand against it.

But the average person is better off today than anyone has ever been since the beginning of recorded history.

In almost every category,

today,

start your day saying, you know what?

Things aren't as bad as I

somehow or another, for some reason, feel they are.

And maybe I only feel that way

because I'm listening to people who want to feed me fear.

By the way, all of those stats can be found in

the prologue of a new book called It's Better Than It Looks.

Who's it by?

Let me look, Stu.

Hang on.

Greg Easterbrook.

Amazing.

I mean,

that is

the most important story that humanity can tell.

It's the greatest human achievement of all time.

And we just discussed it.

Not only have we missed it, 70% of people think poverty has gotten worse in the last 20 years.

70% of people.

And that

through what you just described, which is basically the best thing that's ever happened to humanity when you talk about just human improvement.

It's why I've been saying lately off the air, and I need to say it more on the air.

We're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We have problems, but there is a baby in that bathwater, and it's a really good baby.

All right.

Imagine taking a test drive for a new car for a 100-day drive or a pair of new shoes, having 100 days to walk around to feel how comfortable they are.

I think that would change most men's minds on what shoes to buy, but I'm not sure.

Is Lisa like this?

Does she buy shoes because she really likes the way they look and she'll wear them even though they just kill her feet?

Not really.

You are so lucky.

Well, you've got the purse thing going on.

I don't want that.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Back.

So we're just talking about, you know,

I'm tired of being politically correct.

And here's what being politically correct means today, that you have to be angry, you have to hate, you have to be

against one party or the other.

I'm against both of them.

I don't like you.

I'm against both of them.

I don't like either of them.

And whichever party is doing the right thing at the time, I'll support you at that time.

Don't get a blank check from me.

So I'm tired of it.

And I'm tired of living in this world

where I am, where I'm just, there's not a bright future.

There is a bright future.

We just have to choose it.

You know, somebody just tweeted.

Can you read that tweet?

Mark and Akron.

Great.

All hunger and disease gone by 2030.

So we're nice, fat, and healthy for the singularity when the AGI kills and it slaves us all.

I appreciate you using AGI.

Not just AI.

Okay, so

here's the thing.

People were afraid of technology, just like we are now.

Now, in this particular case, AI, you got one shot.

You have one shot.

Once it goes, if we've screwed it up, it could...

It could rule the world.

Did you hear what's happening in China?

We have to talk about this today.

The Chinese government by 2020 is now using information and machine learning and basic AI

to give you access to things.

So if you write something on Facebook that's a downer or what the government feels is a downer, you'll lose points.

Yeah, it's like a social credit system.

If you've seen that episode of Black Mirror, which was season two or three.

Terrifying, where if you do something wrong, if you have bad interaction, if you post something negative, if you're bashing the government, if you've committed a crime, like one of the examples they give is: if you play video games a lot, they'll track that and give you negative credit because you're lazy.

You're not doing anything productive.

That's literally in the Chinese government plan.

And it's

state policy by 2020.

Right.

And

so here's what it is: it means that you're a Chinese citizen, you play video games, you can't go to the best restaurants, you can't go to the best hotels, you're going to lose access.

And the worse you are on their social media scale,

the less you can do as a human being, the less value you have as a human being.

Now, that is one way to go.

That's one way to go.

I believe that we can make the choice not to go there.

And I'll give you some reasons for the optimism coming up.

Glenn back.

Mercury.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

You know,

I'm finding more reason for optimism because of what is being called the dark web

of ideas, that there is a group of people that are now starting to have the conversations that I have,

you know, been urging and looking for.

And they're happening.

And they're happening with the weirdest combinations.

There's two two brothers.

One of them is an

evolutionary biologist

at Evergreen University.

And I grew up in Seattle.

Evergreen, you know,

really makes Berkeley or Seattle look like Provo, Utah.

And to be clear, he was an evolutionary biologist.

He was.

At Evergreen.

And the reason why he left?

Insanity.

Yeah.

He left because he said, we're now starting, progressivism is starting to deny science, that the left has gone so far that we're now saying

that the X and Y chromosome means nothing.

And he's like, look, I mean, it's just not true.

And so there are people now that are afraid

that their side on both sides are starting to be fascistic or

communistic in its state, but denying science, denying facts by saying that we, you know, whatever it is, just let's fix reason firmly in her seat.

And that's starting to happen.

Tonight, we're doing a two-part series, part two of, you know, the blame game and how we've all blamed everything else.

But we haven't blamed us.

But somebody has.

As we cry out and say, something has to be done.

Something is always done.

Something has to be done about the banks.

Well, they stepped in, they did something.

Something has to be done about terror.

They stepped in and they did something.

As we're now saying something has to be done about guns, they are going to step in and do something.

And they do one thing consistently.

And that is

say you're the problem.

People are the problem.

We need more control over people.

And when I show you tonight

how the Bill of Rights is violated in almost a daily basis,

all 10,

it's commonplace to violate the Bill of Rights now.

That's the source of our worry and that's the source of our problems.

But we don't know the Bill of Rights well enough.

But

that Bill of Rights came from a period of enlightenment.

And I think we're beginning to revive that.

The embers are starting to

be blown somewhat.

And

we have two choices.

Look at China.

We just told you that China is by 2020 making it government policy for you to have a social media

ranking based on what you buy,

how you relate with people what you say online all everything the government is monitoring it places you in a class it's it's quite honestly common core on steroids the government will decide who you are good or bad and you won't have access to the best of the best if you're not the right people it's political correctness gone mad.

It's political correctness gone to the extent of the black mirror.

And if you haven't seen this episode, do you have a let me just play a 15-minute 15-second piece of the black mirror.

One of the episodes is about social media.

Everybody has a ranking.

Listen to this.

I see there's one standby seat on another plane leaving tonight.

That's reserved for members of our prime flight program.

You got to be a 4.2 or over to qualify.

Oh, I'm a 4.2.

I'm afraid you're actually a 4.183.

Gosh, that's true.

Jeez, it's specifically mentioned in the China policy was access to air flights.

They had to have based this on the China policy,

the Black Mirror episode.

Because it's everything that they, everything that they're proposing and they are going to implement by 2020.

Yeah, and the way the Black Mirror thing works is you have an interaction with someone.

You walk up to someone, you have an interaction.

If it's a positive one, they might give you a

positive

ranking.

And if not, they give you a negative.

And once you get below that 4.2 on a five-star system, you start losing benefits and access to things.

And it's, you know, I guess, ideally, it's supposed to incentivize you to never do those things.

It's a level of government control, right?

So the question is: are we sheep or are we people with God-given rights and talents and God-given responsibilities?

Are we sheep or are we

people, individuals, not a collective, an individual?

And I think people are starting to see on the left, wait, my side has gone crazy.

My side has gone crazy.

The leaders of the women's march were in the audience of Louis Farrakhan

last weekend.

And they're defending that.

Yeah, there's now a new letter out from a Republican Jewish group that is saying seven members, seven Democratic sitting congressmen have met with Louis Farrakhan.

Can you imagine if seven Republicans had met with David Duke?

Would those people be elected?

I mean,

the biggest story in the news is getting all of those people to resign.

All of them.

The man came out and said, the Jews are my enemy last week, not 20 years ago in an uncovered clip, last week.

And the organizers of the women's march were in the audience at that time.

And not to mention, it's not just the women's march that was the one right after Trump was inaugurated, but also the upcoming

biggest story in the world, March Against Guns.

Yeah.

The same organizers.

Have you seen the push

on Netflix?

Yes.

Oh, my gosh.

All my optimism is going out the the window.

I know, I know, I know, I know.

But it just shows the choice that we have in front of us.

Yeah.

It just shows the choice that we have in front of us.

There is a show on Netflix, and

let's talk about it for a few minutes and then

I'm going to give you some homework.

Watch the push.

It's one, it's what, an hour?

Yeah.

It's one hour.

It's one episode, so it's not a series.

It's called The Push.

It's on Netflix.

It is a must-watch.

It is a guy who is some sort of a psychologist magician who is apparently known in England.

And

it will bother you.

You will watch the whole thing and say, I don't know if this is even right to do to people because I think they're going to be psychologically scarred by this.

Especially because it's on television too.

You're filmed.

So what they did is they started to, they went and they said, hey, we're doing a TV show and we need reality people.

So they got people and they were looking for normal human beings, but had a tendency to just obey commands, okay?

But not like crazy.

Just you would, you would say these are absolutely normal people.

Listen to instructions like any normal person.

Correct.

Folllows instructions.

They have about a hundred actors and they tell all of the people that have applied,

you didn't get the show.

Then they've waited a few months and then somebody else has called them back through their employer

and it's completely disconnected.

So they don't know that this is a show or reality or anything.

They think this is real life.

Their employer says, I've got this party that you need to go to,

and

it's a fundraiser, and you're going to be able to really network.

And they just need some help.

Can you just go?

The employer drops that person off and says, You're going to really be able to network, introduces, and

the idea is

in 90 minutes,

can we convince the average human, a decent person, male and female, in 90 minutes, can we convince them and get them to actually

murder an innocent person?

Can we convince them that it is the most logical thing to do to murder someone?

You will not

believe how this happens.

You have to see the show.

You have to see it.

It's incredible.

Yeah.

And, you know, the way that they're talking about it, and we won't give too much away here, but what they're talking about are social pressures, right?

Like it's little things that happen to you that you kind of, you're not sure about, but you go along with.

And everybody does this, right?

Like it's the old thing of you'd go up to a counter and there'd be one long line and one short line.

And most people will get into the long line, right?

Especially if they see there's no one in the other line because they're like, well, there's got to be a reason why no one is in that line.

So I'm going to stand here and wait for 20 minutes like an idiot.

That's how we think, you know, we wind up like you're always putting things in context.

And instead of having, you know,

it goes to really having principles, right?

A lot of times this happens.

And we realize,

psychologists have looked at this for a long time.

that

people will violate these things constantly if put in these positions positions where there's just enough social pressure.

And the way they do it on the show is they slowly escalate the things.

Like the very first thing they ask them to do is they have these little,

you know,

cocktailed weenies, right?

The little hot dogs.

And they have, they were supposed to have some that are non-vegetarian, you know, meat, and some that are vegetarian.

Okay.

The vegetarian

delivery doesn't show up.

So what they ask him to do is just, you know what, just put some of the ones that are meat on the vegetarian plate.

So, it looks like, so we have both.

And they just try to just an act, you know, and they're back behind, you know, closed doors.

No one's going to know, just with one other person, one of the persons that's an actor.

And do these people, all right, I'll break.

I mean, I know I shouldn't do that because it's kind of rude.

If someone's a vegetarian, they're going to be eating mean, and that's, but it's no big deal.

I'll go along with it.

And they get them with little things like that and slowly escalate them and try to get them to eventually, by the end of 90 minutes, to murder an innocent person.

Right.

To go up on a roof and push this this innocent person off the roof.

Yeah.

And it is, it's the most tense thing you've ever seen.

It doesn't feel, it's not, I mean, it's obviously a reality show, but it's not.

It is, if you've read the book Ordinary Men,

and

that book was written as a science study, a historic study of going back and how did they get the Poles, the good police people who are in Poland, to go and line Jews up and shoot them and just dump them into mass graves.

It was this show.

It started slowly, little teeny things.

And then there's just this watershed moment where it's just like they're just in it.

They're just in it.

It's fascinating.

If we want to play the clip, we'll probably need to take a break and come back on the other side.

Okay, let's do that.

Yep.

Okay.

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Glenn back

Mercury.

Glenn back.

Welcome to the program.

Okay, so homework assignment tonight.

You have to watch what is called The Push.

It's on Netflix.

We're going to talk about it tomorrow.

You've got to watch this.

This is just the opening few minutes.

They call a restaurant and they say to just a random server, hey, there's a woman.

She's sitting in your restaurant.

She's got a baby carriage.

That's not her baby.

We're the police.

Just distract her, then get the baby carriage and meet me at the corner on the street.

You got to get me the baby.

And the person does it in three minutes.

They just do it.

That's the beginning.

Listen to this.

Tom, you've just persuaded a stranger to steal a baby.

So go on.

How you feeling?

That was horrible.

Okay, well, well done for pushing him into it.

Although, of course, what we've got planned will be a lot worse.

The person you just saw making the phone call isn't really a policeman.

He's an actor.

So is the woman woman in the cafe

and that baby was just a lifelike replica.

But the cafe worker was real and didn't know any of this until my team caught up with him and explained.

It's not even a real baby.

I know, I couldn't see.

I was like, I'm in such a panic.

It's surprisingly easy for someone to pretend to be an authority figure like a policeman and order a complete stranger to do something they would never normally do.

This is an extreme example of social compliance, following orders, doing something because someone else says it's the right thing to do.

Authority can come from a person, from a group of like-minded individuals, or from an ideology.

Don't be too nice.

It can be used to preserve public order, but it can push people to commit terrible acts.

Social compliance is part of life.

Evolution has taught us that it's safer to be one of the crowd, but its dangers are worth being aware of now more than ever.

So I've designed an experiment to investigate the limits of this trait of human nature, and it's this.

Can social compliance be used to make someone push a living, breathing human being to their death?

It is remarkable

and an amazing study of human beings, average human beings.

Watch it tonight.

We're going to talk about it tomorrow.

Watch it tonight on Netflix.

Again, it's called The Push.

Glenn Beck.

Mercury.

Love.

Courage.

Truth.

Glenn Beck.

Well, while the Broward County high schoolers continue their national media tour, we still haven't even begun to discuss school security.

There's been a few mentions of arming teachers, but outside of that, there hasn't been any serious debate on how to harden public schools.

What are we going to do?

This has to happen.

Because while every media outlet and their mom has given airtime to David Hogg and his band of underage national policy experts, there's some very bad people planning on doing very bad things.

On Monday, ISIS tried to attack the Pineview High School.

This is in St.

George, Utah.

If you've never been there, it's an amazing little town.

But I want to tell you, little town, out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by desert.

It's a community with less than 100,000 people.

It's famous really for its proximity to Zion National Park, but it's also the winter quarters quarters of Brigham Young's home.

Okay, it's not the, it's not exactly a hotbed for Islamic extremism.

So a teenager, he arrives at school on Monday and he has a bomb that he made at his home.

He tried to detonate it inside of school, but it malfunctioned, thank God, and it caused the device to emit large amounts of smoke.

The school was evacuated, and thankfully no one was hurt.

So police, they searched the attacker's house and they found the materials that he used to construct the bomb.

But they also found evidence that he has been researching and promoting ISIS.

As it turns out, none of this, again, should have been a surprise.

The student has already been involved in two separate incidents where he made it clear that he was an ISIS supporter.

On one occasion, he took down the school's American flag and replaced it with an ISIS flag.

On another one, he spray painted ISIS is coming on the side of the building.

Actually, he wrote ISIS is C-O-M-I.

He ran out of time for the NG, but I think we got the point.

Despite all of this, officers said he was authorized to be on school grounds.

Now,

I highly doubt that David Hogg has talked about this today, and you probably won't hear anybody else talk about it in the right context.

But imagine if this attacker had attempted this with an AR-15.

What if he pulled out the rifle and it jammed?

Even if no one got hurt, that might have been the final straw that pushed this gun control debate over the edge.

Media coverage would be blowing up,

not over the circumstances surrounding the attack, but over the weapon used.

That's all we'd see on every cable news station.

That's all America would be talking about in the newspapers.

If this attack would have been a jammed gun versus a malfunctioning bomb this close to the Parkland shooting, the Second Amendment would be hanging by a thread today.

And meanwhile, we refuse to talk about the actual problems.

Why did this school, why did this student and the last student at Parkland have access to the school?

Is he supporting the most violent terror group in the world?

And is that not cause for mental evaluation?

Was there no law enforcement investigation into this kid?

And if so, what happened?

Beyond all of that,

the most important conversation that we can have

is this:

suicide rate in teenagers has gone up 20%

since 2012, a 20%

increase.

Clinical depression has gone up 40%

with teenagers since 2012.

Our society seems to be falling apart.

Why?

Why?

It isn't the gun.

It isn't the bombs.

It isn't ISIS.

What is attracting this kid to ISIS?

What is the hole that

our kids are trying to fill and they can't fill it?

That is the question that we must answer.

That is the conversation that we must begin to have.

It's Wednesday, March 7th.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

You know, and in that spirit of asking these

questions,

you know, one of them is there is no absolute anymore.

Nothing is known anymore.

There is no higher reason for being.

It was Silicon Valley and I was

listening to one of the big venture capitalists and he was talking about the future.

And

he is Facebook, Twitter, everything.

Biggest venture capitalist guy in the world.

And he said, you know, I have to tell you, the Christians and people of deep faith

have a leg up on the rest of us.

Well, how do you mean?

He said, because jobs are going to become so scarce life is going to become so easy if we're right about technology and if we survive this this turnover that most people get their meaning out of what they do

and he said

people of real faith get their meaning out of service for others they find their meaning outside of themselves That's really important.

And I think that's what's happening to our kids.

We've lost meaning.

But what does it it mean to be a Christian anymore?

What does it mean?

It's like it's not even living

in the world we're in.

Not that it should be of the world, but it has to be in the world.

So there's a new book out called The Way Back.

Now, this is written by two people.

Eric Metaxas turned me on to this, Phil Cook and Jonathan Bach.

Now, Jonathan Bach is the founder of Grace Hill Media, Media, which has done

every movie that you can imagine

that you might like that has a good message to it.

It's the company that did

the Chronicles of Narnia,

The Lord of the Rings, what else?

Blindside.

And so here's a guy who is in the media.

He works in Hollywood, and yet he says says

Christians have lost their credibility, and here's the way back.

We wanted to get him on now, Jonathan Bach.

How are you, Jonathan?

Brother Glenn, how are you?

I'm very good.

I'm very good.

I'm actually happy to hear that the Caia Fit has moved to St.

George, UT.

Isn't that bizarre?

That's a real retreat.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

Yeah, it is.

Okay, so, Jonathan,

you know, it's interesting that, you know, being Hollywood people, that you see this.

and you're not, I shouldn't say you're Hollywood.

I mean,

you're a believer, but you're seeing this, and

you're largely responsible for the renaissance of spiritual and faith-based films in Hollywood proper.

What is it that we are missing?

What do you mean by

Christianity's lost its way?

Yeah, well, you know, I sit and have for the better part of 20 years on a funny fence where I market mainstream films and television to the Christian community, to the faith community around the country and even now around the globe.

But I'm also a practicing, believing Christian.

And so it's an odd little place to sit, a perch to sit, and so I get to see

maybe

into

both sides of things in a way that somebody just sitting on one side of the fence doesn't necessarily get to.

And look, I don't think I'm saying anything extraordinary here to say that over the last several decades, we've seen

a real

failure on the part of the Christian community to influence culture.

We've just seen it ebbing away kind of day after day after day.

And we're to the place now

where

people can be openly hostile and are openly hostile to the Christian community and

to Christian values.

I mean, for example, Bernie Sanders, like 18 months ago, said that Christians shouldn't be in a position of any kind of authority in politics.

You know, it's things like that that are, like,

what is going on, right?

And so

my concern is something as simple as this, okay?

Is that there is a disconnect between how Christians perceive themselves and how non-Christians and the world actually sees us.

And so a very simple

example of that is the fruits of the Spirit, which Christians are supposed to be known for.

You know, you know the list, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness.

You know the list.

Tell me which of those words non-Christians use to describe us?

None of those.

None of them.

Right.

That's a real problem, right?

That is a,

PR problem.

Yeah.

You know, is how we're viewing ourselves and how they're viewing us are just

not the problem.

Okay, so help me out.

Is this a, you know, I know perception is reality, so you have to deal with the reality that you're handed.

But is that perception coming from, is that because there's this movement on the left to crush Christianity?

Or is it,

well, Christians aren't living what they preach?

Or a combination of both.

Yeah.

Well,

as a PR and marketing guy, and my co-writer, Phil Cook, is also

a media expert.

He actually works on the Christian side of things.

I like to say that Phil helps Christian television suck less.

And he's been doing that for the better part of 30 years.

We came at this,

you know, we've been friends for a long time, and we talk about this kind of constantly around the fire pit and conversation.

And, you know, we come at this as PR and marketing guys.

So, of course, we viewed this initially as a Christianity has a PR problem.

And so, you know,

every marketing problem can be solved by better marketing.

So,

if your house is small, don't call it small, call it cozy, right?

And so, that's where we started.

We started at a place of, well, great, how do we fix this PR problem?

Let's use our expertise to do that.

But the more that we dug into it

and the more we wrote the book it just didn't feel like we were really capturing what the real essential problem was so we decided to go back and look at our community the Christian community and just look at behaviors and where the Christian

community is right now so for example on the movie side of things if if you do research you ask people hey do you like movies everybody likes movies It's like 99% of the country says, Yes, I like movies.

Okay?

Well, that's not, as marketers, we're not interested in those people.

We're actually interested in the people who show up and actually go to movies and plunk down their money once a month and go to movies or who are on Netflix.

So you want people who are actively involved.

So we went to all of the best researchers out there, Barna, Gallup, Pew, Lifeway Research,

to dig into the actual stats of what's going on in the Christian community behaviorally.

And I have to say, we were absolutely shocked.

So depending on the researcher you talk to and the question that gets asked, essentially somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of this country classifies themselves as a Christian.

Okay?

Then you start to look at, we just decided to look at just basic behaviors.

You know, where do you spend your time?

Where do you spend your money?

And what are the markers that you would say, okay, yeah, that's definitely what Christians should be doing.

They should be going to church, right?

I mean, you would assume that Christians would go to church.

We looked at prayer.

We looked at tithing, and we looked at Bible reading.

And we were shocked.

So, for example, if 70 to 80 percent of the country claims to be Christian, how many people are showing up on a weekly basis to church?

It is 20 percent.

Oh, my gosh.

Right.

And the new rule of thumb with churches, with pastors, is you are now a regular at church if you're showing up three out of every eight Sundays or 19 whole times a year.

Holy cow.

That makes you a regular

congregant.

How many times a year are we getting?

19.

Wow.

19.

That's your regular if you're showing up 19.

Wow.

It's like my gym attendance.

And you can see what difference that's making.

Yeah, I know.

It looked great.

Hey, wait a minute.

So then we looked at,

you know, then we laughed.

Anyway, wait, you didn't laugh.

Are you actually just calling me fat?

I don't understand what happened.

Hey, he's a Christian.

He can get away with that.

He loves you.

I speak truth, man.

I speak truth.

That's right.

That's right.

So then we looked at, you know, prayer.

Okay.

And what we found is that 63% of Christians say prayer is essential, which sounds like a great number.

Oh, okay.

That's a good number.

Except the corollary to that is 37% of people who go to church don't think prayer is essential.

Bible reading.

Wait, wait, wait.

Wait, wait, 37%.

What?

37% of Christians who go to church do not think prayer is essential.

What?

How is that possible?

How's that?

I mean,

it's the Lord's prayer.

He thought it was pretty.

How is that possible?

Okay.

This is where we are in the world.

So here's a really shocker, which is Bible reading.

So Lifeway Research.

researchers, these are the Southern Baptists, so this is not, I mean, they want this to be a good number, but their researchers, what they found is that of church attending Christians, we're talking about that 20%, right?

We're talking about essentially the regulars who show up.

40%

of them rarely or never open the Bible.

So, again, we're not talking about Christmas and Easter Christians.

We are talking about people who are actually showing up in the pews on a regular basis.

19 times.

40% of them

are never cracking the Bible at all.

Wow.

Okay.

And then, of course, tithing, you would assume it's terrible, and it is terrible.

Of those 10%, excuse me, of those 20% who are showing up on a regular basis, only 10% of them are giving 10%.

Well, at least they're consistent.

It's a 10% rule.

There you go.

But you look at those numbers, right?

And you start to realize that, oh, my gosh, all of the things that non-Christians are saying about us, that we're hypocritical, that we're negative, all those things, that whole list, it's true.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

So hang on, Jonathan, because

we want to

continue the conversation.

So how does that change us?

And then also

what do we do?

Because I think people feel this.

They just know Christianity is on the ropes.

It's declining everywhere.

And it's on the ropes.

And it's because perhaps we're not living it.

So we'll go there here in a second.

And how do we make, how does it become relevant to people?

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I don't need to keep them in the safe because I use them for protection.

Do you?

Yes.

You should probably, you have two kids.

You should put it in the safe.

I'm just saying as a safety tip.

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Glenn Bach Mercury.

Glenn Bach.

We are talking to

the author of a new book, Jonathan Bach and Phil Cook have written The Way Back, How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Can Get It Back.

He is a marketer and started started looking at the problems of Christianity and saying, well, we just have a marketing problem.

He said, no, after doing research, no, we actually have some real fundamental problems.

And, you know,

people are not viewing Christians as we view ourselves.

Yeah, he brought up a list, you know, positive virtues that you might associate with Christianity to keep it as secular as possible.

And

it was

nobody associates any of those words with Christianity.

Right.

And part of me

believes that because there's been a kind of a negative, there is a PR problem.

I think that is part of it.

But also, you know, maybe we're not living the lives we're supposed to live.

I'd love to see what people do associate with Christianity.

So

we'll get into that

and

how much of this is,

you know, he mentioned that

a lot of the research they did.

One of the big research firms is Barna.

And I've seen the Barna research on Christians.

There's no difference between Christians and non-Christians in divorce, pornography, you know, lying, cheating, stealing.

There's no difference.

We are not different because of our faith.

And I think that's why a lot of people say, you know, you're just a bunch of talk.

You're just a bunch of hypocrites.

Oh, you preach goody-goody.

But there is no difference in

studies done by religious pollsters.

There's no difference between us.

That's a problem.

So how do we get it back?

Continue in just a second.

The name of the book is The Way Back.

Glenn Beck Mercury.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

There is a new book out.

It is called The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back.

Jonathan Bach is one of the co-authors.

He is with us now.

He is

in the film-promoting industry.

He is a Christian,

and his co-author is a Christian.

And they thought that this was a PR problem.

And as they looked into research, they realized, no, it's not a PR problem alone.

There's a problem in Christianity.

And he just addressed, you know, people who say they go to church.

That's only about 20% of the population that says they're Christian.

20% of those go to church on a regular basis, and that means 19 times a year.

63% of Christians say prayer is important, but 37% of Christians say, no, it's not.

And only 40%, or sorry, 40% of Christians rarely or never read the Bible.

And so we went over some of the positive terms that are not associated with Christianity, apparently for good reason in some ways, Jonathan.

But what do people think of when they think of Christians?

Well, I mean, we've all all heard the list, right?

We've all heard

the terrible adjectives that are used, but what we discovered when we started to look in

this research is that

the fact that Christian is now essentially synonymous with hypocrite is not a PR problem.

What it is, is it's a sales force problem.

It's on us because

we're just not living the life.

We have essentially become the fat guy at the gym who's lecturing other people about good health.

And

so researchers know that when conversion happens, and it doesn't matter, we're not talking only about religion.

It could be anything, good health, anything.

It's because you see someone else and you want to be like them.

So when you have 80% of the country saying they're a Christian, but only 20% showing up,

you know, you look at that and say, well, who wants to be part of that group?

Who wants to be part of that?

It's a little bit like if you went to for a meeting at Coca-Cola and three-quarters of the people around the table are drinking Pepsi.

Like, what would you think about it?

Right.

I will tell you that I mean, I have a problem, even in my own church, but all churches, they talk an awful lot about, you know, baptisms and getting people in the faith.

And I just keep,

it drives me nuts because I just feel like, yeah, okay, that's important, but love people.

Love people, and they will just come themselves.

Jesus didn't have to say, get into the water, get into the water.

He loved people, and that's what turned their life.

They saw it and

they wanted that fruit.

And I don't know what our fruit is anymore.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so we looked at this and said, okay, well, here's the symptoms, right?

But what's the real cause of this?

And it really also shocked us.

Essentially, what we determined is that

when you talk about idol worship,

that sounds like an Israelite problem.

Yeah, right.

Right, right, right, right.

A long time ago, kind of problem.

Oh, those silly Israelites, the second

Moses is away, they're making a golden calf.

We don't do that.

If our pastor goes on vacation, we don't make a golden calf.

And then Narthex.

Speak for your church.

Should have seen what happened to our church last week.

But what we feel is that

a lot of Christians out there, a lot of people calling themselves Christians, are actually the most sophisticated idol makers in the history of humanity.

Because essentially what they've done is they've created a God that looks like God, that has the veneer of God, but it's a God who doesn't mind that I'm only going to church 19 times a year and fine with me not tithing or reading the Bible,

you know,

is cool with us divorcing, as you brought up, divorcing at this exact same rate as everybody else, who demands no obedience.

from us at all.

And it's essentially, we have created

a God

who who conforms to our view of the world as opposed to the other way around.

That's idol worship.

And I think that's what's going on here.

And what you realize is that the greatest threat facing American Christianity in 2018 is not radical Islam or the rise of secularism or prayer in schools or gay marriage or the whole list.

The greatest threat to American Christianity in 2018 is American Christians.

That's a powerful statement.

I will tell you this.

I had to write something

this week, this last weekend for church.

And so I was doing some study on

unconditional love and how God's love is unconditional.

And started doing some research and found that was not part of the Christian vernacular until the 1960s.

God's love is not unconditional.

He has divine love.

He loves all of us no matter what we've done, but it is also conditional.

You, you know, all of his promises are, if you do these things, then I will promise you these things.

That is the very definition.

And it was put in there, you know, the unconditional love really kind of entered our vernacular because it was, you know, hey, you can just be a good person.

You can just, you can just, you can do sleep with people and whatever, and God doesn't matter.

It does matter.

It does matter.

Yeah, well, you know, and as you read the stories of Jesus,

you know, he's got all the time in the world and all the love in the world for

murderers and prostitutes and lepers, and, you know, the list goes on and on and on.

The folks he can't stand are

the complacent, the hypocrites.

You know,

he has no patience for them.

None.

So what is the way back?

Yeah, well, so we had to, that's one of the things that we did is we said, all right, well,

how do we fix this, right?

Because a lot of people have accused us of having the spiritual gift of discouragement.

And so

what do we do about this and how do we fix it?

So, you know, what we decided to do is just go back and say, all right, well,

how did the early church do this?

Right?

I mean, essentially when on the Mount of Olives, when Jesus disappeared into the sky, you know, the disciples were standing there.

And as they're standing there, they have nothing.

Okay?

They have no political power.

They have no money.

They have no influence.

They have essentially no education.

They have no plan.

As a matter of fact, two angels had to show up and say, come on, fellas, let's get to it.

You know, it's time to go.

So they had nothing.

So how did they go from

being a backwater

cult

in the far reaches of the Roman Empire to 200 years later, Christianity being one of the most influential forces in all of the Western world?

How did that happen?

How did they go from nothing to that in a

relatively short period of time?

And it's really two things that what we came up with.

First is, they were all in.

I mean, these guys were 100% committed.

They were in it, for sure.

And that's the first thing.

And the second thing is that they went about a process of deciding intentionally to astonish Roman culture.

Roman culture, let me give you an example of it.

Roman culture was a culture of death, really.

I mean, militarism was very strong.

Infanticide was a huge problem

in the early church.

I mean, excuse me,

in Roman culture.

They didn't really name their children for 10 days after they were born because they were still deciding whether they wanted to keep this or not, if it was a girl or too many mouths to feed.

They would just expose the child.

They would just leave it by the side of the road or out in the trash or put it in a field.

They put them in garbage, literally in garbage barges.

Yep, just garbage.

It was a piece of garbage.

And so the early church who believed in life and believed in that everyone was sacred started picking up these children and raising them as their own.

And the idea of that so astonished

the Roman culture.

They didn't know what to do with it.

Who are these people?

And what are they doing?

And how are they doing it?

And so we looked at that and said, all right, well, what are the ways that we can astonish culture again?

And if you go back again to the early church, think of the things that they created.

Hospitals and orphanages and universities.

And I mean, the list goes on and on of things that were so extraordinary that culture decided, hey, we need one of those.

We want to be part of this.

And so, what are the things, I don't think a hospital or a soup kitchen today is going to really, another one of those is going to astonish culture.

But what are the things that we can do as a Christian community both individually and corporately that can astonish culture once again?

So as an example, we have a bunch of examples in the book of those kinds of things that we can do.

And I'll give you an example of one.

The foster care system is a disaster in this country.

450,000 kids living in the foster care system, essentially abandoned.

They're abandoned children.

That's what it comes down to.

And we can look at that and go, oh my gosh,

that's an unbelievably huge number.

What could I do where I'm sitting?

Well, there's actually a lot you can do.

450,000 doesn't sound so terrible when you realize there's 350,000 churches in this country.

So if one family in one church, in every single church in the country, took in a foster care, an orphaned child into their family, and everybody else in that church supported them, we could wipe out the foster care system in this country in a year, just like that.

That's the kind of thing that would astonish people and go, well, who does that?

How did this happen?

That's unbelievable.

Because everybody knows this is a tremendous societal problem right now.

Foster kids have a 1% graduation rate from college.

Wow.

Within one year, 25% of them will be homeless when they are finally emancipated.

75% of girls who go through the foster care system are pregnant by 21.

75%.

Wow.

75%.

So if we want to do something about it, we need to, this is the kind of ways that we can astonish culture is by working together.

But we have to be committed.

That's amazing.

Now we're like, I can't believe Chick-fil-A is closed on Sunday.

Jeez, what are they doing?

Like,

these basic steps now mesmerize us.

And, you know, that's not even close to what the plan was.

Do you talk about...

And you know what's especially amazing about Chick-fil-A is that they make more money than only being open six days a week

than most other changes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, Jonathan, what about the

instead of the grand plan, which I love, I love that about, you know,

you know, the foster care idea,

too many of us are just not doing it.

I mean, we're just not living it.

We're not, we're no different than the rest of society.

Yes.

So,

I mean, how much of a role do we as individuals play?

Because if our churches can say, hey, we're going to do this, but

unless we reduce our divorce rate, you know, our pornography usage, our drug usage, our lying, our cheating, our whatever, unless we start to move those numbers, we're not a unique or peculiar people at all.

No, right.

And it's going to start with ourselves, right?

Because we have to look at ourselves and decide, what do I want to be, right?

Do I want to be this complacent person or do I want to be essentially a Navy SEAL for the Lord, right?

Like all-in, right?

And then with the church you go to is important.

I mean, look, is your church pushing you hard, like a trainer for your soul, into like a deeper and more profound relationship with Jesus?

Or is it like a rose-scented convalescent hospital, which is keeping you warm, dry, and comfortable?

Right?

What's your faith?

Is your faith an active, all-in faith, or is it a 401k faith where you're just putting a little bit away and hoping you have enough for the very end?

So great.

Jonathan Bach, thank you.

The name of the book is The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back.

Thanks, Jonathan.

Thank you.

The book has

a companion devotional

on you version.

It has hit 800,000 downloads in the first 10 days.

Yeah.

So

this is gaining traction, and that's a good thing.

The way back available everywhere.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

Hey, I saw a great movie on Monday night, watched it with my kids.

I have a hard time getting the kids to agree on movies.

Rafe is, you know, he likes action, adventure.

Cheyenne has a sweet, tender little heart.

And, you know, anything scary, you know.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs.

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And it's just a great, great story.

Really well done.

Go out and see it.

It opens up next week.

It's called I Can Only Imagine.

Everyone in the family loved it.

I can only imagine opens in theaters next week.

Glenn back.

Mercury.

Truth.

Glenn back.

President Trump said that he likes conflict.

He likes to watch it.

But the White House is not in conflict today.

And that's probably pretty true.

Gary Cohen, President Trump's top economic advisor, announced yesterday he's going to resign.

Cohen, who is a former president of Goldman Sachs, has been on the losing end of the White House debate over Trump's controversial steel and aluminum tariffs, which the president announced last week.

The president said

trade wars are easy to win.

They're actually historically not, and they can be be extraordinarily damaging.

That was Gary Cohen's position.

But the White House said there's no single reason for Cohen's decision, but

it does come on the heels about the tariff talk.

Yesterday, the president called Cohen a rare talent.

He said that Cohen did a superb job in driving our agenda, helping to deliver historic tax cuts and reforms, and unleashing the American economy once again.

It has been a better White House because of Cohen.

The White House also said that Cohen is departing on positive terms with the president, and they will continue policy discussions even after he leaves.

I wouldn't bet on that because

Trump, I think, is showing Cohen the door.

Cohen is a Democrat who is a free trade advocate who was head of the president's economic council.

Now, what Trump seems to be doing is doubling down on his, what is now an unpopular decision to to slap tariffs on the steel and aluminum industry around the world.

Maybe Cohen just got tired of fighting the battle.

Here's the thing.

Tomorrow, the president is going to sign a presidential proclamation.

I don't like decrees that come from the president, but the president is able to issue this extensive policy

by decree because he has taken the extra step in saying these tariffs, really, this is a national security threat that we don't have the capacity to really make steel or aluminum in this country.

Out of all of the steel that is used in this country to build things,

I don't know how it could be a national security,

you know, or

a security threat to us

when the amount of steel that is used in America, 74% of it, is American steel.

Critics now are fretting about his departure.

People

who believe in free trade are concerned there's not going to be a gatekeeper like Cohen now who managed to keep the president's nationalist economic tendencies at bay.

Last summer, Cohen reportedly

blocked the effort by Peter Navarro, a Trump trade advisor, to withdraw from NAFTA.

Who's going to watch that gate now?

And with Steve Mnuchin and John Kelly, Cohen was firmly in the the camp that felt abandoning trade deals and imposing tariffs would harm U.S.

businesses, our economy, and foreign relations.

Now, there is no free trade advocate, really, or at least one less staunch

defender in the White House.

So who is going to replace Cohen?

That is an important question.

The White House isn't worried.

The White House press conference yesterday, the president said, everybody wants to work at the White House.

So many people want to come in.

I literally have the choice of anybody.

It's Wednesday, March 7th.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say Cohen in.

You're thinking of Michael Cohen, the lawyer.

No, I'm thinking of

my grandson, Cohen.

But anyway,

Cohen.

So let's.

you know, the one thing that Trump did say that he likes, you know, he likes conflict.

You know, if I take that in

the way that I hope he means it,

he likes to have different voices around him.

He likes to have people disagree around him.

Team of rivals, right?

Yeah.

And

I like that.

However, that's not really where America is headed.

Do you happen to have that quote that we were kicking around yesterday?

Or can you paraphrase that quote off the top of your head?

I can find it here in a minute.

Find it real quick.

It's an amazing thing.

Americans,

you know, we used to say that

we're never going to be politically correct.

We're just not going to be politically correct.

Well,

what is politically correct right now is to agree with your side in lockstep, to not listen to any other point of view or talk to anybody, to deem the other side an enemy.

That's dangerous political correctness.

Now, remember, political correctness came from the communist rule that

if you were speaking out of line with the party, you would go to a camp and they would make you politically correct.

And if you didn't conform, you were in a gulag.

Listen to this quote: I have no house, wife, children, parents, or brothers.

My friends are friends as long as they think like me politically.

Who said that?

Che Guevara.

Just a good guy.

A mass murderer, you know, sure, but he's on a lot of t-shirts.

Maybe he's in a t-shirt in one of your teenage relatives' closet right now.

I have no friends unless they think like me politically.

Look at what's happening on our college campuses.

That is what's happening.

That's what's happening on Facebook.

That's what's happening.

I won't listen.

I won't read it.

I won't befriend.

I will not reach out unless they think like me.

That's trouble for any society, for any society, let alone an American society, because that's not who we are.

And when you're challenged, when you're pushed,

that's when you learn things.

That's when you expand.

It's not one side.

You know, it's really amazing is

if you look at the two sides

the the left I hate to use the word left I don't want to use left or right

let's use

liberal and conservative and I mean actual liberal and conservative okay

the liberal side that says, hey, let's, you know, let everybody be themselves, okay?

Let everybody just, let's, let's, let's just dream and let's be and let's create and

let's just go out there and explore.

Okay.

That's all good stuff.

That's sort of how liberals view themselves, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think, I think a classic liberal does think that way.

Well, a classical liberal really is closer to libertarian, right?

Yes.

So totally freedom, you know, total freedom.

You go do whatever you want.

So the people who are like that are the poets and the artists and the dreamers.

Okay.

That is a mindset.

Now, a political side has said, you can't be creative.

You can't be this person

unless you believe these things politically.

That goes against everything that a free thinker and an artist, don't put me in a box.

I have no box.

Conservatives are the ones who say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Hang on, there's a lot of really good things.

Okay.

Let's slow down just a little bit.

Let's move forward, but let's not lose

what we've gained.

A conservative investor is somebody who says, look, I'll take a risk, but I want to make sure that I'm not losing everything on this risk.

I've worked hard for this.

Those two things are necessary.

If you only have the dreamers

and you don't have those people who are fiscally conservative, nothing happens.

Nothing happens.

You see what happens in marriages when you have two people who are just dreamers.

Correct.

Correct.

Yeah.

And so

what we're doing is we're saying, I don't need the dreamers.

I don't need the artists.

I don't need the poets.

And the other side is saying, I don't need anybody who has any kind of traditional value.

I don't need anybody who believes the things that have been believed for 5,000 years.

I don't need you.

You believe in the traditional family.

You believe in, you know, the Constitution.

You believe in those things.

We don't need you.

You're not part of it.

We can't survive that way.

We need both sides.

We have to, we need each other.

And what we're doing right now is we're saying, oh no, my side will make it work.

I don't want to live in in a country.

I don't want to live in a country that

its art is all red, white, and blue, and eagles.

You know what I mean?

Sure.

And I don't want to live in a world where its art is all crucifixes and urine.

You know, there's, there's...

You like having both.

Right.

I don't want to live in a world where

we have no money because we've taken it from everybody and now we're all equally miserable i don't want to live in that

but i also don't want to live in a world that is is so conservative with its money that it it never spends anything and so it never grows never does anything good never doesn't have any compassion because it's worried about its money

That's the stereotypical definition of conservative and liberal.

And we need each other to balance each other out.

And I think that's how you grow, too.

It is.

You talk to someone who has a, it's not always like, you know, you're, hey, I want to go talk to Michael Moore because he's going to convince me about how great, you know, communism is.

Like, obviously, that's a different story.

But how can you, I can think of examples in my life, in my life, where I have changed because I considered.

the other side seriously.

I'll give you one.

Second Amendment.

Now, of course, I grew up in Connecticut.

There was like, I think there's one gun in the state, basically.

And now recently, only over the past few years has gun violence ever really been associated with Connecticut.

It's not one of those rural states.

It's, you know, it's right outside of New York City.

It's between New York City and Boston, right?

And I was never against the Second Amendment or gun ownership or anything like that, but I absolutely.

could have been sold on banning assault weapons or common sense gun measures or all the things that thrown around and you see them polled by 80 and 90% of people go along with them because they just don't know the facts about them.

And over time, because I listened to people who actually did grow up in gun culture and people who actually did look at the Constitution, and a lot of that was just getting older and studying more and learning more, but a lot of it was understanding something that was really foreign to me as a kid.

I didn't grow up in that culture at all.

My dad was in the military, but that was about it.

You know, we didn't have guns in the house.

I didn't really know many people who had guns in their houses.

And it took a time of talking to a lot of people who had thought about these things and had a different perspective on them, came at them from a different perspective.

And then you add in, you know, the constitutional arguments and the statistics about, you know, whether guns actually commit these crimes or if they're actually people and all of the additional layers you put on top of that.

But I don't think I would have, I think I easily could have settled into a life where I just believe, you know what?

Of course, guns, yeah, you can have them, but no one needs an assault rifle.

No one needs those.

You don't need those things to hunt.

Culturally, I absolutely could have fallen into those arguments.

But I didn't because I tried to understand both sides of the issue and then make a decision about them.

Talking to people who were outside of my little group helped me understand the Second Amendment.

So you know who

why I began to search for God?

Carl Sagan.

Stephen Hawking.

They were so convinced God doesn't exist.

And I thought, I've never considered that point of view.

I just never, I've never been around anybody like that.

I have a relationship with God because

through books, I became friends with Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.

And I seriously considered what they had to say.

And it made me search deeper and go, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Maybe they're right.

I mean, I've just been told about this.

I have been a, ever since you've known me, I have been a defender of gay marriage.

Have I not?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, in a different way, I think, than the normal debate has been.

Yeah, my debate is, my feeling is people are people.

Let them be.

The government has no place there.

No place in marriage.

No place in marriage.

Okay, you can believe whatever you want.

It has no place in marriage.

You know how I was raised?

I was raised by a father who I didn't understand this until close to his death when he was 16, was raped by a man.

And

my father was open-minded on almost everything, not homosexuality, not homosexuality.

And we could never understand it.

And we talked about it as a family, and he would never address it.

Never.

Homosexuality is wrong, and it's this and it's that.

And my dad was not a Bible thumper.

And it made no sense because he was so open-minded on everything.

Well,

I didn't just pick that up.

I know homosexuals.

I work with homosexuals.

I'm not afraid of homosexuals.

That was irrational.

They're not all that scary.

They're not all that scary.

In fact, they're quite helpful.

So

I didn't just take take that.

And I could have taken that because my father was very clear on it.

But he was because he was open-minded on other things.

Thank God I escaped the closed-mindedness of that part and became open-minded and have a different opinion by a great deal than my father did.

And had for a long time had a different point of view than most conservatives, certainly anybody who was religious.

It's because I talk to people.

And it doesn't mean anything other than,

I want to be uncomfortable.

The scariest thing in my life came from

the quote from Thomas Jefferson.

Question with boldness, even the very existence of God.

And I wasn't questioning God.

I was questioning my childhood.

I was questioning the things that happened in my childhood, the things that were the deepest, darkest secrets of my childhood.

That's what that quote did.

There's nothing more frightening than really facing what's in you or the void that you think is in you.

That's hard.

But that changed me fundamentally.

And we have to have those conversations and those challenging conversations and meet those people who will push us up against the wall because they're intellectually honest.

Not because they have a different point of view, but because they're intellectually honest and they're making us ask hard questions about what we believe.

That's to me what it means to be an American that is going to move the country forward.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

So I saw a local letter to the editor.

It said, Something different is happening.

I was recently told by a friend that our local paper is a conservative paper, and I felt once in a while the letters to the editor were written by conservative thinkers.

There seems to be a change of late.

I'm not sure if there's a change in the paper's role or if thinkers on the other side are stepping up to the plate, but both political parties seem so lost to their elected purpose of working for the people.

They're overly focused on getting re-elected and not going against their big money supporters.

Last Sunday, I was watching Glenn Beck interviewed on CNN's reliable sources, and to my surprise, he held my attention when he spoke of Martin Luther King's call for reconciliation.

He said, both sides are just trying to win.

We have to listen to one another.

This person writes in, if we're going to continue to have a viable two-party system,

We have to know what each party stands for and what they believe.

And in my mind, Beck makes some very important points.

I'm now reading two books about conservatives written by conservatives.

To get our country back intended by our founders, we have to step out of our comfort zone, listen, reflect, and reframe.

This is fantastic.

If we can have that honest discovery of

each other and ask the Ford dealer about the Ford, not the Chevy dealer.

Ask the Ford dealer.

Ask conservatives about conservatives, liberals about liberals.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

I want to take John in Michigan real quick.

Hey, John, how are you?

Good.

Thanks for taking my call.

You've been talking about balance, you know, and conservatives need to balance their thinking by talking to liberals.

Hey, wait, wait, wait.

No.

No, no, no, wait.

Hang on.

I want to make sure I'm clear on this.

Everybody needs to do this.

This is not a conservative thing.

All of us need to do this.

no, I do.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah, I get that.

But my problem is that

I don't think there's a moral equivalence today

largely because of the media.

The media has enabled the other side, frankly, to be a lot worse than our side.

I mean,

they can get away with a lot more than we can.

And that culture has dominated us for 100 years, right?

Woodrow Wilson?

Isn't that what you've been saying all these years?

It is.

God bless you.

You know, he's a bad guy.

He's not as bad as he used to be.

No, I hate that guy.

I still hate him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But so I guess I just, I'm not understanding

crossing over to the others.

I understand wanting to talk to liberals and

understand.

Okay, so let me let me see if this helps you out.

Let me see if this helps you out.

I'm not talking about,

I don't know if you've ever talked to somebody who is on the other side, and the minute you start talking, they just start going into talking points and you're just not going to change their mind

and they're not listening to what you're having to say.

I'm not talking about that.

I mean,

I can get that in my own family.

You don't,

I'm not someone I'm talking about.

I'm talking about people who the conversation starts with, I am really tired of hating half of the country.

I'm really tired of it.

And I, I, I don't think that's who, I don't think that's who you are because I know it's not who I am.

And finding the things that you have in common.

I'm not talking about changing policies.

We're past that point right now.

We have to find basic humanity and reasons to believe in each other again, to believe that

just because you voted for another guy or you believe something, that you are not a

horrible human being that wants to destroy everything that I love.

We have to get there.

So there's a good portion of the population on both left and the right that I don't need to have a conversation with because they're not, they're into the team.

Don't waste your time on that.

I understand that, and I at least theoretically understand it.

It just seems like the other side has just

I don't know that we have equivalencies on both sides as far as

somebody like Bernie Sanders saying that Christians shouldn't be in politics.

Do we have anybody on the conservative side saying anything that outrageous?

I mean, there are things outrageous.

I think part of this...

Other than the alt-right, I know about the alt-right, which I think you guys exaggerate an awful lot.

We sure do.

We love doing it.

It's our heart.

We do.

We love it.

We love stirring it up.

We love exaggerating.

I think the focus here, and I think the problem with the feeling that we have that you can never talk to anyone who is kind of on the other side is we constantly emphasize the worst people.

I mean, you bring up Bernie Sanders.

The guy's an admitted socialist.

Well, you're not going to convince Bernie Sanders of anything.

You know, here's a good example.

Pen Gillette and I.

Yeah.

Penn and I have talked about we have so much in common and so much we don't agree on.

We focus on the things we agree on.

As Penn said, Glenn, by the time if you and I ran the country, by the time we got to the place to where we had real knockdown drag off, it's 30 years down the road.

There's enough that we can come together on.

For instance, why are we talking about a, you know, repeal all guns and gun control and take them all?

Why are we having that conversation?

That isn't even re that's not based in reality in America as we know it unless you want a revolution.

What are the things that we do agree on?

It may not even be arming teachers.

You can't tell me that you can't have a conversation with somebody on the other side in your own life and say, what are we doing?

What's happening to our kids?

What's happening to our kids?

I'm concerned about our kids.

You know, can we harden the school?

What can we do?

Well, we can do gun control.

Okay, well, okay,

let's let Washington deal with that for a minute.

What are the things that we can actually do?

If you can get there,

then we have a chance.

But I'm not even talking about policies.

Pat Gray joins us.

Isn't there something to say about if you're afraid to talk to someone on the other side about your values, doesn't that mean that you don't actually have confidence in them?

What are you risking?

Like, let's say you never ever convince or understand anything better by talking to someone on the left.

What are you risking?

Our job is partially, if we believe in these things, is to try to evangelize for them.

We certainly believe that with faith, right?

Like, if you never talk to someone who isn't a believer,

what's the point?

Well, I'm not sure I'm there because Glenn just said he's tired of hating people on the other side.

I'm just starting to really enjoy it.

Well, I mean, hating him for no reason.

I like to get to know people and hate them for good quality reasons.

All right.

Well, I like to hate him just in general principle.

Really?

I just enjoy it.

Yeah, it's fun.

Yeah.

It's good.

I just feel better when I'm loaded with hate, don't you?

I'm actually even on my show getting people who are talking about this.

How do we come together?

It's happening.

I'm telling you, it's happening.

The confusing part is,

like

your last caller just said, it's hard to find like-minded people on the other side, but there are some, and you've found some of them.

You talk about them all the time.

Yeah, so I can't wait.

I've got to have the Weinsteins on.

We talked about them yesterday.

The guys who are,

one of them is a biological, I'm sorry, a evolutionary biologist that taught at Evergreen University or Evergreen College in Seattle, which is far to the left, crazy, makes NYU look like, you know, you're, you're going to class and I'm the professor.

So we would probably disagree with him on almost every particular.

Oh, he is.

Except for what makes up a man and a woman, right?

No, I think, no.

What his point is, is that we are not, we are a society that won't listen and

look at facts anymore.

Let's just have a conversation based on facts, not feeling, not what you think, you know, but what do we know?

Let's make sure we are we are looking for facts and having a real dialogue and not just shutting down anybody who disagrees with you.

That's to me, that's exciting because to me, that's we're never going to agree with everybody, but we've got to stop trying to find the wins or trying to find I'm going to change their mind or I'm even going to talk to them about politics.

Why?

When did that happen to us?

Why do we only have politics?

Why do we have to talk to everybody about politics?

Why?

Just find humanity again.

Yeah,

there's a lot of things we agree on.

If we really, you know, set aside all the politics, there's a lot of things.

One of the interesting things that we agree on, and the upper echelon of the Democrat Party makes such a big deal out of, voter ID.

We just voted yesterday.

There's 80% support from minorities on voter ID.

Why?

Because they have ID and they don't want non-citizens voting any more than we do.

And it's not like they can't.

I don't know how to get a driver's license.

I don't know how to do that.

I don't have a picture ID.

What are you talking about?

That is the racist viewpoint, saying that

the minorities can't have access to a stinking ID.

They all do.

Yeah.

I think people, I think there's, I think you're getting extra calls now on this because I think people are starting to see the writing on the wall.

Look what's happening in South Africa.

This is terrible.

Terrifying.

Yeah.

Because it's already been done, right?

Look how super successfully, by the way,

caused an entire nation to starve.

Nelson Mandela is dead now, what, four years?

And the new president, the new president, who was arrested

four years ago, three years ago for singing a song, Kill Whitey,

he was arrested.

He's now

one of the, well, he's the president of South Africa, but his party that he created based on this hatred is the third largest party in the nation.

It was essentially illegal before this.

Right.

So Nelson Mandela dies.

Within five years, You now have a president of South Africa who says the time for reconciliation is over, and he's taking all of the land from the white people in South Africa because of this horrible, you know,

unbalance, if you will, of

or imbalance on

ownership in South Africa.

And people are...

Like the Black Lives Matter, if you will, I hate to even put those guys into this category.

The worst of the worst of what you think Black Lives Matter might be are going down and hunting white people down and killing them,

butchering them, literally cutting them into pieces.

I think the average person is starting to see, wait a minute, this hatred is going to take us to really bad places, and I don't want any part of it.

And the lyrics to kill Whitey are unsurprisingly really terrifying, but you can dance to it.

It is true.

You can dance to it.

The South African bandstand is big.

It does have a good beat.

man.

Yeah, it's really catchy.

I, you know, as a white person, found myself singing it all day.

It was a weird moment in the bank.

So kind of strange.

So, Pat, we were talking earlier today, and we've given a homework assignment for the audience that tonight they all have to go to Netflix and they have to watch the push.

Did you watch that yesterday?

I did.

It's

so riveting.

It's incredible.

And every step of the way, you're wondering, what would I do here?

Would I do that?

Or

would I step back and say, wait a minute, no,

I'm not doing that.

I would have, I think I would have ejected.

Be careful with your details.

I think I would have ejected at the vegetarian question.

Me too.

I thought so, too.

Yeah, I would have been.

No,

I mean, that could really hurt people.

No.

In case you don't know,

they had

little cocktail weenies, and they were supposed to have, you know, normal.

And it's one of the first things that happened, so it's not gay.

I'm not giving away a lot.

They have normal and vegetarian plate.

Well, the vegetarian

hot dogs don't show up.

So they just get this guy to say, just put the regular ones on there and put the vegetarian flag in them, and no one's going to know.

That could really make somebody sick.

It could, but I mean, you know, most

chits, I mean, you know, say this as a vegetarian, most likely the person would eat it and probably be like, wow, this is a really good vegetarian hot dog and not really even realize the difference.

And, you know, so it's a minor break.

It's a minor influence.

Yeah, but it leads to in 90 minutes, the question is, we don't want to reveal.

They do this with four people, and it's stunning.

Can they put these people, normal people, into a situation in 90 minutes, get a normal person to push another living human being who has done nothing to them?

Nothing wrong.

Nothing wrong.

It's an innocent person.

Can they convince them to push that person off the ledge and kill them?

And it's an hour-long show

documentary.

It's amazing.

I felt so bad for the people involved because

he was going through hell

camera.

Did you

see?

Did you notice, A, how relieved they were when they found out?

I think I would have hit the guy in the face.

I would have been pissed.

I would have been pissed.

Yeah, you put me through all this.

And I can't.

I cannot imagine the psychological impact.

That's what we talked about, my wife and I last night.

Afterwards, afterwards, if

you could or you couldn't, or whatever the outcome is, it would affect you for life, I would think.

Big time.

The other thing I kept thinking of is: what is the liability for this show?

Oh, my gosh.

How did they get this done?

I think it would be interesting to watch these people because, you know, if anybody who decided to or didn't decide, whatever they decided to do, push or not push,

I think there could be real psychological damage.

Definitely.

But it is, it's, please watch it.

We're going to talk about it more tomorrow.

It's called Push on Netflix.

One quick three quick questions for you.

Yeah.

So three things.

Was it entertaining?

Yes.

Yes.

Right.

Was it terrifying?

Yes.

Yes.

Was it morally okay for them to do it?

That one I don't know.

I don't think I can say yes to that.

I know.

Only because, only because I know of the 60, the 1960s studies that Yale did, and I just finished reading a book called Ordinary Men that is this study.

I think the times are okay to do this, not for gratuitous entertainment, but for you better wake up.

You better wake up.

Look inside yourself.

Look inside and find out who you are.

I think it is.

Pat Gray Unleashed coming up on the Blaze Radio and TV Networks.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and wherever podcasts are available.

Thanks, Pat.

All right.

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the people who really get you and understand what they're doing and then can bring the tools, the intellectual tools that you may not have or that you need for your position at your company.

You hire the wrong people and the company goes wrong.

ZipRecruiter, ziprecruiter.com slash back.

It's a smarter way.

They'll build a platform that

finds the candidates for you.

So what happens is you go to ziprecruiter.com slash Beck.

You sign up.

You say, I want to find these kinds of candidates.

What ZipRecruiter does is it learns exactly what you're looking for and then identifies the people with the right experience and then invites them to apply for your job.

So it's not just the people who see your job posting.

ZipRecruiter sends out an invitation to the right people.

80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate in the site the first day.

And they even spotlight the strongest applications that you receive so you never miss the right match.

It's ZipRecruiter.

ZipRecruiter is how you find the best people.

Do it for free right now at ziprecruiter.com/slash beck.

That's ziprecruiter.com ziprecruiter.com slash back.

Glenn back Mercury.

Glenn back.

Welcome to the program.

There's a couple of things.

I don't want you to forget that tonight at five o'clock, please watch the TV show.

It's all about the blame game that we're playing and what the real problem is.

Why is the country

so

screwed up?

I mean, how did we get to this point?

How come nothing seems to be working?

There's a really simple question or a really simple answer.

And it all goes to who's really to blame?

Who's really to blame?

We continue to blame

all kinds of things, the media, the politicians, et cetera, et cetera.

And we leave blame out for ourself.

However,

when it counts, somebody else is blaming us.

And we look at that today at five o'clock, and it is pretty darn eye-opening.

You really want to understand what our problem is and who's blaming us, the people?

Watch tonight the Blaze TV.

It's theblaze.com/slash TV live at five and on demand at any time.

Glenn, back,

Mercury.