Best of the Program | Guest: Noah Oppenheim | 11/7/25

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Speaker 2 Hey, today was

Speaker 2 kind of an important podcast. We're going to play parts of it, but you might want to listen to the whole thing, at least hour number two, because

Speaker 2 there were two things that I felt compelled to share with the audience today. And one of them is included a message to the young men in the audience in this edited form.

Speaker 2 But you might, if you're interested, if you hear that and you're like, I want some more information on this,

Speaker 2 go back to the full podcast and listen to episode, this episode, but hour number two.

Speaker 2 In the edited version that you're getting right now, news of the day, government shutdown, FAA canceling and cutting back on flights, what all of this means, what does the election mean to any of this?

Speaker 2 Also, Noah Oppenheim joins me. He is the guy who put House of Dynamite on Netflix, which is a

Speaker 2 great thriller movie that you should watch this weekend. It's all about nuclear war.
It is, if you're old enough to remember

Speaker 2 the day after, it's like the day after on steroids.

Speaker 2 Noah Oppenheim joins me on today's podcast coming up.

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Speaker 2 Hello, America. You know we've been fighting every single day.
We push back against the lies, the censorship, the nonsense of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you.

Speaker 2 We work tirelessly to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it. But to keep this fight going, we need you.
Right now, would you take a moment and rate and review the Glenn Beck podcast?

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Speaker 2 you're listening to the best of the blend back program There's a difference between a revival and an awakening.

Speaker 2 We're in a revival right now, but that doesn't necessarily lead to anything except, oh, I i gotta relearn those principles but that doesn't mean you apply them in your life okay that's an awakening um there's been two great awakenings in american history one brought us the american revolution the second one brought us the civil war and the freedom of slaves um we have a possibility of of of going into a third great awakening and that's the only thing that will save us but if you don't know the difference between a revival and awakening let me give you let me give you the the negative print

Speaker 2 of a godly awakening. Our kids right now, they don't have any purpose.
They don't have any meaning. They look at everything and it doesn't, it's not real.
None of it's real.

Speaker 2 It's money, it's fame, it's, you know, it's ever-changing truths and definitions, and they have no purpose in their life. Okay.

Speaker 2 So they're looking for that because man has to have purpose in his life. Man has to search for meaning.

Speaker 2 So they're searching for meaning and they found a group of people that actually mean something and they're willing to die for it. And it's ISIS.

Speaker 2 And so they're like, you know what? At least these people believe in something. They believe it and they're willing to die for it.
I'm going to stand with them.

Speaker 2 And they put that twisted understanding into action.

Speaker 2 That's the,

Speaker 2 that is a, that's an awakening. It's just an awakening to the dark side.
And that one's already happening.

Speaker 2 It has to happen on the good side.

Speaker 2 And let me speak directly to young men. Look, you are inheriting a very loud, angry, cynical, and worst of all, spiritually starving and malnourished society.

Speaker 2 And you are being sold a future of cheap pleasures and hollow heroes and

Speaker 2 screens with blue light that just rob you of your strength one distracted second after another.

Speaker 2 And in the middle of all that noise, may I just give you one piece of instruction?

Speaker 2 If there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy,

Speaker 2 seek those things.

Speaker 2 Don't admire them. Don't nod at them.
Seek them, hunt them, chase them. Build your life around those things.

Speaker 2 A man who will do that, a boy, a young man who will do that, will become different, noticeably different.

Speaker 2 He will stop letting the culture feed him garbage. He stops applauding the trivial.
He stops laughing at the obscene or cheering for the cruel.

Speaker 2 He will become a curator of real lasting beauty in an age that has forgotten what beauty even looks like.

Speaker 2 When other men are chasing down or holding up cynicism,

Speaker 2 this man holds up hope.

Speaker 2 When everyone around him is chasing dopamine, he chooses discipline.

Speaker 2 When others will blame their circumstance, he'll take responsibility for his own action. When the world worships the shallow, he goes and searches for the deep.

Speaker 2 You want to know what the secret of becoming strong is, or becoming trusted, or becoming the kind of man that your future wife, your future children, your future nation can depend on? Here it is.

Speaker 2 You become what you seek.

Speaker 2 If you seek trash, you become trash. You seek virtue, you become a man of virtue.

Speaker 2 You seek excellence, and your life will begin to shine not loudly, but steadily, like the steel glow of a blade being forged. That's who you'll be.

Speaker 2 The world has a plentiful, seemingly never-ending supply of angry boys. We don't need any more addicted boys.
We don't need any more distracted boys. The world needs men, whole men, clear-eyed men.

Speaker 2 Men whose souls are anchored to something higher than the algorithms, trying to own them.

Speaker 2 Build a life worthy of admiration. Forget about the applause.

Speaker 2 Fill your mind with words that make you wiser. Fill your days with work, hard work that makes you stronger.
Fill your home with beauty that lifts every soul who walks into it.

Speaker 2 Have your home a place where people walk in and go, man, it is so great here. I just love it here.
I don't know what it is about your house. I just love it.

Speaker 2 It's the spirit that's there because you built it. You protect it.
Protect your integrity like a watchman on the wall. Don't lie.
Don't cheat don't steal

Speaker 2 and when you fail and you will

Speaker 2 stand back up again

Speaker 2 because a man who seeks the virtuous is not a man who never fails he just

Speaker 2 he just becomes a man who refuses to stay on the ground

Speaker 2 If you seek things that are lovely and pure, trustworthy, praiseworthy, you become a kind of man this age almost never produces. A man whose very existence is a rebuke to the darkness.

Speaker 2 That's your calling.

Speaker 2 That's why you were born. Not to be lost.

Speaker 2 Not to play video games,

Speaker 2 not to give up,

Speaker 2 not to say there is no hope,

Speaker 2 not to end up in the trash bin of human history because

Speaker 2 you've taken so many drugs, you can't stand up straight anymore.

Speaker 2 You're not destined to be alone.

Speaker 2 You are destined for great things. You are destined to find an amazing woman.
Believe me, I didn't think I would ever find an amazing woman because I didn't think I was worth it.

Speaker 2 I didn't think it was worth it. And until I started understanding how God works, that, yeah, I'm not worth any of the stuff I have.

Speaker 2 When you realize it's all a gift, it's all a gift.

Speaker 2 And even if you work your brains out, you may not ever get all the things that you want,

Speaker 2 but you're going to have everything you need.

Speaker 2 Once you realize carefully selecting friends makes a difference.

Speaker 2 My mother used to always say, show me your friends, I'll show you your future.

Speaker 2 It's true. Be careful who you select as friends.
Watch your language. Watch what you're putting into your brain and what's coming out of your mouth.
Because the brain is so amazing.

Speaker 2 It's being turned to mush. Did you know that there is

Speaker 2 a new study that just came out? I'll tell you about it next week, maybe.

Speaker 2 New study going out. It is, it's AI and it has access to social media.
And they have found that the AI, the AI

Speaker 2 that is scrolling through social media all day just to keep updated on everything that's going on in social media, it's getting brain mush. It's actually becoming dumber.

Speaker 2 It's becoming less effective.

Speaker 2 That's a machine.

Speaker 2 What do you think this flesh and blood, this thing is going to do?

Speaker 2 We say life is meaningless, and life is the only thing that has any value. And yet, we spend all of our time on things like social media, and that has absolutely no value, but we think that's life

Speaker 2 I'm not that smart I've just lived a long time

Speaker 2 and I've made so many mistakes

Speaker 2 and I decided at one point I'm gonna stop saying it's somebody somebody else's fault. I'm going to start saying, maybe, what did I do to create that? What did I do to attract that?

Speaker 2 Why does this thing keep happening to me? Why is it I always find myself involved with the same kind of people?

Speaker 2 Because,

Speaker 2 Glenn, dummy, it's you.

Speaker 2 What you think,

Speaker 2 it's like, it's like think of yourself as a

Speaker 2 beacon.

Speaker 2 It's just, you're a beacon. You're a GPS pin that is constantly saying, here I am, here I am, here I am, here I am.
Except it's transmitting more than just your location.

Speaker 2 It's transmitting what you're looking for, who you are, and it's attracting other dropped pins to you. It's saying, I like this.
I think this way. I believe these things.
I am afraid of these things.

Speaker 2 Whatever it is you're thinking, it's constantly putting that out and saying, Here I am. Is there anything else like that? Anything else it can reinforce that? Anything else it wants to live like this?

Speaker 2 Because that's me. Here I am.
Here I am. Here I am.
That's why you keep finding yourself in exactly the same situations. Nothing will change if nothing changes.

Speaker 2 And the only thing that you can change is you.

Speaker 2 Seek the things

Speaker 2 that have virtue.

Speaker 2 Seek the things that have beauty in music, in

Speaker 2 art, in life, in architecture, in clothing, whatever it is. Look for real lasting beauty and value.
Find the things that are true, truly true, universally true. Find the things that uplift.

Speaker 2 Seek those things,

Speaker 2 and you will change your life and your world.

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Speaker 2 Noah welcome to the program thank you so much for having me

Speaker 2 You bet. I have to tell you, you're a movie frustrating because

Speaker 2 it ends and i'm like wait there should be five more episodes this is should not just be a 90 minute movie there's so much more uh really compelling the way you told the story so congratulations on that first question are there going to be sequels

Speaker 4 well first of all thank you very much i i really appreciate it means a lot coming from you um there is no plan for a sequel um

Speaker 4 you know we we wanted the movie to be a provocation in the best best sense of the word, a provocation to a larger conversation about this nuclear issue, which I'm so glad to be having with you right now.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Was your primary source the Annie Jacobson book, or was that just one of many? I mean,

Speaker 2 did you go to government sources? How did you get all this information?

Speaker 4 We spoke to a wide variety of people who had worked in places like the White House, the CIA, Strategic Command.

Speaker 4 I had worked as a journalist previously, and so knew folks who had held these kinds of jobs. Catherine Bigelow, who's the director of the movie, had made Hurt Locker, Zero Dark 30.

Speaker 4 So she has extraordinary relationships in the national security world. And obviously there's an incredible body of work that has been done over the past several decades.

Speaker 4 you know, think tank folks, authors, journalists, et cetera.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it's surprising how much a lot of this information is in the public domain in terms of what procedures the government would follow in case of an attack like this.

Speaker 4 And then a lot of it, you know, you can build by talking to sources, you know, much like you would do if you were trying to report out a story or get to the bottom of something.

Speaker 2 You know, it's amazing to me that most presidents don't ever ask for training on this.

Speaker 2 They don't do dry runs. This is

Speaker 2 you're the one person that could change the whole world in 15 minutes. And you're coming into it.
Most of them are just coming into it absolutely dead cold. If something would happen,

Speaker 2 they don't know how it works. And this is not, I don't know how you would make the decision in that amount of time.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's, I mean, two of the most terrifying things that we, that we zeroed in on early was this question of sole authority and decision time, right?

Speaker 4 So the idea that in the United States we live in a nuclear monarchy, the president of the United States has the sole authority to determine whether these weapons are used.

Speaker 4 It's not like he has to build any kind of consensus with the joint chiefs of staff or take a vote of the cabinet. He has to decide.

Speaker 4 And he has to decide under extraordinary time pressure. So

Speaker 4 if a missile is launched from the Pacific theater, that part of the world, it's under 30 minutes to impact on the continental United States.

Speaker 4 If a missile is launched off our coast by a Russian sub, for instance, it would take 10 to 12 minutes.

Speaker 4 So you do have a scenario in which one person has arguably the fate of all mankind in their hands, and they've got a clock ticking.

Speaker 4 And, you know, depending on where they are and what the target is, they're probably running for their life or being evacuated, worrying about their own family.

Speaker 4 And it's all put to them. What do you want to do?

Speaker 4 And if you've, that's not scary enough, the cherry on top is we spoke to people who had worked directly with presidents directly with secretaries of defense and we said how often uh is the president rehearsing this practicing for it preparing and they said never basically never never

Speaker 4 they get one briefing when they take office where they're introduced to the military aide who we're all familiar with the guy who follows them around with the the suitcase the nuclear football if you will their ex the process is explained how that would work um and then after that

Speaker 4 uh they never think about it again and you know ronald Reagan, we were told, was the last president who participated in any kind of live nuclear decision-making exercise.

Speaker 4 And so the guy who has the most responsibility, all the authority, is also arguably the least practiced and prepared of anyone in this whole process.

Speaker 2 It's really, it's terrifying. You know,

Speaker 2 I've talked to President Trump about nuclear capability, and I will tell you, you can say whatever you want about Donald Trump, but the one thing I know he's afraid of is nuclear war.

Speaker 2 That has kept him awake night after night.

Speaker 2 He knows,

Speaker 2 like Reagan did and Gorbachev did, you start that, you push that button, it's over. It's all over.

Speaker 2 I mean, you hinted at it, you know, when you were like, I got, you know,

Speaker 2 if we fly these missiles over this country, what are they going to, are they going to perceive this as a threat?

Speaker 2 You know, know, missiles, you know, Russia, I think in the movie, you've got Russia saying, how do we know you're not going to bomb it? We should just trust you. I mean,

Speaker 2 it's over.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And all of which begs the question, I think,

Speaker 4 for President Trump and for all of our leaders, what do we do about it? You know, how do we solve this problem?

Speaker 4 We've lived with this threat in the background of all our lives since the dawn of the nuclear age. I am, despite my last name, not related to Oppenheimer, but you know, we've lived with this.

Speaker 4 We've lived with this dynamite in the walls

Speaker 4 for so many decades now. And really, since the end of the Cold War, we haven't really talked or thought about it very much.
It is obviously on President Trump's mind. He does talk about it.

Speaker 4 He's talked about trying to build the Golden Dome and a better missile defense system. And I think that

Speaker 4 this... this question of how do we make the world safer.
And it may be part of that is building a better missile defense system.

Speaker 4 It may be that part of it is re-engaging with an arms control and arms reduction process, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, New Start, our last remaining treaty with the Russians that governs the development and proliferation of these weapons is set to expire at the end of the year.

Speaker 4 Maybe we should engage in a process with Russia, with China, to try to dramatically reduce the nuclear stockpile. There are a lot of levers that the president can pull to try to make us all safer.

Speaker 2 So, you know, part of the controversy with

Speaker 2 your movie, which is House of Dynamite, and it's on Netflix,

Speaker 2 part of the controversy, I guess, with the Pentagon is that

Speaker 2 the ground-based missile

Speaker 2 interceptors and the interceptors, you say it's 60% success.

Speaker 2 I think Annie Jacobson says it's like close to zero, and

Speaker 2 the Pentagon says it's 100%

Speaker 2 every time.

Speaker 2 What do you think it really is? Is it 60?

Speaker 4 So there's a few factors involved here.

Speaker 4 The record of the testing record for this system, which is the ground-based mid-course interceptors,

Speaker 4 is public and it is 61%. They have done a series of tests over the last 25 years.
And if you add up the, you know, the number of successes over the number of failures, it comes to 61%.

Speaker 4 The Pentagon in their memo is trying to say that the last several tests have been successful. The previous ones were not.

Speaker 4 So they say if you only count the most recent ones, it's 100%, which is, of course, impossible.

Speaker 2 That's like saying,

Speaker 4 I made my last two free throws, and so I'm 100% free throw shooter, even though I missed the previous one.

Speaker 2 top four.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So now that being said, they're not wrong in that the system is getting better.
The software is getting better.

Speaker 4 All of it is improving, but it is nowhere close to being able to say it's 100% effective. And part of that also comes down to the conditions under which these tests are undertaken, right?

Speaker 4 If I tell you, you know, Glenn, I'm going to throw a baseball at your head, it's a lot easier for you to brace yourself and be ready and catch that baseball.

Speaker 4 It's, you know, if an attack were to happen in the real world, it's far less likely,

Speaker 4 it's far more complicated to defend against. So

Speaker 4 this though is not a debate between us as filmmakers and the Pentagon. It's really a debate between the Pentagon and a much wider community of experts about the efficacy of this system.

Speaker 4 And like I said,

Speaker 4 it's a good conversation to have. Do we want to improve the system? Do we want to try to pour more money into building something like Golden Dose?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, we do. Yes, we do.

Speaker 2 The one thing that you didn't hit on that was in Annie's book that I thought was fascinating was that the president, when the president has to finally make the decision, he still doesn't know if it's nuclear tipped.

Speaker 2 There could be a conventional weapon

Speaker 2 on a ballistic missile that is being sent by North Korea, let's say. I mean, it would be an incredible waste, but, you know, if we launch before the missile hits, we don't even know if that's nuclear.

Speaker 2 And we would have then started a nuclear war because we're launching nuclear weapons and they didn't.

Speaker 4 I think that one of the things that we're trying to capture in the story that we tell, which is, of course, a fictional story,

Speaker 4 is the difficulty of making decisions in the fog of war. And that particularly when you have such a tight decision window, when that clock is winding down so rapidly,

Speaker 4 you're going to find yourself being forced to make calls with imperfect and incomplete information.

Speaker 4 And the other thing that is scary is that the system that we built that governs the use of nuclear weapons was designed during the Cold War for a specific purpose.

Speaker 4 It was to make sure that the Soviets believed they could never get away with a first strike, that if they launched missiles at us, the president would be able to fire back so quickly that our decision-making, our command and control apparatus would be able to retaliate.

Speaker 4 And so maintaining that deterrent threat, we needed to make sure that the president could respond and retaliate as quickly and as easily as possible. So that's the world we still live in now.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, again, if one domino falls, there aren't breaks, a lot of breaks built into this. The idea is to make it easy for the president to fire back.

Speaker 4 And And so, yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, mistakes can be made.
It's, I think it's miraculous, frankly, that, you know, we're all still here. Mistake hasn't been made.
It is.

Speaker 2 It really is.

Speaker 5 You're streaming the best of Glenn Beck. To hear more of this interview and others, download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts.

Speaker 2 Hello, Stu. Welcome.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Glenn. Appreciate that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I meant it with everything in it.
I could tell.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know. Listen,

Speaker 2 so 10% of the flights in 40 major cities is where we're starting. We could go as high as 40%

Speaker 2 of our flights. In fact,

Speaker 2 we have

Speaker 2 our Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, actually coming out and saying, you know what?

Speaker 2 The problem is we're not going to have skies that, you know, are unsafe. Sorry.
Can't do it. We'll just shut down the airspace before we have unsafe skies, which I appreciate.

Speaker 2 However, you know, there comes a time when you're like, okay, maybe we should stop this.

Speaker 2 Maybe, Democrats, you should open the government back up.

Speaker 2 At what points do people start to lay the blame, you know, at the feet of the Democrats? Do they ever?

Speaker 2 I mean, they should, of course, do that. They should.

Speaker 3 That does not seem to be happening, with a big thanks to the media, right? I mean, we see this in all different topics.

Speaker 3 What was the stat?

Speaker 3 It was,

Speaker 3 is it 90 something percent? I don't have it in front of me.

Speaker 3 That are favoring, when it comes to talking about the shutdown, for example,

Speaker 3 90%

Speaker 3 coverage has been favoring Democrats, basically saying that Republicans are the ones responsible for it. And when you look at that.

Speaker 2 87%. Thank you, 87%.
87%.

Speaker 3 When you look at that and and you say, well, this is a strategy potentially that goes right through

Speaker 3 what changed the elections in Virginia. And I would point specifically to the Jay Jones election.

Speaker 3 You know, when you have a good chunk of Northern Virginia that is home and not at work because of government shutdowns,

Speaker 3 you could keep this into effect through the election, get that election win, and then Democrats are kind of free now as far as consequences probably to their base.

Speaker 3 They got past this election, they got their wins, and now they could theoretically bail on this. The question is, will Republicans kind of fold and give them this win?

Speaker 3 All this being said, though, if the Republicans are going to be the ones getting blamed for this,

Speaker 3 why bail on the shutdown? I mean, what's the point? All these workers are going to wind up getting their money anyway eventually, so why not hold out and see what happens?

Speaker 3 They're getting no blame from this because the government's shielding them or the media is shielding them from any consequences.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you know, only both on ABC and CBS, only 12% of the reports on either one of those networks mentioned any details on it.

Speaker 2 So they're saying Republicans are shutting the government down and not giving any details. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's remarkable.

Speaker 3 And think of how clear this is, the path here. This is

Speaker 3 a budget, if you will, because, you know, budgets aren't really budgets anymore, but this is a spending plan that was voted for

Speaker 3 by Democrats. Democrats during the Biden administration voted for this spending plan, okay? Republicans were like, all right, we'll just keep it going.

Speaker 3 Then Democrats came in and stopped it and caused a shutdown. Why? Because Democrats are saying that they want

Speaker 3 these

Speaker 3 subsidies from Obamacare to continue, despite the fact that Democrats voted for them to end.

Speaker 2 Right. This is

Speaker 2 these all these subsidies were just for COVID. And we said at the time, you can't give them, and they're not going to take it.

Speaker 2 They're not going to let you take them back. They're not going to stop it.
And that's exactly what they're doing. So they voted for this budget.

Speaker 2 What the Republicans are saying, just leave it alone.

Speaker 2 Just continue the spending as is.

Speaker 2 But those subsidies have expired because that's what you voted for. So those subsidies are gone now.
And the Democrats are saying it's not enough. It's not enough.
Wait, this is your Biden budget.

Speaker 2 This is your Biden budget and it's not good enough. And they're willing to throw our airports and our air transportation system.

Speaker 2 Just throw it away. Just throw it away.
Wreck your day.

Speaker 2 If you're planning on travel, I've got lots of travel coming up in the next couple of weeks. And I have to tell everybody now, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make it.
Well, I mean, we'll see.

Speaker 2 We'll see. Just have to see what's happening with air traffic control.
And this is the beginning of that.

Speaker 2 And it's going to get worse and worse. Can you imagine what Thanksgiving is going to be like?

Speaker 2 These guys have got, they have got

Speaker 2 to stop. They have to stop.

Speaker 2 Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said yesterday his quote party's brand could

Speaker 2 undergo substantial damage if Democrats were to cave and reopen the federal government. Their brand, their brand.

Speaker 2 There will be some pretty substantial damage done to the Democratic brand that has been rehabilitated if on the heels of an election in which the people told us to keep fighting, we immediately stop fighting.

Speaker 2 So he's looking at what happened as a mandate.

Speaker 2 And now it will damage the brand.

Speaker 2 Wow, can somebody not talk? I mean, that's worse than talking, just making everything about politics. That's making it about your brand as a party.

Speaker 2 It's disgusting. I can't believe he had the guts to say it out loud, but I'm glad he did.
So we all know exactly, you know, where this is coming from.

Speaker 2 Let me look. Some of the other things that are going on.

Speaker 2 Shutdown. Meanwhile, do you see Elon Musk's payment?

Speaker 2 His shareholders voted, yeah, give him a trillion dollars. He hits these things, give him a trillion dollars.
I mean, that's absolutely incredible. I mean, I love it.
Incredible.

Speaker 3 The standards are so

Speaker 3 high for Tesla, though. They would have to do so many incredible things for him to get this.

Speaker 3 And of course, like, it all seems ridiculous now, but I will say that is the exact same thing everybody said about Elon Musk's last pay package. Right.

Speaker 3 And he wound up hitting all the goals and getting the money. So good for him.
If he can get it, great.

Speaker 2 So what are some of the things that he has to hit? I'm looking for the story here.

Speaker 2 What are the things he has to hit? I mean, I know that he has to,

Speaker 2 the company has to be worth like $8 trillion.

Speaker 3 I think $8.5 trillion would be

Speaker 3 what it needs to hit, which is obviously really, really high.

Speaker 3 The most expensive company in the world or the highest value company in the world is nvidia which is i think at five trillion um so and that's nvidia yeah that's nvidia

Speaker 3 it is yes i mean

Speaker 2 it's the one making all the chips for all the ai that's nvidia at five trillion Give it to him. If he makes it worth $8 trillion, why wouldn't you give it to him?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 First of all, it's a great incentive, right?

Speaker 3 You're basically saying, hey, if you can hit 85 home runs next year you can have a hundred million dollars and like it's like well no one's ever done that but okay

Speaker 3 uh so again it's a great incentive and you know this is a different uh it's a different way uh he's a different guy right like we talked a little bit about this before we came on the show you talked about was it rockefeller that

Speaker 2 so let me tell you the story rockefeller when john when john d rockefeller senior died he's the guy who you know built standard oil um and he built it with partners.

Speaker 2 By the end, his partners had all gone. I mean, he owned all of Standard Oil.
Okay.

Speaker 2 He was the wealthiest man to ever live at the time.

Speaker 2 And when he died, the accountants and the lawyers came to his son and said, Junior, I don't think you understand how much money you have just inherited. And they explained it.

Speaker 2 And I can't remember what book it was that I read that had all of this in. It's a fascinating story on how they approached him and said, look, this is bone-crushing.

Speaker 2 Your family will have the highest GDP over any country on earth in 25 years.

Speaker 2 And they're like, you've got to divest yourself of some of this and just get it under control.

Speaker 2 And that's why he went out and he gave... What is it? Part of the

Speaker 2 Virgin Islands. He bought them up and gave it away.

Speaker 2 He bought that huge forest on the the side of Jackson Hole and gave it to the government. It's why he bought up all of these things and then gave it away because he was trying to get his wealth

Speaker 2 somewhat manageable.

Speaker 2 And it's still out of control wealth, still out of control wealth. And I was asking Stu, you know, at a trillion dollars, and this is what makes

Speaker 2 Elon Musk unique. At a trillion dollars,

Speaker 2 at some point, money becomes meaningless. I mean, we can't even fathom a trillion dollars, you know, what you could do with a trillion dollars.

Speaker 2 Um, you know, how many, how many boats and airplanes and whatever else you need, how many more do you need? How much is enough?

Speaker 2 Except that's looking at it from

Speaker 2 the viewpoint that you only are an entrepreneur because you want to make money.

Speaker 2 And just like Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk is different. He wants to change the world.
He's not doing it for the money. He does it and the money follows.

Speaker 2 And then he takes that money and he plows it back into something even greater. That's totally different.

Speaker 3 Totally different than the old school of versions. And some of that old school was a little bit of a myth, right?

Speaker 3 Like a lot of those people did incredible things for charity and everything else, but they looked at it.

Speaker 2 Carnegie.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Carnegie built libraries in every small community all across the country because he said everyone should have a king's library because you can succeed in this country if you have access to knowledge and books.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 2 the guy was amazing.

Speaker 3 The robber baron arrow is exaggerated in its evils.

Speaker 3 But still, you know, Musk, I think, is different in that he's constantly trying. I mean, he's trying to solve paralysis, right?

Speaker 3 He's trying to, he's doing all sorts of things that, you know, he's trying to solve

Speaker 3 the traffic problems in the cities. He's trying to get people, he's trying to stop people from dying in car accidents.
He's trying to literally send humanity to Mars, right? These are the things.

Speaker 3 If he gets the trillion dollars, that's where a lot of this money goes. I mean, if you could look back at his history, very early on, when he first became wealthy, he bought a McLaren F1.

Speaker 3 It's, you know, one of the greatest cars ever built. And he almost killed him and Peter Thiel when they were driving it around and they got in an accident in it.

Speaker 3 And, you know, you look at his pattern since then, it's not about fancy, incredible cars, not about giant mansions. I mean, he's been living in relatively normal housing.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 3 he flies around in private jets all the time. He's got a good life, there's no question.
But like, it's just that he does not live the life of a person who is the richest person in the world.

Speaker 3 That's not what he does. He's, I mean, the reports of him recently, it's just been him constantly at work all the time at XAI.

Speaker 3 Like, again, he's back in another one of these stretches where he is not coming home. He's, you know,

Speaker 3 reports are he's staying at work all hours of the day and night to try to get, to try to beat out, you know, his competition when it comes to AI. So that is who the guy is.

Speaker 3 And I think, like, that's the type of person you want to incentivize to hit these massive goals.

Speaker 3 The goals, by the way, are split into 12 tranches.

Speaker 3 There's 12 varieties of this. The details are hilarious, though.
Let me give you some of the.

Speaker 2 Okay, hang on just a second. Let me take a quick break and then we'll come back on this.
And don't let me forget. It may not be able to do it today, but I mean, I wrote a, what is it, a 12-episode

Speaker 2 mini-series on Tesla versus Edison, and I did so much research on Tesla. It boggles the mind when you see how much Elon Musk is like Nikola Tesla.
I mean, it's just, it's mind-boggling.

Speaker 2 He is almost exactly the same guy, working, working, working, working, working, and then just gets sick, has to go to the hospital because he's worked himself almost to death, and then he gets out and he works, works, works, and he just never stops.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's so many parallels between these guys.

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