Glenn Beck's new book, "Addicted to Outrage," is sure to be a New York Times bestseller. It's a labor of love and covers an incredible amount of ground, covering everything from postmodernism to the dark ages, and everything in between. In this special with Glenn Beck, we talk about why he wrote the book, why he decided to write it, and what it means to be addicted to anger. Glenn Beck is a conservative radio host and host of the conservative radio show "The Glenn Beck Show" on SiriusXM Radio. He's also a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, and is one of the most well-known conservative radio hosts in the country. Glenn is also the author of the best-selling book, Addicted To Outrage, and is a frequent guest on Fox News Radio's "The FiveThirtyEight" and other conservative media outlets. His new book is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. If you haven't checked out his book yet, you should do so before the end of the week! You won't want to miss this Sunday special with Ben Shapiro on The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your bookshelf or hardcover copy of his new book. Subscribe to the show on amazon.co/TheBenShapiroShow and become a supporter of the show by clicking the link below. You'll get 20% off your first month with discount code: BENSHAPORTERRORism at checkout. at checkout and get 10% off for the rest of the year, plus free shipping throughout the entire year, and a FREE 7-month shipping offer, plus an additional 3-day shipping offer when you buy a copy of the book is available through Audible starting at $99.99, plus a second year of Audible Prime membership gets you get $99, and they'll get an ad-free version of the entire course starting next month. Learn more about the book on Audible.com/Ben Shapiro's newest book: Addicted to Anger: The Dark Ages: How to Deal with the Dark Ages? Click here to get $5, $10, $25, $20, $50, and $50 off shipping starts after the first month, $75, $99 gets you an ad discount, and shipping starts in 7 days, and I'll get a free copy of my book on the book and shipping begins in 6 months.
00:00:00.000The word that you need to look for is chaos.
00:00:04.000If what you're doing is causing chaos, you are going to be part of the problem.
00:00:17.000So here we are on the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special with Glenn Beck, and we're going to get into his new book, Addicted to Outrage, in just one second.
00:00:23.000But first, let's talk about your data security.
00:00:26.000Whether you're in a cafe or a hotel, we often rely on public Wi-Fi to use the internet on the go.
00:00:30.000But something as simple as paying your bills online from a Starbucks could leave your data exposed.
00:00:34.000A hacker can easily intercept your information, steal passwords, credit cards, personal details.
00:01:34.000Well, he has a brand new book out, does Glenn Beck, Addicted to Outrage, sure to be a New York Times bestseller like all of his other books are.
00:01:39.000This one is really, you can tell, a labor of love.
00:01:41.000First of all, it's longer than a lot of your other books.
00:02:13.000I got to a point to when, you know, there's 120 different genders.
00:02:17.000I don't know, because I don't know where this is even coming from.
00:02:23.000You know, four years ago, I'm thinking, okay, I just don't want to do this anymore because I don't have an answer.
00:02:28.000Started doing my homework, started doing some research, started thinking differently, and really started to bone up on postmodernism and what's really happening.
00:03:15.000So when you start to understand that, you understand that there is no truth, there is no meaning, etc., etc., you start to understand maybe suicide rates, you start to understand why people are arguing back and forth, why people feel betrayed, why people feel like you're a hypocrite.
00:03:31.000Wait, you were just saying this yesterday.
00:03:38.000And so I've spent the last couple of years, and a solid year writing that, in fact it's the second time I wrote that book, just trying to say, okay, so now that we know that, we know their goal is chaos,
00:03:54.000And we're going at it at 180 degrees the wrong direction.
00:03:57.000Do you think that the actual goal of the postmodernists is cast or do you think it's just a natural byproduct of their ideology?
00:04:03.000Meaning that, to kind of steel man the case for postmodernism, basically what they would say is that we're all individuals who operate with certain linguistic
00:04:26.000So I think that's a really charitable viewpoint of it.
00:04:29.000I think if you go back to the roots of what's being taught now, you go back to the 1960s and the Paris riots, where we're not making, we cannot destroy culture.
00:04:48.000Then it fell apart because they didn't have all of the levers to take Western culture down, okay?
00:04:56.000And again, it's almost like what they learned at the Frankfurt School.
00:05:00.000People in the West, they would describe us as, they're being bought off, they're being bribed.
00:05:06.000They're not going to rise up because they're being hypnotized, brainwashed with their cars and their products and everything else.
00:05:11.000They're not going to be the workers of the world unite and tear it down.
00:05:15.000So when you look at it from that point of view, from the groups that got together in the 50s and then again in the 60s after the Paris riots, you then see that come and jump over here with the express plan of being a virus and to take down the Western way of life.
00:05:34.000So is that, I mean, I guess the opposition would say maybe that's conspiratorial thinking.
00:05:38.000Is it motivated, or is it just the way that things happen?
00:05:42.000Like, are these people stating their case?
00:05:44.000No, I think there's, see, this is the problem, you know, and there's no nuance in today's world anymore.
00:05:50.000And that leaves us in a world of black and white, and that's not
00:05:56.000There are those that look at postmodernism as some of the founders did of this particular strain of the movement that want to tear it apart because they are Marxist revolutionaries, okay?
00:06:12.000There are others that look at this, you know, for literature and to be able to understand it, etc, etc.
00:06:17.000They don't necessarily have the same goals.
00:06:20.000In fact, I know professors who actually were Marxist until recently, and one of them is a guy who was postmodern literature and felt that there was meaning in there until recently.
00:06:34.000Now he sees, wait a minute, the extreme is taking the wheel here.
00:06:41.000It's not those of us who are like, no, there's some real meaning here, but it's the extreme.
00:06:45.000And the extremes are the ones that have control.
00:06:50.000So there's a lot in your title here, Addicted to Outrage.
00:06:53.000I want to start with the first word and then we'll skip the conjunction and we'll get to the last word.
00:06:57.000So the first word, addicted, you talk in the book about the idea that we have actually created an addiction to the feeling that we get, the sort of emotional high that we get from ripping other people down and feeling outraged
00:08:25.000The entire country used to say, these people in the media, all they're doing, they're only doing these things because they want the clicks.
00:08:44.000You're saying this because you want your tweet or your Facebook post to take off as well.
00:08:49.000You're doing it for the clicks as well.
00:08:51.000And because we keep getting this constant positive reinforcement of the negative that we put out, call them a name, you'll get more dopamine.
00:09:02.000We become addicted to that rush and it feels good.
00:09:07.000Without the addiction, it still kind of feels good for conservatives because no one has ever hit back for us.
00:09:17.000And when you have been beaten and beaten and beaten for so long, and you think that the Western world is under attack and everything that you hold dear, and it's going to go away,
00:09:28.000You look for somebody, if you've tried to play all of the fairways, you look for somebody who's going to come in and just go, I'm going to take you by the scruff of the neck and I'm going to take you out back and beat the snot out of you.
00:09:39.000That's a problem because that adds to the chaos of our society.
00:09:43.000We abandon our principles and principles are all we have.
00:09:48.000If you look at Kavanaugh, what's happening with Kavanaugh?
00:09:54.000Let's not talk about whether she's telling the truth or he's telling the truth.
00:09:59.000Let's step back a bit and look at that and say, look, people on the right are calling her names.
00:10:06.000People on the left are calling him names.
00:10:50.000We've had a criminal court system that hasn't been just for a long time.
00:10:55.000Back and forth, you know, it's got its problems.
00:10:57.000Still, I think it's one of the best in the world, but it has its problems.
00:11:01.000No one, no one, if you take politics out, if you take the Supreme Court justice or the Democratic charges, take that all out, and I come to you and say, Ben, how do you feel about living in a country where someone could make an accusation
00:11:19.000Not know the facts, have zero evidence.
00:11:26.000The people that she did tell, the one, tells a slightly different story.
00:11:33.000And at the critical point in your career, at the 11th hour, someone can make a charge and call you a rapist.
00:11:44.000And we have to decide now whether you're a rapist, whether you can have a job, whether you're going to be in society or not, just based on do we like her or you better?
00:11:58.000Which one's going to perform better on TV?
00:12:17.000Last night in LA, I had a conversation with a guy who you would definitely know, everybody in the audience would know, who is a very left guy.
00:12:28.000He sat in our apartment here while we were eating dinner.
00:12:33.000I had dinner with a couple of friends and he came in.
00:12:37.000He said, I can't keep up with my own side.
00:12:40.000I'm constantly on the outs now because I can't keep up with them.
00:12:45.000And you have to 100% buy into all of it.
00:12:51.000When you have people who are prominent on the left saying, I think I need to say something,
00:13:00.000That tells you that the absolute crazies are in control, and the average person doesn't want any part of it.
00:13:07.000So, as I was asking before, so your own addiction and your background in the past, some people may not have heard that story, and I think it does lend some color to your talking about the dopamine hits and the addiction that we're all experiencing.
00:13:18.000So, you know, my mom died when I was really young, and it just kind of took my life and turned it around.
00:13:28.000I had been working in radio when I was 13.
00:13:33.000And so I had this really bad toxic mixture of kind of being like you, but you've conquered this apparently.
00:13:41.000I became a monster because everybody was like, oh my gosh, look how great he's going to be.
00:15:22.000But I couldn't look at myself in the mirror anymore.
00:15:24.000Every time I would go into the bathroom, any place, if there was a mirror, I either didn't use the sink or I opened the mirror so I couldn't see myself.
00:15:58.000And so I was having blackouts, which will freak you out.
00:16:02.000And my kids came down for breakfast one morning and they were sitting there and they said, Dad, tell us the story of Inky, Blinky and Stinky again.
00:16:11.000And that was a story of three little mice that go to the Island of Cheese that I just made up every night.
00:16:19.000And I realized, not only could I not remember the story, I don't remember even putting them to bed.
00:16:24.000I don't remember being with them at all.
00:16:26.000And I sat there in such shame, and I thought, what are you doing?
00:16:32.000And I lied to my kids, and I said, I remember the story, but do you remember the story?
00:16:39.000And as I fought back the tears over breakfast as they were telling me the story, all I'm thinking is, you gotta stop.
00:18:44.000The only difference here is I can't think of a good reason to drink.
00:18:48.000We're excusing it because we're standing up for our country and no one wants to surrender in the most important fight maybe in the history of all mankind.
00:18:59.000So how do we fight and fight the addiction at the same time?
00:19:03.000Okay, we're going to talk a little bit about that, and I want to get to the other half of the title about outrage.
00:19:06.000But first, let's talk about getting life insurance.
00:19:09.000So September is National Life Insurance Awareness Month.
00:19:11.000If you listen to this show, then you've heard me talk about how important life insurance is.
00:20:25.000Legitimately, over the weekend, I thought, I'm going to remove Twitter from my phone.
00:20:29.000I'm just going to take it off my phone, because I go on my computer far less frequently than I have my phone on me, and it's a weekend, and I'm walking around with my kids, and I'm still checking the news, checking the news, just trying to check Twitter, and my wife said, why don't you just delete it off your phone?
00:20:39.000I did, and then five hours later, I put it back on the phone, because obviously, you've got to know what's going on in the news.
00:20:47.000That's my excuse that I run a news website, but I totally agree.
00:20:50.000We are all addicted to social media, addicted to being in the moment.
00:20:54.000And what that means, I used to think that it was the most informed people in America who were going to save the country.
00:20:59.000And I've started to think maybe it's the least informed people in America who are going to save the country because those of us who are the most informed are busy smacking each other across the head on a routine basis.
00:21:07.000But that brings us to the second half of the title, Outrage.
00:21:11.000When we talk about how outraged we are at each other, some outrage obviously is legit, some outrage is not.
00:21:16.000How do you distinguish which outrage is legitimate and which outrage is just us being outraged?
00:23:46.000The answer is you must stop the chaos at the border, which means you have to go to the countries and say, we as the United States of America want to make it really clear.
00:23:59.000Every single person that comes across our border
00:25:21.000Safer now than it was in the 90s or the 80s in schools.
00:25:26.000So, but if you really cared, we would do something about it.
00:25:30.000If the parents in Parkland, and I just asked one of the parents this just recently and they didn't give me an answer.
00:25:37.000I mean, no disrespect, but if I was a parent in the Parkland school district,
00:25:43.000I would have, and I didn't believe in guns, I would have been doing the thing about guns, but I also would have demanded the resignation of the sheriff.
00:25:52.000I would have demanded a change at the school board.
00:25:55.000I would have demanded changes at the school.
00:27:02.000And it's going to be the death of us, Ben.
00:27:05.000Do you think that it's a question of the sincerity, or do you think that it's a question of people who are legitimately outraged, but for different purposes?
00:27:12.000Meaning that, you know, it's easy for me to sit here and say, you know, if a parent in Parkland really cared, they'd do something about the Sheriff Scott Israel.
00:27:21.000But what if there's a parent in Parkland, and they think, yeah, you know, there's the Scott Israel issue, and sure, he's a schmuck,
00:27:26.000I'm much more concerned that kids all over the country are really being scared.
00:27:30.000How do we decide whether the person's outrage is legitimate or whether the person is being manipulative?
00:27:35.000And is it possible that in misreading that motivation we could be contributing to part of the problem as well?
00:27:41.000So this is why our system of government is wholly inadequate for immoral and irreligious people.
00:27:50.000People are trying to tear down capitalism.
00:27:54.000First of all, capitalism, as I outline extensively in the book, has changed the world.
00:27:59.000I mean, this is the greatest time, even with all of our problems, Donald Trump and Barack Obama's America, the best time and the best place to be alive in all of human history.
00:29:39.000Then there are the people that are absolutely true, that were the, I gotta give him a trophy, I have to give him a ribbon, everybody wins, oh, everybody's so special, that are just coming out of college now.
00:29:51.000They actually believe that they're outraged.
00:30:02.000Because what, you know, as Jonathan Haidt says in his new book, Coddling of American Mind, you have, your parents and society has prepared the road for you.
00:30:39.000So I want to talk to you in one second about the application of your principle, how people on the left have responded to you trying to outstretch your hand and how well that's going.
00:30:47.000But first, I want to tell you about Robinhood.
00:30:50.000It's an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptos
00:31:19.000You can place a trade in just four taps on your smartphone.
00:31:22.000Robinhood's web platform also lets you view stock collections, like the 100 most popular in sectors like entertainment, and they let you view analyst ratings of buy, hold, sell for every single stock.
00:31:31.000Learn how to invest as you build your portfolio as well.
00:32:01.000Okay, Glenn, so you've... I'm sure the number one question you're gonna get asked about this book is, here you're saying that we are addicted to outrage, but you're Glenn Beck.
00:32:10.000I'm sure this is the question that you're going to get most frequently, particularly from folks on the left.
00:32:14.000Aren't you that guy who was doing chalkboards on Fox?
00:32:16.000And you talk in the book a little bit about, you know, what you think of those days and where you think you're right and where you think you're wrong.
00:32:21.000So let me ask you, what do you think was right and what do you think was wrong there?
00:33:19.000I know how I can take a live frog, you know, cut to tape, replace it with a plastic frog, throw it in boiling water, and it'll set the world on fire.
00:33:35.000Because they see that, they'll also hear the truth.
00:33:39.000My problem was, I honestly believed, that's how naive I was, I honestly believed that if I could get members of the press to actually hear on a day-after-day basis facts, real facts, honest questioning, saying,
00:36:22.000You're getting beaten as badly as I was beaten.
00:36:26.000Called all kinds of names, your children, my children were accosted in the park, several parks, many different states, from Alaska to Hawaii to New York.
00:36:37.000The park experience, you say park to any of my kids and they're like, no, let's not go to the park.
00:36:42.000So you can't go into that position and then not say, which guy am I?
00:36:50.000I know I'm not Nelson Mandela and the Pope, so dismiss that.
00:38:42.000Or what, I should say, what people like Don Lemon, I think, and I don't know, I've not talked to Don about this, but to give him the benefit of the doubt, let's reverse the roles.
00:39:13.000What Don fails to see, and really kind of what I failed to see during the last election, was people feel, you know, when you're in, where is it, Norway, I think, or Sweden, you can't fly the Swedish flag.
00:39:30.000If you fly the Swedish flag, I think it's Sweden, you will be called a racist because you have to fly the EU flag.
00:41:22.000So, in the last few years, you've been saying a lot of things that are honest, because you're a really honest guy, or an emotionally open guy, and an honest guy, and that's ticked off a lot of people on your own side.
00:41:33.000What's the response of people on the left been to the quote-unquote New Glenn Beck, the kind of attempts to reach across the aisle and have discussions?
00:41:40.000Because I can imagine that while you are opening, you're putting out an open hand, I can't imagine that in every case, certainly not publicly, there are people who are actually taking it.
00:41:51.000The worst, the most shameful on the left I think is GLAAD.
00:41:57.000I went to go see the president of GLAAD and her crew.
00:42:03.000She came into my office in New York City and I called for the meeting and I said, just leave your arms at home and can we just come and talk?
00:42:17.000And I started the meeting and I said, look, everyone, everyone on my side will hate me for this, will hate me for this.
00:42:25.000I don't agree with anything that you guys do, okay?
00:42:59.000Ben, in our case, it's not that wide, but I need Penn Jillette to be able to stand next to the Pope and have both of them say, look, there's a lot of huge things we disagree with, but there's a couple of principles that we do.
00:43:16.000And for GLAAD and Glenn Beck to stand next to each other and say, killing homosexuals is wrong.
00:43:26.000We've just taken a big chip off the table of both sides, okay?
00:43:31.000We've lowered the temperature and we can talk.
00:43:35.000Spend an hour showing them the picture, showing them the news of all around the world where we could agree all they wanted to talk about were wedding cakes.
00:43:44.000And I got so frustrated, I just said, do you care about wedding cakes or saving the lives of people?
00:46:16.000And that is stopping us from doing what people who respect each other.
00:46:22.000Ben, I know if you walk down the hall and you start cussing people out, that's so unlike you, that somebody will say, Ben, is something going on?
00:46:36.000So America starts acting irrationally, start going in a direction they've always said they would never go, and I didn't say, what's happening?
00:47:18.000So, you talk a lot about, in the book, outrage and the culture of outrage, but then you talk about, you know, the serious problems that outrage is preventing us from discussing.
00:47:24.000And I'm going to ask you about those important questions, but first, let's talk about genes.
00:47:37.000I know, I'm sitting in them right now.
00:47:38.000Introducing MottAndBow.com, where you can get the most comfortable premium jeans you will ever wear for half of what you'd pay elsewhere for AG or seven jeans.
00:47:45.000These are luxury jeans for $100, and you can only get them at MottAndBow.com.
00:47:49.000They're the most comfortable because they use the best in comfort technology, like Dynamic Stretch, and they are premium because they only source their denim from two of the most well-respected denim mills in the world.
00:47:57.000To make sure your jeans fit you perfectly, they have an at-home try-on program.
00:48:00.000You request a second pair with your order, you try on both, you keep one, you send the other back, in the same box with the prepaid label.
00:48:05.000So check out their top styles and cuts on montandbeau.com and with their at-home try-on program sending you two pair at a time so you can find the perfect fit for your body.
00:48:13.000Business Insider says this about Mott & Bow.
00:48:15.000Guys, these are the most comfortable jeans you will ever wear.
00:49:04.000When you start sweating like Richard Nixon in 1960, I can see it was all my questioning.
00:49:09.000You know, you talk here about, you know, the fact that we're engaged with outrage, and I've said on my program a thousand times that, as you say, we're living in the best time in human history.
00:49:16.000If you could be born any time, you'd want to be born... Right now.
00:49:25.000Not just the outrage culture, what are the deep problems we're missing that we're going to have to figure out solutions for over the next 10-15 years?
00:49:31.000So I lay out about, I don't know, five or ten of them that I think are
00:49:36.000are we're absolutely going to have to deal with.
00:51:18.000Then the rest of the brilliant elites are programming based a little bit of what's online and the debate that's going on right now that we're not a part of.
00:51:31.000The computer in the car will know who's in the car in front of you.
00:51:37.000But as it says in this survey, it can know who they are, what they do, what they contribute to society, how many, if any, they employ, how many benefits they're getting from the government, how their health is.
00:51:55.000It can calculate all of that as it makes a decision.
00:53:38.000So how do we bring our guard down, bring their guard down, and actually talk about it without bringing politics into it, and see what is right?
00:56:35.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
00:56:49.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.