Does the phrase "Monkey it up" mean you're a racist? Is it more than just a dog whistle? Glenn and Pat discuss this and more on today's episode of The Glenn Beck Program. They also discuss the new controversy surrounding Ron DeSantis and whether or not he's a racist.
00:35:47.420And, you know, if the black community, it's, I, again, one of these groups eventually is going to learn this.
00:35:53.060You know, if you, I mean, and I think, you know, Kanye and Kardashian and Kim Kardashian are two of the probably, I guess, the leaders in this.
00:36:01.160Because they know that if they're, if they take.
00:36:06.060And backing Donald Trump, he'll give you what you want.
00:36:08.180And was there any doubt that when Kim Kardashian presented the woman who was in prison for 20 years for the first time drug offense, was there any doubt in anybody's mind that the way she presented that to the president then showed up and was respectful and never, never said anything bad about him?
00:36:26.040Was there any doubt in anybody's mind he was going to pardon her?
00:36:36.040They did it the way it was going to affect Trump positively.
00:36:40.940And I think Kanye's playing that same game now.
00:36:44.940That's interesting because that's a different explanation than I would have thought he gave.
00:36:49.760Yeah, because until I heard this, I was kind of under the impression that he just likes to be a contrarian from time to time.
00:36:56.960That he just likes to stir things up once in a while.
00:36:59.720And so he just took the opposite stance of most of his peers and just said, I like Trump because he's never really outlined that I've heard.
00:37:11.620Maybe, maybe you have missed, you know, I try to stay as current on Kanye affairs as I possibly can, but it's possible I may have missed an interview where he outlined exactly what policies he likes about Trump.
00:37:23.400But when I've seen him interviewed, he hasn't been able to articulate anything he particularly likes about him or why he doesn't there.
00:38:41.780You're not going to win with Michael Moore over to your case.
00:38:44.180But if you focus on actually trying to persuade people rather than, you know, just trying to have your views, you know, echoed back to you.
00:39:27.880So there was they they had some other problem with why she was in jail, how it was portrayed that it was portrayed that she was the first time offender and that she was a mother.
00:39:41.140And yeah, that necessarily I don't think was 100 percent true.
00:39:44.660I've definitely heard the case that the idea, you know, when you say a first time offender and she wasn't, you know, doing drugs or selling drugs, she was transporting them.
00:39:52.860And you think of that and you're like, all right, well, what did you want?
00:39:55.180She's bringing them across town, you know, but I guess it was a very large amount of drugs that, you know, affected a community very negatively for a long period of time.
00:40:03.320So, you know, it wasn't quite as simple as it was portrayed by, you know.
00:40:26.300So I don't know if they've just halted that program or I mean, maybe they need, you know, I mean, this is something maybe Trump.
00:40:32.960I think Trump likes the idea that, you know, a celebrity comes in there and says, hey, you know, here's a sensible thing and please, please do it.
00:40:39.360And then and then you've got to leave it.
00:40:50.800And, you know, while, again, there is a Rasmussen poll out there that has Trump's approval rating among African-Americans very high, I think, in the 30s.
00:40:58.680Most polls have shown an improvement, not quite as drastic as Rasmussen, but in the in the mid-teens, which is high for a Republican president, at least in recent memory, going back at least a couple of presidents.
00:41:11.300So there's probably a couple of factors.
00:41:12.720One, black unemployment is at record low levels.
00:41:17.320And the other factor is probably Kanye West and Kim Kardashian saying good things about him.
00:41:21.900I mean, really, the black unemployment level really should be a lot more important than what Kim Kardashian says.
00:41:28.840I think, you know, politics are so much emotion and so much feeling and so much perception that the Kanye West, Kim Kardashian thing might actually be more important than the low, the low unemployment rate, which is ridiculous.
00:41:40.940But I mean, because it really that should be it falls fair here.
00:41:46.560You know, the African-Americans having such a high unemployment rate for such a long time.
00:41:50.460The fact that he's the first president who's really overseen a large decrease in that to the lowest levels that we've seen in a long time should be enough to win over 30 or 40 percent.
00:42:05.120And the fact that that one has really been improved, you know, it really hasn't had the fanfare that you would expect if we weren't all in our tribes and all partisan all the time.
00:42:21.880This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.
00:42:59.600And this phenomenon is building upon itself.
00:43:02.580And I actually think it's worse than what we say.
00:43:05.020We complain about fake news and politics or something like that.
00:43:07.600You hear those complaints all the time.
00:43:08.760I think it's much worse when it comes to health stuff because it's not partisan.
00:43:11.980And there's not really anyone on the other side pushing back, at least when Democrats and Republicans, you know, go back and forth at each other.
00:43:19.180There's at least, you know, an argument there so you can at least look at, I don't know, two sides of the issue, no matter how nonsensical they are.
00:43:26.260With health stuff, it's just scary or nothing for the most part.
00:43:30.660One person who actually does push back on that is Aaron E. Carroll.
00:43:34.380He's a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine.
00:43:37.520He's got TheIncidentalEconomist.com, also has a great YouTube channel called Healthcare Triage, and he joins us now.
00:44:12.140So, I mean, that absolutely was the take-home message, and that's what the news said.
00:44:16.320So, and I think that if you read the study, I think that there are authors of the study that might actually vocalize that and say it.
00:44:22.620But that is not what the study actually showed.
00:44:25.780So, first of all, it's important to understand this was not a new trial.
00:44:28.700This is not like they did some randomized controlled trial or study where they gave some people alcohol and some people not and saw what happened.
00:44:35.300This is just what we call meta-analysis, which means that, once again, they sort of gather up all the research that's already out there and just put it in a big pile and analyze it again and again and again to see if they can get anything new out of it.
00:44:48.200And when you do that, you get statistical significance because you keep adding data, but it doesn't necessarily change the outcome or how bad things are.
00:44:58.220And so, what they found was that, you know, they can say like, okay, look, we're looking at 23 different harms that might come from alcohol, and we're looking at 28 million people in studies, and we could detect that even at one drink a day, there's a statistically significant risk.
00:45:15.420And, of course, then they say, well, then anything greater than zero is bad.
00:45:17.780But the first thing to understand is, one, this is observational data.
00:45:21.340They can't control for things, and that's important because people who drink tend to sometimes be different than people who don't drink.
00:45:32.300People who drink are often poorer than other people, especially when they drink a lot, and that, of course, has health implications.
00:45:37.620And people who drink might live in different areas or drive differently or all kinds of things can be related, and they can't control for any of that.
00:45:45.520But even if we accept all of it, the actual numbers are much less scary than the headlines would have you believe.
00:45:52.440So even they in the study say that for every 100,000 people who have one drink a day, 918 might experience one of these 23 health effects in a year.
00:46:03.940So right off the bat, 918 out of 100,000 is not that much.
00:46:07.740But then they have to acknowledge that of 100,000 people who don't drink, 914 of them are going to have a significant health problem.
00:46:16.220So that means that of the 100,000 people who might drink, 99,082 of them are unaffected.
00:46:23.520914 of them are going to have a health problem no matter what they do.
00:46:26.860Only 4 out of 100,000 people might have a health-related problem that's related to alcohol.
00:46:37.6204 out of 100,000 is unbelievably small compared to almost anything else you might do every day.
00:46:44.380And even at 2 drinks per day, that 914 only goes up to 977.
00:46:48.840Even at 5 drinks per day, it's still less than 1,300, which means still that 99% of people almost who drink 5 drinks a day,
00:46:57.400which I think all of us can agree is probably too much, still don't have a health-related effect.
00:47:03.060So getting people all panicked about this is sort of done by sleight of hand or by arguing that the relative risk or how much your risk might increase is much more important than the absolute risk,
00:47:16.740which is really what we should care about.
00:47:18.140Yeah, because I thought looking at the study and the way you explain it, which is great, 4 out of 100,000, that gives you a cost-benefit analysis in a way.
00:47:26.100Where you could say, I would have honestly guessed that drinking alcohol was worse for my health than that level.
00:47:33.320It was almost encouraging me to go to the bar, which I know is not what you intended.
00:47:38.620But it's interesting, and you brought a term to my attention that I think would be a great thing to become a lot more popular, which is the number needed to harm.
00:47:47.900Can you kind of explain what that means and how it applies here?
00:47:52.900So one of the things we always talk about is number needed to treat and number needed to harm, and they're both sides of that.
00:47:57.660But we can absolutely focus on the harm.
00:47:59.400So this is what's important is that people don't get, is that harms happen often whether or not you get the actual thing that we're worried about.
00:48:09.500So that's what I was trying to talk about when I say, look, 918 people who drink a drink a day have a harm, but 914 people who don't drink every day have a harm.
00:48:19.840So you can't just look at the people who have harm.
00:48:21.760What we have to care about is the people who would change based upon whether or not they get the alcohol.
00:48:27.620And so if only 4 out of 100,000 people get the harm because of the alcohol, in other words, not just that they got a harm, but we can absolutely say it's because of the alcohol, then that means that the number needed to harm is 25,000 people, which means that we have to give a drink a day to 25,000 people to get one of them to experience a harm because of the alcohol.
00:48:51.720And too often when we talk about health stuff, we only focus on the harm and how many people are harmed, but it's how much how many people are harmed because of the alcohol.
00:48:59.360One out of 25,000 is unbelievably small.
00:49:27.720I think that we're trying to scare people with food, but I think there's another side of that coin is you get people who will swear on the benefits of certain diets and food too when those benefits are almost just as small as the harms I'm talking about here.
00:49:40.980You know, people will swear by healthy, go gluten-free, or if you avoid, you know, like there's like no evidence for any of that stuff.
00:49:47.600And even if there is a benefit, it is, again, so small that it's inconsequential in most people's lives.
00:49:53.920And with the harm, I think what also people seem to forget is that, you know, one, there's sometimes a cost to these – there's an economic cost to these kinds of avoidance or these kinds of seeking out certain kinds of food.
00:50:06.720But there's also a quality of life lost.
00:50:08.720Some people like to have a drink every day, and it is perfectly rational to accept, even if it is true, a four in 100,000 chance if the quality of life that they are gaining from eating or having that drink is greater than whatever harm they might be having.
00:50:26.260But too often, I think when it comes to health studies, we think that we're all supposed to live forever and that there's some magic to this, that we should avoid all harms no matter what, even if we're sacrificing happiness or money or quality of life.
00:50:41.900We have to be able to judge whether or not these kinds of risk avoidances are worth it.
00:50:47.460Aaron, you brought up gluten a minute ago.
00:50:50.040That is one of the fads that is so prevalent now.
00:50:55.160So many people I know and have seen and talked to are on gluten-free diets, and a lot of them aren't even allergic to gluten.
00:51:03.920In fact, very few people are actually gluten intolerant, and yet everybody is on this bandwagon now.
00:51:25.720People who have a wheat allergy and therefore are avoiding gluten because they're allergic to wheat might benefit from avoiding gluten because of the wheat.
00:51:33.020That's less than 1% of the population.
00:51:34.940It's the other 23%, 24% of the population who don't have either of those two things but are avoiding gluten for whatever reason that are doing it again in a way that actually might be providing more harm to their lives than good.
00:51:49.120So, you know, a lot of them will claim that they're gluten intolerant or there's some vague clinical syndrome that's doing this.
00:51:54.720But there have been really good randomized controlled trials trying to find these people, trying to test whether, you know, secretly eliminating gluten from their diet makes them better.
00:52:03.840And those studies show that it doesn't, one, the people who think they're gluten intolerant don't meet the clinical criteria for it.
00:52:10.460And even when they do, being secretly put on gluten-free diets doesn't make a difference in their health, in which case, why are you doing this?
00:52:36.400It's, you know, what we've decided to focus on and say it's a problem.
00:52:39.580We've been eating gluten for tens of thousands of years, and the human race is doing just fine.
00:52:46.720It's not some magic thing that people have all of a sudden figured out.
00:52:51.340Now, I will say, if by going gluten-free people, you know, eat less processed food, stop eating so much bread, or somehow, you know, change their diets in such a way that they lose weight and they feel better, great.
00:53:02.800But don't think it's gluten and don't sort of proselytize and tell everyone else that they have to eat like you eat.
00:53:08.440There's nothing really to fear from gluten in that respect.
00:53:11.000You know, I just read an article a couple of weeks ago that the headline was,
00:53:16.540there is no safe amount of bacon you can eat, including one piece, not one a day, one piece of bacon.
00:53:53.440They were talking about the process by which you would begin to, I don't know, curb the Internet and the expression of people's freedom of speech on the Internet.
00:54:09.320It's from Barack Obama several years ago.
00:54:12.340I want to say it's 2011, but it does not say it in this article.
00:54:14.960I looked it up earlier, and we've been kind of sitting on this for a few days from when, you know, sort of the Alex Jones thing was really going crazy.
00:54:55.100Yeah, just let him speak and let him make an idiot of himself in front of everyone.
00:54:58.300I mean, that's one of the best things about our society is that we have free speech enough so that you can make a moron out of yourself in front of people.
00:56:20.980And there were always outliers who thought that it was all propaganda and we didn't really land on the moon and Elvis is still alive and so forth.
00:56:29.300But generally that was in the papers that you bought at the supermarket, right, as you were checking out.
00:56:36.740And generally people trusted a basic body of information.
00:56:44.540It wasn't always as democratic as it should have been.
00:56:47.440And Zoe is exactly right that, for example, on something like climate change, we've actually been doing some interesting initiatives where we're essentially deputizing citizens with handheld technologies to start recording information that then gets pooled.
00:57:03.480They're becoming scientists without getting the PhD and we can do that in a lot of other fields as well.
00:57:08.400But there has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic...
00:57:19.440Oh, it has to pass a basic truthiness test.
00:58:33.100But the censorship is sort of coming, you know, at other levels from large companies that many people from the administration are on the boards of.
00:58:40.960And they've picked people to go out and record and find truthiness.
00:58:58.480We just talked about it with health information, where that stuff gets completely, you know, massacred when it goes through the media cycle.
00:59:07.200You know, it's not even close to what this study actually says.
00:59:10.000And we've seen so many examples of that.
00:59:28.400I mean, that was the big deal, right, when they, when the printing press, you know, we had the printing press and people were just printing whatever the heck they wanted to print.
00:59:35.040I mean, that was the first set of lies, right?
00:59:37.340I mean, they could print, you just print whatever you want.
00:59:40.980There's one, I can't remember which one it is.
00:59:42.580There's some founding father that wrote about the freedom of speech and how far it goes, and he defended it to the point that the press could print things that they maliciously know are false and are using only to hurt the person, and it's still protected by the person.
01:00:11.840Yeah, they don't, and it's interesting because what you have is a bunch of people, and this, you know, probably goes both ways, but, you know, certainly does on the left, where you have people who, if they had their druthers, would use the government to suppress certain types of speech, and then they leave the government and they go serve on the board of Google, right?
01:00:31.600And, you know, the thing Trump tweeted the other day about Google censoring him does not seem to be accurate, but still, there is, certainly with, you know, the Alex Joneses of the world, you see real censorship of somebody on these platforms, and it's a big part of his business.
01:00:47.880I want his business to fail, but for other reasons.
01:00:50.220I don't want it to be because other businesses have decided to target the guy.
01:00:53.260And since we call it something else, since it's not, we're not calling it censorship, we're just, well, it's the algorithm change.
01:01:02.220And we've given these private businesses a pass on squelching freedom of speech because they're private businesses.
01:01:11.700It's not being done by the government.
01:01:13.300However, right or wrong, they made an agreement with the government that they will not be held liable for certain things that happen on their platform.
01:01:23.460Like, if there's terrorist threats on Facebook or Twitter, you're not going to go to Facebook and Twitter and charge them with a terrorist threat.
01:01:31.920But in order to have that protection, they have to remain impartial.
01:01:45.780So they've, they're kind of violating that sort of arrangement with, with the government protections.
01:01:54.240So you either take away the government protection and say, okay, you're going to be held liable because you're not playing by the rules that were set up for this.
01:02:02.080And I think, you know, or you stop taking people off who you disagree with.
01:02:06.400And this is why they've been careful when they've taken Alex Jones off to talk about his harassing behavior, to talk about other things he's done, not about his political views, which currently target largely, well, really anybody but Trump, right?
01:02:21.800I mean, he still targets Republicans all the time.
01:02:26.980I mean, if you go back to the idea, you know, back in, you know, 2003 and four, and when this guy was becoming well-known as the father of the 9-11 conspiracy theory, you know, you remember that, you know, he started that conspiracy theory against George W. Bush.
01:02:42.620And he still, to this day, you know, we were just talking about him the other day when he was trying to give a eulogy to John McCain.
01:02:48.040And it was like, I'm going to take the high road here.