The Glenn Beck Program - March 19, 2019


Best of the Program ｜ Guests： Ben Shapiro, John Smith & Jason Nobel and Susan Crockford ｜ 3⧸19⧸19


Episode Stats

Length

53 minutes

Words per Minute

178.06485

Word Count

9,566

Sentence Count

801

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

13


Summary

A new study shows that 3 in 5 millennials say life is more stressful than ever before. They feel that their overall stress level is caused by the accumulation of daily micro-aggressions, micro-stressors that are seemingly trivial experiences to some, but now when you put them all together, it s a very sad tale.


Transcript

00:00:00.060 Hey, welcome to today's podcast. It's a pretty good day. I mean, when Glenn Beck against socialism and Colonel Sanders are trending for the same thing, it's got to be a good day.
00:00:17.260 I would agree with that. And I will say, if you are a millennial and you're stressed out, we have the answers for you today.
00:00:23.920 We do.
00:00:24.420 On the podcast.
00:00:25.180 We can see your pain and we're going to address that for you.
00:00:29.260 We feel it. The top 20 things that stress millennials out. Also, Ben Shapiro is going to be on.
00:00:35.320 The actual people from the movie Breakthrough, which is this unbelievable movie, true story, was happening in St. Louis when St. Louis was being burned down the ground about five years ago.
00:00:46.360 A kid falls through the ice and he has no heartbeat for an hour.
00:00:53.020 And he lives and he was in our studio today and you would have absolutely no idea.
00:00:59.040 Yeah.
00:00:59.400 Plus, Booker on term limits, Elizabeth Warren on health care and so much more.
00:01:06.720 All on today's podcast.
00:01:08.400 You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:01:19.660 There's a new study out and it shows it shows that three and five millennials say life now is more stressful than ever before.
00:01:37.660 The survey pointed out numerous causes of the frustration for this young segment.
00:01:45.580 They feel that their their overall stress and the stress level is caused by the accumulation of daily microaggressions.
00:01:56.460 Yes, microaggressions, micro stressors that are seemingly trivial experiences to some.
00:02:05.560 But now when you put them all together, it's it's a very, very sad, sad tale.
00:02:11.860 Like, well, let me let me here.
00:02:16.120 Let me give you the let me give you the list and I'm going to start at the least stressful number 20 on the list because it's.
00:02:23.640 I mean, some would say washing the dishes is not really that stressful.
00:02:30.820 No, it's it's not.
00:02:32.680 But when you couple it with number 19 on the top 20 list of stressors for millennials,
00:02:39.560 I think you can see the damage that it can do washing the dishes and number 19.
00:02:47.280 Choosing what you have to wear.
00:02:49.220 Oh, my gosh.
00:02:50.380 Yeah, they have to do that by themselves.
00:02:53.060 Yeah, they have to do it by themselves.
00:02:54.520 I mean, first of all, think of the dishes and the water going down a drain.
00:02:58.160 Please don't make me.
00:02:59.000 Please don't make me.
00:03:00.020 Don't make me.
00:03:00.800 What what are those?
00:03:01.420 No, I don't let it.
00:03:02.440 Food going down a drain.
00:03:04.200 Don't even add that.
00:03:05.560 I'm just focused on washing the dishes.
00:03:08.440 Screw the environment.
00:03:10.060 I'm just.
00:03:10.840 Wow.
00:03:11.200 No, no, no.
00:03:11.540 That's not a very millennial attitude.
00:03:13.200 Number 20.
00:03:14.300 Washing dishes.
00:03:15.480 We haven't even gotten to the environment yet.
00:03:17.380 So washing the dishes and picking out the clothes.
00:03:20.460 Don't don't add more to their stress.
00:03:22.540 Right, because you have, you know, that beanie hat and the jacket thing, whatever that is.
00:03:32.980 And they put that on.
00:03:34.300 And there's three or four of them in there.
00:03:36.400 They need to select which one.
00:03:38.180 And they also have to worry about job security.
00:03:42.260 Nobody, nobody ever in human history has had to worry about washing the dishes, choosing what to wear and job security.
00:03:49.980 That's never happened before.
00:03:51.340 Never.
00:03:51.700 Yeah, that's number 18.
00:03:53.360 Most people had ate off dirty dishes and went to work naked.
00:03:56.900 That is how society has always been.
00:03:59.380 If they even went to work.
00:04:00.520 Yeah.
00:04:01.280 Number 17 is school loan payments.
00:04:06.040 That's a good one, although the approach to it is an interesting solution for millennials, which is you should just give it to me all for free.
00:04:14.320 That'll solve that stress.
00:04:16.120 Right.
00:04:16.420 You know, another thing in this, I mean, well, in my day, we would just say, don't take out that student loan.
00:04:25.840 I mean, that's probably, yeah.
00:04:30.780 Yes, it is exactly what we said.
00:04:33.860 You know, here's what I said when I was 18 years old.
00:04:36.600 What college are you going to?
00:04:38.040 Can't afford one.
00:04:39.980 That's that's.
00:04:40.580 Well, but that's wrong, Glenn.
00:04:41.920 No, I know.
00:04:42.500 That's wrong.
00:04:42.980 Everyone should go to college so that they can spend 95 percent of their time not doing work.
00:04:47.640 That's a guaranteed right to all.
00:04:49.740 I mean, if you if you don't go to college, take it from me, kids, you're going to live under a bridge.
00:04:57.040 You're never going to amount to anything.
00:04:59.320 You'll just disappear into the darkness.
00:05:02.700 Anybody who if you don't go to college, there's no way in America to make it.
00:05:08.160 No way.
00:05:08.720 No, definitely no way.
00:05:09.940 Number 16 of the list of millennial stressors is check engine light comes on.
00:05:16.940 Number 15 is credit card bills.
00:05:20.340 Number 14 is phone screen breaking.
00:05:23.800 Oh, that's a huge one.
00:05:24.960 Number number 13 is job interviews.
00:05:28.420 Number 12 is paying the bills.
00:05:31.780 Number 11.
00:05:33.140 Now, we're not in the top 10 yet.
00:05:34.960 Number 11.
00:05:36.080 Most stressful thing that millennials have to deal with.
00:05:39.240 They say, and I want to quote, I want to quote, 58 percent say life is more stressful now than ever before.
00:05:51.300 So number 11 is losing and misplacing keys.
00:05:56.860 Number 10, forgetting the phone charger.
00:06:02.060 Number nine, credit card fraud.
00:06:05.080 Number eight, forgetting passwords.
00:06:07.440 Number seven, most stressful thing in a millennial life.
00:06:13.360 Phone battery dying.
00:06:15.400 Every one of these things has already, there's already a technological solution for like all of these.
00:06:21.260 Right.
00:06:21.620 No, no, no.
00:06:22.040 You are not.
00:06:25.020 Really?
00:06:26.020 I'm just, I mean, you just said.
00:06:27.920 You're adding more stress to these poor souls.
00:06:29.920 You can have extra batteries.
00:06:31.360 They're easy.
00:06:32.020 They have cases that have batteries in them.
00:06:34.120 Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever.
00:06:35.260 They have detectors that.
00:06:35.720 Yeah, but is there a solution for number six, slow Wi-Fi?
00:06:40.820 Well, yeah.
00:06:41.380 Number five, arriving late to work.
00:06:45.120 Number four, stressor on millennials.
00:06:47.940 Number four, losing phone.
00:06:50.920 Yeah, where's your technology there?
00:06:52.920 They have a lot of solutions for that.
00:06:53.820 Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.
00:06:54.740 Oh, find my iPhone, right?
00:06:57.060 Actually built into the software.
00:06:59.200 Number three, commute and delays in traffic.
00:07:05.100 Number two, stressor, is arguing with partner.
00:07:10.300 And the number one most stressful thing on millennials, losing wallet or credit card.
00:07:20.500 Wow, that is.
00:07:22.480 How do they, how do they, how do they make it?
00:07:24.740 How do they make it?
00:07:25.560 Seriously, how do they make it with this?
00:07:27.640 It's very difficult.
00:07:28.680 Oh, we're not done, Sarah.
00:07:29.720 Get that music back up.
00:07:30.940 We're not.
00:07:31.640 No, no, no.
00:07:32.100 This is, no.
00:07:34.060 It's crushing.
00:07:34.820 It's crushing.
00:07:35.580 It's crushing.
00:07:36.560 Now, let me ask you this.
00:07:37.360 There's not like, you know, polio in there anywhere.
00:07:40.540 Yeah, there wasn't, there's no polio there.
00:07:43.580 You'll notice there is also no global warming.
00:07:46.300 You would think if we only had 12 years, that would be pretty stressful, right?
00:07:51.820 So no global warming.
00:07:53.360 Also, I'd just like to point out no World War I or World War II or Cold War.
00:07:59.320 Nowhere, nowhere is the fear of being vaporized on this list, which is interesting, you know?
00:08:08.440 Well, but the keys.
00:08:09.600 I remember the keys.
00:08:10.760 It's hard to find your keys sometimes.
00:08:12.420 Right.
00:08:12.540 And that is a big deal.
00:08:14.460 Right.
00:08:15.060 But I would say if we're looking at, if you're the three out of five that say life is more stressful now than ever before, I mean, I would just say amputation without any kind of medication.
00:08:30.920 That might be a life without antibiotics might be the other one.
00:08:36.400 But plowing and growing, plowing your own fields and growing your own food and then having a drought or rain might be.
00:08:45.160 How about so many plagues?
00:08:46.320 They started color coding them.
00:08:48.240 Right.
00:08:48.480 The Black Plague.
00:08:49.560 Right.
00:08:49.720 Let me make sure you know that there's a lot of other ones.
00:08:52.420 Right.
00:08:52.700 But don't get the black one.
00:08:53.480 Yeah, don't get the black one.
00:08:54.500 That's really bad.
00:08:55.900 You know, slavery.
00:08:57.800 That was pretty bad.
00:08:58.780 Slavery was pretty bad.
00:08:59.780 You know, being picked up in the middle of the night and just without charges and just thrown into a prison because the government could do it.
00:09:07.480 I'm very surprised I did not hear a incorrect pronoun stressor because that one is really rough.
00:09:15.020 I mean, just let's, can we, can we weigh these?
00:09:18.880 Slavery?
00:09:20.480 Ooh.
00:09:21.640 Incorrect pronoun.
00:09:23.240 Ooh.
00:09:24.280 I mean, whoa.
00:09:25.900 Teeter tottering on the scale back and forth.
00:09:28.160 I don't know which one is worse.
00:09:29.280 I don't know which one is worse.
00:09:31.420 That's, it's an amazing testament to how good things are.
00:09:36.820 Maybe that, you know, losing my keys to my automobile is a little, is your bigger stress than being scooped up and put into a concentration camp because you're a Jew.
00:09:49.020 Yeah.
00:09:49.920 Yeah, sure.
00:09:50.940 Yeah.
00:09:51.420 It might be, it might be an indication that your life is sweet.
00:09:55.820 Yeah.
00:09:56.000 What is wrong with you?
00:09:57.720 And it also shows they obviously do not care about global warming in real life.
00:10:01.360 It is just a, it's a, an issue to an ends, a means to an end.
00:10:05.720 Uh, well, we're going to say, we'll say global warming is the, inequality, inequality.
00:10:09.300 That's not even stressed anybody.
00:10:10.400 No, uh, uh, no, no, uh, dead naming didn't really didn't, uh, didn't put anything out there.
00:10:18.160 How about, how about if, if, if, what is it?
00:10:21.560 Seven out of 10 women are raped on campus.
00:10:24.380 That didn't make this, washing the dishes did.
00:10:28.800 That's a great point.
00:10:29.700 Fear of being raped on campus didn't.
00:10:33.120 We have a situation that we are told that women are being raped on college campuses at a rate higher than the Rwandan genocide.
00:10:40.680 Right.
00:10:41.200 Right.
00:10:41.460 And I think if you would have asked the 20 somethings in Rwanda during the genocide might've been in the top five, I don't know, genocide.
00:10:50.260 I mean, below washing dishes though, right?
00:10:52.660 Oh, of course.
00:10:53.560 Okay.
00:10:53.880 Of course.
00:10:54.540 Oh, that's good.
00:10:55.100 You know, my whole family being raped and killed in front of me might've made their top 20, you know, but, uh, being raped on campus.
00:11:04.800 No, not there.
00:11:06.720 It's almost as if that statistic isn't near accurate.
00:11:10.920 Almost.
00:11:11.840 Almost.
00:11:12.260 Almost.
00:11:12.480 Because it's so amazing.
00:11:13.700 Like college debt is the thing they worry about in college.
00:11:16.560 Now, if more than half of women are being raped at college campuses, you'd think maybe you wouldn't take the debt on to go.
00:11:25.320 Right.
00:11:25.660 Like why go to the place where you're almost definitely going to get raped?
00:11:29.740 Right.
00:11:30.060 What's the point of taking on debt to do that?
00:11:32.500 Right.
00:11:33.080 And it's almost as if we all know in reality, that's not the case.
00:11:38.700 No, that's not true, Stu.
00:11:40.300 That's not true.
00:11:41.220 It's almost like we all know that in 12 years, we're not all going to die from global warming.
00:11:46.760 It's almost as if what you're saying is not true.
00:11:49.980 By the way, they fact-checked that one.
00:11:51.740 I lost my whole family in the Rwandan genocide.
00:11:55.000 It was horrible.
00:11:56.280 Yeah.
00:11:56.840 Yeah.
00:11:57.300 Well, I lost my iPhone.
00:11:59.280 Okay.
00:11:59.920 Where is it?
00:12:01.560 That's how bad my life is.
00:12:03.980 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:12:05.560 Your mom and everybody raped in front of you.
00:12:08.140 Whatever.
00:12:08.300 I lost my iPhone and the dishes are starting to stack up.
00:12:16.320 The best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:12:25.120 Like listening to this podcast?
00:12:27.120 If you're not a subscriber, become one now on iTunes.
00:12:30.240 And while you're there, do us a favor and rate the show.
00:12:32.580 There is a new book out, The Right Side of History, How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great by Ben Shapiro.
00:12:40.440 Ben joins us now.
00:12:41.340 Hi, Ben.
00:12:44.240 We can't hear Ben.
00:12:47.680 How are you?
00:12:48.460 Oh, there you are.
00:12:49.140 Hi, Ben.
00:12:49.520 How are you?
00:12:50.840 I'm doing well.
00:12:51.380 How are you?
00:12:51.860 I'm good.
00:12:52.500 So The Right Side of History, this really, this book kind of came out of a few conversations that you had with some of the members of the intellectual dark web, did it not?
00:13:05.820 To a certain extent.
00:13:06.920 I mean, it came at the very beginning out of the 2016 election and just the generalized feeling that everybody sort of hated each other.
00:13:13.800 And you looked around and you went, wait a second, everybody is living in the most splendid sort of prosperity in the history of mankind.
00:13:21.460 People are living to record ages.
00:13:23.260 People are living in the freest society where they're allowed to do pretty much anything they want, so long as they don't punch somebody else in the face.
00:13:28.400 And yet we are all really pissed at each other.
00:13:31.800 Yeah.
00:13:32.060 And so I started to wonder, why is it that everybody seems so unhappy?
00:13:36.180 Why are suicide rates going up?
00:13:37.440 Why are we having this opioid epidemic?
00:13:39.080 Why is everybody so unhappy in what should be the happiest time?
00:13:42.060 Yeah, I just read a headline today.
00:13:45.240 I think it was maybe the Wall Street Journal about the greatest job market in a century.
00:13:54.160 That's what they're calling this.
00:13:55.640 The greatest job market in a century.
00:13:58.920 And you wouldn't know that.
00:14:00.620 You'd think we were in the Great Depression.
00:14:04.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:14:05.080 And not just that.
00:14:06.220 You would think that we are in the worst racial time in our history, that white supremacy on the one side and anger on the other side and that everybody just hates each other.
00:14:18.640 And you would believe that we are divided by class in a way that we've never been divided before, that it's the 1% against the 99%.
00:14:25.780 And none of this happens to be true.
00:14:28.300 We happen to live in the most racially equal time in the history of mankind.
00:14:30.740 If you could be born into any time, this would be the time that you would choose.
00:14:34.220 And so the question becomes, why are we so angry?
00:14:36.600 And I think that the real reason is because anger fills something that we are missing.
00:14:41.180 And that is a true sense of what happiness is and what politically we need in order to be happy.
00:14:48.700 We've sort of redefined happiness to mean feeling joy at a particular time or whatever our subjective emotions tell us at a particular time, self-esteem has been mixed up with happiness.
00:14:58.380 But if you look back to the ancients, if you look back to the Judeo-Christian system, happiness has nothing to do with any of those things.
00:15:04.100 Happiness has to do with pursuing moral purpose using reason.
00:15:07.380 That was always the basis of Western civilization.
00:15:09.620 And so I started thinking about maybe the reason that we're so angry at each other is because we've lost what we used to share.
00:15:15.380 We lost what we had in common, which was this common adherence to a set of values that we used to call Western civilized values.
00:15:21.620 Yeah, we don't, you know, Nietzsche is often misunderstood when he's talking about, you know, God is dead.
00:15:27.620 Everybody's like, oh, he was declaring God is dead, and that's a great thing.
00:15:30.300 No, he's actually saying it's a warning.
00:15:32.780 We've just killed God.
00:15:34.220 Congratulations.
00:15:34.980 We've just killed God.
00:15:36.040 Science is reigning.
00:15:37.140 However, God is, he'll be found someplace else.
00:15:42.460 What are we going to replace him with?
00:15:44.820 And, you know, it wasn't too many years later that they found National Socialism and Adolf Hitler replacing God.
00:15:50.640 And that's kind of the same thing now is we've, we've, we're destroying God and everything.
00:15:56.940 We always had Moses and Jesus as our, as our archetypes.
00:16:02.240 Well, they're destroyed.
00:16:03.780 So who's our archetype now?
00:16:05.300 Well, that's exactly right.
00:16:07.520 I mean, Judeo-Christian values didn't just lay the foundation for our moral system.
00:16:12.360 They also laid the foundation for science.
00:16:14.400 They laid the foundation for the idea that reason matters.
00:16:16.580 Because if you're a scientific materialist, if you're somebody who believes that all of humanity, we're basically just wandering balls of meat, firing neurons, wandering through space.
00:16:25.860 Then not only is there no morality, but there's also no such thing as reason.
00:16:30.580 Why should we argue with each other?
00:16:31.860 We are just, again, wandering balls of meat, wandering through space.
00:16:34.460 Why not use force on one another?
00:16:36.560 What exactly do we share at that point?
00:16:38.700 Why not, why not side up with tribes and go to battle with other tribes?
00:16:42.420 And that's what we're beginning to see is there's this God-shaped hole in our heart.
00:16:45.640 We're filling it with anger.
00:16:46.400 We feel a sense of meaning and a sense of belonging by getting angry at other groups, whether it's other groups politically or whether it's other groups racially, and it's really ugly and it's really a problem.
00:16:57.880 This is a fundamental betrayal of what it was that the West built in the first place.
00:17:03.180 The West was built on certain principles.
00:17:04.540 It's kind of fascinating, Glenn, when you look at this manifesto from the shooter in New Zealand.
00:17:10.020 And nobody should read it because we don't want to give it any sort of play.
00:17:13.640 The one thing that is clear is he keeps using the term the West, and he keeps using it to mean white supremacy.
00:17:19.480 And on the left, what you see is people who define the West in much the same way.
00:17:23.160 They'll say Western civilization has to go, and we shouldn't be teaching about it because all it really is is a system of dominance by people who are more powerful.
00:17:30.540 It's a system of white hierarchy.
00:17:32.580 That's not what the West is about at all.
00:17:33.700 What made the West unique is the fact that it was about the notion of individual rights, the notion that we are all made in God's image.
00:17:38.600 On the one hand, on the religious sense, and the notion that we have to use reason to pursue the best outcomes, on the other hand, which is a Greek notion.
00:17:47.200 And the combination of those two notions built America, which I think is the greatest exposition of Western philosophy in the history of mankind.
00:17:57.000 And we're losing that.
00:17:58.140 We're losing that because we've decided that God should not and does not exist.
00:18:03.560 And so there is no actual rationale for believing there's a higher morality.
00:18:07.520 We can sort of craft morality however we want.
00:18:09.780 And on the other hand, we believe that reason is no longer useful because you can't understand me.
00:18:13.820 After all, you don't come from the same background that I do.
00:18:16.560 And if you don't come from the same background that I do, then how can we have a common conversation?
00:18:20.820 So what is the role of the university?
00:18:22.780 You address this.
00:18:24.400 What is the role of the university now?
00:18:26.960 And how do we get it back to, you know, diverse thinking and reason and logic?
00:18:36.000 Well, I mean, I think the only way to do that is for the American people to actually demand it.
00:18:41.580 As always, the responsibility lies with us.
00:18:43.960 There's certainly no question that universities used to be the place where people studied Greek and Latin and actually learned the ancients in the original language and understood what were the foundational principles of the civilization.
00:18:56.020 And they've become almost the reverse of that.
00:18:59.580 They've been taken over by the critical studies genre, which is devoted specifically to the idea that the West is basically just a hierarchy of power that has to be torn out at its roots.
00:19:09.880 This is something that was done by the Frankfurt School.
00:19:13.020 It was done by post-structuralist Marxists in the university system.
00:19:16.620 And it's been seen as a pseudo-sophisticated argument against Western civilization.
00:19:22.340 The truth is, of course, that the university still rests, as all of us do in the West, on that we're still working off the fumes of a gas tank that we emptied ourselves.
00:19:31.600 So if you think of Western civilization as having these values, and that's the gas in the engine, and then we decide which way we want to steer the car.
00:19:38.440 Right now, the car is empty because we haven't actually refilled that gas.
00:19:41.740 We're just living off the fumes, but we're pretending that we're moving as of our own momentum.
00:19:45.040 So how much longer do we have on those fumes?
00:19:49.300 I mean, I see—I mean, Ben, you and I were talking a year ago about how bad things are.
00:19:57.640 They are so rapidly changing.
00:20:03.940 We are running towards socialism.
00:20:07.200 We are running towards infanticide.
00:20:09.900 We're running towards our own destruction now.
00:20:12.520 So how much longer does this car run?
00:20:17.280 Yeah, I'm not sure that it runs too much longer absent a real reexamination of why exactly America is fantastic.
00:20:24.440 And that starts with the premise that America is fantastic and that the West is fantastic.
00:20:28.060 And that itself is a controversial proposition.
00:20:30.700 But if you really don't believe the West is fantastic, you should visit another civilization.
00:20:34.460 You should spend some time there because the West is a pretty incredible place.
00:20:37.900 And as you say, I feel like we are running out.
00:20:43.660 I feel like those of us who are conservative, we need to become better representatives of our philosophy.
00:20:51.140 And it can't just be about we want lower taxes and we want less government intervention.
00:20:55.600 We have to say, what is it in human nature that demands these things?
00:20:59.780 What is it in the system that means that human beings are happier under this?
00:21:03.820 Because the argument that's being made for socialism right now is not, in fact, an argument for prosperity.
00:21:07.800 It's not that we're all going to be better off and we're all going to be more prosperous.
00:21:10.500 Nobody believes that.
00:21:11.340 You read the Green New Deal and you can see that the folks on the left don't believe that.
00:21:14.600 What they are actually saying is that there's a sense of meaning to be found in some sort of shared quest.
00:21:19.320 That's why they're constantly referring to sort of these wartime ethics that we're in a war.
00:21:23.660 And because we're in a war, therefore, we should all mobilize in war-like fashion.
00:21:27.140 Well, you can mobilize people that way, but you're mobilizing them towards something that's not going to bring them happiness.
00:21:31.800 The truth is that happiness can only be brought by social fabric resting on a common frame of morality and by the belief that individuals can make a difference in the world,
00:21:40.000 that we have free will and reason to pursue, and that we are bound to our neighbors not by force of government,
00:21:44.700 but by voluntary belief that these people are our brothers and sisters.
00:21:47.420 So de Tocqueville said, I looked for the success of America and I couldn't find it anywhere until I went into its churches.
00:21:54.680 And there I saw it burning on the pulpits.
00:21:57.500 It was the pulpit.
00:21:59.500 It was the priest and the pastors and the rabbis and everybody else that were speaking these truths that you're not seeing anymore.
00:22:08.780 You know, we were losing the Civil War until about the middle of it when Abraham Lincoln said,
00:22:16.700 you know what, we've got to make this about the end of slavery, and we need a day of fast and prayer and humiliation.
00:22:22.800 We needed a day of atonement.
00:22:26.660 We didn't lose.
00:22:27.720 I think we only lost one more battle after that day.
00:22:31.100 We lost everything before it and only one battle after.
00:22:34.440 You say today, we have to, I mean, when you can't get the Senate to say we won't kill babies after they're born,
00:22:43.800 when you can't get the Senate, we have so withdrawn from God, there's just, there's no protection left.
00:22:52.080 You talk to people and say, hey, we should probably, we should probably turn around and say, hey, forgive us for everything that we've done.
00:22:59.080 And can you just, can you help heal us?
00:23:02.600 Nobody, nobody's thinking that way.
00:23:04.740 You can't say that in regular open society.
00:23:07.680 No, well, I mean, we've become a very secular society.
00:23:11.360 And here's the thing.
00:23:12.120 The argument of the book isn't that you have to be a religious person to be a good person.
00:23:15.000 I know you don't believe that either, Glenn.
00:23:16.540 Right.
00:23:16.860 But what you do have to do is you have to make certain assumptions about human nature that I think are religious in nature.
00:23:22.820 And if you don't make those assumptions, and if you try to rip away the undergirding for those assumptions in the religious belief system, you're really hurting everybody else.
00:23:33.080 And you see this for a lot of folks who live on the coast who still have sort of an ersatz social fabric created by country clubs or by college or by social groups.
00:23:42.860 And they live very conservative lifestyles, and this is a point that Charles Murray has made.
00:23:46.640 And at the same time, they're ripping on churches.
00:23:49.480 They're suggesting that Judeo-Christian values are bad.
00:23:51.240 What do they think is holding up the value system that maintains the country in the rest of the country outside of L.A. and New York?
00:23:57.540 It really is.
00:23:58.280 It's not a tenant to Yale, guys.
00:23:59.940 Yeah, it's the argument that Ben Franklin made to Thomas Paine.
00:24:04.780 He's like, you know, you grew up in this system created by these people.
00:24:09.660 You have a liberty because of that.
00:24:12.180 And you're enjoying those fruits that are allowing you to tear it apart.
00:24:17.120 But it's a suicidal task that you're on.
00:24:21.240 It's the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution.
00:24:23.920 Paine, of course, is a huge fan of the French Revolution.
00:24:26.380 And Edmund Burke, of course, is not.
00:24:28.220 And Paine's basic argument was that we need to get rid of religion.
00:24:31.960 Religion is what has stood in the way of human progress.
00:24:34.920 And the Burkean argument is, wait a second, it's religion that has stood behind human progress.
00:24:38.420 That doesn't mean that Judeo-Christianity has always been free and wonderful or that it's always been interpreted properly in accordance with freedom.
00:24:46.440 But this value system, the enlightenment, these values that I hold the same that Sam Harris of Militant Atheist holds, those values didn't come out of nowhere.
00:24:54.700 They didn't spring into being in 1760 for no reason at all in one place, in one time, in one segment of history.
00:25:00.900 They sprang into being because there are foundations to that.
00:25:03.860 That was the third story.
00:25:05.200 That was the third story of the philosophy, that the foundations were laid at Athens and they were laid at Sinai.
00:25:10.500 And ignoring all of that and deriding all of that in favor of, what, tribalism and subjectivism, it's tearing the country apart.
00:25:17.920 So we need to get back to our roots because the truth is we still do have more in common than we have apart.
00:25:23.880 As Lincoln said, we still are brothers rather than enemies.
00:25:26.760 But the moment that we lose what made us brothers, then we are enemies.
00:25:31.120 Ben Shapiro from TheDailyWire.com.
00:25:33.780 He's got a new book out.
00:25:34.760 It's called The Right Side of History, How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.
00:25:40.400 Ben Shapiro.
00:25:41.180 Thanks so much, Ben.
00:25:41.900 Talk to you again.
00:25:42.700 You bet.
00:25:43.360 This is the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:25:59.140 Hey, it's Glenn.
00:26:00.000 And I want to tell you about something that you should either end your day with or start your morning with.
00:26:06.140 And that is the news and why it matters.
00:26:08.960 If you like this show, you're going to love the news and why it matters.
00:26:12.240 It's a bunch of us that all get together at the end of the day and just talk about the stories that matter to you and your life.
00:26:18.680 The news and why it matters.
00:26:19.840 Look for it now wherever you download your favorite podcasts.
00:26:22.820 If you've been out in the movie theaters lately, you might have seen a trailer for a movie that looks really good.
00:26:29.840 I was at, I don't know, Make Your Dragon Mate or whatever it is.
00:26:33.800 And I saw a trailer for Breakthrough and it looks really, really good.
00:26:41.480 And about a quarter or halfway through the trailer, you realize, wait a minute, they're going to talk about God in this.
00:26:47.700 And you're like, it can't be because this movie looks really good.
00:26:50.600 It's a $30 million movie and it's about a story that happened about five years ago, four years ago, four, four years ago.
00:27:01.520 And it may not be a story that you you heard.
00:27:04.700 And we'll tell you why here in a minute, because it is an amazing story of John Smith.
00:27:09.620 He was 14 years old when he was walking over an ice covered lake and he was with two friends.
00:27:17.220 He broke through the ice.
00:27:18.660 He was they they all fell through.
00:27:21.900 But he went for 15 minutes before paramedics could even come.
00:27:28.800 He was under the water.
00:27:29.880 He didn't have a heartbeat for 45 minutes.
00:27:34.140 And, you know, all of the stories on, you know, what happens when you you're deprived of oxygen and everything else.
00:27:41.860 John Smith is here in the studio.
00:27:44.080 How are you, John?
00:27:45.320 I'm good. How are you?
00:27:46.780 That's incredible that you can without a pulse for 45 minutes.
00:27:52.780 Yes. Yes.
00:27:54.460 How?
00:27:55.980 Only God.
00:27:57.400 Only God.
00:27:57.940 So we also have his pastor, Jason Nobelin, and you are portrayed in the movie as well.
00:28:06.220 Now, let me ask you this.
00:28:07.420 Yeah.
00:28:07.940 In the movie.
00:28:09.560 And only because I've seen another movie like this.
00:28:12.640 And I thought and they made the pastor look like the guy who is doubting.
00:28:16.940 Are you a doubting Thomas?
00:28:18.760 No way.
00:28:19.320 No way.
00:28:19.680 No way.
00:28:20.040 Not at all.
00:28:20.540 I mean, after the first night after John was in the hospital, I walked out to Joyce.
00:28:25.220 We had some incredible miracles happen in the room.
00:28:27.300 And I walked out to Joyce because not only was he without a pulse for an hour, it was
00:28:31.100 over an hour without a pulse.
00:28:32.980 When Joyce walked in the room and prayed, Holy Spirit, bring my son back to life.
00:28:37.120 He came back to life.
00:28:38.360 But the doctor said he was still brain dead.
00:28:40.220 Every organ and catastrophic failure, 1% chance he would make it if he made it overnight.
00:28:45.000 They were planning organ transplants.
00:28:46.760 I mean, so it wasn't just, hey, I mean, we took a group of pastors and we started to
00:28:50.560 pray like crazy.
00:28:51.820 And so I walked out that evening after just a series of miracles.
00:28:56.120 We talk about it in the book, Breakthrough.
00:28:58.800 Walked out and said, Joyce, he's walking out of the hospital.
00:29:00.900 And one of the most iconic pictures in the story is after all of the prayer and miracles,
00:29:06.000 he walks out of the hospital 16 days later.
00:29:09.400 16 days later, completely healed.
00:29:11.540 Him and I are walking out of the hospital together.
00:29:13.380 Were there any side effects from this?
00:29:15.420 No.
00:29:16.100 None.
00:29:16.700 None.
00:29:16.920 I was back playing basketball about two, three months later.
00:29:19.820 Yeah.
00:29:20.160 He was totally cleared 40 days after.
00:29:22.460 That's incredible.
00:29:22.840 Do you remember being on the ice?
00:29:24.180 Do you remember this actually happening?
00:29:25.520 Yes.
00:29:25.860 You know, I remember, you know, like what the ice kind of breaking.
00:29:28.960 I remember that.
00:29:30.000 And, you know, the screams, you know, fighting, you call 911.
00:29:32.300 I don't want to die.
00:29:33.020 Call 911.
00:29:34.000 And then, you know, the water, you know, like the water line, you know, seeing above and
00:29:38.180 below how dirty and brown and green and murky that water was.
00:29:42.320 You know, it was like getting in a fight with a tiger, you know, the ice just piercing your
00:29:45.700 skin.
00:29:45.920 I still have scars to this day.
00:29:47.160 So I do remember a very, very good chunk of it.
00:29:50.280 We also pray that he wouldn't remember because it was so traumatic.
00:29:53.500 And so that's one thing he talks about when he was because people always ask us, did you
00:29:57.540 go to heaven and, you know, whatever.
00:29:59.300 And we have prayed that he wouldn't remember it because it was so traumatic.
00:30:02.660 Like I have the 911 calls on my laptop and I mean, I can barely listen to them.
00:30:06.820 I mean, they're just so intense.
00:30:07.880 And we felt like what God said is it's not about one person experiencing me.
00:30:11.720 It's about every person that comes in contact with this story experiencing me.
00:30:15.780 And so that's why we feel like God did it that way.
00:30:19.080 So you were, were you, how long were you underwater?
00:30:23.040 I was underwater for 15 minutes and without an impulse for additional 45.
00:30:26.940 So a little over an hour without a pulse.
00:30:29.260 And so you're there and in the movie, at least the fireman that is responding.
00:30:35.460 Yes.
00:30:36.020 He goes underneath the water and he can't find you.
00:30:39.240 And then he, uh, he says later in the movie that, uh, you know, he heard a voice say, go
00:30:46.060 back down one more time.
00:30:47.400 Is that true?
00:30:48.620 Yes.
00:30:49.680 Tell me about him.
00:30:50.760 Tell me about what happened.
00:30:52.040 So his name is Tommy shine.
00:30:53.260 He's part of the Wentzville fire department back home in St.
00:30:55.300 Louis, Missouri.
00:30:55.920 And you know, they, they took, uh, he got the call and they said when he got the call,
00:31:00.280 he sprinted as soon as the truck stopped.
00:31:02.120 Like the stuck, the truck hadn't even stopped and he was running to the scene and he gets
00:31:06.400 out in the water and he has a pike pole, which pike poles, a long pole with a big hook at
00:31:09.880 the end used to tear drywall down in a fire.
00:31:12.040 And by now I'd been underwater for like three minutes.
00:31:14.560 So it's crucial now he's timing it.
00:31:17.040 I mean, it's do or die.
00:31:18.020 They actually called the dive team in if he couldn't have found me because I was laying
00:31:23.860 on a cliff.
00:31:24.560 Um, I was on a rocky bottom that was 10 feet deep.
00:31:27.340 If I would have went a little bit, maybe an inch over, I would have fallen into where
00:31:31.040 it was 20, you know, to 25 feet deep with a muddy bottom.
00:31:34.860 So I'm right on the edge of, you know, this cliff.
00:31:38.060 And so he gets in the water and he's looking for me and he has this pipe pole and it's,
00:31:42.000 it's do or die.
00:31:42.780 And he hears a voice, you know, and, and real, uh, in, in the movie it says go back.
00:31:47.600 But what he's told us is go two feet to the left.
00:31:50.140 And he does, you know, he's checking, he just sticks it down.
00:31:53.980 He's like, I got to do something.
00:31:55.140 So he sticks it down.
00:31:55.940 He's like, it could be a tire.
00:31:57.060 It could be my boot, but he realizes it can't be his boot because it's too deep.
00:32:00.600 So he pulls something up.
00:32:01.840 He knows it's heavy, but he doesn't know what it is.
00:32:03.860 And it's me.
00:32:04.700 He found me right at the last minute.
00:32:07.000 I mean, literally one minute from there, they would have sent in divers.
00:32:10.680 I mean, it was literally within just a moment because they were ready to give up.
00:32:15.840 You said, uh, when you came in that this movie, it doesn't even cover half of it.
00:32:21.640 Oh yeah.
00:32:22.000 This is just, I mean, the Joe, the thing we talk about is if, if it really told the whole
00:32:25.960 story, it'd probably be longer than the Titanic.
00:32:28.280 I mean, it would be a very long movie.
00:32:30.040 I mean, it was one miracle after another that God just set up.
00:32:33.220 Um, you know, it, it was incredible to watch it play out incredible.
00:32:38.560 And, you know, I think for me and for what, for our, for our, for John and Joyce and all
00:32:43.040 of us, we just want to encourage people that God still does the impossible.
00:32:46.980 And we've seen it play out.
00:32:48.440 And that's a good, a good segue to, you had mentioned this off the air and I didn't realize
00:32:52.640 the timing was the same, but this happened in the St. Louis area in the middle of essentially
00:32:56.400 the Michael Brown Ferguson stuff.
00:32:58.220 Yeah.
00:32:58.460 Yes.
00:32:58.800 This is, this is a time where this city is completely torn apart.
00:33:01.960 100%.
00:33:02.320 We'd only lived there for three months too.
00:33:04.020 I'd only been there pastor for three months.
00:33:05.660 And so we moved from Washington state and walk into this situation in St. Louis and we're
00:33:09.960 going like, Oh my goodness.
00:33:11.260 I mean, the place was just, it was crazy.
00:33:13.460 And so to see God just do this for John and, uh, it captivated the local media.
00:33:20.340 It captivated the story just reached out and touched the city.
00:33:23.920 The city came together.
00:33:24.920 Yeah.
00:33:25.040 It's, it's amazing to see how through all that chaos that St.
00:33:27.700 Louis was coming together as well behind the scenes as a team and as a community to pray
00:33:32.260 for me and to stand by me and my family.
00:33:34.520 It's kind of amazing.
00:33:35.680 You know, it was the, where in Washington state are you from?
00:33:39.340 Oh, kind of all.
00:33:40.420 I was pastoring in Port Angeles right outside of Seattle.
00:33:42.600 Okay.
00:33:42.940 Yeah.
00:33:43.460 So I grew up in Mount Vernon and Bellington.
00:33:45.320 Okay.
00:33:45.560 And, uh, and, uh, and I remember I moved to Phoenix and I grew up in Pacific Northwest.
00:33:52.940 Right.
00:33:53.520 You don't see the sun.
00:33:54.560 Right.
00:33:55.000 Yeah.
00:33:55.160 Like, what is that?
00:33:56.200 The sky's on fire.
00:33:57.660 Right.
00:33:58.300 And, uh, and I went down and I, I remember, uh, holding my hand out and it was like, I
00:34:03.620 was stoned, but I was sober and I was holding the handout and I was watching the shadows and
00:34:08.780 how sharp they were because, you know, in Seattle, you don't see that there's no real
00:34:13.300 shadow.
00:34:14.320 And, uh, and I kind of realized as the light grows stronger, you know, the shadows are only
00:34:21.020 growing stronger because the light is growing stronger at the same time.
00:34:24.660 Darkness.
00:34:24.700 And it's, it, you kind of wonder, uh, you know, which we focus on.
00:34:29.560 We were focused on the darkness.
00:34:31.500 Right.
00:34:32.040 At the same time, same area.
00:34:34.980 This was happening.
00:34:36.220 Yeah.
00:34:36.420 I mean, I, I'm not afraid of the darkness.
00:34:38.480 I think that the darker it is, the lighter we can be.
00:34:41.500 I can't let that pass without going, you will be straight from Yoda's mouth.
00:34:48.360 What's it like, uh, seeing a movie where people are playing you?
00:34:53.080 Definitely different, but, uh, you know, it's a, it's a little strange at first, but when
00:34:57.580 you get to, we got, we had the opportunity to meet them and they're just super, super nice
00:35:01.420 people.
00:35:01.700 This cast is just a big cast.
00:35:03.440 I mean, big names.
00:35:04.480 Like it's not, you know, it's not like a lot of, some of these movies you see, but
00:35:07.040 they have positive messages.
00:35:08.200 Like you don't see the big actors and actresses taking part.
00:35:10.600 This is, I mean, the woman from this is us, isn't it?
00:35:12.940 I mean, this is, this is usually, yes.
00:35:16.120 It's just one big name and then the rest are minor roles.
00:35:18.960 Stephen Curry is an executive producer.
00:35:20.900 Oh really?
00:35:21.620 Yes.
00:35:22.120 Oh wow.
00:35:22.680 First one that he's done.
00:35:23.820 Oh, that's really cool.
00:35:24.700 Yeah.
00:35:24.980 Isn't that awesome?
00:35:25.760 Yeah.
00:35:26.100 Jeez.
00:35:26.380 This is amazing.
00:35:27.060 So why did, why did this happen to you?
00:35:31.960 There's no real explanation other than what God has in store for me and a purpose to save
00:35:38.400 me.
00:35:39.940 My goal is to just live it out.
00:35:41.820 You know, I, I get that question a lot.
00:35:43.720 It's portrayed in the film of why am I alive and not others?
00:35:46.280 And truthfully, I don't know, you know, I'm not perfect.
00:35:48.580 I'm just an 18 year old kid from St. Louis.
00:35:50.260 But with what I mean it that way, I can see how people mean it, but it, it, I would think
00:35:57.960 it would play on you at night.
00:36:02.060 Not why don't you save other people, but what am I going to do now with my life?
00:36:07.620 I've been given a chance.
00:36:09.260 It could be really uplifting or crippling depending on how you.
00:36:14.220 Yes.
00:36:14.660 It was very hard for me at first to deal with all this because like you said, it was a lot
00:36:18.840 of, a lot of pressure.
00:36:20.260 And I had no idea really how to handle it, but with help from pastor Jason and, uh, Devon
00:36:25.500 Franklin and pastor Samuel Rodriguez, them guiding me and, you know, helping me.
00:36:30.100 Uh, it's just, you know, you remember to stay humble always and, you know, try to answer
00:36:34.400 the questions the best you can, but realize that you don't, you're not perfect and you
00:36:37.600 don't have all the answers.
00:36:38.860 Pastor.
00:36:39.320 I mean, theologically is, is it okay for him to just sit home and eat Cheetos one night?
00:36:43.200 I mean, doesn't he have to do something important every minute of every day?
00:36:46.160 Well, I mean, he is 18.
00:36:48.100 And so, I mean, I think we all feel very strongly that God's given us this message to share with
00:36:53.180 the world.
00:36:53.560 I mean, we wrote the book, we did a movie, my book just released today where it has all
00:36:57.680 the teaching lessons for people that are walking through breakthrough and so it's called breakthrough
00:37:01.480 to your miracle.
00:37:01.980 But the, the thing that I think is so important is, uh, one of the things that is a key in
00:37:07.200 this is John actually was adopted from Guatemala when he was five months old.
00:37:09.960 So his parents adopted him and as he was walking through this struggle after the fact, it was
00:37:14.240 like, man, why didn't my mom want me?
00:37:16.540 And the whole adoption piece was a big thing that he walked through two years after the
00:37:20.400 miracle.
00:37:20.660 And so I think we definitely, one of the things we told God in the hospital when this was playing
00:37:25.600 out is we will shout this from the mountaintop.
00:37:28.220 And Joyce would tell you that Joyce is an incredible woman, mama bear who, I mean, is
00:37:33.480 just fierce.
00:37:34.280 I mean, when she walks into the room, it just, the, the atmosphere changes.
00:37:38.000 And you know, um, I think that's a big piece we've all been given, given this to share with
00:37:44.180 the world.
00:37:44.540 I mean, the movie's great.
00:37:45.500 Love it.
00:37:46.140 Love the screen.
00:37:46.900 Love all of that.
00:37:47.600 But the message I was in a church and spoke, we spoke last weekend in a church of about
00:37:51.680 2000 people.
00:37:52.780 And when I gave the altar response at the end of it, I said, how many of you need a breakthrough
00:37:56.560 in your life?
00:37:57.500 A hundred percent of the congregation stood.
00:38:00.140 And that was in the Northeast.
00:38:01.520 I mean, you know, the Northeast is a rough place.
00:38:03.560 And so, um, I mean, so just for such a time as this, um, were the doctors skeptical of
00:38:13.340 not at all.
00:38:13.920 The doctor's bonafide works like again, in the trailer, it looks like the doctors.
00:38:17.580 It was like, well, I don't know.
00:38:19.920 I mean, if he lives, we should probably shoot him.
00:38:22.500 Right.
00:38:23.540 It's typical doctors, right?
00:38:24.920 I mean, they're going to give you the worst case scenario.
00:38:27.000 Yeah.
00:38:27.200 And that's exactly what they did.
00:38:28.860 You know, I mean, they gave him the worst case scenario.
00:38:30.860 I think that's one thing that really plays into breakthrough is that yes, this was a miracle
00:38:34.660 done by God, but also we have science to back it up.
00:38:37.760 Yes.
00:38:38.120 There's 300 plus pages of medical documents to back up that this is a miracle.
00:38:43.220 They want to say the, the cold water helped you.
00:38:45.340 Well, it was too warm.
00:38:46.160 They want to say, you know, your body froze.
00:38:48.500 Well, my head would have had to go in first.
00:38:50.880 Um, like you said, the doctors doubted, but we had the number one expert in the Midwest
00:38:55.480 or in some, I think the Midwest.
00:38:57.720 Yeah.
00:38:57.960 Midwest.
00:38:58.340 He was the number one medical expert in hypothermia and drowning.
00:39:01.640 And he got on secular TV and claimed that this is a modern day miracle and he can't even
00:39:05.780 explain it.
00:39:06.700 I've spoken to, um, a breakfast with some retired medical field doctors and I told him
00:39:13.580 the story and a lot of them came up to me and said, I have been doing this my whole life
00:39:18.140 until I, when I graduated high school, you did, did med school and done the whole wazoo
00:39:23.480 all my years.
00:39:24.640 And I said, I can explain just about every case, but yours, I have no idea.
00:39:29.100 Yeah.
00:39:29.280 I mean, it defies everything we know about the body.
00:39:33.920 100%.
00:39:34.320 You know, especially, I mean, there's no effect looking at you.
00:39:38.300 There's no effect.
00:39:39.840 And you say there's no, there's nothing, there's nothing that's different.
00:39:44.600 About six months after this, he had to go to the eye doctor because he was having some
00:39:47.940 trouble with his eyes.
00:39:48.640 And usually if you've died, all of your blood vessels in your eyes are the first things
00:39:52.880 to kind of show that sign of.
00:39:54.780 And so the nurse, the doctor was looking in his eyes and she said, you know, after this
00:39:58.180 episode, and I love what John said, it was an episode.
00:40:00.240 He said, I died and told the doctor that.
00:40:02.460 And she looked in his eyes and said, I, there's no sign.
00:40:05.020 Your blood vessels are completely normal.
00:40:07.220 I mean, so it's, it's incredible.
00:40:09.420 You're absolutely right.
00:40:10.380 There's no sign.
00:40:11.540 I mean, it's really great.
00:40:13.620 It's amazing.
00:40:14.340 It's good to meet you.
00:40:15.140 It's good to meet you.
00:40:15.840 Glad you're alive.
00:40:16.960 Thank you.
00:40:17.460 Welcome back.
00:40:17.960 And the movie, the movie breakthrough comes out, uh, April 17th, April 17th, 2019, the
00:40:23.200 books as well.
00:40:23.940 They're out now.
00:40:24.560 They're out now.
00:40:25.040 You can get them on Amazon and breakthrough and breakthrough to your miracle.
00:40:28.900 Breakthrough.
00:40:29.340 Is that your book that came out today?
00:40:30.780 Yes.
00:40:31.040 Breakthrough to your miracle came out today.
00:40:32.540 And so it's just a teaching, you know, it's all of what we learned.
00:40:35.660 So, and Glenn, how long have we been doing the show for a zillion years now?
00:40:38.860 I think since the beginning, we've asked Hollywood to make movies like stories like this and
00:40:44.960 do them right, which never happens.
00:40:47.760 And this is one, they're really doing it.
00:40:49.420 This is them taking a big risk.
00:40:50.680 And it's, you know, it's something we should support.
00:40:52.740 20th century Fox.
00:40:53.820 Yeah.
00:40:54.160 I mean, it's, I couldn't believe it.
00:40:56.340 When I saw it, I was like, shut up.
00:40:59.260 Which you know what that means.
00:41:00.500 It's actually Disney.
00:41:01.440 It'll be Disney in the next couple of weeks.
00:41:03.120 Which they've never done a faith-based film.
00:41:05.180 Wow.
00:41:05.700 All right.
00:41:06.200 It hits theaters April 17th.
00:41:07.780 Guys, thank you so much.
00:41:08.780 God bless.
00:41:14.080 You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:41:26.660 Dr. Susan Crockford is a zoologist.
00:41:29.540 She has been working on the history of Arctic animals.
00:41:37.040 She is a polar bear biologist, I believe.
00:41:42.980 Is that right, Susan?
00:41:43.680 Are you a polar bear biologist as well?
00:41:45.980 Well, I'm really a general biologist.
00:41:49.500 But I've got a special interest in polar bears for sure.
00:41:52.760 Okay.
00:41:53.500 First of all, when did you develop this special interest in polar bears?
00:41:57.480 Or when in your life did you go, I want to study polar bears?
00:42:01.480 Well, it was really probably 20 years ago.
00:42:04.740 I was really interested in the evolution of polar bears.
00:42:09.020 And, you know, like, where did they come from?
00:42:11.620 And how did they actually come to be as a separate species?
00:42:16.620 And so since that time, I've been looking at the literature on polar bears.
00:42:22.800 And, you know, reading it all and examining it in detail.
00:42:26.540 Okay.
00:42:26.860 So that's how I got here.
00:42:27.960 All right.
00:42:28.220 So the catastrophic global warming stuff, they have been telling us for years,
00:42:34.500 we're killing all of the polar bears because the ice caps are melting.
00:42:39.760 And you point out that the ice caps have melted to 2050 levels in the summer,
00:42:47.660 and yet the bears don't seem to be decreasing.
00:42:52.380 Exactly.
00:42:53.460 And that was really what the whole hype was about.
00:42:57.120 Around the turn of this century, like around the year 2000,
00:43:02.000 you had polar bears really elevated to this icon of global warming.
00:43:07.020 And they were, you know, the epitome of what humans were doing wrong
00:43:13.180 in destroying the planet and all of that.
00:43:16.540 And then in 2008, when polar bears were listed in the U.S.
00:43:23.440 as being threatened with extinction, in fact, by 2007,
00:43:29.440 the summer ice levels had already dropped to the levels that they had predicted
00:43:37.740 wouldn't happen until the middle of the century.
00:43:41.320 Now, the middle of the century was when they said that two-thirds of all the bears
00:43:45.880 were going to disappear because of the lack of ice.
00:43:49.600 And in fact, since 2007, although there's been a little bit of up and down,
00:43:54.500 that those levels, summer sea ice levels have stayed at that mid-century level ever since,
00:44:03.600 and yet polar bear numbers have actually increased.
00:44:07.080 And to the point to where, I mean, polar bears, people don't realize polar bears are nasty animals.
00:44:14.040 They will eat you.
00:44:15.180 Exactly. And we saw this just last summer where there were two fatal attacks within two months
00:44:24.080 in Canada on western Hudson Bay.
00:44:28.280 And it really has residents of the Arctic very nervous about the potential
00:44:35.480 for what a really thriving population of polar bears really means
00:44:41.380 for people who actually have to live and work there year-round.
00:44:44.760 So this is an amazing thing because, you know, it's like the people who go big game hunting
00:44:50.080 and, you know, they'll take a picture with a lion
00:44:53.480 and everybody will be all up in arms about the lion,
00:44:56.600 except for the people in the community.
00:44:58.820 They're like, no, lions eat us.
00:45:02.520 We need to keep their population under control.
00:45:05.980 It's not that these people hate polar bears or want to wipe out all polar bears.
00:45:11.780 They just need control of the population because they're everywhere.
00:45:17.420 They're around the garbage dump.
00:45:19.340 They're around, you know, stores or any place where there's lots of garbage or food, correct?
00:45:26.860 Exactly.
00:45:27.840 However, what you have to remember is that the two attacks that happened last summer
00:45:33.280 actually occurred away from communities and there were no attractants involved.
00:45:40.540 Both of those attacks were purely predatory attacks where the bears came after those people
00:45:47.540 with the intent to eat them.
00:45:50.060 Okay.
00:45:50.280 So now, again, the global warming people say this is only happening because their, you know,
00:45:56.300 their food source that they have always had, you know, whatever, is just dying
00:46:02.660 and they can't have the food source, so they're just starving to death
00:46:06.160 and they have to go down into these communities and forage.
00:46:09.480 Is that the truth or is it lazy bears?
00:46:11.280 Well, that's what they say, of course, but, you know, that's,
00:46:14.340 what they're doing is sort of citing a generalized trend of what they think they see overall.
00:46:23.500 But when you look at the specifics of these incidents, what you find is the one attack
00:46:30.600 actually occurred when the bears were just off the ice.
00:46:35.640 In fact, it was a party of three hunters who had, they were on a boat
00:46:42.180 and they had to go to shore because they had engine trouble.
00:46:45.300 So they were just waiting to fix their boat and the ice moved in and trapped them.
00:46:52.160 Wow.
00:46:53.020 Amazing.
00:46:53.500 One of them got, they were just having morning tea and this bear came in and attacked them
00:47:00.000 and they couldn't be rescued.
00:47:01.560 They sat there protecting the body of their friend as more and more bears came in,
00:47:07.880 attracted to all the carnage until they could be rescued because there was so much ice.
00:47:15.540 Now, so that incident cannot be blamed on lack of sea ice.
00:47:19.400 Now, Susan, I've been following the polar bear thing for a while.
00:47:23.460 My understanding of it from the media is it used to be that polar bears would basically
00:47:28.740 only sit at the bottom of hills with their children and drink Coca-Cola.
00:47:32.480 Do polar bears, first let's clear this up, do polar bears share their coke with cubs and
00:47:41.820 other animals up in the north?
00:47:45.240 Well, you know, they sometimes share their seals.
00:47:48.460 So if they had coke, they would share.
00:47:51.140 Right.
00:47:51.380 Maybe they need seal-flavored coke.
00:47:54.160 That would be something they could get.
00:47:55.560 Well, you know, what would happen is that they wouldn't have straws now.
00:47:58.060 Oh, that's right.
00:47:59.300 It's hard to share.
00:48:00.320 That's right.
00:48:00.980 That's true.
00:48:02.260 You are my favorite zoologist.
00:48:05.180 But we do hear a lot of claims about how the sea ice is melting and these poor polar
00:48:11.400 bears are forced to wade into the water and try to swim and find land, and then they just
00:48:18.560 die out in the middle of the ocean searching for a place to stop swimming.
00:48:22.660 How accurate are those claims?
00:48:24.220 Well, one of the things that's happened is that it's kind of an ironic repercussion of
00:48:31.840 all of this concern about the polar bears' future is that all of the money that's been
00:48:37.820 poured into polar bear research has actually taught us a lot about what polar bears can
00:48:46.180 and can't do when there's less sea ice.
00:48:48.760 And one of the things that they've learned is that polar bears deal with open water much
00:48:53.660 better than anyone expected.
00:48:56.180 And that, in fact, you know, they can take less sea ice in summer in their stride.
00:49:02.100 It's not really an issue.
00:49:03.580 It really is amazing because all the claims, I mean, this goes mainly back, I think, to,
00:49:08.900 at least in the public eye, to Al Gore's movie where, you know, he had animation of polar
00:49:14.100 bears dying.
00:49:14.800 And, I mean, when you say that back in the 60s and 70s, it was between, what, 5,000 and
00:49:21.280 10,000 polar bears on Earth.
00:49:23.360 And now we're looking at...
00:49:24.420 I would say between 5,000 and 15,000.
00:49:26.840 So I picked 10 as an average, okay?
00:49:29.760 Okay, 10,000.
00:49:30.560 And then what is the number actually today?
00:49:33.240 Well, when I look at the, all of the information that we've got, all the recent surveys, and
00:49:40.820 apply those to areas that we don't have information for, the number comes to 39,000.
00:49:47.000 39,000, I mean...
00:49:48.400 So, four times.
00:49:49.740 How can they be talking about this creature going extinct when we're talking about a quadrupling
00:49:56.140 of the number of them?
00:49:57.120 I mean, it just makes no sense to the average person.
00:49:59.480 Does it make sense to you?
00:50:00.880 Well, no, it doesn't.
00:50:01.760 And one of the things that I discovered and the thing that I talk about in my book is
00:50:06.520 that back in 2006, 2007, when the polar bear experts of the world were sitting down and
00:50:15.600 trying to figure out what would happen to the bears if the sea ice dropped to, you know,
00:50:21.100 levels that we've got today, they had really no information about how the bears would cope
00:50:28.880 with less sea ice because it hadn't happened yet.
00:50:32.500 So, they were guessing.
00:50:34.540 You know, they were using their knowledge about what polar bears did and what they had seen
00:50:40.300 so far and made a guess about what would happen.
00:50:45.020 And it turned out they were wrong.
00:50:46.540 So, what they had done was sold to the public as facts their guesses.
00:50:55.920 Theory.
00:50:57.640 Are polar bears just northern animals or can you find them in the South Pole too?
00:51:02.880 No.
00:51:03.420 No.
00:51:03.760 They're strictly northern animals because, in fact, you don't get...
00:51:07.800 They come from...
00:51:08.800 They evolved from brown bears.
00:51:10.620 And so, brown bears are also a northern hemisphere animal.
00:51:15.300 And why are they?
00:51:16.420 You started with...
00:51:17.200 I wanted to know why they were a unique species, why they came and how they got there and,
00:51:22.780 you know, how they...
00:51:23.520 Well, from all we can figure out that it really would have come down to the Ice Ages,
00:51:30.560 the response of brown bears to the ice expanding during Ice Ages and there were brown bears,
00:51:41.620 for example, in Ireland.
00:51:43.800 So, if you had ice coming down and covering England and Ireland, what you're doing is reducing
00:51:51.520 the amount of habitat left for the brown bears there to exist and you've got sea ice developing
00:51:58.440 offshore where there is seals because there has been seals for millions of years longer
00:52:04.040 than there's been bears.
00:52:05.520 So, there's food out there.
00:52:08.300 So, it's an alternative habitat for brown bears to use during an Ice Age.
00:52:16.500 Last question.
00:52:17.360 Is there a time...
00:52:19.000 Is there a number or a time when you say, okay, there's...
00:52:23.320 That's like, we're at record-setting numbers of bears, polar bears, or they need...
00:52:29.220 Do we need to thin the herd or anything like that?
00:52:31.700 Is there a...
00:52:32.300 Is there a number that...
00:52:34.040 How many polar bears are too many polar bears?
00:52:35.760 Yes.
00:52:36.180 Well, I don't know.
00:52:37.840 I don't think I can answer that question.
00:52:39.520 But, you know, there's...
00:52:40.920 It's going...
00:52:42.860 It's already a problem for communities in the Arctic.
00:52:45.760 And Churchill in Manitoba is sort of offered as the perfect way of how you deal with large
00:52:56.480 numbers of polar bears coming in in the fall, and this is how you deal with the increased
00:53:00.700 danger.
00:53:01.640 But that takes a lot of money.
00:53:04.420 And most of the communities, you know, little isolated communities, hamlets in Greenland and
00:53:10.040 up in northern Canada, they don't have that kind of money.
00:53:12.760 And so those are the people who are going to have to decide how much is too...
00:53:19.800 How many is too much.
00:53:22.740 Thank you so much, Susan.
00:53:23.940 I really appreciate it.
00:53:24.900 Susan Crockford, she is...
00:53:27.320 She can be found online at polarbearscience.com.
00:53:30.960 She is the author of a book called The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.
00:53:36.180 Susan, thank you.
00:53:37.040 God bless.
00:53:37.500 The Blaze Radio Network.
00:53:39.540 On Demand.