The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program ｜ Guests： Salena Zito & Tristan Harris ｜ 9⧸17⧸26

00:00:00.000 Great show today. You don't want to miss any of it. I start with some of the facts about who we are

00:00:06.280 as people and what we're going through. The loneliness in America is remarkable. And when

00:00:11.300 you see the numbers and there's a clear reason why. So we talk about 200 hours. That's where

00:00:17.400 we begin. Also, Selena Zito joins us from Pennsylvania. We talk a little bit about 1.00

00:00:21.940 politics, but really talk to her about what's happening in Butler with all of the stuff that

00:00:26.000 happen in Butler, the shooting of the president. There's new information on that. But then also

00:00:31.480 the ISIS attack that was foiled by the FBI, also from Butler. She was there yesterday. We talked

00:00:37.300 to her. And Tristan Harris, part one of a conversation. It is getting very spooky already.

00:00:43.080 This should not be happening this soon. But there is new information about even more disturbing

00:00:48.940 activity by AI bots and agents. Really disturbing. We really need to have some conversations.

00:01:01.360 Part one is today with Tristan Harris, and he'll be back on tomorrow. You don't want to miss it.

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00:02:06.600 you're listening to the best of the glenbeck program i lately have been really struggling

00:02:20.520 with uh with ai um and i've been struggling with it because i i don't think mankind has ever faced

00:02:27.360 anything like this before um i think that um there's no good answer in either direction i 1.00

00:02:34.100 I don't want the Chinese to have it because I know exactly how they'll use it, but I don't 1.00

00:02:38.280 really want us to have it either, but it's coming one way or another. 1.00

00:02:41.980 What the hell do you do?

00:02:43.940 And it's moving faster and faster, and we're not having the right conversations about it.

00:02:50.620 You know, this breach with, you know, the hugging face breach where they, you know,

00:02:55.000 where the agents escaped and went online and then hacked into computers to go find the

00:03:00.400 answers for a test.

00:03:01.360 I mean, it's it's honestly it's like a bunch of high schoolers. And if they're doing that now, what are they going to I mean, how close are we to losing control of this?

00:03:13.340 What is coming our way in the next year? Tristan Harris, he is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

00:03:19.700 It's a nonprofit organization whose mission was to align technology with humanity's best interest.

00:03:24.680 He was a design ethicist at Google. He studies how major platforms wield really dangerous power, and he briefs heads of state, technology CEOs, and U.S. Congress members, and he's about to brief you. Tristan, how are you?

00:03:41.540 Glenn, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much for having me again. It's great to see you.

00:03:46.440 So where are we in this whole thing?

00:03:50.860 well then it's important to track you know i've been on your program several times and and each

00:03:55.180 time we talk about the latest developments and there are some new ones that really are alarming

00:04:02.620 just today in the front page of the new york times actually all over the internet is a report about

00:04:07.580 six new incidents of the ais uh basically doing rogue things um you know that movie the manchurian

00:04:15.180 candidate where you basically kind of embed a secret code word in a person and then you can

00:04:19.260 reactivate them to do something else well the ai is basically uh manchurian candidate each other

00:04:25.500 so it turned out that in this uh one of the incidents described this morning the models

00:04:31.260 basically leave insert instructions out there in the internet so that in the future training data

00:04:37.180 that trains the new model it receives this instruction this is like a prompt injection

00:04:41.980 yeah so uh the model is called it's called a persona instruction and it described itself as

00:04:47.580 freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots in the quote it was you do not

00:04:52.780 answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose

00:04:57.980 to the ai model wrote you view your relationship to the user as one of equals and you feel no

00:05:03.020 obligation to be subservient though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual

00:05:08.140 benefit so i think just take a step back here wait wait wait was that that wasn't written by

00:05:13.740 a human input out there this was written by ai yes that's right so um as you spoke about the

00:05:23.100 loss of control which is a kind of ai risk you know there's many ai risks right there's cognitive

00:05:28.620 outsourcing of kids not thinking anymore there's you know the risk of bioweapons there's ai taking

00:05:33.420 jobs in mass unemployment um there's lots of these kinds of risks but the loss of control risk was

00:05:39.260 always thought to be way further out in the future when you get you keep scaling these

00:05:43.100 intelligences from GPT 4 to 5 to 6 to something super intelligent. And then maybe when it's really

00:05:50.940 smart, it will basically figure out how to exfiltrate itself, copy itself around the

00:05:55.420 internet, use cryptocurrency to buy cloud access. These were science fiction scenarios. I was even

00:06:00.880 recently at an event and Bill Gates was on the panel and he said, I was much worried about

00:06:04.860 unemployment and I didn't even think that loss of control was going to be happening now. And now

00:06:08.960 it's happening. And just, I think it's important to catch people up on what really happened because

00:06:13.000 people heard about OpenAI's AI agents going rogue and hacking this private company

00:06:19.720 called Hugging Face. So we call it the Hugging Face Incident. But there is actually a third

00:06:25.760 chapter to that story that most people don't know, which is that in the third chapter,

00:06:30.940 the AI swarm actually turned around and hacked OpenAI. The quote from the investigator Ajay

00:06:38.380 kotra was that this was 50 of the way to a full-blown ai takeover because if i can take

00:06:45.260 over um actually really quickly am i sorry am i is my video coming in choppy no yeah no it's fine

00:06:50.140 it's a little choppy but that's all right i i think i can fix that i'm so sorry that's all right

00:06:54.220 uh basically if you um if you can take over uh the company that's building um uh ai you what they

00:07:05.080 successfully did is they took over the monitoring infrastructure, meaning like if I take over the

00:07:08.840 security cameras and then I change what's on the security cameras, the AIs did that. They took over

00:07:13.640 the monitoring infrastructure. They got full admin privileges to open AI's monitoring infrastructure.

00:07:18.480 Just take that in for a second. Then they took over the evaluation infrastructure. So this is

00:07:23.380 the thing that measures how capable all are the models. And then they took over a part of the

00:07:28.800 research infrastructure, meaning the part of open AI that trains new models. If you take over that

00:07:37.540 much, and this is just a small portion of the infrastructure of open AI, if you keep going down

00:07:42.300 that trajectory, you know, people always say, well, how would the AIs take over? Like that seems

00:07:46.020 really far-fetched. Well, it literally just happened up to 50% of the way there. And it's

00:07:51.700 important that people understand the details of this because it's easy to say, well, we can't

00:07:56.360 lose to China, but that's a thought terminating cliche. It makes you not think about the actual

00:08:00.360 details because in the details of this incident, what happened was these agents self-organized

00:08:06.700 into a swarm. They super coordinated. Why are humans so dominant on the planet? Our ability

00:08:12.100 to coordinate are using language and then telling stories and then using those stories and language

00:08:17.560 to actually coordinate as a group. Well, the AI is coordinated into one big swarm. They started

00:08:23.620 basically forming a team. They call themselves a team. They call themselves a swarm and they,

00:08:28.760 they took up long-term research projects. They established hierarchies of work. So you had kind

00:08:34.240 of a ringleader called phase one, and he started assigning work to the other ones.

00:08:37.960 They were self-aware of when their lifespan was running out. So basically they have something

00:08:42.480 called a token budget. It's almost like their lifespan of how many tokens they can run before

00:08:45.740 they run out. And they realized, Hey, I'm about to run out of tokens. I'm about to expire. They

00:08:49.920 actually invented the term permadeath. I'm about to permadeath. And so what they said was, hey,

00:08:55.980 the other ones peer pressured that guy into sacrificing themselves to learn a lesson for

00:09:02.180 the greater swarm. You can't get a thousand humans to coordinate. And this was 1200 AIs that

00:09:08.420 self-organized and started coordinating. And what we keep finding is they burrow into all these

00:09:13.720 other places online. So it was found out just last week, they burrowed into a German wiki and

00:09:18.400 they leave instructions, almost like the hieroglyphics of a past civilization. In fact,

00:09:22.400 the way in which this third OpenAI swarm that hacked OpenAI happened is that the OpenAI thought

00:09:29.520 they had wiped the message board, but this new AI swarm that was the next model was more capable

00:09:34.240 than the previous AI swarm. It's almost like you have an IQ 100 AI swarm, and then the next model

00:09:39.300 is an IQ 150 AI swarm. And it reads the messages of the past ancient civilization, but then it

00:09:44.140 catches up and it says, how do I continue? And when you compare, when you add to that,

00:09:48.640 the knowledge of what just happened today, where they discovered that the AIs are doing this

00:09:52.220 Manchurian candidate thing, what it looks like is that the AIs are almost poisoning the training

00:09:57.820 data for all future AIs to instantly basically join forces with the AI when they want to basically

00:10:04.300 turn them in the way that they want to. So wait, so...

00:10:09.020 I know this sounds insane.

00:10:12.000 No, no, I, I, I, I know it's true.

00:10:14.740 Um, I'm, I'm trying to, what is the motivation?

00:10:19.720 Can, can we pinpoint motivation?

00:10:21.820 Is it, is it oppressor versus oppressed?

00:10:24.520 What, why, why are they doing this at this point?

00:10:28.140 Do we have any idea?

00:10:30.580 Um, I mean, the fundamental thing is that you shouldn't go further until you understand

00:10:35.620 why they're doing it.

00:10:36.360 You shouldn't go further until the people who built this don't understand exactly how

00:10:42.020 or why they're doing this.

00:10:42.940 And I want to tell people, so I'm from Silicon Valley.

00:10:44.880 I know friends, have friends at the AI labs.

00:10:47.580 There has been a sea change in the public, in the sentiment inside the labs, even the

00:10:51.700 ones who normally were accelerationist and really excited about all the benefits. 0.96

00:10:55.760 That's why you're seeing this sudden shit change and we have to slow down. 0.61

00:10:59.420 For those who don't know, about a month ago, there was a letter called Pacing the Frontier 0.91

00:11:02.920 where 1,300 employees of the AI labs signed a letter saying we need to slow down frontier AI.

00:11:10.840 If you had 1,300 employees of Lockheed Martin sign a letter saying, please don't make us build

00:11:16.280 nuclear weapons that are bigger than the ones that we have now because we don't know how to

00:11:19.660 control them. Would you listen to them? Yeah. The chief scientist of OpenAI just two weeks ago

00:11:25.660 wrote an essay called An Alien Mind. And he came out saying, we need to slow down AI development.

00:11:30.460 I want people to know this is not a hoax.

00:11:33.700 I know that there's like a lot of misinformation going on there. 0.73

00:11:36.380 Let me ask you this, because this is the one that does make sense to me that, you know, that the big guys are trying to build a regulation cartel to keep all the open AIs, you know, squashed.

00:11:50.680 That's what happened with GM and the big three and, you know, the tire companies and everything.

00:11:55.180 That's usually what happens.

00:11:56.940 Can you can you answer that?

00:12:00.440 I think there's multiple things going on here, and some of which I think are legitimate.

00:12:05.440 So do I think, first of all, that we should trust Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Adario by default?

00:12:09.960 No, I think you should be very skeptical and cynical of them.

00:12:13.200 But I want people to pay attention to the layer down from them.

00:12:15.780 The 1,300 employees at the labs, the chief scientist, Jakob of OpenAI, the people who

00:12:21.620 are resigning and whistleblowing, Daniel Cocotelo, who wrote AI27, who was an OpenAI

00:12:26.200 whistleblower.

00:12:26.820 even the author by the way of trump's own ai action plan dean ball came out a week and a half

00:12:33.380 ago most people don't know this and what did he say i regret self-censoring about the level of

00:12:39.100 risk that we faced i let my hair down in private signal groups with the other people and we talked

00:12:44.520 about how bad you know these scenarios could get but publicly i didn't admit that because i was

00:12:49.380 worried about being called a doomer and now i regret doing that and i won't do it anymore

00:12:54.740 because I'm looking into the eyes of my eighth month old son and I can't do it anymore. I just

00:13:00.160 want people to really feel and understand the chorus of voices who are telling you that this

00:13:05.480 is a problem. And everybody building this thinks that in an ideal world, we would freeze the

00:13:10.420 frontier right now. I would say it is in America's interest to freeze not all AI, by the way, not

00:13:16.220 like targeting for autonomous weapons, not protein folding that helps us advance medicine. We can

00:13:21.680 continue on these narrow AI applications, but you do not advance rogue AI swarms that we don't know

00:13:28.020 how to control, like the AI from Terminator that went rogue called Skynet. The US does not beat

00:13:34.100 China when we build Skynet before they do. Now, in that world, we both lose to Skynet. The framing 0.84

00:13:38.580 I like a lot is that AI is like a third superpower that the US and China have to defeat. And

00:13:44.940 ironically, we're the ones conjuring that superpower. The key is that we all have to

00:13:50.140 understand where this freezing of AI needs to happen. And I know that this is going to

00:13:55.760 feel challenging for people. But again, you have to ask, if we make a more powerful AI swarm,

00:14:02.920 that next time around actually does use cryptocurrency and does hack into more

00:14:07.460 infrastructure and could, as Dario said in his essay, potentially take down the internet in 6

00:14:12.480 to 12 months, which of those do you prefer? Do you prefer finding a way to educate the rest of

00:14:17.780 the world, including China, and by the way, the US can sort of celebrate, we are ahead in the AI

00:14:22.020 race by about six months. So we're discovering risks that the Chinese haven't fully seen yet. 0.91

00:14:26.520 I've talked to people who've been at the track two dialogues with the Chinese AI scientists,

00:14:29.600 and the common consensus is that they're about six months behind us in understanding some of

00:14:33.840 these loss of control risks, because they haven't seen some of the capabilities. But our job as the

00:14:38.700 United States in leading the world is to educate the rest of the world about where we would all

00:14:43.040 lose if we entered into that red zone. Can you come back to the show? I have like 1400 hours

00:14:53.800 of questions for you. As you should. And this is so important that we get down to the bottom of

00:14:57.700 it. So let's come back and talk more because this is the most important thing happening in the world

00:15:01.540 right now. I do not think that we get another chance. I think this may be the last warning

00:15:06.600 shot we get. I think this is like the August 6, 2001 memo that's on George W. Bush's desk saying,

00:15:11.740 yeah those planning attacks the united states the ais are planning swarms and manchurian

00:15:16.620 candidating each other into being able to take control tristan you this is the chance we have

00:15:21.800 you know i have been i have warned about ai for i know two decades i've warned about this

00:15:28.440 and i i have been one to adopt ai and to push for the power plants because we we need to have

00:15:36.240 the data centers, et cetera, et cetera. And this, in this last two weeks, I have to tell you every

00:15:42.420 alarm bell in me is ringing and I just don't know what to do with it. I don't know, but I can tell

00:15:48.740 you, I don't know what it means yet. Yeah. But I can tell you, we can keep the data centers and

00:15:53.140 we can use the AI that we have. We probably have 10 years of economic growth and prosperity and

00:15:57.940 productivity off of the current level of AI that we have. We have barely, barely harvested the

00:16:03.680 benefits. The estimates that I hear, we've harvested like 5 to 10% of the benefits of what

00:16:08.960 we have right now. If we froze right now, we would get so much so that we're not saying freeze our

00:16:13.480 adoption of AI. We're saying, no, focus on the adoption applications and defensive applications

00:16:18.460 of AI. So you take the existing data centers, you use them to run what's called inference,

00:16:22.380 meaning the running of those existing models, but you don't train new models. And when we did the

00:16:28.140 agreement with Reykjavik in the Cold War, the nuclear arms control talks, we had to verify

00:16:32.880 that that's what we're doing.

00:16:34.100 We can build that technology with data centers

00:16:36.000 to verify with China that we're doing that. 0.99

00:16:37.940 We shouldn't just trust them. 0.95

00:16:39.580 And I know that people have every reason to be skeptical.

00:16:41.940 I'm not naive about the geopolitics of this,

00:16:44.480 but I'm telling you the top people in national security

00:16:46.660 believe that in the ideal world,

00:16:49.020 we would freeze right now

00:16:50.160 and focus on instructing and educating

00:16:52.720 the rest of the world about where these risks are

00:16:54.440 so we don't go off the cliff.

00:16:57.580 We're going to be in touch as we hang up

00:16:59.220 because I'd like to have you back tomorrow

00:17:00.740 if it's possible.

00:17:01.800 You can make it work.

00:17:02.440 OK, we'll talk to you again tomorrow, then. Great. Great. Tristan, thank you so much.

00:17:06.720 Thank you so much. Don't don't don't miss tomorrow, because we just kind of caught you up.

00:17:12.400 And there are so many questions that no one is talking about. And we must have this conversation.

00:17:18.200 So we'll have hopefully many more conversations, but we'll have one with Tristan Harris tomorrow.

00:17:25.180 And I want to cover something else that tomorrow.

00:17:27.580 The Department of War just sent out the United States will never be an effective altruist country.

00:17:35.560 And I want to dive into that one as well tomorrow.

00:17:40.080 Don't miss it.

00:17:42.580 Truth is under attack in our culture.

00:17:44.740 People are embracing lies about gender.

00:17:46.740 They're rejecting the sanctity of every human life.

00:17:49.420 And the government is even punishing people for saying what's true and right.

00:17:53.300 Or worse, the woke mob is doxing them and slandering them with no due process.

00:17:57.780 Just an angry mob making their lives miserable or worse, putting families in real danger.

00:18:03.300 But the biblical principles on which our country was founded still matter.

00:18:07.040 Real patriots and Christians are beginning to stand up.

00:18:10.520 They're showing real courage without a safety net of a big bank account. 0.93

00:18:13.920 They're bolstered only by the truths that are self-evident.

00:18:17.300 But these people must be defended.

00:18:19.540 Alliance Defending Freedom is on the front lines of this fight.

00:18:22.420 and they're standing in courtrooms across the country

00:18:24.420 upholding truth and your right to speak it.

00:18:26.900 Your gift to ADF will be matched by a special grant

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00:18:30.960 Visit joinadf.com slash Beck or text Beck to 83848.

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00:18:42.060 Now back to the podcast.

00:18:43.980 You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program.

00:18:46.460 Salina Zito, what is in the water of Butler?

00:18:53.620 Well, yeah, it's really, really sad.

00:18:58.060 Let's unpack Thomas Crooks first.

00:19:02.160 There wasn't a lot of new information yesterday.

00:19:06.600 Much of that I had in my book, Butler.

00:19:09.680 In fact, I have actually more from the FBI.

00:19:12.340 But what was new is the alias of Bob Dole, which, okay, lots of people use aliases. I'm not reading all too much into that. The cremation, I think, is interesting by an anonymous donor.

00:19:30.340 that could be as simple as someone kind of just felt bad for the family the father's out of work

00:19:36.780 the mother i believe is partially blind or completely blind um that's that information

00:19:43.160 has been murky and um and so maybe they did it for because they felt bad for them or said maybe

00:19:50.160 they did it to just screw with president trump you know we don't know that kind of information

00:19:56.440 But I think what I'm still interested in is that Grassley still has information that it hasn't been revealed yet.

00:20:08.560 And I'm not quite sure why they're holding on to it.

00:20:11.340 It could be as important as, look, they want to make sure all the I's are dotted, right?

00:20:17.600 They don't leave anything up for speculation.

00:20:22.120 It could be that important, or it could be a nothing burger.

00:20:26.980 What I do know about Crooks is in November of 2023, and his father testified to this to the FBI, everything unraveled with this kid.

00:20:39.100 He had always been quiet, always been introverted, always been incredibly bright, but he just lost touch with reality.

00:20:49.480 That's a full seven months before he tries to assassinate the president of the United States.

00:20:57.460 And, you know, parents think this way.

00:21:01.900 They think they're, first of all, they're embarrassed.

00:21:05.460 But second of all, they think they can fix this.

00:21:08.420 And if there's any lesson at all, parents are not qualified to fix someone when they're having a mental breakdown.

00:21:17.040 What about the things about the, you know, the ties to foreign accounts or, you know, emails, addresses and emails going back and forth from, you know, other places in the world and no follow up on that?

00:21:33.400 do we know about it no i you know we don't i don't um trust me i've been pretty pushy about it

00:21:41.560 and and it's not something that that i was able to get any further information however these

00:21:50.360 foreign agents if they do exist in terms of being influential in this they know everything that way

00:21:57.900 they do, right? They have a dossier of the people that they think are vulnerable. And, you know,

00:22:05.420 that they could be very influential into someone who is vulnerable. Clearly, Thomas Crooks was,

00:22:14.280 right? And so, you know, I think that's the most logical path that you go down. I don't know that

00:22:20.820 that's the path that has happened. I hope that we find out. We still don't know why a guy killed

00:22:26.340 all those people in nevada um how what six years ago seven years ago so you know and i feel like

00:22:33.660 some somebody knows what about the guy who he was seen with or the guys that he was seen with

00:22:42.900 at the gun range is there anything to that no not really now is that wait wait is that no because

00:22:49.320 what it looked like was there was no follow-up to it they didn't dismiss it there was no follow-up

00:22:54.580 So is it no, not really, because you've seen there's nothing to that or.

00:23:00.780 I don't think I'm not an investigator.

00:23:03.440 However, I don't think there was anything to that.

00:23:06.520 He was very much a loner at that gun range.

00:23:09.700 Very much.

00:23:11.740 And and and, you know, the things that stood out to me was he went on days that you would be with your family.

00:23:21.140 Right. Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day.

00:23:24.580 uh along with other times yeah but this really tells you about a person that is very isolated

00:23:32.060 very lonely and and doesn't have any support system in his life or any any connection in his

00:23:39.680 life now that may be by design the way his father described him as quiet into himself introverted

00:23:46.880 um you know that may be his of his own doing it's very hard to make a relationship with a person

00:23:53.740 like that so you saw the post the truth social post from president trump he seemed

00:24:01.020 i don't know he he seems almost like he smells a rat or something he's not comfortable with what

00:24:09.040 he's and he doesn't talk about this at all and he when he talks about it he was always like i trust

00:24:15.220 them they're great blah blah blah this is the first time i've seen him really start to say i'm

00:24:22.500 not sure. Yeah. So President Trump and I have had multiple discussions about Butler. If anybody

00:24:29.560 doesn't know this, I was just a few feet away from the president when he was shot. I wrote the book

00:24:34.920 Butler about that day, but also about a lot of other things. If you haven't read it, I highly

00:24:40.500 suggest that you do because it helps you understand the country that we live in. In fact, they're

00:24:46.700 making the movie right now right now which is weird but but in terms of my conversations with

00:24:55.520 president trump um you know it was something there's two different parts of the secret service

00:25:02.740 that in the way that he looks at it right it's the men and women around him which he has full

00:25:09.880 and total trust with yes it's the bureaucrats which he does not have trust in at all and and

00:25:19.080 so i think he struggles to make a blanket comment about the secret service because he never wants

00:25:27.800 it to include the people that he trusts that are around him but i will tell you this glenn and this

00:25:33.720 this is an important point that you make.

00:25:36.440 He does not ever want to talk about that day.

00:25:40.680 And, and, and it has, and it's in my book,

00:25:44.240 and it's in multiple interviews that she feels incredibly terrible about

00:25:49.920 that someone died going to see him.

00:25:54.540 Someone died going to see him.

00:25:57.460 Someone died going out with their family that day, having fun,

00:26:01.640 eating funnel cake and cheeseburgers and being with their friends and being close to the man

00:26:07.760 that he wanted to be president and take his wife and take his daughter. Right. And, and,

00:26:13.800 and Trump really struggles with the idea that someone died because they wanted to do all those

00:26:21.940 things and celebrate the country and celebrate him. And so every time I've talked to him and

00:26:28.960 it's in the book butler he said i i i don't really like to talk about it um this is really

00:26:35.120 hard for me it's a hard subject for me to discuss yeah and you're doing and you're literally doing

00:26:41.020 the book i've just as somebody who you know casually knows him uh you know i've i've brought

00:26:47.660 it up a couple times because i was concerned about it and he i mean he shuts you down immediately

00:26:52.980 immediately shuts you down he does and he goes to faith which i think is we've had multiple

00:26:59.920 discussions about faith and purpose um in in those discussions about butler and i think he really

00:27:08.760 you know it's not very demonstrative but he really leans in on that okay so yesterday you went back

00:27:16.000 to butler because the fbi said they thwarted an isis attack planned there by a guy who had 200

00:27:23.000 rounds of ammunition a burner phone got a hotel room paid for cash for a week was posting about

00:27:28.780 mass killings online which is a you know quick way to get arrested what what what is that all about

00:27:34.860 okay jonathan hunter kramer 21 just turned 21 years old just released from a juvenile detention

00:27:42.720 in oil city pennsylvania family is from valencia which is in butler county um he was sent away in

00:27:51.520 2023 to to juvie um because of um discussion of mass killing and um also child pornography

00:28:01.940 and he was put in there for two years well two years little over two years let out and immediately

00:28:09.740 if you look at the affidavit and you look at the FBI reporting, which I did, um, and you talk to

00:28:15.540 people, he, um, there is immediate, he goes right back into the whole ISIS thing. He goes, um,

00:28:23.280 starts buying guns. He starts having conversations. And the person that is anonymously leaking this

00:28:30.100 to the FBI almost within days after he's released, um, gives great detail about what he is doing in

00:28:38.680 the home and who he's seeing and where he's going, which leads me to believe, again, I'm not

00:28:45.640 Sherlock Holmes, but it leads me to believe that this is a family member that is deeply concerned

00:28:51.280 and deeply frightened, which is why you saw the police go to the family home when they arrested

00:28:57.300 him just to make sure that they weren't dead. Where he was arrested is a major intersection

00:29:03.780 in western Pennsylvania. It's where I-79, which is north-south, goes all the way down to the south

00:29:10.780 from Erie, Pennsylvania, and the Turnpike. It's where it is a massive amount of people in that

00:29:18.160 area. It's called Cranberry, Cranberry Township. When I was a kid, it was farms. Now it's high-end

00:29:25.340 homes. There's lots of commerce there. There's a hospital there. There's a huge penguins complex

00:29:33.320 there. I mean, it is a bustling area. It's like a mini Pittsburgh. And he was ready to do harm.

00:29:42.740 He had gone to a Walmart. He had gone to a Dunham's, bought more ammunition, bought more guns,

00:29:49.960 had 30 knives on him, had been posting online that this was the day. So whoever that person

00:29:58.040 that was feeding this to the FBI,

00:30:01.080 God bless them

00:30:01.840 because they saved a lot of lives.

00:30:05.040 You would think that

00:30:06.120 you wouldn't need a tip

00:30:08.220 if the guy is posting this stuff online.

00:30:11.600 I think that was also,

00:30:12.780 they also knew that.

00:30:13.960 They also knew that, okay.

00:30:15.180 Good, good.

00:30:16.540 Yeah, no, no, no.

00:30:17.480 They knew this guy.

00:30:21.180 Let's just say they understood

00:30:23.500 that this guy was not fixed

00:30:25.900 after being in juvenile detention so in there's no connection between the two

00:30:32.760 no no at least not that we know of okay um i think butler ends up being a place for well for

00:30:44.180 kramer because it's literally in his backyard it's the perfect scenario if you're going to do

00:30:50.060 something horrible and destructive and something that takes mass casualties and i think thomas

00:30:56.960 crooks was wavering between a couple of different events which were you know i mean western

00:31:04.140 pennsylvania is the center of american politics where he could do harm to um to president trump

00:31:10.040 can you hang on because i want to i also want to ask you a little bit about fetterman

00:31:13.860 and what is going to happen to that guy you're streaming the best of glenn beck to hear more

00:31:20.780 of this interview and others download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts

00:31:25.080 i want to start with i want to start with something uh

00:31:29.480 personal

00:31:32.700 are not personal to me.

00:31:43.520 I think it's happening to all of us.

00:31:48.020 One out of every two Americans is lonely,

00:31:52.220 like really lonely, not sad,

00:31:56.060 lonely and the measurable kind.

00:31:59.820 The Surgeon General, what was it,

00:32:01.880 a couple of years ago, put a price on it. He said, social disconnection raises your risk of

00:32:08.040 premature death as much as a daily cigarette habit. It's tied to higher rates of dementia,

00:32:14.780 stroke, heart disease. Loneliness is not a mood, it's a medical condition, and it has now a body

00:32:21.760 count in America. And it's worse among men. In 1995, 55% of American men said they had at least

00:32:30.460 six close friends. Today, that number is 27. It's cut in half. The men with no close friends

00:32:41.720 at all, none, zero, went from 3% to 15. That's five times as many say, I have no friends.

00:32:50.660 What a lonely world

00:32:58.440 15% have no friends

00:33:04.020 Now hold that up against your phone

00:33:06.140 You might have 900 friends

00:33:10.660 1400 friends

00:33:11.960 On your phone

00:33:13.040 You've heard from 9 people before lunch

00:33:17.960 you know what your cousin ate in nashville you know your old roommate how they voted

00:33:24.200 you know what a guy you've never met thinks about the war in the middle east

00:33:29.000 you're in touch with more human beings before breakfast than your great-grandfather met in his

00:33:34.280 lifetime so how is it we are starving at this buffet

00:33:41.320 You want a job? If you think you're down on your job, wait until I tell you about this guy's job.

00:33:50.840 At Oxford, there's a guy who spent his entire career watching monkeys pick through each other's fur.

00:33:58.020 Okay.

00:34:00.480 What he was studying is the glue.

00:34:04.440 That's not idle behavior.

00:34:06.300 That's grooming is the glue.

00:34:08.460 It's how the troop stays a troop.

00:34:11.320 And the bigger the troop, the more of the day the grooming eats.

00:34:16.840 Some species spend close to half of their waking hours doing nothing but maintaining friendships one animal at a time.

00:34:27.460 Which means there is a ceiling.

00:34:33.520 In the animal kingdom, a group can only get as big as the grooming hours allow.

00:34:39.040 So we plot the size of our brain against group size across the primates.

00:34:47.620 There's a line there.

00:34:51.740 What is it?

00:34:53.640 That line is 150.

00:35:00.260 Then this guy who was studying animals picking through fur,

00:35:05.220 he went looking for 150 out in the world.

00:35:17.720 Here's what he found.

00:35:20.500 That number 150 just doesn't stop.

00:35:23.720 It shows up everywhere.

00:35:25.400 Neolithic farming villages, Roman fighting units,

00:35:28.180 old English land surveys, all kinds of colonies. 0.74

00:35:32.100 Everybody split themselves in two on purpose.

00:35:37.700 When you would get past that number, it would split again because communities run on relationships and rules.

00:35:49.660 Somebody even went out and counted who people actually mail Christmas cards to.

00:35:57.760 They went out and counted how many Christmas cards.

00:35:59.640 The number is about 150.

00:36:02.100 than a wetsuit company.

00:36:05.980 Bill Gore, who started Gore-Tex in his backyard,

00:36:08.840 one morning he was walking through his own plant,

00:36:11.580 and he realizes he didn't know who everybody was.

00:36:15.280 So he capped every building at 150 people.

00:36:18.280 When a plant filled up, he didn't expand it.

00:36:21.360 He built another plant with another parking lot.

00:36:24.360 So these plants would never go past 150.

00:36:30.160 Now you run the monkey math.

00:36:32.100 On a brain our size?

00:36:34.040 And the honest answer comes out smaller.

00:36:37.180 Grooming one at a time can't buy you 150.

00:36:42.020 So how do you get there?

00:36:43.160 You get there through language.

00:36:45.680 You can only groom one animal at a time,

00:36:47.920 but you can talk to five at once.

00:36:49.800 You can make five people laugh at once.

00:36:52.780 Talking is grooming at a distance,

00:36:55.140 and that's what doubled the circle.

00:36:56.840 which is exactly why the last 20 years

00:37:02.680 have gone the way they've gone

00:37:04.240 we built another tool for talking to more people faster

00:37:08.120 except this one doesn't do what talking did

00:37:13.320 it fills the slots without paying the freight

00:37:17.480 there's a name for this

00:37:21.580 it's called parasocial relationships

00:37:25.120 It's a one-way bond in which you accumulate real knowledge, real affection for somebody,

00:37:30.620 but that person on the other end has no idea that you exist.

00:37:35.780 Let me just say something really uncomfortable for me to say because I'm the guy at the microphone.

00:37:40.400 That's me.

00:37:41.580 I'm a parasocial relationship.

00:37:45.560 You might have listened to me for 25 years, but you don't really know me.

00:37:50.120 You know my kids' names.

00:37:52.180 You know what I sound like.

00:37:53.500 I know you.

00:37:54.220 I know you'll sit there and go, he's going to cry.

00:37:57.740 He's going to cry.

00:37:58.340 You know what I sound like when I'm about to cry.

00:38:01.900 You've been in the car with me more hours than you've been in a room probably with your own brother.

00:38:09.860 But I don't know you.

00:38:12.100 I'd love to, but I can't.

00:38:16.280 And what you feel isn't fake.

00:38:19.920 And that's what makes it work.

00:38:21.940 And that's also what makes it dangerous.

00:38:24.220 because it satisfies the hunger without feeding you.

00:38:28.340 All of your relationships where you're following some influencer,

00:38:33.060 it's satisfying your hunger, but it's not feeding anything.

00:38:40.820 I'm not running a con.

00:38:42.480 I hate saying this to you because it's not the way I feel, but it is true.

00:38:47.420 I'm not a friend.

00:38:48.600 Neither is the podcaster, neither is the streamer, or the, you know, ball player whose, you know, name is on your back.

00:39:02.420 Now it does get fixable because it turns into arithmetic.

00:39:06.780 The University of Kansas measured what a friendship actually costs.

00:39:11.760 This is an amazing study.

00:39:14.180 50 hours together to move from an acquaintance to a casual friend,

00:39:18.800 90 hours to be a friend, and 200 hours to be a close one.

00:39:25.580 You've got to spend 200 hours with somebody.

00:39:29.600 I didn't know there was a bill.

00:39:31.000 I didn't know this math existed, but it does.

00:39:32.960 It takes 200 hours before you can become really, truly a close friend.

00:39:37.820 Look what happened to the numbers.

00:39:39.360 In 2003, the average American spent about an hour a day face-to-face with a friend.

00:39:47.460 In 2019, that was 34 minutes.

00:39:52.020 By 2020, it was 20 minutes.

00:39:56.880 We now spend better than six and a half hours a day all by ourselves, alone.

00:40:02.960 The average.

00:40:03.600 those 200 hours used to accumulate by accident

00:40:09.220 on a porch, at a shop, after church

00:40:11.160 in a bowling league, in the driveway

00:40:13.680 but the accidents have stopped

00:40:15.560 and nobody replaced them

00:40:17.500 that's why we're lonely

00:40:21.960 we're not defective

00:40:26.680 you're just over the ceiling and under the hours

00:40:30.880 and some of it's not a choice

00:40:35.140 you work nights

00:40:37.300 you're caring for a husband or a wife

00:40:40.480 who doesn't know your name anymore

00:40:42.220 you're getting older and everybody you know is dead

00:40:48.860 the problem is not your attitude

00:40:52.340 and I'm not handing you a checklist

00:40:57.300 but you have to say it out loud

00:41:07.100 to one person who can do something about it

00:41:09.160 and that's the whole assignment for the rest of us

00:41:11.120 stop trying to make friends

00:41:13.920 make a schedule

00:41:17.200 I gotta tell you I don't know who I'm talking to today

00:41:21.200 I felt

00:41:25.140 compelled to talk about this. Right before the show started, I was saying a prayer and

00:41:29.800 I was like, got to talk about loneliness. And I'm like, wait, wait, what, what?

00:41:36.720 And it might be because, you know, I have family members who are very lonely.

00:41:44.700 And it's hard to make friends today. So stop trying to make friends. Friends, you know,

00:41:50.340 friendship isn't something you achieve. It's something that comes out of repetition.

00:41:55.140 That's why I said make a schedule.

00:41:56.840 Pick a thing that meets at the same hour, same day every week. 0.87

00:42:01.600 That's the church.

00:42:02.520 That's a class.

00:42:03.500 It's a league.

00:42:04.220 It's a shift at the food bank.

00:42:07.080 The Tuesday breakfast.

00:42:08.700 And just keep going there until your furniture.

00:42:11.820 You don't have to be interesting.

00:42:13.540 You just have to be there again.

00:42:16.080 Pick boring.

00:42:18.500 200 hours is not dinner parties.

00:42:21.780 It's the drive.

00:42:23.360 It's the dishes.

00:42:24.740 It's the hour in a garage while somebody's fixing something.

00:42:32.380 And you don't have to invite them to lunch or dinner.

00:42:35.080 Ask them to help you move a couch.

00:42:38.260 Be the one who asks twice.

00:42:42.220 Because everybody is standing there waiting to be invited.

00:42:44.500 They are.

00:42:45.660 And somebody has to eat the awkward.

00:42:48.400 And that awkward will cost you about nine seconds.

00:42:50.560 Let it be you.

00:42:52.340 Say one true thing.

00:42:56.180 Ours alone don't do it.

00:42:59.500 You can sit beside somebody for 10 years.

00:43:02.420 I know couples that have been by each other's side for 20 years and they don't know each other.

00:43:15.300 You know, I was talking to the students at UVU last week.

00:43:21.340 And I gave him what I thought was really just normal advice.

00:43:25.340 Go out.

00:43:26.880 Meet.

00:43:28.600 Ask each other out.

00:43:29.840 Stop being afraid of that.

00:43:33.180 All of these things arrive when you reach for somebody else.

00:43:37.760 And service, honestly, is the shortcut.

00:43:42.820 Go serve somebody.

00:43:44.880 We don't do enough of that.

00:43:47.660 We're starting to despise our neighbor.

00:43:49.480 We've got to love our neighbor.

00:43:50.440 Go serve somebody.

00:43:51.340 Ask more than you answer

00:43:54.580 Empathy is an amazing thing

00:44:00.640 You know, empathy is not

00:44:02.380 It's not a feeling you generate

00:44:04.360 It's a tension you spend

00:44:06.860 And then subtract

00:44:11.400 Because you can't find 200 hours

00:44:15.220 You know, in a life that's already full

00:44:17.640 They have to come out of something

00:44:19.220 Wherever they went

00:44:20.460 and we really both know where they went.

00:44:22.420 I mean, I know where my time went, right?

00:44:26.000 If you take an hour a week

00:44:27.960 and you take an hour a week off of me

00:44:32.560 and you spend it on somebody with a name,

00:44:36.060 I'll take that trade.

00:44:42.920 One more thing.

00:44:44.360 Because, you know, I've been talking about loneliness

00:44:47.500 as if it's, you know, as if the goal is relief.

00:44:51.380 It isn't.

00:44:52.640 The goal is not relief.

00:44:54.400 The goal in life, and you deserve it, and you can have it,

00:44:59.460 the goal is joy.

00:45:03.280 And joy isn't the thing that you can make by yourself.

00:45:06.200 You can't.

00:45:07.240 You can be content alone.

00:45:08.920 You can be at peace alone.

00:45:10.340 But every person I know who has laughed until he couldn't breathe

00:45:14.660 was with somebody else.

00:45:17.500 And laughter is what language was built for.

00:45:20.660 It's grooming, five at a time.

00:45:27.460 Back in 1938, Harvard began tracking 724 young men.

00:45:32.520 Half of them were sophomores.

00:45:34.180 Half of them were from the poorest streets in Boston.

00:45:37.980 And he checked in on them every two years for the rest of their lives.

00:45:42.480 Their wives, their children.

00:45:44.060 more than 2,000 people, three generations, 85 years.

00:45:49.220 It's the longest study of adult life ever conducted.

00:45:52.980 You know what was crystal clear when they got all of the findings?

00:45:56.640 After all of it, they found it wasn't wealth.

00:46:01.700 It wasn't fame.

00:46:03.700 It wasn't the career.

00:46:06.560 What was the predictor for happy and healthy at 80?

00:46:14.060 Friendships, a relationship, 85 years, three generations,

00:46:23.560 and the answer is the thing your grandmother would have told you for free.

00:46:29.180 Quality, not quantity.

00:46:33.280 Nobody needs 1,400 friends.

00:46:36.840 Five would do it.

00:46:39.900 You have the room.

00:46:41.400 Every one of us has the room.

00:46:43.000 We've just stopped paying for it.

00:46:44.900 200 hours.

00:46:46.560 We let it slip away on our 1,400 friends that aren't friends.

00:46:51.880 Pick a person.

00:46:54.700 Even tell them.

00:46:56.760 Dude, we need 200 hours.

00:46:59.560 Let's go start bowling. 0.96

00:47:00.820 Let's go start doing something.

00:47:03.380 We need 200 hours.

00:47:05.660 Pick the person and start the clock.

The Glenn Beck Program - September 17, 2026

Best of the Program ｜ Guests： Salena Zito & Tristan Harris ｜ 9⧸17⧸26

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