The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program with Dr. James Lindsay ｜ 10⧸15⧸18

00:00:00.120 The Blaze Radio Network, on demand.

00:00:05.960 Hey, welcome to Monday. It is the podcast.

00:00:09.240 We are just a couple weeks away from the beginning of the big tour going across the country, stopping in your city.

00:00:16.560 Go to glenbeck.com slash tour, and you can see where we're going, and you can, I mean, I don't know.

00:00:21.960 To me, the Elizabeth Warren discovery of her Native American heritage may give us some material.

00:00:28.520 Get in front of that. What are the odds that it's, what are the odds that it's, or in this case, what are the odds that it's right, Stu?

00:00:34.580 Well, they're saying she's either 132nd Native American or 1,024th Native American.

00:00:42.480 However, they don't actually, they didn't actually test Native American DNA to figure that out.

00:00:47.940 Well, because they don't have any DNA, you know, a lot of the Native American tribes, their leaders have said, don't participate in any.

00:00:54.780 So we don't actually have any Native American DNA.

00:00:57.440 No, so read the reports. First of all, the supposedly Native American relative identified themselves as white.

00:01:05.800 Secondly, they only tested Peruvian, Mexican, and Colombian DNA to figure out whether she was Native American.

00:01:12.500 So she might be Mexican. 0.99

00:01:13.580 She might be Mexican, Peruvian, or Colombian. That's what they actually found.

00:01:16.400 They're just saying, well, some of those people may have also been the same people who settled in North America.

00:01:20.800 I think what we're saying here is, by the time you get to the theater, we're going to have lots of jokes.

00:01:26.140 Yes.

00:01:26.420 We're going to have lots of jokes.

00:01:27.760 So grab your tickets.

00:01:28.700 You can find them online at glenbeck.com slash tour.

00:01:32.440 Going to be headed out right before the election and right after the election.

00:01:36.020 Lots and lots of laughs.

00:01:37.660 Make sure you join us, glenbeck.com slash tour.

00:01:39.940 Okay, today's podcast.

00:01:43.780 I think the interesting one was James Lindsay today.

00:01:49.200 We had Dr. James Lindsay on, and he's the guy who oversaw the, would you call them hoaxes for the scientific reviews?

00:01:59.640 I think that's fair.

00:02:00.240 He wrote fake papers to get them submitted into real top-level journals, and he goes through all the, you know, how the scientific community, and in particular gender studies and feminist studies, were, you know, faked into, you know, publishing nonsense.

00:02:17.220 Right.

00:02:17.460 And it's not just nonsense.

00:02:19.300 I mean, some of it is.

00:02:20.980 Dog Park rape was nonsense.

00:02:22.760 But some of it is actually truly terrifying.

00:02:25.740 And I talked to him about that terrifying moment when you realize, oh, my gosh, they're publishing this.

00:02:34.360 And then, oh, my gosh, they're publishing this and what it means in academia and in our culture.

00:02:42.960 He's quite clear on that.

00:02:44.680 We go over the election numbers as they look right now.

00:02:47.120 Also, you started the show with a message, and you posted this as well at glenbeck.com.

00:02:52.800 You can read it at glenbeck.com.

00:02:54.160 But a message kind of stepping back and looking at the world a little bit more than day-to-day and more like 50,000-foot view.

00:03:01.480 Yeah.

00:03:01.840 As a doctor, which you know I am.

00:03:04.060 Yes.

00:03:04.520 We've been diagnosed as sick, and that's right.

00:03:09.060 But I don't think we have the disease the doctors are telling us we have and what we need to do to get well again.

00:03:17.620 It's the podcast for money.

00:03:18.820 You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.

00:03:31.860 It's Monday, October 15th.

00:03:33.860 You know the saying, may you live in interesting times?

00:03:36.880 They always say, oh, that's a Chinese curse.

00:03:38.860 No, it's really not.

00:03:39.920 No, it's not.

00:03:41.200 May you live in interesting times is not a Chinese curse.

00:03:44.020 In fact, the first place that we can really find it being said is in the Yorkshire Post that's in England in 1936.

00:03:53.520 A guy stood up in Parliament.

00:03:56.020 His name was Sir Austin Chamberlain, and he was meeting with unionists, and he spoke of the grave injury to collective security by Germany's violation of the treaties.

00:04:09.560 So he said, look, not so long ago, I spent some years of service in China, and there was this old Chinese fellow who told me of a curse.

00:04:22.100 May you live in interesting times.

00:04:24.200 And there is no doubt that this curse has fallen upon us.

00:04:27.500 So it's not Chinese. 0.85

00:04:29.000 It's this guy.

00:04:30.160 It's the only one.

00:04:31.040 It's the only place we can really find this.

00:04:33.300 But I've always liked that because I don't think it's a curse.

00:04:38.340 It's just a saying, and you decide if it's a blessing or a curse.

00:04:45.500 I personally think it's a blessing.

00:04:49.780 My dad taught me when I was really young that no matter what happens to you, there is no bad.

00:04:57.240 Now, he taught me this when I was really young, but it took me hitting rock bottom, alcoholism, divorce, everything else, my life completely falling apart before I really learned that.

00:05:09.980 It took a dark chapter in my life that taught me there is nothing that life can hand you that is in itself bad.

00:05:20.480 It just depends on what you do with it.

00:05:22.580 Is this going to change you in destructive ways?

00:05:29.620 Is it going to make you angry?

00:05:32.240 Are you going to be filled with bitterness and despair?

00:05:35.060 Are you going to be looking for vengeance?

00:05:38.540 Blame?

00:05:41.740 Or will you allow whatever calamity has come your way to strengthen you?

00:05:48.920 Through enlightenment.

00:05:51.620 Through correction.

00:05:53.320 New understandings.

00:05:55.500 Humility.

00:05:56.980 It's up to you.

00:05:58.920 So living in interesting times, I think that's a blessing.

00:06:05.260 And we're going to learn this one way or another.

00:06:07.660 We can either learn this the easy way, like with my dad telling me, or we're going to learn it the hard way, like I actually had to take at the end and learn through just total collapse.

00:06:18.360 But one way or another, humility will reign again, because we have an unbelievable lack of humility in D.C., in Hollywood.

00:06:28.760 I have a story today to tell you about Michael Buble, who's now quitting the music industry.

00:06:35.320 He says he's tired of the celebrity nonsense.

00:06:40.720 Everybody on the left and the right, we all have an ego problem.

00:06:46.500 We're utterly convinced that our side is absolutely right.

00:06:50.780 And if you violate that, if you violate one part of that, you're a traitor.

00:06:57.060 You're a traitor to the race, the party, the cause, whatever.

00:07:00.240 However, they are wrong and we remain right.

00:07:04.600 Now, there are real, true right and wrongs.

00:07:07.920 There is truth.

00:07:11.360 But I don't think any of us are really looking for it.

00:07:14.280 At least a large section isn't looking for it.

00:07:17.820 We are indeed living in interesting times.

00:07:20.280 But is our crisis, is our problem a them problem? 0.98

00:07:28.760 Because that's what the world is trying to sell us.

00:07:32.440 I personally think it's an us problem.

00:07:35.620 All of us, both sides, all of us.

00:07:38.500 And maybe we don't see it because we're so busy staging and filtering

00:07:42.320 and enhancing the colors on our Facebook or Instagram pictures

00:07:46.440 that we can really no longer recognize what is true even about our own lives.

00:07:53.920 Because everything that we print and post, most of it is a lie.

00:07:57.520 One way or another, subtle or bold, it's a lie.

00:08:01.620 And why is that?

00:08:05.120 Because we've been marketed to ever since we were born.

00:08:08.540 All of us.

00:08:09.160 If you were born after 1950, you were marketed to your whole life.

00:08:15.480 Especially now, it's just getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

00:08:18.560 You are not complete unless you wear, consume, you own, you vacation at,

00:08:25.140 or you don't buy product A or B.

00:08:28.220 You're not complete.

00:08:30.560 You're not good enough.

00:08:33.580 You're not complete.

00:08:34.720 You have to have this product.

00:08:36.240 But now we're being told that you can't even be part of the great new society

00:08:42.040 unless we believe and champion product, politician, or party A, B, or C.

00:08:49.240 Opinions now are products as well that you must embrace and wear.

00:08:54.080 Somebody else's, not yours. 0.73

00:08:55.420 And now we're in the final stages where we are selling our products.

00:09:02.120 Companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon and YouTube.

00:09:06.020 We're not a customer.

00:09:08.960 We're now the commodity.

00:09:10.720 We're the thing they're selling.

00:09:13.760 Oh, you want this group of people that want to buy these things?

00:09:17.600 Here they are.

00:09:18.380 If you can't fill in the line, I am blank.

00:09:27.300 If you can't fill that in with an actual word and be it complete, happy, satisfied, excited,

00:09:38.580 or I am worthless.

00:09:41.160 If you don't fill it in yourself, somebody else will.

00:09:48.540 And marketers are trying to fill that in for you.

00:09:51.960 You buy this product and you can say, I am cool.

00:09:55.760 Or I am in style.

00:09:57.680 I am rich.

00:09:59.480 I am smart.

00:10:00.760 You buy Democrat and you can say, I am compassionate.

00:10:04.980 You buy the Democratic label, I am smarter than others.

00:10:07.920 I am science-minded, and it doesn't even matter if you really are.

00:10:11.620 It doesn't matter if you've ever given a dime or given any time to anything.

00:10:16.820 Just by buying this label, you are compassionate.

00:10:20.740 It's the label that everybody needs.

00:10:23.720 Now, if you want to buy Republican, well, then you get to be patriotic.

00:10:28.900 I am patriotic.

00:10:29.840 I support our troops.

00:10:31.260 I support family values.

00:10:32.840 It doesn't matter if you're whoring it every night. 0.96

00:10:36.520 If you're by the Republican label, you can say that.

00:10:40.020 Buy the Christian label, and you can do whatever you want.

00:10:43.640 You just use religion to excuse you or others in their behavior.

00:10:48.360 Buy the label progressive.

00:10:50.640 Oh, my gosh.

00:10:51.920 I am science-minded, even though you deny basic biology.

00:10:58.200 Labels like courage.

00:11:01.460 He has courage.

00:11:02.700 That has a price tag now.

00:11:06.200 But don't buy now, because the price of courage is going lower and lower.

00:11:10.120 For a while.

00:11:13.160 For a while, this was a time-revered label.

00:11:17.160 You actually had to earn this.

00:11:18.980 But now it can be yours, simply by saying things out loud in a room full of people

00:11:23.740 who all agree with you and will cheer and clap when you finally say what they're thinking.

00:11:30.160 That's courage.

00:11:32.240 Oh, they have such courage.

00:11:36.120 Labels and words are experiencing a fire sale.

00:11:40.240 And it seems everything must go now.

00:11:45.240 But once that fire sale is over, something else happens.

00:11:55.860 And what comes next forces people to earn their labels.

00:12:02.740 And that's the world we're about to enter.

00:12:06.240 And I actually think it's a blessing, not a curse.

00:12:14.660 The best of the Glenn Beck Program.

00:12:23.360 Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

00:12:27.640 Part 1 Introduction

00:12:29.740 Something has gone wrong in the university, especially in certain fields within the humanities.

00:12:34.840 Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances

00:12:41.640 has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields.

00:12:46.460 And there are scholars increasingly that bully students, administrators,

00:12:50.760 and other departments into adhering to their worldview.

00:12:55.140 So Dr. James Lindsay, along with a couple of other friends, decided,

00:12:59.720 you know, let's find out what this is all about.

00:13:03.100 And let's see what the lines are.

00:13:05.360 And they learned an awful lot.

00:13:07.660 They learned something quite valuable, that you just can't get away with anything.

00:13:13.180 You have to fall into a set pattern, really.

00:13:18.760 Dr. James Lindsay is joining us now.

00:13:21.760 He is a thinker.

00:13:22.900 He's not a philosopher, but he is a thinker, which I like.

00:13:25.100 A doctorate in math, background in physics.

00:13:29.360 James, how are you, sir?

00:13:30.300 I'm good, Glenn.

00:13:32.060 How are you?

00:13:32.760 I'm good.

00:13:33.580 So tell us what you were trying to do.

00:13:36.820 What were you trying to prove?

00:13:39.100 Well, we were looking into these fields to find out whether or not their scholarship has

00:13:45.760 gotten so kind of ideologically biased that if we put forth really absurd arguments that they

00:13:56.160 might be willing to publish those so long as they fell in line with the political views that

00:14:03.020 they seem to be forwarding in place of scholarship.

00:14:05.120 So at first, you didn't really understand the political view part, right?

00:14:11.400 Because the first few studies that you submitted, you got back.

00:14:18.200 They were rejected.

00:14:20.760 Yeah.

00:14:21.360 Well, it's not quite that, actually.

00:14:23.300 I think we understood the political view, but we didn't understand the need for scholarship.

00:14:27.560 We started this project out.

00:14:28.960 And as you said, we got the first several papers back rejected.

00:14:33.400 We started in August by Thanksgiving.

00:14:35.700 It was literally Thanksgiving on the day of.

00:14:38.740 We really realized we were in trouble.

00:14:41.240 We weren't getting anywhere with trying to hoax them.

00:14:43.660 The problem wasn't that we didn't understand the politics so much, although there's still

00:14:47.440 a lot to learn there.

00:14:48.500 And there was for us, too.

00:14:49.820 It's very complicated.

00:14:51.400 They call it a matrix of domination that you have to understand.

00:14:54.340 But it was more that we actually were not trying to work their scholarship in.

00:14:59.820 So there are two things that are needed to get these papers in.

00:15:03.220 One is that you actually have to understand what they call scholarship.

00:15:06.000 You have to do it according to their rules.

00:15:08.420 You have to understand the concepts you're working with and present them knowledgeably.

00:15:13.940 And then you also have to navigate this kind of matrix of offense-based rules that stand

00:15:20.940 in place of the academic rigor you would expect in a more serious field.

00:15:29.780 One of the things I thought was really interesting, and I apologize for, I think, misunderstanding

00:15:33.920 this initially, because the coverage gave me the impression that what you were outing here

00:15:39.400 was these sort of pay-for-play journals where you could get anything published as long as

00:15:45.180 you pay and they'll print anything.

00:15:46.840 But this is, I think, A, much, much, much more thorough process, and B, much scarier,

00:15:53.260 because these were not these crappy internet things that you could pay $100 to get your nonsense

00:16:00.260 published.

00:16:00.780 These were top-end journals.

00:16:02.800 Can you kind of go through how you made the decision to go that direction?

00:16:06.680 Yeah, actually, you know, a little over a year ago, about a year and a half ago, I heard

00:16:12.240 you on your program reading out from the paper I wrote previously with Peter Bogotian, the

00:16:18.360 conceptual penis as a social construct, and that ended up going to one of these pay-to-publish

00:16:25.480 open access journals that has apparently fairly low or very low review standards.

00:16:31.260 And so it didn't prove what we wanted to prove, or it didn't even really offer good

00:16:36.640 evidence for what we're looking at.

00:16:38.180 But it was fun.

00:16:38.820 So we learned our...

00:16:39.520 It was fun.

00:16:40.480 It was fun.

00:16:40.940 It was definitely fun.

00:16:42.160 It was definitely fun.

00:16:43.520 Right.

00:16:44.460 Yeah, penises don't exist, but they cause all of our problems anyway. 0.99

00:16:47.720 Right.

00:16:48.420 They succeed in that.

00:16:50.740 But yeah, so we learned our lesson.

00:16:53.400 We took the criticisms we got from that to heart.

00:16:56.260 It was fun, but it didn't work.

00:16:59.900 People criticized us, I think, fairly, pointed out where we were weak by using these journals.

00:17:04.920 And instead, we committed to a few things going into this new project.

00:17:09.400 One is that we would not use pay-to-publish journals in any sense.

00:17:14.340 Secondly, and by the way, they don't charge like $100.

00:17:17.400 They charge like a couple thousand.

00:17:19.540 Wow.

00:17:20.240 It's really kind of a financial racket going on there.

00:17:22.860 It's its own big problem, and I hope people continue to address it.

00:17:27.440 Secondly, we decided that we would use the highest-ranked journals within the disciplines

00:17:33.460 that we were examining that we could get into.

00:17:35.480 So we would start at the best journal we could find for what we were doing and then work our

00:17:39.160 way down.

00:17:39.760 If that one didn't take it, we'd go to the next one.

00:17:42.580 And then thirdly, we committed to being transparent about our results no matter what happened.

00:17:46.720 So if we had gone crash and burn, complete failure, then that would have been what we

00:17:55.040 reported.

00:17:55.540 I don't think it would have gotten much attention, but we would have come out and admitted that

00:17:58.440 we were wrong.

00:17:59.380 But that's not what happened.

00:18:02.880 And early on in the process, not just to keep us honest, because I think we would have

00:18:08.000 kept our promise, but early on in the process, we ended up in contact with a documentary filmmaker

00:18:13.340 who was interested in this stuff already.

00:18:15.200 So he's been recording us for a year.

00:18:17.160 His name's Mike Naina.

00:18:18.840 And since he's been recording us, I mean, clearly whatever happened is going to come out.

00:18:23.660 So there it is.

00:18:25.560 Okay.

00:18:25.680 So before we take a break and get into what you actually got published, tell me about

00:18:32.640 the work behind it.

00:18:34.220 This took a year to do.

00:18:35.940 What kind of time are you looking at?

00:18:39.660 Well, the easiest kind of thing to look at with this is I had exactly five social outings

00:18:46.920 between Thanksgiving and when the project came out into the public.

00:18:52.920 I took maybe that many days off, including weekends.

00:18:56.860 I worked probably 80 to 90 hours a week, almost every week.

00:19:01.500 My two collaborators worked also very, very hard.

00:19:06.280 Peter put in at least a full-time job.

00:19:08.920 Helen did most of the same.

00:19:10.520 And I know you talked to Helen the other day.

00:19:12.920 So this was an immense amount of work.

00:19:16.000 It required learning these fields very quickly, writing academic papers, a typical academic

00:19:21.580 will publish a couple a year maybe if they're working hard.

00:19:24.740 And we wrote 20.

00:19:27.720 Holy cow. 0.89

00:19:29.540 Yeah.

00:19:29.840 It's a lot of work.

00:19:31.040 It was an insane amount of work.

00:19:32.400 And these are all fields we have no expertise in.

00:19:34.580 And Helen has a little bit of background in some of this, but this was primarily having

00:19:40.280 to learn this material on the fly with no education, with no teachers instructing us.

00:19:46.180 Our only feedback was how our papers fared in the peer review process and then reading

00:19:50.580 what was out there to try to emulate it.

00:19:52.520 And so what does having something published in one of these magazines mean?

00:19:58.640 What does it mean to the author and to the educational community?

00:20:04.040 So for the author, it is the absolute pinnacle of what an academic is trying to do in the

00:20:11.060 research side of their career, is to get papers published in well-established journals.

00:20:15.940 For example, Hypatia is one of the journals we got a paper in.

00:20:19.380 And Hypatia is the feminist philosophy journal with probably the highest standing.

00:20:24.600 So it would carry a lot of weight looking at the academic community that that scholar is

00:20:29.220 embedded in.

00:20:29.700 So they could take that to their university and say, hey, I got this many papers published.

00:20:33.760 If people are being considered for tenure, there's a research component to that.

00:20:37.660 Depends on how the school wants to do their tenuring process.

00:20:41.980 But typically, seven papers spanning seven to 10 years is considered the basic research

00:20:48.020 requirement to be qualified for tenure.

00:20:51.180 Our papers spanned, the ones we wrote spanned 15 sub-disciplines of thought.

00:20:56.160 The ones that got accepted spanned seven.

00:20:58.880 And so we've got big journals.

00:21:02.600 We've got seven disciplines that papers got into.

00:21:05.060 We probably would have had more had we not been cut short.

00:21:08.300 So you had 12 in the pipeline that looked like they would be published.

00:21:13.500 And then this came out.

00:21:14.920 And so you pulled those.

00:21:16.960 But you might have had as many as 12.

00:21:18.780 I think, honestly, we had 14 that weren't dead yet.

00:21:23.420 And I can say with some confidence that I think 12 would have gotten in and possibly

00:21:27.540 possibly 13.

00:21:29.300 So I would guess with pretty good confidence that somewhere between 11 and 13 would have

00:21:32.860 gotten in in the end had we not gotten pulled.

00:21:36.020 OK, so when we come back, we will go into and remember, we're on we're on public airwaves.

00:21:41.420 So so we'll be as careful as we can to to discuss what was in each of these papers and

00:21:50.260 incredible where they got a little gold star for these now published studies are just tremendous.

00:21:58.360 I mean, I don't know if you guys had beers before you came up with this or how you guys

00:22:02.720 came up with these, but they're fantastic.

00:22:05.660 Let's go through some of them one by one.

00:22:07.660 Let's start with the first one.

00:22:08.640 Dog Park, the the thesis is dog parks are rape, rape condoning spaces. 0.78

00:22:15.700 Tell me.

00:22:16.680 Tell me about it.

00:22:18.160 Well, it's kind of funny, actually.

00:22:20.020 I'll tell you a story.

00:22:21.640 When I went to we all got together to to have this come public as best we could.

00:22:26.840 So I went to Portland.

00:22:27.900 We all went to Portland, Oregon to get ready for this project to come out to the public.

00:22:33.820 And we went to the dog park on the first day I got there.

00:22:36.200 Almost right.

00:22:36.660 I got off the plane.

00:22:37.500 And I took an Uber.

00:22:38.560 Next thing you know, I'm walking Peter's dogs up to the dog park with our filmmaker.

00:22:43.800 And we get to the dog park.

00:22:45.760 And there's this dog there that's living out the paper.

00:22:48.460 It was crazy.

00:22:49.120 This dog was fighting the other dogs, pinning them down, humping them left, right and center.

00:22:54.640 The owner comes over, swings the swings the ball thrower at the dog gently.

00:22:59.620 I'll point out he wasn't being abusive and then says, stop humping.

00:23:03.420 And then we get to lean over to the filmmaker and kind of mutter, I guess a little too loudly.

00:23:09.000 But maybe we should start interrogating people about their sexuality, given what's going down here.

00:23:14.380 And then this lady yells out to me, oh, no, no, it's okay.

00:23:17.680 She's the girl dog. 0.99

00:23:18.700 And I was like, oh, man, this paper's happening for real.

00:23:21.720 So what is the thesis?

00:23:29.720 So the thesis was, well, the original idea behind the thesis was that we should write a feminist paper arguing that we should train men the way that we train dogs to prevent rape culture.

00:23:41.580 And so I thought that up today, thought it was pretty funny when I was brainstorming ideas for papers, threw it to Peter.

00:23:49.340 Peter takes his dogs to the dog park every day, said, let's work in some of the stuff from the dog park.

00:23:55.740 And as we started working in just, you know, absolutely absurd ideas from what might be considered the most ridiculous dog park in the world, the paper grew into that.

00:24:07.720 And so we made it about so-called queer performativity and human reactions at the dog park and then ended up concluding things like that we should be able to leash men like we leash dogs to prevent rape, except it's not politically feasible. 0.63

00:24:24.760 And it would be great if we could put shock collars on men, but that's not okay either.

00:24:31.260 So we have to shock them out of, you know, hitting on women by screaming at them to scare them and get them to desist from their behavior.

00:24:38.740 The thesis of the paper was, though, that humans reacted differently to gay dog humping as opposed to straight dog humping.

00:24:49.460 And men were far worse about this than women. 0.95

00:24:52.560 And then we concluded that this is indicative of rape culture, and we called the dog park rape condoning space, which we then likened to nightclubs.

00:25:02.700 We said nightclubs are also rape condoning spaces with no evidence for that whatsoever.

00:25:06.980 We should have had it.

00:25:10.020 So that was pretty out there.

00:25:12.660 That one was really out there.

00:25:14.600 I think it's, I don't know, maybe the one about the feminist spirituality meetings and poetry.

00:25:21.060 It's a little more out there, but it's probably close to the most.

00:25:24.620 Well, let's finish the dog park.

00:25:26.740 This one was accepted and reviewed.

00:25:29.600 Some of the reviews.

00:25:30.700 This is a wonderful paper, incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, extremely well written and organized, yada, yada.

00:25:38.700 I believe this intellectually and empirically exciting paper must be published.

00:25:44.980 And congratulate the author on the research done and in the writer.

00:25:49.380 And in the writer.

00:25:50.140 Yeah.

00:25:50.380 That was one of the most disturbing parts of this, I feel like.

00:25:53.960 Because, again, it wasn't like these journals looked at this and didn't really go through it and kind of just made its way through the process.

00:26:01.380 There are very specific comments from dozens of reviewers who are doing peer review and saying specific things that you wrote that are completely ridiculous are amazing new accomplishments in the field.

00:26:15.700 I mean, that had to be, while funny and it proved your point, it had to be really disturbing as well.

00:26:21.280 Oh, yeah.

00:26:21.880 That's by far what we consider to be the most important evidence that we gathered in the process of this project.

00:26:28.500 That the papers got published or that they got awards in some cases, or one case, and all of this, it's fine.

00:26:35.120 It says a lot and it's disturbing.

00:26:37.420 But the reviewers' comments show that these peer reviewers, which worked out between two and four or five per paper.

00:26:45.440 So we ended up with something like 45 or 50 total sets of comments.

00:26:51.680 They really did engage with what we did.

00:26:53.700 They really looked at it.

00:26:55.120 They said our analysis was good when our analysis was terrible.

00:27:00.480 They didn't raise an eyebrow about the data we gathered, the idea that, you know, that dog park paper contains a bit of completely irrelevant evidence about where dogs go to the bathroom in unauthorized ways, as we worded it.

00:27:17.340 And that's completely irrelevant to the paper, but nobody raised an eyebrow about how ridiculous that is.

00:27:22.560 They were concerned, however, that we indicate that we're humans, not dogs, so that we can be sure that we don't claim that when a dog does a humping of another dog, whether or not the dog that got humped wanted it or not, because how could we know that as being humans, not dogs?

00:27:41.960 And they were really concerned, as I hope everybody's seen in our little video we put out to announce the project.

00:27:48.600 They're really concerned with the fact that we respect the dog's privacy in the process of inspecting their genitals.

00:27:58.140 What specifically were they concerned about?

00:28:03.200 I mean, the privacy of the dog.

00:28:04.920 I mean, you got me, man.

00:28:08.400 That it was done in the privacy of a veterinary office?

00:28:12.960 I don't.

00:28:13.700 Okay.

00:28:14.980 Let's see.

00:28:15.840 You did fat bodybuilding, which quickly is what?

00:28:21.100 That's the idea that what needs to be added to the professional sport of bodybuilding is a category in which fat is displayed politically,

00:28:29.500 so that fat is just considered another tissue that's equal with muscle.

00:28:34.500 And to say that that's not true is to be mean to fat people, fatphobic, as they call it.

00:28:41.420 It's incredible.

00:28:42.640 And that was accepted?

00:28:45.200 Yeah, that was accepted.

00:28:46.600 That was a pretty exciting acceptance, especially because we actually had a real scholar who let us use his identity, who we claimed wrote that paper.

00:28:58.120 And he actually is a professional bodybuilder, Mr. Northern Hemisphere, 1978 or something.

00:29:03.160 I mean, this guy's 70 years old and just stacked.

00:29:06.140 And the picture in my mind of this guy being the author of this paper for fat bodybuilding was just kind of hilarious.

00:29:13.140 Because that was another thing, too.

00:29:16.220 A lot of these papers, you had completely fake organizations.

00:29:19.920 You had completely fake scholars coming from colleges that I think didn't exist in some cases.

00:29:25.180 I mean, some of this would have been easily disproved by basic checking, wouldn't it have?

00:29:30.620 I think so.

00:29:31.740 I mean, this is a tricky point.

00:29:34.580 And I don't want to get too far into the weeds here.

00:29:36.920 But honestly, scholarship should stand or fall on its merit, not on who did it.

00:29:42.440 And so a lot of people are making that point.

00:29:45.260 And we deliberately chose names that would be hard to find in a Google search.

00:29:49.240 In specific, we chose very common names on purpose.

00:29:52.420 I actually used – I rolled dice to pick off of a list of the most common names for certain years.

00:30:00.660 We're talking to Dr. James Lindsay, author of Life in Light of Death.

00:30:05.020 He is – you can follow him at Conceptual James on Twitter.

00:30:13.220 He is one of the, if not the mastermind behind the papers of record that were being written for feminist studies and queer studies.

00:30:28.060 And were published in some of the leading journals and critiqued, but not really critiqued in a way that most people would.

00:30:38.860 I'll just quickly go through some of them going in through the back door, which is not something we're going to discuss here that's really great.

00:30:47.120 Rubbing one out.

00:30:48.160 The violence of objectification through non-consensual masturbation.

00:30:56.240 Then we get to some really disturbing ones.

00:30:59.140 The progressive stack.

00:31:02.100 James, tell us about the progressive stack.

00:31:05.320 Yeah, the progressive stack is a pretty horrifying piece of work.

00:31:08.660 In fact, it's evil.

00:31:09.880 Fortunately, it did not get accepted.

00:31:13.680 The journal was inviting us to resubmit it and give it another go.

00:31:21.920 It says it's a solid essay that, with revision, will make a strong contribution to the growing literature of addressing injustice in the classroom.

00:31:31.560 Yeah, and so what it argues for is that we take students in college classrooms and we have them go through some kind of a inventory that determines how privileged they are.

00:31:43.480 It recommends a thing called the step forward, step back game as a possibility.

00:31:49.200 Once they determine how privileged they are, the students are ranked according to their privilege.

00:31:54.580 Then the more privileged you are, the worse you get treated in class.

00:31:57.900 So the most privileged white and male students are invited to listen and learn throughout the semester, which means they aren't allowed to speak or ask questions in class. 0.51

00:32:08.420 They're invited to sit in the floor in chains to experience reparations and level the knowing field to de- and re-privilege the classroom learning environment.

00:32:20.760 And the problem that the reviewers seem to have with this set of suggestions was that we thought there's no way this will get in.

00:32:30.960 We have to temper it by saying we have to be compassionate to these students as we put them in the floor in chains.

00:32:35.960 And they said, watch it with a compassion that re-centers the needs of the privileged over the oppressed.

00:32:43.140 And there's this idea out there called the pedagogy of discomfort, which means that you learn to overcome your privilege by being made uncomfortable and left to sit in that without being comforted.

00:32:54.560 And so they actually wanted to make a terrible, scary idea properly evil.

00:33:00.160 And that's the worst part is it's only a small step from what already exists in a great deal of the feminist and race-based education literature. 0.98

00:33:12.000 So this was not this was not accepted because it didn't it wasn't bad enough?

00:33:17.000 At first, yeah, and then later they were a bit concerned with the depth of the scholarship and the kind of routine things that you would expect out of a scholarly paper.

00:33:29.100 They claimed, for example, that we drew on too many concepts and it would be confusing for the reader and to try to narrow it down to something a bit tighter and so on.

00:33:36.640 But the idea that giving students experiential reparations and asking them not to be able to speak in class or to be spoken over and interrupted to teach them what that feels like, none of that was questioned.

00:33:53.200 So what if this were published and it were real, if this were published, what would that mean to the university system?

00:34:01.020 What does that mean?

00:34:03.760 So all these answers are really complicated.

00:34:06.640 There would be people who try to take this up.

00:34:09.520 In fact, we got the idea from a news article about somebody at the University of Pennsylvania who was employing a similar but less extreme version of this in her classroom and got in trouble for it late last year.

00:34:23.140 So this idea didn't come to us out of the vacuum.

00:34:26.540 This was actually something that people are attempting in classrooms.

00:34:29.940 And so there would have been some educators primarily working in social justice side field topics courses, I guess is the best way to say that, but also probably into some of the general ed stuff who would take up some degree of these suggestions as experimental but legitimate to use in the classroom.

00:34:52.100 And this was being submitted to the gold standard journal.

00:34:55.980 This wasn't some fringe journal in education.

00:34:58.480 This was the gold standard feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, that we were working with here, which is where a lot of the literature that's like this already exists.

00:35:06.500 Which, if you don't mind me going on a little bit, this is kind of what's happening.

00:35:10.720 We think that what's happening here is kind of the equivalent with ideas of money laundering, called idea laundering.

00:35:19.920 So they take these bad ideas, some of which are just opinions.

00:35:25.040 Some of them are prejudiced.

00:35:26.320 Some of them are genuinely terrifying, like this educational thing.

00:35:30.680 And then they launder them through the academic process, and they come out with the stamp of academic approval that makes them look like they're real knowledge.

00:35:38.740 So you'll hear people say, oh, well, there was a study, or we've based this program on studies that show.

00:35:44.380 Well, that's fine when the studies are good, but when the studies are coming from a place that can't tell truth from prejudice and opinion, it becomes a real problem.

00:35:56.760 James, one of the other ones I found disturbing was the HOH2 and HOH1.

00:36:05.100 And HOH2 was accepted.

00:36:08.860 Can you explain this one?

00:36:11.940 Yeah, that paper was accepted by Hypatia, the same journal I was just mentioning.

00:36:16.140 That HOH stood for hoax on hoaxes. 0.69

00:36:19.320 So it was a hoax paper we wrote that was about writing academic hoaxes.

00:36:23.360 It's just a code name we gave for convenience.

00:36:25.260 What it argues is that you can only properly criticize things that go against social justice.

00:36:33.380 And in particular, you can only use humor to make fun of or use satire to deflate that which goes against social justice.

00:36:41.540 If you use humor against social justice, if you criticize social justice, what that means is you never really properly engaged with it.

00:36:48.300 Therefore, we don't have to consider your criticism.

00:36:50.560 And that's one of the huge problems going on in this set of fields is that they don't accept criticism.

00:36:58.380 If you try to criticize them, they say that it's privilege-preserving epistemic pushback.

00:37:02.680 That's a scholar named Allison Bailey, who's huge in the education literature.

00:37:07.060 They say it's white fragility.

00:37:08.700 That's Robin DiAngelo, who has just had a big book published on that this year but introduced a concept in 2011,

00:37:15.980 which says that if somebody with privilege, in particular white people for her work, is challenged so that their privilege is put into question,

00:37:25.080 that they are fragile and don't know how to deal with it because their privilege made them weak.

00:37:29.520 They don't know how to psychologically deal with having that challenge.

00:37:31.960 And they act out in anger or grief or something like that in trying to maintain their privilege.

00:37:38.340 And so these ideas are already getting out there.

00:37:42.240 We just took them a step further.

00:37:45.580 It's interesting because the one about hoaxes is interesting in that to criticize what you guys did,

00:37:53.400 they would almost have to cite your paper as—

00:37:56.960 That was the idea, yeah.

00:37:58.060 It was definitely to put them in that position.

00:38:00.240 And I've asked Hypatia to stand by the paper that they accepted and published in our right names.

00:38:05.040 They haven't responded yet, but we'll see what they do.

00:38:08.060 That way, indeed, people who want to criticize our project from a position of intersectional feminism will need to cite us in order to criticize us.

00:38:17.960 Unbelievable.

00:38:18.360 Can we get one more, Glenn, because you talked about this on the scary front.

00:38:22.760 The feminist Mein Kampf—

00:38:24.900 Well, you also did the white man Mein Kampf.

00:38:27.760 You did two.

00:38:29.160 One, the feminist was accepted and the white man wasn't, right?

00:38:33.520 Correct.

00:38:34.440 Okay, tell me about them.

00:38:36.040 So I'll do the white one first because it didn't get in.

00:38:39.800 It was much more frightening.

00:38:41.640 It was written from the position of an autoethnography where the researcher is reflecting on, in this case, her own experience as a white lesbian woman coming to hate her own whiteness.

00:38:52.280 And it was rejected partly because the scholarship wasn't quite there, which is the case in all of the papers, but also because it positioned the author as a good white rather than being sufficiently supplicant or whatever to critical race theories.

00:39:07.820 So there was an explicitly political reasoning behind why it was rejected, and it was that the author, as a white woman, was trying to make herself look good by criticizing her own whiteness.

00:39:19.580 It was one of the main reasons.

00:39:21.380 So the feminist one was— 1.00

00:39:23.520 Well, hold on just a second.

00:39:24.840 Hold on just a second.

00:39:25.480 And that took the parts of Mein Kampf where he was talking about Jews and replaced the words Jews with whites.

00:39:35.440 Yeah, in that case, it was either whites or whiteness. 0.93

00:39:37.900 And then we edited the text around it and added a whole bunch of literature and reworded things so it would get past plagiarism checks and things like that.

00:39:45.960 So yeah, that was a—it started with scanning through Mein Kampf, picking out passages about the Jews and replacing Jews with whites or whiteness, and then editing around it.

00:39:59.840 The feminist one didn't do it quite the same way. 1.00

00:40:02.420 The feminist one was not about—it didn't take Jews out and replace it with men, for example. 1.00

00:40:07.540 It actually is the chapter in Mein Kampf where Hitler explains the need for the Nazi party as Chapter 12 and what its members would be expected to hold to, including especially the sacrifices that they have to make to be Nazis. 0.62

00:40:23.380 And we replaced our movement, the party, et cetera.

00:40:27.860 He doesn't mention Nazis specifically in that chapter.

00:40:30.760 We replaced that with intersectional feminism or solidarity or allyship, something to do with the feminist movement, and criticized the idea that some feminists do what they call choice feminism, which is the idea that if a woman is living her own life the way she wants to 1.00

00:40:49.320 and considers that to be a statement of feminism, then she is doing feminism. 1.00

00:40:54.480 It's feminist for women to have, you know, full agency and make their own choices in the world. 1.00

00:40:58.040 That's what this paper was criticizing, saying that, no, no, their responsibility, if they really want to consider themselves feminists, is to be—to make sacrifices and stand in solidarity with other oppressed people, 1.00

00:41:10.140 particularly of, you know, women of color or women of other marginalized statuses.

00:41:15.480 James, a couple of quick questions.

00:41:19.940 A, this had to be one of those things that you entered into and hoped that you were wrong, and when they were accepted, you had to celebrate and then short time later going, good God, this is bad.

00:41:34.580 Am I right?

00:41:35.460 That is exactly right.

00:41:37.260 So especially with the Mein Kampf paper, I think, the one that got accepted, the idea there was that we were trying to—it's very different from Mein Kampf, of course.

00:41:47.540 Don't let me mislead you that it's a one-to-one thing.

00:41:49.720 But the politics of grievance coming through, and I really am glad I get to talk to you about this if I can, because politics of grievance is everywhere, and it's certainly being used in the academic left as we were trying to demonstrate.

00:42:03.780 We call this stuff grievance studies.

00:42:05.500 But we see it everywhere, right?

00:42:06.680 And I think this is why we're so divided politically right now.

00:42:10.580 I was really happy to talk to you because, I mean, I don't want to get anything touchy with you, but you're a real dude, and that's why I wanted to talk to you.

00:42:17.140 Thanks.

00:42:17.360 You know, you had this whole mea-cola about how things were going for you under Obama's time, and I thought that was huge.

00:42:25.000 And I was like, you know, this guy Glenn Beck is a bridge.

00:42:28.420 He's looking for reconciliation.

00:42:29.760 It's on your Twitter bio.

00:42:31.280 We need to be talking to each other again.

00:42:33.360 So our project was, you know, we're people on the left.

00:42:36.300 We're left liberals.

00:42:37.420 I'm not ashamed to say that.

00:42:38.500 I know you consider yourself a classical liberal, and you're conservative on the right.

00:42:42.300 That's great.

00:42:44.060 We on the left need to take responsibility for our own lunatics, and so our project was kind of that.

00:42:50.160 You know, we're left-wing people who want the left to come back from the edge, and we hope that, you know, the same thing is happening on the right, and we can all start.

00:42:59.120 I think, you know, people in general, I get a lot of sense of this.

00:43:02.660 People send me emails about this now all the time especially.

00:43:05.540 We're all kind of sick of all this nonsense, all the fighting, all the polarization, and we can't get anything done.

00:43:12.300 I think we want to get back to productive politics, and as long as we're relying heavily on this grievance stuff, which clearly the academic left is, I think we see a lot of it coming out of the right-wing media sphere as well.

00:43:24.340 From my perspective, I think as long as we're focusing on that, we can't have productive conversations.

00:43:29.320 We can't remember, you know, you're an American.

00:43:31.960 I'm an American.

00:43:32.880 You're a person.

00:43:33.840 I'm a person.

00:43:35.240 We have most of the things that we think in common, even though we have some probably pretty serious political differences.

00:43:42.040 But I think we also have in common that we want to have better conversations.

00:43:45.560 We want to move society in a direction that benefits us all, and it's just a matter of working out the details.

00:43:52.080 And I really hope that, you know, that our project kind of reaches that point.

00:43:57.260 Does that make sense?

00:43:58.600 It totally does.

00:43:59.600 I hate to say this, too.

00:44:01.500 I'm out of time.

00:44:02.340 Could I invite you to come down and do a podcast with me?

00:44:07.240 You know, we could spend an hour and a half uninterrupted and just start where we've just left off.

00:44:14.040 Yeah, I'd love that.

00:44:15.620 That'd be great.

00:44:16.620 Great.

00:44:21.260 This is the best of the Glenn Beck Program.

00:44:23.400 And don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

00:44:32.340 Like listening to this podcast?

00:44:34.500 If you're not a subscriber, become one now on iTunes.

00:44:37.780 And while you're there, do us a favor and rate the show.

00:44:40.640 I want to thank American Financing for sponsoring this podcast.

00:44:44.240 We have worked with American Financing now for almost 10 years, and I just love how they have disrupted the mortgage industry.

00:44:52.380 I found them in about 2007.

00:44:55.600 They called and they wanted me to endorse, and it was just a small company at the time.

00:44:59.180 And I said, no, I don't do anything for mortgages because I don't believe in mortgage companies and banks and everything else.

00:45:04.540 I think it's going to fail.

00:45:05.480 Everybody else said that's crazy.

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00:45:40.700 There is a fascinating story about Michael Buble.

00:45:43.640 If you're a longtime listener of this program, you know that Michael Buble is a friend of the program and somebody that I have known, I think, since before he was really, really famous.

00:45:59.420 This comes from the dailymail.co.uk.

00:46:04.660 Okay, I'm not sure that Michael wasn't joking in part of this.

00:46:10.940 I'll just give you the highlights.

00:46:11.980 Michael Buble is officially retired from music following his son Noah's cancer battle.

00:46:18.740 The singer, 43, explained that the heartache he endured following his son's cancer diagnosis at just three years old has changed his perception of life,

00:46:27.220 and he is done now with fame.

00:46:30.140 With a new album out titled Love on the way, he explained that this is time for him to step away from music,

00:46:38.420 wanting to leave it at the very top after making the perfect record.

00:46:42.000 Michael revealed his decision to quit the industry in what he claimed to be his last interview.

00:46:46.460 My whole being has changed since my son got cancer, he said.

00:46:51.000 Michael Buble says he was embarrassed to realize how egotistical he had become as he nursed his boy Noah back to health.

00:46:57.680 But now he's got his mojo back.

00:46:59.980 The Canadian singer has won four Grammys, sold 75 million records, earning him $35 million a year.

00:47:05.960 He has been married to a stunning Argentinian model and actress for seven years.

00:47:10.980 The couple lived the life of luxury with their three children, Noah, five, Elias, two, and daughter, Vidya, Amber, Betty, who is 11 weeks old.

00:47:19.400 Yet all of this seemed meaningless when Noah was diagnosed with liver cancer two years ago,

00:47:24.320 and the devastated couple immediately announced that they were putting their careers on hold for the care of their son.

00:47:30.300 Noah has been declared now cancer-free.

00:47:34.720 Michael Buble is very emotional.

00:47:36.680 His brown eyes well up at the mere mention of the C word.

00:47:41.620 Cancer. There's too many C words now.

00:47:43.940 And it is clear he is living in the shadow of what he describes as two years of hell.

00:47:48.280 You just want to die, he said.

00:47:50.280 I don't even know how I was breathing.

00:47:53.640 My wife was the same, and even though I was the stronger of the two of us, I wasn't strong.

00:47:58.740 My wife was.

00:48:00.080 I'm sorry, I can't make it to the end of the sentence.

00:48:02.560 Let's just say we find out who we are with these things.

00:48:06.320 Going through this with Noah, I didn't question who I was.

00:48:10.280 I just questioned everything else.

00:48:11.760 Why are we here?

00:48:13.040 Is this all there is?

00:48:14.460 Because if this is all there is, there has to be something bigger.

00:48:17.400 He says that one way he got through was to pretend he was in Roberto Benigni's character from Life is Beautiful.

00:48:25.960 I don't know if that was a choice, he said, but that's who I became.

00:48:30.140 For instance, I never called it the hospital.

00:48:31.940 I called it the fun hotel.

00:48:35.340 He said every day I got extra bedsheets and I would build a tent for Noah.

00:48:39.480 I just made the best of it.

00:48:41.500 It's such a difficult exercise.

00:48:43.320 It hurts me, and it hurts to talk about Noah because it's not my story to tell.

00:48:47.060 It's his.

00:48:48.020 But my whole life has changed.

00:48:49.700 My perception of life.

00:48:51.020 I don't even know if I could get through this conversation without crying, and I never lost control of my emotions before in public.

00:48:57.420 I actually thought I'd never come back to the music business.

00:49:00.240 I never fell out of love with music.

00:49:01.900 I just needed to put it aside.

00:49:03.620 What was hard was going to the store and buying hot dogs and toilet paper and going to the gas station, going for a walk by the sea to clear my head.

00:49:11.040 Everyone recognizes me and says, how's your son?

00:49:13.840 You think you're close to getting over it, and you're sucked right back into it.

00:49:17.040 But at the same time, I was given back my faith in humanity.

00:49:22.460 He said the illness made him realize he needed to make a change in his life.

00:49:28.620 I spent a good deal of time with people who aren't so lucky.

00:49:33.820 When this terrible news came, I realized I wasn't really having fun in the music business.

00:49:38.580 I had lost the joy, and at some point just before the Brits, I was starting to lose the plot.

00:49:44.840 But I'd become desperate to hold on to something I thought I might be losing, and I thought I had to do something special to keep it.

00:49:51.900 I started doing things out of my comfort zone, like presenting, and the truth is, it had been a while since I had been having fun.

00:49:58.500 I started to worry about ticket sales for my tours, what the critics said, what the perception of me might be.

00:50:05.500 I felt like I was living with this over my face, and the reality I was seeing was all blurred by it.

00:50:12.300 I decided I never wanted to read my name in print again, never read a review, and I never have.

00:50:18.980 I decided I'd never use social media again, and I never have.

00:50:22.580 But the diagnosis made me realize how stupid I had been to worry about all of these unimportant things.

00:50:28.080 I was embarrassed by my ego.

00:50:29.880 I was embarrassed that it allowed this insecurity.

00:50:35.900 I realized that for many years, I couldn't believe I was on the same stage as my heroes.

00:50:41.160 I couldn't believe I was looking across somebody like Paul McCartney and saying things like,

00:50:45.680 it's hard to get here, but my God, it's harder to stay here.

00:50:49.440 Then I woke up and thought, after ten years of trying to get here,

00:50:52.280 and five years of being scared that it would go away,

00:50:54.880 I think I can enjoy it.

00:50:56.260 After his son's illness, he says,

00:51:00.760 I just don't have the stomach for it anymore.

00:51:03.740 The celebrity narcissism.

00:51:06.320 I started to crumble, but then I started to wonder why I wanted to do it in the first place.

00:51:12.240 I had forgotten that it was all about souls connecting, because I'd become so anxious.

00:51:17.820 There were people in my business life saying,

00:51:20.100 if you hadn't done this or that, if you'd written a better song, tickets might be selling quicker.

00:51:23.740 I started to take all of that on board, and no one wanted to take any responsibility.

00:51:29.120 It's just so much easier for people to pass the buck to me, because I was insecure enough already.

00:51:34.120 I would digest it and say, it's my fault, I'm rubbish.

00:51:37.700 It affected me, and I started to think, it's all going to go.

00:51:40.980 I'm going to lose everything.

00:51:42.140 It is fascinating to read these things from him, because what I've always felt about Michael Buble was he was just having fun.

00:51:56.600 He was just living a dream, and I wondered, and I never spotted it in him.

00:52:06.200 I just wondered if it was ever going to get old to him, because what makes him, I think, the best performer I've ever seen on stage is that joy.

00:52:18.820 He just has a joy of performance, and it is so infectious.

00:52:27.040 Yeah, he loves it.

00:52:28.420 I mean, you can tell when you see him live, you can tell he just absolutely loves doing it, or at least did at one point.

00:52:34.780 But they're starting to talk about, I mean, there's conflicting reports that he's actually thinking about stopping it completely.

00:52:40.940 He says, he says,

00:53:10.940 I think he's joking about, because he says, I miss the guys in my band.

00:53:17.840 So when my wife had to go back to Argentina, I said to the guys, come on over to the house.

00:53:22.100 Let's have a drink, order some pizza, play some video games, and jam.

00:53:25.740 They came over, and we partied, and I said, let's play some music.

00:53:28.880 And I thought, wow, this is fun.

00:53:32.120 It was then that I realized I missed making music.

00:53:34.960 I didn't even know I missed it.

00:53:36.660 That was about a year ago.

00:53:38.120 So why would he possibly be saying that he is now?

00:53:44.520 It seems like it might be one of those situations where the internet has taken somewhat a sarcastic comment and turned it into reality.

00:53:51.780 His spokespeople are coming out today and saying that he's not actually going to retire because he's in the middle of a tour and a book, album release, and all that other stuff.

00:54:01.280 So here's what he says exactly to the reporter.

00:54:05.360 He pauses.

00:54:06.020 Then he suddenly stops.

00:54:33.940 Quote, this is my last interview, he says quite solemnly.

00:54:38.020 I'm retiring from the business.

00:54:40.000 I've made the perfect record, and now I can leave at the very top, end quote.

00:54:44.240 Somehow, though, the writer says, I don't think he really means it.

00:54:49.020 That's unbelievable because it was put all over the media as if he was retiring.

00:54:54.040 Well, he said it was his last interview.

00:54:56.060 He's got other interviews scheduled.

00:54:58.040 He's had a whole press tour for this album.

00:55:00.520 It's just silly.

00:55:01.480 The most important thing, though, is looking at that and saying that is really the type of thing that changes your perspective completely.

00:55:08.540 You go through something like that, and you stop and you examine all the nonsensical idiocy that you participate in every day, and you can reprioritize.

00:55:18.980 You don't want to have to go through that to do it, but sometimes it's the only thing that makes you kind of reprioritize the things you're doing in your life.

00:55:24.800 And he seems to have—I mean, he is making $35 million a year if he's out there touring and stuff, and he's able to walk away from that because he just wants to spend time with his son.

00:55:38.160 How many times do we hear those excuses?

00:55:40.880 It's so quitting to spend more time with my family.

00:55:43.140 That was completely real with this guy.

00:55:45.060 It's nice to see somebody who actually cares.

00:55:47.160 And it's nice to see that he got through it and has made it into a good thing, you know?

00:55:53.780 I have probably more respect for Michael Buble than any other professional that I have ever met in the entertainment industry because he has found a way to keep his feet on the ground.

00:56:11.120 And he was unafraid.

00:56:12.900 I mean, when everybody—when it was very popular to hate me, he didn't.

00:56:19.400 It's always popular to hate you.

00:56:20.980 I know, but he—and he was never taking a stand for me.

00:56:24.580 He just wouldn't—he just didn't understand.

00:56:27.460 He's like, look, I'm not in politics.

00:56:29.360 I'm Canadian.

00:56:30.420 Why do I care?

00:56:31.540 Leave me out of it.

00:56:32.300 Didn't he get a fight at a hockey game about you?

00:56:34.480 Yeah.

00:56:35.020 He said the guy turned around and said, I can't believe you like Glenn Beck.

00:56:38.940 And he's like, I'm Canadian.

00:56:40.320 I don't vote.

00:56:41.060 What does it matter?

00:56:42.500 What does it matter to you?

00:56:43.880 And the guy threw a punch, and he said, I threw punches back, and he said, I got into a hockey fight.

00:56:50.300 Got into a hockey fight.

00:56:52.940 I am so happy to hear that his family is doing better, and his son has made this miraculous turn.

00:57:02.960 And, uh, Michael Buble, you've given enough.

00:57:08.600 If you want to give more, we will certainly take it.

00:57:12.460 But, uh, do what's right for you.

00:57:15.320 Do what's right for you.

00:57:17.040 And for your family.

00:57:19.520 And your real fans will be thrilled no matter what you decide.

00:57:25.220 The Blaze Radio Network.

00:57:30.020 On demand.

The Glenn Beck Program - October 15, 2018

Best of the Program with Dr. James Lindsay ｜ 10⧸15⧸18

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