Glenn Beck takes aim at a fast food giant that has turned their logo upside down to resemble a woman. He also tells the story of how a billionaire came out to the public as gay in 2007, and how the media covered it up.
00:04:13.880So, Ryan, can you tell this story like only you can?
00:04:18.100Tell this story before we get into what we are supposed to learn from it.
00:04:21.440Well, it's an almost unbelievable story.
00:04:25.060In 2007, Gawker Media, a gossip website in New York City, has a Silicon Valley arm called Valleywag, and they out the Silicon Valley investor, Peter Thiel, as gay.
00:04:36.900He's at that point the founder of PayPal.
00:04:39.880He was an early investor in Facebook, but a relatively unknown person whose sexuality was known to his friends, but he was not publicly gay.
00:05:10.220Ryan, when this happens with Gawker, is this, because I find Gawker despicable.
00:05:16.560They've done things to me and my family that are just despicable.
00:05:19.540But on this, people were saying, well, we should out people because that's only going to make, you know, people more comfortable with, you know, with gay people if they know you're around them all the time.
00:05:32.940So, were they using the ends justify the means at that time to do something good, or are they just dirtbags?
00:05:39.800I think it's a little bit of both, right?
00:05:42.140I think they thought, why should he get to keep this secret?
00:05:45.820And I think they also thought, why should it be a secret?
00:05:50.680This isn't something to be ashamed of.
00:05:52.900But the truth is, he didn't want it to be public.
00:06:48.640I will fund this case as far as you're willing to take it.
00:06:52.160And he approaches a number of other people of similar cases.
00:06:55.020And then for the next four years, this case winds its way through the legal system, and he eventually wins a $140 million bankruptcy-inducing verdict against Gawker in Florida
00:07:10.520to the shock of all onlookers and legal strategists at the time.
00:07:15.660And he achieves that thing that he had set out to do in 2007, which was to both get his revenge and to prevent this website that he believed to be evil from doing what it did to people.
00:07:29.960So I know, Peter, he is a very, you know, generally quiet guy.
00:07:44.760Doesn't seem like a guy who's driven by vengeance, but does sound like a guy or feels like a guy who will take all the time necessary in the world.
00:08:28.020But he looked for an opportunity where he actually had legal ground to stand on, where he actually could have an impact, where the public would be so universally repulsed by what these people did, that he would have a shot at making a difference.
00:08:43.320And so I think both that patience and that ability to be strategic is why he was able to solve a problem, if that's what you want to call it, that many other powerful people had looked at and said, basically, there's nothing you can do about this.
00:08:58.740But he didn't do, did he become the thing that he despised?
00:09:04.140I don't get the impression that he did.
00:09:19.360Look, I think secrecy is a fundamental element of a conspiracy.
00:09:23.740And I respect that he was willing to see that the optics of a billionaire being publicly in front of this thing completely changes how the public would look at it.
00:09:34.320But he said to me, he got this advice from one of his friends.
00:09:37.400His friend said, Peter, you have to choose your enemies carefully because you become just like them.
00:09:43.200And so that's really the danger of, you know, spending nine years scheming to destroy or ruin someone or something, is that you study them so much, they consume so much of your mental bandwidth that you can kind of become like them.
00:10:00.000I don't think that he became anything like Gawker.
00:10:04.420But, for instance, there's a seminal moment in jury selection where they notice that overweight female jurors are the most sympathetic to their case.
00:10:15.620And now that's not disgusting, but there is an element of unpleasantness in selecting a juror to then exploit their most vulnerable body issue.
00:10:26.200But don't you think that that's done in the court system every day of the week?
00:41:38.620The privilege is the one you refer to.
00:41:40.720If you want to talk about privilege, it is that if you go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale or a variety of other highly prestigious colleges, you get interviewed by places that aren't going to interview you for jobs.
00:41:55.020I mean, I'm talking about Goldman Sachs and things like that.
00:41:59.400That's privilege when you get access to that kind of job opportunity that can make you fabulously wealthy.
00:42:07.100There are a whole variety of things that the new upper class, which is my label for this educated class, have going for them, whereby they have crafted a world that is perfectly suited to what they do best.
00:42:24.000That's privilege in a real, concrete, powerful sense that makes any Christian privilege trivial.
00:42:33.820So, you know, in reading your book, it's just fascinating the way you use stats and the way you view things and compare apples to apples.
00:42:44.320But, you know, you wrote this in 2012, and it is all it's all heavy on the tree now.
00:43:40.760But what that did was over time, as the decades went on, it created a kind of new culture of all these kids who are really, really smart and who who become isolated from each from the rest of the country.
00:43:58.120I love I love in your book the way you describe this, that because we all went to school with a geek.
00:44:03.540I mean, I went to went to school with a guy who was a math genius, first chair violinist.
00:44:11.340I mean, the guy was, you know, and good looking.
00:44:13.560And I just I wanted to stone him to death.
00:44:15.500If I would have lived in biblical days, I would have led the charge.
00:44:18.400But, you know, I don't know what he's doing now, but he was very isolated in some ways because he was so smart.
00:44:26.960And, you know, I, I always you know, when when he went off to college, I always wondered what that was like, because now he was in a group of a bunch of other really, really smart people.
00:44:39.820And the way you describe this and what happens is fascinating.
00:44:44.120And it's much, much different than it used to be.
00:44:48.760You know, think about this way, Glenn, if you're talking about, let's say, people with high IQs and let's just say that's people with IQs of 130 above, which I hasten to add, does not make them wise.
00:48:01.880People are saying that it's racism on the left.
00:48:04.980And the right is saying that it's elitism.
00:48:07.520But there's actual reasons for why this is coming apart.
00:48:11.800And we're not addressing any of those.
00:48:13.880So Charles just explained why the elites have started to pull away from the average American.
00:48:25.840And it's because they they they used to go to college in their own area.
00:48:31.700And what the colleges weren't elite like they are now.
00:48:34.920And you would pretty much go home and you you'd pretty much live the same kind of life as everybody else around you, which is not happening.
00:48:43.100Yeah, you were mixed up with all sorts of other people, too, because, look, here's an example.
00:48:48.520In an elite neighborhood like the North Shore of Chicago or whatever, which used to be prestigious in 1960, the same way it is now.
00:48:58.160But in 1960, the wealthy executives in the North Shore of Chicago were mostly married to high school graduates, you know, and you go to those same kinds of neighborhoods today.
00:49:12.160They haven't married the girl next door.
00:49:15.180I'm talking about the guys now who are very successful.
00:49:18.380They've married the graduate from Yale Law School that their company was litigating against and that fell in love with.
00:49:25.080You've got you've got people being reinforced in these these bubbles.
00:49:31.920And if you live in a an affluent neighborhood and you send your kids to even to the public schools, if it's in a rich neighborhood, you're probably not going to have your child meet anyone who makes whose parents make a living with their hands.
00:49:50.340They're not going to meet anyone who isn't real smart.
00:49:53.600And as a result, they get to be twenty five, thirty, thirty five years old.
00:49:59.760And they sort of assume that all these people out and fly over country are really stupid and really can't be trusted to manage their own affairs.
00:50:08.340And it's we smart people who have to make the choices for them.
00:50:25.700I talk exclusively about white America.
00:50:28.380And the reason I did that, Glenn, was originally just because I didn't want people to think these problems are only in the black community, Hispanic community.
00:50:37.340As it turned out, there were even bigger problems going on in white America that we realized a lot of demoralization.
00:50:45.440That demoralization came from all sorts of things.
00:50:50.660Another part of it was the ways in which white working class Americans who were applying for the police academy or for the firefighting academy found that they weren't getting in because affirmative action, even though that, you know, they'd taken the entrance examinations very well.
00:51:08.340Affirmative action was making it harder for them.
00:51:10.220There were a variety of other things going on that undermined the role of the male as, you know, putting food on the table and a roof over the head.
00:51:22.860And, you know, the respect he got for that, that was being undermined by feminism in large part, by the sexual revolution in another part, though, because guess what?
00:51:34.180Well, a lot of guys in their early 20s who were getting all the sex they wanted to without getting married didn't feel any strong urge to get married.
00:51:45.600They plummeted in the white working class.
00:51:48.280And all of these things just change the nature of life in white working class neighborhoods for the worse.
00:51:56.200So now we have a group of people who are, you know, if you don't if you don't finish high school, you're most likely to marry somebody who didn't finish high school.
00:52:05.520If you went to college, you're most likely to marry somebody who went to college.
00:52:11.200So it's it's it's a normal, natural thing, I think.
00:52:18.020And and I don't necessarily think that's anything nefarious.
00:52:22.940It's just the way it has it has happened.
00:53:00.500But here's the bad part, which is that life gets really thinned out when you are cocooned in this elite bubble.
00:53:13.220I live in a town of 152 people, 60 miles out of D.C.
00:53:20.460I'm talking to you right now, looking out my back window over the farmlands next door.
00:53:25.940And we moved here in 1989 in large part because I didn't want my little children at that point to grow up only knowing the people who lived in northwest Washington.
00:53:37.100OK, so hold on just a second, Charles, as we get to what can we do and not a government program.
00:53:44.220And I also want to talk to him a little bit about our own responsibility when it comes to social media.
00:53:50.660What's happening to us there when we come back.
00:54:32.200But Charles, you were talking about, you know, in 1989, you move your kids to the farm so they, you know, they wouldn't get caught in this trap.
00:56:11.640And then the collapse of marriage is the biggest problem here, because what makes communities work, whether they're urban communities or small towns,
00:56:20.380is the married couple that are trying to create an environment for their kids that is good.
00:56:26.280And that's why you have the little league teams that the fathers are coaching.
00:56:30.300That's why you have people attending the PTAs.
00:56:32.960That's why you have all sorts of these interactions.
00:56:36.940And once marriage goes downhill, single guys don't very often coach little league teams.
00:56:45.220And and this problem, I have no idea how you fix, except, I guess, Glenn, just as I want to say to the people in the bubbles that life is more fun outside the bubble.
00:56:58.880I want to say to people who are not getting married that a good marriage is the best thing that will ever happen to you.
00:57:05.760And it's worth just going way out of your way to try to find that.
00:57:10.680And my daughter was going to Fordham and she met her now husband and she was a junior, I think, maybe a sophomore.
00:57:19.980And she said to me, you know, she was talking to me about him and I really liked him.
00:57:24.320And and I said, so is he the one she said, yeah, he's the one I said.
00:58:10.720And then an awful lot of that is exaggerated, too, once you get into the elite school.
00:58:16.080So even to get married in your 20s is considered too young and you don't get married until you're 33, 23, you're already making a quarter million dollars a year.
00:58:28.460And, you know, that kind of approach to life, I think, is missing the point in lots of important things.
00:58:37.780One of the really interesting points you make, we're talking to Charles Murray, by the way, author of the book Coming Apart.
00:58:42.620One of the really interesting points you make in the book is how sort of the great society welfare programs of the 60s led to sort of a degradation of the four pillars of American exceptionalism.
00:58:58.840You just talked about marriage, the others being religiosity, industriousness and honesty.
00:59:03.920Can you talk about the relationship between those programs and the changes in our attitude of those main points of American exceptionalism?
00:59:10.720Yeah, they're pretty simple in all sorts of ways during the 1960s when you greatly expanded the scope of things that government did for single women, for example.
00:59:23.680It made it economically a lot more feasible to have a baby without a husband than it used to be.
00:59:49.260Because when you've got one girl in the high school class who's pregnant, that's kind of a tough position to be in.
00:59:56.660When you've got six, seven, eight or nine, when you start to have a daycare center for the babies, you've got a problem in terms of the stigma.
01:00:06.060The whole problem with crime, the 1960s is when crime started to shoot up and continue to shoot up for the next three decades because of changes in the criminal justice system, whereby the old rather simple formula, you commit a serious crime, you're going to go to jail, that broke down.
01:00:27.600People now talk about the incarceration, mass incarceration.
01:00:33.780The crime surge started when we stopped incarcerating people who committed serious crimes, and we've been trying to catch up with it ever since.
01:01:01.240I'm born in 1964, so I'm at the very last year of that.
01:01:05.720And, you know, I'm kind of sitting here watching it and seeing that, you know, it doesn't work, and nor do the policies that we're talking about today.
01:01:17.300I mean, today we're talking about the shooter in California, the killer that went out and tried to kill people at YouTube.
01:01:54.700And the problem is that it seems to be getting worse.
01:01:59.060Here's a problem we haven't talked about.
01:02:00.940In 1960, if you were a guy of working age and you were reasonably healthy, you were in the labor force.
01:02:08.520I mean, if you weren't in the labor force, everybody got in your back, whether it was your girlfriend or your parents or your – or the other guys would get in your back if you weren't either working or looking hard for work.
01:02:21.040Now we've got, even in a time of full employment, you've got something in the order of 15% of working-class guys in their 20s, 30s, 40s who aren't even looking for work.
01:02:34.580That is a new phenomenon whereby you have a breakdown in the social fabric that makes it – that's another thing that contributes to the deterioration of life in working-class America.
01:02:47.420Once again, it became possible to exist at the margins of society in ways that it was much harder to exist in previous years, and a lot of that was cultural.
01:02:59.440You were a bum if you behaved that way, and you're no longer a bum.
01:03:03.440Talking to Charles Murray, I want to continue our conversation here just a bit with you, Charles, and delve a little bit deeper into, you know, what can be done and the role of social media.
01:03:35.980We are our own worst enemy, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on that when we come back.
01:03:41.380Charles Murray, the book, is coming apart.
01:03:46.740Came out a few years ago, but it's really well worth a read now because it's – you know, we're being pushed into racism and pushed into this is not the problem.
01:03:55.900No, no, there's some actual stats here that show what the problem is.
01:04:01.800Let's deal with the stats and the facts.
01:04:06.420Charles Murray is the author of Coming Apart, The State of White America, and Charles, I want to ask you a question.
01:04:14.840This is my perception, okay, of how things are.
01:04:18.500That there is – there's always been a group of racists, and they're on both sides, all sides.
01:04:27.660However – and we were getting better as a society on the whole.
01:04:32.540However, we are being pushed and painted as racist and, you know, Islamophobes and everything else.
01:04:39.660And this is allowing these crazy nutjobs to be able to come out from under, you know, under the wraps, out of the holes that they have always been in and start to make points and say, see, they are coming after you.
01:05:07.100Back in the 1960s, when we adopted the rule that it is okay to treat people by their race as long as you're doing it for the right reasons, we opened Pandora's box.
01:05:22.880You know, at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I wish they had had as the core of that, there shall be no law that gives one race advantage over another legally of any kind.
01:05:36.060And just said, well, you know, here we are in the anniversary of Martin Luther King's death.
01:05:40.780And that really was his point, wasn't it?
01:05:43.180His point was, America, live up to the words you wrote in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
01:05:50.000And what happened was that we said, we gave identity politics the green light.
01:05:55.700It's great for black people to identify with being black and great for Latinos to identify as Latinos and so forth.
01:06:03.340And as that went on, and as the kind of anger that was coming out toward whites increased, all at once you had the 70-odd percent of the people in this country who are white who started to say, or at least some of them did, hey, what's good for them is good for us.
01:06:23.720I'm going to start identifying as being white, as being my primary way of thinking about myself.
01:06:30.640It was the inevitable consequence of saying it's okay to treat people differently by race.
01:06:38.720How much of a role is social media playing in the acceleration of our country being torn apart?
01:06:44.640It is amplifying all of our natural tendencies to only talk to people who think the same things we do.
01:06:56.220So now you can get your news from only sources that agree with you.
01:07:02.180You can interact with only people who politically agree with you.
01:07:06.580And that is happening big time on both the left and the right, which I think accounts for a lot of this tendency to say, if somebody disagrees with me politically, they are not just disagreeing with me on a political issue.
01:07:24.920And that's driving me nuts because it's so widespread now.
01:07:31.640In looking at all the stats and studying this for so long and being a watchman on the tower and the gates and blowing the horn and nobody listening, are you still optimistic?
01:07:48.280I'm optimistic for the long term, Glenn.
01:07:51.580I cannot imagine that 200 years from now, with all of the increases in wealth and technology that will have occurred, that we still think that a big government running our lives minutely is a great idea.
01:08:04.160I think that a lot of the trends in technology and wealth are going to make it easier for us to live three lives.
01:08:12.240But, Glenn, you and I are part of – here's where I get pessimistic – we both, in one way or another, are Madisonians.
01:08:21.000I mean, we are committed to the original American ideals of limited government and freedom.
01:08:27.060And I'm afraid over the last few years, we've discovered a whole lot of people who talk to good game with regard to that didn't really believe it when push came to shove.
01:08:37.180So, you know, I'm pessimistic in the short term.
01:08:40.680I don't know where we resuscitate a movement that says, for heaven's sakes, let people live their lives as they see fit.
01:08:51.360I don't see a constituency of that anymore.
01:15:18.300You're not going to stop the bloodthirsty civilians that are, you know, actually doing crime.
01:15:25.020You're going to get those killers that are just looking to assemble their IKEA furniture.
01:15:30.140Now, eating a steak might be a little difficult as well over in the UK, banning the tools of criminals and evil men don't really stop crime.
01:15:40.380But now in the UK, they may stop steak.
01:15:43.280So a big shout out and a thank you to the London mayor for opening Pandora's box and making a case for the Second Amendment.
01:15:51.440Because now instead of watching clowns on CNN, I can watch the town halls on the BBC,
01:15:57.100where they are going to be arguing the evils of their NRA.
01:16:02.560You know, the National Ratchet Association.
01:16:18.560David Bonson is a is a guy who wrote a book called Crisis of Responsibility.
01:16:24.340Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It.
01:17:21.860Yeah, I mean, essentially, in line with how you sort of set it up, there was a underlying theme out of the financial crisis, and it really has sort of been baked into the American understanding of what took place, that there was some great big infraction that took place.
01:17:43.940And if you're left of center, you believe that infraction came out of Wall Street.
01:17:49.840And if you're right of center, you believe that infraction came from government, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, maybe even Federal Reserve monetary policy.
01:17:59.880And there's a certain kind of prima facie truth to both sides.
01:18:04.540Wall Street had its fair share of negligence and most certainly government housing policy contributed greatly.
01:18:13.940But the problem was that both narratives, whether on the right or left, were perfectly willing to treat Main Street as a victim of the crisis and to totally ignore Main Street's culpability in the crisis.
01:18:30.260And so as I studied it further and further, it became just too easy and too simplistic to say that big greedy bankers were giving money to people, and then those people really wanted to pay it back and just couldn't.
01:18:48.220And the government was asleep at the wheel and forcing the banks to do this and so forth and so on.
01:18:54.980And there was all kinds of policy failure.
01:19:46.120And it's a term I use in the book because the fact of the matter is, best case, you had people that were willing to take loans irresponsibly, that believed they could pay it back, hoped they could pay it back, but were being somewhat reckless.
01:20:02.780Worst case, they were committing full blown fraud, absolutely lying.
01:20:06.700And just assuming that even though their cash flow would not enable them to service the mortgage, the property would continue escalating and they would just participate in this little pyramid scheme that became the U.S. housing market from 2004 to 2006.
01:20:21.980But then as I as I really delve into in chapter four of the book, this is the part that breaks my heart morally and culturally is the fact of the matter is we had no financial crisis if it weren't for the people that were perfectly able to meet their loan obligations that actually could make their payment.
01:20:40.660Yeah, maybe their house price had gone down in value and it was unfortunate and so forth, but they had the assets, they had the income, but they were allowed to just walk away from the loans.
01:20:51.760And this is the area that I think warrants a further cultural and moral conversation is to why in 1991 in the savings and loan crisis, when 20% of Americans were upside down in their home, did we have less than 1% of a default rate?
01:21:11.060And yet in 2008, just 17 years later, not only did you see upwards of 20% of people walking away from their homes, but this is the worst part.
01:21:22.000They could go to the bar and brag about it on Friday night.
01:21:26.100That was the part that to me indicated this crisis of responsibility.
01:21:30.160So there is a there's a great deal of difference now.
01:21:32.680One of my favorite presidential stories, I think that very few people know is about Harry Truman, who I may disagree with his policies here and there, I think was a really decent, decent man in World War Two.
01:21:47.760He comes back from World War Two and he gets a loan to start a business and he runs a men's clothing store.
01:21:53.960He and his partner, he and his partner, they go into business, things don't go well, and he goes bankrupt, I think, in the mid-20s.
01:22:03.760It takes him until he's president to pay all those loans back.
01:22:31.380I think that speaks to a certain character and ethos that existed.
01:22:35.600And in fact, the whole Great Depression, by the way, if you read some of what Amity Schlaes has written on it, it's fascinating.
01:22:41.600It was a culture in which then you could really argue people had tremendous justification in needing to sort of walk away from some obligation.
01:22:50.880But there was a stigma that said, I'm not going to do that.
01:22:56.820But 2008 was not a situation defined by that legitimate struggle.
01:23:02.720It was a self-induced problem from excessive greed.
01:23:07.860And what I argue in the book is that that greed at Wall Street that we're all very quick to condemn was exactly the same covetousness on Main Street.
01:23:16.020Wall Street, they just wore, you know, fancier suits and had more zeros and so forth involved.
01:24:35.180And and David is here to continue the conversation.
01:24:38.960And David, before we before we move off of the the personal responsibility, one of the reasons why we're having that we may have real trouble in the future is because all of us or many of us have have decided that we are going to take the easier route for one reason or another.
01:25:03.300And you point out that one of the big signs is the disability insurance that we are now on and the record numbers and how that's just not possible to be real.
01:25:17.420Well, I mean, it would require a certain leap of faith that is somewhat staggering medically because one hundred percent of the seven hundred percent increase in disability claims over the last eight years is limited to the area of back pain and anxiety.
01:25:39.280So so so somehow you have to believe that there has been absolutely no increase in anything organic or organ related, neurological, cardio, respiratory, all these things.
01:25:53.280And yet it just simply comes down to the two areas where any old doctor can write a note and get somebody out.
01:26:00.420So it's really quite distressing because it's a seven hundred percent increase.
01:26:08.360Yeah, well, seven hundred percent in just eight years.
01:26:10.680I mean, the numbers going back for a generation are far worse than even that.
01:26:17.760And and and we and that's tracking those using Social Security.
01:26:21.840So what is this what is this telling you, David?
01:26:24.080It's telling me that we have right now a segment of the society that is comfortable to live off the public dole and not work, receive compensation for it and to do so with highly questionable claims about their own physical and mental health.
01:26:46.140And that the reason for that is the underlying breakdown or morality and breakdown of of dignity that is embedded in a work ethic, the very work ethic that made America the greatest nation on Earth.
01:27:03.500So you you point out early in the book that we are addicted to blame.
01:27:11.120And until we start taking responsibility for ourselves, we're we're just going to get worse and worse.
01:27:21.480Well, one of the things, you know, I believe very much, as is the case of most really stellar recovery programs for those who have wrestled with personal demons, that, of course, the very first step is to admit you have a problem.
01:27:35.980And that's one of the reasons I suggest in the book that the admitting we're in this position and stopping the blame casting the next time.
01:27:45.840See, I'm a conservative, limited government advocate.
01:27:49.300But the next time the government does something that really bothers me, I want to be able to stop and say, OK, the government could be wrong here.
01:27:58.780Not just simply rely on the fact that big government is always and forever the permanent recipient of my frustration, ire and wait.
01:28:09.000Right. And likewise, that person who has been fired from a couple of corporate jobs and is personally very vindictive at corporate America to always assume their sort of default psychology is that the man is out to get him, so to speak.
01:28:25.640Breaking down that mentality in our personal lives, but recognizing that we, in fact, have it.
01:28:31.800And I wish very much as a right wing guy that this was something that the left had a monopoly on.
01:28:54.800And how do I change my life and my circumstances?
01:28:58.820A must read book, Crisis of Responsibility, came out a few weeks ago, Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It.
01:29:06.600David Bonson is the author of the book.
01:29:08.860He describes himself as a as a national review kind of conservative.
01:29:14.980David, you start out with a quote from from Foucault, which.
01:29:19.660This is the postmodernism, BS, radical leftist that really caused, I think, a lot of the arrogance and elitism that we have in academia now.
01:29:34.600But you follow it with a quote from Gustav Le Bon, who was a critic of socialism.
01:29:42.820And throughout the book, you kind of it's almost Jeffersonian in the way you do this, as he wrote a letter between an argument between his head and his heart.
01:29:51.840You say there's an even handedness that we're missing and and we we need to really have a balance and hold each side to task.
01:30:05.820I think at the heart of this really intense polarization that we're experiencing in the political culture and and this kind of tribalization that has taken place,
01:30:17.580the the ability to somehow magically interpret literally every single event that happens through some sort of partisan lens is a byproduct of the crisis of responsibility.
01:30:30.260That we have so removed ourselves from family, church, community, that that the the mediating institutions of society that are so important for good civic life have been discarded.
01:30:46.400And it's forced us into this kind of obsessive and polarized manner of living.
01:30:53.480I feel like I feel like we've made our our religion, our political party.
01:31:00.260And that's always the end run of statism.
01:31:03.400And this is the thing I want to point out, Glenn, because I really believe a target of the audience I had with the book are those who are right now very susceptible to the present populist uprising,
01:31:15.460which I acknowledge is responding to things that deserve to be responded to the elites, the the big institutionalists have failed.
01:31:25.840And yet my fear is that by us going forward and saying things like if we just renegotiate a trade deal with China, all these jobs are coming back to Ohio instead of acknowledging that there's actually been a total
01:31:40.980a total paradigm shift in the culture, not just economically and technologically, but culturally and morally that what we're doing is setting the table for more statism later, because when this populist uprising inevitably fails, we're not going to turn to greater individual responsibility, but rather to some sort of messiah to come bail us out.
01:32:03.980And that messiah has always been the nanny state.
01:32:08.760So we have and it rings all the way through this book, and it is really, I think, an important book and study that you have done.
01:32:22.160But I look at things like, for instance, you take on higher education and you say, you know, it's not the either or what's wrong with universities.
01:33:42.600What is it you're looking to do with your life?
01:33:45.080For one thing, the lack of that conversation is one of the great reasons.
01:33:48.940I think we have this systemic extended adolescence where our whole society has decided it's OK for people to be kids all the way through their 20s.
01:33:59.320I have no problem with people starting these conversations, again, with a lot of open endedness and vulnerability around them, but looking at what their goals may be.
01:34:09.420Now, maybe they want to go to college to meet a spouse.
01:34:12.060Maybe they need specialized vocational training.
01:34:14.540There's all kinds of reasons to go, but don't go because, A, if you're a parent, you want to be able to brag to your friends where your kid went to school.
01:34:24.880I think that is one of the biggest drivers of this whole mess, frankly.
01:34:29.120But also, having the student involved in what it is they want out of their life and how is college going to advance it.
01:34:36.800And so I think that it will not take place overnight, but right now what we're seeing is it's always economic, right?
01:34:44.540The economics are forcing a cultural moment.
01:34:48.680David, there's a lot of people who are who I think fought for 10, 15, 20 years and have been fighting and fighting and fighting to change this and to and to do the right thing.
01:35:02.960And they feel, I think, at this point, nobody's listening.
01:35:10.320I just keep getting on the short end of the stick and I can't afford to live this way anymore.
01:35:16.800I have to have somebody who is listening to me that is going to plow the way because I've tried.
01:35:23.160I think there's a lot of people who have really tried for a long time and they feel like they're just being mowed over.
01:35:30.040In terms of the higher education conversation, the whole thing, all of it, higher education, the jobs, income, they see the direction of the country, they know, but they feel like, what am I going to do?
01:35:47.500And that frustration is perfectly understandable and rational and probably in most cases accurate.
01:35:56.080And yet, like any other frustration we face, as soon as we're able to sort of calm the emotions, settle down and think through it, the only thing we can do is keep fighting.
01:36:07.180We cannot give up the free and virtuous society that I am advocating that I want as my telos out of this book and out of my life efforts can only come about by an army of people from the bottom up who believe in living morally responsible lives.
01:36:25.180The frustrations that we feel can never become an abdication of our own responsibility.
01:36:32.400You know, David, in the Wharton School of Business, I don't believe they teach moral sentiments.
01:36:37.680They only teach wealth of nations, if they still even teach that.
01:36:43.680And I think your book is a is really a new kind of moral sentiments that, you know, if if the people don't change, you know, let me phrase it.
01:36:56.980What we're going through right now is really a reflection of what we have allowed ourselves to accept or become over a very long period of time.
01:37:06.780And so we have to we have to fundamentally change and the system will change.
01:37:12.980That's right. It starts with us and then there is no limit to what we can do.
01:37:17.640It becomes infectious in our families, infectious in our communities.
01:37:21.920And a lot of the things I describe or prescribe in Chapter 11, the individual things that I am suggesting people do, they that contagious piece takes over.
01:37:33.380And not only does it bring greater satisfaction and joy in our own lives, but I think serves as an example for how communities need to function.
01:37:43.440I have an incredible optimism, even in the face of everything we're dealing with right now, even in this polarized political age and in this dysfunctional and sometimes morally reprobate culture.
01:37:55.080I have a tremendous amount of optimism that what made us great can make us great again if we stop the blame casting and look forward.
01:38:03.540So let me ask you this, David, because I feel the same thing.
01:38:06.400The more I look at the opportunities that are on the horizon and not and stop looking at the past, recognize the past, recognize the mistakes, try to correct those mistakes and then see the opportunities that are on the horizon.
01:38:20.200I am really, really optimistic, more optimistic than I've been in probably 10 or 15 years.
01:38:27.920With that being said, we are, I mean, good heavens, we are facing a bucket load of stuff that only the worst times in the world's history.
01:38:40.240Was it this bad around the world or had the seeds of being this bad around the world?
01:39:36.000For one, the one thing I'll say for all the good and the bad that can be said around the Donald Trump phenomena, nobody could have predicted it.
01:39:45.200And I believe that what will take place in 20 years, just as the fall of communism in the early 90s came out of nowhere, whatever takes place in the next 20 years is likely to shock us all, for good and for bad.
01:39:58.960But I want us, those who are sort of the remnant, who believe in the values of our country, believe in faith and family, but believe in taking initiative over our own lives.
01:40:10.440I think that one of the things, Glenn, that is most discouraging is that the backbone of America, that kind of nostalgic image we get of these blue-collar families that just want to be there with each other, work hard and come home and worship and live together.
01:40:29.360I fear that that is what's falling apart, that that ethos is disintegrating.
01:40:35.580What I desperately hope we will see over the next 20 years is individuals not only taking responsibility for their own economic well-beings, but taking responsibility for their individual decisions, building strong families.
01:40:50.300And then the one piece that I think is so important I wrote about near the end of the book, getting their joy out of their production, not their consumption.
01:40:59.220Seeing themselves as image bearers of God, that are here to produce on planet Earth and not merely be a consumer.
01:41:08.060I believe that that alone can change the world.
01:43:40.980And that's when she saw the underwear thief in her home.
01:43:45.100The underwear thief had been in her home several times.
01:43:49.760She then locked the door and called 911.
01:43:52.400The responding officers say that the underwear thief was at the door of another house in the neighborhood, pretending to knock on the door.
01:44:02.320They found several pairs of soiled women's panties on him.