Glenn Beck (5:24)
You got that? Let me just say. Do you hear that? I think we're going to hit AGI next year in 27. AGI is artificial general intelligence. That means the computer, the AI system, is smarter at everything than any human is. It is better at. Name the topic than the best human you can find. And it can do everything that a human can do best. Better than a human. It's not super intelligence. It's just better than humans on everything. He thinks we're going to hit that. Some people said we were not going to even. There was not a chance. 10 years ago. People said we'd never even get to there. We'll never get there. We'll never get there. He's saying we're going to hit it next year. I believe we are going to hit it. I think. I think there's a chance we hit. The world is going to be different by 2028. It's just going to be different by 2028. And we have got to prepare for this. So our last caller was saying, you know, well, you know, Smoot Hawley, you know, you can use tariffs to protect. There is a conversation that we have to have right now. We have to have because of artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, you know, entire categories of work dissolving quickly. You know, not in a generation, maybe not even in a decade. Maybe in the next few years. Factory workers first. You know, I reached out to Elon Musk and said, for my museum, I want one of the first Tesla robots for the museum. I want to keep it in the box and keep it in the museum. The first mainstream robot. You know what he said? All of the robots for the first. I think he said two years. He may have said one. All of the robots that Tesla will be making for the first two years will be for Tesla. Think of how many robots he's going to be making in a two year period. And all of them are going to Be for Tesla, that is a workforce. Army. Army. So. And that's coming quickly, really, really fast. So it'll go the factory worker, then the truck driver, then the coder, then the accountant, you know, the analyst who thought they was immune from everything because, you know, I work with ideas. The ground is shifting quickly. So what is it we should talk about? Well, the world is going to talk about universal basic income, and I am dead set against that. But that's the only thing anybody is talking about. I went back and I did my homework last couple of days on Milton Free. Milton Freeman was kind of for UBI, but a different kind of UBI, and he may have the answer. That is a bridge. least when the world is in a panic, that's not the time to discuss things. You discuss things before you're in a panic. You make decisions before there's an emergency. And now is that time. Because once there's an emergency, the loudest voice comes in and they have usually the simplest answer, and everybody's like, yeah, yeah, go with that. And that answer is going to be universal basic income. That is the modern version of bread and circuses. And make no mistakes. The communists, the social planners, the Davos crowd, they're going to offer it all as. Not as a temporary bridge, but as a permanent arrangement with you. A managed society, a population that is pacified, production centralized, dependency normalized. They're already talking about it. Read Yuval. No, Yuval Harari. Read his work. He is the. One of the main thinkers on the left and with all of the elites, and he talks about, you know, there's just a useless class of people. We cannot look at it that way. And people are going to go for this not because they, you know, love collectivism, but because nobody offered them another path. I have been talking about this and trying to get people to talk about this for a while, and there's a guy that we have to revisit, and he's honestly a guy who surprised me that he's in this debate, and it's Milton Friedman, at least surprised me that he's on the side that he's on. I mean, here's the free market economist, the man being a defender. He's accused of being a defender of the coldest kind of capitalism, where they just don't care about babies and children and food. He's the godfather of deregulation. He actually support or supported a version of basic income, but not the kind that's being sold today. He calls it the negative income tax. Listen to what he Actually proposed his idea, the negative income tax works like this. You eliminate the sprawling welfare state, okay? Really important we do all of these things. Eliminate the welfare state, that's food stamps, housing subsidies, overlapping programs, bureaucracy. Replace all of that with a simple income floor that everybody gets. If you earn below a certain threshold, the government will send you supplemental income, but as you earn more, the support will phase out very gradually. That way you're not being punished for working. And that last part is really critical because under the welfare system, if you earn a dollar, you lose a dollar in benefits. And so the rational response is, well, why would I earn a dollar? Because I'm never going to make enough to really be happy. So why just I'm just be. I'm gonna live here. I live off the government. Friedman system preserves incentive, okay? You always gain more by working more because he knows that you just can't make people comfortable in the lack of work, okay? And. The system that we have now is honestly designed to get people destitute and destroy productivity. This is the opposite, okay? And I'm shocked that Milton Friedman is thinking this way, but he understood something. Freeman understood something fundamental. Markets require stability. Free societies require order. So when we're talking AI, technological advancement is going to become so severe at some point that AI could create pockets of severe displacement. And with that you'll either get violent populism, authoritarian redistribution of wealth, or a market compatible safety valve. And that's what his negative income tax was, a pressure release. Without central planning. This is absolutely critical to keep the choice decentralized, the individual. You still get to choose how you spend the money. The federal government doesn't decide on which apartment you can rent, what food you can buy, which training program you have to attend. None of that shrinks shrink down the state as you create a floor for everybody. This is very different from modern UBI, okay? It's, that's tied to digital IDs, programmable currency, behavioral compliance. I mean, all of that is the New World order and one World Government. I mean, but it is coming. If AI eliminates 15 to 25% of current job categories over the next decade, you're going to see sudden income collapse in certain sectors, huge geographic, economic deserts. Most importantly, political radicalization. Okay, there is a piece, there's only two copies of this book that I have. One is in the National Archives because it was all handwritten and the charts are all made by hand. And it was made for President Roosevelt in World War II. It was, I think it was the election in 1936 or 38. And it's called radicalism, revolution or recovery. And they're making the case to fdr. Radicalism, revolution or recovery. That's what really enhanced the New Deal they chose incorrectly. Will we choose the right thing? You ever feel like you just need a moment to take a breath? I mean, not a vacation, not a week off, just a little space, a little room in your chest that isn't filled with numbers and due dates and interest rates that never seem to sleep. For a lot of people, that pressure isn't coming from one big disaster. It's just coming from a stack of high interest debt that just sits there month after month, quietly draining your paycheck before you even get a chance to use it for something that actually matters. Credit cards at 20 something percent. Personal loans that looked helpful at the time. That's where American financing can step in and help you. They are salaried employee owned company, which means their mortgage consultants aren't paid to push you into something that doesn't make sense. They'll take the time to look at your full financial picture and see whether consolidating high interest debt into your mortgage could lower your monthly payments, reduce your interest that you're paying overall, no upfront fees. They'll shoot straight with you. I've done business with these people for gosh, over 20 years. Now. It's American financing. 8009-0624-4080-0906-2440 It's American financing.net Now back to the podcast. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. And don't forget, rate us on itunes. While we were all talking about the State of the Union yesterday, two big stories happen and it's been unfolding for the last couple of days. And both of these stories are treated as no biggie. And I found them yesterday and I'm like, oh my gosh, these are earth shattering. So let me tell you the first one. Prime Minister of India, Prime Minister Modi landed in Israel yesterday and then he addressed the Knesset. Then they signed defense agreements or they discussed these defense agreements that are going way beyond commerce. It's deep integration of Israel's layer air defense systems, including the Iron Dome and the laser layer known as the Iron Beam. Okay? Not a sale, not a sale of those things to, to India integration, okay? Technology transfer discussions happened yesterday. This is joint production and institution institutional entanglement. Okay? Even if half of what is being reported about the Iron Beam, the cost per interception is accurate, it's game changing. I don't know if you know about the Iron Beam, You've heard about the Iron Dome. What is the Iron Beam? Right now if you have an interceptor missile, okay, an interceptor missile is anywhere between 2 million and $110 million. Why do third rate countries love new technology so much? Because they could take a million dollars and pour it all into drones and they could just wipe an aircraft carrier out. Okay, because we have to fire really expensive weapons to take those things down. And so you just bankrupt us. What the the Iron laser is doing is its single digit dollars of electricity. So you turn it on, boom, boom. It's the electricity that fast and that's all you're paying for. And it's single digit dollars instead of $110 million. As that changes the game. The, the economics of attrition warfare completely out the window. The old model has been overwhelm your enemy with cheap drones and rockets until he runs out of the expensive interceptors. That math collapses if defense becomes cheaper than offense. Okay, now that's one shift that went over to India. Now here's the second. India's Ministry of Defense briefly posted and then deleted that the Indian Navy had become had begun intercepting and seizing the Shadow fleet oil tankers. Wait a minute. What? The Shadow fleet, these are ships wildly understood to be part of Russia's sanctions evasion system. Okay. This is going from Russia to other countries and from Iran to Russia, et cetera, et cetera. He posted that they were now going after the Shadow Fleet and then the tweet disappeared. But the operations didn't. So let me translate this. India has been kind of a frenemy, if you will. They're kind of, they, they just, they always play the edges, you know, their national identity for 80 years has been non aligned. We're not going to align with anybody. And they're the founder of brics, okay? Historic customer of Moscow for defense. They bought a ton of discounted Russian oil even during the Ukraine war. India has built its post independence mythology around strategic autonomy. It, it doesn't bow to anyone. It doesn't, it's not part of a bloc. Until this week. India is now policing maritime law against the financial lifeline of Vladimir Putin. That's not a policy tweak. That is a tectonic shift. The Shadow Fleet is not a detail. It's how Russia sells oil outside of the sanctions regime. It's the way Russia gets around us and the rest of the West. It's how Moscow finances drones. It's how they finance artillery shells and spare parts. And political loyalty. If you take down the Shadow fleet, you constrict the war. And what India is doing is not stopping there. Iran is also using the same kind of network to move, sanction oil. China buys enormous quantities of discounted Russian and Iranian crude. Cheap energy that subsidizes Beijing's manufacturing edge and their ambitions to rule the world. Now imagine India taking their navy and saying, yeah, we're going to, we're going to choke that off. Not just by America, but now joined by India, a non aligned BRICS founder. The country that for decades used Moscow as leverage against Washington. That's what India does. They play both sides. But something changed. Hmm. What has changed over the last, what, two decades? The narrative coming out of Washington itself, coming out of the United States is America is over. America is declining. We're managing the decline. We're spending ourselves into oblivion. We're not doing any of the things that you and I know we should have been doing for a very long time. So brics, the dollar is going to fall. Brics will replace the West. China's century is inevitable. That's been the narrative for the last 20 years because we hollowed out our industrial base, we financialized absolutely everything. And we were sitting here arguing about pronoun pronouns while, while China and everybody else was building factories and missiles and what was happening was our politicians, unbeknownst to you. I mean, they would say it, but they didn't ask you to vote on this. They were managing America's decline. Then Donald Trump came in 2016, but he didn't have it. He didn't, he, he didn't really have his arms around what everything was and how to manage everything. Then came 2024, when Donald Trump came in. The strategy now is not subtle. The moves he's making are all transactional and unapologetic. Carrot and stick and mean, both of them. But India continued buying Russian oil. So tariffs followed, trade leverage followed, energy dominance returned as a strategic tool here in the United States. Sanctions enforcement tightened, US Naval seizures. Seizures of the Shadow fleet vessels off of Venezuela sent a very clear message. We are now going to enforce maritime law. We are not screwing carrot and stick and mean both here in America. Our press said that's reckless. It's going to alienate India and the rest of the world. It's only going to strengthen brics. Except look what just happened. We now have a sweeping trade framework that is reducing tariffs conditional on India curbing Russian energy purchases. First they said no, then they said yes. Now they're in Israel partnering on the iron Dome. And then they begin maritime enforcement against the shadow fleet tankers. Modi standing in Jerusalem discussing the integrated defense architecture while F22s are sitting on the Israeli tarmac. China is negotiating for supersonic anti ship missiles with Iran. India is tightening the alignment with the West's security ecosystem. This is not chaos, this is fundamental transformation of the way the world is working. We have pursued cautiously India for a very long time. Then their Silicon Valley section, Bangalore I think realized, wait, I've got to do things differently. Then after the, the tidal wave, what was that in Japan? Remember the big tidal wave? I can't remember what that was called. But anyway, something formed called the Quad. Okay, Bangalore grew, the Quad was formed. Relations start to thaw. Suspicion still lingered. India still balancing their relationship between Moscow and the United States, not choosing side. What you're witnessing now is different. The US India relationship has been thawing because of India's Silicon Valley. What they, they realized is that we need to integrate with the US and the west on tech. Okay, US, India, tech integration has to happen. Massive Indian migration to the United States. We are closer. Shared software, AI, semiconductor defense innovation, ecosystems. And then a detox in India from the Cold War socialism that they were going through. Okay, let me explain this in plain terms. India began tying its future to the west and Western capital, Western markets, Western technology. And it was the first slow shift from Moscow. Now I think India is looking at who's going to win. AI, who's actually playing for the world, who actually has a solution that will work and that will want partners. And I think they're picking us. Then I said the Quad, that's the United States, India, Japan and Australia. After the tsunami in 2004, they joined this thing and then it kind of went dormant. And then it was revised as a balancing coalition against China because China was, everybody knew China was growing in maritime power and aggression. So India agreed to sit at the security table with America and the Indo Pacific. India acknowledged China as a structural threat. That's a pretty big deal. India began stepping into the coalition, you know, instead of strict non alignment. It was cautious, it was quiet, it was incomplete. But it was the first physical visible crack in India's 80 year old posture. Okay, Donald Trump comes in, he sees all of this, he sees what's happening and he sees the opportunity. What just happened with the shadow fleet enforcement and deeper defense integration is not incremental, it is massive acceleration. For 30 years India leaned towards the west economically. For 15 years they leaned to the west strategically. But now this is a structural Move. So why does this all matter? You're listening to the Best of Glenn Beck. Need a little more? Check out the full show podcasts anywhere you download podcasts. There are moments in a man's life when he has to say three words, and it does not come easily. I was wrong on this one. I want you to understand. I want you to listen to the whole explanation here, because I don't believe I was wrong in principle. I was wrong in understanding and. And possibly timing. Okay? I've been thinking about this and playing with this for a while now. But I think I am ready to say what I once depos. What I once opposed tariffs. I now think I support. In fact, I know I support. Okay, I believed, and I believe sincerely that free markets are not just efficient, but they're moral. And I still believe that free markets are moral. That voluntary exchange between borders lifts all boats, that protectionism is a relic of fear. And I hate that. And I still believe those things because historically, there is truth in that. But historically, there is also proof in the other way. And let me explain. After World War II, the United States stood alone. We had everybody's gold from World War I and then World War II. We had everyone's gold. Everybody's gold. Our factories, we didn't have. We didn't lose anything to a bombing here. Our factories were untouched. Our industry was unmatched. Our dollar, unquestioned free trade worked. Why? Because we were the apex predator in a world of economic rubble. We were Tyrannosaurus rex. And in that environment, terrorists would have been stupid for us. Why would we impose tariffs? We wanted the world to buy our stuff. We're an engine. We're just churning stuff up. Okay? But that's not the only chapter in American history. Let's go back further. Before we had everybody's gold, the founders. And there's a great George AI on income tax, unrelated to this. It's so funny because the Georgia came up and I'm like, oh, my gosh. This is exactly. I mean, this is tied directly to what I'm talking about today. The founders did not like income tax. They didn't want any direct tax on people. Okay? The founders used tariffs as the primary funding mechanism of the federal government. They did not have an irs. They did not believe in income tax. They funded the entire government on tariffs, excise tax, and duties on imports. That's it. Okay? It was simple. It was transparent, and it tied government revenue to trade rather than the confiscation of labor. Okay? That's how we Set it up first. Then came Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln. And the Republicans were unapologetically pro tariff. Why? Ever wonder why the Republicans had for such a long time? Oh, they're just for big business. They're for big business. It kind of comes from this in a way. Okay, America was industrializing at the time. We were. We were a nothing country back in the 1800s. Okay? We were still kind of a joke to the rest of the world. We were a neat little experiment, let's put it that way. And we needed to protect our infant industries from European dominance because they had all of it. We had nothing. So we enacted tariffs. And tariffs allowed us to make our own steel, our railroads, our manufacturing. It helped turn a fractured farming nation into an industrial powerhouse. Tariffs are not a sin. They weren't then. There aren't now. Tariffs are a strategy. So what happened? Because tariffs were very, very popular from the founding of the country up until 1913. This is when tariffs start to get a bad name. Tariffs. What happened in 1913? Oh, Woodrow Wilson, the Federal Reserve and the income tax. Okay, Tariffs and income tax. The federal government untethered itself from trade and tethered itself to your paycheck instead. However, it didn't fully untether itself from trade. And this changed everything. Because by 1930, Smoot, Hawley come in, and they are rightly or wrongly blamed for worsening the Great Depression because tariffs were imposed, and that's protectionism. And became politically toxic. Okay? I believed they were toxic. And one reason why they were toxic, that I now understand, is because they were coupled with high taxes. You cannot have both tariffs and high taxes. I'll explain that in a minute. So after World War II, America dominates the global economy. Free trade is not just workable, it's to our advantage. You got to start thinking, you know, we think all idealistically. Well, that was the principle. Free trade then. They weren't thinking that way, okay? They don't think that way now. Why all of a sudden, they were pure and like the driven Snow back in 1940 or 1950. No, they knew this was advantageous. We had all the gold. We had all of the industry. We needed to sell stuff to the rest of the world. So we opened our markets because we owned the markets. And conservatives, including myself, inherited that worldview. And we never asked beyond that worldview. Free trade just became synonymous with prosperity because there are times when it is tariffs become synonymous with stagnation. Because when you have all of the cards, why would you block your own market? If you are trying to sell to the rest of the world, don't do that. Okay? Inflation became the argument. Entertainment. Because that's what I always argue. Well, tariffs are going to raise prices. Case close. Okay, but here's what I failed to see. Free trade works when all of the players are playing free. We all know that, right? It works when your trading partners are not subsidizing industries, manipulating currencies, stealing intellectual property property, weaponizing supply chains, using slave labor. We've said those things, but it never gets you over the hill. Okay, here's what got me over the hill. Tariffs. Or free trade works when you own the markets, but there comes a time when you then have to look at it and say, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. Now we own the markets, but everybody else is weaponized trade against us. And now we're hollowing out our own industrial base. You know, we're financing. Our adversaries rise. We see China, we're funding that. What are we doing? We're hollowing ourselves out and we're funding them. This is insanity. Okay, it works when trade is reciprocal, but when it's not, free trade becomes unilateral. Surrender. And for decades, we told ourselves that cheap goods were proof of wisdom. No, it was just proof of cheap goods. Because while we were getting the cheap goods, our factories closed, our communities were collapsing, our strategic supply chains were all moved overseas. We financialized our entire economy while others were. Were industrializing theirs. And we confused low prices with. With national strength. I didn't get this. I mean, I've slowly been getting it, but I didn't really understand it until I started to see the world the bigger picture that Donald Trump is doing with tariffs. Okay? Because I believe 2024 was our last call. We were at last call. You either have to change your ways or you're going to die as a nation. Okay? Structurally, we have to change the. The era of effortlessness. American dominance is over, okay? Unless we rebuild, unless we retool, unless we think out of the box, unless we start new strategies, unless we start saying, wait a minute, this doesn't work. What about we try this, okay? The lights will slowly and then quickly go out. I have had very long conversations with the President about tariffs. He has been remarkable in his conversations only because he's been honest. He listened to me go on and on and on and go like, well, Glenn, I've already thought of all those things. I think you're wrong. I'm going to do tariffs. It's been refreshing to have a guy who will listen to you, actually take you seriously, listen and then say, thought about that, thought about that, thought about that. You haven't changed my mind. Okay, But I didn't understand. I didn't understand his vision. I believe because he has the vision to see the world economically as it truly is, but also the vision to see economically, business wise, how it can be. He understood tariffs are not just punishment and higher prices. Okay, you use tariffs strategically as leverage as negotiation. Tariffs as industrial policy without the bureaucracy. Tariffs used strategically, not universally. Tariffs used as a tool to bring trading partners to the table. Tariffs being used to build domestic capacity. When he keeps saying about these $18 trillion, everybody just. They don't. They blow it off like it's no big deal. That's $18 trillion. That's just about half of our entire national debt. That $18 trillion is not being given to us. That's foreign countries saying, I'm going to invest and build factories in your country and I'm going to build about $18 trillion worth of factories. What does that mean? That means jobs and $18 trillion worth of factories. Let's say half of that is true. Uh, that's pretty remarkable. You know what that will do? That will rebuild our industrial base, which we hollowed out because we didn't have terrorists. I, I'd never seen them deployed in the way he's deploying them. You know, I didn't understand the full history of it. The founders did, the founders did, Lincoln did, early Republicans did. I think we as a nation understood the other side in the 1940s and 50s, how they could be strategically removed and work to our advantage but for a limited time. Instead, we married into them and said, universal principle. It's not, it's not. Tariffs are not isolationism, tariffs. Now listen to this. Because, man, when I thought of this, I thought, oh my gosh, I've always hated two words, nation building. We're nation building. Oh my gosh, my eyes start to hemorrhage when I hear nation building. Right? I've always hated that. You know why? Because those two words always meant we were building someone else's nation at our expense. How many times have you or heard people say on the left and the right, why are we nation building? Our schools are failing, our factories are closing, our streets, our airports are falling apart. Why are we building somebody else's nation? Let's use the money here. To everything there is a season. We were nation building. That's what we were doing in the 1940s through the 1960s. We were building other nations that had been completely destroyed. So we, we allowed them to put tariffs. We. We bought their goods. They did it. We were just open. We sold them our stuff. It was good for us and good for them for a while. But to everything there is a season. After a while, they caught up. They got there, they rebuilt their nations, okay? And we helped them do that. But then we just kept this in place. And by the time we hit the year 2000, China is rising, Russia is weaponizing energy. Our factories, our treasuries, our institutions, all hollowed out. Okay? No tariffs, not noble. At some point they become negligent. So this is why I'm reversing myself. Not because I abandoned free market. I believe in the free market. But I think I've misunderstood the free market. And to everything there is a season, okay? A true free market cannot exist if your industrial base is gone. And what no, no tariffs did to us, we did it intentionally, was nation build someone else at our expense. After a while, it hollowed us out, okay? You cannot have a free market if supply chains are controlled by China adversaries. A free market doesn't exist if your middle class has been hollowed out. All in the name of theoretical efficiency. Tariffs, properly understood, properly used, are not anti market. They are a defensive tool to restore market sovereignty and to rebuild our nation. Now, when these tariffs are nation building, our nation, you know, and I bought the inflation argument as the strongest valid point. Tariffs raise prices. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can. And if you let them stand with high income tax alongside the tariffs, you've got the worst of all worlds. So here's where I want to go further. Tariffs and income tax cannot coexist. Okay? They cannot coexist. Donald Trump talked about this. This what got me thinking on this part. This is what finally pushed me over the edge. He started to talk about getting rid of the income tax. And I was thinking, okay, let's just play this out here for a.
