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All right, today's podcast. Great. And you don't want to miss the after show. If you are a Torch insider, you don't belong to the torch. Go to torch250.com or glenn beck.com torch and join us. I did a whole hour commercial free on why this is the scariest war of my lifetime and how should we look at this? But in today's podcast, the best of how can I say there's hope in destruction? Oh, man. We're at a. We're at a turning point, and I think it's a good turning point. I'll explain why. The truth on the free market. Life in the 1970s and if the editors find time growing ourselves as clones. That was in the news yesterday. Oh, I've seen this movie before. All on today's podcast. I can't believe it's been four years since the overturn of Roe. But tragically, abortions have continued to rise. Today, the abortion pill accounts for more than 60% of all abortions. Last year alone, over 1.1 million babies lost their lives. And that is why the work of Preborn Network clinics is more urgent than ever before. Every day, moms are facing unplanned pregnancies, and they walk through preborn's doors. They search for hope instead of pressure and fear. They're met with love and kindness and compassion. And through a free ultrasound, moms meet their babies for the very first time. It was like the beginning of my healing journey. They do an ultrasound, and that's when everything changed. Because when I saw my baby and when I heard her heartbeat, that was it. Just $28 sponsors one ultrasound 140 will help rescue five babies. Donate dial pound 250. Say the keyword baby. That's pound 250, baby. Or visit preborn.com beck preborn.com Beck Sponsored by Preborn hello America. You know, we've been fighting every single day. We push back against the lies, the censorship, the nonsense of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you. We work tirelessly to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it. But to keep this fight going, we need you right now. Would you take a moment and rate and review the Glenn Beck podcast? Give us five stars and leave a comment. Because every single review helps us break through Big Tech's algorithm to reach more Americans who need to hear the truth. This isn't a podcast. This is a movement. And you're part of it. A big part of it. So if you believe in what we're doing. You want more people to wake up? Help us push this podcast to the top rate review. Share together we'll make a difference. And thanks for standing with us. Now let's get to work. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program. So I want to. I want to give you hope in destruction as I am watching what is going on and Mamdani, what he is doing. Let's play that clip that Jason just played a minute ago. Can we play that? He was playing a clip from Mamdani's speech for the Torch insiders. And I want you to hear one part of this speech from last night. Go ahead.
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Have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear, Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon. And we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.
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Stop. What has he just said? He has said, I call on the federal government to arrest him because they have. And he called on the ICC International Criminal Court. Okay? The federal government just this week came out and said, we're out of the icc. It is nothing but a sham of a court, and we're not gonna play this game anymore. So on the same week that Trump and our State Department says, we have nothing to do with the icc. It is a sham of an organization. He then says, I'm calling on the federal government. Most people that he's actually talking to have no idea what the ICC is or that our government has just said that we're out of the ICC or why we said we're out. Okay? They have no idea, nor do they care. He knows. He knows. So he is setting up. See the big bad boogeyman, Orange Man Bad is letting this criminal, this war criminal, just walk the streets of New York. Then he goes on and he says, but we are not gonna let our silence stop this. We're not gonna be silent. So what is he saying? He's pouring gasoline all over the streets of New York and he's flicking matches, and it will catch fire in September and it will be his fault. And he's not doing it. I can guarantee you the people that have supported him and put him into office already have had plans to have uprisings in the streets this fall when Benjamin Netanyahu gets there. All right, so, Glenn, where do you find hope in this? You know, I think my mantra is going to be on this show from here on out. We've been here before. We've been here before because we have been. Now, we've never seen all of these things at the same time, but it rhymes so closely. We've been here before. Let me give you this example. It's June 1969. It's the largest radical student organization in American history. It's about the same size as the DSA is now. And they had their national convention in the Chicago Coliseum. Students for a Democratic Society had somewhere near 100,000 members and chapters on hundreds of campuses exactly like the dsa. It had started seven years earlier at UAW camp in Port Huron, Michigan. They had a manifesto written mostly by a young man named Tom Hayden. It was a document that opened not with rage, but with unease. Students raised in modest comfort, looking at the world their parents built and finding it hollow. That is exactly the same pattern. I'll give you the stats later on in the program. That's exactly what is happening today. It was arrogant, but it was also persuasive because there were enough people that felt that way, and it began to win the people. Now, fast forward seven years later in that coliseum, SDS argued about which faction was more revolutionary. And Bernadine Doran led about a third of the delegates out the door, chanting the names of the North Vietnamese dictator. What is that? That was the violent side. And all they were doing is basically. And today, like our communists in the DSA are doing, they are chanting the names of dictators like Mao. Within a year, the largest student movement in American history essentially no longer existed. That faction that walked out called themselves the Weathermen. And they announced that they would bring the war home. Does that sound familiar? Bring the Intifada here. Same thing. Now, they expected thousands, and a few hundred showed up. I think this is where it's going to be different. I think there will be thousands on the streets of New York. But they ran through the Gold coast breaking windows. They got beaten. They were arrested. And the man who saw it most clearly was not a conservative. It was Fred Hampton. He was 21 years old. He was the chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers, the most genuinely radical man in the city. And he said, these guys are opportunistic. They're adventurous. In fact, the word he coined for them was, I think, Custeristic, basically marching a handful of people into a massacre and calling it strategy. Five months after that, on a March morning in 1970, a townhouse on West 11th street in Greenwich Village blew apart and took the blocks quiet with it. What was happening? Well, the weathermen had been assembling a nail bomb and three of them died in this. Its target was a dance at Fort Dix. Enlisted soldiers and their dates. That was the destination. Not a symbol, not a statue, not a building. At midnight, a dance floor. Two months after that, construction workers in lower Manhattan waded into a crowd of anti war demonstrators with fists. Three years after that, the union man who led those workers, Peter Brennan, was sworn in as Richard Nixon's Secretary of Labor. Now, here's the arithmetic that nobody planned. 1964, Lyndon Johnson carried 44 states with 61% of the vote, one of the most complete liberal mandates ever handed to an American president. Four years later, Nixon and George Wallace combined for 57%. Eight years later, Nixon carried 49 states. When the National Guard shot students at Kent State, the polling didn't break the way the campuses expected. Most Americans blamed the students. You see, the New Left in 1962 had an argument. By 1970, it had a bomb. And a bomb is not stronger than an argument. It's a confession that the argument has stopped working. The moment you decide to make people comply rather than convince them, you have quietly conceded that you cannot get their consent. And in a country where consent is the whole operating system, that concession is fatal. They are now announcing themselves that they're communists and violence is growing. You don't need to defeat a movement that has stopped trying to persuade. You need only to stay standing while it persuades the country. Your side's right. That's the pattern. To me, that's worth watching. And it repeats because it's structural. It's not accidental. This is the problem. They do. This is the way it ended with Woodrow Wilson. There were bombings in the streets. They started openly saying that they were communists and it was over. They moved too fast, too quickly. Because it always gets to a certain point where the radicals just can't hold back anymore. They're like, we're so close. Just take it. That's what's happening. A movement that trades in argument grows because an argument can scale and anyone can be convinced. A movement that trades in coercion contracts because coercion requires purity. Purity requires purges, and every purge is smaller than the one before it. What happened in Chicago in 1969 is what that looks like on the last day. 100,000 people. And by nightfall, a room of a few hundred certain that everyone else is a traitor. They are entering the traitor stage. They've already said it. They're already purging Democrats out because they're traitors. The people who walked out of that coliseum thought they were the vanguard. They instead were the remnant. So when you see a faction of the American left today convinced that the founding documents are obstacles rather than inheritance, convinced that the people who disagree are not wrong but illegitimate, the honest response should not be panic, it should be recognition. Because this is what a movement looks like when it's run out of persuasion and knows it. See, this is why everybody says, oh, the Constitution, it's so slow. Everything is so slow. Yes, this is why the Constitution is slow. The Constitution is impatient. You're impatient. I'm sorry. The Constitution is everlasting patient. Because it's a machine that is built to outlast people who are impatient with it. Okay? It just says, slow down, slow down. Eventually they'll reveal themselves and then we'll all know. Madison didn't design it for agreeable seasons. He designed it for a season exactly like this one, where the people start to say things that we hope and I still believe is true. You know, I said this to a family member last night who disagrees with me with almost everything, okay? We're on opposite ends of the spectrum on this. And I said, look, this about. It's about to be over. Because Democrats are not communists and they're not violent. Americans are not communist and they are not violent. Radicals are. Americans are not. And she agreed with me. Now, I don't know if she fully understands what I was saying at that time, but she will. And it doesn't mean I'm right. It doesn't mean my side is right. It means that we're not radicals when it comes to the Constitution. We're not radicals. We believe in that. When somebody goes and says they're going to get rid of the presidency and the Senate, the most logical thing for a Democrat to do is to say, well, they're just fringe and they're crazy. Okay? And I think that's what a lot of Democrats have done. Now, some Democrats, when you have. When you have Bill Maher and who was the other guy that came out this weekend that was big, that says, this is crazy. This gotta stop. This has got to stop. I'll vote for J.D. vance. If this doesn't stop, you know, you have a problem. See, the Founders bet was that in an open contest, coercion eventually reveals itself and loses. That bet has been called several times and it has not yet been beaten. So here's my bet from John Brown to the Weather Underground to today. Americans are not communists. Americans are not violent. This movement is about to hang itself. They're almost done with persuasion. They're showing every signs that they are walking into the same noose that they built for others. They're walking into it themselves. So have faith, have hope. Just stay the course. Know who you are. Be peaceful. Now is the time to be as peaceful and as loving and as empathetic as you can possibly be. Sincerely be that way. Because there's going to be a lot of people that have been on the other side that don't know what to do and they don't want to come your way. They don't have to come our way. They don't have. You don't have to say Glenn Beck was right. You don't have to say that. I'm not asking you. I don't need that. The Constitution and the Republic doesn't need that. What the Republic needs is all of us to go. You know what? I'm done with the communist thing. I'm done with the radical thing. I'm done with the violence thing. I don't want any part of that. I just want our Constitution and our Senate and our House to be fixed, not destroyed. I want our country to be fixed, not destroyed. We have problems. We all agree on the problems we can get there. And we're about to hit that off ramp. Pray that your neighbors take that off ramp. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program. So there is a new survey out of 7,000 estranged parents that found that one in three believe their adult's child's therapist recommended or influenced cutting family ties. More than 25% of young adults in the US are or have been estranged from one or both parents. Because our culture is obsessed with drama. If something goes wrong in our lives, our therapy culture looks at it and looks for someone else to blame. And your therapist will tell you it was because your parents were actually narcissists and that's why you can't quit vaping. But here's what stuck out this. I'm reading this article and here's what stuck out to me. Mental health experts expressing concerns that young adults without ties to their familiar support are more susceptible to falling into and staying in toxic relationships. So children who cut themselves off from their parents are more likely to end up in a toxic relationship. This is the story of the dsa. Hear me out. Nate Silver found that the key demographic of the Democratic Socialists of America is those who are highly educated and Downwardly mobile, they have doctorates and they make less than their parents.
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And that feels unfair to them. So they look for someone to blame. And just like blaming their parents, they blame their ancestors, they blame our history for their trauma. So they go no contact with America, and they cut themselves off from who they really are. And the result, they enter a toxic relationship with the dsa. So now this is my theory, but I think this is good news because they say in the article, most people don't stay no contact forever. It's not sustainable. And most people want a healthy life. So we have to help the DSA members come back to the American family. So let me try to do that with just some facts that, you know, they could try to argue. But good luck with that. And I want to build this case on the free market system carefully and accurately. Let's go back to 1639. Shopkeeper named William Keene. He was dragged into court for selling nails at too high of a price. He goes to court, okay, The General court fined him £200. That's a lot of money back then. The deputies wanted the full amount. Magistrates cut it in half because they said it was too harsh. Then his church admonishes him from the pulpit on a public fast day for selling nails that were excessive rates to the dishonor of God's name. Well, Keane spent the rest of his life in shame and trying to clear his name. Reverend John Cotton preached a sermon the next day listing the false principles of trade. And the first one on the list was that a man might sell as dear as he can and buy as cheap as he can. All right, these were Puritans and they were. They were asking the right question. Is trade just. Is this trade just. Is my neighbor better off? They just reached for the wrong tool to answer it because a court can't know the price of a nail. The price is not a moral statement. It is a signal. It's information about scarcity moving at the speed of light between millions of strangers who have never met. But the Puritans were onto something that the modern free market crowd gets wrong in the other direction. They think the price is that answer. That is the answer to a moral question, but it's not. The market is the greatest engine for lifting human beings out of misery that has ever been discovered. And it's not. It's not even close now. It has no conscience of its own. It borrows yours. So watch what happens when you put both halves together. In 1990, 2.3 billion people on this planet lived in extreme poverty. 2.3 billion people. By 2025, that number had fallen to 831 million. By the way, the world population grew by more than two and a half billion. So that works out to about 115,000 human beings living the worst, leaving the worst poverty the earth has ever seen every single day for 35 straight years. But nobody's noticing it, Nobody's celebrating it. No, nobody organized it, nobody voted for it. And before anybody says, well, that's all China. No, no, it wasn't. Outside of China, the extreme poverty rate went from 33% in 1990 to 12% in 2025. It's the whole world. How food. I mean, I could go into a long story about how, you know, Norman Borlaug spent decades standing in the mud in Mexico, you know, trying to figure out how to breed shorter wheat, wheat that wouldn't fall over in the weight of its own grain. Mexico went from importing wheat to exporting it. India went from 12.3 million tons of wheat in 1965 to 20.1 in 1970. Five years later, Pakistan hit self sufficiency in 1968. This is the man who's credited with saving up to a billion billion lives. And did you know his name? I mean, how many of us have heard, even heard his name? Power. Electricity. In. In the year 2000, 2 in 10 people on Earth had no electricity. Today, that's fewer than 1 in 10. The number living in dark has been cut by more than half since 2000. Why? Solar modules back then were more than $100 a watt in the 1970s. They're now measured in cents. Lithium ion cell prices have fallen more than 99% since 1991. All of these declines follow a curve. All of them. Every time cumulative production doubles, the price drops about 20%. Got it? Scale matters. With batteries. Same number, doesn't matter. Food, everything. No agency mandated that curve. It's just what happens when millions of people are free to try, fail, undercut each other, and quite honestly, steal each other's ideas. So why doesn't it feel like this for you? Why doesn't it feel like it's great? Because in the part of the American economy that you actually touch, it's not a free market. It's not, and I'm not going to be one that pretends otherwise to win an argument. This is not the free market. Since 2000, prices for televisions fell about 97%. Toys, computer software, cell service, Everything down now in the same time period. Hospital services, college tuition, college Textbooks, childcare, medical care went up faster than anything else in the economy. And what does that tell you? The things that got radically cheaper are the things that nobody in Washington was protecting. The things that eat your paycheck are the ones where the government sits between you and the buyer and the seller. Okay? Subsidizing demand, restricting supply, or both. Well, Glenn, what about housing? Great. Listen to this. This stat will boggle your mind. I sat with this stat yesterday and I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. How is it we don't know this? Government regulation at all levels now accounts for $131,734 of the price of. Of an average new single family home. That's 26.4% of the price is from government regulation. And that number is up more than 40% in the last five years. It's more than double than what it was in 2011. First time. Buyers made up 21% of the market last year. That's the lowest share since anyone started counting in 1981. So what is the problem? Government regulation. You get rid of the government regulation just since. Just go back to 2011. 2011. How much money are you saving? You go back. You go back just five years and you're saving $131,000. Then there's the permission slip problem. In the 1950s, about 5% of American workers needed a government license to do their job. 5%. Today, that's north of 20% and by some counts, closer to 25%. A barber in Iowa needs 21 hour, 2100 hours of training. 2100 hours of training to be a barber in New Hampshire. It's 800 now. Is that because hair behaves differently in Iowa? This gap is not safety. That's the guy who already has a shop making sure that you don't open one across the street. That's the machinery that drives prices up, okay? That's the machinery that keeps it all in place. And that machinery has just had the best year it's ever had. Federal lobbying spent spending broke $5 billion for the first time in 2025. That's the largest single jump since quarterly disclosure began in 2008. We now have 15,000 organizations reporting. So when some 27 year old tells me the game is rigged, you know what my answer is? Yeah. Do you have the stats on it? Because I do. The problem is you have the wrong defendant. Let me tell you something about the Boston Tea Party. You probably didn't know. It was not a protest against high prices. Okay? Parliament had just Made tea cheaper. Now there are other things going on, but let me just talk to you about the price of tea. India East India Company was, was going under in 1773. Bad debt, corruption in its leadership, and about 17 million pounds of tea rotting in London warehouses. So Parliament floated it alone, they waived its duties and they handed it a monopoly on selling tea in America. And Lord north assumed the colonists are not going to riot over a bargain. They're going to get a great price now for different reasons. December 16th, the men climbed onto three ships and threw 342 chests in the harbor. And the company billed Boston £9,000 for it. But here's, here's, here's what you can get from this that a lot of people with, you know, an economic degree still doesn't. They don't get. A low price from a politically protected monopoly is not a bargain, it's a bribe. The founding economic act of this country was Americans refusing a corporate bailout. Refusing cheap goods that came with it because it was a corporate bailout. Now that's not anti capitalist. That's the most pro market thing anybody has ever done on this continent, quite frankly. So here's what we should be suggesting to people who say it's broken. This is broken. You're right. You're right. But let me give you some answers here. None of them are socialist. Okay? First, end the rescues. You hate the bailouts. I hate the bailouts. No rescue. If a firm is too big to fail, then it's too big to be private. Let the company die. Bankruptcy is not a market failure. It's the market working. Then delete every license, any license that protects an incumbent instead of a customer. And recognize the license across state lines. If your hands are steady enough to cut hair in Nevada, they're steady enough to cut hair in Iowa. Legalized building is the next thing. You can't subsidize your way out of a shortage. Every dollar of demand side helps get demand side help gets absorbed by the price when the supply is frozen by law. Next thing you want to fix. Colleges, stop lending 18 year olds unlimited money for a product who prices whose price rises to match the loan. That's not giving them access. That's a transfer from students to the institution. It's wrong. It's immoral. Next, prosecute fraud like you actually mean it. Enforce contracts and jail liars. That's not a restraint on the free market. It's the immune system. And if you don't have that, no market stays free. And the rescues, the bailouts delete the license that protects the incumbent. Legalize building again. Stop lending people money for colleges that just keep raising the rate. No, it won't work that way. Get the government out of it. Prosecute fraud. Then here's the half that no regulation can actually reach. There is no regulation that arrives at the moment a man decides what to charge his neighbor. No agency in the room. When you write the invoice, describe the product or answer honestly about what it cannot do. Robert Keene's court could fine him, but it could never make it fair. The Puritans learned after four years what we keep forgetting. You can chain a merchant or you can raise a merchant. A free market run by liars produces exactly what you expect, which is what we're all angry about. It's a rigged market run, you know, run by liars. And, you know, a rigged market run by saints just produces slower theft, but it's still theft. You have to have both. You've been handed neither and then told that the wreckage proves that capitalism has failed. No, it hasn't. Most of what you want to fix, you're not going to fix in Washington this year. But there are three things sitting in front of a 25 year old right now. One, build something that somebody actually wants that will make people's lives easier. Price it honestly, and tell the truth about what it does. Do whatever scale you have, okay? That's how 115,000 people a day walked out of extreme poverty. Not by decree, but by an enormous number of ordinary people making and selling honest things. That engine works. And it's the difference between famine and surplus. Darkness and light for 100 million people you've never met before. And remember, no government can give this system a conscience. This system doesn't come with a conscience. It borrows yours. So you first have to be secure in your own ethics. We have to be a moral and ethical society, otherwise we're just going to keep producing this garbage. The answer is not socialism. This system pulls people out of poverty like nobody else. But the system has gotten into bed with the federal government. So the answer is not to make the federal government bigger. It's to make it an actual referee that punishes people when they do something wrong. You don't make the. You punish the banks. I'm sorry, we're not gonna bail you out. You made bad bets. We're not gonna bail you out by bailing them out, you've only made them bigger, and now you're in bed with them. Not you, the federal government. That's the problem. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program right behind me here in the studio. We don't have. We have swamp coolers up here at the ranch. And, you know, it gets up in the 90s in late July and. And in August, we get into, you know, 90, 100 degrees, and it's really super hot without real air conditioning. So there's a door right behind me here, and I'm putting a screen door in there. And I asked for a wood screen door because it's the sound of my childhood. There was this. There was a sound in the 70s that almost no one under 40 has ever heard. And it is a screen door. It's the slam of wood on wood, and then nothing because you were gone. You were running. You just opened the screen door and you would hear it as you were down the stairs already from the stupa. You hear, go and slam closed. Nobody knew where you were going. Nobody expected to, because that was the arrangement in the 1970s. You left after breakfast on a Saturday, and you came home back at night when the streetlights came on. You didn't have a phone. There was no tracker. There was no check in. Your mom's entire surveillance system was a set of lungs on her and a nickname that she only used when you were in trouble. Mine was just my full name, my two middle names. That's what brought you back home. It was a childhood that you owned. You negotiated your own disputes on a ball field with no empire. You lost and found your way back. You were bored, gloriously, stupidly bored. And boredom was the mother of every invented game and every kid who ever built something in a garage. In the 1970s, we had three channels in one country. When something happened, we all watched the same man, tell us about it at the same hour. And then the next day, we'd go to work the next morning and we'd talk about the same thing. Nobody had a feed. Nobody had a bubble. A hit song was a hit song for everybody. Dinner was at a table. The phone was bolted to the kitchen wall. If you wanted privacy while you were on the phone, you stretched the cord around the corner until it looked like a Slinky. Nobody photographed their food photographing their food. I still don't understand that. You barely photographed anything because you got 24 pictures on a roll and you had to wait to see them. And 11 of them were of your mother's thumb. Which means that Most of the 70s really exist only in the heads of the people that were there. Because mom always had her finger in front of the Lens. There's a kind of freedom in the 1970s that we will never get back. A single paycheck could buy a house. Not necessarily a great house, but it was a house. Your dad would work for one company and expected to die with a pension from that company. The bank was a building with a man in it who knew your family's name. Those are real losses. I don't romanticize those things. I miss them. Now let me tell you the part of the 1970s that if you romanticize the 70s, you'll leave out. The air in America, in our cities in 1972, was something you could taste. I couldn't believe this, but it's absolutely true. I was in Pittsburgh. I saw it. It's crazy. Pittsburgh had days where you could drive and you had to drive with your headlights on at noon because of the smog. The Cuyahoga raver in Cleveland caught fire. A river on fire. Not once, but at least 13 times. Did you know that Lake Erie Was declared dead? 42% of adults smoked and they smoked everywhere. Everywhere. In the office, in the hospital, on an airplane. In a non smoking section that was separated strangely from the smoking section by an imaginary line in the air. Your pediatrician might have lit up a cigarette while examining you. You rode in the back of a station wagon, facing backward, no seatbelt, 70 miles an hour with a bare steel dashboard and a steering column that your father. The steering column was engineered to run through your father's chest if you were hit head on. It was a death trap. 26,000Americans died every year in alcohol related crashes. How's that possible? Because drunk driving wasn't a crime. It was a personality trait you'd hear people laugh about. I gotta tell you, I don't even remember driving home. What did you know that airplanes got hijacked constantly? Between 1961 and 1972, there were more than 150 hijackings of an American aircraft. There was a stretch where it happened on average once every other week. Pilots actually carried a map of Cuba in the cockpit because they figured I might need this at some point. There wasn't any screening. You walked to the gate like you were walking to a bus station. Universal Passenger Screening didn't begin in this country till January of 1973. And I don't even know what that means because I remember it between 73 and 2001. I don't remember being screened. What are you talking about? He just walked onto the plane. Then there were the things that people did not say. If a man beat his wife. That's a private matter. If a child was being hurt. Keep your voice down. Cancer was a word you said like this. I think grandpa is cancer. A child with leukemia in 1974 had roughly even odds of seeing five more years. Today, seeing five more years, that's 90%. Roughly, a million American children with disabilities were not in school. I don't mean struggling in school. They weren't in school. They were legally excluded because they had a disability. Until Congress changed that law in 1975, there were no curb cuts, there were no ramps. A man in a wheelchair, he just didn't go anywhere. And the country was fine with it. Okay, so why am I telling you this? Start with a screen door and with kids who are handicapped or have special needs. They're just not in school. Here's what I want you to get. In the early 1950s, there was a young geochemist. His name was Claire Patterson. And he set out to answer a question that had nothing to do with anything in this monologue. He just wanted to know how old the Earth was. He measured lead lead isotopes in meteorites. And he got his answer. Four and a half billion years. Number we still use four and a half billion years. The problem was he couldn't get clean readings because his samples were contaminated. Every single one of them, no matter what he did. So he built the world's first ultra clean laboratory to find out why. And. And it was there that he found something. He found that contamination wasn't in his equipment. Contamination on lead was everywhere in the world. Lead was in the dust, it was in the rain. It was in the snow of Greenland. It was deep in the ocean. It was in the bones of every American, hundreds of times more than any human being who had ever lived before the 20th century had ever had. And the source was gasoline. Lead in the gasoline. We had been pouring lead gasoline into our vehicles since the 1920s, and that lead poison was everywhere. So he brought this up. Now, remember, he's just studying rocks. He just wants. But he brings this up and he's like, hey, this is a problem. Well, the industry comes for him and they funded opposing science. I mean, you've heard this story. We've done this story over and over again. They leaned on his university. They kept him off of the federal advisory panels, the National Research Council that was convened, convening a lead panel. And they left off the one man on Earth who understood it the best. Okay, well, he spent 20 years being called an alarmist by men, you know, in really nice suits. And then what happened in 1973? They start phasing out lead gasoline because they knew the truth. And now we have non leaded gasoline. It's because that guy. The average blood lead levels in America fell by roughly 80%. Now, there are economists who will tell you that a meaningful chunk out of the crime wave that terrified this country and the crash that followed it traces back to that one decision. Now, at the same time, a pediatrician in Rutherford County, Tennessee, his name was Robert Sanders, he got tired of watching babies come into the emergency room after crashes. Remember we were sitting in the back seats facing the other direction. You know, dad with the, with the steering wheel, it just shot through his chest. And nobody was wearing, nobody had car seats. They weren't required. So he's seeing these babies go through windshield and he's like, this has got to stop. And they laughed at him. People said, government has no business in a man's automobiles. Well, he came back and back and back and back. And finally, Tennessee passed the first child restraint law in America in 1977. Hey, let's make sure our kids don't fly through the windshield of the car. And within eight years, every state in the union had one. Okay, so why am I telling you all this stuff? Because that's the principle and it's the only one that actually matters every day in our lives. Nothing on that list I gave you in the 70s fixed itself. Not the river, not the air, not the lead, not the car seat, not the school door. Every single item was one person's stubborn, unglamorous decade long fight. And usually against people who told them, stop being so hysterical. So when somebody says, this country is finished, look at the decline we're in. Everything is worse than it used to be. No, no, no, no, no, it's not. And you have to be prepared to answer them. No, it's not. No, it's not. There are things that I miss from the 90s. There are things that I missed from the early 2000s. But we've gotten better in a lot of things since the 1970s. The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. Cars don't kill us. Planes aren't hijacked all the time. Children don't go flying through the windshield. The doors to our school are open to everyone. A kid with a disability sits in a classroom instead of being hidden in a back bedroom. We lost the screen door. We lost having to invent games ourselves because we were bored. We lost the bike with no destination and cards in the spokes. We lost the one channel that we all watched and brought us together. But we didn't get worse. We got better at the things we decided to get better at, and we only got worse at the things we stopped paying attention to or took for granted. That's not fate. That's a to do list. The people who cleaned up the 70s were not more talented than we are. They were just unwilling to be told it couldn't be done. As I was writing this yesterday, The thing that kept coming to me over and over was, you know, when we pay attention to something, we're remarkable people. We're remarkable people. Culture is not fixed by the government. It's fixed by people, individuals who want to do something about culture. It's fixed by individuals who just say, I don't want to live like this. You know what? I think television shows should be uplifting, whatever it is. I think music shouldn't all be about sticking something in somebody else's butt. There's a market for it, believe it or not. There's a market for it. And today we are more free to produce and release anything. And, yeah, you could join the club and, you know, write songs about putting things in people's butts, I guess, if that's what you want to do. Or we can go the other direction and we can say, you know, there are certain things we got better since the 1970s. But there are certain things that I do miss. I miss the family dinner. How do I change that? I don't have to write a song about it. I don't have to make a TV show about it. I just have to do it myself. And our children will grow up doing that as tradition, and they will want it, and it will be so unusual. You know, the way to really fix things is be. Is be a peculiar people, an unusual and peculiar people. That you are so different that you might be called weird. You might be called, you know, homeschoolers, called weird. Until you're having to compete against a homeschooler. And then you're like, oh, crap, they're not weird. They're just really buttoned up. They learned stuff I didn't learn. And then, because those homeschoolers at first were weird, and now people look at them and go, geez, I wish my kid was like that. Now more people are homeschooling. The way to fix things is just be a peculiar person. Somebody that navigates, isn't preaching to everybody, isn't carrying a sign, but just enough peculiarity where people go, what is it about Bill? Why is he like that? Have you noticed his family is different. And they will come to you. That's how you change things. How you change things. Culture is never going to be changed by the federal government. It's going to be changed by you. We stop paying attention to it. Let's pay attention to it again, Nana.