Monday's show really centered around technology and how it impacts you. The world is changing rapidly, and you need to be prepared. It could be really, really cool. But there are dangers that come with every advancement in technology. In his opening monologue, Glenn talked about some of the biggest stories in tech and how quickly things can change in a few short years.
Glenn: Right now, I’m really focused on culture and technology. The world is about to change, but if you talk about the things that are over the horizon, you’re either a prophet or, you know, a guru or a wizard, or in my case, you know, a lunatic, and that’s okay. If you’re a leading voice on an issue, it’s an open invitation to mockery, and that’s totally fine. Caliphate is a good explanation of that. Oh, Glenn Beck is crazy. Everybody said that. I’m a glutton for punishment. I got it. But my record stands for itself.
We were way ahead of the curve on so many things—the rise of the political machine that the progressives were building, ObamaCare, the 2008 economic collapse. The bailouts we told you would come. Iran and the rise of Iran and the way that’s playing out, the caliphate, as I said. We knew these things not because we’re a prophet, because I’m not. I’m a guy who just looks at the big picture, and everybody can see this if you look at the words of leaders, thought leaders, and you believe their words. I do.
If you look at the thought leaders, the leaders in the Islamic world, the radicals, who want to reestablish the caliphate, it doesn’t make me crazy for saying that they’re going to reestablish the caliphate. It makes them crazy for saying it, them, not me, and it also more importantly makes anyone ignoring the threat absolutely nuts. Of course, if you’re running a network, you also have to focus on the big current stories as well, and Dana is going to be here in a few minutes, and she is going to cover some stuff that we covered earlier.
Louie Gohmert is a really big story today. I spoke to him earlier today on the radio program, which you can see that interview on TheBlaze.com/TV. I’m thrilled that he’s gunning for Speaker of the House. John Boehner needs to go. You need to call your congressmen and all of the congressmen that you can think of and tell them you are done with the GOP if they keep Boehner.
They are only a few people away from actually…I mean, this will uproot the establishment leadership of the GOP in Washington. This is a game changer, and it’s within our grasp, but we have to do it. They vote tomorrow, by the way. This is all coming from the fruit that we’ve been reaping for what we’ve been sowing for years and years.
When we were on FOX, there was a movement that was started, and it was dedicated to the principles of our country and the Constitution, the values over politics. That’s what it requires. Otherwise, you’re just playing a game on everything. But if you know the principles and values, you can see what is, and you can look over the horizon and see how it plays out.
We’ve been mocked for an awful lot of stuff. That’s where the Glenn Beck cries comes from, because I believe in these principles, but I don’t think I could have seen Louie Gohmert…in fact, I asked him, I think, in 2012, if he would do this, and he wouldn’t, but this is a direct result of that movement. So, it’s our job to show you what’s coming, to help you make sense of everything that you’re seeing currently, and to prepare you for it. I think it’s also to be uplifters.
We need to show you the positives, so tonight I’m going to talk about some of the things that I see coming next, some of the really scary things and some of the positive things. The future is not frightening. It really isn’t. It’s just different, and you have to be prepared for it.
For instance, this is a word that I think you’re going to really understand by the end of this next year in the next 12 months. It’s called doxing. Watch for it. When this becomes part of the lexicon, you know the world has changed. It is the idea that you can publish personal information about someone without their consent. The term is not really new. It came out around 2000-2001, but it has largely been contained in the hacker community until now.
The Sony hacking is what shook the media world, and the hackers promise now to attack a cable news company. I wonder which cable news company that might be. But that’s what they’re going to attack next, and I believe it’s going to be effective, because social media, stolen emails, information spreads like wildfire. Even though it is stolen, it doesn’t matter.
In the middle of the riots, Officer Darren Wilson’s address was released. Who would do that? It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing and a dangerous time that we’re rapidly entering into, and it’s rapidly changing. All secrets are going to be gone. That’s a good thing unless you like secrets.
Just a couple of years ago, to show you how really we mocked ourselves on this one, 3-D printing. This was three years ago, I think. We brought a 3-D printer into the studio. It was right around this time, and I said 3-D printing is going to become big this year. And I printed a bunch of stuff like toy little sharks. Where’s the Batman? Do we have the Batman? Here it is. Thank you.
This, I printed, the head of Batman, and I printed this on that 3-D printer three years ago. Justin, our jib operator, which is this camera that I’m talking to right now, he didn’t tell me at the time, but he kind of mocked me in his head. He’s like yeah, right, okay, we’re going to print little plastic toys, and I said you’ll be able to print anything with this new technology. He didn’t believe me.
Well, it wasn’t too much later; it was within a year that we interviewed a guy who created a new blueprint. This is him on the air. We are holding a plastic version of what he’s talking about making, the world’s first fully 3-D printed gun. He had printed it in plastic, but at the time he couldn’t print it in metal.
In two or three years…how old is this, Tiffany, two years or three years? Two years, in two years, we’ve gone from this to this. This is number 15. This is in the museum, and I wish you could hold this, because you would not believe what this thing feels like. It is absolutely real. This is a 1911. This is the 15th digitally printed gun ever made, and it’s real. Everybody I’ve handed this to today, they have all said you’ve got to be kidding me. They expected it to be plastic. It’s not. This is the future.
That’s three years ago. See how fast things are changing? We are in uncharted territory. We have social media changing everything. We are growing up now, our kids have social media, and our kids and we don’t have any idea the implication of social media. I was on vacation. I kept everybody…I took everybody on vacation with me—pictures, thoughts, everything else. I write a lot on my Facebook page. Am I going to regret that?
Well, according to our good friend Eric Schmidt, he says, “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time…every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”
Well, that sounds nuts, until you see the news today—Facebook. Facebook is now indexing all of our posts, one trillion posts, so you can search anything. You can search what did Glenn Beck say about worried? They don’t have enough storage to be able to do that. But you can find anything about anyone at any time. It’s the Wikipedia now of Facebook.
Let me switch gears, another story from today, Oculus Rift. They are the leading virtual reality innovators, and they have developed now sensors so you can use your hands. Here’s the problem, our kids are no longer going to be looking at their games like this; they are going to be in virtual reality. They’re going to be having the Oculus glasses which pretty much blacks out their entire face. You think your kids are not tuned into you now? The virtual reality world completely blocks out your face.
Now, here’s the problem. Right now, if I wanted to play virtual reality in Oculus, and I wanted to take a drink, and I’m all blacked out, I’m looking for my cup to drink. That’s hard to do. Here’s what happened. They’ve just invented a new switch that now your hands are involved, so now you do this, and you’re back into the real world. You do this, you’re back into virtual reality. It’s the blending of virtual and actual reality now.
They said today that at the end of the year, they believe there are going to be 10 million people using it by the end of the year, 10 million people. They believe by, I think it’s 2018-2020, it’ll be 25 million people, and it will just skyrocket. By the way, we are now closer to 2030 than we are to 1990. To me, 1990 seems close. 2030 seems space-age. No, no, no, no—one of my…in fact, my brother’s daughter is going to graduate in 2021.
By the way, 2015…we have to do a special. Tiffany, remind me we have to do a special on what Back to the Future got right, because when Michael J. Fox went back to the future, he went to the year 2015. It doesn’t seem like we’re futuristic yet, does it? Oh yes, yes, the iPhone will be a joke soon. We’ll be saying stuff to our grandkids, you know, in my day we used to have to type things into our phones with our bare hands, and we liked it. None of us had these newfangled artificial intelligence things that does stuff before you actually think it. No, we had to actually ask Siri to look something up with our own voices, right?
Check this out. A user on Reddit just purchased a 1997 Ford. In the Ford, inside the glove box, they found this, a welcome message on VHS, 1997—one of the largest companies in the world, Ford, in 1997, still schlepping around those giant VHS tapes. It seems like a lifetime ago when people were proudly displaying their home movie collections in a special VHS bookcase that took up half the wall. Remember the big DVDs, or not even DVDs…I don’t remember, they were the big disks that had the movies on them, the movie discs? Then we went to DVDs. Now, we’re on Netflix.
Seeing that post made me think of cars today, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about…I wanted to show you how fast things are changing now, and I can’t really even go into great detail because I don’t have…well, I’ll show you. Things are changing faster than you can possibly even imagine, and I wanted to bring some cars in to show you how fast they’re changing.
So…by the way, this is Stage 19. This is where the Dana show happens, my show. Radio show currently happens there. These are the historic studios of Las Colinas, the Mercury Studios now, where we’re going to be doing all kinds of things, but we’ll talk about that later. I brought the cars in because I wanted to show you something that I realized when I was driving this.
This is the car my wife got me for my 50th anniversary or my 50th birthday. I wanted a car that was like my grandfather’s, and I have to tell you, I have learned more from driving this car than any vehicle I’ve ever been in. This was hard work. I used to think that it was like, I don’t know, male chauvinist that, you know, my grandmother never drove. She wouldn’t have wanted to drive this. It’s hard work. I don’t want to drive this—no power steering, nothing.
If you look into the interior, you will see that it’s pretty simple. It’s pretty bare. If you look into the engine, even I can figure this one out. You can get in here, lift up the hood, and track it all down and fix it yourself. This is 1957.
This is the car that I drive in to work every day. This is 1976. This is a Land Cruiser. Let me show you the difference. 20 years, 20 years, here’s the Chevrolet engine. Here’s the Toyota engine. It’s a little more complex. It’s got power steering now, power brakes, but still, I can get in, and I can change the air filter. I can change things myself. I can figure it out. I don’t need a computer. All I need is a little bit of knowledge. I can get it in a book, a little bit of knowledge, and I can trace all the wires back, and I can figure out what’s going on with my car.
And what I learned is when you look in the interior of this car, you’ll see that nothing has really changed. In 20 years, power steering, power brakes, the car was the same.
Go 20 years ahead. I’m going to show you a Mercedes. The Mercedes, pretty much the same car. You look at the dashboard, it has some bells and whistles on it. It has some digital going on, but it is still the same basic car. Key turns the ignition. Here’s the difference, I don’t know how to fix his car. You can’t fix this car. In fact, they seal the car so you can’t fix it. You have to take it in to somebody with a machine. It becomes a magic box. Nobody’s going to fix this car. Now, this is 2000…Sara, when is this car? This is 2009.
Here’s the brand-new Vanquish that would make me Handsome Rob. I actually had to ask the guy how you even open the door. You have to push here and then pull it out. This is an entirely carbon fiber car. It’s absolutely unbelievable. This is built for speed. Those cars, no production car was going 200 miles an hour. Nothing would take you 200 miles an hour. This car, 205 miles an hour, and it’s not the only one in production that will do about 200 miles an hour.
This is the key. I mean, this looks like something like Superman dropped in the cave of…what was that cave where the crystal, the ice crystals? This is the key. Let me show you how this works—not built for somebody my size. Okay, put the key in, and I don’t know what happened. All I know is the speaker system came in. Everything started to come up. Do I push? Hang on.
I have absolutely no idea, absolutely no idea. I don’t even know how to get out of this car. No idea how to fix this car, barely have any idea how to drive this car, and this is today, but this one is all in the engine. Nobody is changing this engine. Nobody’s getting into this engine. This one is built for speed.
Okay, take this car and look at this one and compare it to Tesla. There is no engine in Tesla. The next generation of cars is going to be linked to your iPad, so whatever you’re listening on to your iPad, forget about the radio. The radio doesn’t matter anymore. Forget about a key. Your key is your iPad. Everything will be controlled with your iPad. That’s the future—2006, 2015, 20 years apart, not a lot of difference.
The world used to take a long time to change. Think about our parents’ and our grandparents’ generation, decades and decades of living life without technology, the same picture tube as they used to call television. They didn’t see a reason to change it. They didn’t have cell phones. They didn’t have computers. It was charming, great little throwback on things and the way they used to be, but you’re not going to have that luxury of choosing not to join in. It just will. It will just be this way because everything is changing.
During my vacation, I tried to change the water pump on my car. That didn’t go well. People my age used to be able to fix an engine. You cannot fix these two cars. You can’t. The water pump for the 1976, as we pulled it out, I said to the guy who was helping me, “Do we rebuild this one? He just looked at me like I was an alien. “No.” “Well, is it cheaper to rebuild?” I’d like to learn how to rebuild. He said nobody rebuilds. We’re a disposable society. It’s $2.00 more expensive now to buy a brand-new one. Nobody rebuilds anything. You dispose of it.
That’s not good for two reasons. One, what Carl Sagan talked about in his book that came out right before he died, The Demon-Haunted World, things become magic, or better yet, better expressed, Latin. You have to go to a high priest to have them fix it because you can’t fix it yourself. What’s the difference between a priest and a mechanic? Nothing, because you’re beholden to one of them.
The second problem with it is how do you defeat an army? The best way to defeat an army is to cut off its supply chain. Well, everything is a supply chain now. Tell me how to fix a water pump. Tell me how to rebuild a water pump. Tell me how you can grow your own food, fix your own car. Show me the TV that you have where you can change the tubes in. Show me how you can repair a telephone. There is no such thing as the local repair man anymore.
Well, that is good in some ways. It is also very dangerous if you’re not wide awake. But that’s the way the world is going, and there’s nothing to fear as long as you’re aware that you are growing up in an age where literally anything you dream you’ll be able to do, and if you can’t do it, you have to make the tools to make it happen, but understand the tools as we go along.
Everything that we have has to be based on something real or it will not last in an ever-changing world, one where a thirty-something will be the one who can’t figure out how the latest newfangled remote for the TV or more likely the virtual reality glasses actually work, a 30-year-old. Twelve-year-olds will figure it out because they’ll be able to adapt quickly. That’s our job from here on out, adapt.
The days of picking one career, one car, one thing, and clinging onto it for 50 years are over. I’m buying old cars because I think we need to preserve this. I want a simpler life, but it’s hard to have a simpler life, and if you’re not willing to adapt, you’re going to be left behind. You can’t just plug into the old time and disregard what’s coming.
I think it was this summer that I realized I was probably scaring the crap out of my 10-year-old son, because he talked to me. He had overheard me have a couple of conversations about a special we’re doing next week on Russia, and he said, “Dad, do you believe we’re headed for World War III, and what does that mean?” I told him I’m not sure. I’m not sure, but I know that the world that he’s going to live in is going to be extremely challenging and dynamic and not to fear, because if we choose, it can be great.
For tonight and the days to come, we are going to show you the future. What does the future look like? The positives and the negatives, and hopefully we are not going to leave you frightened; we’re going to leave you a little more prepared, a little more knowledgeable, and a little more inspired.
