Best of the Program | 9/14/26

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

There is so much NFL on ESPN right now.

Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week.

Stu Burguiere (0:14)

Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_1 (0:16)

And now, NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

Glenn Beck (0:31)

Okay, you want to understand what is happening with AI? All I have to do is tell you about GM and street cars. Also, 9-12, the day after, and the flag that flies in my office, right behind my desk. It's actually a significant flag from 9-11, and I've never told the story on the air. I share it with you on today's podcast.

All right. I want to explain the AI thing by using history. This is what I think is happening. Now, if you ever saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you know the story. General Motors and the oil companies and the tire companies, they all got together, and they bought up America's street car system, and they ripped the tracks out and forced all of us into cars.

That's the cartoon version. Most of it is wrong, but it has true parts to it.

And it's better and stranger than the legend, okay? Here's what's true. A bus company called National City Lines went looking for capital in the late 30s and got it. They got it from Firestone, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks and some from General Motors. The money came with a string. The transit systems they bought had to buy their buses and their tires and their fuel from the investors. So in 1947, the Justice Department indicted them. In 1949, a Chicago jury convicted them and held it up on appeal. This is where the legend comes from. You know, the jury convicted them, but it convicted them of one thing, monopolizing the sale of buses and fuel and parts to the companies they already controlled, okay? A closed supply loop. On the other count, conspiring to monopolize transportation itself, the jury acquitted them. General Motors was fined $5,000. Its treasurer was fined $1. Okay, so as usual, the big guys get away with it. But 25 years later, a young government lawyer testified before a Senate subcommittee and described that conviction as a conviction for monopolizing ground transportation, which is not what the jury said. But the press ran with it, Hollywood ran with it, and America has believed it ever since.

Not because GM was clean, but because the trolley was already dead, and it was killed by something a lot closer to home. Let me now take you quickly. Jason, give me the stats that you just ran with Palantir and what they were saying about open sources.

Stu Burguiere (3:25)

Yeah. So Palantir said that they have been running their own models, and their own models, it's all open source. And they said, quote, the cost of our fine-tuned open source model was 95 percent lower than the frontier models, the big ones that, think Google, you know, OpenAI, Anthropic, 95 percent lower costs than what those frontier models are using.

Glenn Beck (3:56)

So what happens to Claude and to Chachi BT and Grok and everything else, if somebody else, a smaller company, has suddenly found that they can lower the cost of compute by 95 percent, puts those companies out of business. So let me go back to the streetcars. You have to understand what a streetcar company actually was, okay? It wasn't in business in the ordinary sense. It was a bargain with a city. The company got a franchise, the exclusive right to run the rails down the public street, no competitors, and in exchange, the city wrote down what it would charge and what it could do, okay? The fare was a nickel, and it was locked into a nickel for decades. It was a nickel. And the company agreed to pave and maintain the strip of public street between the rails and a couple of feet on either side and plow the snow off it and everything else. A monopoly that nobody could touch. At a price, it could never change, with a road and a road crew attached to it. Twenty good years, great deal for everybody. Then in 1914, a man in Los Angeles, out of work, puts a sign in his windshield of his Model T. And he starts picking people up along the streetcar route for five cents. So five cents less than what the streetcar was doing, okay? It was called a Jitney. It went across the country like a fever. I mean, you know what happened when people started doing Uber. This is really kind of the first Uber. Within a year, there was something like 60,000 of these Jitneys. They were just model T's, and they would put a sign in their window going from here to here, and they would drop people off, okay? Thousands of them. Portland, Maine, San Francisco, all of them. They had no fixed routes. Driver in San Antonio wouldn't even choose a destination until his first passenger got in. He said, where are you going? Then he'd chalk it in on the window and fill the car along the way. You didn't need to get to your door. He would take you close, or he would take you to your door. Well, people loved them. The clients loved them. It was half the price of the streetcar, and it could take you right to your door. One man wrote in 1915, Nothing is going to stop the jitney now. No corporation, no legislation. Nothing will ever stop the jitney. The streetcar industries, their own trade journal, called this the Frankenstein of transportation. Then the streetcar companies did the thing this whole hour is all about, and what's really happening with AI. They didn't compete. They just went to City Hall. And what did they do? What did they ask for? The most reasonable sounding request you have ever heard. They said, We don't want you to ban these guys. That's a free market. We're just asking you to hold them to the same standard that you hold us. They should have licenses. Make them post a liability bond, because these cars, a lot of them are uninsured, and people are going to get hurt. Make them run a fixed route so a rider can depend on them. Make them run a full day, not just profitable hours, but a full day. Okay, well, so I guess you could say every one of those is defensible. Two of them are good ideas. But whose advantage did that work to? Salt Lake City was the first city to pass this, effective the 1st of April, 1915 You had to have a license, a bond, and a requirement that you would operate 16 continuous hours a day. 16 hours. That one line is the whole thing. I mean, the driver, how is he going to drive? Now you have to hire other people. This was just a guy with a car and a job driving a couple of hours. This is Uber, okay? 16 continuous hours doesn't regulate that man. It deletes that man. So the ordinance took place April 1st. By April 4th, nearly every gyp, gyp, a gypny operator in Salt Lake City had walked into the city offices and handed his license back and said, I don't, I don't want it. 40 gypnys down to two in three days. And it worked. It worked every city, city after city. Same result. Within a couple of years, the gypny was completely gone. Okay, it was a national thing. Street companies now just had their streets back, street car companies. They're all of a sudden now, they're the only ways to get around. Then the war came, and it was the worst inflation the country had ever seen. And everything that people bought had doubled in price. Wages were rising. So the companies went back to the same city halls that had just done them a favor and said, hey, can you raise the fare to 7 cents? The answer was no, we can't do that. Of course, it was no. You can't hand a politician the monopoly of price control and then ask to give you back the price control. Okay? No, you're not going to raise the price on anybody. That's what broke the street car companies, okay? Because anybody who would vote for it to say, we're going to raise the price, they would lose his seat. By 1919, street car companies were failing all over the United States. Enough of them that President Wilson convened a federal commission on it. That's 15 years before General Motors bought a single share of anything. They had handed their freedom for protection. They had used the protection to kill the only competitor who could have ever shown a city what a ride was actually worth, and then they found that that protection was actually a cage. And by the time the buses showed up, there was nothing left to conspire against, because GM just bought a corpse. Two things to take out of that. First, you've heard me talk about all this hour. And the street car men would recognize every word. Nobody writes a law that says eliminate my competitor. They're not writing that law. They're saying they just want some common sense laws. Write laws that say, hold that guy to the same standards as me. See the issue here? The standard always, always, the big, who's going to go to write these laws? You think the congressmen are going to write these laws? They're not going to write these laws. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. They're going to go to all these AI companies and say, what do you think the regulation should be? And all these AI companies will write it for them, knowing that they can handle all of the regulation because they have the money. And so they'll have all this regulation. But the little guy won't be able to do the regulation, so you'll put the little guy out. The bond, the license, the full-time hours, the compliance officer, the inspections, it's never a ban, it's a floor, and the floor gets exactly the height of the incumbent's own shoe.