Best of the Program | Guest: Brad Meltzer | 6/24/26

**Glenn Beck** (0:03)
Oh, there is so many good highlights from today's show. We can only get to some of them today. I want to start with something that, I started with the fact that New York has just hired a bunch of socialists. They just voted socialist out. Good Democrats, they threw out, and these were all, when I say good Democrats, what do I mean by that? I don't know, don't define it. But people who were like, I would let the rally to get Trump out of office. He did all these things, but you're not socialist, are you? Now the socialists are coming in and they're eating their own.
And the problem with this is, is no one is teaching in a understandable way what socialism is and what capitalism is. You can't defend it if you can't teach it. And so I modeled how you teach what socialism is and what capitalism is. And I start with the famous pencil story. Also, the World Cup.
I am in love with all the people coming here because they have a they have a skewed idea. They've been told by their media and their politicians, America bad, America just a killing field. And then they come here and they're like, oh my gosh, no, this is much better than our country. And they're expressing it. We're seeing it now because of social media. So I talk about that, the world that came to see and now how politicians are twisting it because everybody's talking about the World Cup. So let's take a World Cup story and make it into immigration. It's what the Wall Street Journal did. And it's a lie. And I expose it today. Also, one of my favorite guests, Brad Meltzer, is with me. He's got a new book out for kids, perfect for the 250 I Am Teddy Roosevelt, who, and we talk about this, Teddy Roosevelt is one of my favorite presidents and one of my least favorite presidents.
Because I mean, it's weird. I caught him a break, and I don't know if I should cut him a break, but I cut him a break on some really bad stuff.
And at the same time, I love him on other things and despise him on the other half of his personality. You decide all that and so much more on today's podcast.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:22)
You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.

**Glenn Beck** (2:30)
Okay, I want to help out the homeschoolers. I want to help you out if you can't defend capitalism, you can't explain why it's better than socialism, because I'm telling you, we are going to be a socialist nation if we don't stop this soon, and that is going to require us to be stronger people that are educated people. And there was something that I read when I was a kid, and I think it was eye pencil, I can't remember exactly, and so I'm going to bastardize it horribly, but I'm holding a pencil, yellow, six sides, little pink eraser at the top, and we've used these our whole life, I mean, you don't know use them now, but we use them our whole life, everybody had one, okay? Nobody on earth, even though you have these, nobody on earth knows how to make this thing, not me, not even the man who runs the pencil factory. I mean, he knows what it takes, but he's not the guy doing all of it, not the CEO, not his best engineer, not the genius three cubicles down who corrects everybody's grammar, not that guy, it's a pencil. The cedar comes from, comes off a mountain in the Pacific Northwest. It's cut by a steel saw, that steel came from iron ore in Minnesota, smelted with coal hauled by the rails by people who are long dead, okay? The graphite comes out of the ground in Sri Lanka, and it's mixed with clay from Mississippi. The little band up at the top, that used to be copper from Chile, zinc from Canada, the yellow paint, the rubber that never once met a rubber tree in its life, all of these things, thousands of people on five continents that don't speak the same language, who never met, who probably crossed the street to avoid each other if they did. All of them somehow or another, without even knowing it, have conspired to put this perfect little writing machine in a child's hand for less than a quarter.
These people couldn't agree on lunch, and they built the pencil. And here's the key, no one was in charge. There is no pencils are. There's no department of pencils in a marble building, deciding how much graphite Sri Lanka needs to mine this year. Nobody on the planet wakes up at 3 o'clock in the morning in a cold sweat, thinking, dear God, does Ohio have enough eraser erasers? You know, it just happens every day. It's a miracle so ordinary, we walk right past it on the way to complain about something.