Glenn Beck (FB/TW: @GLENNBECK, GLENNBECK.COM) hit rock bottom as an alcoholic in his 30s and restarted his life. Fast forward to 2014, Forbes named him to their annual Celebrity 100 Power List and pegged his earnings at $90 million for that year. This placed him ahead of people like Mark Burnett, Jimmy Fallon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Will Smith. Glenn’s platforms—including radio, television, digital (TheBlaze.com), publishing, etc.—receive somewhere between 30 and 50 million unique visitors per month.
The goal of my podcast is to push listeners outside of their comfort zones and force them to question assumptions. I regularly invite divergent thinkers who disagree with one another. This interview came about thanks to a late-night sauna session with an old friend, a mixed-race Brown University grad who is liberal in nearly every sense of the word. I casually asked him, “If you could pick one person to be on the podcast, who would it be?” He answered without a moment’s hesitation. “Glenn Beck. His story is FASCINATING.” And it was….
“If I have to pick one, the best thing I learned, I learned by mistake. Somebody calls in [to the radio show in the early days] and said: ‘Glenn Beck, you’re Mr. Perfect, like you’ve ever done anything wrong. You just can’t accept a flaw in anybody.’ I stood there for a while and the room got really quiet. And I said, ‘You know, let me tell you something. You don’t have any idea who I even am, or the bad things that I have done. Let me tell you who I am.’ And I spent about 15 minutes being unbelievably, brutally honest and laying out who I am. The worst. No apology, nothing. Just saying: ‘You think you know? I’ve been lying to you. This is who I am.’ I turned off my mic and I looked at my then-intern, the lowest producer on the ladder who’s now my executive producer. I said to him, ‘Mark this down on your calendar. Today is the day Glenn Beck ended his career.’
“The opposite happened. I had grown up in a world where everything was manufactured, everything was written, timed, produced perfectly. What I realized that day was people are starving for something authentic. They’ll accept you, warts and all, if that’s who you really are. Once you start lying to them, they’re not interested. We’re all alike. So the best advice I learned by mistake, and that is: Be willing to fail or succeed on who you really are. Don’t ever try to be anything else. What you are is good enough for whatever it is you’re doing.”
Glenn recounted what he learned from an old lady who, at age 16, gave a Jew a bowl of soup. It was a death sentence at the time and she was sent to Auschwitz:
“She said, ‘Glenn, remember, the righteous didn’t suddenly become righteous. They just refused to go over the cliff with everybody else.’ That’s all we have to do: Know what our principles—not our interests—are today. And as the world goes over the cliff, I’m not going to change my principles. Treating human beings, whether they’re like me or not like me, whether they’re the same religion or a different religion, with love and respect.”
In his early 30s, Glenn spent a semester at Yale as a theology major and felt out of place:
“[Wayne] reached across the table, and he grabbed my hand and he said, ‘You listen to me for a second, would you? You realize you belong here, right? You’re okay to be here.’ That endorsement, and as stupid as it seems, opened up my whole world. Because it was the first time somebody said, ‘You’re smart enough. You can do it.’ … That changed my world. I wish it hadn’t, in some ways. I wish it didn’t mean so much to me. But I’ve learned from that, now in my position, to say that to people. Because there’s something stupid in us that just makes us feel like we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough.”
“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”—Thomas Jefferson