On an episode of “Moonshots with Peter Diamandis” released earlier this year, Elon Musk dropped a statement so chilling, it stopped Glenn Beck in his tracks.“Well, one, like, side recommendation I have is, like, don’t worry about, like, squirreling money away for retirement in, like, 10 or 20 years. It won’t matter. ... If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant,” the tech titan said.Diamandis followed up with an equally chilling statement.“The services will be there to support you. You’ll have the home. You’ll have the health care. You’ll have the entertainment,” he said.Musk then likened today’s AI progress to a roller coaster car perched at the crest of a hill, insinuating that right now we’re in the stomach-churning hang time before the inevitable free fall.“I think we’ll hit AGI next year in ’26,” he posited. (Note: The podcast was recorded in December 2025.) Glenn unpacks the gravity of Musk’s shocking statements: “AGI is artificial general intelligence. That means the computer — the AI system — is smarter at everything than any human is. It is better at, name the topic, than the best human you can find, and it can do everything that a human can do better than a human.”But unlike Musk and Diamandis, Glenn isn’t as optimistic about this techno-utopia that AI will supposedly create.“We have got to prepare for this,” he warns.Already AI is replacing workers in many industries, but the free fall into rendering humans virtually useless has yet to come but approaches closer every day, he says. “It’ll go the factory worker, then the truck driver, then the coder, then the accountant, the analyst.”“The ground is shifting quickly,” he says, warning that the world is gearing up to propose dystopian ideas to compensate for the coming AI takeover — ideas we must be prepared to reject.One of the most prominent (and harrowing) “solutions” is universal basic income — that is, regular cash payments provided by the government or a similar authority to every individual in a population, with no conditions attached.“I am dead set against that,” Glenn says.“[UBI] is the modern version of bread and circuses — and make no mistakes, the communists, the social planners, the Davos crowd, they’re going to offer it all as, not as a temporary bridge, but as a permanent arrangement,” he cautions.Already, the globalist elites are devising plans to create “a managed society — a population that is pacified, production centralized, dependency normalized,” he explains, citing the work of WEF agenda contributor Yuval Noah Harari, who’s argued that AI and automation will create a “useless class” of people who become superfluous to the economic and political system and therefore must be provided for with universal basic income and essentially sedated via computer games, virtual reality, and possibly even drugs.“People are going to go for this,” Glenn says, “not because they love collectivism, but because nobody offered them another path.”It’s essential, he argues, that we explore other avenues for how to handle the AI takeover before true panic sets in and the frenzied masses agree to something disastrous.One promising alternative, Glenn says, originates from celebrated free-market economist Milton Friedman, who, despite being “accused of being a defender of the coldest kind of capitalism,” supported “a version of basic income” called the “negative income tax.”This idea, Glenn explains, proposes eliminating the welfare state — “that’s food stamps, housing subsidies, overlapping programs, bureaucracy” — and “[replacing] all of that with a simple income floor that everybody gets.”“If you earn below a certain threshold, the government will send you supplemental income, but as you earn more, the support will phase out very gradually,” he adds, noting that the genius in this plan is the preservation of “incentive.”“Technological advancement is going to become so severe at some point that AI could create pockets of severe displacement, and with that, you’ll either get violent populism, authoritarian redistribution of wealth, or a market-compatible safety valve, and that’s what [Friedman’s] negative income tax was — a pressure release without central planning,” Glenn says.If we fail to choose the path that preserves our freedom, a bleak “new world order and one world government” will greet us on the other side of the impending AI apocalypse.To hear more of Glenn’s analysis, watch the video above.Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.