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April 28, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
46:57
My Interview with Tucker Carlson— Advice, Religion, Politics, and More
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Re-Airing The Tucker Carlson Episode 00:01:22
Hey everybody, re-airing this episode.
I thought it was timely.
Our conversation with Tucker Carlson from AmFest.
If you didn't listen to this, it was dropped right near Christmas, so there's a chance you missed it.
I think you're going to really enjoy it.
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Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
Embracing Life's Inherent Mystery 00:12:25
That's why we are here.
Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
Tucker Carlson, welcome back to the program.
Ladies and gentlemen, how's it going?
Silence dissent.
That's right.
It's great.
I'm able to just...
I love that.
You've got the Earth's volume knob.
You and I were talking about this at lunch about how you have to resist the temptation of just total Stalinistic power when you're in charge.
When you give speeches, especially, you come to the inevitable conclusion, usually toward the end of the speech, that you are Jesus.
And that is probably the worst conclusion a man can come to.
And I mentioned, and for our audience's sake, that neuroscience tells us that noreperephine, dopamine, endorphins, just off the charts when you speak publicly.
Yes.
Or when you have control.
I mean, this is this, I've decided, well, I've decided I don't really understand a lot of what's happening in the world right now, which is a good thing, I think, to conclude.
But I've also decided that the main motivator for people in charge is to feel like God.
I mean, I guess it's all very obvious, but this is coming to me late in life.
And the feeling that, you know, I run things, I make the big decisions.
I'm in charge of life itself, when it begins, when it ends.
This is like the highest high people can get.
And it makes smoking crack seem like nothing.
And it motivates, I think, a lot of really bad behavior.
In an increasingly secular society, it's the only thing that they can get to for a pinnacle or a zenith of feeling that way.
There is a God and you are not him.
They reject both of those.
Well, that's right.
And yeah, that's exactly right.
And at this point, you know, I'm never been very sectarian, kind of more ecumenical by my temperament.
And it's not even a question of who's a Christian, who's a Muslim or a Hindu.
It's a question of, you know, do you believe in God or do you think you are God?
And that is the dividing line.
And for you, and the point is that it's less theological in the sense, I mean, I have a very specific theological view of the historical Jesus, but do you at least believe in the concept that there's something bigger than you?
Well, of course.
Of course.
And do you think you're omnipotent?
Which would be fine, by the way, if you were, but we're not, actually.
And, you know, as my father always said to me when I was a child, and he used a word I'm not going to repeat, it was a bad word, but it was an evocative word.
But he always said the root of all wisdom is knowing, you know, what a flawed person you are, effectively, you know, and seeing yourself realistically, which is, you know, someone who can't see beyond like the next 20 minutes, if that person whose judgment is often clouded by desires and silly things like that.
And basically a person who's imperfect.
Once you understand that and really internalize it, you're in a better place to make good decisions.
Mike Tyson said something to me.
I can't believe I'm quoting Mike Tyson.
There's only one Mike Tyson.
Well, my favorite Mike Tyson until they get punched in the bank.
Everybody got a plan until he gets hit in the face.
Yes, totally true.
But that, it turns out, is one of like many Mike Tyson aphorisms that are worth remembering.
Mike Tyson just stayed at my house for an interview.
The hurricane destroyed down in Florida.
The hurricane completely destroyed all the hotels.
Mike Tyson.
Isn't he like a philosopher, though?
He like reads a lot.
He's like a wonderful person.
He was super wise.
I would never have interviewed Mike Tyson.
I've heard this from three or four people.
It's unbelievable.
And a good friend of mine, someone whose judgment I respect, said to me, you know, you don't know Mike Tyson?
I was like, how would I know Mike Tyson?
I'm a talk show host.
Well, you should meet Mike Tyson.
Well, why would I meet Mike Tyson?
Mike Tyson is a wonderful man.
My friend said, he's totally transparent.
He's totally honest.
And he's really smart.
I was like, okay, no, all right, he's really smart.
He's a lot of former boxers.
Yeah, really a smart guy.
Well, it's all true.
And I could go on, but I would just reduce it to this one thing that he said I thought was so smart.
I said, when you go out, you know, you're obviously one of the most famous people in the world and people approach you.
And I'm sure it's mostly positive.
Probably sometimes it's not.
You did go to prison.
How do you feel when people attack you?
And he said, this is almost a verbatim quote.
He said, when I feel like I'm somebody, I'm offended.
But when I remember that I'm nobody, it doesn't bother me.
And I thought, man, that is the key.
That is the key.
What percentage of our ruling class believes that?
Look, if you knew who you were in the scope of things, if you spent like 20 minutes staring up at night on a cloudless night and looking at the stars, I mean, you know, I'm not sure you would achieve enlightenment, but you would achieve perspective.
And you would recognize your place in the cosmos, which is infinitesimally small and totally forgettable in the scope of things.
Like you're nothing.
And that's just true.
I mean, we don't want it to be true, but it is true.
And so knowing that, you probably wouldn't imagine, you probably wouldn't convince yourself you could restore permanent peace to the world by putting a fake democracy in Iraq, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That you couldn't, you know, affecting regime change in Russia would fix everything.
You would know there are limits to your predictive power as a person.
And maybe you should scale back your ambitions a little bit, consistent with your abilities, which is pretty limited, actually.
The same people that wanted to bomb Baghdad now want to blitzkrieg a female's body to change their nature from female to male.
It's the same thing.
We are going to impose our will on what is to what we think is.
100%.
We're in charge of nature.
Yes.
And, you know, on one level, I find it kind of poignant, sort of sad almost.
Like, no, I'm in charge.
Really?
Can you forestall your own death for 20 years?
No, you can't.
You can't even cure baldness, dude.
Shut up.
You have no power, actually.
And by you, I mean up to and including the president of the United States or anyone else who thinks he's God.
You know, you actually don't have that much power.
And again, that's not like my opinion.
And it's not even my wish.
I wish people had more power to change the course of human events and to change nature, but they don't have any power, actually.
So it's a question of whether you're going to acknowledge reality or not.
And we're just all a lot better off when you do, I think.
Who gets this right if anybody in public life?
Who has the requisite humility to lead?
Sure.
Or just the recognition of where they are in the grander scheme of existence.
I mean, that's a great question.
Look.
Like Bob Dylan?
You know, actually, I think I don't know Bob Dylan.
I know his son.
And I think Bob Dylan actually knows.
You know what I mean?
Like the people that are the poets and the songs.
No, you're right.
Of course.
The Willie Nelsons of the world, I guess.
You never go to any.
The best book I've read in the last, I don't know, many years is a book by Matthias Dismet, who's a Belgian psychologist, professor, written about COVID, but it's not really about COVID.
It's called The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
And in it, he makes many points about science.
It's a book that actually changed the way I see the world.
But one of the points he makes is that we never go to anyone who speaks literally or in formulas or in ones and zeros to find out what the truth is.
We always go to people who speak metaphorically.
We always go to poets or the entire New Testament is like indecipherable if you're a literal person.
That's right.
Door, garden, yeah.
No question is ever answered in a straightforward.
Fishermen of men.
Exactly.
And you're like, why don't you just spell it out for me?
You know, if you're God, just say so.
And Dismet.
They tried in the Ten Commandments.
It didn't work.
And Dismet, who does not self-identify as a Christian, I have no idea what his religious views are.
Clearly, he's a believer of some kind, makes the point that that's necessary, that you can't communicate truth literally.
It has to be metaphorical.
Why?
What's the argument?
Because we've reached the limits of language.
The reality...
The logos reaches a place.
Yes, the reality of life, the spiritual reality, even the physical reality, is beyond the limit of language to describe.
We actually, we don't have the words.
So it's beyond...
It's beyond reason, but it's, I guess that would be.
It is beyond reason.
It's beyond reason.
It's beyond physics.
Nothing that we have created can capture the essence of what's true.
Not the essence of what's true.
We can measure certain things.
Certainly in the short term, math is super helpful if you want to know what something weighs or how long it is.
But math is incapable of answering questions like what happens when you die?
What's the most important thing?
Like AI will never get to that, okay, ever.
And so, in place of literal descriptions and in place of math, we seek metaphor and poetry and indistinct, imprecise expressions of this thing or this reality that we all sense, but can't, again, quite sum up in words or numbers.
Almost every culture or civilization had their own way of doing that or communicating it.
And now we're ruled by a group of people that think 84% of the religious people on the planet are wrong.
It's pretty funny.
They don't have the balls to say that, of course.
But if you look at it across the scope of known history, it's like how many civilizations at scale, big civilizations, have been secular that we know of ever.
And by secular, I mean don't acknowledge in kind of hiring everyday conversation.
Yeah, exactly, the existence of something bigger and more powerful than our temporal leadership.
And you would say, none.
Like, this is the first one.
This actually is an experiment that we're conducting without even knowing it, I think, in secular society at a scale.
That's so profound.
And so, like, how's it going?
And I would say, not that well.
And I'm not saying that as a Christian.
I'm just saying that as like an observer of how well things are going.
Not that well.
And why would it go well?
Like, people are born knowing there's something more powerful than us.
I'm a Christian.
I don't think it necessarily points to Jesus.
It hasn't over time pointed to Jesus for a lot of people.
They may be wrong or right or whatever, but every person is born knowing, obviously, that people are not kind of the final word on everything.
I mean, we're born with an intuitive moral sense, a sense of justice.
This is right.
That is wrong.
A lie is bad.
That's not something we're taught.
It's something that we know.
Why do we know that?
Because it pre-exists us.
That's why.
And to not acknowledge that is a recipe for disaster, the disaster we're living through.
Look, you need to acknowledge the inherent mystery in life.
You need to say out loud, we just had lunch, and at lunch you kept using this phrase, the spoken truth, which I thought was such a cool, maybe a common Christian phrase.
I've never lived in a Christian world, so I don't really know, but I love that phrase.
It stuck with me.
Thank you.
Because it's not enough to know the truth.
The act of speaking it, articulating it, putting it into language makes it real.
Yeah, it is a Christian phrase because in the book of John, the first verse is, in the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God, and the word became flesh.
But that word is logos, right?
So they're saying Jesus is the logos, which is Jesus was the spoken truth.
Interesting.
The spoken truth.
Yes, the spoken truth.
That because to not go too deep into Christian theology.
I didn't teach this in Episcopal school.
I'm just here to tell you.
I'm not shocked.
But in the creation story of Genesis, we're told we're made in the image of God.
God speaks things into existence, spoken truth.
Right?
So God didn't make it into existence.
He spoke it into existence.
And God said there would be light.
And God said there would be distinction.
And God said that there would be said spoken truth.
Well, I love that.
And I think one of the truths that we need to speak is that we don't know.
That the mystery of life isn't just this ancillary thing.
Admitting We Don't Know Everything 00:15:52
Like there's some things we don't understand, but we will.
No, the mystery of life is life.
It's central to life.
It is the core of life.
It is unknowable by people.
What is this?
How do we get here?
Where are we going?
These are not questions we will ever answer with scientific certainty in this life.
And like, I think we need to start there.
Because if we don't start there, then you have this procession of charlatans who come forth.
They're like, no, no, no, no, we got it under control.
Here's what it's about.
Here's where we're going.
It's like, you don't know that.
Like, I call BS on you.
You don't know that.
I mean, I spent my whole life.
Like, I actually don't have very many answers, but I think my one skill is like I can tell deception from like 100 yards for some reason.
It's like it's a smell thing.
And I see these people come up.
It's like almost 100% of them are all lying.
Well, here's what we know.
Oh, really?
Do we know that?
How do we know that?
And the answer is, of course, but they don't know it.
And that's fine.
I'm totally comfortable with people saying, you know, I don't really know.
And that's how we ended our lunch where you said, you know, do you see a realignment?
I'll say, I have no idea.
Yeah.
Well, that's a liberating thing to admit.
It's a liberating thing to admit.
And that's, I must say, my tolerance for atheism has really dwindled to nothing at this point.
My tolerance for people who are agnostic or aren't really sure.
I totally agree with this.
But the idea that there are people who are completely certain as a matter of religious faith that there's no God, I just find it hilarious and like so childish.
I just can't take it seriously.
And so I was talking to somebody the other day.
He was like, well, Sam Harris is smart.
It's like, do we have evidence Sam Harris is smart?
Sam Harris seems like a child to me.
He has no wisdom.
Like a terrified little child.
I've never heard Sarah.
Sam Harris seems like one of the dumbest people I've ever listened to in my life.
Like, if you live in a world of people like, oh, well, Sam Harris is very smart.
Really?
I'm not going to agree to that because it's demonstrably untrue.
He's never said anything wise.
Sam Harris is like a ridiculous figure.
Sam Harris is very smart.
Oh, really?
Okay.
How are we measuring that?
Through how many degrees you have.
So I just love that.
And by the way, that was like a smart person who said it to me.
Okay.
Sam Harris is an interesting segue because he wrote the book Moral Landscape.
I don't know if you ever read it or not.
No.
Sorry, I missed that one.
No, you probably spent that summer better than I did trying to maneuver that drive-by shooting of metaphysics.
He tries to say that you can come up with an objective moral construct via atheism and fails miserably.
But the intelligentsia that's running our planet right now, they are practicing parishioners in the church of Sam Harris.
Yeah, it's metaphorically.
No, of course, but it's like Unitarianism.
It's just like a sad, doomed little church.
It's not even interesting.
I mean, there are all kinds of religions that I don't believe in that I think are kind of compelling and speak to something that's true or have some good premises, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Or at least like there is a kind of crackling fire about them that seems like it's coming from somewhere.
Like I don't believe in it, but I look at it and I'm like, I'm not dismissing that as like absurd.
I think it's wrong, but I kind of get it.
I get why people are Muslims.
I do.
I do.
And I'm not a Muslim.
But I look at Sam Harris and I'm like, you're like a fifth grader.
I'm a church.
That's fine.
There'd be a lot of people like that.
But for other people to look on at Sam Harris, who was truly an absurd figure and be like, oh, he's really smart.
God, we have just, we're not measuring this correctly, I don't think.
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So you said something earlier that I totally agree with, but I want you to expand on.
You said I'm less certain about what I know even in the time of which we are in.
Yeah.
What do you mean by that?
And I'm paraphrasing, of course, but.
Well, I mean, I'm just I'm certain of what I believe.
I'm more certain than ever in my instincts about things.
I feel like if I have any advantage, it's not IQ.
I don't think I'm that smart at all, but certainly not in that way.
But I take my own instincts more seriously, I think, than most people do.
I was raised to do that.
I was trained to do that from childhood.
Stay in touch with your inner dog.
I mean, that was like the commandment in our house, like pee outside, smell things before you put them in your mouth.
Like we were taught that, you know, as I'm not joking.
And it really worked.
And so I still trust more than I ever have my instincts.
If someone feels deceptive, he is.
You get a vibe off someone, it's real.
If you feel some sort of like churning volatility inside someone and you can absolutely feel it, it doesn't take a lot of training to feel it.
That's coming from somewhere.
If you feel like someone's got a big hidden secret, he does.
If the Warren Commission seems ridiculous, it is.
Like, you know, these kinds of things.
Like, don't lie to yourself about what you feel because you're right.
If you see three guys walking towards you at night and they cross over to your side of the street and seem menacing, they're going to hurt you.
Don't talk yourself out of what your senses tell you, what your animal senses tell you.
So I am certain of that.
But what I'm so grateful to be reminded of is that I really don't understand what's going on in the world right now.
Clearly, we're in the middle of a realignment.
This is a pivot.
We're going to look back from the vantage of 300 years and say, wow, a lot changed in a short period between 2020 and 2022.
Like, everything changed in two years.
And we'll understand much more about it.
But right now, I don't really understand it.
And I was reminded of that in the midterms, which I miss called completely.
I fell down in my duty as a talk show host to the extent I have duties.
One of them is to, you know, make a good faith effort to get it right for our audience.
I really do try.
I try not to overstate what I know.
I try not to say things I'm not sure are true.
I mean, I'm often wrong, but I'm always wrong in good faith.
I try to be.
But this time I was up on TV being like, wow, meet Lee Zeldin, your new governor.
It's like, what?
And I don't want to make it all about me because it has nothing to do with me.
It was the nation voting, right?
But one of the takeaways for me was I got it wrong.
It was, in my mind, about me.
Like, I played a role in this.
And I got it wrong up and down the board.
Wow, did I get it wrong?
And I'm still not really sure why.
I'm not really sure what happened.
I could give you a long list of factors that I think played a role.
I'm sure all of them are true, but it doesn't add up to a really coherent story in my mind anyway.
So at this point, and this is, I think, the 17th of December 2022, the only thing I've concluded is I'm not good at predicting the outcomes of things.
I should stand back and appreciate the majesty of the unexplained, unknowable mysteries of life.
Okay, that's kind of what I've concluded.
And I should be as honest as I possibly can be about what I don't know, about what I can't know, about what I'm guessing at.
And I should make a distinction between those things and the things that I'm certain of.
And I should be explicit about it.
Like, I think that's incumbent on me as someone who talks in public and as a father and a husband and a friend and all that.
As someone with the power of speech, I should be more fully honest about what I know and what I don't know.
And I'll admit, I hate, and I mean it, and I don't want to feel this way, but I actually hate this neoliberal movement or whatever this is, this anti-human movement that's sweeping the West right now.
I think it's a threat to everything that I believe in.
It's a threat to the well-being of my family, and I really feel hatred.
I'm just being honest.
And I really hate it.
And that loathing clouded my judgment.
I was like, I dislike these people so much.
What they're doing is so wrong.
It is helping so few people and hurting so many.
It's so immoral on every level that I just want it to be repudiated.
I don't want anyone to be hurt or go to jail.
I'm not that guy.
But I do want it to stop.
And a rejection by the voters might be the beginning of slowing them down.
And so I wanted that so much, not because I like the Republicans.
I really dislike them more than I ever have, but I dislike the other side more.
That's it.
I'm over talking.
But I did learn that.
Like, I have no freaking idea what goes on in American politics.
That's what I learned.
What do you mean by neoliberal and anti-human?
How are those things connected in your mind?
Look, politics in the United States.
I moved to D.C. in 1985, and I've watched pretty closely since then.
I lived there for 35 years.
I felt like I understood it, sort of.
But politics is a very straightforward enterprise with complications on the margins.
But the business is straightforward.
Like your job is to represent your voters, and the guy who makes life better for the biggest number of voters or convinces them their life is getting better wins.
It's like not hard.
And like conventional politics in Washington for my whole lifetime, I'm 53, was always like Republicans would be mad because of earmarks and they're building bridges to nowhere in some congressional district in some state.
And yeah, I get it.
It's wasteful.
It's bad.
But at least someone drove on the bridge and like liked the bridge.
Someone's life was improved.
Someone's commute was shortened.
I look around now and I'm like, what are you peddling?
You're peddling things that, first of all, I disagree with.
You know, I'm not for abortion.
I'm just not.
I'm not for killing people in general, but you're peddling things that have no conceivable benefit.
Your son gets chemically castrated.
Like, who would want that?
No one would want that.
No normal parent.
I'm a parent.
No parent would want that.
And that's what you're peddling?
We're going to have a war that literally couldn't possibly even theoretically benefit the United States.
And we're going to send tens of billions of dollars and risk nuclear annihilation.
Why would we do that?
What's the cost-benefit there?
Well, there isn't one.
Shut up.
Okay.
And a million things like that.
Our economy goes to hell.
Well, in a normal political scenario, the people in charge be like, it's not that bad, and we've got a plan to make it better.
The Treasury Secretary goes on television and said, oh, you gotten a little poor recently?
Well, have an abortion.
That's her answer.
Even if you're totally for abortion, even if you're all in, even if you're pro-choice, that's not much of an answer.
Don't have children?
What?
Really?
That's your answer to me?
And so I'm like looking at this and I'm thinking, again, even if I agreed with it, which I don't, but even if I did, I'd be like, I don't really think you can get elected on that.
Because the core promise is a chicken in every pot.
How about this?
If the Democrat, like, I got student loan forgiveness.
I wasn't for it.
It sets up bad incentives, but at least it made a kind of intuitive sense to me as a human.
It's like, I'll pay you to vote for me.
Okay, I will.
Like, I get that.
I get that.
I don't think that, I think it's wrong and corrupt and all that stuff, but I don't think it's like demonic.
I think it's just sleazy politics.
It's transactional, of course.
It's transactional.
Thank you.
That's the word.
But we're going to castrate your children?
Okay, I'll vote for you.
Against your will.
Yeah.
Like, what?
What is that?
And that's when I started to think as an Episcopalian or former Episcopalian, like, very conventional person theologically.
I'm like, maybe there's more going on here.
What do you mean by that?
Well, there's a spiritual component here.
It doesn't make any sense.
There's no rational explanation for it.
Why would someone want that?
Why would you want to hurt your own children?
No one's even making the case.
I would even understand it if people got on television and said, you know what?
I was chemically castrated as a child.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
If you chemically castrate your children, if you cut your daughter's breasts off, she'll be so much happier as a person as she gets older.
Okay, I don't think that's true, but at least it's like an argument based on incentives, I recognize, right?
Do this and you'll be happier.
They're not arguing that.
Let your cities become filthy and impoverished and dangerous.
Okay, what's the upside here for me?
Shut up, you deserve it.
Okay.
So clearly, people are not responding to conventional incentives at all.
So what is happening?
Well, I'm not sure, but I can promise you this is not politics as I've understood it for the past 35 years.
This is something very, very different.
And I think it's very obvious that there's a spiritual component to it.
That's an imprecise description because it's all I've got.
I have all kinds of theories.
None of them are knowable or provable, but it's not conventional.
This is not what we've seen before.
This is a completely different thing.
I mean, just like logic tells you that.
Logic is a gift, I think, from God.
We're born with the capacity.
It says that in Isaiah.
Does it?
Yeah, that reason is a gift from the Lord.
Let us reason together again.
Well, I believe in that just intuitively.
And use your God-given reason to assess this.
It doesn't make sense.
There is an explanation, but clearly it's outside the political realm.
It's in the supernatural almost, yeah.
That would be my guess.
I know it.
I know it's not a political motivation.
I know that because what they're doing is doesn't make no one's ever done this before in our country at all.
And I really have tried for the 27 years I've been on TV not to overstate things too much.
Not every election is the most important election.
Not every person I don't like is a Nazi.
I mean, I don't like that kind of overstatement.
But I do think it's not an overstatement to say what's happening now is evil.
I'm not saying everyone involved in it is evil, knowingly.
I don't think they are.
But what they're doing is evil.
It's not helping anybody.
It's hurting a lot of people.
And they're continuing to do it.
So why?
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You said something interesting.
You said neoliberalism is hurting a lot of people, but also benefiting only a few.
Yeah, I mean, and the benefits are not simply material.
I mean, people have, I mean, this has been gone over at great length by people smarter than me, but, you know, people have a need to feel like they're doing the right thing, to feel virtuous.
I mean, clearly, that's a basic human need.
You know, food, water, shelter, sex, virtue.
You know, these are like, these are inherent.
But, I mean, what you're describing, though, I mean, we said this before.
This is unsustainable.
I mean, it's totally unsustainable.
It's totally unsustainable.
The demographic mix, by the way, is changing so fast.
None of us are even aware of it.
We all live in communities that look like the communities we grew up in, but that's not the larger community at all.
And my instinct is, I have no evidence of this, but you get different people, you get different politics.
And I do know our politics are a product of a very small, specific group of affluent, well-educated white people who I grew up with.
And they're running everything, and they have a particular worldview that I find repugnant and horrifying, but it is particular to them.
And so if you change the demographic makeup of the country, you're going to get different politics.
This was not, and this is like the end.
We're watching the end of something, not the beginning of something, I think.
This is the final sort of scene in this play.
There's no doubt about that.
It's not just that it's going to collapse under the weight of its own ridiculousness, though it will.
It's that the players will go away.
You know, this is when Joe Biden gets up there and tells you that, you know, racial justice and reparations and equity and trans rights and all this stuff.
I mean, okay, these are the concerns of a group I know very well.
You know, these are the ladies waiting in the lift line in Jackson Hole right now, that sort of unhappy 45-year-old wives of private equity moguls.
That's what they care about.
And that's his constituency.
That's who funds the Democratic Party.
And those are the people in charge right now.
But this is a point on a continuum.
Nothing stays the same.
And you wake up and you're like, what is this?
Oh, it's my country?
It's totally different.
So.
Weren't we supposed to begin to correct some of that in 16?
Yes.
Right?
That's kind of what is so confusing to me.
Well, that's why I was kind of happy.
And I tried to say this to my staff.
We're just such wonderful, smart people.
I didn't express it very well.
I think they thought I was crazy.
But right after the midterms, we were so far out on a limb with like, you know, Washington State's going to elect it right where, you know, and meet Joe Kenny.
He's going to be Speaker of the House.
And I was just like, so, I was softing my own gas.
You know, it's like so ridiculous.
I wish it had all happened, but none of it did.
But anyway, but after, so I was like very, it felt like a repudiation of my judgment, which of course it was, the results.
But, and by the way, I think there was fraud.
I'm sure a lot of your listeners would be like, well, what about all the voter fraud?
Yeah, there was a lot of voter fraud for sure.
On the other hand, you know, in Montana, they had a ballot initiative that said, well, if a baby's born alive, you can't kill the baby.
Seems like a pretty, you know, pretty easy one.
Not a close call.
In 9010.
Yeah, at least 9010.
I mean, maybe at the Organic Foods Co-op in Bozeman, they'd be like, no, but everywhere else.
Right.
Yeah, it's fine.
And that failed.
So, yeah, voter fraud, but also there's something else going on, right?
So I looked at this and I felt really, you know, as I said, distressed about it.
But then I also felt just intuitively, and I think this is right, that everything is the opposite of what, it's like the Beatitudes.
Everything is the opposite of what you think it is.
You think the people first in line are going to be first.
No, actually, they're last.
They're last.
And that's not just something that Jesus said sitting on the shores of the lake.
It's a fact of life that's observable, that your victories are your losses and your losses are your victories.
That is just inflexibly true.
That has been true in my life.
I can think of three or four things that I've had a very easy, happy life, very easy, happy life.
But, you know, like everybody, I've had things that were, I felt were a disaster or whatever, you know, that were sad.
And it's only the sad things in my life that I've learned anything from.
Every one of them has become the basis of future happiness.
Your losses are your victories.
That is true.
And I know for a fact, having been both poor and rich, and then poor and rich again.
I've done the whole cycle a couple of times that your victories are your losses.
Like ask any person who's worked toward a goal and then achieved the goal, particularly men.
And ask, have like some quiet time with the person where he's honest, and he'll tell you that it's almost post-coidal.
I mean, I'm sorry to be crude, but it's true.
It's almost that, as the French call it, the little death, you know, le petimo.
It's like it's at the, right after the peak comes, this is vulgar.
I'm sorry.
But it's true.
This is life, man.
This is like real, okay?
Nature is real.
And you feel this loss, this like sadness.
It's hard to explain.
You've achieved what every fiber of your body wanted.
You got what you wanted.
You sold the company for $100 million.
And I know someone who did that, $2 billion, $2 billion.
Never took a single loan.
His name is Jimmy John Leoto.
Yeah, he's speaking at our event.
What a wonderful man.
He's great.
He's a wonderful man.
He's wonderful because he knows himself.
And he knows himself because he's suffered.
And he suffered in his triumph, which is the standard.
It's not the anomaly.
It's what happens.
You win, you suffer.
And I don't fully understand this as I don't understand so many things, but that is just true.
And I've lived it.
I know it's true.
So I saw this disaster with no possible upside that was personally humiliating for me.
And I could feel in my bones that this was in some way something we would look back on and say, man, I'm glad that happened.
And I look at 2016 in the opposite way.
We thought this was the ultimate triumph.
We really did.
And I was thrilled by it.
And that was a vindication for me because I thought Trump was going to win.
And I said so.
And my neighbors thought I was an idiot and they hated me for saying that.
But I said it in public.
And I turned out to be right.
So, of course, I made it all about me.
And I was like, oh, I was right.
I'm so smart.
And then I spent, you know, four years feeling like really disappointed and sad.
And it never reduced my animal level affection for Trump, which I still feel.
I talked to him yesterday.
I will always love Trump as a person.
I will never stop loving Trump because he's just like, he's such an amazing, he's such an animal.
He's also uniquely American.
Turning Affluence Into Disappointment 00:06:56
Only American.
He's unbelievable.
He's like a savage.
He's just like, having dinner with Trump is like my favorite.
I could have dinner with Trump five nights a week.
I would need a break.
But for five nights, I could sit and eat with Trump and talk about, and another thing.
And you see that woman, she's beautiful.
And like, yes, yes, more.
I just love Trump.
But for four years, I was like, wait, what?
Jared made the decision.
Like, we didn't vote for it.
Like, what?
And so, again, I'm not, without even getting into all that, I will just say it is the iron rule of life that your victories are your losses and your losses are your victories.
And let me just lay it down here, another one of my stupid theories, which happens to be true.
We're going to look back at the midterms and say, man, if that hadn't happened, we would have been even dumber than we are.
And it will require action, though.
That's part of it.
It's not going to happen automatically.
So we got to get you on stage soon.
But I'm going to talk about young people, students.
Yeah.
Most depressed, anxious, alcohol-addicted, drug-addicted, psychiatric-addicted generation history.
Why?
Because they've been, you know, encouraged to be.
I mean, there's something really dark going on with adults where they would intentionally hurt young people, but you see it at every turn.
It's so true.
It's on purpose.
It's not.
It's the fiscal policy.
Every lockdown.
It's cruel.
It's the opposite of what you would do to your own kids.
If you treated your own kids like this, if you told them they were helpless victims, they'd be in rehab.
If you gave them access to drugs, if you let them order meth on the internet called Adderall, which they can because it's now legal after COVID, you would turn them into drug addicts.
And we have.
If you gave them porn and video games and then forced them into four years of pointlessness in the prime of life in college, took away any meaning or duty, any struggle, if you poisoned the relationship between boys and girls and men and women and made them suspicious of one another and hate each other, you would spike the suicide rate to the levels we see it now.
You would destroy an entire generation.
I would say, and I don't have a ton of contact with young people, but I have a bunch on my staff and I have four of mine.
And I'm amazed by the resilience, by the wisdom, by the cleverness.
You are seeing young people just like intuitively know.
You and I talked about this at lunch.
This is a tough time and it's a time to get ready.
It's a time to prepare physically, emotionally, intellectually.
I mean, I have young people that I come into contact with, some of whom I'm related to, who are reading things.
When I was, you know, I was reading Evelyn Waugh's comic novels, okay, when I was 20, which I love, and I would still recommend them to everybody.
They're amazing.
Decline and fall, vile bodies, scoop, black mischief, they're incredible.
But like the young people I talk to are reading like Aeschylus or, you know, they're like really trying to, they're very serious about what they read.
I think most people don't read at all.
They're on their iPhones.
But the ones you do read are serious about it.
And I'm like, what is that?
Well, they live in serious times.
That's what it's about.
Yes.
And they know it and they can feel it.
They can start to feel things falling apart.
Yes.
They've already fallen apart.
But you know, there's a huge upside to that.
I mean, I spent my whole life bemoaning it.
But the truth is, you know, too much room service is bad for you.
Like, you don't want to live in luxury.
Luxury is bad for you.
And I say this as someone who grew up in an affluent family, and I'm affluent now.
There's a great comfort crisis.
You should have him on your show, Michael Easter.
I don't know if you know.
Oh, he's fabulous.
He wrote the book Comfort Crisis.
That's his whole book is about how comfort's killing everybody.
Well, it comes close to killing me every year.
You know, the room service, man, I got to stay off the room service.
Had it today.
But no, there's something to that.
You know, when it's too, I know for my, speaking for myself, I don't want to cast aspersions on young people.
They have it so easy.
I'm saying for me, when I have it easy, when I've got, you know, it doesn't happen often, but if I've got nothing to do all day, I mean, that never happens because I won't allow it to happen.
But if it were ever to happen, if I had to sit, you know, outside at a Sandals Beach Resort for a week with an open tab, I don't know what I would do.
I would hurt myself.
You know what I mean?
Yes.
It's not good for anybody.
You need a mission.
Let me say of men.
Men need a mission.
They need something that they think is important, that's difficult to do.
Challenging, yes.
And if they don't have that, they will turn all that energy on themselves and they'll destroy themselves.
And then what do women do?
What do they need?
You know, I just feel like I'm not, I have four in my house, but I just love them and I'm not an author.
I don't fully understand women.
That's one of the reasons I like them so much.
I get about 70% and the rest is Sanskrit.
I'm just like, I like the tonal qualities of it.
I like the way it sounds, but I don't really understand what you're saying, but it doesn't detract from my love for you.
But here's my one observation about at least young women, is that they're far more self-directed, far more self-directed.
Is that a good thing?
You know, I think it is.
I think it's one of the reasons that women do so much better in college is I always tell my girls, boys will never do anything unless they have to.
But if they have to, they will do anything.
That's the key to men.
Boys will never do anything unless they have to.
But if they have to, they will do anything.
In other words, you've got a man and he's got nothing to do.
He's going to be on the couch drinking beer.
Okay?
Or whatever.
He will be utterly indolent.
They're energy savers, right?
But if some menacing force shows up at your house, he will beat them to death with a two by four if he has to, because that's his job.
There's a crisis and he's responding to it.
And so if you're organizing a society that you want to be healthy and successful and you want to harness that energy, that male energy, which is like the driver of civilization, that's why we have office buildings, you need to think through like, how do we get the most out of young men?
And if, by contrast, you wanted to destroy young men, you would do what we're doing now, obviously.
You would give them nothing to do.
You would berate them.
You would patronize them.
You'd belittle their natural qualities.
You would get them addicted to drugs.
And that's literally what we've done.
Drive through, last thing I'll say, drive through rural America right now.
The only new buildings, in other words, the only capital flowing into small towns across rural America is for weed dispensaries.
Where's all that money coming from?
I live in a place like that, so I know.
The only new buildings in the entire freaking county are weed dispensaries.
Finding Hope At Your Lowest Point 00:03:20
That's true.
Go to rural Colorado.
You see exactly the same thing.
The only new buildings are weed dispensaries.
Take three steps back.
What are we watching here?
Why is the only money BlackRock is sending to Leadville going to weed dispensaries?
Like, what?
Unless they're buying the home to rent it back to you.
I don't even know if it's Black Right.
I'm just saying like, well, but that's, yeah, but that's what are you, what?
So, anyway, that's my view.
Last thing, what gives you hope right now?
Because there's so many people that are just down and cynical and negative.
You mentioned it briefly, young people, more serious.
What else gives you hope?
That we're at the low point.
We're at the low point.
And by low point, I don't mean that things are so difficult.
I mean, Uber Eats apparently still works.
I don't use it, but like, there's a lot of luxury still, right?
The empire's not quite dead.
We have Advil.
Air conditioning.
Forgot about Advil.
Advil's a big deal.
It is.
I'm off Advil, but apparently we have an Advil shortage.
But imagine like 1800s and you have a headache.
No, that's totally true.
I tried to get off Advil last year, and I have.
But anyway, leaving Advil.
I've got a bunch of Advil theories, that and Underarm deodorant, which I'm not going to share with you or your viewers.
But I will say this.
When you're at the moment of least hope and maximum confusion, when you're like, not only are we going in the wrong direction, I don't even know what that direction is.
We're going really fast.
And really fast.
That is almost always the point at which things start to make sense.
It starts to come together.
I really believe that.
Why do you believe that, though?
Because I've seen it so many times.
I've seen it so many times.
The worst thing is not poverty or death.
Well, death is certain.
Poverty is always the normative stability.
It is the normative state.
That's exactly right.
The worst part of life, the worst condition to live in, is a world without meaning or purpose, a world defined by chaos and uncertainty.
So it's modernity.
Yeah.
And that is the worst thing.
I'd rather be hungry than live in a chaotic world.
Victor Franco would agree.
Yeah, that's right.
A man who's literally went to concentration.
No, that's exactly right.
And that's where we are.
And that's an intolerable state for most people.
And I really believe that there will be clarity soon.
I do.
I can feel it.
But not political.
It'll be something else.
I don't know.
I mean, look, these things find their final expression or penultimate expression in politics.
Yeah.
But that's like the thing that we forgot.
You said this to me at lunch and was so wise.
It's like, it's true.
We like imagine for a moment we are as dumb as Kevin McCarthy and we're like, no, really, the most important thing is to vote.
No.
Sorry, Kevin.
That's important.
Is that the most important thing?
If you come to a place where you think the most important thing is to vote, you have lost your way.
Actually, the most important thing is to be nice to your wife.
Do you know what I mean?
Like go to work?
Honor God.
Yeah.
Right.
Amen.
Tucker, thanks so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
Don't give a barn butter.
Spinning off into Crazyland.
Thank you.
That's awesome.
Thanks so much.
Thanks so much for listening.
Everybody, email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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