Dec. 22, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| All right, people, this is my last direct message of 2017, so hopefully I'll make it a good one. | ||
| Last week we put up five shows in five days for Rubin Report YouTube Week, this week we've got my sit down with former National Public Radio CEO Ken Stern, and next week we'll be highlighting some of my favorite episodes of the year. | ||
| Today's Direct Message is going to be quick and to the point. | ||
| With incredible gratitude and a humble heart, I want to thank all of you who helped make 2017 such a memorable year here at the Rubin Report. | ||
| The ride to get here, from 12 years of stand-up comedy in New York City, to my pop culture radio show at SiriusXM, to hosting on The Young Turks, to joining my friend and mentor Larry King on OraTV, and finally to this independent show funded by you, has been a long and windy journey, one which I wouldn't trade in for anything. | ||
| It's only been a year and a half since we made the move to independence, and as some of you have heard me say, the night before we launched on Patreon, I literally thought that my career, as well as the careers of my team, might actually be over. | ||
| Fortunately, within hours of launching, we quickly realized that not only was it not over, but we were just at the beginning. | ||
| In the 18 months since then, I bought a home in which we built this totally professional home studio, we expanded the team behind the scenes, the show absolutely exploded with almost 400,000 new subscribers, and most importantly, we've continued to have honest, civil conversation that hopefully has left you feeling a little more enlightened and a lot less alone. | ||
| This year we did an on location shoot with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| I interviewed Richard Dawkins in front of a live studio audience in New York City. | ||
| We helped put important voices fighting for academic freedom on the map like Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, and Lindsey Shepard. | ||
| We hosted a conversation on religion and morality with Dennis Prager and Michael Shermer. | ||
| We introduced you to incredible voices fighting for liberalism like Yasmin Mohamed and Lubna Ahmed. | ||
| We also introduced you to some previous guests, like Peter Boghossian, Eric Weinstein and Gad Saad, all of whom who are great guests, but more importantly, have become great friends of mine as well. | ||
| And of course we also hosted the infamous debate between Blair White and Candace Owens, which got me trending on Twitter for the first time in my life. | ||
| Hashtag Save Dave. | ||
| Your support also allowed me to take some time off in August to work on my book and take 30 truly life changing days off the grid. | ||
| In an age when we never get off our devices, when we're slammed with news about terrorism right after we scroll past a cat video and a picture of your high school friend's kid, you guys gave me the greatest gift I could possibly ask for, a little time to reset and rejuvenate. | ||
| And in exchange for you giving me some of that precious time, we made sure to have all new shows for you throughout August, ready to roll while we were gone. | ||
| I've got a long list of people to thank for making everything happen here, but I have to give personal shoutouts to David, to Amira, to Alexis, to Talia, and even to Emma. | ||
| There's an incredible amount of work that goes into producing these shows, and the only reason that it looks so easy is because of the team that I have making it look just that way. | ||
| I also want to give a special shout out to those of you who provide us with monthly support on Patreon and on PayPal, or who have done one time donations via Bitcoin. | ||
| Your support not only keeps us independent, but has given me the luxury of saying no to several big money offers this year. | ||
| As long as that support remains, I see no reason to change that, and I promise that I will do my best to make sure that your continued support is well worth it. | ||
| And of course, thanks to all of you who watch, share and like these videos. | ||
| We've never put a dollar into YouTube ads, but the show continues to grow because you help it do so. | ||
| The emails I get from you saying how you're putting the ideas we discuss here into action, or changing what you believe because of something you've heard, or just talking to people in a new way because of the tone we've set here is incredibly inspiring. | ||
| And I'm sorry if I don't write everyone back immediately. | ||
| Trust me, I'm trying. | ||
| So thank you, thank you, and thank you. | ||
| This time of year is when we give thanks and show gratitude, and it's all of you who have given me so much to be thankful and grateful for. | ||
| I look forward to kicking off 2018 with you soon enough, but in the meantime, Merry Christmas, | ||
| Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, and May the Force Be With You. | ||
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| Joining me today is the former CEO of National Public Radio and the author of Republican | ||
| Like Me, How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. | ||
| Ken Stern, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having me on the show. | ||
| You left the liberal bubble and have survived. | ||
| I did. | ||
| You're a survivor. | ||
| So, I live in a 94% Democratic ward in Washington, DC. | ||
| 100% Democratic household. | ||
| Increasingly concerned about this. | ||
| Does that mean they kicked you out of the house? | ||
| Well, it's still under debate. | ||
| My 10-year-old son booed my first television appearance when the book came out. | ||
| And I'm increasingly concerned about sort of the polarization, how much we hate the other side, often without really knowing the other side. | ||
| So I decided I'd spend—I'd do something about it for myself, recognizing I'm in a bubble, like all of us are. | ||
| I wanted to spend time, as much as I can—could—trying to understand things from someone else's point of view. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Spend a year traveling the country, communing with conservatives, with Republicans, really trying to see things from their point of view. | ||
| And I did survive. | ||
| So before we get, well, you've survived so far. | ||
| Let's see how this hour goes. | ||
| And there's a lot that I wanna talk to you about because even the use of the word liberal in the subtitle I think is interesting, because I always talk about the difference between the left and liberalism and a few other things. | ||
| But first, let's just find out a little bit about your backstory, what were you doing that led you to be the CEO of NPR? | ||
| So I've spent, A good part of my career in media. | ||
| I spent time in international broadcasting, Voice of America, and joined NPR in 1999. | ||
| First as chief operating officer and then eventually became CEO and was there for about a decade. | ||
| I've spent time in almost all the unpopular professions there are. | ||
| Law, politics, and media. | ||
| And you're from DC, so you've really done the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, so there's a lot to dislike about my background, apparently, for most of the country. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about just the NPR machine. | ||
| I know half my audience, my audience that leans right is probably hearing NPR, and they're going, well, I like this guy because he left the bubble. | ||
| But NPR raises some flags for them, and then my audience on the left is going, NPR, they're the new Bible of truth and all that. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about just the ecosystem of NPR. | ||
| So NPR is an interesting place. | ||
| It is really a collective of public radio stations from around the country. | ||
| So NPR is a company, which I ran for a number of years, of journalists and similar people. | ||
| It's essentially a news organization, but is connected to 500 public radio stations around the country. | ||
| So it's unique in the sense that most of its reporters are located in Washington, D.C. | ||
| and similar places, but you can go to virtually any community around the country. | ||
| The wilds of Alaska you'll find public radio stations, which I think makes it sort of a unique place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do they have any other connection, the radio stations, other than that they fall under the NPR umbrella? | ||
| Well, they're all part of the, not NPR, they're all part of the public radio system, and the thing that often people key on is that they are, not through NPR, through the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the recipients of various federal funds to support their operations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does it say that If we were to look at all of these radio stations, then I would guess that probably every single one of them leans left, yet they're funded by the government. | ||
| So this isn't a non-partisan radio operation, really, right? | ||
| Yeah, so I've made myself somewhat unpopular in public radio over the last few months by saying two things, which I think you can hold in your head at the same time. | ||
| I actually have a lot of admiration for virtually all the reporters I know at NPR and public radio stations. | ||
| They try to tell stories from both sides. | ||
| They're dedicated to the craft of journalism. | ||
| Sometimes I think they are often even too almost metronome-like, and here's one point of view and here's another. | ||
| And so, I think it is appropriate to acknowledge that they are serious journalism doing, journalists trying to be balanced and fair, to appropriate a slogan from Fox. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think the challenge that I raised with them, which made me unpopular, is they all probably, not all, but many of them come from the same, these are self-perpetuating organizations. | ||
| They hire people who are like them, who tend to think like them, who came from similar backgrounds. | ||
| All problem. | ||
| Many of them, I think if you took a census of them, you'd find very few voted for Donald Trump. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's funny, I can see how careful you're trying to be with your words, that you don't want to say all, and of course you don't mean every employee there, but probably the vast, vast majority, if not 90% or more, are progressives, I think is basically what you're trying to say. | ||
| I think that's probably right. | ||
| And so, I mean, so I think the challenge is not that they're progressives, but there is a consequence of groupthink about what stories are important, what policies are right and wrong, what voices should be on the air. | ||
| And I think that's a real challenge for a place like NPR and really for mainstream media as a whole. | ||
| You know, what I said to the folks at NPR was, they would never think of covering racial issues | ||
| only with white males, no matter how good those white males are. | ||
| And really it should be the same with politics. | ||
| They shouldn't cover it only with people who largely come from a progressive background, | ||
| no matter how dedicated the craft of journalism they are. | ||
| What kind of racial issue do you mean? | ||
| I just mean any sort of, you know, if they wanted to cover, you know, if they had a beat on race in America, they would not only have, they just wouldn't have whites on it, white males only on them. | ||
| They shouldn't. | ||
| They shouldn't cover gender issues only with men. | ||
| I mean, I think you need to have people of different backgrounds and different ideas to have the right type of Creative tension that a newsroom needs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're not saying exclude those people, you're saying they just have to be. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| I'm all for white males. | ||
| I happen to be one. | ||
| Alas, I checked. | ||
| It's that you need to have not only diversity of gender and race in a newsroom, you have to have diversity of ideas and backgrounds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So where were your politics? | ||
| So you started there in 99. | ||
| Were you a hardcore lefty? | ||
| Were you a centrist? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think a hardcore person would write the book I did and take the experience, but I spent time in Democratic politics on the re-elect for Bill Clinton. | ||
| I think, I say in the book, I voted straight Democratic ticket except for, I think I probably voted against Marion Barry and his various quests to be mayor for life. | ||
| And that's about it. | ||
| So the crack arrest was too much for you. | ||
| That's where you drew the line with Marion Barry. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when did you sort of start realizing that there was this ideological lockdown on alternative opinions there? | ||
| You mean, so I think there's an alternative lockdown on ideas generally. | ||
| Let's not make this about NPR or One Place because I think that's unfair because what has happened in this country is we've all become in our own bubbles, liberals, conservatives, and it's a product of a number of different things that's going on. | ||
| It's really quite extraordinary. | ||
| We now Choose where we live based upon political ideology and try to find politically homogeneous neighborhoods that didn't exist before. | ||
| Our political parties are increasingly politically homogeneous. | ||
| There's no such thing as conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans anymore. | ||
| They don't have homes. | ||
| Yeah, where'd the Blue Dog Democrats go? | ||
| Those are the guys that I would love to be voting for. | ||
| Right, they died. | ||
| I mean, the Blue Dog Caucus was quite important 15 years ago. | ||
| It doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| There is no Democrat who is more conservative than the most liberal Republican and vice versa. | ||
| The Venn Diagram does not meet anymore in the Congress. | ||
| And now we have all of our own media, right? | ||
| So conservatives can listen to Fox or Rush or any other place. | ||
| Democrats have, liberals and progressives have plenty of choices that fit their own. | ||
| And it's incredibly destructive and it means we're all increasingly in our own bubble. | ||
| And when that happens, it's not that we actually begin to disagree more. | ||
| It becomes easy to demonize the other side. | ||
| When you don't know them, when you don't hear from them, when you don't dialogue with them, it's really easy to hate each other. | ||
| And that's what's happened in this country. | ||
| We really hate the other side in ways that are very different than 15 years ago. | ||
| Well, I think that's why I do this show and why you wrote this book. | ||
| But before we get out of fully the radio part of it, you mentioned Rush. | ||
| Why does it seem that right-wing radios, so Rush and Glenn Beck and Michael Savage and the list goes on and on, Seems to be commercially viable gets tons of listens and all that and left-wing radio It simply doesn't work outside of what's funded really by the government. | ||
| So Air America was a catastrophe, right? | ||
| For example, I don't have a good answer that so let's let me Admit up front. | ||
| I don't think it's a good answer. | ||
| I'll tell you what conservatives will say They will say I don't think this is I think there's a little bit of truth and a little bit of falsehood in it. | ||
| Liberals find a home at places like the New York Times and NPR. | ||
| They're comfortable with them. | ||
| Their needs are met. | ||
| And they'll say that Rush and others are successful because conservative needs are not met in mainstream media. | ||
| I'm not gonna make an equivalency between left and right. | ||
| I think that's a false equivalency in terms of media and how they operate. | ||
| But it is clearly true when you look at the psychographics of the readers of The New York Times or the listeners of NPR, they come primarily from the left. | ||
| Yeah, when you hear people on the right, it's usually people on the right, say, well, why are we funding NPR? | ||
| I mean, why is the government even funding public radio at all at this point? | ||
| And especially if there is an ideological bent to it. | ||
| How do you respond to that? | ||
| Again, let's not take this too far, because ideological bent is right in sort of an unconscious way, a subconscious way. | ||
| It doesn't have, I think, no one sits at NPR, or at least didn't used to, and says, you know, let's tell one side of the story, not the other. | ||
| I suspect that's actually not quite true. | ||
| I mean, I think they're in their bubble, as you talk about here, so much that I don't know that they're consciously doing it, but they've sort of decided what the truth is. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a fair criticism, right? | ||
| But there's a difference. | ||
| I mean, there's a very significant difference in how mainstream media works and conservative media works. | ||
| And let's just acknowledge it without sort of attributing anything good or bad to it and just acknowledge that they come from a different place and a different sort of journalistic ethic. | ||
| You know, public broadcasting is an artifact of a different era. | ||
| They started in 1970 when there were three networks and there were just no real alternatives to those three networks and a handful of newspapers. | ||
| And it was really important that the government, as they do in England and a lot of other places, support that public radio and public television may exist. | ||
| Probably true that if public radio and public television did exist, | ||
| No one would create it now because there's so many different outlets. | ||
| I think it's interesting, though, to actually explore the reason why public broadcasting funding still exists. | ||
| It's not because of NPR and PBS. | ||
| It's because of the local stations. | ||
| They'll bang on NPR and PBS, but at least in my day, the people who actually stood up for public broadcasting when it came to appropriation time was Ted Stevens, as conservative a senator you ever get from Alaska. | ||
| He didn't really care for NPR or PBS, but he loved Alaska Broadcasting. | ||
| And he knew that that was actually a lifeline service to parts of Alaska that didn't get content, local news and others. | ||
| And that's why I think it still gets public support, not because of Like or dislike for the national content providers. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I don't know too much about Ted Stevens specifically, but I wonder, was he fighting, would he have been okay with, well, let's the state fund it then, you know, instead of the federal government? | ||
| Or is this all funded, I assume, is it a partnership, partly with the states? | ||
| Yeah, so states have put up, so public broadcasting is complicated, but states. | ||
| We don't have to go too into the weeds, but I do think it's interesting relative to the role of government and all that. | ||
| Yeah, so states, yeah, so many, not all, Many broadcasting stations get significant support from local jurisdictions, whether it's a state or a municipality. | ||
| So even though he probably wasn't thrilled with what they were putting on air, he just wanted some of the federal funds that help allow it, because he liked it for his state's purposes. | ||
| Yeah, he knew it was a lifeline service to Alaska and Wyoming and other places like that that don't have major media markets. | ||
| That's really who, and that's where the money goes, is to those stations. | ||
| It's interesting, because the world has changed so much, obviously, since 1970, and the idea that the government, I mean, to me, and I get it, Sesame Street's great, and I was just watching it with my niece a couple weeks ago, but the idea that the government is funding any of these ways that we get media now seems very archaic to where we are in 2017. | ||
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It is. | |
| You know, the interesting thing to think about, and we could spend the whole hour talking about it, and I hope we don't, because I don't want to talk about my book. | ||
| We'll get there. | ||
| But if federal funding went away tomorrow, on the radio side, I know much more about radio than television, NPR would ultimately be fine. | ||
| Many of the stations in big cities would be fine. | ||
| It's actually the rural stations that would collapse. | ||
| And that's why, you know, I think there is that support for public broadcasting funding as it goes forward. | ||
| Yeah, just generally speaking, do you think that if funding was slowed down or cut or whatever, that wouldn't private people that feel that this is important jump in on that? | ||
| I mean, that's one of the themes that I talk about here a lot, about how much should the government do, and if the government stopped doing so much, maybe if these things are vital and important, that private people would. | ||
| And they do. | ||
| Take on some of the burden. | ||
| Yeah, public radio, I think, principal support. | ||
| I mean, 10 years out of date, so. | ||
| At least when I was there, the principal revenue came from listeners like you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where the largest source of revenue comes from. | ||
| I was the host of the PBS fundraiser in New York City. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| In Manhattan. | ||
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Right. | |
| Many years ago, I gave away some totes and all that, did it for free. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so again, I think, wouldn't, in New York, WNYC would be fine. | ||
| They'd probably hate me for saying this, but I don't know that Alaska Public Radio would be fine, because the amount of people to give them money, pretty low. | ||
| I mean, just the number of people and the wealth available tap is very different there. | ||
| Yeah, it's just an interesting dilemma, because I could see some valuable stations in these local markets, these small markets, that there's worth to them. | ||
| And then on the other hand, it's like, Why should we be funding all of these things if they can't just exist on their own? | ||
| It's just an interesting philosophical. | ||
| It's interesting and it's actually a good segue because it's one of those issues which I think if conservatives talk to conservatives about and liberals talk to liberals about, they come to very different points of view. | ||
| If you actually talk to people who know and put people together, you actually realize it's actually a fairly complicated, nuanced issue that has no sort of obvious right or wrong answer. | ||
| That's actually true when you go out and talk to people about issues. | ||
| People actually, in social media, they're angry and mad, but in real life, they're actually Pretty moderate, and that's one of the things I discovered in my year traveling the country. | ||
| Yeah, well, people are always their seemingly worst online and snappiest and very rarely do that, you know, when you're standing across somebody or sitting across somebody just like this. | ||
| So let's talk about the word liberal for a second. | ||
| The subtitle is How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does liberal mean to you? | ||
| So I think that's a catch-all phrase for Progressive. | ||
| I think I'm using that in some type of gross way to describe Democrats, progressive, people of the left. | ||
| I don't mean necessarily classical liberal as you might be thinking of it, as it meant, because I think today it means it's the catch-all for the left portion of the spectrum. | ||
| Yeah, it's unfortunate for me because I've tried really hard to show people that if you're a classical liberal and you believe in the individual and live and let live, that actually, that has virtually nothing to do with progressives. | ||
| But even some of my allies now who are on the right, always say liberal, liberal, liberal, and I'm like, guys, let's separate liberal from left, but. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know if I gave it that careful thought in terms of the term. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a catch-all for the people whose environment I was shared. | ||
| The people I lived with, the people I worked with, the people who ran the media organizations that I used. | ||
| Did you find those people to actually be liberal, though? | ||
| I know this is a little bit about the definition of the words, but did you find that they really, at their heart, were liberal? | ||
| I mean, that they really were tolerant and understanding and liberalism in its best sense? | ||
| Good God, no. | ||
| Now I think this gets us to where the book is. | ||
| Yeah, and I think the thing that's worried me, I'll say two things, one of which is I think that's Cher, we're increasingly intolerant of anyone who disagrees with us, extraordinarily so. | ||
| And it has angered me a little bit, sort of wounded me personally, because I've always thought of, I mean, like you, thought of liberals, one of the tenets of modern liberalism is tolerance of different perspectives and belief that really we need a diversity of ideas. | ||
| And there is value in different ideas and value in listening and engaging. | ||
| That is not a value of Modern American politics as we know it. | ||
| And that sort of wounds me personally, and one of the things that led me to this book. | ||
| Yeah, do you remember a moment when you started seeing that? | ||
| More amongst your kind, so to speak? | ||
| So I'll tell you a story. | ||
| No, not particularly. | ||
| I mean, I think there are lots. | ||
| But I'll tell you a story that's got me going on the book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is a story of my neighborhood in Washington, D.C. | ||
| I live in this nice neighborhood called Mount Pleasant. | ||
| 94% Democratic award. | ||
| The Green Party candidate out-polled Donald Trump in the last election. | ||
| Um, uh... | ||
| And, you know, it's a nice diverse neighborhood. | ||
| We value our diversity. | ||
| But we don't, and it's always been obvious, we make jokes about it, we never really valued political diversity. | ||
| Obviously so. | ||
| But it really hit home to me on something called the Hobart Street Pledge. | ||
| That's the name of the street I live in. | ||
| It's got a lot of team spirit on Hobart Street. | ||
| We have lots of block parties. | ||
| We close the street on Halloween. | ||
| And our biggest block party is called Porch Fest. | ||
| And it has a parade, and every year it starts with the Hobart Street Pledge. | ||
| And I always loved the idea of the Hobart Street Pledge, because the kids sort of pledge allegiance to Hobart Street Northwest. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And change it every year, and one year it went, I pledge allegiance to Hobart Street Northwest, yada, yada, yada. | ||
| Everyone is welcome on Hobart Street, white or black, gay or straight, man or woman. | ||
| Everyone but Republicans. | ||
| And it was a joke, but it wasn't a joke. | ||
| And I wrote a mediocre article for the Atlantic about it, but it really got me thinking about how have we come to a place where we can value diversity but not viewpoint diversity. | ||
| And that's I think where we are as a country. | ||
| And let's say, you know what, I'm not all that different. | ||
| I have the same sort of prejudice against the other side. | ||
| Let me test that in some interesting ways. | ||
| So how did you start testing that? | ||
| So that's a challenge, like, okay, how do you actually see things from the other point of view? | ||
| So over a course of a year, I did tons of different things. | ||
| I went to Trump rallies and spent tea party meetings and went pig hunting in Texas, spent more time than the rest of my life combined in church, mostly evangelical churches. | ||
| I got adopted by an Assembly of God congregation in Fredericksburg, Virginia. | ||
| I spent time working class bars in Youngstown, Ohio, and went to coal mining country. | ||
| Went on a tour of all the places I thought I should hate, like Liberty University, and on hunting trips, and gun shows in Texas, and really found out I didn't hate them, and they didn't hate me. | ||
| Disagreed on a lot of things with the people I met, but eight things out of 10 we probably saw eye-to-eye on when we were actually talking. | ||
| And that was a real lesson. | ||
| We're actually surprisingly moderate people. | ||
| You just wouldn't know it from the media environment that we all live in. | ||
| So what's it like to show up in these places? | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| Did you just walk into a church and go, guys, I'm here to make sure I don't hate ya! | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| I did. | ||
| That's exactly what I did. | ||
| So I had a couple interesting experiences. | ||
| I went to a jamboree for evangelical youth, 15,000 of them, called Urbana, in a football stadium in St. | ||
| Louis. | ||
| I managed to get an invitation to that and spent two days listening to kids talk about They're the issues that I want to talk about abortion gay rights, but they want to talk about they want to talk about black lives matter They want to talk about refugees how to help them not how to keep them out. | ||
| It's a little bit of a preconception destroying experience And then I went to churches so I emailed pastor Steve So I'll actually tell you how I ended up with the pastor Steve so I had a sort of a rabbi. | ||
| That's a Maybe not the right term when you talk about evangelicals and the evangelical community. | ||
| A guy, a professor at Washington University Law School named John Inazu, and he said, I told him, I went to one of the big evangelical megachurches and I sort of proudly told him about it. | ||
| He said, well, you know, that's great, but you need to go to an evangelical, you need to go to an Assembly of God church, you know, with 50 members to really see the real heart of evangelicalism. | ||
| Where the hell am I gonna find that? | ||
| I live in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And I Googled evangelical churches in Washington, D.C., somewhat in sort of desperation. | ||
| It turned out there were like 100 congregations within 50 miles. | ||
| I had no idea about it. | ||
| So I randomly picked one, had a service time that appealed to me, and emailed Pastor Steve and said, I'd write a book, I'd like to come. | ||
| He was a little hesitant, but he opens his door to everyone, and I probably went down there half a dozen times in Fredericksburg, Virginia. | ||
| It's interesting, Pastor Steve and I actually have almost the same biography in some ways. | ||
| We're of the same age, we're born in the same area, had very different paths in life, but we actually both have a wife and one son who happens to be the same age. | ||
| We had a lot in common, very different thoughts on life and what's important, but a lot in common. | ||
| When I think of Pastor Steve, I think of someone who I really admire, and when people betray everyone on the right as deplorables, I think of Pastor Steve and a lot of other people I met, and I know that description is just flat wrong. | ||
| Yeah, so you go to the churches. | ||
| Now, were you just sort of watching from the back, or did you actually, beyond the pastor, I mean, did you start interviewing people? | ||
| Did they know you were writing a book? | ||
| They were kind enough to actually put together a focus group. | ||
| So, like, the second time I went, Pastor Steve put together, like, ten members of the congregation, and I sort of sat in their lunchroom in the basement, and we talked for an hour about politics and community and things like that. | ||
| People are actually extraordinarily welcoming. | ||
| That's one of the other things. | ||
| They want to talk. | ||
| A lot of people want to talk about media, just like you did, because they feel locked out. | ||
| I wasn't there talking about media because I don't listen, but they feel locked out from the national media and the frustration. | ||
| I was a good person to express that frustration to. | ||
| Yeah, were you shocked that they were as welcoming and friendly? | ||
| I mean, it almost sounds silly to have to ask that question, but I think a lot of lefties, a lot of progressives actually think that these are all evil people. | ||
| I mean, did it shock you? | ||
| So, let me tell you a story. | ||
| So the Washington Post did a word cloud, I think about a year or two ago, | ||
| which they asked Democrats what you thought about Republicans | ||
| and Republicans what you thought about Democrats. | ||
| And then they sort of put it up visually. | ||
| And all the words on both sides were terribly nasty. | ||
| Democrats thought Republicans were bigoted, cheap, selfish, racist. | ||
| And that was two years ago. | ||
| I'm sure it's much worse now, right? | ||
| That's nice words now. - Those are the good old days. | ||
| So I just sort of challenged myself. | ||
| I didn't believe that, but I sort of believed it. | ||
| What were the words, though, that Democrats said about Republicans? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| I'm sorry, the other way around. | ||
| That Republicans said about Democrats. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| But they were all unflattering. | ||
| I think stupid, intolerant. | ||
| Libtard. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Snowflake. | ||
| It was all before that, right? | ||
| Before that whole lingo. | ||
| I learned that lingo from Breitbart. | ||
| So I had to admit myself that somewhere, you know, deep down I probably had those, let's call them prejudice, because they're not accurate. | ||
| And it sort of carried me with them even as I was trying to be open-minded and open-hearted in the journey. | ||
| So, you know, it didn't shock me that people were people. | ||
| And they cared about the same things I care about and wanted to talk. | ||
| But you know, I also know that it was preconception-busting, if I have to be perfectly honest about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Give me another anecdote or two of wandering around, things that sort of hit you that became sort of the seminal moments in this. | ||
| Yeah, so, again, sort of the challenge of what do you do to sort of be in the shoes of a conservative? | ||
| I mean, you can watch Fox and you can read Breitbart and do a lot of different things, but how do you experience it? | ||
| So, you know, NASCAR races. | ||
| So I read an article in the Washington Post. | ||
| Apparently I still worry the Washington Post. | ||
| And it had a quote from the head of Heritage Action, Heritage Foundation Action, who said, you know, the people in this cellar corridor are missing the awesomeness of America. | ||
| That's right, that's me. | ||
| I'm in the Accel Corridor. | ||
| I need to find the awesomeness of America. | ||
| So I knew Tucker Carlson a little bit, and I went to see Tucker, who I know well, and I said, all right, tell me how to find the awesomeness of America. | ||
| You should know, even though he's from the same Accel Corridor I am. | ||
| And he said, sort of puzzled, and then he started, you should go pig hunting in Texas. | ||
| All right, I'll go pig hunting in Texas. | ||
| So I did that as part of my challenge. | ||
| I wanted to challenge myself on an issue that I didn't know a lot about, but I was sure I was right on gun control and gun rights. | ||
| So what was your position at that time when we started here? | ||
| I'm for virtually every form of gun control imaginable, up to If I could figure out a way to take everyone's guns, I would probably have been for it. | ||
| That was your previous position? | ||
| That was a previous position. | ||
| All right, now we'll get to you. | ||
| So then you had this experience. | ||
| So I went pig hunting in Texas and learned out, you know, some people should have a gun and some shouldn't, and I'm on the shouldn't side because I'm more dangerous. | ||
| But you know, in the morning... Was it your first time actually holding a gun? | ||
| My first time holding a shooting gun. | ||
| I went to a skeet range in Prince George's County the week before to test it, but essentially that experience was the first time. | ||
| In the morning I ended up with a three-generation family from Georgia. | ||
| Isaac, CJ, and Paps, the grandfather. | ||
| And I ended up actually with Isaac, who was at the time eight. | ||
| He was sort of my hunting companion. | ||
| He was the mentor in that, because he knew how to hunt, and he sort of gently guided me | ||
| through the hunting process. | ||
| And we had a great time together, and we told stories of hunting, | ||
| even though I didn't have stories of hunting, and he wanted to tell how he shot the shit out of pigs | ||
| the previous day. | ||
| In the afternoon, I ended up with what I call sort of a demographic version of a bar joke. | ||
| A black guy from Houston, a Hispanic former soldier, and a Serbian immigrant, and me, a Jew from Washington. | ||
| We were the hunting group. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we had a great time. | ||
| We talked about guns and their community and why they cared about guns, and it's a great experience. | ||
| And they also called up John Lott, the conservative economist, and said, all right, convince me why I'm so wrong. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| I mean, when you talk to real experts, and you talk to real people and real experts, you better be open to learning a little bit. | ||
| You do learn a lot. | ||
| All right, let's pause on economics for a second. | ||
| It's so funny, as you're describing this, I mean, basically you're writing the plot when you do the screenplay on this to City Sickers 3. | ||
| I mean, you're Billy Crystal, and he has to go pig hunting this time instead of, you know, wrassling. | ||
| Bronco busting. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So you have these experiences, you seem to like the people. | ||
| Did you find any diversity of thought on that side? | ||
| I mean, it sounds like it was mostly at first about, well, they were nice, so that's pretty good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were they all in lockstep intellectually, the way you were sort of frustrated with that on the left? | ||
| So yeah, I think people lived in a conservative bubble too, and tend to gravitate towards the other. | ||
| the truth of matters i mean but the truth of matter is | ||
| or most people don't actually spent a lot of time thinking about these issues | ||
| I mean, the media is saturated in my hometown, the swamp of Washington is saturated. | ||
| Ninety percent of the country is not spending their time worried about the details of the tax bill or whether Jerusalem should be the location for the American Embassy in Israel or not. | ||
| They're worried about the community, they're worried about family, they're worried about the Youngstown State football team more than they are worried about that. | ||
| And part of the, sort of, I think the The fallacy of modern media and political insiders is that everyone cares about the same things we do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They don't. | |
| They really care about their local issues and their family matters. | ||
| And that's really what they want to talk about. | ||
| You know, the charge, like I hear from a lot of my liberal friends or progressive friends, that everyone who voted for Trump is, you know, either agrees with Trump or is a racist like Trump or whatever. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| I mean, people just don't pay attention on the same levels that I do, that you do, and others. | ||
| And I think a lot of the conversations was, Show diversity of thought because most people don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about it. | ||
| When you actually talk about, are you for guns? | ||
| People don't fall neatly into, are you for guns or are you against guns? | ||
| They actually tend to gravitate towards the middle when you actually start talking about, is this a reasonable gun control idea? | ||
| Do you really want to confiscate guns? | ||
| People gravitate towards the middle in real life, just not in the media world. | ||
| Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about your evolution then. | ||
| So as someone that was pretty Radical in a certain sense on guns beforehand, I mean you were saying almost get rid of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now you go out, you're hunting pigs in Texas with an eight-year-old? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then what happens? | ||
| So eventually I came to the conclusion, you know, so I came, not an acolyte of John Lott, because that's not correct, I criticize some of his work in my book, but I was persuaded by sort of the The effectiveness. | ||
| So John Lott is not a gun rights guy, he's a public safety guy. | ||
| And the challenge he put to me was, explain to me how so many of these gun control measures that you believe are fantastic actually would change things. | ||
| And as I dived with him and then separately into the data, I understood that how these things actually work, | ||
| it actually taught me two things. | ||
| One is that most of the things that people stand up for gun control don't actually work. | ||
| Meaning the laws themselves don't actually-- | ||
| The laws themselves or the proposals for further restrictions on gun use | ||
| generally won't have any impact. | ||
| And secondly, I think even more importantly, people have forgotten that the murder rate | ||
| with using guns in this country has fallen half over the last 20 years. | ||
| As we've been arguing over here about gun control or gun rights, we've actually been extraordinarily effective in terms of driving down gun homicides in this country. | ||
| It has nothing to do with that debate. | ||
| It has to do with better policing, economic opportunity, attacks on drug gangs and things like that. | ||
| There's actually a lot of learning, and if we really cared about the ultimate outcome, we'd spend a lot more time figuring out how to do things like Boston did on the pulling levers program, and less about this argument about whether, wait a minute, do you need an assault weapon ban, because that actually has relatively little effect of any. | ||
| Yeah, so when people are talking about guns, I mean, to me, this is one of the ones where we've really cordoned ourselves off. | ||
| We're almost at the place of ban or everyone gets a bazooka. | ||
| I definitely fall more on the side of, I strongly believe in the Second Amendment, and I don't think that the murders that we have necessarily are gun issues. | ||
| I mean, even the guy, to your point about the laws, the guy last month that shot the church in Texas, It was illegal for him to get a gun. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there were laws in place. | ||
| So it's like, we can keep making more laws, but that doesn't mean people won't keep breaking the laws. | ||
| And that seems to be the disconnect, I think, where the left says, well, just make more laws and we can actually whittle away at all of this. | ||
| And for me, it's like, I don't see how more laws actually resolve this. | ||
| These things are actually complicated. | ||
| So the Sutherland Spring Church Lane, as you described, was evocative to me because where I went pig hunting was about eight miles from Gonzales, Texas. | ||
| As the crow flies, about 30 miles and 30 minutes by car. | ||
| And that's actually one of the things is, you know, you don't have a cop around the corner, you know, a beat cop around the corner like you do in Washington, D.C. | ||
| Reminds me of the t-shirt I saw at gun shows, which is, I'd rather have a gun in my hand than a cop on the phone. | ||
| But it's, you know, it's evocative because it has so much, it sort of bottles up so much of the challenge, which is, we clearly have a problem. | ||
| Look, we have a, you know, a mass shooting, and more importantly, we have urban shootings every day. | ||
| And we, you know, even though we've had successes, we still are way, we have far more violent society than other similar situated countries, say, in Western Europe. | ||
| For people that want to know a little more about that, I mean, just Google just how many people were shot in Chicago this past weekend. | ||
| I mean, they keep a running tally, and it's insane. | ||
| And that has nothing to do with assault weapons or registration laws, because it's almost all handguns and almost all guns obtained illegally. | ||
| So we have a problem. | ||
| So let's all acknowledge that there's a really horrible public policy problem. | ||
| But nothing that we talk about actually would solve it. | ||
| And, you know, in Southern Springs, you have a guy who got his gun, shouldn't have got his gun, and then he was ultimately corralled by a, you know, a private citizen who lawfully had a gun and, you know, probably stopped, potentially stopped worse killings. | ||
| So it's a complicated issue. | ||
| And I think because we're all in our own bubbles talking to each other, we miss the nuance and don't really try to solve the problem. | ||
| Because it's solvable. | ||
| We've actually solved it in some ways. | ||
| So obviously you had an evolution on guns. | ||
| Was it just like knocking down dominoes once this happened? | ||
| Give me a couple of the others that you evolved on. | ||
| So, the way I structured the book is I took a number of issues, which I acknowledge are front I wasn't an expert on, but sort of sensed that I was on the right side of history. | ||
| And I sort of built the book around that. | ||
| So, guns was one, climate change was another, poverty programs. | ||
| Let's do climate change. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, climate change is where I learned to hate everyone. | ||
| I was just gonna say, no matter what you say right now, we're both gonna get a tremendous amount of hate. | ||
| And truthfully, probably should. | ||
| I mean, I learned to hate sort of the conservatives, not conservatives, the Republican Party, who I think has diminished itself by ignoring science, that is awfully clear. | ||
| I learned to hate the Democratic Party, which has sort of then taken established science and then described I think policy results that probably aren't going to be very effective and often essentially go at the weakest in society. | ||
| People can least afford the result of higher energy prices or the shutdown of coal mines. | ||
| I spent time in Pikeville, Kentucky. | ||
| I'll tell you, the world looks a lot different if you're in Pikeville, Kentucky, watching the local coal mines close. | ||
| Appalachia has been an internal colony in the United States for 100 years. | ||
| They found a reasonable semblance of middle class life through coal mining, and then to have sort of the outside power say, wait a minute, what you're doing has too much externalities, you're out of business, really a very destructive thing. | ||
| Complicated because of course it was probably natural gas that drove a lot of the coal mines out of business, but not feeling sort of the, I mean one of the reasons people are angry is because they feel like they've been abandoned by their political leaders, and I think to a certain extent it's true. | ||
| Yeah, and Trump went right to that during the election. | ||
| I mean, he made a major play to that. | ||
| So when you were talking to some of these people about climate change, did you feel that, now I'm gonna go on the assumption that most of them didn't believe in it in the conventional sense, but did you find that they didn't believe in the science? | ||
| If you brought some scientific information, was it a dismissal of science or was there something else? | ||
| Or did it have to do with religion and what they believe The Earth and God is capable of, and all of that. | ||
| What was actually the way of thinking? | ||
| So I think the way most people think around these things is, and I'll put words into people's mouths, this is my sort of read-on, which is, I'm getting screwed, my community's getting screwed, people are leaving, anyone who can leave Pikeville, Kentucky, leaves Pikeville, Kentucky. | ||
| I had a job and a career in the coal mine, and I wasn't getting rich, but I was having a decent life for me and my family, and it's all gone. | ||
| I'm getting screwed. | ||
| I think once you recognize that, everything else sort of follows behind that. | ||
| So it's government's fault, it's science's fault. | ||
| I think people are angry and then They can reason anything behind that, and I think that's the story. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| So it's sort of a visceral reaction because of their day-to-day life having nothing to do with the science. | ||
| So, for example, like when Hillary Clinton during the campaign said something about closing down all the coal mines, even if you gave them the greatest scientific study in front of their face, You know, with lock proof, you know, lock box proof. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it's irrelevant. | ||
| Well, I mean, look, Trump's victory is, there are a number of reasons for one, but one is doing better among the white working class, whites without a college degree. | ||
| He won it by 39%. | ||
| It's an extraordinary amount. | ||
| And you look at the white working class, which is sort of a big 40%, 40% of the country. | ||
| I mean, and, you know, Income down, life expectancy down, opioid addiction up. | ||
| Belief in the future, sort of, you know, what do you think? | ||
| Will your kids have a better life than you? | ||
| Way down. | ||
| That's a group of people who are on a 30-year losing streak. | ||
| I mean, that's the story of a big chunk of America, and a lot follows from that. | ||
| Politics doesn't drive that. | ||
| Politics follows from that. | ||
| You know, I remember taking, I think it was an AP history class in eighth grade. | ||
| It was either seventh or eighth grade. | ||
| And I remember the teacher telling us that we were gonna be the first generation | ||
| to not do as well as our parents. | ||
| And I remember the way that stuck with me. | ||
| Like, it felt like the weight of the world, what a horrible thing. | ||
| Like, you know, I grew up, we were fine, but I wanted to be more or better or whatever that means. | ||
| I just remember thinking, it's just such a depressing thing to have to hear, that your kids are gonna have it worse than you, or you as the kid, you're gonna have it worse than your parents. | ||
| It's so reverse of the way the American dream is supposed to work. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting, so I'm older than you, so I probably heard it more years than I care to mention that I'm older than you, but people didn't say that. | ||
| There's an unstated, or maybe a stated belief, that every generation will be wealthier, taller, | ||
| you know, better looking than their parents, that we'll have it better. | ||
| And that's what your parents—I'm working so that my son Nate can have a better life. | ||
| And that's sort of a core of the American dream, and to see—and it's not just the | ||
| There are other parts of the country, and it just happened to be where I spent time with in this book, see parts of the country proven that that American dream is not right, is a painful indictment of our system. | ||
| And, you know, on the left side, that's, you know, that's sort of the attack on the 1%, but on the right side, it's belief that Government, society has left us behind, and the establishment has forgotten us for their own good. | ||
| And Donald Trump, as you said, went right into that and won that argument. | ||
| Yeah, so on the climate change one, so how do you resolve those two things then? | ||
| So if you have people that are just dealing with the immediacy of their lives, their jobs, their family, and then you have science that seems to be settled. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But those things cannot come together because these people have to worry about their lives now, not the planet in 100 years or whatever. | ||
| And at the same time, what you were saying is that the Democrats, often their policies related to this hurt those people the most, because you raise costs for alternative energy and all that stuff. | ||
| So how did you evolve on this? | ||
| Where do you find yourself in this discussion now? | ||
| So I think I've become more so, I haven't become more skeptical about the science. | ||
| Haven't? | ||
| Haven't, no, not at all. | ||
| But I've become more skeptical about the government's solutions to the problem, and the belief that Government by fiat is the right way to deal with this. | ||
| So I've come to believe that, I mean, if you actually look at how other governments have dealt with it, often badly, like in Germany. | ||
| No one talks about the fact that we're actually doing better in the U.S. | ||
| on climate change because of the natural gas revolution. | ||
| We're here in L.A. | ||
| right now. | ||
| I mean, if you walk outside with a plastic bag, they'll shoot you. | ||
| We have cops on every corner. | ||
| They have snipers. | ||
| They literally will take you out. | ||
| It's a dangerous place. | ||
| You know, the solutions that are offered, you know, some global solutions aren't necessarily the best ones. | ||
| I mean, the things that have actually been effective in the U.S. | ||
| are fracking and the natural gas explosion, figuratively, not literally. | ||
| That's what's driven coal out of business. | ||
| That's what's actually driven down the carbon curve in the United States, not government fiat. | ||
| The innovations in the electric car market, often driven by government subsidies, so let's recognize that, but it's the innovations of places like Tesla that I think hold prospects for the future. | ||
| And government's job should be not to do it by fiat, but actually to encourage innovation and change. | ||
| And I've just become skeptical towards the view that we have to do it one way, because those one ways don't often work. | ||
| And that's made me skeptical actually towards both sides. | ||
| I've actually come back, people ask me, I was a Democrat, I registered as a Republican for the year, I was going to commit to the bit. | ||
| And I didn't know what would happen when I came back, and when I came back I re-registered as an Independent. | ||
| And I actually think, you know, I think both parties are kind of selling us out. | ||
| And that there's actually much more possibility in a dirty word, which is compromise. | ||
| Even that choice, though, of which way you're gonna register, although I'm a big states rights guy, it creates a problem, because in some states, you then can't vote in primaries. | ||
| Sure, right. | ||
| Which is an inherent problem. | ||
| And I would always leave that to the states, but not everyone has that luxury in states that don't allow you to do that. | ||
| Well, I tell people I now have the most useless vote in America. | ||
| I live in Washington, D.C., right? | ||
| So it's only gonna be the Democrats who get elected. | ||
| And I don't even vote in the Democratic primary. | ||
| So my vote is pretty useless. | ||
| What does it tell you that that D.C. | ||
| area is so ideologically one way, and that way at the moment is in direct conflict with the way that the administration is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, how did all the apparatus around D.C., is it just because, generally speaking, Democrats in the left want bigger government and everyone there is working for the government, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting question, which I haven't given entire thoughts to, but I think, look, I think I would say two things. | ||
| One of which is, naturally, I think people who believe in government and the effectiveness of government gravitate towards Washington, D.C. | ||
| It makes sense, right? | ||
| Just from a life goal perspective. | ||
| If you believe in government and the power of government to solve problems, sure, you want to be in Washington, D.C. | ||
| That's a place you want to be. | ||
| It's also pretty hard to get fired from the government, so if you're pretty inept at your job, it's a good place that you do. | ||
| But I think the other thing is, I mean, we've actually done pretty good. | ||
| So I think it's asking yourself, if you're conservative now, do you want to listen, do you want to move to Washington, D.C., the place that you believe is a swamp where you know everyone around you is going to think differently from you? | ||
| We're now self-segregating. | ||
| I mean, people, conservatives move one area, Democrats move another. | ||
| And you can even see it on a micro level within D.C., the greater D.C. | ||
| area. | ||
| But like in Texas, if you're a liberal and move to Texas, where do you go? | ||
| Austin, yeah. | ||
| Right, and then you got the, you know, the conservatives moved to the rural areas of Dallas and stuff. | ||
| I mean, it's a very interesting segregation that we have going. | ||
| It's called the big sort, and it's real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so guns, climate change. | ||
| Give me one other. | ||
| So I spent a lot of time on poverty programs. | ||
| So, you know, I'm born in 1963. | ||
| Grew up in a sort of Roosevelt Democrat household, believing in the great deal and the great society. | ||
| And I sort of wanted to dive into poverty programs and their effectiveness, believing that society's obligation to make opportunity for those who need it most. | ||
| And I came away, I think, You know, skeptical, still believing in sort of the importance of that principle, but skeptical about, I think, sort of established nostrums on the right, on the left, about the effectiveness of poverty programs. | ||
| We spend a trillion dollars a year. | ||
| Even poor people don't actually believe that they're effective. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No one actually in this country believes they're effective. | ||
| Government spending on poverty programs, broadly defined, has gone up every year through Democrat | ||
| and Republican administrations alike, every year since the Great Society in 1968 | ||
| or whenever it really started. | ||
| 50 years going up and the poverty level hasn't changed a bit. | ||
| So how much of that do you think is just lazy thinking? | ||
| Getting it away from politics for a second, it's just always easier to be like, there's a problem, throw more money. | ||
| It's a problem, throw more money. | ||
| Or it just sounds bad. | ||
| There's a problem, we're gonna take money away. | ||
| That just sounds evil. | ||
| So it's not even political per se, it's just not clearly thinking about the issue itself. | ||
| Yeah, so I think there's two things, which is, guess what? | ||
| These things are hard! | ||
| I mean, Sai's ability to sort of solve these things has proven wrong time and time again throughout history. | ||
| The second thing is I think we have an exceptionally short-term memory. | ||
| We tend to look at things in almost like monthly slices without looking at the long-term history of things. | ||
| So I think You know, the idea of we should put less money into poverty programs or rethink them doesn't make sense on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| But if you look at it over 50 years, you probably start thinking maybe we need to rethink some of these things. | ||
| And I sort of had this thought again when, you know, when President Trump rolled back the Bears Ears National Monument. | ||
| Whether you agree with it or not, the diction from the environmental community that this is a destruction of the American landscape and betrayal of our cultural and environmental heritage, that didn't exist. | ||
| Bears Ear didn't exist ten months ago. | ||
| We still actually have a bigger dedication of land than we did a year ago. | ||
| We need to think things in a little bit broader context before we sort of run to our battlements and start accusing the other people of being evil, which is what we do every day. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting to me, although you're saying Republican like me, and I do wanna find out the exact moment you said, all right, I'm a Republican, a lot of what you're saying here really sounds very libertarian. | ||
| Now, I understand there's a libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but basically what you're saying is your feelings on most of these issues didn't change that much, but where the rubber met the road every time, You realize that the government wasn't the answer. | ||
| That strikes me as a really libertarian way of thinking. | ||
| Yeah, I like to think so. | ||
| In the book, I describe myself as being part of the muddled middle, because I see sort of value. | ||
| I mean, I see still value in government solutions. | ||
| And I still think society has an obligation to care for the people who live in the shadow, the people, you know, the people in Pikesville, Kentucky. | ||
| They need our help. | ||
| They don't need our lectures on the evils of cold, they need our help. | ||
| I don't know if there's a sort of a principled belief other than sort of the notion that a lot of the solutions that we talk about and defend every day have proven not to work. | ||
| And we really owe ourselves to rethink a lot of these things. | ||
| Yeah, and unfortunately people don't seem to be very good at that. | ||
| So when did you actually say, finally, did you wake up one morning and go, My God, I've been doing this for a year. | ||
| I'm one of them. | ||
| But I'm not. | ||
| So in the end, I'm one of them. | ||
| So a Republican like me, as you know, has a little bit of a take on black like me, where in that case a journalist donned a disguise to experience what it's like to be black. | ||
| So I was, in my own small way, trying to experience what it was like to be Republican. | ||
| And when I finished, You know, I said, do I really want to be? | ||
| I mean, in another year I might have very much thought that I would be a Republican, because as you say, a lot of things I learned along the way. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump and sort of the carnival atmosphere of the Republican Party. | ||
| I couldn't stay there. | ||
| But I didn't feel at home in the Democratic Party either. | ||
| So I think I'm at home being independent, you know, and finding ideas I like on both sides. | ||
| Disliking a lot of people and a lot of the political apparatuses on the extremes. | ||
| Do you think a sensible middle can actually hold? | ||
| I mean, it's one of the things that I've been talking about for a long time, that there is this sort of new center developing, that there's the disaffected liberals, the people who realize that the government can't do everything. | ||
| There's a certain amount of people who don't like the Yeah. | ||
| that the right has related to religion and a few other things, | ||
| that there is this new center of basically people who are pro-freedom. | ||
| My fear is that I don't know if it can really hold for that long. | ||
| We're building it now. | ||
| There's this and so many of the conversations I have are around that, but that ultimately, | ||
| because we're gonna be nipped off by both sides, we may not have enough staying power. | ||
| I'm gonna keep trying for it, but I'm curious what you think about that. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| So I think that's a good point. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I think it's early. | ||
| One of the interesting political dynamics is the rise of the independents. | ||
| People don't realize that independents now are 42%. | ||
| People who identify as independents are 42% of the country, far more than Republicans or Democrats. | ||
| and a lot more than there were 15 years ago. | ||
| And that I think is because some people are thinking a little bit differently. | ||
| I think it's because some people are really Democrats and Republicans but are embarrassed by their parties. | ||
| And I think then there are people in there who really don't know what they're for or against. | ||
| But it is interesting to me that there is that growth of people who are saying more and more, | ||
| you know what, I don't trust the party even if I vote for them lockstep. | ||
| I don't trust the one side or the other. | ||
| I don't like the way they're going about doing their business, | ||
| there's gotta be a different way. | ||
| And that's the rise of independence, whether it coalesce into a political movement or force changes in politics, I don't know. | ||
| But there's something interesting going on. | ||
| So it's interesting to me that you said the carnival atmosphere around Trump, because certainly there is a carnival atmosphere, there's no doubt, the tweets and all of that. | ||
| But in terms of the things that he's talking, that he's actually doing, it does kinda line up with a lot of the things that you learned about it, right? | ||
| I mean, I think I read, The other day that for every one regulation that they've passed now, they've knocked away 17. | ||
| He basically has been for smaller government and tax cuts and trying to rethink some of these things. | ||
| So is that, it's really, you're hung up on the carnival portion. | ||
| Look, I wish we had Thomas Jefferson again. | ||
| Go to the Jefferson Monument near your house. | ||
| That's the stuff that I would rather have these days. | ||
| So Trump's really interesting. | ||
| In some ways he's run a very conventional Republican government. | ||
| The tax bill is a very standard Republican playbook. | ||
| Obamacare. | ||
| Appointments to the Supreme Court. | ||
| A lot of things actually straight from the Mitch McConnell playbook. | ||
| The thing I object to, and I think it's real—so, I mean, I think the tweets are not just sort of a carnival atmosphere without consequences. | ||
| I think a lot of people are willing to say, well, that's just Trump being Trump. | ||
| This isn't just him. | ||
| Destructive of democratic institutions that matter. | ||
| I mean, is it tax on the press? | ||
| I'm not the person who stands up for the press, as you know, 100%. | ||
| But is it tax on the press? | ||
| I think it's tax on the judiciary. | ||
| Is it tax on the independence of the Justice Department and the FBI investigation? | ||
| I think those are all destructive of public faith institutions, which are weak anyway. | ||
| I think that's really bad for a president. | ||
| And that's independent of policy. | ||
| That's Donald Trump being a Trumpist, not being a conservative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So where does this all lead? | ||
| What's next now? | ||
| How do we get some of this to coalesce and get some people to think clearly about these issues and realize that the Republican down the road is not your enemy and the Democrat is not the libertard and the rest of it? | ||
| Yeah, so I think it's actually a really interesting question, which I don't have a good bottle answer. | ||
| I'm going to keep talking about it and writing about it. | ||
| That's what I can do. | ||
| That might be the answer right there. | ||
| I mean, there are some structural things that matter. | ||
| I think the Supreme Court case on gerrymandering actually matters a lot. | ||
| Because one of the things that has happened is we have what's called landslide counties, a county in which one party essentially controls it, wins the election by 20 percent or more. | ||
| Basically, it's a one-party county. | ||
| Ten years ago, we had 1,100 of those counties. | ||
| This past election, we had 2,500 of them. | ||
| We've essentially forced it in a way that it's one-party rule in most parts of the United States. | ||
| And when that happens, well, then you don't talk to each other. | ||
| You don't compromise. | ||
| You don't need to. | ||
| And you're essentially fighting whatever two wings of the party are fighting each other. | ||
| That's what the politics are. | ||
| That's destructive, and I think the Supreme Court has a Once in a lifetime opportunity to start pushing us backwards towards a more balanced political environment. | ||
| I need to do a show on gerrymandering, because it really is one of the most important, especially if you care about local politics, which is really where it matters. | ||
| It's one of the most important things. | ||
| It's just one of those topics that never gets traction. | ||
| It's not sexy. | ||
| People look at a map and they're going, oh, you're gonna shift this line here, and it's like, nobody gets riled up about that, unfortunately. | ||
| Well, but it goes to the essence, I mean, it really goes to the essence of which is political dialogue. | ||
| I mean, you can all dislike Congress, but ultimately, you know, its job is to compromise and to find ways, solutions that enough, you know, half the people can get behind. | ||
| And right now it's only the Republicans. | ||
| Literally, you have the Democrats sitting there saying, I'm going to vote no on everything. | ||
| And the Republicans trying to hold on to the, you know, their, their, their majority. | ||
| That's one party rule. | ||
| That's not the two party system that I know and we need. | ||
| And until we actually sort of structurally figure that out, I'll write a nice book, hopefully it sells some books, but things won't change, I think, in a meaningful way. | ||
| Yeah, as a general rule at this point, I sense you'd be for scaling back all of this, just stop giving these people so much power, right? | ||
| These people being? | ||
| Being government, just in general, that they just shouldn't have as much power. | ||
| If their solutions aren't really working, then why should they have that much power? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think there's a... I think, I wouldn't put it that way, I think is... The reason I'm leading you with the question a little bit is because... | ||
| You're badgering the witness. | ||
| Well, slightly. | ||
| Slightly, in a way, because I find, I know there's so many people that are feeling what you feel here, that have realized that, you know, lefties that realized, okay, these aren't horrible people, they have a different set of problems, or a different set of beliefs. | ||
| Well then, what is the, the only answer is that the government should just let us live and let live more, in my estimation. | ||
| So that's why I'm leading you. | ||
| Yeah, I think the government should be obligated, so. | ||
|
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But perhaps we'll do this in a year from now, and. | |
| Yeah, who knows? | ||
| I think the, You know, for me, the thing I'm skeptical about is not ultimately, it's a power without results. | ||
| And so much of which I think I've learned over the years, not only this book, but my first book, which is about sort of charitable programs, which are usually funded by the government, is that we continue to perpetuate programs and projects and spending that has no provable results. | ||
| They sound good. | ||
| Problems are hard, and what we keep doing is we keep layering one thing on top of the other until we have this large, unwieldy, ineffective government. | ||
| I think that's where we're at today, and part of the reason for our disconnects. | ||
| I'm curious, what was it like in your bubble once the book came out and you were on? | ||
| Television and the internet talking about these things and going, these guys aren't so bad. | ||
| How'd your bubble treat you? | ||
| It's mixed. | ||
| So it's mixed. | ||
| I'll tell you sort of three different reactions, one of which gives me hope. | ||
| As I said, one was my 10-year-old son booing me on television because, you know, he's grown up in an atmosphere in which Democrats are right. | ||
| Conservatives are wrong. | ||
| It's actually a phrase from a conservative talk show called the Will Cowell Majority, which goes, we're right, they're wrong, that's the end of the story. | ||
| And so many people actually believe that. | ||
| Not on the conservative side, liberal side, both sides. | ||
| I got attacked on social media by a lot of people who wanted to call me You know, I must be a racist, or hey, gays, or Benedict Arnold. | ||
| All people, none of them, have actually read my book. | ||
| Having fun judging a book by its cover. | ||
| So there's a lot of that. | ||
| It's dispiriting and makes me want to chuck my phone out the window. | ||
| And I think that's probably been the biggest reaction. | ||
| But there's been enough people who read it and said, you know what? | ||
| I like where you're coming from. | ||
| I don't necessarily agree with everything you say, but we've gotten to a bad place. | ||
| We need to work our way out. | ||
| And that's conservatives and liberals alike, or at least Democrats and Republicans alike. | ||
| And I think there's enough there to give me a little sense of encouragement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, I like talking to anyone that is on a journey of trying to figure something out and not pretending they have all the answers. | ||
| I think that seems to be the key to this whole thing. | ||
| You're not sitting here pretending that you've got all the answers, but you're going to keep trying to figure it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's nice, right? | ||
| I mean, it sort of feels freeing in a way. | ||
| Yeah, I'm happy to admit some of the things I say in the book, probably wrong. | ||
| And I'm happy to be proven wrong. | ||
| I think none of us can be expert in all the issues, but we all sort of inherently believe that our side is right, they're wrong. | ||
| How do we know that if we haven't explored those issues? | ||
| And none of us have the time and freedom to do that. | ||
| That's why we shouldn't just immediately assume our colleagues, our fraternity is right and they're wrong. | ||
| We should be listening to everyone and making up independent judgments. | ||
| It's been a pleasure chatting with you. | ||
| We're gonna put a link to the book in the comments section right down below. |
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