Oct. 26, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. | ||
| Now a New York Times best-selling author with his new book, Ship of Fools. | ||
| Tucker Carlson, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, Dave. | ||
| I am glad to have you here, my friend. | ||
| I'm glad to be here. | ||
| I love this. | ||
| I don't know that anyone has ever walked in here and been more impressed by the Rubin Report. | ||
| Because I work in television, so I know what this is, and it's just the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. | ||
| Are you jealous? | ||
| Are you joking? | ||
| Yes, I'm jealous. | ||
| You have millions and millions of viewers, Mike. | ||
|
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You have a massive staff. | |
| But I don't have the control that you have, which is wonderful. | ||
| Yeah, control. | ||
| All right, so speaking of control, I have only one goal for the next hour, which is to some point say something so ludicrous that you stare at me with that face. | ||
| I may do that. | ||
| Where did the face come from? | ||
| It's totally organic. | ||
| Everyone, the memes that come out of that face. | ||
| It's totally organic. | ||
| The funny thing is when, I mean, that's just my face at rest, which is Golden Retriever-like. | ||
| I'm a mouth breather. | ||
| And when I first started this show, I got complaints about it internally. | ||
| And the idea was it's too embarrassing, click moron. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But I can't stop, I can't help myself. | ||
| So I'm not a super self-aware person, I'm not a mirror user, for example, | ||
| because if you work in TV and you become really self-conscious, it destroys you. | ||
| It makes you insecure, so I just am trained, after 20 years, not to think about the way I look. | ||
| And I didn't even know that I look like a moron when I'm listening, but I do. | ||
| And I'm not changing. | ||
| Well, I know you're not BSing, because even just now, when you were in the green room and my girl was putting makeup on you, you sat there for literally two seconds, you were like, don't do anything, you didn't even look at the mirror, you were looking at me. | ||
| You can go crazy, as you know, in TV, if you start to think about how other people perceive you. | ||
| You just drown in Lake Mead, and I don't want that. | ||
| All right, so I'm glad to have you here for a couple of reasons. | ||
| We're gonna get into the book, and obviously we're kind of simpatico on what I think are the big issues of the day related to free speech and all that stuff. | ||
| But I will be totally honest with you. | ||
| Years ago, when I first saw you on Crossfire on CNN, I was not a fan. | ||
| You weren't alone in that. | ||
| I thought, here's this bow tie wearing guy who is seemingly kind of smug and whatever. | ||
| And I was a lefty at the time, so we were really polar opposites politically. | ||
| But everything has shifted enough that we are kind of allies now. | ||
| And I actually think that's kind of cool. | ||
| So before we do anything else. | ||
| Tell me about little Tucker Carlson. | ||
| People know about Tucker Carlson that eviscerates socialists all day. | ||
| What was I like as a kid? | ||
| Well, I grew up here in Southern California, and we lived in Studio City. | ||
| And, I mean, I think I've always been the same, anti-authoritarian, for the individual, against the group. | ||
| Um, I hate bullies. | ||
| I hate being bullied more than anything. | ||
| And so if you... I found myself, and I've always been this way, in a scenario where everyone is forced to sort of nod in bovine agreement about something, my instinct is always to be the one guy who's like, no. | ||
| And so I haven't changed at all. | ||
| The particulars of my political beliefs have changed because America has changed so dramatically. | ||
| I'm 49, so in the last 40 years, it's become a different country, and a lot of the things that I thought would work haven't worked. | ||
| A lot of the things I thought were not threatening turned out to be threatening. | ||
| So, you know, my views have changed, but my instincts have remained, I think, consistent over time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were you always political, or were your parents political? | ||
| I was always political. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah? | |
| Well, I was always interested in history, And my father was a non-conformist, I would say. | ||
| I mean, that's an understatement. | ||
| And his baseline position was just because everybody says it doesn't mean it's true. | ||
| And the answers to the way People are, are found in history because the one immutable fact of history is human nature. | ||
| Like, it literally does not change. | ||
| And you see consistent themes over time, and so if you want to understand what's happening, look backward, and you will... I mean, just pretty conventional stuff, but now it sounds kind of radical, but basically my main influence was my dad. | ||
| I grew up with my dad and my brother, and again, his view was, you know, just because all the chin-tuggers are saying it, Does that seem like a pretty obvious through line to your success right now? | ||
| Because it's like every day there is some other groupthink, lunacy that it's like, these people then go on your show and I always think it's hilarious because it's like, do they know what they're getting into? | ||
| Well, but they don't actually have the same goals for the debate that I do. | ||
| So I'm linear and literal and old-fashioned, and I go into it believing that I can win the person over | ||
| with superior reasoning or a larger and more compelling fact set or whatever. | ||
| They're coming to this believing they've already won because they have superior virtue. | ||
| So they're having a theological conversation. | ||
| I'm having a political debate, and too often we talk right past each other. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting, a theological conversation. | ||
| A couple people have mentioned on the show, my friend Peter Boghossian, who's a philosophy professor who's been on a few times, he calls this sort of new leftism a secular religion. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Do you view that? | ||
| Look, I'm an Episcopalian, so I know what happened, because the Episcopal Church was the church of America's ruling class. | ||
| Our national cathedral is an Episcopal church. | ||
| So our culture was rooted in mainline Protestantism. | ||
| This was a Protestant country. | ||
| And our rulers, whether they were like literally Protestant or not, internalized The values of that faith. | ||
| And then within like a 20 year period the faith evaporated. | ||
| The Episcopal Church barely exists anymore. | ||
| And certainly as a national force it's irrelevant. | ||
| But that didn't eliminate the religious impulse within people which is inherent. | ||
| It's innate. | ||
| We're born that way. | ||
| We worship something in the end. | ||
| Whether, you know, it doesn't need to be God. | ||
| And so they've transferred that religious impulse to the political sphere. | ||
| They're making the same arguments that 19th century Protestants made. | ||
| Especially the Calvinists. | ||
| Like, I am saved. | ||
| Like, I know this. | ||
| That's my baseline assumption. | ||
| I'm one of God's elect. | ||
| You are not. | ||
| If you go into any conversation like that, nothing will be resolved. | ||
| Because it's already been decided! | ||
| Well, it's good versus evil. | ||
| Exactly, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| Was it always like this, though? | ||
| No, it wasn't like... So give me some markers of when you saw things kind of start to change. | ||
| I mean, I'm kind of, you know, I'm not an intellectual. | ||
| I'm a talk show host, so I'm a little... Well, now we have our promo clip. | ||
| Well, it's true! | ||
| I mean, that's what I do. | ||
| So it took me a while to see the outline. | ||
| I mean, this all comes kind of slowly to me because I'm caught in an earlier time just by virtue of my age. | ||
| And so I would have these conversations that were confusing to me where you would be debating a so-called liberal I would be, and I would find myself taking the liberal side, like in favor of free speech, or my default suspicion of corporate power, or concentrations of power anywhere, because it's a threat to the individual, or in favor of due process. | ||
| I would take a position that I heard liberals of my childhood take, and the liberal I'm debating would be like, nope! | ||
| You know, if Google says it, it's true. | ||
| Or, you know, if you're accused, prove yourself innocent. | ||
| Or, if what you say is offensive, you don't have a right to say it, I'd be like, wait a second, this is a mirror image of what I grew up with. | ||
| So actually, to answer your question as honestly as I can, I don't know if they ever really meant what they said. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| It's possible that the pursuit of power and the empowerment of the Democratic Party was always the goal, and that was just the disguise they used in order to achieve it in 1979. | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think we'd be in a healthier situation if there was a sane Democratic Party, even if all the policies were against everything that Douglas Carlson believes? | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That's the point of my book. | ||
| The feng shui is off. | ||
| So for like a hundred years, you had one party, which was the corporate party, the Republican Party, the Country Club Party, the party of the ruling class. | ||
| And the other party existed in effect to keep it in check and to say, wait a second, you know, you're getting rich because all these people are working really hard. | ||
| You need to think about their interests. | ||
| And a bunch of different things happened. | ||
| The value of labor dropped because of technology to the point where it's not even worth representing the working class because they're not worth anything, actually. | ||
| This was the calculation of the Democratic Party. | ||
| And so basically what you have is this weird alignment where the leadership of the Republican Party represents corporate interests and the leadership of the Democratic Party represents corporate interests. | ||
| And there's no one to represent the middle class. | ||
| And that, again, the balance is off. | ||
| You need a vigorous party standing up and saying, whoa, wait a second, you need balance. | ||
| Always you need balance. | ||
| Yeah, so is that the part of this that's sort of scary for our future, and that's kind of what you're going for in the book, is that if one side completely implodes, which it seems more likely as we're taping this at the moment, that the Democrats are going to say, It's gonna absolutely implode, but it's not as if all the conservative policies that you might like would suddenly take root. | ||
| It's that we would actually tilt in some really bizarre... Exactly! | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, this is why marriage as an institution works, because there's like another person pushing back against your bad instincts or balancing you out, you know? | ||
| And what's true at home is probably true on a national scale, on a political scale. | ||
| And yes, you absolutely need a vigorous and principled opposition party always, or else you've got something really ugly. | ||
| Then you've got the monoparty, which is kind of what we have. | ||
| Yeah, you know Jordan Peterson, who I know you admire also. | ||
|
unidentified
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I do. | |
| One of the lines when he's talking about politics, it's interesting you brought up marriage, he'll always say, you know, it's like a fight with your spouse. | ||
| You don't wanna beat them because then you're married to a loser. | ||
| You wanna give them a chance to figure out something so that you'll be able to move forward. | ||
| And we seem at this, we're at this odd place right now where it's like one side is trying to beat the other side, the other side is trying to beat the other side, and the rest of us, which I think is actually most of us, are just like. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You don't want to beat your spouse because you're married to a loser, but you're also a loser if you're married to a loser. | ||
| The point is, you're implicated in the future of the other side, because in the end, you're all in this together, even though you're coming from different perspectives. | ||
| So we're all Americans. | ||
| So in the same way that crushing your spouse doesn't actually win you any kind of meaningful victory or victory you'd want, crushing your fellow Americans doesn't Improve your life or your country! | ||
|
unidentified
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No! | |
| You don't want any of this! | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's going to lead to something really bad, actually. | ||
| Really ugly. | ||
| And everybody who's paying any kind of attention senses it on an animal level. | ||
| This is moving in a really ominous direction. | ||
| So I know we could talk about why we're frustrated with the Democrats all day long and all that, but let's put that aside, because I feel like that's a little bit of low-hanging fruit and we both do it. | ||
| We do it enough. | ||
| So let's talk more about the Republicans. | ||
| So tell me some of your frustrations with the Republican Party. | ||
| It's really simple. | ||
| The Democratic Party was for, you know, 80, probably close to 100 years, the party of wage earners. | ||
| And sometime in the last, I would say, 15 years, probably at the end of the Clinton, right at the kind of apex of the tech boom in the late 90s, the Clinton administration decided to reorient the party away from its traditional base to its new base, which is the rich and the poor. | ||
| And the Republican Party, being dumb, didn't see this. | ||
| And it was only the emergence of Trump that forced them to sort of realize that, wait a second, You know, we don't represent the people we thought we represented, actually. | ||
| It was the country club party, they denied it. | ||
| They hated that line because it was true. | ||
| I mean, it's the things that are true that we hate to hear. | ||
| That we hate the most, yeah. | ||
| Right, but we now need to become the middle class party. | ||
| Well, they just didn't want to become the middle class party, actually, at all. | ||
| And it took Trump, I mean, Trump is a flawed person, a complex, well, not a complex person, but a flawed person. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| But he basically has forced the Republican Party to be what it, in effect, already is, the party of last resort for people making, you know, $50,000 to $150,000 a year. | ||
| You know, the people who are making enough not to be on welfare, but not enough to send their kids to summer camp. | ||
| I mean, that's the core of the country. | ||
| And they don't want to represent those people. | ||
| And so to me, and by the way, I'm not one of those people. | ||
| I'm not here to give you the view from coal country at all. | ||
| I grew up in La Jolla and Georgetown. | ||
| But I know less about what the middle class thinks. | ||
| I know a lot about what the ruling class thinks, having lived in it my whole life. | ||
| And they hate, the leadership of the Republican Party, hates What does it say, though, that Trump, who's not one of them, seems to care about them? | ||
| You, who's not one of them, seems to care about them. | ||
| Me, I've only lived in New York and L.A. | ||
| I care about them. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Why has there been such a shift? | ||
| That almost seems impossible that Trump would be the hero of these people. | ||
| But that's exactly the last time we had something like this. | ||
| Of course, it was in the progressive era. | ||
| Teddy Roosevelt, really the pivotal president of post-Civil War America, I would argue, who made this a capitalist country by restraining capitalism. | ||
| The Romanovs didn't do that, and they got 70 years of Bolshevism, right? | ||
| But Roosevelt, who really was a genius, was like, wait a second, the concentrations of corporate power are so scary, they're going to overwhelm the democracy, and we're going to have a counter-reaction, and the Wobblies are going to take power. | ||
| So Roosevelt was the last person To fill this role. | ||
| And he was exactly the same, similar to Trump. | ||
| He wasn't throwing chairs through the window into the country club. | ||
| He was throwing them out onto the street like he was. | ||
| From the class that he was trying to restrain. | ||
| And you sort of have to be. | ||
| Like he knew what they were like because he was one of them. | ||
| I don't know, there's something that, but I would just say my, for me it always goes back to I have greater sympathy for the lone guy who's getting pushed around than I do for the group that's pushing him around. | ||
| So I feel like right now the least popular group in America You know, lives in the Middle West, and they have kind of antiquated social attitudes, and they have very little economic power, and they're overweight, and everyone hates them. | ||
| And I feel like, really? | ||
| Because they're Americans, actually. | ||
| Like, you don't—what is this? | ||
| By the way, if they were doing this to black people or Hispanics or any group, I would be sympathetic, because I hate that. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm actually not even sure that, when it comes to some of the social stuff, that their views are that antiquated. | ||
|
unidentified
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I agree, I agree. | |
| I think they've changed, and I think, I mean, I can see this from going across the country. | ||
| You would know, you would know. | ||
| It's like, people don't, they want you to live however you are. | ||
| They don't want you to come on their property and take their stuff, and you can't punch them walking down the street. | ||
| They're like, hey, I'm the liberal gay guy from New York, and they're like, we love you! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| No, I mean, I totally agree, actually. | ||
| But in the mind, in the kind of, you know, cliche-controlled mind of your average Brooklyn intellectual, you know, they're all, you know, medieval. | ||
| But they're not, actually. | ||
| They're basically libertarian in temperament. | ||
| They always have been. | ||
| Is Trump then? | ||
| You've interviewed the guy a bunch of times. | ||
| I know him well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What actually, in the scheme of what your book is about and sort of where America's at at the moment, is he just the great wrecker that we sort of needed so that this ship of fools wasn't gonna sink and take everybody down? | ||
| Well, he's certainly a wrecker. | ||
| Look, here's what Trump is not. | ||
| Trump is not the guy who comes to Washington and transforms the system because he's not capable of that. | ||
| He's not interested in that. | ||
| Washington is a very specific town, okay? | ||
| So, like, the legislative process is highly complex. | ||
| He doesn't understand it, doesn't seek to. | ||
| He's not gonna be the guy who runs on these nine policies and then affects them once elected, gets them through the Congress, gets them through the agencies. | ||
| He can't! | ||
| That's not his role. | ||
| It's very frustrating, actually, if you're from D.C., like me, to watch it. | ||
| You're like, wow, you know, what a second! | ||
| Get the energy department under control! | ||
| Not gonna happen. | ||
| There's three million executive branch employees versus Trump, okay? | ||
| Trump's role is- Is that right? | ||
| That's not right. | ||
| There's three million? | ||
| Million, three million executives. | ||
| I think there are three million executive branch employees. | ||
| That may include the military, by the way, so it's not quite right. | ||
| But I'm just saying the permanent class in DC, and I live right in the center of them, they hate Trump. | ||
| He's a threat to them. | ||
| But why do they hate him? | ||
| They hate him not because he's a right-winger. | ||
| He's hardly a right-winger, actually. | ||
| They hate him because he's the guy who says the obvious things. | ||
| So, like, we went to Helsinki last summer and interviewed him during the Putin thing. | ||
| And this crystallized for me in this conversation I had with him off camera. | ||
| I said to him, I'm going to ask you about NATO. | ||
| And he goes, why do we have NATO? | ||
| And as someone who's like a Cold War kid, I was like, well, I like NATO. | ||
| I'm thinking to myself, and he goes, you know, the Soviet Union, you know, fell in 1991. | ||
| Wasn't the point of NATO to keep them from invading Western Europe? | ||
| But they don't exist anymore. | ||
| Why do we still have them? | ||
| And I'm searching for a good answer and I couldn't find one. | ||
| So Trump repeats this in public and everyone's like, well shut up! | ||
| You know, what are you working for, Putin? | ||
| And I thought, this is what Trump does. | ||
| He comes in in his kind of autistic way and asks the obvious question at the core of whatever the issue is that is the one question everyone's been avoiding because they don't have the answer to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, why are we signing a trade agreement and letting the other signatories ignore the terms? | ||
| Why don't we have a border? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| These are, like, not complex questions. | ||
| They're very obvious questions. | ||
| But because they are unanswered and unanswerable in some cases, they expose sort of the mediocrity of our ruling class, like they actually don't know what they're doing, is the truth. | ||
| All right, so I have a lot of friends, I think you know some of them, who think that this thing that you're talking about with Trump is a sort of existential threat to the system, that this erraticness, this idea of you just throw the idea out there and then let it sort of ruminate and see what happens, that that is just too dangerous to play ball with. | ||
| I suspect you disagree with that. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I don't think you want, I mean, populism is a threat to everything that we have. | ||
| I'm not a populist at all. | ||
| But I think populism arises as a symptom of discontent that you need to address in a democracy if you want to continue the democracy. | ||
| So I don't want to live in a country this volatile anymore. | ||
| Nobody does. | ||
| But I think in order to solve the problems, you have to name them. | ||
| You know, I'm not one of these guys who's like, I believe in creative destruction. | ||
| It's very easy to destroy things, very hard to build them. | ||
| You know, it's incremental effort over time that builds things. | ||
| So no, I mean, look, I understand the complaint a hundred percent. | ||
| But I also think it's a two way deal here. | ||
| So if I say, hey, Dave, you know, like, did you pay for this house? | ||
| And you're like, that's the one thing I don't want to talk about because actually you didn't. | ||
| You're just squatting here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whose fault is that? | ||
| I mean, I guess, you know, I'm disruptive for asking you the question, but you also should pay for the house. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So like he's calling BS on them. | ||
| I get why they don't like it, but it also is a call to action to them to like answer the question and rule in a way that is sensible and wise and sustainable. | ||
| And they're not. | ||
| So the byline on the book, how a selfish ruling class is bringing America to the brink of revolution. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you think we're that close? | ||
| I think we're in the middle of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We just elected Donald Trump president. | ||
| What? | ||
| I mean, this is what got me to write the book. | ||
| Donald Trump, who I've known for 20 years and always sort of liked because, like, why wouldn't you? | ||
| I think he's funny as hell. | ||
| Did you ever think he was racist or any of those things? | ||
| Racist? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Like, put aside the Twitter part. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| I mean, look, I think on some level everybody is bigoted. | ||
| I mean, the human heart is dark and light and, you know, it's a patchwork. | ||
| But like, talk about, I mean, look, if he has a policy, if he were to get up and say, you know, the problem is that this one racial group is screwing everybody else, and in response we need to crush them, we need to attack them in public, and then make it much harder for them to get jobs, government contracts, get into school, that would be racism. | ||
| That's racist, yeah. | ||
| Oh wait, that's what our ruling class has been doing for 35 years. | ||
| So, you really want to have a conversation about racism? | ||
| Racism is attacking people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, which is like how our government operates. | ||
| It's totally wrong. | ||
| So, yes, there's a lot of racism. | ||
| Is Trump an offender? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Who isn't? | ||
| But the actual structural racism that hurts people and rewards others on the basis of their skin color, something I thought we got rid of 50 years ago, that is not being perpetuated by Trump. | ||
| It's being perpetuated and defended and celebrated by his critics. | ||
| Don't lecture me or anyone else about racism if you're pushing that crap. | ||
| Isn't that the irony? | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Half the guests that you have on your show are the people who are actually trying to inject racism into the system. | ||
|
unidentified
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Literally? | |
| With quotas and the rest of it. | ||
| Of course, and why are they doing this? | ||
| It's a complicated psychological phenomenon, but at root, it's much easier to maintain power when you divide your opponents, when you divide the country into warring tribes based on characteristics that don't change and therefore can't be resolved. | ||
| You know, this is how the British ruled India. | ||
| This is the problem with Rwanda. | ||
| I mean, this is like a very well-known phenomenon. | ||
| But anyway, yes, it's all projection and displacement. | ||
| It's like whatever I'm doing, I'm accusing you of doing. | ||
| Like, I can't believe, you know, whatever it is. | ||
| And it's actually Orwellian, because it's not a lie. | ||
| It's the mirror image of the truth. | ||
| Yeah, and this is what you're fighting constantly on your show. | ||
| Well, it actually gives you a headache. | ||
| Like, I have a bunch of kids, and they lie because everybody lies, and you especially lie to the people you love because you care about their opinion most, so kids lie to their parents, like it's a feature of it. | ||
| But a child's lie is very recognizable because it's always three shades off from the literal truth. | ||
| So it's like, you ate 10 Oreos. | ||
| No, I just had three! | ||
| But no one's contesting that you ate the Oreos. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What they're doing is what all authoritarian regimes do, and Orwell, being the great genius in English ever, got right to the heart of it. | ||
| He's like, you know, if I were dealing with a powerful leftist, I would say you weighed three orders. | ||
| He'd be like, no, actually, you did. | ||
| You ate the Oreos. | ||
| And I'm going to punish you. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| It's actually much more effective and manipulative not to grade the truth and distort the truth, but to tell the opposite of the truth, because it throws the other person completely off. | ||
| Yeah, and that's then why they hate all of the supposed minorities who walk away, who leave. | ||
| There's nothing they hate more than a gay person that leaves, a black person that leaves, an Asian person that leaves. | ||
| I can't, Matt, and I have, you know, just because of my job, I mean, I know a lot of people who dissent from the orthodoxy within their group, you know, because I try to have them on because I think they're brave. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I'm not involved in any of these debates, I'm so, but like, if you're a gay guy, it's like, you know what, I'm not really on board with this. | ||
| What happens to you? | ||
| And I have deep sympathy for that. | ||
| Have you seen my Twitter lately? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| I would never go there because it upsets me. | ||
| I think in the end, the individual has a right to make up his mind. | ||
| You can control what I do, okay? | ||
| Societies get to do that. | ||
| They get to control the behavior of the people who live with them. | ||
| You're not allowed to sleep in a crosswalk. | ||
| Sorry, we don't allow it. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| What you can't do is control what I think. | ||
| That's not allowed. | ||
| That crosses the line from order to totalitarianism. | ||
| And all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, that's what they are not simply attempting, but demanding. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so then that's a perfect segue to the technological part of this. | ||
| Because I think the last time I was on your show, this is what we discussed, just what's going on with Google, what's going on with the algorithms, are people being shadow banned, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I think there's plenty of evidence that yes, this is all real. | ||
| What is your solution to this? | ||
| I suspect you don't want the government I hate to use the term existential threat because it's so banal and overused, but actually it is an existential threat to the ability of the U.S. | ||
| government to run the country, to administer the democracy. | ||
| There are 20,000 engineers, engineers making between $200,000 and $400,000, working right now just on Google Search, just on that one feature of Google. | ||
|
unidentified
|
20,000! | |
| This is the most technologically advanced and powerful organization in the history of the world. | ||
| Its technology and capabilities so far outstrip those of the Pentagon, for example, or the Chinese military. | ||
| Or the Russians! | ||
| The Russians! | ||
| Or any other group. | ||
| This is the most powerful technological entity in the world which has a chokehold on all human information in English. | ||
| So that is sort of all you need to know. | ||
| I don't care if Jesus is in charge of the country. | ||
| That's too much power for any entity to have. | ||
| And it's a threat to the nation state, actually, and it's a threat to all of us. | ||
| So, yeah, I think whatever it takes, Yeah. | ||
| Is that a tough pill for a conservative to swallow? | ||
| No, they don't, no. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| Well, first of all, I would say not to go to motive. | ||
| I hate it when people do that, but in fact, a lot of them are just flat out bought off | ||
| by Google. | ||
| Google literally funds the antitrust think tank In Washington. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| Speaking of Orwellian. | ||
| No, but look, it's so asymmetrical, like all these debates are, because with liberals who are only about power, you just make the pitch like, look, we'll fund you. | ||
| We're on your side. | ||
| You know, we're part of the coalition of the ascendant, so just like, shh, no problem. | ||
| With conservatives, all they, who are sort of like dog-like in their, ooh, market, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, what, are you against markets? | ||
| Do you want government control? | ||
| Are you for regulation? | ||
| Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand! | ||
| And conservatives are like, oh my gosh, kryptonite, I'm sorry! | ||
| You're right, you're totally right, Mr. Google. | ||
| It's actually, and so I feel like I'm the only person who, like, yeah, of course I'm conservative, of course I'm not for regulation, of course I believe in markets. | ||
| But this isn't a free market. | ||
| This is your free, this is your version of capitalism? | ||
| This is what you've been promising all these years? | ||
| When, like, two guys who run a company that's not even American, whose values are not aligned with the interests of my country, is in charge of the country? | ||
| No, I'm not for that. | ||
| I gotta say this, man, I did not think that I was gonna bring you in here and that I'd have Tucker Carlson agreeing with my friend Eric Weinstein about this, but that you're basically laying out the same case he's laid out. | ||
| It's too big, and sometimes I think, well, maybe I'm going crazy, maybe I'm thinking about this too much, and I'm becoming like the wacko who's like, you don't understand the threat! | ||
| But actually, the deeper, and I know people who work there, and I've actually spent a lot of time on it, No, I don't think I'm overstating it. | ||
| And by the way, I'm not temperamentally an extremist. | ||
| I'm from Southern California. | ||
| I'm a kind of semi-observant Episcopalian. | ||
| I'm not like, the end is nigh! | ||
| That's not the way I am. | ||
| But on this topic, I think I'm becoming that because I think the facts warrant it. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of the whole shift, sort of, of what's happening with news and technology at the moment? | ||
| That it's funny, I said this to you in the green room, but when I was doing a show with Peterson last week, I said, oh, you know, Tucker Carlson's on my show next week. | ||
| The audience went wild, like, went crazy. | ||
| And I was like, oh, that's interesting, because I hear from so many of these young people that they don't get their news from cable news anymore. | ||
| I think you and Gutfeld are a little bit of a, like a bridge, sort of, between mainstream and the internet thing. | ||
| But that CNN has sort of become a joke, that just saying these things about cable news, that's already the punchline for young people. | ||
| I know, and I spent many years at CNN hosting a show there and had a lot of, have friends there. | ||
| I mean, the landscape changes. | ||
| Technology, you know, destroys and then creates, you know, it's a very familiar cycle. | ||
| I think cable news has remained relevant much longer than a lot of us who work in it thought it would. | ||
| But that of course will change because once again technology changes everything. | ||
| What's ominous is the next thing. | ||
| I'm completely for digital media. | ||
| I own part of a digital media company. | ||
| But we've sort of wound up exactly in the opposite place we expected to wind up. | ||
| I mean the promise was that this was going to diversify. | ||
| You know, the media and decentralized power over information. | ||
| And of course the opposite, you know, Google controls everything. | ||
| So without YouTube, I mean, where are you without YouTube? | ||
| So we're actually finding ourselves more dependent upon a smaller group of people who hate free speech and hate our values. | ||
| That's a very precarious place to be. | ||
| Somebody needs to introduce competition. | ||
| into this space, like, yesterday. | ||
| Like, right now. | ||
| It's the most important thing. | ||
| Otherwise, we're going to find ourselves, like, at the mercy of these commissars. | ||
| Like, is that where you want to be? | ||
| It's the opposite of where you want to be. | ||
| If only there were some influential billionaires... No, that's so true! | ||
| ...who might be listening to this show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's so true! | |
| We're not going to name names. | ||
| But whenever two or more people who've thought this through for ten minutes get together, they mention one name and they're like, when's he coming to save us? | ||
| Well, now you said it's a he, but let's not get lost in gender pronouns. | ||
| So with that being said about the technological component, watching cable news shift right now, there's also an issue that a lot of people are getting their news from this, from this show, shows like this, Shapiro, Rogan, all of these guys. | ||
| That's kind of worrying, too, at some level, right? | ||
| And I say that, I'm talking about guys that I love, but just that the fact-checking is different here than, say, it would be on cable news, not that, Cable news has done a great job. | ||
| No, but you're right. | ||
| I mean, we're part, you know, we're always a point on a continuum and we're in the middle of a cycle where the media are being reinvented completely and you're right. | ||
| I mean, the problem with individual operators, solo guys on YouTube, is they have so much less to lose than a television network does that the incentives to get the facts right and be responsible are, of course, much lower. | ||
| The problem, as you well know better than anybody, is that the media have so discredited themselves that it's like, it's so obviously propaganda. | ||
| Yeah, but did you ever think it could be that bad? | ||
| No, I never did. | ||
| As bad as it is now, where every day I look at a story from CNN or Politico and forget BuzzFeed. | ||
| Right, yeah, whatever. | ||
| Forget the really bad ones. | ||
| Vox, and it's like everything you guys are doing, every headline, the way every Republican has a picture | ||
| that they look awful in the picture, Democrats look great. | ||
| Like every little thing, it's like they're just smashing us with it. | ||
| They've just turned it up to 11. | ||
| I mean, I grew up in a media family. | ||
| I mean, my dad was anchor here in L.A. | ||
| of ABC, and so I have always lived in this world, and I always thought the media are liberal, but I was totally wrong about that. | ||
| They're not ideologues, actually. | ||
| They're party people. | ||
| That's what I totally missed. | ||
| They are loyal to the party. | ||
| They feel powerless except as part of a group. | ||
| That is the main distinction between left and right. | ||
| In this country. | ||
| And so whatever the Democratic Party's imperatives are, they will act on them. | ||
| If the Democratic Party invaded Canada... | ||
| Tomorrow, you would see, I'm serious, they'd be like, you know, these Canadians, they live among us, you know what I mean? | ||
| They're a fifth column, like they would actually, it doesn't matter what the party does, they will defend it. | ||
| Once you understand that, then it all makes sense. | ||
| They feel threatened. | ||
| That's the truth. | ||
| And you and people like you are the main threat to them. | ||
| It's not me, actually. | ||
| I'm on a competing medium, but in the same medium. | ||
| They are They know that their power is ebbing. | ||
| And when you feel like you're losing control, that's when you try to assert control. | ||
| That's when the most ludicrous propaganda comes, when you feel like, you know, oh my gosh, they're not listening to me! | ||
| I have to yell! | ||
| But that's the funny part is, and I tweet this all the time, | ||
| it's like if these guys had just been pretty bad, I think it would have been tolerable. | ||
| People would have, because it had been happening for so long | ||
| people kind of would have noticed. | ||
| And maybe they could have got a little worse and we would have been okay with it. | ||
| But it's like they've just completely bottomed out. | ||
| And well, this is one of the criticisms of Trump that has a lot of truth in it. | ||
| When people are like, well, he's a destroyer. | ||
| He destroys everything he touches. | ||
| You know, probably an overstatement, but he does. | ||
| You know, you get close, you sit and stare at Trump all day. | ||
| And you're going to burn out your retinas. | ||
| OK, you are. | ||
| And that's one of the things I try not to do. | ||
| I don't do a show about Trump. | ||
| I didn't write a book about Trump. | ||
| I'm not against Trump. | ||
| I think Trump is useful and a truth teller in some ways. | ||
| But the people who obsess about Trump are destroyed. | ||
| And that would include his opponents, maybe especially his opponents. | ||
| So what would you do to get some of those people back? | ||
| If they're out there now, the ones that really are overboard on Trump, that I haven't, you know, I've been able to reach some liberals, some good lefties and liberals, so that, okay, we can put a handout for them, but for the people that are really feeling like they're buying all the nonsense, that this guy is Hitler, and all of this really, do you have any technique that gives them a little bit of an out? | ||
| Well, sure, I mean, I almost never argue about Trump. | ||
| I really try not to. | ||
| I mean, the platonic ideal for me of a show is never mentioning Trump. | ||
| Because I try to take the long view. | ||
| I mean, look, other shows have different roles. | ||
| Everybody sees his or her specific task. | ||
| But I feel like mine is to try to take the long view. | ||
| Not easy in the middle of this news cycle, of course. | ||
| I get caught up all the time in the bullshit of the day. | ||
| But I really try to think about, well, how would this look 10 years from now? | ||
| Trump will be gone. | ||
| I'll be gone. | ||
| We'll all be gone, because we actually die at the end, it turns out. | ||
| But I want the country to continue. | ||
| Hopefully not 10 years from now. | ||
| No, not 10 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I'm just saying. | |
| What kind of country do you want? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| Do you want to live in a place where the individual has the right to dissent? | ||
| And I think most people would say, yes, I do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that why the free speech stuff has become so important to you? | ||
| Well, it's just foundational. | ||
| I mean, that's just, if they can tell you what to say, they can control what you think. | ||
| And if they can control what you think, you're not fully human. | ||
| And so you're really, you're not fighting for a political party or an ideology, you're fighting for your humanity. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| That's what I was taught as a child by liberals. | ||
| And they were right. | ||
| And I bought it then, by the way. | ||
| And so the ACLU stood up for Clarence Brandenburg, who was not only literally a Klansman from Ohio, but a moron, like literally a moron. | ||
| He was the least appealing person ever and they stake their entire credibility on defending this guy. Why'd they do | ||
| that? | ||
| They did it of course to preserve the absolute right of free speech for the rest of us and they made the country | ||
| better when you Abandon that yeah, dude, it's over and now you see what | ||
| comes out of the ACLU And you're like you're not you're not defending free speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're clearly a progressive Group, they're opposing free space there | |
| They issued a statement saying, you know, some speech is just too offensive. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because you defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, which, everyone forgets, had the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors of any town, like, outside Israel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it was the most offensive thing you could do, and they defended it, and they lost a lot of money doing it. | ||
| Like, they lost a ton of donations doing it, but they defended the principle. | ||
| And I noticed you've got Nadine Strossen's book. | ||
| Yeah, we talk about this here. | ||
| So there are people like her or Dershowitz or these former ACLU board members who are like totally bewildered by this. | ||
| Not because we care about the ACLU as an institution. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| It's some dumb nonprofit. | ||
| But because the principles are literally foundational. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So let's let's jump back for just a second here. | ||
| So I want to talk about Fox generally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So first off, You guys are doing something right. | ||
| And I don't mean just you here. | ||
| Clearly, if you look at the ratings, I just looked at this thing and it's like the last bottom 20 shows are all CNN. | ||
| The top 10 are basically all Fox. | ||
| Maybe there's one MSNBC show in there. | ||
| Beyond just you, what do you think that Fox is just doing right? | ||
| You know, being slightly different. | ||
| I mean, you know, I would argue that, I mean, I can only speak for my show, I'm only in charge of an hour of 24, but, you know, that it's actually worth defending the principles as distinct from the individuals or the political figures. | ||
| And over time, like, you're not embarrassed to do that. | ||
| It's worth doing. | ||
| But I think as a business matter and just sort of a matter of life, if you're the guy who's not entirely with the herd and you're like, actually, no, it's a little bit different. | ||
| You know, you go to the 19 other stores and you can buy this one product and I've got a different product. | ||
| I mean, why is that bad? | ||
| Yeah, so that just seems obvious. | ||
| What's so interesting is how offensive that is. | ||
| I've worked at CNN, I've worked at MSNBC, I've worked at PBS, I've worked at Esquire, I mean I've worked at like a million different liberal publications and television channels, and they're all selling exactly the same product. | ||
| And then there's Fox, in the mainstream landscape, that's different. | ||
| Just one channel is different. | ||
| And the overwhelming feeling is that should not be allowed. | ||
| Like, I can't believe that they're allowed to say what they're saying. | ||
| We need to shut them down. | ||
| Well, that's the irony. | ||
| It's like, you guys are the only ones that will put me on. | ||
| I will gladly go on CNN or MSNBC. | ||
| You can't get on those channels? | ||
| I've never been asked. | ||
| I can't just show up there and bang on the door, but you guys call me. | ||
| And every time I've done your show, it's live. | ||
| I never know what you're gonna ask me. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And same thing with some of the other shows. | ||
| And it's like, I will go where I can talk to people. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I don't want to be edited and misrepresented, so I don't know that I would trust a lot of these other people. | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, so that's sort of what... But it's just so uninteresting. | ||
| I mean, if everybody's repeating the exact same pieties, diversity is our strength, our children are our future, whatever the sort of banality is that you think is profound, if everybody's saying the exact same thing, that's just boring. | ||
| I like to have people on who surprise me. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Just because, again, I'm more curious. | ||
| I mean, I'm a human being. | ||
| I want to think about things. | ||
| Does it ever drive you crazy to just be in the constraints of what television is? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Because we've done segments where it's like, you know, we've got maybe six minutes, and I feel like I just started. | ||
| And then you're like, Reuben, I'll see you next time. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I was a writer before I went into TV, and one of the reasons that I failed a couple of times pretty spectacularly in TV is because I didn't understand the medium and I didn't respect it. | ||
| I was like, I'm a writer, I'm a deep person, here I am in the shallow medium. | ||
| And what I didn't understand is that TV is a completely different thing. | ||
| And it's got its own requirements and its own rules, and you need to understand what it's capable of. | ||
| And it's capable of great things, it's just not capable of everything. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's not capable of explaining complex concepts. | ||
| That's not what TV's about. | ||
| That's not what it's for. | ||
| Is it odd to you that the interview, the real long form this, like just sit down with another human being that, you know, CNN booted Larry King, which I think was the beginning of the end for them. | ||
| So smart, I think that too. | ||
| I really believe it. | ||
| So I've never heard anybody else say that, but I argued that when I worked there. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| So you were, because they were getting rid of him. | ||
| I think he told me, he was here a couple weeks ago, he said, I thought it was the number one rated show still on the network. | ||
| It was number two at the time. | ||
| And they said, no, no, we're done. | ||
| 30 years. | ||
| Adios. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they also ended Crossfire, which had become a kind of perversion of its former self. | ||
| But I was in both versions of it. | ||
| And at one point, Crossfire was like a public service. | ||
| Did something shift with Crossfire? | ||
| Because I do remember watching you on Crossfire. | ||
| It became partisan, which is uninteresting. | ||
| Nobody wants to hear what your team thinks, we already know. | ||
| What's interesting is when we throw up an idea or policy and we deconstruct it and we have two fairly evenly matched people You know, kind of competing for you, you know? | ||
| So anyway, it became something much more... But the idea was always a good idea, and especially the idea of Larry King. | ||
| I pitched that show to many different channels, black curtain, two people, hour-long conversation, and my argument was, this will rate. | ||
| People want this, there's none of it. | ||
| And everyone's like, yeah, I don't think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need interstitials and graphics, and it's like... They love interstitials! | |
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| And now, of course, With YouTube, it's like you look at the numbers that you're getting and others are getting with that exact format. | ||
| And they're huge! | ||
| So it turns out, yeah, of course there's a market for that. | ||
| Why wouldn't there be? | ||
| How much of all of this, everything we're discussing here, and so much of what you're doing on your show, is just that people are just tired of having their intellect insulted? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Well, look at television versus movies. | ||
| If you had told me 30 years ago that the most interesting visual art being created would be in television, scripted television, like what? | ||
| I don't think so! | ||
| That's the province of morons! | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Full house! | ||
| But it turned out to be true. | ||
| I have to stand up for Bob Saget. | ||
| I actually know Bob Saget. | ||
| I like Bob Saget. | ||
| He's actually very smart. | ||
| But the point is that there is, especially when we're all narrow casting, When you don't need to reach 80 million people, when you can reach three million, and that is a more than viable commercial proposition, you can aim at an audience that wants that, and there is a substantial audience that does. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so Fox News, we get it. | ||
| Some things are clearly going right, and by ratings and everything else. | ||
| Is there anything that Fox is doing that you think is wrong? | ||
| Is it too close to the president, or anything? | ||
| You know, I mean, obviously I'm dodging the question. | ||
| Even if I had a real answer, I would run from that question because I work there. | ||
| Well, that's why I have to ask you the question, right? | ||
| But if I'm being completely honest, you know, I'm not a huge... I'm so caught up in our hour and I'm so... it's such a hive in my show and we have, like, you know, I intentionally hired really smart, smarter than I am people, that I don't have a sense sometimes of the larger programming. | ||
| I would say as a general matter, I've always tried not to be aligned with any politician, because in the end, no matter how sympathetic I might be to the message, it's a politician, and I'm not, if I wanted to be a policymaker, I would be one. | ||
| There's a pretty low bar for that, it turns out. | ||
| I mean, like, I could probably be. | ||
| Right, exactly, so. | ||
| Do you ever think about it? | ||
| Not for two seconds. | ||
| I mean, I live in that world, so I know what it is. | ||
| I don't want that. | ||
| I have a journalist temperament. | ||
| I like to watch. | ||
| I like the freedom to say what I really think is true. | ||
| One thing I will say about Fox, which I'm grateful for every single day, and this is Rupert Murdoch, They don't, they do not control what you say. | ||
| I've had this show for two years, almost exactly two years. | ||
| Not a single time has someone called, well no one calls me at all, but like no one calls and is like, I can't believe you said, there's nothing like that. | ||
| Pure editorial freedom. | ||
| So like, why is that not a great job? | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, and I know it. | ||
| Again, I just wanted to illustrate it, because people don't understand that. | ||
| Every time I have gone on your show, that we, you know, they give me some sense of what we're gonna talk about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| We go live. | ||
| It's live, and if you want to say something insane, like, we can't stop you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I would say the other thing is the way TV works, at least at our network, but I think this is true. | ||
| When I worked at the others, it was also true. | ||
| The shows have enormous autonomy. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| I mean, there's not a morning call where it's like, here's our line on this or that or the other. | ||
| It's like, I never talk to any... I talk to my executive producer, Justin Wells, whom I love, and a lot of my other producers all morning, just in the car parked outside. | ||
| I was just doing the show, like, here's what I think we should do. | ||
| There's, I mean, we can do whatever we want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's your day-to-day like over there? | ||
| So I know what it's like to do, I do a couple shows a week and I'm doing long form and this way, but we're not doing a zillion segments and all the interstitials and all that stuff. | ||
| What's your sort of day-to-day? | ||
| Tucker wakes up, he's got a show that night. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I try and I'm married. | ||
| I've been married for 27 years. | ||
| I really like my wife. | ||
| My kids are all gone. | ||
| So I really try and stay home. | ||
| I mean, the key in daily TV is not to go insane. | ||
| That actually is like the whole deal right there. | ||
| If you can keep from becoming an insecure sort of bag of neuroses, you win. | ||
| Do you mean that just because of the media criticism and just the constant worrying about ratings? | ||
| The medium, yeah, all of that, but just the medium itself leaves most anchors at some point feeling totally exposed and alone. | ||
| It's like, I'm out here, you know, I've got a staff of 80 people or whatever, but in the end I'm out here live, it's just me, I'm taking all the crap, and no one's backing me up. | ||
| I mean, every person in the business feels that way at a certain point, and then you start to feel like, you know, no one understands me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| And you actually become so self-pitying and self-involved that no matter how much they pay you, you're deeply unhappy, and then you start acting in erratic ways. | ||
| And like, look at TV and you know exactly who's going through this. | ||
| Everybody except me. | ||
| Because I keep my world so small. | ||
| I married my high school girlfriend, I live walking distance from my dad and my brother, and my college roommate and best friend. | ||
| And that's who I talk to every day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| And the reason I do that is because I love them, but also because I don't want to feel the way that most people on TV do. | ||
| I want to talk to people I love and trust, and I want my security and happiness to come from those relationships and not from the affirmation I get on television, because you will become a crazy person. | ||
| Someone once said to me, a head of a TV network once said, what do you think my job is? | ||
| I said, I don't know, running a TV network? | ||
| And he goes, nope, it's keeping millionaires from killing themselves. | ||
| My job. | ||
| How dark is that? | ||
| It's also true. | ||
| It's like his job was to keep the people from going totally bananas because the medium itself drives you crazy. | ||
| And you're doing this. | ||
| No booze. | ||
| No cigarettes anymore. | ||
| No! | ||
| You got any vice? | ||
| The booze is easy. | ||
| You're drinking coffee. | ||
| I drink probably, you know, I drink a lot. | ||
| Voltaire levels of coffee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Not quite as impressive effects, but yeah, and I quit smoking four or five years ago and, but I'm, I'm, you know, I wouldn't call it a vice, but I'm a, I'm a enthusiastic user of nicotine gum and lozenges because I think they really have improved my life, like a lot. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to endorse the product, but I'm not sure what the downside is of using nicotine. | ||
| There's a huge downside from smoking, of course. | ||
| The tar gives you cancer and emphysema. | ||
| But I don't think that we've shown that nicotine, for people who don't have blood pressure problems, and I don't, hurts you. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of evidence that it's great. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so I wanna spend the remaining time really focusing on the book. | ||
| We sort of did. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah! | |
| I think we did everything here, but we did everything else, but let's really focus in on the book. | ||
| Okay, if we're on the brink of a revolution, what are your prescriptions to save us? | ||
| I mean, I think the first thing you need to do is cool the temperature a little bit. | ||
| The president's not good at that. | ||
| That's not his, temperamentally, he's incapable of doing that. | ||
| I don't think he sees it as an important thing to do. | ||
| So is that, do you think, the fundamental, like sort of, if we're looking at this just at a base level, that Trump's temperament and the way the media is with him, is that sort of the root of everything else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The volatility's the problem. | ||
| I mean, I think that we needed to awaken the people in charge, not simply of our political system, but also of our economy and our culture, from their stupor. | ||
| You know, hey! | ||
| You're not listening. | ||
| We're going to elect this orange guy to wake you up. | ||
| I actually think that was a useful thing, a necessary thing. | ||
| But repeated cycles of political volatility, like break your country, obviously. | ||
| There are a million examples of this, and it's obvious. | ||
| So you need to calm people down, and the main way you calm people down is the way you calm children down. | ||
| Which is, you explain to them, as simply and clearly as you can, why what's happening is happening, why you're making these decisions. | ||
| And you give them some sense that they have some control, not total control, but some control over the decisions that you're making. | ||
| You know, you enfranchise them, you bring them in. | ||
| In a democracy, the system is predicated on that idea. | ||
| So you need to say to people, look, you want X, Y, and Z? | ||
| You elected this guy to build a wall? | ||
| We think a wall is stupid. | ||
| We don't think it's going to work. | ||
| We think it's kind of embarrassing, actually. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| We're going to do it. | ||
| Because you have demanded it. | ||
| You have to kind of give people a sense that the democracy is real if they think it's fake. | ||
| If they think it's really an oligarchy posing as a democracy, what are they going to do? | ||
| You don't even want to think about that. | ||
| So just practice democracy a little bit. | ||
| It would calm things down. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Is anyone doing it better than us? | ||
| Like for all the sort of anger at each other right now and it's funny because you know I spend time on Twitter where it seems like the Civil War has begun already and then I get out there in real life and I'm on this tour and it's like I meet thousands of people all across the middle of the country who are wonderful and open and decent and all those things. | ||
| But I lost my question in that. | ||
| What was the point of that? | ||
| There was a point there somewhere. | ||
| Is it actually as bad as it seems, and is any other country more stable and happier than ours? | ||
| Oh, that was it, yes. | ||
| Is there an example to look at? | ||
| Because I see all these people always complaining, and as you said, it's easier to break things and burn them down than it is to build. | ||
| So all these people are always, oh, look at these countries. | ||
| They always say, look at the Nordic countries. | ||
| That seems to be the big one. | ||
| Look at Sweden, even though Sweden's got all sorts of problems right now. | ||
| You're one of the only people covering it, actually. | ||
| I'm one of the only Swedes on television, maybe that's why. | ||
| Are you Swedish? | ||
| My name is Carlson! | ||
| Oh, all right, there you go. | ||
| I've got a lot of Ikea in here, by the way. | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| I'm not in any meaningful sense Swedish. | ||
| I mean, I guess I am genetically Swedish, not that I even care about that stuff. | ||
| 1 in 1024. | ||
| Um, but, I mean, those are not models we can replicate for obvious reasons. | ||
| This is a country of, what, Sweden's got 8 million people? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Um, 10 million, something like that? | ||
| Anyway, uh, no, who does, look, Nobody does it better. | ||
| There's no greater country. | ||
| I don't have a foreign passport. | ||
| I'm stuck here. | ||
| I plan to do everything I can for the country because I have a long-term interest in it, and I don't want to move anywhere else. | ||
| I can't think of anywhere better. | ||
| Alpine, Switzerland's pretty nice, but there's no humor allowed. | ||
| Anyway, the point is, no, you can look at countries and see their ruling classes doing things you wish ours did. | ||
| There's no country I kind of despise more than China, but one thing I do admire about China is that its ruling clique thinks long-term about stability. | ||
| That's their overriding concern. | ||
| Now, of course, that's rooted in their desire to hold on to power, which is ignoble. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| They understand how important continuity and stability are to the society, so they think deeply. | ||
| And they don't make the right decisions all the time, obviously. | ||
| The one-child policy is a disaster, but that's how they think. | ||
| And I wish we thought that way. | ||
| I think we've too internalized libertarian economics as a model for everything. | ||
| That, like, it's always virtuous to destroy this thing and build something new, and what we don't understand is, like, that's not, people are not capable of that on, at scale. | ||
| Like, 325 million people can't deal with tearing down and remaking the society every generation. | ||
| They just can't. | ||
| They'll go crazy. | ||
| And so we need to identify the things that we wanna preserve and actively work to preserve them. | ||
| And I would start with the Bill of Rights. | ||
| So do you think any of the people right here, these beautiful caricatures of Maxine Waters and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, who else do we have on there? | ||
| I'm upside down. | ||
| Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Bill Kristol and Zuckerberg. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bezos. | ||
| Who's this? | ||
| I'm upside down here. | ||
| That's Lindsey Graham. | ||
| Oh, and Lindsey Graham. | ||
| Oh, well, okay, so I actually wanted to sort of get Lindsey into this somehow. | ||
| He's a little pudgier there than in real life. | ||
| He's become sort of like a star suddenly. | ||
| Like, what do you make of sort of these- And rightly so. | ||
| These Republicans that, like, even Mitch McConnell, like, they seem like they've got a little juice at the moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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For sure. | |
| Like the Kavanaugh thing did something. | ||
| Well, they did the right thing. | ||
| And they're on the cover of my book not because of that or any real political reason, particularly Lindsey Graham is there and it's described inside. | ||
| He's the embodiment, and I like Lindsey Graham and I think he's smart, but he's the embodiment of a phenomenon that I think is really destructive, which is the refusal of people to learn from the failures that they created. | ||
| And so, like, it's okay to have supported the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| I did. | ||
| What's not okay is to, you know, 15 years later, look at it and be like, | ||
| "No, that wasn't a mistake," and, "No, I refuse to learn from what happened," | ||
| and, "Yes, I think we should do it again." | ||
| That's something for which you should be held responsible. | ||
| That's my only point. | ||
| It's like, I catch my kids doing something wrong. | ||
| I'm not surprised that they did something wrong, but I demand that they concede they did something wrong, and I make them try and learn from it. | ||
| That's just basic. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's do, I know there's nothing that people on television like doing more than predictions. | ||
| We got an election coming up. | ||
| Well, they don't like accountability is the problem. | ||
| All right, so you seem pretty open to this. | ||
| So look, I had Glenn Beck on last week. | ||
| How was he? | ||
| He was great. | ||
| Look, this is a guy who, if you haven't sat down with him in a while. | ||
| I have. | ||
| Oh, okay, good. | ||
| This is a guy who admits, freely admits now, that he was part of the problem, that he was one of the people that led to the polarization, and he's trying to fix it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| People will say, well, his motives, he just wants money. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| People's motives are unknowable. | ||
| Yes, if you repeatedly show me that your motives are bad, fine. | ||
| But I see a guy who genuinely is trying to fix some things. | ||
| So when I discussed this with him about the midterms, we sort of agreed basically that the only option that I see that is remotely possible here for the betterment of the country going forward The Democrats kind of have to be destroyed so that they can rebuild. | ||
| Otherwise, if they do well in these midterms, we end up in two years of impeachment. | ||
| And then it's like that revolution thing that you think we're on the brink of? | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| And the reason is not because Trump is inconvenienced or impeached or whatever. | ||
| The reason is that the problems that led to Trump's assent are unaddressed. | ||
| I mean, that's, you know, the dying of the middle class is the core problem and no one is talking about it. | ||
| And Trump, I have to say, sometimes makes it easier not to talk about it because he seeks to be the person people talk about. | ||
| Yeah, I think the ideas need to be repudiated really clearly. | ||
| You don't win when you say that the guilty have an obligation to prove their innocence. | ||
| I'm sorry, we're not rewarding that. | ||
| like sort of just obvious way this all was gonna go. | ||
| Like everything with identity politics and everything else and believe all women or, | ||
| because when you group everybody, you can't have anybody that wanders. | ||
| So the Kavanaugh thing really was kind of the, like did it seem obvious to you? | ||
| It seemed obvious to me, that's what it felt like, the way the reactions were. | ||
| It was totally obvious. | ||
| And I mean, I got caught up, I mean, I say it's obvious, | ||
| but I also got caught up as I always do in my sort of literal like, | ||
| but wait a second, what about Ted Kennedy or whatever? | ||
| When I should have been far more sophisticated and just said, yeah, what you just said, | ||
| which is of course, they're doing this 'cause they have to do it. | ||
| And this is kind of the logical apogee of. | ||
| Identity politics anyway, that no one is really human. | ||
| We're all just sort of component parts of a larger whole, of a group, and we have to act as a member of a group. | ||
| We can never act alone. | ||
| Our unique humanity cannot be acknowledged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, you must deal with this all the time. | |
| I mean, I'm like a straight white man, so like, you know, whatever. | ||
| I guess I'm acting according to type. | ||
| But if you're not, you know, so anyway, you know exactly what I'm talking about. | ||
| Yes, and I should have known that, of course. | ||
| But the point is, I don't think that most people buy that or want to buy it. | ||
| They don't want to live in that country where you're required by your DNA to act a certain way. | ||
| So what makes you different from a robot at that point? | ||
| And these are the exact same people who are now defending Elizabeth Warren, who could not be more fraudulent in what she's saying. | ||
| Have you had a Native American tribesman or a leader? | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| I mean, I have to say, I think that story for me has been a happy respite from all this heavy stuff, because it's just so hilarious how out of it Elizabeth Warren is. | ||
| But I do think there's a deep question at the bottom of it, not even at the bottom, at the very top of it, which is, Like, should your DNA determine your life? | ||
| And maybe I'm just too American or too Californian or something, but no, I don't think it should. | ||
| I don't think you're responsible for what people you never met did. | ||
| I think you're responsible for the decisions that you make. | ||
| I don't think we should hurt you because of your eye color or your height or your race. | ||
| I mean, like, if you start to accept that it's okay to inflict group punishment on groups, Then like, I mean, isn't that the whole lesson of the 20th century, that that's wrong, and that's a cul-de-sac that ends in bloodshed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So why are we accepting this? | ||
| And every day on TV, one of the main problems, last thing I'll say, but one of the main problems with our coverage is that it's brought to us by dumb people. | ||
| And I really think finance, the whole finance world, is partly to blame. | ||
| Forty years ago, Evan Thomas from Newsweek used to live on my street. | ||
| Evan Thomas is a very smart guy. | ||
| Went to Harvard. | ||
| You know, he's kind of liberal, whatever, but he's legitimately smart. | ||
| Smarter than I am. | ||
| He left Harvard and went to work at Newsweek because that was kind of an acceptable path. | ||
| Now, what percentage of Harvard seniors are going to Newsweek? | ||
| No, they're going into private equity. | ||
| So what you're left with, it's almost like medieval England where, you know, under primogeniture, the first son gets the estate and the second son has to, like, figure it out or become an army officer or a vicar or something. | ||
| It's like we're getting the dumb people. | ||
| We're getting the people who can't think for themselves are all of a sudden winding up as cable news anchors. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I do know what you mean. | ||
| It's sad! | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why I'm on YouTube with all the smart people of YouTube, you know what I mean? | |
| Listen man, you know the first video that I did in 2018 was that I thought this was gonna be the year of unusual alliances and I would say this is right up there because I consider this a great alliance and I think you're doing great work and all that stuff, not that you need me to tell you that. | ||
| It's really simple. | ||
| If you feel a moral obligation to scream at people in restaurants if you disagree with their political views, you're not on my side. | ||
| And if you don't, you are. | ||
| So it's like, do you know what I mean? | ||
| This is such an intense moment, it's thrown everything into stark relief. | ||
| I just care about aligning myself with people who believe in the individual and freedom of expression. | ||
| Period. | ||
| I hear you, brother. | ||
| And for more on Tucker, watch him on Tucker Carlson Tonight at 8 p.m. |
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