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Sept. 12, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:03:40

Exposing Who the Media Is Really Trying to Protect | Tucker Carlson | MEDIA | Rubin Report

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dave rubin

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tucker carlson

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tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		The media stuff is so shocking to me because I, you know, I worked at CNN for years, and I hosted a couple shows there, several shows there, and then I, you know, I was the main anchor on MSNBC for four years.
		I got fired.
		But, you know, I still have a really good friend who will remain nameless who works there, just a wonderful person, really good guy.
		And I have a couple of friends at CNN, so not a ton, two.
		But anyway, but I know that world really, really well.
		And the biggest surprise for me in one sentence is how illiberal they are.
		I always imagine there are liberal networks.
		No, no, no.
		I'm liberal.
unidentified		Okay?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		In the sense that, like, I believe in the Enlightenment, and I believe in the Bill of Rights, and I think we do have rights.
		They are not liberals.
		They are defenders of the powerful, which is the much graver sin.
		Like you can have silly politics.
		I get it.
		I've had silly politics.
		Maybe I do now.
		People make mistakes.
		But defending the billionaire class, blaming everything on like working class white people who are like, you know, by far the most shafted people in America.
		Look at the suicide rate.
		Look at the death rate.
		I mean, it's like, it's measurable, but everything's their fault?
unidentified		(upbeat music)
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News
		and the author of the new book, "The Long Slide, 30 Years in American Journalism", Tucker Carlson.
		Welcome back to The Rubin Report.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for having me, Dave.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Tucker, you are not in your studio.
		You're not in a suit.
		You appear to be in some sort of secret bunker area with books and pictures.
		What's going on over there?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I'm in my barn, actually, to be totally honest, which is where I work.
		I live in a rural area in northern New England, and we have an old barn that we use for everything, basically, to store the boats.
		My wife has her Peloton, and we have our studio in it, and, you know, bunk beds for people.
		And so, yeah, I live in my barn.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you're kind of living the dream that you always wanted in a way.
		I mean, a couple of years ago, I've quoted this many times, quoted you actually many times.
		You walked into my house, opened the door to my garage, and I don't know if Fox News is gonna want me to say the exact thing you said, but you basically said, holy effing shit, you've done it.
		Meaning that I had a studio at home and I was able to run my operation.
		You've kind of expanded into that world while still maintaining the mainstream cred.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I've always believed that what matters is how you live.
		You know, what's your life like?
		What do you do when you wake up?
		What time do you wake up?
		Who do you wake up with?
		I mean, those are the things that define your life.
		And so when I saw how you lived, I thought, man, this guy is really fit.
		I mean, I know people who make a ton of money.
		who don't live anywhere near as well as you do.
		And I was just so impressed by that.
		And a confluence of events happened.
		And we actually live in the town that we've been in our whole lives.
		So it's not, we didn't move anywhere weird.
		This is where, you know, we had a house here always growing up, but why not just move there?
		And so we did, and it's been wonderful.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and you were dealing with some headaches living in some other places because, you know, obviously the media matters people and all the usual trolls and everything.
		They were sending people to your house and, you know, going at, I mean, literally like going after your wife and kids and all that.
		I know it's not fun to talk about that, but can you just talk about it a little bit, just sort of relative to, you're just trying to do what you think is right as a journalist and as a personality, and then how it affects the life and the people around you.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, it was just sad to see it happen.
		I moved to Washington as a kid.
		My dad worked for the federal government on the Cold War and doing pretty honorable things, I would say.
		I think that, anyway.
		And so I've lived in Washington essentially my whole adult life.
		I mean, since high school.
		And it's a bipartisan town.
		I mean, by definition, both parties are represented.
		Both parties live there.
		And as a result, there's been this permanent truce effectively for decades where you can live next to people you disagree with, but you don't talk about it at dinner parties.
		You can be friends anyway.
		And I love that environment.
		A lot of my friends had politics different from mine.
		And then in 2016, Trump was such a threat.
		They were so worried.
		Not that Trump would actually do anything, and he really didn't, as we know.
		But he said stuff, and he said obvious stuff, and they were so terrified that Trump was going to point out some really obvious things about the way things actually work, that they were completely threatened by him.
		I mean, really threatened by him.
		It was like a foreign power occupying the city, and the hatred, the bitterness.
		And I just kind of agreed with a lot of Trump's, I don't know, ideas may be a little strong, but themes.
		You know, like, when you run the government, you should always ask yourself, is this helping the people who live here, who voted for me, who pay for all of this, whose country it is?
		I really agree with that.
		I always have.
		So the division in the city between the overwhelming majority of people who saw Trump as this satanic figure and the tiny minority of us who were like, well, yeah, okay, Trump.
		Whatever, you know, he's got all these personal faults, got it.
		But he's making really good points.
		Like, what is the point of NATO?
		I mean, just pick one of a thousand examples.
		Why shouldn't we have a border wall?
		You know, what about all those people who died of fentanyl?
		Like, what's the answer?
		And all of a sudden it just became impossible to live there.
		And then, you know, I've never lived behind a gate or anything.
		We lived right on the street in the city.
		I raised my kids, my four kids there, and all of our dogs and all this stuff.
		And I felt like we were really part of the city.
		Next thing you know, people are showing up at the house and you can sort of see where this is going.
		You know, it's so threatening.
		You know, where does it end?
		You're going to wind up shooting somebody.
		And I don't want to do that.
		You know, I hate, but that's, that's where it's going, you know, because just living there was so provocative to them.
		Having them show up and threaten violence against my family was so threatening to me that it just, it wasn't going to end well.
		And I just thought, and our fourth child went off to boarding school.
		And we didn't have any kids at home.
		And so we're like, well, wait, you know, why don't we just move to where we already spend the summer?
		So we did.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So do you think that the people that you're talking about there that are sort of the permanent DC class and the swamp as Trump would call them, do you think it's a conscious decision that they're always existing to keep themselves in that power?
		Or is it just that you just get there and then before you know it, You're just in this thing and you like what's happening, so you just stay in that thing.
		So that's why he was the threat to it.
		And I would argue that in a weird way, you, now that Trump has stepped away, a lot of the hatred that was just always directed towards Trump is now directed more towards you because you're carrying the torch for some of those ideas.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I'm not...
		Totally aware of that.
		I have a kind of peripheral sense that I'm disliked by some people, but you know, I don't, I don't have a television.
		I don't, I don't go on the internet.
		I don't use social media.
unidentified		I'm pretty, pretty insulated from that stuff because you literally don't, I know you don't check Twitter, but you literally don't have a television.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Oh no, I've never had a, I've never had a TV.
		No, no, no.
		I just didn't, you know, I didn't grow up like that.
		My dad worked in TV when I was a kid, and he was pretty pro-reading, I would say.
		He was a militant reading person.
		So, yeah, we had a lot of enforced reading in our house.
		And so, yeah, that's how I grew up.
		But, yeah, but mostly, you know, I have a very close circle of friends, and I have a big family, and I'm really close to my wife and my producers, who I absolutely love.
		My executive producer, I'm really close to him.
		So I have a lot of people around me who will tell me the truth and do.
		Um, if they think I'm being a douche or I'm crossing some line or whatever, they'll just say it.
		I mean, they're not afraid.
		They're not afraid of me at all.
		So unfortunately.
		So I feel like I've got a pretty good series of backstops against going totally crazy.
		And so, and I really care about their opinion because these are people I love and respect.
		And so my view has always been my whole life.
		You know, I had a weird childhood which kind of changed my view on this, but fundamentally it was you should only care about the opinions of people who care about you and who have, you know, demonstrated loyalty and wisdom and an ongoing relationship.
		Why would you ever let strangers have control of your emotional state.
		Like, that's insane.
		And, you know, you hear people say that, but I think I'm in the rare category of people who mean it.
		So I would never go online and like Google myself.
		Why would I do that?
unidentified		No, I know you mean it. - You're like, what's the time?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, exactly.
		I know you mean it, because I think the first time we met in person, I asked you something about the hate and the Twitter mentions, and you're like, I don't have Twitter.
		Like, you know, it's Tucker Carlson on Twitter, but you're like, it's not, you know, I'm not the one checking it and tweeting this stuff.
		And that keeps you kind of insulated and safe and sane.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I have a huge number of people I talk to every day.
		I mean, I spend my whole life talking to people, mostly by text, but hundreds of people.
		And I try to clear my text every night.
		It was up till two in the morning.
		In front of the fire where I live, it's cold, on September 1st, with my dogs.
		And I'm up really late, banging out these texts, taking notes.
		So I speak to a ton of people, and not just people in my world, not just famous rich people, but a lot of random people.
		A waitress that I had in Big Sur, and I hope she's watching this, I know she's a fan of yours, years ago, I gave her my text for some reason.
		She and her husband are such thoughtful people.
		And she has been texting me ever since.
		And I swear, once a month... Two nights ago, I used one of her lines on the air.
		At least once a month, I'll run with a story idea she sends me.
		So I have a huge number of people that I correspond with.
		But I don't want to open it up to the mob.
		Because then I can't think clearly.
		And my whole job is...
		And I don't always pull it off, but I really try to think clearly, like, what is going on here?
		Ascend a little bit.
		Get higher.
		Look down.
		What are the outlines of this?
		And being involved in this, fuck you.
unidentified		Fuck you, too.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I don't like noise in my personal life.
		I like quiet, and I don't like noise in my work or intellectual life.
		I like to think.
		I like nature.
		I like hunting and fishing.
		I like to be outside.
		I don't want to sit in a room and read other people's hysteria.
		I don't think there's any upside to that at all.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Trust me, man, as a guy that just spent 30 days in a rainforest, basically, I completely feel that.
		And I've realized that my relationship with social media has to be a little bit different.
		And one of the last things that I remember before leaving in July was that you sort of got accosted while you were going fishing, basically, by some guy.
		And what was so interesting about it, and I say this about everything these days, it's not the incident itself.
		It's not the incident.
		It's the way the media reacts to the incident.
		So this guy's kind of getting in your face, and the way the whole media was like, yeah, yeah, well, Tucker's mean, so everyone should get in his face and be more mean.
		And it's like, man, that will lead us all to a very dark place.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, someone's gonna get shot.
		I mean, I'm serious.
		I mean, like, where do you think that ends?
		You physically confront people because you don't like their opinions about politics in front of their children?
		I mean, one of my kids was there.
		I was in a fly shop that I've gone to for many, many years, in a town that I've gone to for many years and that I really love.
		And it, gosh, it felt, I mean, this is so whiny and I try never to whine in public or private, but it, oh wow, it really felt like a violation.
		And I thought, well, I, you know, I'm never going here again, which was sad, but then, you know, there are other places to go, I guess.
		I live in a really beautiful place with just, I mean, untold miles of empty rivers and streams and lakes.
		And like, why am I in Montana anyway?
		stay in Maine, you know, but anyway, it just made me sad.
		But I also think it's very unwise to do that.
		I lived in DC for 35 years.
		I would see people all the time I disagreed with.
		You know, I've had dinner with Nancy Pelosi.
		I stood next to Barney Frank, I remember it at an event.
		I could, you know, that was my whole life.
		And the idea of screaming at someone because that person disagrees with you was like insane.
		This is what happens when you have a secular society at scale, which has never happened in human history.
		There's always a religion because people have a need for meaning.
		You take that away and people just replace it with political ideology, and that's what it's really about.
		The guy screaming at me felt that I was an apostate.
		I was attacking the one true faith or something.
		That's not how I see it.
		But it's how a lot of people do see it.
		And I think that we should be aware that the end point of this is violence.
		Like, that's where it's going.
		You know what I mean?
		And I hate that.
		I hate violence.
		I've seen it a lot, actually.
		I'm totally opposed to it.
		But the way that things have been set up, the way we communicate, the end point is violence.
		And I say that all the time on the air because I think people should know that.
		Let's pull back a little bit.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, which is so interesting because then the way they'll frame it is that you're throwing these firebombs and it's actually the reverse.
		It's a warning.
		But to your point on the secularism part, do you see where we're at right now as just sort of the end of a purely sort of secular America, that at the end of just a secular America, two plus two now equals five, boys or girls, we don't know which way is up, our history is no longer our history, that sort of without some sort of undergirding of religion or some subset of belief that this is what you get.
		And I really fear this because as you know, as someone that considered myself liberal my whole life, I wanted that thing to work, but I have come to the uncomfortable truth that it cannot work.
		It simply cannot work when it's purely secular.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		You know, you're always gonna have a religion and you can say, well, the crucifixion is kind of a ridiculous story.
		The Talmud is sort of absurd.
		Okay.
		But compared to what?
		You know what I mean?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, what do you got that's better?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Compared to the idea that men can get pregnant or 2 plus 2 equals 5?
		You're trading one superstition for another.
		And that's just the state of man.
		We're always going to have a belief in the transcendent because we're wired that way.
		But you need to think carefully about what God you worship, what religion you sign up for here.
		But we should be honest about it.
		The political discourse that I just described and that you live in the middle of every single day, is not about convincing people.
		It's not rational people bringing, you know, a set of facts to the conversation to try to persuade the other side to join them.
		Of course not.
		It's a religious work.
		That's exactly what it is.
		So we should just, we should name it.
		This is a cult, the mask stuff.
		You know, I won't be boring about it, but in one sentence, like we spent a year, first of all, I was really worried about COVID at the beginning.
		I think we were the first show on cable TV to note that COVID existed because were interested in the rest of the world,
		saw this in Central China, what is this?
		I thought, I believe the numbers.
		It's gonna be three, four, 5% mortality, really?
		You know, many millions would die?
		So it's not a question of not taking COVID seriously.
		If you take COVID seriously, you want solutions that are effective.
		I mean, that's how you give the virus the respect it deserves, is by responding to it rationally.
		And the mask stuff, and particularly things about vaccines too, but the mask stuff is so totally unmoored from any kind of research data at all.
		In fact, there's a lot of countervailing data that shows that it's counterproductive and bad.
		We keep saying this for like a year.
		We're like, well, no, there's this new study out of Vietnam, the biggest mass ever done.
		And everyone's like, yeah, shut up, mass denier.
		And I finally realized, because I'm not super smart, They don't care what the evidence is.
		No interest whatsoever.
		Masks are good.
		This is what we know.
		This is the catechism.
		And I'm like, okay, this isn't public health.
		This is theology.
		So I don't really know what to do with theology.
		That's why we don't talk about it.
		You know, I'm a WASP, so when I was a kid, it was like, no, you don't talk about religion in a public setting because it's too personal, right?
		Sex, religion, politics, off limits.
		So I just don't really have the tools to argue with people over religion, because my default setting is, you know, hey, everyone has their beliefs, like, I'm very liberal that way.
		The problem is, theirs is an evangelical religion.
		You know, it's seventh century Islam.
		It's convert or die.
		It's really, really aggressive.
unidentified		Whoa.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what do we do with that?
		I mean, I've spent a lot of time when I was off the grid thinking about just that, because I'm with you, that we sort of are in a cold civil war in that, and I don't want a civil war, obviously, and I don't want violence, just as you laid out, and I want this thing to work.
		But it seems to me you have a set of people that I would include people like us in, which is basically live and let live, and we can talk about where the government should be.
		But then we have this other set that want everything and they want everything from us and to tell us how to do everything.
		That's not a liberal arguing with a conservative.
		That's something much more dangerous because they are not going to stop.
		So what do we do with that, those of us that want to live freely?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		You know, I don't know.
		Like you, I haven't been in a treehouse for a month, I wish, but I have been brooding about it.
		My instinct, I think, is the same as everyone else's.
		Let's use the federal system to create zones of choice where people can decide how they want to live by moving there.
		You know, certain states will have these rules.
		Others will have another set of rules commensurate with the desires of the people they represent.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Like that's federal.
		Will that be enough as they're always trying to give the federal government more power
		in the presidency when it's their guy more power?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So that's kind of the problem.
		It's like, that's not their temperament at all.
		So, you know, I live in a super rural area where it's basically 1985 and people just, they don't spend a single second worrying about the sex lives of hipsters in Brooklyn.
		Like, it's not even a thing.
		It's like, if they're interested in Brooklyn, they'll go and check it out.
		But they're not.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Their sex lives aren't that great, from what I understand.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know they're all involuntarily celibate.
		That's my obsession.
		No one's having sex.
		Everyone's talking about sex.
		No one's doing it, which is so distressing to me.
		But anyway, whole separate topic.
		But here's my point.
		In Brooklyn, there are people laying awake at night, really agitated, on a sincere level, too.
		It's not just performative.
		I'm worried that there are people in my zip code who are, like, maintaining these attitudes that are unacceptable and must be stamped out.
		So it's, like, it's asymmetrical.
		Like, one side is evangelical, wants to convert the other side or kill them, and the other side is, like, kind of traditionally liberal, like, hey, you do your thing, I'll do mine.
		That's why I live here, you know?
		We don't have a police department in my town, obviously.
		That's because no one can afford it.
		Of course, also no dentist because no one can afford it.
		But it's also because unless you're doing something really outrageous, there's no need for the police.
		I will say this.
		I live in a state that votes kind of mixed.
		It's probably mostly Democrat, actually, but because it's sparsely populated and huge, That there really is this tolerance that I've never seen anywhere else.
		Like, they put up in a small town—and anyone who lives in a small town can, I think, confirm this, because it's true everywhere—they put up with levels of eccentricity of, like, truly weird behavior.
		In a way that liberals used to dream about.
		I mean, there are people in my town who are doing totally weird things, and people still see them as people.
		They're not reduced to their weirdest perversion or something.
		It's like, no, he's a good father, but he also exposes himself when the train goes by.
		You know what I mean?
		And actually, there literally was a person like that in my town, for real.
		And everyone loved him.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They could probably do something about a guy like that, but I get the broader point.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, but you see what I'm saying?
		It's like, but people here were so taught that you see the whole person.
		And I feel like in internet world, it's like, Oh, you said something mean about gays 15 years ago where you were insensitive to black people by current standards.
		Then like, it's done.
		You're it's over.
		Like no more job for you.
		And I'm not defending being mean to any group.
		Of course not.
		I'm just saying, That people are super complicated, and they have good days and bad days, and virtuous qualities and very ugly qualities, and they're all mixed together in people.
		That's who we are.
		But that's not acknowledged online, because people's statements are totally disaggregated from the person.
		And that's not true in a small town.
		You have to deal with people.
		We only have one store.
		It's a gas station.
		Everyone uses it every day.
		So you see people every day.
		So there are people in there who probably vote for candidates I hate, Doing weird shit, you know, when the lights are off, but I still know who they are!
		You know what I mean?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's three dimensions there.
		That's actually a perfect segue.
		And of course, I do wanna talk about the book too, so I promise you we'll get there.
		But that's actually a perfect segue to some of the tech stuff, because I think the first time I was on your show, which is a couple of years ago now, and we did it this way, not in person, but online, I was taking the more libertarian approach on the big tech stuff.
		I was basically like, and this is probably three years ago, and things have now been exposed, Which is why I've changed my opinion a bit, but I was basically like, they're private companies, let them do their thing, we'll build better things and all that.
		Now you know I'm building stuff, but...
		At this point, it seems to me, and your argument, I think, was a little more like, oh, well, there are antitrust things.
		There's something government's got to do.
		I don't know exactly what, but something.
		I've really come around to that, because to me, at this point, if we don't do anything, then we're all anarchists.
		Like, if the government doesn't exist to do something about how they're manipulating us, then what is the purpose at any level?
		Do you feel like you've been pretty, pretty right on it the entire time?
		And where are you now at this point?
		Because I know you don't love the administration.
		It's like, do you want them to have the power to break up these companies?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I haven't been right about anything the whole time.
		I mean, my views are constantly in flux.
		My views are utterly different.
		And, you know, I have the misfortune of having been on camera for 25 years.
		So, like, it's pretty easy to prove that my views today are not what they were.
		They're not even close.
		And I'm not ashamed of that in the slightest.
		I think people who pay attention change their minds when the evidence changes.
		Our conclusions always ought to be evidence-based.
		And so, I mean, I was a libertarian.
		I mean, I was a fellow at the Cato Institute.
		Unpaid.
		It's hard to even believe that.
		But, you know, it's a different country.
		Anyway, so my view currently is that democracy is incompatible with this level of concentrated power in the hands of a few people.
		So the promise of democracy is that everybody has power by virtue of their citizenship.
		We all have a hand in choosing our rulers.
		And that's what keeps the society calm because, you know, you don't have to storm the Bastille or hurt anybody because you know in two years or four years or six years you have a chance, a meaningful chance, if you get your neighbors involved to make a change.
		If people start to understand or believe that they don't have that power, they go crazy.
		They become really, really radical.
		That abets radicalism.
		And the tech power is so overwhelming.
		I mean, all information in English flows through one portal, Google.
		That, I mean, Google literally, and I'm not saying this as a partisan at all, just because somebody cares about democracy, prevented the Trump campaign from raising money with its Gmail lists in the last weeks of the campaign.
		I don't think that was ever reported.
		The Trump campaign was so stupid they never said anything about it.
		But someone told me, and I verified, that's true.
		So like, you don't have to believe, you know, Nutcake Sidney Powell to think, you know,
		that the voting machines were rigged or whatever.
		That right there is rigging.
		That's not a free and fair election.
		If one side can't raise money, what?
		Like that's never happened before.
		And I'm not even getting into the, you know, the rejiggering of search results,
		which are clearly designed to produce propaganda rather than what they promise,
		which is to produce the most popular results.
		No, it's the whole thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Tucker, they've got a word.
		They made up a word for it.
		It's unbiasing.
		That's what they do.
		They unbias when they rejigger.
unidentified		It's the whole thing.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		It's like, it's so beyond.
		And it's, I mean, first of all, it's driving people crazy.
		It's making people into like for real conspiracy nuts because there actually are conspiracies that we can prove for the first time in my lifetime, 52 years, A. B, it's making, People radical because it has destroyed their belief in the system.
		And C, it is totally incompatible with the system itself.
		In our system, the government has to be the most powerful entity in the country.
		Why?
		Because it's accountable to voters.
		So ultimately people were born here who are citizens of this country are supposed to be able to control it on the big questions.
		If all of those decisions are made, you know, if Google's more powerful than the federal government, which it is, then, and Google is not an American company, it's owned by shareholders from around the world, a sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia, or whatever, or China, then, like, who's in charge of the country?
		I mean, it raises, like, really deep questions like that.
		So, no, for our own survival, we have to, we have to break it up.
		Teddy Roosevelt, You know, who really was always been my favorite president.
		When I was a kid, I loved Teddy Roosevelt because he was such an extraordinary person.
		He actually hurt members of my family.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Um, you know, what do you mean?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, my mother's family was, had, uh, you know, owned the sugar trust.
		And, um, so he broke that up, you know, it was a, it was a monopoly on sugar and, uh, he, the Havemeyers and he broke it up and, um, you know, there, even when I was a kid, My great-grandmother, who was from that family, was like, whoa, Teddy Roosevelt, bad!
		But I always thought he was a cool guy.
		And so I liked him for those reasons.
		Now as I age, I realize what a wise man he was.
		He's just an extraordinary person.
		He believed in capitalism.
		He believed in democracy.
		He was actually deeply conservative.
		He didn't want radical change.
		There was massive global technological change.
		On his watch, it was called the Industrial Revolution, and it reached its kind of apex around 1900, 1901, when he became president, and it unleashed all kinds of, like, super volatile politics.
		And in fact, it culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution, October 1917, which enslaved half the world for 50 years.
		So, like, these technological changes have effects that, you know, are really, really deep.
		And Roosevelt could see this.
		It was anarchism, not communism at the time, but the anarchist movement was killing people, All over the country.
		In Chicago, Denver, you know, Butte, Montana, New York City.
		And Teddy Roosevelt's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to return some of this power, this political power to voters, or else the country, the systems will collapse and we're going to get some kind of dictatorship.
		And he was totally right.
		And so the trust busting that he engaged in was in fact You know, a last ditch effort to save the systems that he believed in, capitalism and democracy.
		So, you know, clearly, you know, that's what Trump should have done.
		You know, he wasn't serious enough to do that, unfortunately, and there were a lot of other problems, but I don't think he could see, I don't think Trump fully understood this, or, you know, I don't know.
		I'll let historians figure it out, but we kind of missed a chance to make these reforms, and I'm definitely worried about it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Definitely worried.
		That's the messed up part, because it's like, I'm with you, and then it's like, oh, do you want to give the Biden administration the chance to do this as if they won't make it worse?
		By the way, I'm guessing you covered this on your show, but you know they took Teddy Roosevelt's statue down at the Museum of Natural History in New York City because of something he said about Native Americans.
		And it's like, the planet that these people live on, I don't live on that planet, I don't think.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, Teddy, I mean, whatever.
		I can't even get into it.
		I actually have a signed, in my barn, a signed picture from Teddy Roosevelt to my great-grandfather over my sink.
		I really, I really admire it.
		But look, they don't know anything is the bottom line.
		Teddy Roosevelt lived with Indians.
		Teddy Roosevelt knew more about American Indians than any president in history.
		He literally lived with them.
		No, he wasn't a hater of American.
		These people never met an American Indian.
unidentified		I mean, the whole thing is, they're children.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And the thing about children, and I've got a ton of them, I can tell you, I was one once, is they have this moral certainty that's completely uninformed by experience.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		They don't know how fucked up they are personally because they never fail.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So it's very easy for a child to make swift and severe moral judgments about others in the way that when you're 52, it's like a little harder to judge because you know how screwed up you are, right?
		So this is why the Camarouge had 15-year-old soldiers.
		And that's the species of what we're seeing.
		Take down Teddy Roosevelt.
		He's white!
		Okay.
		Teddy Roosevelt was, like, in a meaningful way, the most progressive president, like, in the hundred-year span, in which he— Yeah.
		It's so stupid.
		I can't deal with it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, all right, we'll move on from that.
		One more thing and then the book.
		So I just wanna talk about the media landscape in general, because one of the things that I'm realizing now that I'm back on the grid is I spend so much of the time on my show just cleaning up lies.
		Just AOC said this, it's a lie.
		CNN said this, it's a lie.
		Kavanaugh, everything they said was a lie.
		Covington kids, all the stuff that you've covered, obviously.
		And I'm just a little curious, first off, like how bad you think really like the CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, WaPo machine is on one hand, but on the other hand, just like a little insider stuff on how you guys go about doing your show on a daily basis.
		Cause I know your producers a little bit and obviously I go on the show and I find that you do the show in a way where it's like, you're almost doing like a, It almost feels more like a book than a TV show, where it's like each day you're doing something and then you sort of pick up the next day and pick up the next day.
		And I'm trying to do something similar here so that everything doesn't feel like this disconnected lunacy that everyone else in.
		I'm just wondering a little bit about like the nuts and bolts about how you guys decide to do what you're gonna do.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm a writer, so that's how I think, you know, in terms of chapters and, you know, serials.
		This is, you know, giving you one installment today, another tomorrow.
		It's just how my brain works.
		But as a practical matter, you know, I wake up not too early, I hope, and with my wife and four dogs, I try and sit outside for a minute, get my head together, and then I write out a memo every morning for the whole staff on what I think the lead ought to be, who we should book, and we've got a whole pipe.
		We have some unbelievable people who work on the show, just really, really smart.
		I mean, really smart.
		And one of the people I talk to a lot, You know, we've had, if I can brag, the same staff for five years.
		I think we've lost one person, two people, and it's pretty big staff.
		And they're just, they're all in, they're so clever, they're so creative, they're so interesting, but one of our head tape guys, a guy called Tom Fox, the guy's just a freaking genius, and he really is my window into cable news.
		Like, the poor guy's very smart, but he watches all this cable news!
		So he's constantly texting me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		He drinks a lot, I'm guessing.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		What?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		He drinks a lot, I'm guessing.
unidentified		I don't, he seems pretty sober, but I mean, maybe he's on pills.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		But I like, you know, I sit there with my, you know, stupid glass on and my phone, and I'm looking, I'm like, I honestly can't believe, I cannot believe they're saying this.
		So basically by like 11.30 in the morning, you know, I've sketched out what I think the show should be.
		In my mind, it's always, because again, I was a reporter and a magazine writer.
		I think in terms of the lead, you know, what's, My editor used to say to me when I was a kid, get in the lead!
		They're like, but what's the lead?
		Like, how do you open it up?
		You know, what's the theme?
		And I try to, as just an exercise that I've always, you know, that I learned as a kid and I've always used, sum it up in a sentence.
		You know, what's it about?
		You know, our first segment usually goes 20, 25 minutes.
		What's it about?
		One sentence.
		It's not about eight things, it's about one thing.
		How would you summarize it?
		And that's a really helpful organizing principle.
		for putting it together.
		And then, you know, right around five o'clock, I try and take a sauna every day, because I think it's really important.
		As a Scandinavian, I'm true to my people.
		And I think about it in the sauna.
		Then I go out, I think about it more.
		And then I sit down around five, have a cup of coffee, and I start writing the lead.
		And so that's basically it.
		But the media stuff is so shocking to me, because I, you know, I worked at CNN for years.
		And I hosted a couple shows there, several shows there.
		And then I You know, I was the main anchor on MSNBC for four years.
		I got fired.
		But, you know, I still have a really good friend who will remain nameless who works there, just a wonderful person, really good guy.
		And I have a couple of friends at CNN, so not a ton, two.
		But anyway, but I know that world really, really well.
		And the biggest surprise for me in one sentence is how illiberal they are.
		I always imagined there were liberal networks.
		No, no, no.
		I'm liberal.
		Okay?
		In the sense that, like, I believe in the Enlightenment and I believe in the Bill of Rights and I think we do have rights.
		They are not liberals.
		They are defenders of the powerful, which is the much graver sin.
		Like, you can have silly politics.
		I get it.
		I've had silly politics.
		Maybe I do now.
		People make mistakes.
		But defending the billionaire class?
		Blaming everything on, like, working-class white people who are, like, you know, by far the most shafted people in America?
		Look at the suicide rate.
		Look at the death rate.
		I mean, it's like, it's measurable.
		But everything's their fault?
unidentified		It's insane.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		CNN ran a piece today saying, white supremacists are applauding the Taliban.
		And it's like, okay, you know, I don't even know what they're talking about.
		But leaving that aside, it's like, what are you really saying?
		You're saying the real problem with the withdrawal from Afghanistan was not terrible decisions that the Biden administration made or the Pentagon made, or that our entire foreign policy establishment, bipartisan, made for 20 years.
		No, the real problem is some guy in Alabama who's got unauthorized views.
		Maybe you should stop attacking these people because they are the weakest people in our society, and you're doing it in order to defend the shittiest people in our society, but also the richest and the most powerful.
		You're the praetorian guard for the most powerful people.
		How can you live with yourself?
		I mean that.
		That is so immoral.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what do you think the answer to that question is?
		When you have to cover some idiotic thing that Stelter said, or Cuomo, just these clown people, when you have to cover it, Right, or Don Lamon, as you call him.
		Like, what, how do you think they live with themselves at this point when they just lie again and again and we have the internet to expose the lies?
		If this isn't 20 years ago when you were on CNN.
unidentified		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And we couldn't expose things.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We can expose it now and they still do it.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's, I guess I would ask myself, like, I mean, I lie.
		If I'm really cornered or something, I lie.
		I really try not to.
		I try never to lie on TV.
		I just don't, you know, I don't like lying.
		I certainly do it, you know, out of weakness or whatever.
		But to systematically lie like that without asking yourself, like, why am I doing this?
		So if these people ask themselves, why am I doing this?
		You say, well, because I want to protect the system, because I really believe in the system.
		Okay, who's running the system?
		You're lying to defend Jeff Bezos?
		Like you're treating Bill Gates like some sort of moral leader?
		Are you kidding?
		How dare you do that?
		How dare you use your power to protect and guard the powerful even as you put your boot on the neck of the weakest piece?
		Some Catholic school kid from Kentucky?
		It's like a parody!
		Are you kidding?
		He's a child!
		And you're using your power to crush him, to wreck his life.
		That shocks me.
		And I have to say, there have been many times in the 25 years I've been in TV where I think, are we using this very substantial power that we have to put pictures on the screen to hurt weak people?
		And I have done that.
		Inadvertently over the years because I got carried away, but I really try not to.
		And everyone who works on our show is very aware of like the most basic rule, which is don't piss down.
		Don't attack people beneath you.
		If you're going to take a punch, make sure it's upward.
		Someone who's richer, stronger, more powerful in charge of more things than you are.
		Punch up.
		Like, that's just like a life rule.
		And people who punch down are the worst.
		They should have no power whatsoever, in my opinion.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And the irony is they're punching down while pretending they're doing the opposite, which is the grossest part.
		All right, wait, let's talk about the book, because I thought it was really interesting.
		So the book is basically a collection of essays that you've written over a couple of decades, over about 30 years.
		And there's a line right in the front that I thought was great, actually.
		You say, magazine journalism is worth remembering.
		And that you also then go on to say that, you know, some of the stuff in these pages you got right, some of the stuff you got wrong, some of it could have been written today and would be as important, some of it not.
		But magazine journalism is worth remembering.
		I thought that was a key line there because it seems really dead right now.
		Like when I read any of the things that 10 years ago were respectable, the Atlantic, just any of the things, like they're just all terrible now.
		Was there a moment that it shifted?
		Was it as pure as maybe we all thought it was at one point or any of that?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, the funny thing is I grew up thinking it was kind of shallow.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God, then we're really in trouble now.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I know.
		So my father was a magazine writer, actually, when I was born, and a successful one.
		And I remember him saying to me in this sort of acid way about a relative of ours who was smart.
		I said, that person's smart.
		My father goes, clever.
		She reads magazines.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The lowest of the low.
unidentified		Right.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Rather than books.
		Like, smart people, deep people read books because, as my father always told us, there is value in the process of reading a book.
		You have to follow a narrative for 300 pages.
		You have to pay attention to the same storyline as it unfolds and develops.
		And that's really good training for your brain, because you see things longitudinally.
		And you understand that sometimes the consequences of decisions aren't apparent for a very long time.
		Like, that's, you know, long stories are good.
		But, you know, I was a magazine writer and a book author, but really a magazine writer.
		And now that doesn't exist, really.
		And the reason it doesn't exist is because people can't read for 30 minutes at a time because their brains have been so totally changed by the iPhone.
		That they don't even have the ability to do it. It's so amazing to me
		So that's part of what's going on is the process of staring at this tiny screen for half your day or more
		Has changed the way you Metabolize information and
		I remember when Twitter first came out I was I made fun of it to everybody I knew like a hundred and forty or
		however number characters Like, that's the space with which we have to express the deepest truths in American society?
		Like, we're kind of fucked, actually.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		The medium really matters.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And now it's, like, totally normal.
		You know, the President of the United States was communicating his thoughts on Twitter, and now, you know, that's the forum.
		And so it's the medium itself.
		It's not simply that the business model went away.
		That's all true, of course.
		It was taken over by the worst people.
		Yeah, obviously.
		But it was that the American population became incapable of consuming this media because it was too long.
		That's so awful, if you think about it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		No, listen, as a guy that just took a month off the phone, I get it.
		I get it.
		I'm more patient now.
		Even when I opened up Twitter again, on a quick scroll, I was like, these people are all insane.
		It had nothing to do with whether I agreed or disagreed.
		It was just like this short burst thought war is just making us all crazy.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I know!
		And you know, the other thing is it's all transmit.
		That's the problem with it.
		And for me, that's the thing that I miss most, especially now that I'm a talk show host and I don't do any real reporting of the kind that I used to do, is that all I do is talk.
		All I do is express my views.
		And that imperils your soul after a pretty short period of time.
		Like, it's not good for you.
		And if you know any talk show hosts, like, they're unbearable.
		You know, I can think of a couple in particular.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm trying, man.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		You just cannot talk to them because they don't listen.
		They only talk.
		They're only on transmit, no receive.
		And the beauty of writing magazine stories was part of the deal, in fact, the essence of the deal, was going out and listening to people, shutting up, blending in, watching.
		Taking in other people's experiences and then thinking about them.
		And you have to have that in your life or else you just become, and men as they age, by the way, become less capable of listening and more insistent on talking all the time.
		And I'm already that way anyway.
		I mean, I just, I can't shut up.
		So for me, it's really, the job is really dangerous.
		Like I could wind up, and I've told my wife, I keep a 38 next to my bed my whole life.
		I always have a little, you know, two inch barrel, special, whatever.
		Just take it, headshot, end it.
		If I become like a lot of these people we both know in our business, just end it before I humiliate myself in front of the kids, before they don't want to be around me anymore because I can't shut up and listen.
		I do miss that.
		I really, really miss that, just going out and listening.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you also lead in the book.
		You talk a little bit about how the business has changed, because it's not just our brains have changed.
		So that's changed, you know, sort of long form journalism, but also the way the structures themselves have changed.
		And you juxtapose the way the publishing world treated Josh Hawley's book versus Hunter Biden's book.
		And I think it's a perfect example of almost everything that's wrong with things right now.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was so distressing for me.
		I mean, the book is published by Salmon & Schuster.
		It's the second book in a row I've written for them.
		It's the last I would ever write for them.
		I mean, it's such a disgusting company run by disgusting people.
		But I didn't fully appreciate that.
		I knew that.
		I knew that the guy who runs it, this guy John Karp, was dishonest and not super smart.
		But, you know, that goes for a lot of people in our world.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How do you really feel, Tucker?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Come on, open up.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, he's awful.
		He's absolutely awful.
		But I know, you know, whatever you do with awful people.
		I mean, you know, I can be awful, so I get it.
		I'm not as, I'm not that judgy in my personal life.
		But in January, right after, you know, January 7th, Simon Schuster issues a statement saying we're canceling Josh Hawley's book because he is an insurrectionist.
		So I was like, hmm, Josh Hawley seems kind of mild-mannered.
		So I look into it and he basically voted to, you know, stop the certification of the vote.
		Let's figure out if the vote was fair, whatever.
		Okay, you can agree or disagree.
		I wasn't calling for anyone to do that, in point of fact, just so you know.
		I'm not even sure I was for that, but he did it.
		Democrats did the same thing after the 2016 election, after the 2004 election.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm in Washington.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I know this.
		So I'm like, what made Josh Hawley special?
		Nothing really.
		Democrats were mad at Josh Hawley, so Simon & Schuster canceled his book, which had nothing to do with, it was on Big Tech, actually.
		So I was shocked by this.
		Publishers have to be for free speech.
		They have to.
		That's a prerequisite.
		They're the gatekeepers of our corporate intellectual life, our common intellectual life, and so they have to allow for a dialogue, a free exchange of ideas.
		And maybe on the way out margins, maybe they're not reprinting Mein Kampf every year, get it, but the strike zone has to be really, really wide.
		It really does.
		And it always has been.
		And so I was really shocked by this.
		So I was rabbit hunting in Maine, It was like a blizzard, and I'll never forget it.
		I was in my truck driving, and I got so pissed.
		I called John Carpenter, and he answered, and I was like, did you just cancel his book because you don't like his vote?
		He's like, well, and I said, you're disgusting.
		What you did is totally disgusting and wrong, and I feel implicated in it because I owe you this book.
		And I don't want to write a book for you, but I'm under contract to do it and you're holding me to the contract.
		I just want to get out of it.
		Oh, no, you must write the book.
		I said, well, if I'm going to write the book, I'm going to open it with the story of what you did.
		And I want to interview you and that idiot editor.
		So I did.
		I interviewed them on Zoom for an hour and I took notes and I printed the conversation and the intro to this book.
		And they come off as every bit as shallow and dumb and completely unprincipled as you would expect in your worst nightmare of what New York publishing is like.
		I was really shocked by it.
		And it was just sad.
		And so at that point, it kind of put them in a tough situation.
		They don't want to print a tax on them, of course, but they figured correctly that if they cancel a book about how they've canceled other people's books, probably a PR nightmare.
		So they had to go through with it.
		You know, they hate me more than they've ever hated anybody, but obviously I don't care.
		But I just felt a moral obligation to do this because they were sending me money to do this book, and I didn't want to be part of it at all.
		And I really did my best to get out of doing this book.
		They threatened to sue me.
		They really got up in my face about it.
		And so I was like, OK, fine.
		I'm going to write a book about you.
		And I did.
		And I dedicated it to John Karp, and what a worm he is.
		And I really mean that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you juxtapose that with the Hunter stuff.
		And the Hunter stuff was a little bit different, right?
		The publishing world and big tech and everybody, a little bit different when it came to Hunter.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Hunter Biden's illiterate.
		Like I know Hunter Biden really well.
		He was my neighbor.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, you talk about that, yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, and I always, I mean, I always liked him and, you know, I used to party way too much and I quit 19 years ago.
		So I'm the last person who's gonna judge an addiction.
		I still use nicotine product, Every waking hour.
		So you're not going to catch me being like, Oh, you're addicted.
		You know, I, I get it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		But, and, and there are a lot of things about Hunter I like and always did like, and I feel so bad for him.
		And he, anyway, it's a very complicated story, but I'm not anti Hunter Biden, but pretending that Hunter Biden can like write a book or has something useful to say, or even as an audience is like insulting to me.
		I know the answers to all those questions are no.
		So, They paid him millions of dollars.
		What are they doing?
		They're paying off the administration, of course, because they see the federal government as their real audience.
		They don't mind that they lost all the money on the Hunter Biden book.
		They made a statement that the people in charge, you know, are on the same team as they are.
		And I think that's so dark.
		It's unbelievable.
		And just to be totally clear, there are a lot of payoffs in American life.
		The society is increasingly corrupt.
		And of all the people who get payoffs, Hunter Biden's not the worst person.
		I know probably everyone's gonna be like, really, you're defending Hunter Biden?
		You know, there are a lot of bad people, and Hunter Biden's not a bad person.
		He's just screwed up, you know, whatever, done a lot of bad things.
		So I wasn't mad that they gave him the money.
		I'm just mad that they paid off a political regime.
		Like, that is not your job if you're a publisher.
		You're supposed to be brave.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		By the way, I mean, the publishing world was also giving, what, 5 million to now disgraced former, I didn't know it till yesterday, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for a book in the middle of a pandemic.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		You missed all that?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I missed all that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It was a good month, man, it was a good month.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		You know, what's so funny is, I mean, you've been doing this for a long time.
		August was always, like, I haven't taken a single day off in August.
		And that was always the time where, you know, I would always go on a fishing trip or whatever, you know, go to Europe or just because it's August, nothing happens.
		We make up stories.
		But all of a sudden, it's like you go away for August and you missed a ton.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, actually speaking of that, and then let's just do one more August-related thing then, and then we'll get back to the book.
		The Afghanistan stuff, obviously, I have to ask you a little bit about that, because I'm just catching up on it, literally, in the last 24 hours.
		It's sort of, from my perspective, impossible to tell exactly what happened from a media perspective, because it seems like they really are trying to figure out a way not to blame the administration, but this thing seems, Like, as bad a bungling as... Could it have been worse at this point?
		Like, what could have made this worse?
		This exit and now everything that's happening?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I don't... I can't see it.
		And I say that as someone who is passionately Passionately in favor of withdrawing troops because I didn't see the point.
		No one could ever explain what the mission was.
		And that's just a violation of my most basic rule of life, which is know why you're doing something.
		You know what I mean?
		Especially if people are dying and you're spending trillions to do it, what is it?
		And no one could answer.
		So I was totally for pulling out.
		But to, in order of severity, leave American citizens behind, move Tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans who did not work for the U.S.
		military, who aren't our allies, whose identities we don't know, into suburban America.
		And then three, to leave behind $90 billion worth of military equipment, an entire Air Force, 360,000 automatic battle rifles, heavy machine guns, Blackhawks, fixed wing.
		The Taliban now control the best armed military of its size in the world.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's unimaginable.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		It's unbelievable.
		And then you start learning.
		And I felt I was pretty well versed on Afghanistan.
		I mean, I first went over there in October of 2001 because I was a working journalist and that was my job.
		So I've sort of paid attention to Afghanistan for 20 years, not as deeply as I thought I was.
		However, because we learn all these things, it's like, was that really happening?
		The president of Afghanistan left the country without telling anyone.
		Some of his aides who were at lunch got back to the office and he was gone.
		He was on a flight to Tajikistan with tens of millions of U.S.
		currency.
		How did that happen?
		Who was this guy?
		Turns out, we installed as the president of Afghanistan a professor from Johns Hopkins Who, like, is the last person.
		I mean, it just tells you everything about our ruling class, which is they only talk to, believe, trust, promote people exactly like them.
		I don't think you speak Dari or Pashto, I'm assuming.
		But if I said, Dave Rubin, your job is to pick a leader of Afghanistan, you'd probably pick some pretty tough Pashtun warlord type who could make the provinces obey
		if you wanted a central government, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		He probably wouldn't have gone to John Hopkins.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How about that?
unidentified		Right.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So then it turns out that this guy's doll, he's got two kids, both with American passports.
		One is a, and I'm quoting, "visual artist in Brooklyn."
		And the other was a staffer for Pete Buttigieg's.
		It's only about self-love, self-worship.
		Wait a second, Afghanistan, the poorest country in the world
		on the other side, South Asia, other side of the globe, we pick a leader who is exactly like our leaders.
		And that's how you know that it's all about narcissism.
		Like it's only about self-love, self-worship.
		Like these people are incompetent because they're narcissists.
		Like they can't imagine that anybody but a Johns Hopkins professor of some like totally douchey discipline too, like social science.
		He's not even like a math professor.
		He's not even a real professor.
		And they made him president of Afghanistan?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because he thought it was- I think it was lesbian dance theory.
		I'll have to check that, but I think, yeah.
		So, but how bad do you, I mean, like how bad do you think this will be?
		I mean, it seems to me this is almost the type of thing if we had an honest media that could actually topple an administration.
		Like this seems like, and now the phone call where Biden basically was in advance trying to cover the whole thing up about how bad things had gotten there.
		Like this seems extraordinarily awful.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those moments and there are, you know, usually things change incrementally in a way that's only barely perceptible and you wake up and everything's different.
		You know, 2015, the middle class became the minority of the American population.
		No one really noticed.
		Six years later, it's like pretty obvious, okay, that we live in Brazil.
		This is one of those rare moments where the pivot point is like right in your face.
		It's crisp, it's dramatic, it's on television.
		Like, you know that nothing will be the same after this.
		You're just not exactly sure in what way it'll be different.
		But the obvious effects, of course, were just a radical diminishment of American power.
		You know, it's pretty clear the United States can't actually enforce its will, even on this stone-age country.
		It can't make anybody do what it wants them to do.
		It won't protect people it says it will protect.
		It can't even protect its own citizens because it doesn't even try.
		The people in charge are dumb.
		They don't know they're dumb.
		They have no actual skills.
		They're totally unaware of that.
		It's ripped the mask off.
		And I'm not personally smart enough to figure out all the ramifications of this, but they are absolutely profound.
		And you're going to see an acceleration of trends already in progress, which is like none of the 340 million people who live here really think the people in charge have any clue what they're doing.
		Nobody really believes the system is real.
		Nobody actually thinks we live in a representative democracy.
		Nobody really believes in American empire.
		It just makes everybody totally cynical, totally atomized.
		There is no kind of center of gravity in America.
		This is bad, man.
		I think it's really, really bad.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is that the most dangerous place that a country can be?
		That it only works if we believe that it works?
		And we sort of, it feels like we're in the show must go on version of democracy.
		Like, oh, it's just gotta go on.
		Cause it's gotta go on.
		Even though the president probably has dementia.
		Nobody's listening to anybody.
		We're unearthing and upending everything we ever believed in, but we gotta keep the show going.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		But everything works that way.
		I mean, everything.
		I mean, there's a huge corpus of literature on You know, the effective attitude on health.
		You know, there are cases, not a few, many cases that are documented in the medical literature of people who got better because they, like, decided to.
		So like, you know, mind over matter, that's a real thing.
		How you feel about something.
		And the opposite is also true.
		Anxiety can give you cancer.
		Like, terminal cancer.
		So how you feel about something determines what that thing is.
		And in the case of a huge, incredibly complex project like running a country this big, it's determinative.
		It makes all the difference.
		If people believe in it and it works, if they don't, it doesn't.
		And I'm just amazed, there are a lot of reasons why no one believes in the system anymore, but I'm just amazed by the recklessness of a ruling class that sets out intentionally to destroy, say, patriotism.
		And then what do you replace it with?
		We haven't replaced it with anything.
		So we kneel for the anthem.
		Okay, what's your idea?
		We don't have a racial majority, a religious majority, increasingly not even a meaningful linguistic majority.
		What is it that holds the country together?
		What do we all have in common?
		Countries don't hang together by accident.
		Centrifugal force is a physics principle.
		It breaks apart unless there's a reason for it to hold together, period.
		So what's ours?
		And the idea that they would systematically go through and destroy the last remaining connective tissue between Hundreds of millions of Americans, professional sports.
		Well, we're all into football.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Not anymore.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		That's a political category now.
		You know, we're all, we all believe in the military.
		Not anymore.
		They're lecturing us about white rage.
		Oh shit, I'm white.
		I guess I'm excluded from this.
		I mean, like, well, who thought of this?
		This is the single craziest thing our ruling class has done has been thematic.
		And the theme is destroy the connection between Americans.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's so interesting you're saying that, because since I just caught up on the Afghanistan thing, as I'm trying to piece it all together in a short amount of time, it feels to me almost like it's intentionally horrible.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Like if you were intentionally trying to not only destroy Afghanistan, but destroy our credibility, make us look like fools, make it look like no one's in charge, could you do it any better than you did?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, you couldn't.
		It actually just, it breaks my heart.
		You know, I don't know the answer, and I've asked a lot of really smart people who know, you know, much more about how the military works than I do, and some of them have recently been in Afghanistan.
		I probably asked five or six people like that, everyone I know like that, in the last week.
		This looks intentional to me.
		This looks like vandalism.
		This doesn't look like an accident.
		And all of them have said, you know, I'm not sure, but I think they really are that dumb.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Gosh, that's even scarier.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is scarier, but you also think like motive may not even matter as much as effect.
		I mean, the message, of course, to China and I mean, everybody I know had the same.
		I wish you had been, you were in You know, in your treehouse when this happened, but the moment that Kabul fell, I must have gotten five texts from smart people I know who had the exact same reaction, which is, man, if I lived in Taipei, I'd be offshoring my money right now and buying a condo in Santa Monica.
		Like, everybody had the same reaction.
		Taiwan is just screwed.
		And I think that's true.
		But that's just a small piece of the effect of this.
		I mean, rarely do empires short of, like, Full defeat in a war.
		And as abruptly as ours just did.
		Like, we're done.
		So what does that mean for us?
		I mean, in some ways, I never thought we were served by the American Empire, especially.
		I don't know how much we've gotten out of Puerto Rico and Guam and Afghanistan and all these other colonies that we call other things, but our colonies.
		You know, I don't think it's been good for us, actually.
		But it has been, I would say, on par good for the world.
		And I don't really know if you can be as powerful as we are, or thought we were, without having an empire.
		Is that even possible?
		I don't know.
		Maybe empire is just an inevitable stage once you get as rich as we have.
		These are all too deep for me.
		But I do know we're about to see massive change.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and then there's the, you know, Rome was an empire too.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's, I know you got to get back to that little, you know, highest rated cable, whatever thing you got there tonight, but I want to give you one chance to, is there one particular essay in here that you think would be like particularly poignant that we could just hit on for just a couple minutes?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's only one poignant essay in there and it was, it's the last one in the book and it was a piece that I've gone to this, well, I'll just say it, I live there now.
		the same house my whole life in Maine.
		And my four kids grew up there.
		And maybe 20 years ago, a little over 20 years ago, every September we'd go back to Washington.
		We spent the whole summer there.
		And of course still do.
		But I'd put all the kids in the truck and drive them home with the dogs.
		And it was always very sad.
		It was always sad.
		Summer's over.
		And one year I wrote an essay about it, probably around 2000.
		About how nothing in Maine ever changes.
		Like, it's the house that I grew up in, that my kids grew up in, and, you know, nothing changes.
		Like, there are things on the shelf that I put there in fifth grade, you know?
		I mean, it's just like, it doesn't change.
		But we change.
		And against its unchanging nature, we see our own changes.
		And it was funny, just this morning, so I write about in there, a workshop, a shed that we have.
		It's been built in the 1890s, and it's just like, it was a coal shed.
		It has a workshop, because things break, and I fix them, or whatever.
		And there are shelves along one wall, and my kids, when they were really little, my oldest is almost 27, they would put like little things that they found, weird colored rocks, or like a rusty anchor they found at the bottom of the water, or whatever, you know, broken fishing lures.
		And they put them there as children, that this was their treasure.
		And this morning I was in there fixing a line, a rope from a boat, melting the ends of nylon boat line.
		And I looked over and there's a rusty anchor that my almost 27-year-old daughter put there when she was like five.
unidentified		And I just felt, no!
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And it'll be there when I'm gone, and it'll probably be there, her grandchildren will see it.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, there's something, it's funny how much we change without perceiving it, but to have one constant in your life against which you can measure that change is really interesting and sad.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Tucker, I think you've proven the impossible that guys on cable news are also human beings.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's wild.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I'm trying, man, it's not easy!
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We're going to link to the book down below, of course, and I hope I get to see you and not through these pipes sometime soon, although I suspect I'm going to have to make it out to Maine before you make it out to L.A.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		That's definitely true.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		See you, man.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Thanks.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I appreciate it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about the media instead of nonstop yelling, check out our media playlist.
		And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out the full episode playlist.
		They're both right over here.

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