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Dec. 13, 2022 - Tulsi Gabbard Show
01:12:36
Tucker Carlson: life, death, power, the CIA & the end of journalism | The Tulsi Gabbard Show
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He told somebody that I was a Russian agent or something, and I was outraged, so I called him on the phone.
You know, I used bad language.
I was really mad.
And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, I just got that, you know, that's what the intel briefers told me, that you were working for Russia.
And I said, that's what the intel briefers told you?
You believe your f***ing intel briefers?
Like, how old are you, son?
You're being manipulated by your intel briefers.
Duh!
Now, Tucker Carlson is absolutely the undisputed king of cable news.
He hosts the most popular cable news show in the country, and despite the relentless smear campaigns and constant attempts to get him canceled, Tucker continues to attract the youngest and most politically diverse audience in cable news, often bringing in more Democrat viewers than even CNN or MSNBC. What does this tell you?
It turns out that the American people have an appetite for independent thinkers who speak their mind, who speak freely, whether you agree or disagree, and who have the courage to hold leaders accountable regardless of political party.
It's a rare thing, unfortunately.
This was the norm, though.
This is the thing that was expected of all journalists.
It's what made journalism a noble profession, that we could depend on those who were behind the camera or who were writing the articles in our newspapers to tell us the truth, to tell us what was really going on, to go after and hold accountable those in power, whether they be in government or in the private sector,
and make it so that we, the people, We could form our own opinions, could make informed decisions about who we wanted to vote for and who we wanted to fire from people who are in positions of power.
This is why, one of the reasons why our press was originally granted such robust constitutional protections, ensuring that we have a free press, was that they could do just that.
that, and they could actually provide this necessary check on balance on the power of those in Washington, of those who hold the power in this country, and to do so without fear of repercussion, without fear of retaliation, without fear that they would be canceled or without fear of retaliation, without fear that they would be canceled or lose They were necessary to serve as the watchful eye on our leaders and do all that they could to expose corruption, to hold them to account.
They would operate outside the system and be an entirely separate entity that works in the interest of the public, not those in power.
That is what is at the heart of what journalism should be and what it used to be.
But today, that's rarely the case.
It is hard to find that in journalism today.
Rather than operate outside the system, they've actually become the system.
They have become the very establishment they're supposed to be challenging.
Now, this could explain why there was a recent Gallup poll that showed only 7% of Americans have a quote-unquote great deal of trust and confidence in our news media.
7%.
Now, this cozy relationship between so-called journalists in the permanent Washington establishment, they have become the Washington establishment.
They are spending time in parties and building close friendships and relationships with politicians, bureaucrats, and the military-industrial complex.
This cozy relationship is what poses a dangerous threat to our democratic republic.
Because in order for us as voters, us as Americans to make informed decisions when we go to cast our votes, we have to be able to trust that real journalists are reporting the facts and telling us the whole story, allowing us to think critically and form our own views and opinions.
Rather than doing what we are seeing far too often today which is just pushing the propaganda or narrative that their friends in power want us to believe.
When the most powerful media organizations promote uniformity of thought and vilify and smear those who merely dare to ask questions What to speak of express opposition, it has an incredibly chilling effect on our freedom of speech, and it undermines a truly necessary free press.
Tucker Carlson has such a large, diverse audience, and he pisses so many people off in Washington from both political parties and across his own field in the media because he challenges all of them.
Nobody's safe.
He asks tough questions.
And he's one of the very few people in Washington or people in media who exposes the war machine and the military-industrial complex for what it really is.
What happens as a result?
Well, you can probably guess.
He often has a target on his back, with organizations like Media Matters and the New York Times and just about every other mainstream media organization working around the clock to try to get him canceled and taken off the air.
But it's not working so far.
He drives on every day as host of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News and Tucker Carlson Today on Fox Nation.
He's also a best-selling author, someone who has a lot to say on all of the issues of the day.
I can't read.
I'm 53. I can't...
What?
I can't do my...
I know.
I'm so old.
It's like shocking to me.
Stop.
I feel great, actually.
Well, that's what matters.
I do feel great.
That's literally what matters.
But I'm moving toward death at like pretty high speed.
And one of the first things to go is my sight.
And I can't text without my glasses on.
I've been feeling that way since I was very young, moving towards death at a rapid rate.
Yes, yes, because we are.
And the root of all wisdom is knowing that, you know?
Exactly, exactly.
And so many people are just afraid to talk about it, acknowledge it, as though it's some taboo subject.
No, I don't feel that way at all.
And I feel like people who are aware of death are way happier and lighter because they're not denying, you know, what's just biologically intrinsic.
Like, you can't get away from it, you know?
Exactly.
Because if you acknowledge the reality of death and that it's not just something like, okay, I'm going to set my clock, it's going to come at this time, at this place, at this age, then you realize how precious life is, right?
Yes, and you're not in control.
Time.
That's it.
The hubris starts to recede a little bit because you're like, actually, I can't control that.
Exactly.
And that's a good thing.
It's good to keep that knowledge ever present.
Oh, man.
I know in our conversation last night on your show, that was your final comment.
It's like, why are these people doing all these crazy things and this insanity of trying to be in control of what is true and biology and all this stuff?
It's totally right.
And you said it perfectly as they're trying to be God.
They think they are God.
And I think of the world as divided into two groups, not, you know, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, whatever.
No, it's people who think they're God and people who know they're not.
And those are like, those are the two categories in my head anyway.
Yeah.
I'm on one side.
I know I'm not God.
Yeah, yeah.
You and me both, buddy.
God, that's so true.
It also kind of lends to...
I mean, ultimately, that's the problem with all of the...
That is the truth about all of the problems that we face in society.
Yes.
Right there.
That says it all.
I completely agree.
I brood on this every day in my sauna.
I think about this stuff.
Yeah.
We...
You know, when I think about the...
A lot of the things you talk about, there's a lot of things that I've talked about, you know, when you look at drug addiction, you look at corruption in government, you look at, you know, the deep dissatisfaction of society, you look at, you know, the problems we have in mainstream media, the problems we have within leaders in just about every sector in our society, it all comes down to, I think, two things.
One is people think they're God, and they think they're in control.
Yes.
Yes.
And the other is a lack.
They're chasing all the wrong things, whether it's money or power or attention or so-called love, affirmation, fame, and just this desire to be liked.
And all of these things just come down to this refusal to even take a moment and ask the all-important question is, what is the purpose of my life?
No!
And what comes after?
I totally agree.
How could you miss that?
Exactly.
That is the problem, though.
100%.
I love that in a lot of your shows, both your Tucker Carlson Today and Tucker Carlson Tonight, you ask a lot of these questions that nobody else is asking.
People are like, oh my gosh, we have this epidemic of opioid addiction in this country.
What in the world are we going to do about it?
But they're not even asking the right questions.
Well, and the capacity for people, and me too, for sure, but to ignore the big things in favor of the minutiae It's just, it's limitless.
I mean, I remember when I was a magazine writer for a number of years in the 90s, and I would have a story due every Friday morning, just a magazine piece, you know, 2,500 words.
Not that hard, but sort of hard.
And so I would always stay up all night Thursday writing it.
I'd report it all week, write it Thursday night.
And then Friday morning, I'd just be like in a lather, you know, chain smoking in my basement, trying to get this thing filed.
My editors would be calling, oh, we need to get this to the printer.
You know, it was like, it was intense for me, you know, in my 20s.
And it was at that moment that I'd be like, you know, maybe I should rearrange my bookshelf by author or maybe by title.
I would become like completely obsessed with something unrelated to the big question, which is, are you going to finish the freaking magazine piece or not?
And it was a window into people's most basic defense mechanism, which is to look away from this thing.
They can't face it.
Or when I was a police reporter, you would interview these people, always the same story.
I'm standing, I'm coming out of Dillard's, you know, in downtown Little Rock.
And I hear, I thought there were fireworks or a car backfiring.
And it's like, no, it's not the 4th of July.
Cars don't backfire anymore.
If you hear that sound, it's gunfire.
And everyone knows that, but nobody in the moment can face the horrifying fact of gunfire.
So they always explain it away as something else.
And to me, that was a metaphor for the way people naturally are.
It's like, this isn't happening.
Clearly, there's some other explanation that's less sinister than what is obvious, but there isn't.
What's obviously happening is the thing that's happening.
It's really hard for people to metabolize that, I think.
You've been in journalism for what?
You said your 20s, right?
31 years.
I was 22. I'm 53. And you've worked across the spectrum of media outlets, both in print and on TV, ones that these days are very clearly kind of delineated based on their bias in one direction or another.
How have you seen, I guess I'm curious about how you've seen this really truly, what is a noble profession of journalism, of true journalism, a noble and necessary profession, especially in a democracy where we as people need to know the truth, need to know the facts, need to know that obvious thing that is right in front of us rather than all of these different distractions.
How have you seen things evolve?
Well, I mean, I don't think it's an overstatement to say they've collapsed.
I mean, my dad was also a journalist, so I grew up in it.
That's why I did it, because I really admired my father, and I thought he had the most interesting possible life, and he did.
And he was surrounded by the most interesting possible people, curious, literate people.
You know, it's great people, fun people.
And so I went into it, you know, with very high hopes.
And by the way, those have been exceeded.
I have had a really interesting life.
I've been, you know, everywhere and met everyone I wanted to meet, and I've just derived so much from it.
But the change has been complete.
I mean, it's just it's not the same business that it was when I got into it.
And the reason is really simple.
It was rotted from the core bipartisan politics, which is a virus.
I was always ideological.
I always had really strong beliefs about various things.
I was never shy about it.
I was also not very judgmental about people who disagreed with me because I didn't need to be because my political views were never the most important thing about me.
I never thought they were.
I had a family.
I've got religious faith.
I love my dogs.
I have a lot of hobbies.
I love to hunt and fish or whatever.
Those are also parts of who I am as they are for everybody.
People are multidimensional.
But over time, as religion kind of receded from people's lives, which it did, it was a pretty religious country in 1991 when I started.
It's a very secular country now.
Politics filled that void.
And so political affiliation, not ideological alignment at all, nothing to do with ideas, but just the team sport of partisan politics replaced religion.
And all of a sudden, it became impossible to be honest about anything because you don't want to betray your own team.
You know, and I remember thinking when I was a kid, not a kid, but in my 20s, and I was covering like Al Sharpton, who I secretly do kind of like.
I'll admit it because I think he's smart and funny and he's interesting.
But Al Sharpton is obviously a very corrupt guy, okay?
And I would always think like, how can he declare himself leader of black people in America?
Like, why doesn't anyone, because he's not, but why doesn't someone stand up like a black person and say, you're not my leader?
Like, what?
Who are you?
Who made you boss?
And I realized over time that a lot of African Americans in our country feel under attack.
That's real.
And so they didn't, nobody wanted to criticize Al Sharpton.
Like in private, they'd be like, oh, he's a buffoon.
Or, you know, what's with the hair?
You know what I mean?
The gold medallions.
But no one wanted to attack him in public because that would be betraying the team.
And I remember figuring this out in the 90s.
And now I see it on both sides.
You traveled with him, didn't you?
Did you travel with him overseas?
Oh yeah, extensively, yeah.
And I just should say again that I always had great affection for him and I never patronized him.
I never treated him like a lesser being like a lot of white liberals do.
Like, oh, here's my little black friend.
I just assessed him on his own terms and I think he liked me for that.
We disagreed, but we always got along.
But the point is, watching Al Sharpton never get denounced by people who didn't like him, but they felt like, oh, I can't betray the code of the team.
And thinking that's a really sad dynamic.
Now I see that universally.
Like, universally.
Like, nobody wants, like, the one thing you can't do is betray your side.
And first of all, that's a really divisive way to look at the world.
We're all Americans.
That should unite us.
It no longer does.
And second, it's just really small.
It's really small.
Like, my political team is my defining, you know, identity?
No!
I see this with, I mean, I grew up in a world, I grew up in an affluent world, coastal California, Southern California.
And there were a lot of gay people where I grew up.
I had someone in my family really close who was gay.
And, you know, gays were always different because they were gay.
But, again, this is, I'm 53, so this is a different country I'm describing, but being gay was not a political identity at all.
Like, you weren't, like, part of a political party because you were gay.
You were just gay, okay?
And, like, I knew right-wing gays and a number of right-wing gays, including my relative who's gay, very right-winged.
And then there were left-wing gays, but that's just because they're right-wing and left-wing people.
You wake up in the morning and all of a sudden, one of my producers, my head producer, a very close friend of mine, Justin Wells, who's gay, produces our show and is the best producer in television, I think widely acknowledged.
And this piece comes out yesterday, like, how dare he do that?
He's gay!
Well, actually, Justin and I agree on politics, or we couldn't, you know, run the show together if we didn't, right?
That'd be tough.
That'd be tough in your day-to-day planning sessions.
Completely!
So, but I'm reading this piece, and I'm like, actually, I had to stop reading because it made me too mad, but I was like, how Why do you assume that just because he's gay that he has a certain kind of politics?
Well, because that's part of the identity.
I just reject that whole way of thinking.
I think it dehumanizes people.
It reduces us to only part of ourselves.
It ignores the whole person.
It turns people into machines or widgets in a bin.
And I'm really opposed to the way of thinking.
Not just what people think, but how they think.
I don't like it.
And that's the underlying thing there, and how insulting that way of thinking actually is, and how pervasive it is.
As you're talking, I'm thinking of a number of examples.
One, first of all, when I refused to support Hillary Clinton back in 2016, I was like, so many people were like, Tulsi, how dare you?
You're a woman!
How dare you not support this woman?
She's gonna be the first female president this country's ever had, and how could you?
And my response to them always was, both privately and publicly, was, how dare you?
How dare you reduce me to my parts or my biology or my sex and think that I don't have a brain, like, I don't have a mind, I don't have my own views to be able to actually look at a person, male or female, and figure out, okay, well, is this person the best person to lead the country?
The answer was very clearly not in that case, but just how condescending and how offensive and insulting it really is.
Well, as always, it's the opposite of what they claim.
So if you cared about women, And I'm not bragging.
I don't think I'm unusual.
I actually like women.
You know, I've got three daughters and a wife.
I do.
I'm genuine.
That's the headlines, Tucker.
I think I didn't grow up with them.
And I'm like, maybe more than most men, I'm really interested in women.
But even if I didn't like women, whatever, it's nothing to do with my personal views.
I just think if you claim to like somebody, then the first thing you do is respect their personal autonomy.
Yeah.
You know, you don't try and force them to think something because you respect them, even with my own children.
Who are my children?
Like, if they think something different from what I think, well, I love them, so I allow them, I try to allow them space to have their own views because I, in order to really love them as people, I have to acknowledge that they are separate from me.
Yes.
They're not just accessories, they're not extensions of my ego, they're independent They're human beings.
And that mindset, if you love someone, you have to respect that person, and then you have to inevitably respect their autonomy.
That's intrinsic.
There is no love without that.
So if a woman stands up and says, I'm for all women, and that's why Tulsi Gabbard, as a woman, you have to believe this or else you're not really a woman.
What's the message there?
I hate you, right?
I mean, I'm treating you like an object.
That's exactly it.
You know, that love and that respect that you're talking about.
I know you spent some time out here in Hawaii when you were a kid.
That is aloha.
That is the meaning of aloha right there.
When you have aloha for someone, it is that recognition that we're all God's children.
We're all connected.
We're all family in that spiritual sense and therefore have respect and real love and care and compassion for one another.
And that truly exposes the hypocrisy.
I saw it when I ran for president where they're like, oh, yes, women of color, you know.
We're all about it and we want to advance equality and all this stuff.
But it was very clear very quickly that they were only interested in a certain woman of color who was following the rules and kind of towing the line of the mainstream political establishment.
Someone should write a book about what happened to you.
I watched it and it was like...
You didn't even, at least from an outsider's perspective, disagree that much.
You just had an opinion on foreign policy that was totally within the realm of reasonable and it was mainstream 10 years ago.
And you're like, no, actually, I kind of think this.
Any disobedience from you It drove them to literally hysteria.
They couldn't deal with any of it.
You didn't come out and like, I hate the Democratic Party.
No, I think maybe we should do this.
I think this is the wiser course.
They tolerated less dissent from you than they would have from, say, Pelosi.
You weren't allowed to disagree even a tiny, tiny bit.
It was crazy.
No, and that's really what it came down to was they knew throughout my eight years in Congress, you know, there was like all this fanfare when I got there before they got to know me.
And once they got to know me, and it actually started that first summer.
I was sworn in in January of 2021 in August of, I'm sorry, not 2021. What am I saying?
2013. Yeah.
I was sworn in January of 2013, and that August, as you'll remember, is when President Obama then said, hey, I'm going to go to Congress and get approval to go and bomb Syria and go to war, start another war.
And I was the first Democrat, and I don't know if I was ultimately the only one, but I was certainly the first Democrat to come out and say, this is a horrible idea.
This is going to undermine our national security.
This is going to Right, right.
It's how dare you because you're a Democrat from the same party as the president and you're from Hawaii, the same place where the president was born.
How dare you do such a thing as come out in opposition to him?
Which, once again, completely insulting, reducing these most critical and important decisions to this team sport, this identity politics, and not actually caring.
That was the whole reason why I ran for Congress in the first place, was to be in that exact position I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee questioning Secretary Kerry at the time to be in that position to have an influence on our foreign policy and prevent us from going into more of these catastrophic and counterproductive regime change wars.
They didn't care about any of that.
And that was what I saw in the presidential campaign as well, is they saw somebody who wasn't just going to go along to get along.
And it was foreign policy.
It was about bringing the Democratic Party back to its roots of being an open...
A big tent party that was inclusive, that stood up for civil liberties, and allowed people to come together and have discussions and debate on different issues.
I didn't support open borders.
I thought it was insane to allow for abortion up to birth and after birth, or for biological men to have access.
Anyway, there was a whole host of these insane...
issues and policies they were pushing forward that I was as I stood on the debate stage often I looked around I was like wait how come nobody's like saying this is just crazy and I tried at different times I was but they wouldn't let me talk which says more about them and what they're afraid of than than anything else.
So I always thought there is an economic and cultural division here that no one ever points out.
So a lot of Hawaii is not rich at all.
So you think of Hawaii as...
Most of Hawaii.
Right.
Yeah.
And very rural.
I mean, I don't need to tell you.
It's your state.
But it's a little surprising, I think, for mainland people when they go there who think, oh, it's all Waikiki or whatever.
Yeah.
No, at all.
And there are a lot of, and it's also extremely international and multiracial and like not everybody there is a sort of, you know, Columbia educated white liberal lawyer from Brookline.
Like it's very different culturally.
Yeah.
And you were also, by the way, one of the only members of Congress I've ever met to serve eight years and run for president and not get rich, which I always have thought was like one of the most interesting things about you, which I happen to know that that's true, but you didn't get rich from public service.
So that's really weird.
So you were coming at it from a much more, I mean, I hate to say it, but middle American, like normal perspective, like culturally different.
You know, you're Democrat, people said you were liberal, but you had different values from A very specific kind of liberal that you find in Washington.
I'm not being very articulate, but there's a big difference between those groups.
It's such a huge difference, and I think it goes back to that mentality of whose team are you on, as too many people are going there with...
Or maybe they go there with the right intentions, but quickly get sucked into that team sport mentality that really, I remember...
Even before we were sworn in, you know, you go in as a new member of Congress, you have freshman orientation.
And for the first week or so, you have, for us, there was 84 new members of Congress.
It was a large group of incoming new members.
And we had Democrats and Republicans.
We had our families.
You know, we're spending time together.
We're going to these policy briefings together, all sorts of things.
But then very quickly, after that first week or so, we were segregated.
And immediately went into, like, hey, Democrats, you've got this schedule.
Republicans, you have that schedule.
And the message from both respective parties was essentially that, like, okay, you are here to support the party.
You are here to make sure, you know, whether it's raising money or the legislation that you're putting forward.
The whole goal is to figure out how do we keep our power, get more power, and win more seats in the next election.
And even if that means, like, hey, I made it a point at every opportunity to find Republican partners to work with on legislation and work with on amendments and different issues so that we had a bipartisan offering to Congress, actually have a bipartisan solution, that was something that was discouraged from the outset.
Like, oh, if you're going to work with a Republican, don't work with one that's in a swing district or in a race that we really think we can win because you might actually make them look good and give them a success mark that they can put on their flyer, their TV ad or whatever.
And it was very, very revealing from the outset that we have these people in Washington, they don't give a shit actually about the American people.
No, that's right.
It's totally right.
And it is about the team sport.
It is about those big whiteboards on CNN or whatever of like, okay, we got this many points for this team, that many points on that team on election day.
And I had the chance to travel a little bit before this last election and campaign for some great Americans and had a chance to talk with voters.
And I brought this point up.
I wasn't telling him, hey, vote for one party or another party.
I'm saying vote for leaders who are committed to upholding the Constitution and who are going to Washington to work for you.
That's right.
And not get sucked into these team sports.
And people resoundingly share this same feeling that you and I are talking about, how sick and tired they are of this.
Well, they can see it.
Yeah.
Clearly.
Clearly.
I couldn't see it.
I mean, I was in D.C. from 1985 when I was in high school.
My dad moved there until 2020. So that's 35 years.
And during that whole time, I'd hear people say, well, Washington is so corrupt.
And I always think, it doesn't feel very corrupt to me.
I've been gone almost three years now.
I had dinner with a very close friend of mine at my house, not in Washington, on Sunday night.
And we were talking about another friend of ours who's a lobbyist, who's a great guy.
And he was talking about some ranch he's got in Montana.
He's got another ranch here.
And I was like, wow, you know...
How did he make all that money?
Like, a lot of money.
And I've got a good job, and I was like, wow, he makes a lot more money than I do.
And he's like, oh, he lobbies the farm bill.
And I was like, really?
You can make that much money lobbying?
And I was like, you know, my friend has also moved out of Washington after a lifetime there.
And I said, it's a really corrupt city.
He goes, I know.
I never realized that when I lived there.
It's like having an alcoholic spouse.
I've known a lot of people with alcoholic spouses and they don't realize they're living with an alcoholic until they get divorced or the person goes to rehab.
And all the friends are like, how'd you deal with that?
And he was drunk every day.
And I didn't really notice because you don't notice if it's right in your face.
Yes.
And that is exactly the case.
I get asked by people a lot, like, hey, do your former colleagues, do they realize, like, all of these crazy things that are happening?
Do they see what's wrong with, like, this insider trading happening in Congress?
Yeah, exactly.
And, like, the honest answer is most of the time, the answer is no.
No, no.
They don't see it.
No, I didn't see it.
Yeah, yeah.
The swamp.
Yeah.
Well, it really is.
And I remember when Trump started saying that, I was like, and I wanted to take it seriously, but it also felt like an attack on the culture that I lived in.
And I really loved Washington.
I'm not embarrassed to admit it.
I would, of course, never go there again, but I can't.
I'm not loved there.
But I did love the city without reservation for my whole life.
And I just couldn't understand why everyone else seemed to hate Washington.
From my perspective, everyone in Washington was smart, engaged, nice.
Everyone was nice.
When I lived there, it was pretty nonpartisan.
I was never a liberal.
My neighbors were liberals, but we had dinner all the time and no one ever brought up politics.
It was like a nice place to live.
I raised four kids there.
And it was only when I left that I was like, wow, it is just its own hermetically sealed biosphere.
You know, it's like it has no connection to the rest of the country.
It's amazing.
How do you think, I'm thinking back to some of those dinners that I went to, some of the people that I got to know there in the media, in the mainstream media.
How does it change?
How does it change from this completely failed venture where it's clicks and it's controversy and it's the things that grab headlines that seem to drive the news of the day and this team mentality where Most people on television and in print are not willing to say the truth if it means pissing off their friends in that media echo chamber or their friends in politics unless they're left out.
This thing with Biden's granddaughter's wedding...
I was laughing as I read all these pieces about, oh my gosh, you know, the New York Times, like, you know, we have to point out the small lies because small lies lead to big lies and just how incensed all these people in the media were.
I was like, come on, guys.
You perpetuate so many of these lies.
You're just pissed off because you weren't invited to the party by somebody who you thought was your friend.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
And get back to me when you apologize for the Iraq war.
Yes.
And until then, please don't lecture me about lying.
Yes.
But no, I totally agree.
I don't think it gets fixed.
I think it dies.
I mean, if you look at...
I worked at CNN for like maybe nine years.
Yeah.
And so I knew CNN while I hosted a show there for a long time.
And CNN has changed a lot.
Now they're trying to change again and become more what it was like when I worked there.
It's not working.
Nobody watches.
And it's collapsing.
I mean, they're laying off a huge percentage of the staff right now.
I feel sorry for those people.
But it's dying.
Who's exploding?
Well, you know, alternative media is no longer so alternative.
I mean, Matt Taibbi on Substack has a much bigger audience than primetime CNN. Glenn Greenwald on Rumble, you know, someone I despised 20 years ago.
Glenn Greenwald must have written 50 pieces attacking me when I worked at CNN. And now Glenn Greenwald is one of the people in media I respect most.
I think he's so honest.
You know, he lives in Brazil, so he's just like...
He has the necessary distance.
He can see things clearly.
Glenn Greenwald is, you know, one of the biggest draws on the internet.
It's so interesting, the people who are emerging as stars.
Russell Brand, who last time I checked was some kind of comedian or actor.
I'm not a big movie guy, so I wasn't that familiar with him.
You watch a Russell Brand video on YouTube, or now Rumble, and you're like, this guy is like So much smarter than anybody.
Oh, he's unbelievable.
And so I do think the truly thoughtful, deep, honest people are actually being rewarded.
It's just not on NBC News.
I bet you that your podcast has been up and running.
A little over a month, not that long.
Okay, so there's no doubt by the end of the year you'll have a way bigger audience than MSNBC, if you don't already.
I mean, that will happen, guaranteed.
And so that's kind of the answer.
The old things are dying, but new things are taking their place.
And they're better things, in my opinion.
Is it true, before you got into journalism, you were thinking about joining the CIA? No.
I actually just, I read that somewhere recently.
I didn't know that.
What was your interest?
What drove that?
Well, that's the world that I lived in.
I mean, we lived in Georgetown.
And this was, obviously, it was 10 years before 9-11.
It was 11 years, 1990. And there were a ton of former CIA officers in our neighborhood.
My father worked for the government.
And, you know, there are a lot of them in that world.
And CIA officers, from my perspective as a child, were like kind of dashing, physically brave intellectuals.
You know, some guy who'd studied classics at Yale who wound up in Beirut as station chief.
You know what I mean?
Right, right.
Leading this interesting life.
And I wanted an interesting life.
That's the main thing that I wanted.
Out of life.
I never was interested in money.
I had the privilege of not being interested in money because I didn't grow up in a family where we were worried about money.
So I just never really thought about money.
But I wanted an interesting life.
I didn't want a boring life.
And so I wanted, I was like, oh, CIA, they send you to foreign countries as a case officer.
And you do vaguely patriotic things, and I was patriotic, and I thought that would be great.
And I didn't think the CIA was a sinister force.
It never occurred to me that the CIA might be playing a role in domestic politics.
That was insane.
First of all, it's illegal.
Now, CIA is all over domestic politics, and they clearly took out Joe Kent in Washington State, I think, and a lot of other ways that they are tampering with our democracy.
But at the time, that was not the view.
That was not my view anyway.
Maybe Philippa G thought that, but I didn't.
So I took a series of assessment tests and ultimately they discovered through those tests what was true, which is I was completely, totally unsuited for the job.
I mean, there's nothing about my personality that would make a good case officer.
I can't keep a secret.
I never can't stop talking.
I hate authority.
I hate all bureaucratic institutions.
I cannot take instructions.
I'm a little bit insane.
Everything about me screamed, don't hire this guy.
And they thankfully didn't.
And so I was getting married and my father-in-law was like, you can't, correctly, he was like, you can't marry my daughter unless you have a job.
And I was 22. And my dad's like, you know, I didn't graduate high school and I went into journalism and he was very successful in journalism.
So he's like, they don't care.
And I had not done well in school at all.
I didn't have a college diploma.
So they were like, he's like, just go into journalism.
Okay.
So I did.
Wow.
Can you imagine just what would a different path your life would have taken?
Oh, and I would have been terrible at it.
I would have been terrible.
I tell my own kids the most important factor in happiness professionally is finding a job that matches who you are.
Who natively are.
Like we're always like, "Well, you need to work at this and get better." And that's true, but you cannot make up for inherent deficiencies.
Some things you're just not good at.
Like I'm very dyslexic.
I can't do math.
Can't parallel park.
Okay, fine.
So I'm not going to get a parallel parking job or become an accountant.
It wouldn't work.
And so do what you're naturally good at.
And being a case officer and the operations director at the CIA would have been...
I would have loved the adventure.
I would love living in Tunis, you know, but I wouldn't have been good at it at all.
Oh man, somebody should make a movie about that alternate life like a Tucker Carlson CIA operative in some foreign land.
That would be a really interesting movie, I think.
The worst spy ever.
I think the interesting thing about that initial interest, and I think at its core, whether it's the CIA or the FBI or the NSA, these other entities that at their core purpose is...
They're supposed to be performing an essential service to the country.
Like the CIA, for example, gathering intelligence and helping our leaders make the best informed decisions to serve the best interests of the country.
Well, you take that and then you look at kind of where things have gone wrong and how things have played out over years, but also like how they're playing out today and how you talked about on your show what happened with your, what text messages and emails being read or collected by the NSA. Would you talk a little bit about that and how,
what a chilling effect that has on our society and our democracy yeah i mean it's it's you know you don't have a democracy when you have powerful government spy agencies with multi-billion dollar black budgets turning their powers against the population they're supposed to be serving it's that simple so that's this is incompatible with with representative government and it's happening at scale so in my case not a complicated story i wanted to interview putin
this was before the Ukraine war because I always wanted to go to Russia.
I want to meet Putin.
He's a player in world affairs.
Why wouldn't I want to interview him?
That's my job.
So I didn't tell anybody, actually, including my company or my producers or whatever.
I reached out to a friend of mine who I thought might know somebody.
We had a bunch of exchanges about this, got in touch with the Russians.
And then I got a call last summer before last from one of my closest friends in Washington saying, hey, why don't you come up on Sunday in Washington?
I need to talk to you about something.
What is it?
Just come up.
So I actually flew to Washington from Maine to go see this friend who's like, I know someone at NSA, you know, not a low-level person at all, who secretly likes your show, who told me that you are trying to get a Putin interview and go to Russia?
I was like, nobody knew this.
Not one person knew this.
So the hair in my arms went up, and so I knew this was real, and they have your emails and your texts, and they're going to leak them to the media to discredit you as a Putin lover.
And I was rattled by, I mean, I'm not often rattled just because I've been doing this for so long, but that bothered me.
So I called a U.S. Senator, who I don't know very well, but for some reason I kind of trusted.
And I said, I just want to get this.
I just want to tell you this.
You're like my safety deposit box.
I don't know where this is going, but I want you to know.
And then I talked about it on TV. But, you know, it's a minor thing, but it's not just me.
It's not that minor, though.
In the end, I'm not having an affair.
I'm paying my taxes.
Like, I don't actually have much to hide.
But, you know, a lot of people have things to hide.
And by the way, in a free society, you're allowed to hide them.
There's no freedom without privacy.
Like, we don't have to tell everybody everything.
That's not required.
And when it is required, we're living in a totalitarian system.
So I believe in privacy.
There are members of Congress who are controlled by the intel agencies.
I'm not speculating on this.
You know, I lived there for 35 years.
I know this.
I had a very high-ranking, very high-ranking member of the House Intel Committee tell me at dinner at a restaurant in Washington when he'd been drinking, we got to talk about this.
And I said, oh, I'll text you.
He goes, I can't text.
And I said, why is that?
And he goes, well, because NSA reads my text.
And I said, NSA, wait, you're the head guy on the Intelligence Committee.
You're their boss.
You're providing oversight in our constitutional system.
He's like, yeah, but, you know, they're still spying at me.
First thing.
Second thing, Michael McCall, who is, you know, the...
Leader of, I would say, the neocons in the house, kind of low-key neocons, but neocons.
I got into an argument with him once last year on the phone.
He told somebody that I was a Russian agent or something, and I was outraged, so I called him on the phone.
And I, you know, I used bad language, I was really mad.
And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, I just got that, you know, that's what the intel briefers told me, that you were working for Russia.
And I said, that's what the intel briefers told you?
You believe your fucking intel briefers?
Like, how old are you, son?
You know, I'm from D.C. My dad was in this world.
Like, you're being manipulated by your intel briefers.
Duh!
And he's like, well, they had, you know, all kinds of corroborating evidence.
Did you see the evidence that I was a Russian agent?
I'm an American.
I was born here.
I've never lived anywhere else.
Pretty patriotic.
Like, what an outrageous thing to say.
He goes, well, they had, you know, I kind of, you know, I believe what they, basically, he tells me, I believe what they say.
And I told him like five times.
I probably shouldn't be repeating this, but I was thinking about this morning.
Because I just saw that McCall is now sending more money to Ukraine.
And it's like, why are you doing that?
Well, because you're controlled by the intel agencies.
That's why.
That is true.
And I'm just absolutely sick of it.
I'm sick of it.
I believe my intel briefers.
By the way, I don't think he's dumb enough to believe his intel briefers.
I don't think any of these people think they're not being manipulated.
They know they're being manipulated.
And there are pressure points that can be applied on people.
I mean, let's just be totally honest.
I'm not, you know, accusing anyone of anything specifically, but if you have a drinking problem or you're not, you know, you have a complicated personal life and a lot of people do, a lot of people do, particularly in D.C., You're vulnerable.
And that's just true.
And I, you know, I'm sure if this, I assume this is going to be public, people, oh, you're a conspiracy.
No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
I'm from there.
And I know how this works.
I spent, again, my whole life around it.
So that's real.
I'm not accusing them of killing Kennedy.
I'm just telling you there are members of Congress who are controlled by the intel agencies.
And that's a fact.
And I just think that that's completely incompatible with a free society or with a democracy.
And I don't know why nobody ever says it.
I think you just said why they never say it, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Chuck Schumer, I mean, that famous news clip where he said that quiet part out loud, right?
Where, you know, he was talking about, I think he was talking about Trump, wasn't he?
He was.
Where he was saying, you know, hey, he doesn't know who he's messing with when he's taking on the intelligence community because they can screw you, you know, seven ways till Sunday or something like that.
Which it definitely points to that bigger issue and that bigger problem.
But how could he say something like that?
I mean, how could you, as the head Democrat in the Senate, accept a system where the people are not in charge?
It is not a democracy.
Unelected spy agencies are controlling the outcome of domestic politics.
Like, you're okay with that?
That's a dictatorship.
I mean, I just think, and I couldn't have less regard for Chuck Schumer, but I know him and he's not stupid.
He's not stupid at all.
He's quite smart.
So he's never thought this through.
He has thought it through.
He accepts it as okay.
And, you know, we should never accept something like that, ever.
No.
And the fact that there was no response like yours to his statement on whatever show he was on when he made that statement says it all and how pervasive this is.
It's not only with those who are in Congress and some of the most powerful offices in the country, but how it also plays out with people in the media who just accept that power position.
And then they lecture us about democracy.
Democracy's at stake?
Really?
What is this democracy you speak of?
What does it look like?
Define that for me if you would.
What does it mean to have a democracy?
My understanding was that representative democracy is a system in which the population gets to govern their own country through their representatives.
You're describing a completely different system where they are disenfranchised and disempowered and then controlled by people who've never been elected by anybody.
So that is, you know, whatever you call that, that is the opposite of democracy.
That is not democracy.
So how dare you?
May those words burn on your lips next time you lecture me about democracy.
Exactly.
That actually gets, I guess I'm too literal, but it just gets me spun up thinking about that.
No, but you're speaking the truth about what is at the core, this underlying problem, and they're so careless in their actions and their rhetoric that shows they're either not thinking through what the consequences of their actions and words are,
And the impact that they have on our democracy and frankly on our national security, especially people like Chuck Schumer and Mike McCall and others, they're either not thinking through it or they really, really, really just don't care.
Yes, I think it's the latter.
I think it's the latter as well.
They're too busy thinking about themselves and how they can advance themselves and going back to this whole team sport and their own position or fame or thinking about how they're going to make money after they leave Congress than they are actually about the consequences of a decision.
And this thing with Russia, it is now the thing that they throw out any time there's someone that they disagree with.
I have been called all the same things that you have been called.
You certainly have, much more than I have been.
And, you know, Senator Mitt Romney, case in point, put out a tweet calling me a treasonous liar with no obviously saying that I was a traitor and a Russian asset or a puppet or whatever it was.
But having no evidence to back it up, we sent him a legal letter saying, hey, you've just accused me of a crime, I still serve in the U.S. Army Reserves, of a crime that is punishable by death under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, of committing treason, yet, and you're in a position of great power and influence, of committing treason, yet, and you're in a position of great power and influence, where if you really believe that was true, then there are things that you can do, actually, There are actions that you should take.
Of course, that's right.
If you think that a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Reserves has committed treason, also a former member of Congress who ran for president, well, like, what are you doing about it?
What are you doing about it?
Yeah, come arrest me.
Exactly.
Send the cops to my house.
Exactly.
Absolutely nothing.
Had no response, publicly or privately, to our legal letter demanding, hey, you've made this statement.
Back it up if you really meant it.
But that's just one of those many examples where they treat this so lightly and don't have any concern for the chilling effect that it has on our democracy, on us being able as people to say, hey, you know all those tens of billions of dollars you are taking out of our pockets and our wallets?
To send to Ukraine, like even just asking, where is this money going?
How is it advancing the interests of the United States?
How is it advancing our own national security interests?
Even asking those questions invites those smear attacks, not only on people like Rand Paul, who said, hey, maybe we should actually track this money.
What to speak of other people who are just trying to live their life.
live their lives and trying to struggle just to survive and being told, well, Hey, that the IRS is going to send over 87,000 new agents to go and comb through your taxes.
You know, everyday American or small business owner, But how dare you say that we need to hold Ukraine accountable for all this money that we're spending and sending them and actually know where every penny of that is going?
That they're stealing.
And by the way, today, Sam Bankman-Fried and President Zelensky are appearing as heroes in a New York Times symposium along with Janet Yellen, the woman probably most responsible, more responsible than the other for destroying our economy when she ran the Fed.
None of them are being treated as the criminals they are.
They're all being treated as moral voices.
It's upside down.
At a certain point, we need to We need to play our part in getting their grip off of our brains.
They control us because, on some level, we care what they think.
Speaking for myself, I just made a mental break with that.
I really don't.
I care about what sincere people who care about me think.
I care a lot about what they think.
Our producers, my wife, my children, and my neighbors.
But if someone is a liar, a demonstrated liar, who's unscrupulous and reckless, like, why would I care what that person thinks?
They are constantly demanding that I, a 53-year-old, law-abiding, tax-paying father of four, am required to hate this or that person.
And you know, I reserve that choice for myself as an adult.
I don't have to hate Vladimir Putin.
I'll decide whether I hate Vladimir Putin.
That's up to me.
You're not in control of my brain, right?
Or in control of my conscience.
This is a free country.
I am a free citizen.
And if I decide I hate Vladimir Putin, that's my choice.
If I decide I love Vladimir Putin, that's my choice too.
I'm not taking instructions from you anymore.
And I mean it.
I really have reached that point where I just don't care.
It seems like throughout your career in journalism and in news, you have been unafraid.
You've not played this game of picking sides and you've called out people, whether they were Republican candidates running for president or Democrat candidates running for president or other public figures.
Foreign policy, though, as you've pointed out so many times, is kind of that third rail, that thing, like, oh, how dare you challenge the foreign policy establishment and say, you know, all these regime change wars, bad.
Nuclear war with Russia, really fucking devastatingly bad and a threat to the American people and people all over the world.
Given you grew up in...
The establishment, the belly of the beast in Washington.
Was there a turning point for you?
Were you always kind of cynical of these things?
Or was there some kind of turning point in your experiences that made you say, well, hold on a second.
The things that I've heard and been exposed to and experienced, it's not actually what they've said it is.
That there's something deeper and bigger going on here.
I mean, I think it was a little bit like Hemingway's description of going broke, you know, gradually and then all at once.
So just, you know, spending my life there, I was never that impressed by the people I lived around.
I liked them a lot, but I didn't think they were smarter than me or wiser than me, because I know them, you know?
So I was never...
And I lived in a world where, like, everyone went to Harvard, you know?
My grandfather went to Yale.
He was an alcoholic.
Like, that didn't mean...
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm not impressed by...
By merit badges and never have been.
But I wasn't against the system at all.
Really what changed me was watching Trump in 2015. And I knew Trump before, because I'm in the media, so I'd known Trump, you know, not well, but I'd known him for, I don't know, 15 years before, right?
A long time.
And I was like, I thought he was kind of a buffoon.
I still think that sometimes.
But what changed my view wasn't Trump.
It was the reaction to Trump among my neighbors.
So Trump would say something in his, like, florid, orange way, you know, like, why are we funding NATO? Right?
And that was the one that got me.
I remember this.
And I never questioned NATO because I grew up during the Cold War.
And NATO was the bulwark against Soviet aggression into Western Europe.
And my dad, as I said, worked for the government.
So we were totally for NATO. Why wouldn't you be?
But that ended in August of 1991. I was on my honeymoon when the Soviet Union collapsed.
But we still had NATO in 2015. What was the point?
And I'd never thought about it in my life.
And Trump's like, why are we funding NATO? And I thought that was a really interesting question.
Okay, well, I don't know why.
What's the answer?
And my neighbors are like, shut up!
He must be killed!
It's like, okay, but maybe shut up, maybe he must be killed.
But what's the answer to the, like, why are we funding NATO? Is there a good reason?
Shut up!
They were so hysterical about obvious and basically common sense questions about the way things were working that that was a tell to me.
I was stunned by it, actually.
I was like, reasonable people who are acting out of honorable motives should be happy or at least willing to explain themselves.
Like, hey, Chelsea, why are you doing that?
If you're like, shut up!
Then that tells me like you're doing something wrong.
You may disagree, but here's why.
They couldn't do that on any topic.
Immigration policy.
I was already, I've never been like, my best friend's an immigrant.
I've never been against like immigrants or anything, but I was like, you should have control of your border.
And Trump, in his Trumpian way, was basically arguing for that.
They just couldn't deal with any questions about the way things were then operating.
And when I saw that, that just completely exploded my view of the system.
I was like, this system is a lot more fragile than I realized.
It's a lot less legitimate than I realized.
And then just the whole four years of Trump, and he'd say something that was truly insane, like, the intel agencies are spying on me.
And you're like, okay, the intel agencies are not spying on me.
You know what I mean?
Is the moon landing fake too?
And then you'd find out a year later, actually, the intel agencies were spying on him.
And then everyone would be like, well, they had to.
And you'd be like, wait, what?
First of all, he was right.
Second, I don't care who the president is.
You can't spy on the president because he works for you.
That's an attack on our system.
No, it's totally fine.
I would see stuff like that and I was just like, you know what, I'm out and we ultimately left the city.
And we still have a million friends.
I have some of my closest relatives still live there.
But I really became convinced that the system was not going to be enduring.
This can't go on.
You can have a system with some lying in it.
All systems do.
We all lie if we're pushed.
That's just who people are.
I get it.
I try not to be too judgmental about it.
But you can't have a system based on lying.
If the system is based on lying, that's a foundation of sand.
Like, it will not continue much longer.
And that's how I feel about our system.
And by system, I mean our political system, our financial system, And our foreign policy assumptions.
Like they are just, they're not rooted in reality.
They're not wise.
No one can defend them in clear, non-hysterical language.
They have to immediately go ad hominem.
Your career in the Congress is like the shining example of that.
Wait, I don't think it's a good idea to fund more bombing in Libya.
Shut up, Russian agent!
What?
Why don't you just explain to me?
Or fund terrorists in Syria.
Like the fact that I had to introduce legislation called the Stop Arming Terrorist Act.
I know.
It says it all.
But where was the person to say, Congressman, you just don't understand.
They're not terrorists.
Here's who they are.
Here's why we need to fund them.
I understand why you think they're terrorists or you're just mistaken.
You read the wrong website.
Here's what the facts are.
No one ever bothered to do that.
They just yelled at you.
And I know from having a lot of kids that that's a sign of deception.
I know just from being a human being.
If someone can't explain something and instead turns the rage on me, that's a cover Because I've called that person out for doing something he can't defend.
Like, duh!
This is life 101. And I just saw this all around me.
You know, why is the Federal Reserve doing this?
You know, on every level.
And, you know, really?
A man can become a woman, but a white can't become a black?
Like, what parts of our biology do we have control over and which don't we?
Shut up!
Racist!
It's like, what?
The whole thing just got so absurd.
And then it kept getting more absurd.
And then it got so absurd, which is where we are right now on the last day of November 2022, where it's just like we're all just waiting for it to implode.
Because everybody on all sides knows this is way too silly to continue.
Or in its current form, it either becomes truly totalitarian.
Remember, anyone who steps out of line is going to be involuntarily hospitalized with mental illness.
Right.
It becomes something different, but this cannot stand.
I think, you know, you and I certainly see that we have lived and are living through, like, kind of being in the world but not of the world, like seeing the world as it actually is.
I think more and more people in this country are actually seeing it.
But do you think that people who are in kind of the heart of the Republican establishment, the heart of the Democratic establishment, do you think that they see that this house of cards they've built is...
Is falling and this foundation of democracy is being eroded by their actions?
Do you think they see that reality?
I don't.
I think...
I mean, just as a gentleman...
That's a broad statement, I know, but...
Well, I think people feel more than they understand about everything, from love to foreign policy, politics to finance.
We just feel things.
And I'm not sure we ever understand anything very well, just in general.
So I don't think the people in charge of the current system understand a lot about themselves or the system they run, but they can feel that there's real change, there's real volatility in the air, and they're really afraid.
And that's why they're being so hysterical.
I mean, there's this amazing tape, which I think about all the time, of Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife Elena.
In 1990, they ran Romania, and they're really pretty brutal Stalinist-type dictators.
And there was a revolution there and they got put before a, you know, just a very hastily brought together tribunal and they were convicted of crimes and they were executed.
And there's video of them walking out to the courtyard about to be shot to death, which they were, like 10 seconds after the video was shot.
And as they're being dragged out, they're issuing orders to the people who are about to execute them.
They can't fully accept the fact that they have no power and that the old way is ending and a new way is coming.
So what's their gut reaction?
To double down on their efforts to control everything around them.
And as we said at the outset, and I think we agree on this on a deep level, the core mistake people make is thinking that they can control everything, not recognizing the limits of their own power and wisdom and foresight, ability to see into the future.
They don't recognize those limits in themselves.
And that's why they get way over their skis and destroy everything.
And so I think the people in charge are seized by hubris.
They think that they've got some complex plan for making the world better and themselves richer by defeating Putin.
Okay.
But it's not really working and they kind of feel it's not working and they also feel like the whole population hates them and they're right.
And so they're in this defensive crouch and that's why they're so hysterical about everything.
That's why they got so up in your face.
Like in a healthy system, even 20 years ago, you had a broad variety of Democrats and Republicans.
And there were always Democrats who were like, you know, I'm an anti-war Democrat.
Actually, there were a lot of them, as you know, we grew up with them.
But by the time you got there, they started to feel like, oh man, we're losing control.
You know, we don't have the legitimacy that comes with popular support.
No one's really in favor of bombing Syria, okay?
And so we can't allow dissent because we're too weak.
They know how weak they are.
I guess that's the point I'm making.
They know how weak they are.
And they're getting hysterical about it.
And that's...
I get it.
That's an understandable response.
It's a human response.
But it's the least wise thing you can do.
It really is.
Like, when your kids become teenagers, there's always this moment where you catch one smoking weed.
And you realize that, like, you've reached your limit as a parent.
Like, you didn't want them to smoke weed.
They did it anyway.
You're not really in control.
And, like, how do you respond?
Do you flip out and punch the kid in the face?
No.
I mean...
Not unless you want the kid to become a heroin addict and destroy your relationship with the kid.
You have to accept something about yourself, which is you're not fully in charge of this child anymore.
When the kid was five, you were.
The kid's 15, now you're not, and you have to accept that.
They can't accept that.
That is such a great analogy.
I'm thinking as you're talking about this in the responses that you and I and others have gotten.
Glenn Greenwald is amongst those who are immediately shouted down, silenced, censored with big tech or through the use of big tech, called names.
Smeared because of this refusal to just engage in a rational way and how it reveals their weakness and their insecurity.
Well, it also just shows that they have a product people don't want to buy.
If I've got a great product, I don't need to put a gun in your face and force you to purchase it.
You'll do it voluntarily.
But if I don't, then I have to force you to buy it.
What is it, after all of these years, 31 years working in this field, getting the kinds of attacks and smears that you get personally, but frankly also that have impacted your family over the years, I remember sitting with you and Susie at dinner one night and she made a comment about how hard it is to get you to go on vacation because you're so committed to what you're doing.
What is it that drives you in spite of all of these different challenges, both personal and professional, that you face?
Well, I mean, we have a happy life.
I mean, the center of our family is really strong, which is to say You know, my wife and I are happy with each other, and we're happy with our children.
I think they're happy with us.
We have poor dogs.
I think they're definitely happy with us.
And we have a lot of really close friends.
I mean, you definitely find out who your friends are.
And we have, like, real friends.
And we don't go out.
We don't go places that much.
And so we have people stay with us a lot.
You know, we always have houseguests.
Always have one this afternoon.
I think our relationships with other people are deep and deeply satisfying.
That's kind of everything right there.
I feel like I'm playing with house money.
I don't really care at this point.
My kids are all grown and they're thriving.
And I'm just not, you know, if I don't live to 80, no one's going to cry about it.
So I guess the only thing I would say that I have learned, so I've always thought that.
I've always thought, you know, the people around you in your immediate vicinity are the most important.
That's your whole life, is the people right there.
Your co-workers, your friends, your neighbors, the waitress at the restaurant.
If you gyp the waitress on a tip, I don't care how much you yap about effective altruism.
You're a phony.
Your duty, I think, as a humane person is to help the people right in your path.
I've always thought that.
Anyway, I've always thought that my views have not changed.
The one thing that really has changed in the way I live is I really try and succeed every day to have at least 20 minutes of silence.
I take a sauna every single day, seven days a week.
I love the sauna.
You know, I grew up taking saunas just because Scandinavian thing, but I also value it now, not just for its physical effects, but for the stillness and the calm, for the reflection and the prayer, and then nighttime reading.
You know, it's very hard to read books with the iPhone because there's always the demand of text.
I turned all my alerts off on the text.
When I want to text, I pick up my phone, it's done beeping or buzzing, and I can do my text, and that's great.
And I do hours a day of text, and that's fine.
It's great, actually, but that can't crowd out The quiet time and the time where I'm actually learning something new.
And so I'm pretty intentional about the books that I read.
My wife is a fanatical reader, and so she's always reading a book, so it's easier for me to join her in that, and I do.
But without that time to just think or just listen, I still don't know what's going on.
I'm still confused by what's happening in our world.
All the threads have not connected in my head.
I don't pretend to know what all of this really means or where it's going because I don't know.
But I would have no freaking clue if I didn't spend A little bit of time every day just not being distracted.
We're too distracted.
I speak for myself.
I am too distracted.
Too much stuff coming at me all the time.
And that is not the path to wisdom.
And if you're ever around someone who's wise, I don't mean smart.
Nobody remembers the quants.
Nobody cares how many details or facts you have.
What does it mean?
Where is it going?
What should I do?
What's my response?
You know, those are the questions that people care about, that I care about, I think.
And to answer those questions, we go to wise people.
And the one thing we know about wise people is they're not distracted.
They're wholly in the moment.
They're experiencing things.
They're allowing themselves to experience things and let those things settle.
So quiet, Fresh air, nature, those are prerequisites for wisdom, in my opinion.
And I've always known that, I guess, but just in the past five or six, seven years, I mean, I've really become more rigorous.
Most of my day I spend doing frivolous bullshit on my iPhone, but not all day.
Because if I did that, I mean, I would just be, you know, I would be at sea.
Yeah, that's a really powerful practice.
I've found that myself in my own life and in my own way.
That is the priority for me and how I start my day is creating the space for that solitude, for that prayer.
I don't do it in a sauna.
It's a lot of weirdo today!
No, it's not.
It's not at all.
I probably should.
I know it's really good for you.
But for me, it is what keeps me rooted in that spiritual foundation and provides me with that perspective to spend that alone time with God in prayer every morning.
Yes.
I love that.
You do it in the morning?
Do it in the morning.
You know, I try to take pockets of time throughout the day, but to start my day with that centering practice of meditation and prayer and reflection and just in the most raw way.
I love that.
Having that time has, I mean, it is essential, and it's throughout all of my years in Washington, spending eight years there, spending a couple of years out on a campaign trail, all these things you're talking about, the noise and the distraction and the pulls and the glitter and the this and the that,
all the things that are dangled before me and dangled before people who are running around in these circles, It has been and continues to be that practice that helps provide me with perspective and allows me to be able to listen and hear what is most important.
I don't know why nobody ever gives the advice to do that.
I don't think it takes...
It's not like it takes all day or something.
I mean, if you take...
In my case, 15, 20 minutes.
I usually sign it for 15 minutes.
I have one of those hourglass timers.
And sometimes I'll go 20. I like it pretty hot.
But anyway, that's all it takes.
That's all it takes.
And it makes all the difference.
And if I don't get that, I have trouble understanding what things mean.
I can't rise above the stuff that's right in my face.
All the stuff comes at you, and it's like a car crash.
You don't know what happened.
Yeah.
And it's in those times that I think bringing this conversation back full circle as we wrap up here is it provides us with the space and the opportunity to truly reflect on the most important questions of life.
Yes!
We started this conversation talking about death.
I didn't know we were on the air, by the way.
I had no idea you were recording that.
Okay, sorry.
We just hit record right away.
No, no, no.
I don't care.
My views on air and off air are identical.
I know.
That's what I love.
That's what I love.
I always love our conversations, but that really is...
That's what it comes down to, is the question of life.
And as we talk about all the things we talked about, you know, the problems with the media and the country and leadership in this country and the lack thereof, the lack of true leadership that's asking these most important questions like, what is my purpose in life, just as a person, as an individual, but then also, you know, those in positions of leadership, whether it be in government or the private sector, saying, What is best for society?
What is best for people?
And instead of measuring what's best based on what are the jobs numbers this month?
Or what is our GDP? Or what are the dollars?
How's the stock market doing?
That is exactly the opposite of a reflection of measuring what is a truly happy and fulfilled people.
And society in this country.
And just so many of these challenges and problems that we face across the board, we could start getting after real solutions if we all took that time and asked these questions.
What I loved about your political career, I was just reminded of as you were talking, is that you were never not Totally reasonable and thoughtful.
You never raised your voice.
You never said anything crazy.
You never said anything, even in my view, controversial.
It was always like humane and well-reasoned.
And their reaction to you was so unbelievably hysterical that you just, by your presence, smoked them out.
And it was sad to see it.
It was shocking.
It was legit shocking for me to see it.
But it was also so wonderfully clarifying and And I'm just being honest, that is a model that I've not been able to attain because I get pissed and start calling people names and making fun of people.
But what you do is way more effective because people, a certain sort of person is completely triggered by your decency and calmness.
There's nothing that exposes someone more than that.
Really?
Tulsi Gabbard makes you mad?
Like, why?
You know?
Aloha.
It's all about the aloha.
I love it.
Thank you, Tucker.
It's so awesome to talk to you, as always.
Oh, it was.
You know, on the air, off the air.
I appreciate you as a person.
And I appreciate the approach that you take and how you, you know, the conversations that you have with the platforms that you have.
These are the kinds of things that we need to be having in this country and more people who are willing to say what's true and what's real.
Thank you for having me.
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