00:00:16.000It remains the greatest place on earth.
00:00:18.000Hey, I'm out of the office today, but I wanted you to hear a speech I just gave at the University of Austin about the death of our institutions, why that matters, why it's breaking apart our politics.
00:00:27.000I think it's pretty interesting and I think important stuff.
00:00:32.000First of all, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here at one of the most important institutions in America, University of Austin.
00:00:43.000It takes tremendous innovation, creativity, and courage to put together a brand new institution dedicated to the restoration of what a university was originally supposed to be.
00:00:53.000And the people at University of Austin are, I think, maybe the only people in the country who had the balls to do it, so good for them.
00:01:04.000Well, today, I want to talk a little bit.
00:01:05.000About why we seem to hate each other so much here in the United States.
00:01:10.000I want to talk about why we are obsessed with conspiracies and steeped in anger and apparently ready to spend large segments of our day fulminating on the internet about people we don't know on topics that we know nothing about.
00:01:26.000And the simple answer is the failure of our institutions.
00:01:29.000Trust in our institutions in the United States is at an all time low that is across the board.
00:01:33.000Trust in the media is at an all time low.
00:01:36.000Trust in church is at an all time low.
00:01:38.000Trust in the scientific establishment.
00:02:17.000And as we lose faith in all of those institutions to shape us, we are incapable of coming together anymore.
00:02:24.000See, you don't mistrust the people with whom you are oriented.
00:02:28.000Institutions tend to foster a common orientation.
00:02:31.000This is, of course, why Alexis de Tocqueville was such a big fan of them.
00:02:34.000It's why in Democracy in America, he made the suggestion that one of the things that made America so different from all other countries was the plethora of social institutions in which Americans were enmeshed.
00:02:45.000That in most other countries, people had formal institutions that they were forced to interact with, but in America, everybody was a member of a social institution or many social institutions, and that created this extraordinary social fabric that was durable, that allowed for innovation, that allowed for freedom.
00:03:00.000Because without trust, there really can't be freedom at all.
00:03:05.000If the institutions, which provide the shaping function that set the rules for our lives, the way we interact with the world, if those die, so too does the social fabric.
00:03:14.000And then when the social fabric dies, we stop.
00:03:17.000Attributing to each other decent motivation.
00:03:20.000Instead, we start engaging in what the philosopher Alastair McIntyre called emotivism this belief that everybody except for you is motivated by something nefarious.
00:03:29.000And so instead of having a political conversation, what you do is you just attribute a motive to the person's policy.
00:03:36.000So, just to give a quick example, last week, a couple weeks ago, I was speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, and there was a student who got up, and that student started asking about Obamacare.
00:03:46.000And started off the question, Talking about the differences in policy between Republicans and Democrats on healthcare.
00:03:52.000Now, it's a very complicated topic because obviously the United States has a very heavily regulated and subsidized system.
00:03:57.000Even if you wanted to unwind it, it's very difficult to do so.
00:04:03.000But what made the question, I think, sort of telling is that he finished the question by saying, Why do people who want to change the healthcare system want tens of thousands of people to die?
00:04:17.000That is the idea that the person who disagrees with you on policy does so not because they have an honest, differential assessment of the evidence or different premises from which they are working.
00:04:27.000Instead, that person disagrees with you because they actually want people to die.
00:04:32.000And that's what happens when you lack trust in the people around you.
00:04:35.000You've never actually said this, unless you're a very young child in my family, to other members of your family.
00:04:41.000My kids say it to each other, but that's because my kids are, you know, 12, 10, 6, 2, and in the womb.
00:04:48.000So it takes a second when you have that many.
00:04:52.000But unless you're a child, you shouldn't be attributing motivations to other people unless you have good evidence that their motivation is malign.
00:04:59.000But that's what we jump to when there is no trust.
00:06:07.000And then how do we mobilize some small number of facts and evidence, or maybe not even facts and evidence, in order to support that narrative?
00:06:15.000It's all reverse engineering of the factual reporting of the evidence that is presented.
00:06:20.000And the most egregious form of this, of course, in the social media sphere, is when you move from narrative to outright conspiracy theory, where you just jettison the evidence entirely and you just go with whatever is the purest form of narrative that gets you where you need to go.
00:06:33.000That's how you get to the idea, for example, that Erica Kirk must have been involved in the murder of her husband, right?
00:06:38.000It is factually unbased, it is insane, but there are an enormous number of people who believe it because for some other narrative reason they wish for it to be true.
00:06:47.000There's some manipulation of the American system by malign foreign powers, or the entire institution of TPUSA has been perverted from the inside.
00:06:55.000If you have a narrative in your head and evidence and fact no longer matter to you, then you can push any narrative using any conspiracy theory that you want.
00:07:04.000Churches used to be truth making institutions, spiritual truths, like baseline morality.
00:07:11.000The whole purpose of a church, the whole purpose of any religion. is to present eternal truths that stand the test of time.
00:07:17.000Now, of course, all churches, all synagogues, are going to stick and move with the application of those morals.
00:07:24.000There can be lots of arguments, and there always are, on the application of eternal morals to temporal principles.
00:07:30.000But the question of whether the church ought to pursue truth has sort of been supplanted by the idea that churches ought to do politics.
00:07:37.000And again, I don't believe that my rabbi shouldn't sign into politics when it's relevant, but the idea that churches have basically become, in many instances, sort of progressive bastions Where people go to eat pizza and play guitar rather than unite with some internal value, that is why people don't go to church anymore.
00:07:56.000The scientific establishment moved from evidence to narrative, from truth to narrative.
00:08:01.000We saw that most obviously during COVID.
00:08:03.000And the result of that was not a sort of moderate critique of science.
00:08:08.000The result for an enormous number of people was to completely discard science in favor of woo woo nonsense that has zero evidence to back it.
00:08:17.000Again, the slide from truth to narrative is almost invariably followed by a slide from narrative to conspiracism or nonsense.
00:08:25.000You can see that in the world of science very, very clearly.
00:08:28.000We were told a lot of lies about, for example, the efficacy of masks or the ability of vaccines to prevent transmission of the COVID virus.
00:08:37.000And the backlash to that was all in pursuit of a narrative.
00:08:40.000And the backlash to that was what if we don't do vaccines ever again?
00:09:07.000We watched the apotheosis during the sort of woke revolution that happened over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but it's been going on for a very long time.
00:09:15.000The first book that I ever wrote, I'm now middle aged.
00:09:16.000So when I started this, I was your age.
00:09:18.000When I started working in this field, I was 17.
00:09:20.000So I've been doing this now for 25 years because I'm now 42.
00:09:23.000The first book that I wrote was a book called Brainwashed How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth.
00:09:29.000Okay, and that book was all about liberal indoctrination on college campuses.
00:09:34.000I was at UCLA at the time, I was a junior when I wrote it.
00:09:37.000And not much has changed, except that it's gotten in many ways worse.
00:09:41.000And that happened because professors decided, back in the 1960s essentially, professors and administrators decided to cave to activist students because they did not have the courage of their own principles.
00:09:51.000And in doing so, they turned over the purpose of a university, which is emblazoned on pretty much all of the insignia of every major university, which they then all ignore.
00:10:02.000Where I went for law school, Harvard, the insignia says Veritas on it.
00:10:06.000The last time that Harvard met Veritas, it's been a century.
00:10:13.000The move from truth to we are going to engineer a population of discontented people who believe that the system must be turned on its ear, that is what college became.
00:10:22.000It was still good in some STEM areas, obviously, when it came to science and tech, but when it came to the liberal arts or to the idea that you were actually trying to generate good, productive citizens.
00:10:33.000Citizens, in the fullest sense of the word, people who are engaged in their community and who believed in the fundamental principles of their civilization, these universities decided to discard all of that.
00:10:42.000And so, naturally, people don't trust the universities anymore.
00:10:46.000And this was mirrored in a radical distrust of our government.
00:10:50.000See, the thing about the way the American government is built is that it was built to really pursue one fundamental principle above all.
00:10:56.000And it wasn't even freedom as much as epistemic humility.
00:10:59.000Because freedom is rooted in a certain level of epistemic humility.
00:11:02.000What I mean by that is the idea you might not be right.
00:11:05.000If you think you're always right, Then you might want to be a tyrant because you're always right.
00:11:13.000With my wife, I have to have a little bit of epistemic humility because mostly she's right and I'm wrong.
00:11:18.000And I'll save that one for tape, so I can show her later.
00:11:22.000But humility with regard to other people in your society, the idea that maybe they're right on occasion, maybe you're wrong on occasion, that again has to be rooted in trust of our fellow citizens.
00:11:32.000So if all of those truth making institutions that allowed us to orient towards something useful and good and powerful together, if those all go away, And all you're left with is government.
00:11:42.000And the fundamental basis of your government is respect for your fellow human beings, such that sometimes you might lose.
00:11:48.000And not only might you lose sometimes, you might have legitimately lost sometimes.
00:11:51.000And sometimes, even if you win, you don't get what you want because we have checks and balances in the United States government to prevent the system from swinging side to side radically.
00:12:00.000The whole point of the American government is to stop things from happening.
00:12:04.000That is legitimately the point of the American government.
00:12:08.000The entire thing is unless we have very broad agreement on something, it should not happen.
00:12:13.000That is why we have a bicameral legislature, it is why we have three branches of government.
00:12:18.000There are lots of other countries that don't have these systems.
00:12:20.000This is why we have a Federalist system in which the powers of the federal government are enumerated.
00:12:24.000And the powers of the state government are significantly broader.
00:12:26.000The whole idea is lots of people live lots of different kinds of lives.
00:12:30.000And you may not like that, but you might also be wrong.
00:12:33.000And so, in order for us to determine what right looks like, there better be a broad agreement on us, between all of us, to do that thing.
00:12:41.000And when that wears away, when that wears away, what we end up with when we hate each other is a battle to the death in the blood sport of politics.
00:12:50.000We get angry at the checks and balances because it's not possible that people who oppose me are right.
00:13:03.000I'm going to add states willy nilly to the United States Senate.
00:13:06.000And then I'm just going to run right over everybody.
00:13:10.000And by the way, the sentiment is not a pure left wing sentiment, although it's very, very often expressed at the top levels of the Democratic Party.
00:13:15.000It's also expressed at the top levels by some on the Republican side.
00:13:18.000Sometimes you'll hear it phrased in preemptive tones.
00:13:22.000Therefore, we must do it first, which is always a get out of jail free card.
00:13:26.000But the reality is that in the absence of rebuilding trust in the institutions, what you will end up with is a war of all against all on the governmental level.
00:13:38.000And you can see this with regard to how the government is now approaching a wide variety of issues, how Americans want things from the government they never used to want.
00:13:45.000Checks and balances, when you get rid of the fundamental epistemic humility of the government, give way to a centralized tyranny.
00:13:53.000Free markets, which are rooted in the idea of epistemic humility, the entire Marginal theory of value, the idea that was promoted by the Austrian school thinkers in economics.
00:14:05.000The basic idea that actually value is subjective at the margins.
00:14:09.000I value a glass of water differently than you value a glass of water, and I value a glass of water differently if I'm in the Sahara Desert than if I'm here in Austin, Texas.
00:14:17.000That basic idea suggests that there is no possibility of centralizing economics.
00:14:21.000The entire basis of free market economics, as Hayek would argue, is diffuse knowledge.
00:14:27.000That everyone in this room has a different idea of what things are worth.
00:14:31.000And what the price is, is the aggregate of what we all think that thing is worth.
00:14:36.000Well, what happens when we don't trust each other?
00:14:39.000And when we think some of us are screwing other of us?
00:14:41.000Then we say, well, what if there was a person right at the top who is deciding what's fair?
00:14:46.000And again, I wish this were only a left wing phenomenon.
00:14:48.000It is increasingly a right wing phenomenon.
00:14:50.000This idea that somehow free market capitalism is eroding the soul of the American people.
00:14:55.000Whenever people say that capitalism is what's responsible for the soul sickness in Americans, and you hear this from, I've seen this in.
00:15:03.000Places like Compact Magazine, for example.
00:15:06.000When you see this sort of argument, understand that trying to solve a sole problem with economics is like trying to change a baby diaper with a hammer.
00:15:19.000Economics and free market economics are about the generation of new and better products at a better and lower price.
00:15:26.000That is what economics are designed to do.
00:15:29.000This is what they do better than anything else because of the preservation of private property and because of the diffusion of knowledge.
00:15:35.000But if you don't trust your neighbor and you think your neighbor's screwing you, you might be very likely to say that maybe the government should just do what you want it to do.
00:15:42.000Grab that brass ring and do exactly what you want with that power.
00:15:47.000And in the realm of equal rights before law, which is of course what all freedom is predicated on and rooted in, the idea that all of us, we have different skills and abilities.0.99
00:15:56.000Some of us are tall and some of us are short, some are smart, some are stupid, right?0.77
00:16:00.000But we all have equal rights before the law.0.98
00:16:02.000Once we lose the trust in our institutions, you fall back on tribal solidarity, which is why you will see people saying that certain types of crimes from certain types of people should be excused.
00:16:12.000If they look like you or if they're part of your tribe, it's fine.
00:16:15.000As opposed to if they're part of the other tribe, in which case, the law.0.56
00:16:20.000Now, none of this is simply solved by jawing at one another.
00:16:24.000This is another one of these great internet myths that if we have debates with one another on these particular issues, that it actually solves the problem.
00:16:31.000There's this bizarre notion online, this sort of debate bro culture, that if you yell at each other a lot in short spurts, that somehow this solves the problem.
00:16:39.000And this is based on a fundamental misreading of John Stuart Mill.
00:16:41.000John Stuart Mill, of course, suggesting that liberty was the best pathway toward truth.
00:16:45.000Well, it's the best pathway except for all the others, meaning it's the worst pathway except for all the others, meaning there is no guarantee that at the end of a debate, The best side wins.
00:16:57.000In order for a solid debate, a solid discussion to take place, there must be a fundamental sharing of values, rules of the road, you might call them.
00:17:05.000Western civilization, there ought not be debate about fundamental propositions.
00:17:11.000Because if you are having to debate individual value, like the idea that individual human beings have individual worth, you are arguing with something outside the system.
00:17:21.000If you have to argue with somebody about the worthiness of truth, That is not an argument that can ever be won because truth itself is an assumed value.
00:17:31.000This is why, in the Declaration of Independence, when the founders say that there are certain rights that are self evident, they don't mean that they prove themselves.
00:17:39.000They mean that these are the fundamental building blocks of a society, and if you question them, the society crumbles.
00:17:51.000But one of the things that we've decided as a sort of internet culture is that if we debate the fundamental propositions of things like Private property, or free speech, or freedom of religion, that somehow things get wildly better.
00:18:05.000And I mean, I'd just like to point out that all of those things were actually come to, in a sort of Burkean sense, by human experience, not by logic.
00:18:12.000We did not argue ourselves into freedom of religion.
00:18:14.000We had a bunch of bloody wars, and then we decided, hey, you know what would be great?
00:18:27.000Private property was not the outgrowth of people arguing themselves into private property.
00:18:32.000It was the outgrowth of the experience of centuries of poverty and death and despair.
00:18:38.000And if you have to argue your way back into private property, this doesn't mean you can't and shouldn't defend, you should.
00:18:43.000But if the idea is that you can only win this debate on the fundamental basis of speaking it out, that's not right.
00:18:51.000Human experience has something to say about this as well, which is why it is so dangerous what is happening right now, because it takes centuries to build the institutions that we are taking minutes to destroy.
00:19:03.000A carefully cultivated moral culture that values truth and evidence and logic and moral decency, that actually protects free speech and property rights and equal rights under the law, is capable of restoring our institutions.
00:19:15.000We shouldn't be debating about the fundamental moral matters.
00:19:26.000Or that individual human beings have moral worth and that their autonomy has moral value.
00:19:30.000Those are the values that we begin with.
00:19:33.000That needs to be embodied in institutions.
00:19:35.000And that's why, bringing it all the way back to the beginning, that's why the University of Austin is really valuable.
00:19:40.000Because the University of Austin takes as its fundamental presuppositions the building blocks upon which you can actually erect a civilization, the most important fundamentals of that civilization.
00:19:51.000Now, they can give you all the justification for all those principles.
00:19:53.000If you read the literature, you can do it.
00:19:55.000But the point is that that is already there.
00:19:58.000It doesn't have to be erected de novo, it doesn't have to be remade from nothing.
00:20:03.000And so, the case for the University of Austin is that it is a brand new institution built on very old things, it is a brand new institution that is taking.
00:20:11.000The foundations that have been cast aside by all of these institutions.
00:20:16.000And it is taking those and it is building a new institution atop the foundations that have been discarded.
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00:21:37.000In our American experiment class, we learned about how Lincoln connected the Declaration of Independence to why slavery should be ended, or by the end of his arguments.
00:21:48.000Do you think it was a mistake to connect the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to law in the American imagination?
00:21:59.000I mean, what Lincoln said about the Declaration of Independence is he suggested that the Constitution was the frame of silver surrounding the apple of gold, the apple of gold being the Declaration.
00:22:10.000The basic idea that the Declaration is law, it's law in the sense that it is a guiding principle, but it's very hard to derive black letter law from the Declaration of Independence.
00:22:21.000Consilience with the Constitution was the case that Lincoln was making.
00:22:24.000And it is a really complicated legal case, frankly.
00:22:26.000I mean, it's very interesting to read the arguments and counter arguments leading up to the Civil War about the application of the Constitution to the issue of slavery.
00:22:34.000But the idea that what Lincoln was doing was reading the Constitution in light of the Declaration, that I think is correct.
00:22:39.000I think that the sort of hard divide that was made by the secessionists between the Declaration saying this is not law and the Constitution saying this is law, that's ideologically wrong and un American.0.80
00:22:50.000And so I think Lincoln was right to link the two.
00:22:54.000The mistake would be to de link in the other direction the declaration from the Constitution.
00:22:58.000Say the Constitution is not important, the principles of the declaration are what's important.
00:23:02.000That's how you end up with the idea that on the basis of vague pursuit of happiness standards, the government can do whatever it wants, as opposed to the actual limitations of that frame of silver.
00:23:41.000The biggest thing that's needed in government is for the federal government to go back to its constitutional boundaries, which of course is never going to happen, but it's a nice idea.
00:23:51.000The truth is that the state governments were given extraordinary powers under the federal constitution.
00:23:56.000The original amendments have nothing to do whatsoever with the states.
00:23:59.000So, for example, the First Amendment, which declares freedom of speech, says literally Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
00:24:05.000It does not say that states shall make no law abridging it.
00:24:08.000Now, there are mirror provisions in virtually every state constitution in the original colonies.
00:24:12.000But the idea that there's a strange sort of balance.
00:24:16.000I actually have a political philosophy book that I wrote that has not been published yet and may one day.
00:24:22.000But the basic thing that I talk about in that book is the idea that the place where you can do and it's appropriate to do the most legislation is the place where you need the least and vice versa.
00:24:32.000So in your local community, in your HOA, there are a lot of informal things that don't need to be codified because you know all of your neighbors and you know your family members, but that would also be the place where theoretically a lot of rules could theoretically apply because there's a lot of agreement.
00:24:44.000As you abstract up the chain, there should be fewer rules because there's less agreement.
00:24:49.000And instead, we seem to do the reverse.
00:24:50.000The idea being we don't need any rules at the local level, but we need lots of rules at the federal level.
00:24:55.000It's one of the reasons why we have such knockdown, dragout battles over the federal government.
00:25:01.000Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who, again, I was actually originally supportive when he ran for president in 2012, and then his campaign flamed out over his inability to name agencies.
00:25:10.000Governor Perry had, I thought, the best line of the campaign, which was he wanted to make Washington, D.C. irrelevant to your life.
00:25:22.000And instead, we spend every minute of every day caring who the president is, whether it's Democrat or Republican, whether he is, you know, comatose or whether he's tweeting, which seems to be the only two possible options for each party, variously.
00:26:28.000So I try not to get into Tucker's head, although I seem to take up an enormous amount of space in his head, Renfree.
00:26:37.000But when it comes to what Tucker has been doing, when I spoke about truth, making way for a narrative, making way for conspiracy, I think that's clearly what's happened with Tucker.
00:26:46.000I think that the first indicator that I thought that Tucker Carlson was going off the reservation.
00:26:51.000Was actually significantly earlier than anyone else.
00:26:54.000I've been saying that I think that Tucker's ideas are quite dangerous and that he's demagogic since I believe 2018, 2017, 2018.
00:27:02.000And there are a couple of early indicators.
00:27:04.000One of them, he did a monologue where he was just launching into an investor who had made the signal moral error, in his opinion, of buying a firm that was going out of business.
00:27:15.000He had bought the firm, it was in Wisconsin, some industrial firm, and he basically sold off the pieces that made it indebted, and then he had tried to relaunch the business or sell it.
00:27:23.000And this was a great sin, according to Tucker, and he used all sorts of terms like vulture capitalism to describe all of this because the idea is that if free markets don't work the way that Tucker Carlson wants them to work, then free markets are immoral and wrong and evil.
00:27:35.000About a year later, Tucker was on my show and he was talking about self driving cars.
00:27:40.000And I asked him whether he would outlaw self driving cars.
00:27:56.000Self driving cars will be significantly safer than human driven cars.
00:28:00.000And he said, You asked me on what grounds I would ban them, not what's true.
00:28:05.000And I, you know, that's kind of the whole story.
00:28:08.000So I think that Tucker Carlson is steeped in grievance.
00:28:11.000He believes that America is fundamentally bad in some of its founding principles.
00:28:14.000He thinks it has gone completely wrong.
00:28:16.000It is not a misnomer to say that he thinks pretty much everything America has done since World War II has been wrong, nefarious, and indeed evil.
00:28:25.000I mean, that's the kind of language that he uses.
00:28:27.000I think he feels himself to be part of an aggrieved group of people who have been ground underfoot by a nefarious coterie who may have certain types of last names.
00:28:37.000And while proclaiming, obviously, obviously, that he is not in any way discriminatory, of course.
00:28:47.000And so, again, without getting into why he is saying what he's saying, I will say any person who is now making the overt case that the world would be better off if the United States ceded power to Russia and China, which they think he is saying, overtly, right now, and that the president, he's making the case that the president of the United States is the Antichrist.
00:29:35.000I wanted to be here because of you and you presenting this to me.
00:29:40.000The preamble established the foundational terms of our country 250 years ago, laying out the self evident truths.
00:29:46.000The challenge for us today in 2026 is whether we'll respond to the concluding appeal in the Declaration and commit our, just as the Founding Fathers did, lives, fortune, sacred honor to the proposition that these truths remain self evident.
00:29:58.000And throughout time, as countries grow and got more diverse, Frederick Douglass did not share in that promise of 1776, but he believed in it more fervently than many who did.
00:30:11.000To recultivate a generation of American citizens to help want to pledge their lives, sacred and honor to the commitment of these self evident truths, that they remain self evident?
00:30:44.000It requires an extraordinary amount of ignorance about the way the rest of the world works, or indeed how all of human history has worked, in order to come up with the idea that America is somehow in outlier fashion terrible.
00:30:55.000America is in outlier fashion unbelievably wonderful.
00:30:59.000And there is a reason why literally billions of people would kill to get into the country.
00:31:04.000Because this is the greatest place on earth.
00:31:06.000It remains the greatest place on earth.
00:31:09.000And anybody who refuses to say that is lying.
00:31:15.000Now, there's a corollary to that, which I do think that we should do some tough.
00:31:19.000Talk to people who are not grateful for what they have.
00:31:24.000I think there are an enormous number of people who sit around, for lack of a better word, bitching about their lives and pretending they don't have the ability to rise or that bad decision making is somehow excused by the evils of the system.
00:31:36.000And that seems to me an aspect of weakness that needs to be called out at every turn.
00:31:40.000That doesn't mean there aren't terrible things that happen in life.
00:31:43.000It doesn't mean some people aren't unlucky.
00:31:44.000It doesn't mean that every decision is going to be met with success, even if it's a good decision.
00:31:47.000What it does mean is that if you make more right decisions than wrong in the United States, You have a better chance than anywhere on earth at any time in human history of succeeding than anyone.
00:31:58.000And so if you're failing, the first place you should be looking is in the mirror, not out the window.
00:32:13.000It's a pleasure to have you here and speak to you today.
00:32:17.000I wanted to ask that in a world that politics is so polarized right now, And at the end of the day, we're all humans, but we seem to be assigning these labels to our identities I am a Democrat, I am a Republican, and this is furthering us more and more and polarizing our society.
00:32:35.000I wanted to ask you, from everything that you've learned, what do you see as the common ground and the common vision that can reunite both extremes to furthering America, to furthering our institutions, and ultimately lead to less polarization, more collaboration between two sides when it's so polarized now?
00:32:52.000So the truth is that I think the vast majority of Americans actually want, still, when you're not online.
00:33:00.000I think the vast majority of Americans still want basically the same thing.
00:33:03.000They want to get married, they want to have kids, they want to have a job, they want to have a family, they want upward mobility for themselves and for their children, they want to go to a church where people care about them, they want to be part of a community where people care about them, and they want a country where their freedoms are still capable of being exercised.
00:33:17.000I think Democrats and Republicans want that in the main.
00:33:20.000And I think that this is why one of the things that I've said very often is I think that we should try to avoid words like they without mentioning the antecedent.
00:33:50.000When you're vague, it allows people to take it any way that you want, and it allows them to put themselves on your side or on the other side, and it creates artificial divisions.
00:33:58.000When you're very specific about the things that you're talking about, and this is why I try to be as meticulous as I can about my language on my show, for example, because of that, I think that you end up with a strange amount of bipartisanship.
00:34:10.000Because if you say to somebody, listen, here's what I want to do with the healthcare system, then you list 10 things.
00:34:14.000It may be that they agree with you on four of them.
00:34:26.000And that creates also, by the way, permission structures for violence.
00:34:28.000I think one of the reasons we've seen this massive uptick in violence in the United States on a political level is because we're creating these gigantic permission structures where we basically say there are a group of people out there.
00:34:54.000When you meet a human being, the first thing you tend not to ask them is listen, we all use shorthand, right?
00:34:58.000I mean, when somebody says they're a Democrat, okay, we understand they're probably pro choice, they're probably for higher taxes, they're probably left on social issues.
00:35:04.000Yeah, but we really should, if you have the time, you should dig below the label.
00:35:10.000Because sometimes what you'll find is that many of the reasons they think they're a Democrat are reasons they probably should not be voting that way.
00:35:16.000And that's a strange thing that happens in a lot of conversations, you'll notice.
00:35:20.000Somebody will say, What I really want is flourishing families.
00:35:22.000And you'll say, Okay, well, which policies best match that?
00:35:25.000Again, specificity allows you to get somewhere in a conversation.
00:35:36.000At UATX, it's an example of rebuilding the institution of education.
00:35:41.000Instead of repairing Harvard, instead people sought out to make their own institution of education.
00:35:47.000But there's a lot of other institutions that have failed us, like medicine or government, which are going to be a lot harder to rebuild, and instead we need to repair them.
00:35:54.000What are the avenues that we need to use to repair our institutions which have failed us?
00:35:59.000So, first of all, I think that some of them will actually be easier to replace than repair.
00:36:03.000So, I think in the institutions of medicine, for example, there's no reason why the AMA needs to be the charter organization for medicine, for example, or the AMA.
00:36:14.000Those institutions are eminently replaceable.
00:36:16.000It just takes some courage and some solidarity in order to make that happen.
00:36:19.000And there are, in fact, competing organizations in that space.
00:36:21.000Again, the private sphere, it's a lot easier to do this.
00:36:24.000When it comes to the government, much, much more difficult.
00:36:27.000And the reason that it's much more difficult than the government is because politicians make bank from lying to you.
00:36:31.000And again, I think most of the politicians that I know are not willfully trying to lie, but I think that the way that most people get elected is not by telling you, I can't solve your problems, you can solve your problems.
00:36:42.000It also, by the way, happens to be the only true electoral pitch.
00:36:46.000The vast majority of problems in your life are solvable by you.
00:36:49.000And if you're looking to government to solve those problems, you're looking to the wrong place.
00:36:52.000The best pitch would be something like, I can get government out of the way so you can solve your own problems.
00:36:58.000That would be the best electoral pitch.
00:36:59.000But politicians, that's very likely to be defeated in many cases by somebody who's going to say, no, no, no, you sit back, I'll take care of it for you.
00:37:07.000Now, I think that at a certain point, the American people are going to get tired of people telling them they're going to fix it.
00:37:11.000What we seem to be doing right now, politically, is swiveling between parties telling you that only they can fix.
00:37:19.000I love President Trump for a lot of reasons.
00:37:20.000There are a lot of things he does that are really, really good.
00:37:22.000But I will say that President Trump's approach to government, which is, I'm going to fix it for you, at least rhetorically, I think is wrong.
00:37:28.000I don't think it's his job to fix the economy for me.
00:37:31.000So whenever I hear presidents say, I'm creating jobs, you're not creating jobs.
00:37:42.000It's private entrepreneurs and markets that are creating those jobs.
00:37:45.000So it's going to take an awakening on the behalf of the American people.
00:37:48.000I think the most likely scenario, honestly, Is the federal government keeps growing and growing and growing.
00:37:52.000People keep moving down to places like Texas, to places like Florida.
00:37:55.000You end up with a massive divide in the country politically between blue states, which get bluer, and red states, which get redder.
00:38:00.000And then probably the impossibility of governing a country as divided as that means that there has to be a kind of renewed baseline federal redistribution of power back down to the state level just as a solve.
00:38:14.000Which, by the way, wouldn't be the craziest thing.
00:38:15.000I mean, it's kind of funny that now we think of, oh, when the United States was founded, everybody was unified.
00:38:19.000Nobody thought of themselves as an American at the beginning.
00:38:22.000If you go back and you read the way that all the founders talked about themselves, they talked about themselves as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, as a Bostonian.
00:38:28.000They talked about themselves as the state that they were from, which is why the South referred to the Civil War as the war between the states.
00:38:35.000It wasn't that we are Confederates and they are Unionists, it was a war between states.
00:38:38.000And so the sort of grand federalization scheme or nationalization scheme in politics will have to, I think it will be naturally reversed because it's unlivable.
00:38:53.000Howdy, my name is Noah, and I'm very excited to.
00:39:04.000So, one of the most important things that you have is that you always say you go approach things with facts and logic.
00:39:13.000What I'm curious is there are oftentimes really huge contexts to debates.
00:39:18.000So, how do you know when you've gotten to what's important, like you've gotten enough context to what's important, and that you're not being influenced by your own biases?
00:39:26.000So, I think we're all influenced by our own biases, obviously.
00:39:30.000I think that you have to have a good feedback loop in terms of people who are going to check you on those and tell you when you're wrong.
00:39:35.000And that's something you should have just in your personal life, let alone your political life.
00:39:39.000People who will tell you the truth about things, even when they're hard, and you have to cultivate people who care about you so it's coming from a good place.
00:39:46.000It's the way to stay sane, it's the way to have a good life, let alone a sort of good political outlook.
00:39:51.000Obviously, when it comes to cultivating the proper context for things, the best thing that you can do is read and Truly.
00:40:08.000But in a lot of other places, they've gone totally out of fashion.
00:40:10.000You can only have context when you know a broader context.
00:40:13.000You can only have broader context when you actually know a broad panoply of things, and usually you should read an entire book to even get one look at that.
00:40:21.000Like, what I do for a living is I talk about an enormous number of topics, okay?
00:40:23.000There are experts on those topics who are more expert than I in pretty much all of those fields.
00:40:28.000What makes you an expert in the public commentariat space in politics is you read two books on a thing.
00:40:35.000Because most Americans have read zero books on a thing, right?
00:40:38.000And the ones who are fairly informed have read one book on a thing.
00:40:41.000So, if you've read two books on a thing, this makes you so much more knowledgeable than the vast majority of the population.
00:40:46.000I mean, honestly, if I'm going to talk about a thing and really not bring on an expert to talk about it, I'd like to have read five or six books on a thing minimum.
00:40:51.000But I think that that's going to provide you the proper context.
00:40:54.000And again, I think it's totally fair to say that the three most important words in the English language I don't know.
00:41:02.000You're just allowed to say, I don't know.
00:41:05.000One of the things that happens on X, which is always hilarious, is that somebody who Was a Ukraine expert since 30 seconds ago will suddenly become an Iran expert when they didn't know what the Strait of Hormuz was or where it was on the planet until 10 seconds ago.
00:41:21.000They shift expertise to expertise, of course, not having achieved any expertise in those particular areas.
00:41:26.000I think it's definitely possible to say, I don't know enough about that.
00:41:29.000Maybe I should do some reading before I come back on that one.
00:41:38.000What do you think of how the last two elections became fairly populous?
00:41:44.000And then the UK's Reform Party is also a very populist movement.
00:41:50.000How do you think we can come back from populism as the West, or do we need to fundamentally move to different parties and create new parties instead of move back from populism?
00:42:05.000So I think Britain is obviously constituted governmentally very differently than the United States, right?
00:42:10.000You can have a third or a fourth or a fifth party in Britain that can be successful.
00:42:14.000I mean, the Reform Party didn't exist until five seconds ago.
00:42:18.000In the United States, it's a two party system, much easier to take over one of the established parties than it is to remake a third party, which is why Trumpism is different than Bushism.
00:42:26.000It's why what comes next for the Democrats is likely to be even more left than Obamaism, which was significantly more left than Clintonism.
00:42:33.000So, I think that when it comes to populism itself, I do not like populism.
00:42:39.000I think that populism is not a philosophy, it is an approach.
00:42:43.000And that approach tends to be, again, lowest common denominator.
00:42:49.000There are certain areas where I think populism There's a case to be made for it.
00:42:53.000The case that I would largely make for populism is in moral populism, but that is because most people get their morals from their parents, and most parents get their morals from the sort of Western, I would say the gas left in the tank from Western civilization.
00:43:07.000And so, if you want to do a moral populism, it's sort of like the William F. Buckley, I'd rather listen to the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than the professors at Harvard.
00:43:14.000I agree with that kind of populism because the first hundred names in the Boston phone book probably went to church more often than the professors at Harvard.
00:43:21.000When it comes to things like economics, No.
00:43:48.000Or 90 of us don't like this one guy over there, and so what we're really going to do is we're going to regulate the hell out of him or subsidize his rival in order to destroy him.
00:43:55.000So, yeah, I'm not a fan of populism, but I think, again, it takes a long time to build the wonders of Western civilization, a very short time to break them.
00:44:04.000And populism has been a tactic used for literally millennia at this point, so, nothing new.
00:44:40.000I believe at least there was a change in opinion.
00:44:42.000So the government, when it's able to use that and outlaw guns.
00:44:46.000So, an equivalent thing in America, what would we do?
00:44:49.000I mean, obviously, what I'm in the business of is trying to change opinions back the other way, right?
00:44:53.000So, we started a company specifically in order to prevent this, and we need to grow.
00:44:57.000And there are other people in this space, Barry Weiss being one, who is trying to move away from sort of the traditional left wing narrative towards something that's more centrist and more interesting.
00:45:07.000There are a lot of people in this space.
00:45:08.000I would say in the media space, I'm a lot more hopeful than I was even when we started the business because so many avenues have been opened.
00:45:15.000I'm a lot more pessimistic when it comes to social media.
00:45:17.000I think social media has been a bane and a curse.
00:45:19.000And if I could somehow, I mean, again, here's the only area in life in which I'm a Luddite is when it comes to social media.
00:45:25.000If I could hit a red button today and destroy it, I would do it.
00:45:29.000I think social media has been a blight on human existence.0.99
00:45:32.000I think it's hacked our lizard brains and turned us into morons and taught us that smarts are to be found in unity.0.97
00:45:41.000It's used all of the flaws in human thinking and then exacerbated those flaws in order to hit our dopamine receptors.0.99
00:46:51.000Earlier today, Sir Neil Ferguson described domestic Israeli politics as the hardest thing in the world for him to understand other than astrophysics.
00:46:59.000I was wondering if you had some insight as to why it's so hard for even a sympathetic outsider to understand the political climate, and if you have any views on the upcoming general.
00:47:09.000Okay, so I mean, okay, I can try to explain the.
00:47:11.000I actually know a lot about this, okay?
00:47:16.000So, without going into a massive disquisition, basically, we can say this.
00:47:20.000When it comes to the Israeli population, the Israeli population is center right, okay, very center right.
00:47:26.000What I mean by this is that there was a poll recently done of Israelis between the age of 18 and 29.
00:47:39.000They never want to get caught up short again by somebody denying them military capacity in a time when they need to win a war.
00:47:44.000Two, everyone needs to serve in the military.
00:47:47.000This is the most divisive issue in Israel.
00:47:49.000Basically, you have 10% of the population, which is Arab, and 10% of the population, which is ultra orthodox in English, called Haredi in Hebrew, who don't serve in the military.
00:47:57.000The other 80% say this is crazy and everyone needs to serve in the military.0.75
00:48:03.000Okay, so those are the three issues, and 80% of the population agrees on them.
00:48:07.000The reason that you've had a significant breakdown in Israeli politics is because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in his heart agrees with all three of those things, cannot form a coalition based on all three of those things.
00:48:19.000So he's got a coalition right now that agrees that Israel should be militarily independent and agrees to a large extent on economic deregulation, although there's part of his coalition, the ultra orthodox, that are heavily welfare dependent and oppose a lot of the economic deregulation.
00:48:31.000Okay, that third issue, the one about everybody serving in the army.0.91
00:48:36.000He would love for the Haredim, particularly the ultra.0.98
00:48:39.000No one is expecting the Arabs to serve in the army, right, left, or center.0.94
00:48:42.000When it comes to the ultra Orthodox, people in Israel want the ultra Orthodox to serve, except for the ultra Orthodox, who, again, are taking a disproportionate share of welfare and also are not serving in the military.0.57
00:48:51.000But they're part of the coalition because nobody in the center or center left will join Netanyahu's coalition because they despise Netanyahu.0.53
00:48:58.000And that is a result of Netanyahu being the most effective single politician in Israeli politics for the last 25 years.
00:49:05.000I mean, that's not even descriptive of whether you like him or hate him.
00:49:07.000Just as a political Machiavellian player, Benjamin Netanyahu is unbelievable at this, which is why all the parties in the opposition, I'm not even kidding, two thirds of the parties in the opposition are started by people who used to be deputies to Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:49:22.000Naftali Bennett used to be a deputy to Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:49:24.000Avidor Lieberman was a deputy to Bibi Netanyahu.
00:49:27.000Benny Gantz was a deputy to Bibi Netanyahu.
00:49:30.000So basically, you have a bunch of personality conflicts that are preventing a unity government from doing the things that ought to be done.
00:49:46.000His dad lived to 101, Benzian lived to 101.0.90
00:49:48.000So he could theoretically be around for a while to the consternation of Americans, many Americans on the left.
00:49:54.000But the reality is that there will come an administration that is beyond Netanyahu in which the center left, all the way out to the right, is basically unified because the left does not exist in Israel.
00:50:06.000And so then you will have all three of those policies pursued.
00:50:10.000The truth is, Israel is not in existential trouble.
00:50:12.000Israel is actually domestically in quite good shape.
00:50:15.000Israel's shekel is trading right now at three to one to the American dollar.
00:50:18.000To understand how insane that is, you have to understand that for the last 30, 40 years, the shekel was trading well north of four, sometimes up to five.
00:50:26.000That as of two years ago, it was trading at four.
00:50:29.000The Israeli economy, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, has gained more in the last three years since October 7th than any stock exchange by percentage on planet Earth.
00:51:15.000The second question is meant for both of you, but the first question is where would you point to.
00:51:23.000The starting point of the American culture, like disagreements.
00:51:27.000And the second question is in such a time of uproar, like during, okay, so if you want to preserve American exceptionalism during our era, I've read that a couple of texts by Ray Dalio that suggest that great powers fall every 250 years.
00:52:54.000Anyway, so as far as what America needs to do, a couple of things that America needs to do it needs to re embrace the principles of free market capitalism.
00:53:16.000Most people who have grown up under a free market don't even understand the alternative to a free market, so they think that the natural state of mankind is prosperity, which is not true.
00:53:25.000The natural state of mankind is penury, starvation, and death.
00:53:29.000All you have to do to check that out is take an airplane most places on earth.
00:53:33.000But the thing that we need to defend is the idea.
00:53:36.000That free markets are inherently good.
00:53:38.000They are, because they're a reflection of human innovation and human creativity, the fact you own your own labor.
00:53:42.000They're an outgrowth of your honor and dignity as an individual.
00:54:36.000So, this was touched on earlier with having a support system of people that you can trust to fact check you for bias.
00:54:43.000I wanted to ask if you have any practical advice for students that want to inform ourselves.
00:54:49.000There's a lot of information, some of it is true, some of it is medium, some of it is really not true, and it can be really overwhelming wanting to inform yourself, but wanting to find the truth in facts.
00:55:06.000I mean, listen, we all have heuristic shortcuts, as I say.
00:55:08.000You have to find people that you can trust because you can't be an expert on everything.
00:55:11.000And so, what I would say is if people keep making bad predictions, those people should not be listened to.
00:55:16.000If people keep making, based on their ideas, predictions that keep coming false, then probably they're not worth listening to.
00:55:24.000If their response to a request for evidence is to be offended or upset or to claim that you are doing something wrong, then you shouldn't listen to them either.
00:55:33.000Well, what I usually say to people is that you should read legacy media publications, then you should read Conservative publications, and usually where there's crossover, that's the basis of fact, and then everything else is the opinion.
00:55:43.000So, I have some friends on the left, like I'm friendly with Van Jones, I'm friendly with Bill Maher.
00:55:48.000If you listen to my show and then you listen to what Van says, Van and I come at it from very different angles, but our basis in fact is going to be pretty similar because Van is a reasonable human, even if we disagree.
00:55:56.000And the same thing is true for a Bill Maher or, say, for a John Fetterman.
00:56:00.000They're going to be operating off the same basis of fact.
00:56:02.000So, where we agree, that would usually be the basis of fact, and where we disagree, that's usually the opinions that we're drawing from the facts based on a different lens on the world.
00:56:10.000That's a good way to get informed, I think.