Tucker Carlson joins me to discuss his new book, Ship of Fools, which is already a massive bestseller on the New York Times charts, and on charts that are more reputable than the NY Times charts. Tucker talks about how he became the biggest cable news host on the planet, and why he thinks you should get life insurance if you're going to die. He also talks about his political career, how he got started in politics, and how he ended up where he is today, as a conservative commentator on Fox News and other media outlets. And he talks about why he doesn t believe in the death penalty. And he explains how he s changed since he was a kid and how his views on abortion have changed since then, including when he became a conservative pundit and when he decided to go all in on a pro-choice platform. You won t want to miss this Sunday Special with Tucker Carlson, hosted by the host of the Fox News Channel's "Fox News Radio" and host of "America's Most Powerful Person" on the Fox Business Channel's Tucker Carlson Jr. on Sunday Night with Alex Castellanos on the Tonight Show with Alex Blumberg. If you haven t checked out his book, you ll want to do so, because it's a must-listen Sunday special! Subscribe to the show on Amazon Prime and subscribe to his podcast on Audible. Subscribe on iTunes and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on Podchaser and subscribe on iTunes to get the latest episodes of the show wherever else you get your favorite podcast on the internet? Subscribe and review the podcast on your favorite podcasters are listening to the latest episode of The FiveThirtysomething podcast on all of your favorite streaming platforms. You can also become a supporter of the FiveThirtyEight channel on the Four Corners Podcasts and other social media platforms? Subscribe here to learn more about what s going to be featured on the show? Learn more about your ad choices and more, including the latest podcasts on the future of the Four Seasons and more like that on The Six Sigma on Six Sigma's newest podcast, Six Sigma s newest podcast? and much more! in this special coming soon, coming soon on this Sunday special on the Six Sigma is a special ad-free version of Six Sigma? on the next Sunday special, coming soon! in the future, coming in 2020?
00:00:00.000What I care about is living in a country where, you know, decent people can live happy lives, actually.
00:00:06.000I don't want to put 10 million men out of work, and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country.
00:00:19.000Hey, hey, and welcome to the Sunday special.
00:00:20.000I am super excited to be joined by Tucker Carlson, and we're going to jump into his brand new book, Ship of Fools, which is already a massive bestseller on the New York Times charts and on charts that are more reputable than the New York Times charts.
00:00:32.000We'll get into all of that in just a second.
00:00:34.000But first, we have to talk about your imminent death.
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00:01:40.000A lot of people don't know your actual background, like where you came from, because, you know, folks sort of exist in the immediate ecosystem.
00:01:51.000How did you become Tucker Carlson, the biggest host on cable news?
00:01:54.000Well, I mean, I filled a job that was open.
00:01:57.000I mean, chance plays a massive role in life, which is part of the thesis of my book, and it's unacknowledged.
00:02:03.000But I grew up here, actually, and I'm from Southern California originally.
00:02:07.000Right here in Los Angeles, very close to where we are right now.
00:02:09.000I actually went to first grade in this town and then I moved to La Jolla and then I went to high school and college on the east coast and kind of stayed in Washington where my family had moved to work for the Reagan administration.
00:02:21.000And I've been there ever since, and I've had a series of jobs mostly in print, magazines, newspaper, and then website, and then worked at CNN, MSNBC, PBS, ABC, and Fox.
00:02:35.000So I've just kind of been always in the world that I occupy now with varying degrees of success based partly on the amount of effort I was exerting in the job I was in, and also based on luck and things you can't control.
00:02:49.000So what sort of shaped where you are politically right now?
00:02:51.000Because if I look at your political career, you were much more aggressive on foreign policy in the early 2000s, for example, and now you're much more isolationist on foreign policy.
00:03:21.000And so if you think that the policy that you're proposing will reach a certain conclusion, produce a certain result, and it doesn't, I think you should acknowledge that, and I think you ought to change your views based on the evidence.
00:03:32.000And so, to bottom line it, in a sentence, America has changed so dramatically.
00:03:37.000In the 49 years that I've been here, that, like, why wouldn't my politics change?
00:03:42.000They've changed completely on all kinds of different issues.
00:03:45.000I mean, I was once pretty stridently pro-choice and for the death penalty, and now I have, you know, very strong feelings in the opposite direction.
00:03:52.000I mean, I've supported all kinds of things that turned out to be wrong, but that's the point.
00:04:34.000What I require is that they acknowledge that they've made a mistake, that they say sorry, and that they try better based on what they've learned from that mistake.
00:04:40.000And that's exactly what doesn't happen in Washington, and that's why I'm mad.
00:04:43.000So when it comes to ideology, so I actually am a stronger believer in ideology than you are.
00:04:48.000One of the reasons being, it seems to me that the way that we determine whether an appropriate metric for success has been achieved is ideologically based, meaning that we can both look at the same policy, and I can say that its goal was achieved, and if you're using a different ideology, then maybe its goal has not been achieved.
00:05:40.000But what you never do is try to control or mandate what people believe.
00:05:44.000That that is a kind of, you know, that's a sphere that you would never violate.
00:05:49.000And so, in the end, you want to live, if you're in a democracy, any democracy, you want to live in a country where the middle class, normal people, you know, with 100 IQs, making 80 grand a year, can lead
00:06:00.000You know, productive, meaningful lives, unbothered by the people in power, and they have the hope, at least, that their kids can do slightly better than they have.
00:06:09.000That was kind of the rule for a lot of the, certainly the post-war period in this country, and it no longer is.
00:06:15.000So my question always is not, like, what party wins?
00:06:19.000Or, you know, is my economic theory validated or not?
00:06:55.000And you talk a lot in Ship of Fools, particularly, about the threat to these sorts of ideas from a left that is focused on a sort of forced diversity.
00:07:03.000And you've been labeled racist by folks at Media Matters for this, of course, because they label everyone a racist.
00:07:08.000I'm a Nazi, according to Media Matters, because of my yarmulke, apparently.
00:07:11.000But your viewpoint on diversity is basically, as I see it expressed in the book, that diversity is a neutral.
00:07:21.000Right, and so where do you see the conflict lying between right and left on that particular issue?
00:07:25.000Well, so where I agree with you is that, you know, while, as I noted, I am distrustful of complex ideologies, I do think that you need to start with certain things that you believe are true and act on them if you want to get to the place you deserve to be.
00:07:41.000So, what I just noticed, just as an American, and I'm not an intellectual, I'm a talk show host, so this is a very obvious thing,
00:07:48.000That our national motto has been redefined to its mirror image.
00:07:52.000So of course it was, out of many, one.
00:07:55.000And now it is diversity is our strength.
00:07:57.000So I think it's fair if you, without asking my consent, replace the core principle of our country.
00:08:04.000It's fair for me to ask if that principle
00:08:46.00050 nights in the past 200 nights, I made the case explicitly against racism, which is you are not responsible for your immutable qualities.
00:08:56.000You can't control your height, your hair color, your DNA, what your parents did.
00:09:01.000None of that is your fault and you should not be punished for it or rewarded for it.
00:09:39.000But, you know, there's a lot of talk these days about political realignment.
00:09:43.000And I wonder if it's not really political realignment that's taking place, but a hunkering down of the far left into the diversity politics, identity politics, and then just the backlash to that.
00:09:53.000Because it seems to me that was the real dividing line between Obama and Trump.
00:09:57.000It's not even on economics, where in some areas there's actually some sort of populist agreement.
00:10:17.000Basically buoy our boat all the way to victory from now until the end of time.
00:10:21.000And then the backlash to that was, well, wait a second.
00:10:23.000You know, you guys don't get to do identity politics when you've been saying that identity politics is what's wrong with America for generations, correctly.
00:10:56.000But our ruling class, and I do think this is the least responsible, the most reckless thing they have done, is they have not only failed to come up with what that set of common beliefs is, they have argued against the fact
00:11:55.000So I'm pretty good at telling you what I think is wrong.
00:11:58.000It's not as clear how you fix it other than go back to the obvious things.
00:12:04.000Like, demand that everybody who comes to this country for economic opportunity, for example, or for the safety of our rule of law, also buy into the things that make all of us Americans.
00:12:20.000So yeah, I would start with the Bill of Rights.
00:12:21.000You have an absolute right, as defined in 1967 by the Supreme Court, but also by centuries of tradition here in this country, which we inherited from another culture across the ocean, to believe what you believe.
00:12:41.000And that right is under assault, not by a political party, but by, in effect, a secular evangelical faith, which we're calling progressive or liberal or whatever, but it's not.
00:12:50.000It's a species of religion that seeks to convert by force.
00:12:54.000And that is deeply anguished and concerned that other people disagree.
00:12:58.000So, like, I doubt you go home tonight and fret at any length over the idea that somewhere in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, someone disagrees with you on an issue.
00:13:08.000But I can promise you somewhere in Williamsburg, right now, someone is lying in a studio apartment fretting that in the, you know, the far reaches of red clay Alabama, someone's not fully on board with the bathroom program.
00:13:19.000I'm really bothered by that, and they need to do something about it.
00:13:22.000So actually it's an asymmetrical contest between one group that wants to affect policy outcomes and the other group that wants to convert by the sword.
00:13:30.000So it's the religious people versus the political people, and I don't even think we acknowledge that most of the time.
00:13:35.000One of the things that you do in the book, and I wanted to ask for clarification on this because you've mentioned the words elites a few times.
00:13:39.000And when I talk about elites, what I've really tried to do is distinguish elites from elitists because elites to me are folks who very often, you have elite in every field.
00:13:48.000You have elite in the NBA because they're the best basketball players.
00:13:51.000You have elite economically, many times because they went to a good school and because they have generated some sort of service or good that a lot of people want to buy into.
00:13:59.000And then you have elitists, who are, in my opinion, the people who are really the problem, the folks who think that they ought to be able to cram down their values on somebody else.
00:14:06.000Are you conflating elite with elitist?
00:14:08.000Because obviously, look, you're an elite, right?
00:14:25.000I'm not here to give you the view from coal country.
00:14:28.000I'm here to give you the view from the world I grew up in and have lived in always, which is the world of the people making a disproportionate number of the key decisions in our country, economic.
00:15:05.000From previous generations is not simply the magnitude of the concentration of wealth and power, though I do think, like, measurably that is more disproportionate than ever.
00:15:15.000What's actually changed is the mindset of the people in charge.
00:15:19.000They no longer acknowledge they're in charge.
00:15:23.000And they no longer acknowledge that they have a responsibility to the people whose lives they influence.
00:15:28.000So the robber barons who we learned, you know, Carnegie and Rockefeller and Phipps and all the people that we learned to hate in ninth grade, those people, you know, had a lot of flaws.
00:15:38.000And I do think the concentrations of their wealth was a threat that did justify what Teddy Roosevelt did.
00:16:21.000And so Travis, the teenage billionaire who ran Uber, founded it, oversaw the second biggest workforce, employee workforce in the world, and yet he didn't claim them as employees.
00:16:42.000But it doesn't absolve him of his core responsibility.
00:16:45.000If you're creating a hierarchy of responsibilities, first is to the people closest to you, and that would include your children, your spouse, your employees, and then to the world.
00:16:53.000So Travis was always lecturing the rest of us about police brutality or Black Lives Matter or global warming or whatever.
00:16:59.000What he was doing was displacing his responsibility from the real and the tangible to the theoretical and cost free.
00:17:07.000So I would get these notices on my Uber app being like, let's pause for a moment to remember the victims of police violence, which, you know, that's fine.
00:17:15.000But before you start lecturing me about my moral inadequacies and about how you care more than I do, maybe you could pay for the health insurance of your freaking employees, pal, Mr. Teenage Billionaire Guy.
00:17:24.000Like, so this is actually part of a much larger syndrome that grows out of the meritocracy the SAT created 60 years ago that has convinced the people in charge that everything that, and trust me, this is the world I'm from, has convinced them that, of course, they're richer and better educated and, by the way, more attractive.
00:17:42.000than the people in the great middle of the country, in the medieval parts of the country.
00:17:56.000This is where I think we come to the second half where we disagree.
00:17:59.000So I talked about bifurcating sort of the conversation into elite control of your life in terms of family life and everything else with the economic suggestion that the meritocracy itself is deeply flawed and that the meritocracy can only survive if the people on the top of the meritocracy start to essentially give things away to a certain extent.
00:18:20.000So the Uber suggestion that you make, for example,
00:18:23.000The reason that Uber operates with a bunch of independent contractors is obviously because it's less costly.
00:18:29.000It's because it's less costly that Uber is able to have an extraordinarily profitable enterprise that allows them to have all these independent contractors in the first place.
00:18:37.000If you have employees, then basically you have a taxi medallion company.
00:18:42.000Obviously, that leads to increased pricing, which leads to more competitiveness with the taxi companies, the worst product for consumers.
00:18:48.000So the question is, when it comes to this idea that the meritocracy itself is deeply flawed, I want to read a quote from your book because it struck me, because it's obviously a really well-written book, and it makes some arguments that struck me as actually very much in sync with, for example, some of the things that Bernie Sanders says.
00:20:36.000It's underrated because we've always had it.
00:20:38.000So it's almost like, you know, you don't appreciate a friend until he dies, and you're like, oh man, I wish I'd, you know, told him I loved him or whatever.
00:20:44.000We've had, with a four-year exception, almost continuous
00:20:48.000Social stability, the strata upon which we build our economy and our civil society, all of that was possible because we had a stable society.
00:20:56.000We had a middle class that was the majority.
00:21:01.000And so we're not thinking clearly about what's going to happen unless and until we regain that stability.
00:21:07.000And the core factor driving it is expanding inequality, not just the fact that our ruling class is richer than it's ever been, including me.
00:21:17.000But that the rest of the country is going in the other direction.
00:21:20.000Life expectancy for huge parts of the country is in decline.
00:21:24.000Like, that's the most... So I guess I would just say the problem with the meritocracy is not that the idea of a meritocracy is bad.
00:21:42.000I'm merely saying that if you have an economy that suddenly
00:21:47.000Makes labor valueless, physical labor valueless, and rewards dramatically, I'm not going to say disproportionately, dramatically cognitive ability.
00:21:58.000What you're really saying is we have a class system based on IQ.
00:22:03.000Now, Charles Murray wrote a book on this 25 years ago that included a very controversial race chapter, which he never should have included, because it obscured the core point of the book, which is what I just said.
00:22:11.000Right, and then you wrote Coming Apart, which is basically the book without the race chapter.
00:22:14.000Exactly, because you read it, and it's like actually the most brilliant thing I've read in the past 20 years.
00:22:19.000Those two books together explain what has happened.
00:22:22.000We have a ruling class that is becoming impenetrable, actually.
00:22:27.000You can't join unless you have inequalities
00:22:31.000That are the kind of price of membership.
00:22:34.000I mean, we do have 7 million unfilled jobs in the economy right now.
00:22:58.000And the reason that I'm doubtful is because we are, as a society, more prosperous than any society in the history of humanity, including the people at the lower end of the spectrum.
00:23:06.000And that's not to say that there aren't people suffering.
00:23:08.000But by comparison to any other time in human history, it's not close.
00:23:12.000No, but I'm not making that argument, though.
00:23:14.000So this is the Heritage Foundation argument.
00:23:33.000What you want is a society that is cohesive, where everyone feels part of the same thing.
00:23:41.000You don't want the people who are making the huge majority of important decisions to be completely cut off from everyone else for a bunch of reasons.
00:23:49.000One, it will engender resentment, inevitably, as it has.
00:23:53.000And the people who feel resentment, since they still have the vote, their labor is worth nothing, okay?
00:23:58.000That's why labor unions have collapsed.
00:23:59.000The value of labor has declined over the past 100 years dramatically.
00:24:10.000And that Trump is the beginning of that.
00:24:12.000But isn't the way that, at least the founders thought of this, that the way to prevent the elites, you know, an elite class from controlling other people's lives is to restrict the inherent power of government to control everybody's life.
00:24:23.000When you suggested before that the goal of the society should be stability,
00:24:27.000Everyone wants a stable society, but there are lots of different... I mean, you say this in the book.
00:24:30.000There are lots of different types of stable societies.
00:24:32.000I mean, there are monarchies that are stable societies.
00:24:34.000There are communist regimes that are... Monarchies are the most stable societies.
00:24:46.000Because... Well, they often do, and that's an incisive question, and you're exactly right.
00:24:50.000And I would say to narrow the goal down to a single thing, as I did, is probably stupid.
00:24:55.000Stability makes a lot of other things that you want possible.
00:25:00.000But I would say within the American context, what you want is a country where the average person, again with an IQ of 100 and an income of 90 grand a year and three kids, can sort of live the life that people lived under those circumstances in 1950.
00:25:15.000You want the average person to feel like he's vested in a society, that he can have a stable family,
00:25:23.000Without, you know, by the way, let me just say, the economic impetus behind family destruction is totally underappreciated by conservatives.
00:25:32.000So they looked at the landscape of inner-city America for 50 years and they're like, nope, you know, family formation's gone.
00:25:37.000Like, the overwhelming majority of kids grow up without a father.
00:26:39.000Do you think that's because of structural changes in the American economy or the counter-argument, which would be the welfare state, which is when you start to see all of this begin to spike?
00:26:47.000Of course, it plays a huge role in this, but I'm talking employed people.
00:26:51.000So when manufacturing dies, what's left?
00:26:53.000Well, in a lot of parts of the country, huge swaths of rural America, you have two main employers, the schools and the hospitals.
00:26:59.000Those are the full-time, year-round employers.
00:27:02.000And those are traditionally female, not exclusively, there are many exceptions to all of this and there are plenty of women who are happy to marry a man who makes less than they do.
00:27:11.000But I'm saying across large populations that is true and it's been shown to be true.
00:27:15.000So when male wages decline below those of females, marriage formation declines along with it.
00:27:30.000So what the net effect is you have no families and more kids, especially boys, growing up in fatherless homes, which all but guarantees that you repeat the process.
00:27:39.000So like, you have the disintegration of the family because of an economic factor.
00:27:42.000There are other factors, and I, of course.
00:27:44.000So are you calling for redistribution into these areas?
00:27:48.000I'm calling for whatever it takes to stop this.
00:27:50.000Right, so this is where I was asking about the Bernie Sanders crossover.
00:27:52.000Where do you see the Bernie Sanders program going too far?
00:28:00.000But I'm saying conservatives go on and have for generations about how important the family, they don't mean it at all.
00:28:07.000I live in DC, where the entire conservative non-profit infrastructure lives, okay?
00:28:12.000And I know what their priorities are, and they're lowering marginal tax rates, which I'm for, by the way, as someone who pays the majority of his income in taxes.
00:28:20.000But the goal, if the goal is preserving the family as the core building block of any successful society, and it's got to be that goal, because it has all kinds of effects that we want,
00:28:31.000I don't need to explain it, but I could.
00:28:33.000But the point is, if that's the goal, what are you doing about it?
00:28:37.000If you wake up one morning and you find yourself in a society where 23-year-olds with four-year college degrees and, like, initiative, who aren't smoking weed every day, if they can't make enough to buy a car, much less a home, much less get married, much less have children, then why should you be surprised when half of them say they prefer socialism?
00:29:09.000And you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that there are going to be automated cars on the roads.
00:29:13.000So would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favor of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to sort of artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?
00:29:59.000So the greater good is protecting your citizens from... Look, capitalism is the best economic system I can think of, I think, that anyone's ever thought of.
00:30:10.000But that doesn't mean that it's a religion and everything about it is good.
00:30:14.000There's no niacin creed of capitalism that I have to buy into.
00:30:18.000What I care about is living in a country where, you know, decent people can live happy lives, actually.
00:30:24.000And so no, I would say immediately, no, are you joking?
00:30:27.000And I maybe would make up some pretext for public consumption like, oh, they're dangerous.
00:30:33.000But the truth would be, I don't want to put 10 million men out of work because you're going to have 10 million dead families and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country.
00:30:42.000So I'm going to ask about the limiting principle there in just a second.
00:30:45.000But first, let's talk about Talkspace.
00:30:47.000So if you're feeling a little bit nervous because of this conversation, because you're one of these people in an industry that's being assaulted by technology, or if you're just a person who is having trouble at home, maybe you need to go to Talkspace.
00:30:57.000It's the online therapy company that lets you message a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time.
00:31:01.000All you need is a computer with internet connection or the Talkspace mobile app.
00:31:05.000That means you can improve your mental health, even if you've had trouble making time for it in the past.
00:31:08.000I'm a big advocate, by the way, of folks talking to somebody if you need to do so.
00:31:12.000I think it's one of the stupidest stigmas in American life that you're supposed to sit there and try and grit your teeth and make your way through life without any help at all.
00:32:04.000So, it's fascinating to me that you're so willing to restrict technology in this particular area, not because it's not a justifiable policy.
00:32:18.000Because, obviously, jobs are lost in industries through creative destruction and have been for the entire time the free market has existed.
00:33:09.000So we're on the cusp of a completely transformative revolution, as or more transformative as the industrial revolution.
00:33:16.000And no one is trying to take control of it at all, or figure out how to channel these forces into an outcome that we want to live with realistically.
00:33:24.000And because they're not, you're going to see reactions, and you're already seeing reactions against this stuff that are flat-out extreme.
00:33:31.000So the model again is Teddy Roosevelt, who was a capitalist, a patriot, a man of deep faith.
00:33:37.000He was not anti-business, and yet he restrained American businesses.
00:33:42.000He broke them up and was hated for doing it in the service of a higher goal, which was a stable, happy country where the traditions could be preserved.
00:33:50.000If he didn't do that, you know, there's no telling, like, what would have happened to the IWW or whatever.
00:33:57.000We could have gone in a totally different direction.
00:33:58.000I mean, so I will admit, I'm not a Teddy Roosevelt fan, and I would have opposed the trust busting, but when it comes to the sort of politics we're talking about, I guess my major question is, is it a contributing factor to societal unrest to tell people that politics is to blame for the problem?
00:34:16.000Are we edging on political messianism, the idea that if we just change a couple of policies here or there, then we'll be able to fix everything, when the reality is that, as you talk about a little bit in the book,
00:34:28.000What we may be suffering from is an actual spiritual malaise, and maybe economics has something to do with it.
00:34:33.000I would argue that it has a lot more to do with a generalized move away from social fabric driven by all of the factors that used to exist in churches and all of these things, and that if we are going to maintain both freedom and stability,
00:34:46.000You know, the John Adams formulation was that this Constitution was only built for moral and virtuous people.
00:34:51.000There are two ways to actually tackle that.
00:34:53.000One is to say, we are no longer moral and no longer virtuous, so we have to change the freedom.
00:34:58.000And the other is to say, well, if we want to maintain the freedom, we have to become moral and virtuous again.
00:35:03.000And I wonder if we as public figures, because we're in the same business more or less,
00:35:07.000Where we ought to be putting our focus.
00:35:08.000Should we be putting our focus on justifying people's fears about the economy and suggesting that a political messiah is around the corner?
00:35:15.000Or should we be saying to people, listen, the industry in your town may be dying.
00:35:20.000And as a temporary stopgap, perhaps we can stop technology from advancing.
00:35:25.000Perhaps we can stop trade from eating your job.
00:35:27.000Or should we be saying to people, listen, America was built by folks who crossed mountains to go to the middle of nowhere in pure risk.
00:36:01.000And to answer your initial question, anyone who argues that any of this is going to be fixed by a person or a bill that makes its way through Congress or a new Supreme Court justice is lying to you.
00:36:12.000That's a grotesque and dishonest oversimplification of the sort that politicians and, by the way, talk show hosts specialize in.
00:36:18.000And so to the extent I played a role in lying about that, I'm sorry.
00:36:24.000I always want to acknowledge how complex and multifaceted all of these problems are because they are.
00:36:30.000I'm merely making a couple of very obvious observations.
00:36:32.000That there are downtides to this stuff.
00:36:33.000We are not servants of our economic system.
00:36:37.000We are not here to serve as shareholders.
00:36:40.000We're human beings and our concerns are real.
00:36:45.000Now they must be balanced against the concerns of shareholders and lots of other concerns.
00:36:48.000But to say that, you know, if it's more efficient to have you move to some crappy suburb to serve some douchey company because that's what, you know, is best to increase value, it's like, it's okay for me to stand up and say, you know, there are other concerns here, actually.
00:37:06.000And there's a social cost to doing that.
00:37:25.000But actually, the concern is totally real.
00:37:27.000If you spend, I don't know, just like roughly 5,000 years
00:37:32.000In one kind of economy that changes incrementally over time, but basically living from what you grow, living with your family and working a hundred yards away for thousands of years, and then in the space of, I don't know, a hundred years after the steam engine is invented, everything is completely different.
00:37:50.000It doesn't mean that you should stop it or smash the machines with a hammer, but it means you should be thoughtful in the way you channel these awesome forces, these awesome economic forces.
00:38:03.000They are tools that thoughtful people use to increase the goodness of their society.
00:38:10.000So I guess I'm just so struck by, like, if I would ever talk to liberals or conservatives, market fundamentalists in Washington, they're like, well, we can't stop.
00:38:29.000God created us to make these decisions.
00:38:31.000No, but there is a balance, obviously, between...
00:38:34.000Increasing prosperity across all of humankind, which has really been the result of free market capitalism over the past 40 years, and redistribution of the benefits, because the benefits obviously fall upon people deeply unequal.
00:38:46.000Look, I'm not for taking stuff from people.
00:38:47.000I don't want my stuff to be taken from me.
00:38:56.000I mean, I know that that's a talking point.
00:38:57.000I'm not exactly, I mean, yeah, a lot of regulations are unbelievably stupid, and they benefit, you know, certain categories of rent seeker at the expense of everyone else.
00:39:04.000Like, I'm very aware, I live among it, I know.
00:39:07.000And a lot of this is totally corrupt and counterproductive, okay?
00:39:22.000And we are not powerless in the face of these forces.
00:39:24.000And if we decide that we are powerless in the face of them, we're all just along for the ride, we're not the authors of history, we're merely just flotsam floating atop it.
00:39:33.000Whoa, that's a totally different way of thinking about it that's really bad.
00:39:38.000And as we go through these changes, the people benefiting most, to whom much is given, much is expected.
00:39:43.000They should feel an obligation to those beneath them in the way you feel to your children and your employees.
00:39:47.000Well, that's certainly, I feel, I mean, you know.
00:40:25.000Like, they understood that there are other things, providence, grace, luck, whatever you want to call it, that determine the outcome.
00:40:34.000So, like, the people now in charge, your average private equity guy, and I know a million of them and like them, okay, but they believe that they're rich because they're better.
00:40:42.000Because they made good choices, and you're not because you didn't.
00:41:52.000And the one thing that is unknowable is the outcome.
00:41:55.000You can only guess at its outlines, and often you're wrong.
00:41:58.000But you need to approach all of these questions with deep humility, understanding that, you know, you think that X will produce Y, but it could produce K. Like, you don't really know.
00:42:09.000If you do that, it doesn't mean you won't make mistakes.
00:42:12.000Of course you will, but you'll make fewer mistakes, less profound mistakes.
00:42:15.000Hubris guarantees disaster every single time.
00:42:26.000When you start thinking that you're God, you know, you are going to fall from great heights.
00:42:31.000And so, the problem is not, these are very human problems, and they're long-standing problems, they're eternal problems, but when you have an entire city full of policymakers who don't acknowledge these problems,
00:42:43.000That's when you want... Look, I supported the war in Iraq.
00:43:00.000Because we're not willing to admit we have an empire.
00:43:03.000The British were very effective and they could absorb losses, like their loss in Afghanistan, because they were honest about what they were doing.
00:43:09.000It was a colonial power that existed for the benefit
00:43:12.000Primarily of Great Britain, also for the edification of the peoples over whom they ruled.
00:44:36.000When you look in retrospect at how we justify our involvement in World War II, most Americans, if asked why we were involved in World War II, would probably not say Pearl Harbor.
00:44:45.000They would point to ending the Holocaust and defeating Hitler as a moral matter, that these were evil regimes that needed to be defeated.
00:45:33.000But yeah, life expectancy in post-colonial Africa has gone down, so how's that working for you?
00:45:36.000But anyway, so I understand that impulse and I admire it, and I think this is not only the most prosperous, but the best country in human history, so like, I get it, I get it.
00:45:46.000But you balance those impulses against what's actually achievable, and always and everywhere the threat that you will unintentionally make things worse, which is a very real, present threat, always.
00:45:58.000Americans have no appreciation of that at all.
00:47:25.000We would never know that because it never happened.
00:47:27.000There's been a decrease in the number of at least mass attacks in the United States over time.
00:47:33.000So their argument would be, this is where I was getting at with the metrics question at the beginning.
00:47:38.000By your metrics, the war in Iraq is a disaster, the war in Afghanistan has turned out to be basically a disaster.
00:47:43.000By their metrics, these have both been successes to the extent that it has prevented casualties on American soil, assuming there would have been more casualties on American soil.
00:47:58.000Like, you talk in the book about American intervention with regard to the mujahideen in Afghanistan under Reagan, and you point out that this was an instrumental factor in the fall of the Soviet Union.
00:48:54.000Then you can't say the Iraq war, by that one standard, that one measure, which seems to be at the center of people's foreign policy understanding right now, was a good idea.
00:49:39.000You, the guy who's telling me that we need to go to war with Iran now, that the decision that you helped make created the problem that you now tell me we need to solve.
00:49:47.000You should at least admit that, or else you're a liar!