00:01:36.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:09.000I'm not subtle in my product endorsements.
00:02:11.000How does it not make you burp every five seconds when you have that?
00:02:15.000You know, I quit drinking in 2002 and promptly went to my college roommate's wedding in Italy where everyone was just like loaded the whole time.
00:02:24.000And I thought to myself, I probably should find an option here.
00:02:28.000And I'd never had sparkling water in my life since I'm just so thoroughly American.
00:02:32.000And I started drinking it and I never stopped.
00:02:34.000I don't know why, but I really dig it.
00:02:38.000Did your life improve when you stopped drinking?
00:03:28.000If you've been doing something, anything, if you've been, you know, running marathons every year for your life and you stop, you feel an effect.
00:03:34.000And that is very true for drinking and the rest of it.
00:03:37.000But there are people who, when they quit and they get over that period, feel really liberated by it.
00:05:20.000I don't think it was a thing in American society more broadly, except, you know, shooting heroin in some, you know, ghetto somewhere in the 70s.
00:05:28.000That was so far from where I was from that it was, you know, just wasn't even an option.
00:05:31.000So I really didn't, other than have my wisdom teeth out, taking one pain pill after an appendectomy, I had no experience of it.
00:05:39.000I had back surgery quite unexpectedly a few weeks ago, and they put me on all these drugs.
00:08:58.000It's hard for me just because the way I was raised to be like, oh, you shouldn't be doing that.
00:09:04.000But the truth is there, you know, the core problems in our society are not like coronavirus or the eastern, you know, border of eastern Ukraine or police brutality, George Floyd's death.
00:09:44.000These are problems that will change the course of your country, civilization, history, species, thank you, the drop in testosterone levels.
00:09:52.000These are big things and they're ignored.
00:09:54.000And my theory is, can't prove it, that they're ignored precisely because they are the big things, that there's something about the human brain that can't actually metabolize the fact there's a meteor streaking toward us.
00:10:08.000She's like, shit, I better rearrange the bookshelves or whatever.
00:10:24.000And I remember standing up once and literally thinking, should I rearrange the shelves by title or author?
00:10:30.000Because I just couldn't deal with the enormity of this, you know, when I was 25, this disaster coming toward me at high speed, which is, I'm going to blow the whole magazine.
00:10:38.000And I feel like as a country, we're there.
00:10:40.000But isn't it the responsibility of leaders to look at the media?
00:10:44.000But if you just, and I'm not, I know I sound like a liberal when I say this, blaming the system rather than the individual, but I think there's some truth in it.
00:10:52.000If you design a system that elevates mediocre people on the basis of irrelevant criteria, and by the irrelevant criteria, I don't just mean affirmative action, though that's part of what I mean.
00:11:01.000But I mean, like, you know, are you a child of the class into which you're being installed?
00:11:06.000Like nepotism, which has always been a factor in every society, I think is all around us and we don't acknowledge it.
00:11:14.000So basically we are training people to run the country.
00:11:18.000We're doing that through universities, of course, but we're not giving them the skills you need to run a massive, incredibly complex continental country that leads the world like ours.
00:11:57.000So the system itself is not producing wise leaders.
00:12:00.000It's not producing people who are grounded in physical reality.
00:12:03.000It's producing people who, as like a matter of habit, deny nature and people's natural needs and like the imperatives that don't change about the world.
00:12:13.000Last thing I'll say, God, now I am getting born.
00:12:15.000If you're running a society, like there are a couple of really basic questions that you ask in every society, in every peer in history.
00:12:57.000Because you've gotten so far from people's natural needs and the physical reality of the world around you that you really think that putting gender advisors in marine platoons is like the most pressing duty you have.
00:13:21.000This is third generation inherited money family blown up to scale.
00:13:25.000Take a sip of coffee and then talk about that.
00:13:26.000Well, I mean, it's I don't want to interrupt your question.
00:13:29.000I mean, I grew up in, you know, I'm very familiar with that world.
00:13:32.000So, um, and you notice, and this is information available to anyone who reads People magazine, you know, families lose energy and focus, self-discipline over time if it's too easy.
00:13:48.000I mean, I, you know, I will admit that this has been a factor in my own family.
00:13:51.000So, you know, I'm very familiar with, we're all familiar with this.
00:13:55.000We all know of, you know, super impressive, whether you like them or not, but profoundly energetic people who create something that didn't exist before and are rewarded for it.
00:14:28.000You've got to wonder like how many second generation people like that are there.
00:14:34.000I met a few, two, actually, that I can think of.
00:14:37.000I'm not going to name them, but who are really impressive, who took what they were given and turned it into something bigger or turned into something more meaningful or lived really engaged, meaningful lives.
00:15:12.000And you're able to worry about gender identity or, you know, North African lesbian poetry when you have the abundance that we're, that we have.
00:15:31.000I mean, I've been through periods where, you know, I really like legitimately didn't have enough money and had to make like massive life changes with children involved because of it.
00:17:51.000Reminded me of Victor Frankl's book, Man Search for Meaning, one of the best books ever, where there's three different types of wills that he organized.
00:17:57.000Will the power, very Nietzschean, will the pleasure, and then will to meaning.
00:18:48.000No, I'm not, again, I just want to be super clear.
00:18:51.000It's easier for me to say this because I'm not poor, but I'm being as honest as I can be when I say the threshold for happiness is getting rid of debt, getting rid of worry.
00:22:48.000But all of it is about this deep, unresolved anxiety within, unfortunately for the rest of us, a lot of the people who are running everything and have all the power.
00:22:57.000That's the theology of Greta Thunberg, basically.
00:23:47.000You've got the most powerful Democrat in Washington.
00:23:50.000and you've got the president of the United States and you've got the head of our public health apparatus and they're all in their 80s or about to get there.
00:24:01.000And I love and revere old people and I don't even mock Joe Biden's cognitive decline because I feel guilty because he's my elder, terrible president, but he's 79.
00:24:15.000That's not a sign of a vigorous, healthy society when you've got 81-year-olds making all the decisions because they have a different perspective.
00:24:23.000As you move through life, I'm probably closer to the, I'm definitely closer to the end of it than the beginning of it, but I'm, you know, middle-aged.
00:24:45.000But if I didn't, if it had been 40 years since I had kids in the house and something like Corona shows up, my overriding concern would be not dying of it because I'm 80.
00:25:52.000So you had this massive runup of wealth post-war as the United States took over the world.
00:25:58.000And a wildly disproportionate percentage of that wealth went to that generation who are now aging out of their productive years.
00:26:05.000And the people they left behind who are supposed to be moving up into the productive years are much poorer than any generation in the modern era.
00:26:14.000And not just materially poor, but every other metric.
00:26:18.000I mean, if you just want to just do it materially, because that's the easiest thing to measure, like we just use Department of Labor statistics for that.
00:26:29.000And they can't get married and they can't have kids.
00:26:31.000So if you don't see that as a crisis, or by the way, as the prelude to some actual turmoil, in addition to the moral imperative that we have to make sure that the next generation thrives, which is our overriding moral imperative.
00:26:44.000It's what grandparents are programmed to.
00:27:23.000It is absolutely happening at such a scale that it's just like, I don't know, there's something about personally, I've always thought that generation had a disproportionate number of loathsome people in it.
00:27:36.000So they were my teachers and they were defined by their narcissism.
00:27:40.000That was kind of the overriding quality that stuck to me as a kid sitting in class, listening to them blather on about their time at Woodstock.
00:31:35.000But anyway, A lot of this stuff seems like an elaborate attempt, perhaps not conscious, to keep us from considering that we are animals, that we do exist in nature, that we are bound by some limits that nature imposes.
00:31:52.000It doesn't even need to be God-based, but these are just the rules.
00:31:56.000Like if you stay out overnight below zero, you're going to die.
00:32:20.000They love the power over life and death.
00:32:22.000That's why they love wars, especially the ones that are no cost to them.
00:32:26.000If you're Anthony Blinken, if you're Tony Blinken and you're like a frustrated pop musician who wound up somehow as Secretary of State and you've never achieved anything in your life, the one thing that you can do, the one way you can exert power, how?
00:32:43.000No, I'm saying, this is how they think.
00:32:45.000So there's like a big coping mechanism or it's like these, look, one of the basic desires, as you noted, is to exert power over your environment.
00:34:14.000So like, how did we get to a political class where everybody has a sad, barren personal life?
00:34:20.000And you finally conclude after 35 years there, as I did, maybe there's a connection between their sad, barren personal lives and the fact they are where they are.
00:34:28.000Maybe they're compensating for what they don't have by exerting power over the people.
00:34:35.000So it took me decades to figure this out.
00:34:37.000But once I did, it explained pretty much everything.
00:34:40.000So we're all just pawns in there, massive coping.
00:34:43.000I mean, I'm actually not like, ask anybody who lives there, what percentage of members of Congress go home to like some happy spouse and well-adjusted children.
00:34:52.000I mean, there are, I'm sure there is one, you know, I'm sure there are some.
00:36:31.000And now, but the idea of it, the idea of it, the whole purpose of it wasn't to exert influence over American society and like get this person elected, crush that person.
00:36:43.000I do think Watergate and anyone, I came, of course, after Watergate, 20 years after Watergate, but I know a lot of guys who covered Watergate and they all say everything changed because that's when the Washington Post figured out it could take down a president without relitigating Watergate and whether Nixon should have been destroyed by it.
00:37:46.000And the next thing you know, like Carl Bernstein is being portrayed by some famous actor, Dustin Hoffman, and he's like taking down the president.
00:38:08.000Or, you know, worming your way through, I mean, during the New Deal, all these ambitious, in some cases, really bad people wound up in the, in the Roosevelt administration because it was huge.
00:39:23.000And that's what the media have this disproportionate power, which I guess redounds to my benefits since I'm in it, but I still don't like it.
00:39:30.000In a democracy, you know, you shouldn't have elections determined by what the New York Times thinks.
00:39:47.000You have an op-ed page, but it's to get as much information in the hands of voters as possible in the belief that it's their country and they have a right to pick their leaders.
00:39:56.000So you just inform them and then they'll decide.
00:39:58.000You shouldn't be withholding information from people or beating them over the head or calling them names if they don't like your candidate.
00:40:06.000And I guess the one advantage of being, you know, older than 30 is I remember when it wasn't like that, when the media were very liberal and they hated George H.W. Bush and whatever, who cares?
00:40:17.000But they weren't like putting the thumb on the scale and preventing the release of documents that might hurt their candidate.
00:40:24.000Like, that's just crazy that that were leaking privileged documents from Project Veritas they got from it's beyond belief.
00:40:31.000And then it just kind of just kind of happens.
00:40:36.000Last thing I'll say: if you're in journalism and you find yourself sucking up to the people in power to the detriment of the people without power, you have lost the thread.
00:41:14.000And I thought that this morning when I was on the plane, I, a buddy of mine, who you know texted me this thing about Brett Kavnaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
00:41:24.000And I was like, could it really be that they're that bad?
00:41:29.000You know, maybe we should have dug in a little deeper.
00:42:08.000Amy Coney Barrett, I was like, I like her.
00:42:11.000But if both of them turn out to be for vax mandates, then I think conservative media, including me, very much including me, need to ask, like, were we as aggressive as we should have been on behalf of our viewers when we vetted these people?
00:42:26.000Or do we make it all about how the left is crazy?
00:42:42.000And everybody knows it, but that's not the whole story.
00:42:45.000Just because the left is dangerous and insane, comma, which they are, comma, doesn't mean that we don't have an obligation to ask, like, okay, so Amy Coney Barrett has all these kids.
00:44:14.000Since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, which was like a big deal in my house, I've been interested in the Soviet Union and I still am.
00:46:25.000And the question that we have to ask first, second, and third before any foreign policy question is resolved is, how does this benefit our core national interest?
00:46:35.000So is defending the border between Eastern Ukraine and Russia an essential American interest valuable, essential enough that, say, we might sacrifice American lives, including my 24-year-old son.
00:47:35.000Yeah, so here's the point: you're telling me at exactly the moment that's going on.
00:47:41.000It's not an overstatement, it's not some right-wing Fox News talking point to say we don't have a southern border.
00:47:45.000We don't, we literally demonstrably don't.
00:47:47.000You're telling me that Ukraine's eastern border with Russia, without even getting into the history of it and like how many Russians there, I don't even care.
00:47:54.000Kind of how Ukraine's like kind of a made-up country, but whatever.
00:48:28.000She can find Ukraine on a map and she's like, oh, really, it's the most important thing.
00:48:32.000And I'm like, I just felt so sorry for her because she is such a nice person.
00:48:35.000I think she's pretty conservative in ways that I am, that I like, but she's living in a world where these people talk to each other all the time and they're like, no, really, the border of Eastern border, Ukraine, Roger Wicker, who was like nothing else going on in his life.
00:48:47.000You know, he gets to pretend he's an expert on Ukraine.
00:48:49.000Oh, do you speak Ukrainian now, Roger Wicker?
00:48:55.000These are idiots, but they talk to each other.
00:48:57.000They think they have secret esoteric knowledge from their dumb briefings in the Senate committee and they convince themselves that they know much more than you do.
00:49:05.000And the next thing you know, poor, you know, Joni Ernst, who again is just such a nice person, comes out of the meeting and she's like, well, yeah, actually, no, no, no.
00:49:11.000And she's repeating what she just heard.
00:49:13.000And it's also humiliating, but it's also totally disconnected from the actual concerns of Americans.
00:49:18.000So you have to wonder, like, how long does this continue exactly?
00:49:59.000It was an alliance between the ally Western Europe to keep the Soviets from invading Western Europe, which was an actual concern.
00:50:05.000That's why we kept our troops in Germany and England at Great Britain now.
00:50:10.000And we were worried about that for 40 years, you know, from 1945 until really 1991, when it August, when it really all like fully collapsed.
00:50:27.000But rather than acknowledging victory and redeploying to like the next new thing, because there is always a next new thing, turned out to be China.
00:50:36.000I don't know if that was obvious in 91, but it certainly shortly thereafter became obvious.
00:50:51.000And organizations after a certain point of scale exist to perpetuate themselves.
00:50:57.000And they kind of act like organisms in the natural world.
00:51:00.000You know, they repel invasion, they protect their borders.
00:51:03.000You know, the amoeba kind of scoots along looking for sustenance.
00:51:07.000And that's just the nature of organizations, nature of human organizations.
00:51:10.000And God, you see it in Washington and you certainly see it in NATO and all these other post-war institutions that are not serving really any purpose.
00:51:29.000So the last thing, because I don't want to work you too hard before you have to speak to our students.
00:51:33.000Christianity on your life, impact you had in your life.
00:51:37.000We have a lot of listeners of faith, a lot of pastors we deal with.
00:51:40.000People ask me all the time, what's Tucker's faith?
00:51:42.000You know, just as shortly as you want or as long as you want.
00:51:45.000I would say my faith, my faith is, if I had to sum it up, profound but peasant-like.
00:51:52.000So I grew up in a very specific faith tradition, which, you know, was impressive in my view for, you know, the faith of my ancestors for a long time and then very rapidly became a hollowed out, a husk, and then a parody of itself.
00:52:09.000The Episcopal Church in the United States, the builders of the National Cathedral in Washington.
00:52:28.000You know, you go to church, but you can't talk about what you think.
00:52:31.000So, but one of the, and then there's always drama in the church.
00:52:33.000So like the church completely collapsed while I was a member of it and became this kind of repellent, you know, actively anti-Christian organization.
00:53:33.000I pray in my sauna every day, go through all my kids.
00:53:37.000I go through all my dogs, Meg and Dave, Brookie and Alice, and, you know, all my relatives and people I love.
00:53:45.000And my prayers are very simple, but I think they work, actually.
00:53:51.000I'm married to a woman who's much more systematic about it.
00:53:54.000And, you know, if I go through periods in my life that were rocky, you know, I am totally convinced that that made the difference.
00:54:03.000Her, you know, writing in her nooseleaf prayer journal every night, and which, you know, 30 years ago when I first married, I was like, really?
00:54:16.000We have so many people in our orbit, in our personal family orbit who we love, and life is so precarious.
00:54:24.000And as you get older, you really understand how precarious it is when like, you know, people get weird diseases at early ages or die of this, that, or the other thing.
00:55:36.000Using that very basic way of understanding the world has stopped working in the last two years because you're seeing people do things that are not only counterproductive to the interests of the society, they're counterproductive to their own interests.
00:57:35.000And so if you see this force at work from which no one is benefiting, really, whose only purpose is destruction, maybe you're not looking at a human force.
00:57:43.000Maybe you're looking at something that's like can't be explained with reason or conventional motives of the kind I'm used to assassinating in Washington.
00:57:49.000Oh, he's getting paid by the lobbyist.