The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 50 ｜ The Globalist Gilded Age of Twitter-Fed Misery ｜ Kevin Williamson ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 About this time every year, our attention turns to the solemn anniversary of 9-11.

00:00:05.820 It's a moment when we all take time to reflect on those who gave their lives that day.

00:00:11.600 Seems weird for those of us who remember it, what we promised ourselves we would do.

00:00:16.360 Those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the years to come, those who went to war,

00:00:22.120 how are we treating them? Defending our liberties in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. 1.00

00:00:27.440 And now, here we are, 18 years later, we find ourselves seemingly in a state of permanent war.

00:00:32.780 We're warned that the Islamic State is poised to make a comeback. 0.89

00:00:35.500 We watch as the crescent of Iranian influence extends its long shadow. 0.95

00:00:39.340 And in Afghanistan, our leaders are now negotiating the terms of peace with the Taliban,

00:00:44.520 which I thought we had wiped out at one point.

00:00:46.720 Well, I want to tell you about a new film that is out. It ties all of this together. It's called Mosul.

00:00:51.200 It is the story of the last battle of the Iraq War, documenting the 2016-2017 fight against ISIS in Iraq's second largest city.

00:00:59.800 It's directed, actually, by a CIA officer, Danielle Gabrielle.

00:01:04.140 Mosul is the name of this film. It's much more than a war story.

00:01:07.360 It is a journey that will take you up the Tigris River right into the heart of darkness of the ISIS caliphate, 0.93

00:01:13.580 revealing an apocalyptic battle against two unyielding enemies,

00:01:18.260 the violent Islamic extremism and the sectarian mistrust and hatred that will remain long after all of the politicians declare victory.

00:01:25.680 It's available now on iTunes or Amazon, Vimeo. Just visit www.mosul-film.com.

00:01:34.480 Today's podcast guest has chalked out a reputation as an unrelenting conservative voice in media

00:02:01.440 at a time when conservative voices are routinely exiled from the media.

00:02:05.600 He does a lot of work with us at the Blaze, and you might have seen him on Blaze TV.

00:02:10.100 He's been exiled. That's why we have him. We're kind of the island of misfit toys.

00:02:13.940 In 2018, he was hired at the Atlantic, only to be fired three days later for a tweet he posted or something he said in a speech in 2014.

00:02:22.820 It was taken out of context, but that didn't matter.

00:02:24.940 Currently, he is a correspondent for the National Review, and his articles are often intricate, witty, and spontaneous.

00:02:31.440 The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, The Dependency Agenda, The Case Against Trump,

00:02:38.580 and his most recent book, The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.

00:02:44.140 He dives into some of the most pressing issues of our time, and he does it without blinking.

00:02:48.220 It's not a PG-13 book. It may not even be a rated R book.

00:02:52.440 We begin there with Kevin Williamson.

00:03:01.440 All right, so Kevin, there's so much of this book I'd like to read, but...

00:03:13.400 It's a family show.

00:03:15.380 Well, not really, but I'm a family man.

00:03:18.580 This is not a family book.

00:03:19.900 It's not one for the kids.

00:03:20.860 I mean, just in your first chapter, if you've ever been to the monkey house in one of those

00:03:30.800 awful downscale zoos that smell very intensely the way you imagine that Bernie Sanders probably

00:03:37.280 smells faintly, you know what monkeys these particular monkeys are like.

00:03:42.340 They, not a family part of this episode, they jerk off, fling, poo all over every day, generally

00:03:51.020 using the same hand for both.

00:03:53.260 No, they fling, poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don't do a

00:03:59.300 hell of a lot else unless there's McDonald's.

00:04:02.000 All day, jerk off, fling, poo, jerk off, fling, poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling. 0.50

00:04:07.200 Twitter, basically.

00:04:08.400 And after about 300,000 years of atomically modern H-SAP, here we are again. 0.93

00:04:18.040 Monkeys, albeit monkeys with Wi-Fi, you can try being human beings.

00:04:22.740 You could.

00:04:23.700 You could try a little freedom on for size, see how it fits, see how it feels, but you're

00:04:28.060 not going to.

00:04:29.000 We both know that.

00:04:30.500 Jerk off, fling, poo, jerk off, fling, poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling. 0.88

00:04:34.220 I hate monkeys, but this is their story.

00:04:37.120 Yes.

00:04:39.060 When you read this, and I'm going to get into some of this, you compare pretty much

00:04:46.680 everybody to monkeys.

00:04:48.320 I got a monkey theme in the book.

00:04:50.120 There is a monkey theme.

00:04:52.400 We started off, you mentioned earlier, I first started working newspapers in India, and I

00:04:58.660 was living in Delhi.

00:04:59.280 And the city is just covered up by monkeys, partly having to do with the fact that there's

00:05:04.060 a temple there.

00:05:05.240 It's a Hanuman temple, and you can't mess with monkeys. 1.00

00:05:06.880 And people would bring offerings, you know, the monkeys, and the people who don't know

00:05:11.820 what they're doing, of course, bring them bananas and fruit and stuff, but what they

00:05:15.060 really like is McDonald's.

00:05:16.740 And I covered the opening of the first McDonald's, actually, in India, which was a very fun story

00:05:20.320 to work on.

00:05:21.520 And so it was just a scene that's still in my head of these, you know, monkeys eating

00:05:25.220 Happy Meals and pilgrims and stuff and thinking that's a little bit like modern life in the

00:05:30.420 United States, I think.

00:05:32.320 And you just swing in, grab the food.

00:05:35.260 Yeah, monkeys kind of are the worst.

00:05:37.180 And, but occasionally they kill somebody there, you know, they cause problems.

00:05:40.200 Or I was in our office one day there, and it was in a basement, and just the lights flicker

00:05:44.880 for a second, and I hear, ehh, and this flaming monkey goes shooting past the window, and it

00:05:49.900 had chewed through the power main, apparently.

00:05:52.320 And I don't know why it was chewing through the power main, but it caused an electricity outage

00:05:57.240 for about four and a half hours, as I recall, which is a pain when you're in the newspaper

00:05:59.840 business.

00:06:00.400 It's hard to get much done.

00:06:01.400 Right.

00:06:02.520 So you think that's who we are now?

00:06:05.260 I think that social media doesn't change who we are, it reveals who we are.

00:06:11.580 It's like alcohol.

00:06:12.800 Alcohol doesn't make you a jerk.

00:06:14.360 You are already a jerk.

00:06:15.840 It just took away your inhibitions.

00:06:18.120 And that is confessional, by the way.

00:06:21.400 But aren't our inhibitions, I'm happy to say I was a nicer guy when I was drunk.

00:06:27.880 Aren't our inhibitions what make us human in some regard?

00:06:34.400 And the things that we have inside, we're like, I don't think I should, you know, fling

00:06:39.920 poop and jerk off, fling, jerk, fling, jerk. 1.00

00:06:42.260 I don't think I should do that.

00:06:43.540 I think our inhibitions are what make us better than human.

00:06:45.840 I think our inhibitions are a gift from God.

00:06:48.620 Right.

00:06:50.220 Anything.

00:06:51.860 Well, individuals are a lot like governments, right?

00:06:53.840 That you want divisions of powers and you want stops on things.

00:06:58.180 And anything that stops me, especially, but any other person, but I'll take myself as

00:07:02.440 a good example of this.

00:07:03.700 Anything that stops me from doing what exactly I want right then at the moment where it comes

00:07:08.580 into my head is a good thing.

00:07:10.380 Anything that stops that from happening is a good thing.

00:07:12.220 And the structure of social media, you know, psychologically is that it rewards theatricality

00:07:19.380 and hysteria and invective and stuff, but it does it immediately.

00:07:23.340 And so people have a tendency to just, you know, hit that button, post, get that feedback.

00:07:28.980 Did you hate me on Fox?

00:07:30.560 You must have hated me on Fox because that was a lot of theatrics.

00:07:34.320 Yeah.

00:07:34.580 I never, you know, I was on the last episode of your Fox News show, I don't know if you

00:07:38.420 remember this, and I...

00:07:41.600 What did we talk about?

00:07:43.860 Well, you ended up at the Blackboard.

00:07:46.100 And when Glenn goes to the Blackboard, I always kind of wanted to go do something else.

00:07:49.600 But to be honest, I've never watched a Fox News show all the way through.

00:07:53.540 Really?

00:07:53.900 Not one.

00:07:54.640 I've never watched any of those shows all the way through, except for the ones that

00:07:56.800 have been on all the way through.

00:07:57.840 Because you just don't watch...

00:07:58.980 You don't watch...

00:07:59.340 I don't watch a lot of television.

00:08:00.440 KTV, especially.

00:08:01.320 Well, I watch Game of Thrones and, you know, Breaking Bad and stuff like that.

00:08:06.020 I mean, cable TV.

00:08:06.040 I don't watch TV news.

00:08:07.180 I mean, I'm sorry, cable TV news.

00:08:08.280 I don't, no.

00:08:09.380 I think it's predictable and useless and...

00:08:13.320 Becoming much more so.

00:08:15.060 Yeah, and it doesn't bring out the best in people.

00:08:17.620 Like, I knew Chris Hayes a little bit before he had his own show and all that sort of stuff.

00:08:22.260 And TV has just taken 30 points off that guy's IQ.

00:08:25.560 You know, just the way he presents himself.

00:08:27.540 The, well, and the book is about tribalism and TV, cable news is about tribalism.

00:08:33.360 It's about, this is our team.

00:08:34.800 Here's how we, here's how we encourage our team.

00:08:37.760 Here's the cheers for our team.

00:08:39.420 Here's all that stuff.

00:08:40.680 And I think that, and here's especially why the other team is bad.

00:08:44.000 And that's where the real ritual of all this is.

00:08:46.520 It's, this is Old Testament stuff.

00:08:48.000 It's like a scapegoat ritual.

00:08:49.480 It's the ritual and ceremony of hating people in public together.

00:08:54.440 That's what Twitter is really for.

00:08:55.880 And that's what Facebook is really for.

00:08:57.700 And to some extent, cable news and some talk radio is really for that.

00:09:01.400 It's let's abominate the people on the other side together. 0.99

00:09:04.980 As this communal team building exercise, it gives us a sense that we belong to one another,

00:09:10.520 that we're part of something significant and important,

00:09:13.020 and that we are affirming our values in some sort of proactive way that really matters.

00:09:18.420 That's an illusion.

00:09:20.120 None of this stuff really matters that much.

00:09:21.900 There was a great, actually, this was maybe right around the time when you were first on Fox.

00:09:28.040 There was a poll that I found very heartening where they're asking people about various TV pundits.

00:09:33.040 And it's old enough that Keith Olbermann was on the list.

00:09:35.360 So I remember Keith Olbermann being on the list.

00:09:36.880 And with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, the most common answer in every category wasn't trust him, don't trust him, like him, don't like him.

00:09:45.220 The most common answer was never heard of him.

00:09:46.840 Yeah.

00:09:47.420 And most people don't know about this stuff.

00:09:49.160 We who work in the media tend to get worked up about these intra-media things that happen sometimes.

00:09:55.560 So when I went through the nonsense with The Atlantic, you know, there are columns in The New York Times and columns in The Washington Post and all that sort of stuff.

00:10:02.120 And two weeks after I got fired, I called my dad, and he's like, so how's the new job going?

00:10:08.360 Wow.

00:10:08.760 Never heard a word about it.

00:10:09.780 No one knew.

00:10:10.340 No one cared.

00:10:10.720 We get real excited about a lot of little things that matter to people who work in news or in media or in television or in politics.

00:10:19.760 But it doesn't really affect the outside world that much.

00:10:21.900 It's a game.

00:10:22.640 I was just in Australia, and there wasn't not one place that I walk into, not a hotel lobby, not a restaurant, bar, airport.

00:10:35.640 No one had cable news on that was just kind of playing.

00:10:41.040 Oh, yeah.

00:10:41.340 They'd have, they'd have sport, apparently sports and horse racing running all the time in Australia.

00:10:46.320 You'd have sports, but no cable news.

00:10:49.740 Yeah.

00:10:50.140 And while you still have Twitter and Facebook and everything else, there's something to that where we are glued in.

00:10:57.780 And when I was over there, I was just minding my own business and doing a, you know, a charity thing over there.

00:11:04.500 And I came back and I was like, what's happening?

00:11:09.460 Because, I mean, none of it, none of it's changed, right?

00:11:11.800 I mean, it's the same crap.

00:11:13.000 We get so wound up in it, and I don't know where the balance is on what's important and what's not.

00:11:21.180 What's worth fighting for and then what's worth leaving alone because I got to live.

00:11:25.320 Yeah.

00:11:26.320 You know, the only foreign language I ever studied in school was Latin.

00:11:29.760 So unless I happen to be at the Vatican, if I'm in a non-English speaking place, I don't understand the news or people's conversations, things like that.

00:11:37.400 And it's such a relief.

00:11:39.100 I just love, I love being in countries where I can't understand people's conversations.

00:11:42.600 I can't understand the news.

00:11:44.040 And you can just kind of be alone with your own thoughts again for a while.

00:11:46.140 And it's kind of, you know, it was real.

00:11:49.000 I hate to say this because I really like Australia.

00:11:50.760 I would live in Australia if, you know, and I would live there comfortably, not with all the socialism and all the, but it's not my country.

00:12:00.100 Right.

00:12:00.540 So I wouldn't care.

00:12:01.640 I mean, they could go crazy in Parliament and be like, all right, well, let's move back.

00:12:05.600 And they're screwing up their country, not my country.

00:12:07.920 So it wouldn't be the same.

00:12:10.100 When you're here and you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that's going to hurt.

00:12:13.940 That's going to leave a mark.

00:12:15.000 And it's your country.

00:12:16.680 How do you know what's important, what you engage in, what you don't?

00:12:22.500 Yeah, I think that, well, anything that can be summed up in five seconds on Twitter and the answer to which is people on the other side are evil and we're good.

00:12:34.060 You got it wrong.

00:12:35.280 Yeah.

00:12:36.280 There aren't any real simple answers to things.

00:12:38.720 I have a thing I jokingly call Williamson's first law of politics, which is that everything is simple when you don't know a thing about it.

00:12:46.580 Gerund deleted there.

00:12:48.420 And it's true. 0.56

00:12:49.860 Everything is simple when you know anything about it.

00:12:51.440 If you get people who are actually subject area experts in something and talk to them about it, nothing's ever simple.

00:12:58.000 Nothing's ever cut and dry.

00:12:59.240 They're always very qualified about their opinions.

00:13:02.280 You know what's interesting?

00:13:02.800 You get like Paul Krugman.

00:13:04.200 You get Paul Krugman writing or talking about his actual area of academic expertise.

00:13:08.420 He's a very interesting guy.

00:13:10.960 His New York Times column could be written by a monkey.

00:13:15.240 You know, it may be for all I know.

00:13:16.580 Back to the monkeys.

00:13:17.480 Back to the monkeys.

00:13:18.640 You know, he's this angry Twitter rage monkey character that he plays in the New York Times.

00:13:23.200 I mean, the rumor is he doesn't write his own column.

00:13:24.640 I don't know if that's true or not.

00:13:25.380 I really kind of hope for his sake it's not.

00:13:27.860 I would be less embarrassed for him if he were outsourcing it than if he actually were writing that crap.

00:13:31.760 But the story we want to tell ourselves is that everything that's wrong with the world is that there's someone evil out there who's causing this to happen.

00:13:43.160 It's good guys and bad guys.

00:13:44.580 We're the virtuous ones.

00:13:45.880 The people we don't like are the evil ones.

00:13:48.240 And everything would be fine if it weren't for them.

00:13:50.020 And if you've got a country in which about 40% of the people believe that, about 40% of the other people, and those 40% reciprocate that belief, and 20% of the people are just watching The Bachelor or doing whatever the rest of the people do, you're not going to have a healthy democratic culture in the long term.

00:14:07.840 You know, if you think about a guy like Lincoln who was in office in a much more difficult time.

00:14:14.300 You think?

00:14:14.800 I think that was actually much more consequential, and Lincoln was the one out lecturing Americans about, you know, we have to be friends.

00:14:20.160 We can't think of each other as enemies.

00:14:21.960 And now we've got President Trump saying, you know, punch that guy in the face and I'll post your bail for you.

00:14:25.880 I hate that.

00:14:27.380 That is evidence that if evolution is a real thing, it's in species and not in countries.

00:14:37.680 And you have people on both sides.

00:14:40.980 Why they decry it on one side, they'll do it on the other side.

00:14:44.020 Sure, of course.

00:14:44.480 That's on both sides.

00:14:46.180 It's on both sides.

00:14:49.500 How did we get here?

00:14:50.880 Is it Twitter and Facebook and all of that that got us here?

00:14:54.540 No.

00:14:55.240 Again, I think those things, they reveal things about us and they intensify things because they give us the opportunity to do bad immediately before we stop and think about it.

00:15:04.280 But I think...

00:15:05.220 And then reward you.

00:15:06.440 Yes, and reward you with attention.

00:15:07.840 So that's the economy of social media, right?

00:15:09.620 You pay attention to other people and then you go out there and that you hope attention will be paid back to you.

00:15:14.020 I heard an interview on the radio the other day with a woman who's in a band, Sleater Kenny, is that what it's called? 0.96

00:15:20.440 It was big back in the 90s or something.

00:15:22.720 A lady from Portlandia was in it. 1.00

00:15:24.640 Apparently, they're popular.

00:15:26.960 People shake their heads when I can't remember this.

00:15:28.880 Anyway, she was talking about this weird thing of being on social media where you set yourself up on this little stage and then you wait for applause.

00:15:34.740 And for someone who actually is a performer to feel weird about that and to understand that weirdness is one thing.

00:15:40.400 For people who aren't professional performers, who still in their everyday lives are basically trying to live psychologically the same way, I think is really very difficult for them and is bound to be unsatisfying.

00:15:51.620 I think a lot of this has to do with changes in the way we live and work in the last 30, 40 years where a lot of us move more often.

00:15:57.700 We change employers more often.

00:15:59.540 We delay marriage.

00:16:00.860 We delay parenthood.

00:16:01.980 We don't go to church as much as we used to.

00:16:04.800 So things that used to provide us with relationships and a sense of belonging, status, significance have either been diminished or for many people taken away entirely.

00:16:13.820 So people go looking for new things to belong to and new sources of identity and meaning.

00:16:18.380 And unfortunately, they've turned to this really dumb form of cowboys and Indians politics on social media. 0.95

00:16:24.860 And again, you're right.

00:16:25.740 This is on both sides.

00:16:26.520 It's a conservative thing as well as a progressive thing.

00:16:28.920 It's team red and team blue of screaming at each other and saying, you're evil, you're evil, you're dumb, you're dumb, you're rotten, you're rotten.

00:16:35.780 And they somehow managed to convince themselves that they're doing something other than playing a game.

00:16:42.020 But they're really just playing a role-playing game.

00:16:43.660 That's why things like Antifa are a problem.

00:16:48.520 I think anytime you've got ordinary political violence happening in a city like Portland, it's a problem.

00:16:53.520 But in a sense, you know, groups like Antifa and groups like the Proud Boys or whatever their opposite number is on the right these days are really just playing a game with one another.

00:17:03.520 They're not really engaged in serious politics.

00:17:05.520 They're not really in pursuit of real political power.

00:17:09.100 They're LARPing.

00:17:10.900 You know, they've got this role-playing game that they've taken into the public square in places like Berkeley and Washington and some other places.

00:17:17.720 And they're essentially playing a game.

00:17:19.100 It's a game in which people actually get hurt and killed sometimes.

00:17:21.440 But they're essentially playing a game because they're bored and they're lonely and they're alienated.

00:17:26.280 And they don't know what to do with their lives.

00:17:27.840 I don't think the SA was playing a game.

00:17:34.060 No, I think they were a lot more serious.

00:17:36.160 I think that, and that's the difference really, is that...

00:17:38.740 They were, I mean, they were not so bright.

00:17:42.140 No, they weren't bright necessarily.

00:17:44.140 I think that, you know, with the National Socialists, you had more of a coherent ideology.

00:17:49.400 You had an actual social crisis that was going on, which always helps demagogues.

00:17:54.720 We don't have an actual social crisis, so we're constantly inventing one.

00:17:58.360 Trump is Hitler.

00:17:59.840 Bernie Sanders is Stalin.

00:18:02.400 None of these things are true.

00:18:04.160 The country is, you know, two tweets away from the Holocaust or one election away from losing the Republic. 0.59

00:18:09.900 I don't think those things are true.

00:18:11.260 You don't?

00:18:11.720 No, I don't think so.

00:18:12.880 I think that we tell ourselves that story.

00:18:14.760 I think that, you know, having elected Hillary Clinton in 2016 or electing Elizabeth Warren in 2020 will do a great deal of damage to the country.

00:18:24.700 I think so, but I think the country is resilient and can withstand a lot.

00:18:27.680 And we made it through the Civil War and the Great Depression and a lot of other stuff.

00:18:30.880 And we'll make it through these things, too.

00:18:33.080 I think we have these big watershed moments, though.

00:18:37.440 Me, too.

00:18:37.800 I just don't think this is one of them.

00:18:39.800 All right, so let's talk about it for a second.

00:18:41.060 9-11, watershed moment, changed us.

00:18:44.980 The Patriot Act was sitting on a dusty shelf, already written.

00:18:48.560 That happened.

00:18:50.060 Let's take some control.

00:18:52.780 TARP, Bush actually saying, you know, Mr. President, you're either going to be remembered as Hoover or you're going to be remembered as FDR.

00:19:01.300 All of them would say FDR.

00:19:03.140 Right.

00:19:03.380 And he did.

00:19:04.280 I got to, what was he saying?

00:19:05.840 I got to violate the free market, save the free market.

00:19:08.000 That's crazy talk.

00:19:08.940 Yes, it is.

00:19:09.600 And that changed us.

00:19:11.820 Barack Obama, health care, changed us.

00:19:16.180 And we're getting to a point now to where there's almost, I mean, it's, we're driving a truck or a classic car.

00:19:29.100 And we're driving it like it's a brand new Porsche.

00:19:33.100 You know what I mean?

00:19:34.060 And it doesn't handle real well in corners.

00:19:36.440 It's not meant to go this fast.

00:19:37.860 It's, you know, it's got all these different things.

00:19:40.080 At some point, one of these is it just you've pushed it too far.

00:19:45.540 And I, we don't know our own history.

00:19:48.760 We, we don't know each other.

00:19:50.500 We don't like each other for all intents and purposes.

00:19:53.560 It seems when, when, and if the economy goes down, you have wolves licking their chops saying free market doesn't work.

00:20:05.360 Once you take away the free market, do you have the United States of America?

00:20:11.900 No, I don't think you do, but I don't think it probably gets taken away.

00:20:14.980 I think even if you elect someone who really, really wants to do it and has the political power to do it, I think it's just, it's almost an impossible thing to do just because the way we live is so enmeshed in that.

00:20:25.820 And people will try to raise taxes.

00:20:28.400 They'll try to have the government take a commanding hand over certain things like maybe energy, labor policy, those sorts of things. 0.93

00:20:35.620 And those will all be bad things, but I don't think you, I don't think the United States is really quite that weak.

00:20:43.020 I mean, you're right about the way change is happening.

00:20:44.740 And it's always, you know, Robert Higgs wrote this famous book, Crisis and Leviathan, and that's the way it always happens.

00:20:48.800 There's a crisis.

00:20:49.860 Government expands.

00:20:50.620 Crisis goes away, but it stays where it was.

00:20:52.300 Because I sometimes have these funny conversations with my conservative friends and they'll ask me about my politics.

00:20:57.220 And, you know, I'm a pretty crazy libertarian, you know, sort of borderline anarchist.

00:21:01.180 And they're like, that's extreme.

00:21:02.420 That's crazy.

00:21:02.980 And I said, well, what do you guys want?

00:21:04.000 And they say, well, I want us to live under the Constitution as it's originally understood.

00:21:07.720 That's libertarian extreme.

00:21:09.440 I was like, you guys are much more radical than I am.

00:21:11.400 Do you realize how different this country would be?

00:21:14.120 I've just been rereading Cult of the Presidency, but that guy works over at Cato.

00:21:17.940 I've forgotten the author's name.

00:21:19.260 Forgive me for that author.

00:21:19.980 And, you know, if you just look at the way our conception of what the president is supposed to be and do has changed over the years, it's crazy.

00:21:28.720 Taft wrote a little pamphlet on it when he was running for re-election about, well, I'm not really supposed to solve every problem.

00:21:34.400 I'm supposed to just basically be the CEO of the government and make sure the agencies run the right way.

00:21:38.100 Right.

00:21:38.260 And if you don't like what the law says, tell Congress about it.

00:21:41.040 Yeah.

00:21:42.260 That changed with Wilson.

00:21:44.020 Right.

00:21:44.460 Who beat Taft.

00:21:46.240 Right.

00:21:47.440 Because of a third-party spoiler.

00:21:48.960 Well, yeah, there was that, too.

00:21:50.160 Although, you think Wilson might have beat him anyway?

00:21:52.420 I don't know.

00:21:52.880 I don't know that election very well.

00:21:54.180 I don't think so.

00:21:57.140 Yeah, I mean, it's not to say that we couldn't have a crisis.

00:21:59.540 It's not to say there aren't dangers out there lurking for us.

00:22:01.800 There always are.

00:22:03.160 But I think that the United States is a country with a lot of strong and functional institutions, some of which we really don't appreciate very much.

00:22:09.460 I mean, you take the Fed.

00:22:13.000 Every conspiracy theorist hates the Fed.

00:22:15.420 The president hates the Fed right now.

00:22:16.840 He hates his appointees to the Fed.

00:22:19.740 The Fed has basically done a pretty good job of doing what it's supposed to do.

00:22:23.560 Now, if I were designing the country from the ground up back in the 1700s, I wouldn't have put a central bank there either.

00:22:28.440 And I think we'd probably get along just fine without one.

00:22:31.260 Well, without having had one.

00:22:33.260 Now that we have one, we have a lot of institutions that are built up around that.

00:22:36.400 I don't think Americans want to be poor.

00:22:37.900 They don't want to be vulnerable.

00:22:38.800 They don't want to be miserable.

00:22:39.700 They know how not to do that.

00:22:41.260 We know how to make stuff and do stuff.

00:22:43.320 So you might say that people don't like the Fed, and they may actually say, I should have asked this question.

00:22:51.100 I was with a friend this weekend, and he said, Glenn, we just sold our business.

00:22:55.680 We have some money.

00:22:56.620 We lost everything in 08.

00:22:58.000 You know, I just don't know what we're going to do because we just can't afford to lose all of our money again.

00:23:04.960 And as he's talking, I just started hearing, you know, Wilson and all the progressives talk about the Fed.

00:23:13.220 That's the thing that brought the Fed in.

00:23:15.860 You know, you had a depression.

00:23:17.700 Well, it lasted about a year, but you had a depression about every 10 to 12 years.

00:23:22.580 And you would lose everything, and you'd have to start over.

00:23:25.200 And not everybody would, but a lot of people would.

00:23:28.380 And there was no room for that pain.

00:23:31.880 People did not want that pain.

00:23:33.960 Yeah.

00:23:34.060 Yeah, I think that people like predictability.

00:23:39.840 And that's part of, I think, where our anxiety right now comes from, is that we don't know what's going to happen next.

00:23:48.360 You know, I think about people in my father's generation who would work for the same company or for two companies over the course of their lives.

00:23:54.840 Whereas a lot of people in my generation, I think I've had 21 employers or something like that.

00:23:59.040 Or maybe I'm a bad example of this, but I can't keep a job.

00:24:02.660 But our 21 home addresses and 17 employees or something, I get them confused.

00:24:07.180 But we don't have these fixed lives anymore.

00:24:11.220 And so it's great for a lot of people, and people like me especially, because it brings opportunity and new things.

00:24:16.480 And you can try new things.

00:24:17.540 And you don't have to be doing the same thing at the same desk for 25 years the way a lot of people used to.

00:24:22.840 But a lot of people want to do the same thing at the same desk for 25 years.

00:24:25.560 And there's nothing wrong with that.

00:24:26.480 We shouldn't sneer at those people and look down at them.

00:24:28.540 A lot of people prefer the predictability of life as an employee in an old-fashioned 1960s-style corporation to life in an economy in which everyone has to be, to some extent, an entrepreneur, in which there's no fixity and no security.

00:24:43.940 And I think that is part of where this anxiety and hysteria and also this desire for autocracy comes from.

00:24:51.960 Because people are looking at the government saying, be my father, you know, be my father, be my chieftain, be my God, solve my problems.

00:24:58.920 I will give you my allegiance if you'll just make sure that I've got a roof over my head and that my health care is taken care of and my kids are educated.

00:25:05.780 So how do you bring America back to where it was?

00:25:10.680 Well, was when?

00:25:13.140 When we were.

00:25:14.040 And do we want to?

00:25:17.480 I mean, some things we'd like to bring back.

00:25:18.960 Like, you know, there were some aspects of life.

00:25:20.880 Yeah, I'm an Eisenhower guy.

00:25:21.960 Right.

00:25:22.160 I'm sort of philosophically a radical, but politically I'm pretty moderate.

00:25:25.580 I like consensus and bipartisanship and that stuff because I think that's where stability comes from.

00:25:30.380 Right.

00:25:30.740 And I think instability is the most dangerous thing in a country that has democratic institutions.

00:25:34.800 We are so successful because we had cheap energy and stability.

00:25:38.680 Yeah.

00:25:39.480 And, you know, rule of law, basic things like that.

00:25:41.720 Secure property rights.

00:25:42.780 Yeah.

00:25:43.080 All the things that go along with that.

00:25:44.400 Stability.

00:25:44.420 That brings stability.

00:25:46.820 There are a lot of things about that era that I like.

00:25:48.540 A lot of things that obviously we wouldn't like that we'd want to change.

00:25:50.480 Um, but it's not one of those things where you get to pick things you like and then leave behind the things you don't.

00:25:56.260 And so everyone who complains about globalization likes globalization.

00:26:01.620 We like having access to things from all over the world at better prices.

00:26:06.480 I always point out there's a wonderful passage in The Count of Monte Cristo, which is one of my favorite novels.

00:26:11.220 And, um, the count who is this, you know, richest man in Paris, and he always does these whimsical things.

00:26:18.960 He has a dinner party at which he serves two different kinds of fish.

00:26:21.840 And this is a huge thing.

00:26:23.620 Everyone is just stunned and awed by this display of wealth and ingenuity of having, uh, ingenuity of having, uh, two kinds of fish.

00:26:32.880 And you walk into a Walmart, and the poorest people in America can go choose from 70 kinds of fish, and we don't think twice about it.

00:26:40.740 Um, but even you read books like, uh, you read Stephen King's The Stand, which was written, I guess it's published in 1980, written in 1978 and 1979.

00:26:49.340 There's a guy who's going home to visit his mother in the Bronx, and he's a rock star.

00:26:52.860 He's made all this money, and his mom cleans houses, and she doesn't have very much money.

00:26:56.660 And he goes back home, and he finds that she's bought two pounds of butter because she's going to cook for him because it's what mothers do when their sons come to visit.

00:27:02.440 And he thinks to himself, how did she ever get the money to do that?

00:27:06.880 You know, this was during my lifetime.

00:27:08.420 I'm not an ancient man.

00:27:09.920 And, um, so our quality of life has changed just radically over where it was in the 1960s, 70s, to say nothing in the 1950s.

00:27:17.280 If the American people were asked to go back to the economy where everybody had a job in these factories or pumping people out, right?

00:27:23.980 Yeah.

00:27:25.260 Oh, man.

00:27:26.480 You talk about that in your book.

00:27:28.120 I do, yeah.

00:27:28.780 Yeah, and people talk about wanting that because they want the stability, but they don't want the standard of living that goes with it.

00:27:34.300 So they want to get all the dynamism and quality of life that comes with having globalization and the other institutions that we have now and the other economic practices we have now, but they don't want to pay the price that goes with it.

00:27:46.900 So they've essentially become, you know, as I always say, we're the spoiled children of history.

00:27:50.860 We're the richest, freest, happiest, best-off people in the world, and we are miserable.

00:27:55.140 We've never been unhappier.

00:27:56.140 We're, we think that, you know, we're always, it's always 1939 here.

00:28:00.420 The Great Depression is going on and there are Nazis somewhere.

00:28:03.220 And that's not really the case.

00:28:05.340 That's not how we live.

00:28:06.800 But there have been changes that have gone along with that that are not universally welcomed and do make people's lives less stable, less predictable, and more stressful.

00:28:15.140 And I think that is really the basic source of our political discontent right now.

00:28:21.360 I write about this a lot for National Review that when conservatives look at members of the electorate who don't tend to go along with us on stuff, single women, African Americans, immigrants, if you look at them, these are groups of people who tend to be risk averse and who often have good reasons to be risk averse.

00:28:41.340 The market economy has not always been good to African Americans, not when you're being bought and sold in the market economy.

00:28:46.140 And this was not a thousand years ago.

00:28:48.340 And, you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not 500 years ago.

00:28:51.960 It was not that long ago.

00:28:53.920 There's reason for people to be risk averse.

00:28:55.780 And we look at their preference for big government programs as being personal corruption, as being you're lazy, you want welfare benefits, and you're being bought your vote.

00:29:07.480 Your vote's being bought by the Democrats.

00:29:08.980 We have this stupid plantation talk that people use as though it's impossible that black Americans just simply prefer the policies of the Democratic Party and maybe have good reasons for doing so. 0.97

00:29:19.220 So we're out there talking about the free market and entrepreneurship and dynamism for people who don't want those things, who are afraid of them, who don't like what they brought.

00:29:28.820 And we need to make our argument in the context, I think, of that risk aversion of here's what you stand to lose, first of all, which is your 21st century quality of life and your standard of living, which is very important to you.

00:29:41.240 Do you know where it comes from?

00:29:42.840 Do you know how these things happen?

00:29:44.380 And then people need to understand the tradeoffs between these things.

00:29:47.040 And then to the extent that Republicans and conservatives want to offer social policies, welfare policies, social insurance, those sorts of things, they should be tailored in a way to deal with that specific risk aversion because that's really what's going on.

00:30:00.480 It's not a bidding contest.

00:30:02.220 We'll give you $60,000 for your vote.

00:30:04.080 They'll give you $70,000.

00:30:05.900 And we really misunderstand how this stuff even works.

00:30:08.360 Again, if you look at the case of African-American voters, they tend to move to the left the wealthier they are and the higher income they are. 0.86

00:30:15.220 So they become more supportive of redistribution, higher taxes, social spending when they're wealthy.

00:30:21.180 So the black voters who are the least likely to benefit from redistribution and from welfare spending are the ones who most support it. 0.99

00:30:27.420 So this is not about someone out there going, how can I get the government to give me money?

00:30:31.180 It's a whole different set of things.

00:30:33.220 I've wandered a bit afar from the book here, but that's a reality that I think conservatives and libertarians and free market people need to deal with and need to deal with in a way that's forthright and honest.

00:30:44.500 So we're looking at, I mean, nobody will talk, and I don't think this is the answer, but I've had a conversation.

00:30:50.520 Imagine this on talk radio.

00:30:52.220 I've had the conversation that we have to talk about basic minimum income.

00:30:57.560 I don't think that's the answer, but the world is changing so much.

00:31:01.740 And the wealth will really truly be concentrated in very few hands if the Amazons and the Googles and everything else actually do block people through algorithms or through government regulation.

00:31:19.800 And we have a situation to where we could be in trouble only because people have to go out and find something new and different.

00:31:31.800 And, you know, my wife is a good example of this.

00:31:36.560 She's not cut from the entrepreneurial cloth.

00:31:39.620 She's an entrepreneurial person with our children.

00:31:43.460 I mean, she's got it down.

00:31:45.540 I couldn't do that job.

00:31:47.060 She couldn't do my job.

00:31:48.240 What happens to those people?

00:31:51.180 What happens to people who are happy being a truck driver?

00:31:53.420 And they don't want to start their own business.

00:31:55.440 Yeah.

00:31:55.700 But the truck driving job is going away.

00:31:58.920 Yeah.

00:31:59.320 I mean, we have to get used to the fact that things change.

00:32:01.320 They always have.

00:32:02.180 There are lots of jobs that were good jobs in the 19th century and the 1950s that aren't jobs anymore.

00:32:09.820 You know, the job my father had for most of his life is a job that simply doesn't exist because of information technology.

00:32:14.260 So these things are not changing.

00:32:19.540 And to the extent that we've got demagogues who want to tell people, I can protect you from this, but I can stop these changes from happening by putting tariffs on this or having a Green New Deal or doing this or that or the other.

00:32:31.260 These are all dishonest.

00:32:32.880 And I think that people understand that they're dishonest if you really explain to them in some detail why this is the case.

00:32:41.260 And you shouldn't give in to the temptation to shake your finger at people and say, well, you should just get used to the world as it is.

00:32:47.440 And, yes, you do have to get used to the world as it is.

00:32:49.440 But there are also things we can do to help people to live in that world and to get used to it.

00:32:53.880 Because I don't care about the idea of popularity very much, I suppose, which is hard when you're trying to sell books.

00:33:01.620 But I sometimes frame this as the problem.

00:33:04.620 What do we do about dumb people?

00:33:06.560 And which I don't really mean dumb people.

00:33:08.720 So you've got half the population who are at median IQ or lower, and the 21st century is a really tough world for them.

00:33:17.180 If you're in the sort of top 20% in terms of your skills, your education, your intelligence, it's a great world.

00:33:21.380 You've got lots of opportunities, all sorts of fun, interesting things to do.

00:33:24.820 You can go from one thing to the next.

00:33:26.780 If you're someone who would have made a pretty good clerk in a hardware store in 1959, and that's really what you're cut out for,

00:33:34.560 and you don't really have the raw materials or the ambitions to do something else to be that entrepreneurial 21st century worker.

00:33:44.520 What do we do about that?

00:33:45.300 And I think that's a real problem.

00:33:47.540 People sort of sneer at the so-called gig economy and Uber drivers and that sort of stuff.

00:33:52.680 But I think there's actually some real value there because human effort and human energy and intelligence and ingenuity are inherently valuable.

00:34:04.240 So the nice thing about being in a society in which a lot of people have a lot of disposable income and a desire for more time on their hands is they can consume more services.

00:34:13.020 And, you know, my colleague Michael Brendan Doherty sort of sneers about this sometimes.

00:34:17.640 And, well, why is our economy only creating jobs detailing cars and, you know, things like that?

00:34:23.940 And I thought, you know what?

00:34:24.800 The guy who details my car drives their Mercedes, he's got a really good business.

00:34:29.020 I have friends who are in the lawn care business who make, you know, healthy six-figure incomes.

00:34:34.720 Now, not everyone's going to do that, but some people are.

00:34:37.080 And some people are going to be the employees of those companies who make less money.

00:34:39.960 That's okay.

00:34:40.640 I'm not a big supporter of the basic income.

00:34:45.060 I don't think it's a great idea for a lot of reasons.

00:34:47.640 I prefer the—

00:34:48.640 It's not worked anywhere.

00:34:49.480 It's tried.

00:34:49.980 I don't think it would work.

00:34:50.880 I do like the idea of a negative income tax where you can take all the stuff that we do in terms of welfare support and just make a check out of it, which I think is fine.

00:34:59.920 I think most people can spend their own money and make their own decisions.

00:35:02.900 I don't think that patronizing, condescending idea about people who receive benefits is very helpful.

00:35:08.000 But you do it in such a way that it incentivizes work rather than disincentivizing work.

00:35:13.180 And so I think maybe if we could replace a whole bunch of this stuff with the negative income tax, I think that would be a worthwhile experiment.

00:35:19.220 So I don't see us turning around on socialism.

00:35:25.600 I don't see us turning around fast on nationalism.

00:35:29.380 And I don't see us turning around on socialism.

00:35:38.300 So where did we go from here?

00:35:43.160 My read on where we are is that I'm a long-term optimist and a short-term pessimist.

00:35:49.580 I think that we are in for some bumpy spots ahead of us because if you keep acting like you're in a crisis long enough, you'll get one.

00:35:58.660 You'll create one of your own.

00:36:00.600 And by making bad decisions, by swinging back and forth radically on things, by precluding the emergence of that stability that we were talking about earlier.

00:36:10.420 It's sort of like, you know, I say this about tax policy sometimes.

00:36:12.700 It's not that I don't care whether the top rate is 39% or 34.5%.

00:36:17.780 I do care.

00:36:19.020 I think it makes a difference.

00:36:20.300 But I'd be fine if we would just pick one and stick with it for the next 50 years.

00:36:25.560 There are things about how I would like to organize the health care system that probably wouldn't be that popular.

00:36:32.300 There are things from the...

00:36:33.340 Like what?

00:36:33.460 I think that the people who came up with the original version of Obamacare were essentially trying to adapt the Swiss system to the United States.

00:36:48.100 I think the Swiss system is actually pretty good for Switzerland.

00:36:51.560 I don't think it's going to work very well for us.

00:36:53.780 You go over to those countries and you see...

00:36:56.440 I mean, when I walked into Sydney, I always thought Sydney was a giant city.

00:36:59.100 It's about the size of Pittsburgh.

00:37:00.240 Yeah, it's nice.

00:37:00.600 And then there's nothing else.

00:37:01.640 It's if we moved everybody in New York onto that entire continent, that's it. 0.97

00:37:06.180 You would notice them.

00:37:06.740 You know, things work differently when you don't have 350 million people.

00:37:10.560 That's true.

00:37:11.840 But there are things that I think that come from the left on what they want to do with health care reform that I could countenance, even though they're not my preferences.

00:37:20.600 Like an individual mandate, I could actually countenance.

00:37:22.880 I think if you're going to have one, you need to enforce it.

00:37:24.800 And you need to make sure, like, you've got Swiss-style 99.9% compliance.

00:37:29.480 It changes your market a lot.

00:37:31.640 I'd be willing to accept some of those things in return for policy stability.

00:37:37.340 And that's what we used to do is we used to work toward compromise and consensus.

00:37:41.340 And again, this is a big part of what the book is about, is that if we're going to have a political culture in which we interact with one another only as mascots and as representatives of the team and the tribe we don't like, rather than as individuals and citizens having a conversation in the context of the democratic institutions of a democracy, then we can't forge consensus and we can't ever have policy stability.

00:38:06.580 And so we get these swings back and forth, back and forth.

00:38:09.560 Joe Rogan's joke about this.

00:38:10.900 You know, we go right, left, right, left, dumb smart, dumb smart.

00:38:13.740 Right, right, right.

00:38:14.360 And I don't think he's exactly right on that.

00:38:16.360 And I don't think a lot of the smart people have been as smart as they think they are.

00:38:20.180 But we do that, you know, there's no, there's no coherent explanation of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump.

00:38:31.500 That's not a country that's thinking things through real carefully.

00:38:35.120 I think that's a country that's just having a hissy fit. 1.00

00:38:38.500 And it depends on which side is having the bigger hissy fit in any given moment.

00:38:41.940 So do you see us turning?

00:38:46.060 I see us evolving in the right direction.

00:38:48.340 Ultimately, yes, I think that Americans will make the right decisions about things once they've exhausted all their other options.

00:38:57.960 Again, we don't want to be poor.

00:39:00.300 We know this.

00:39:01.000 We know where our wealth actually comes from.

00:39:03.100 We know why we trade.

00:39:04.920 We know why we allow for entrepreneurship.

00:39:06.960 Yes, some people resent the fact that Jeff Bezos has so much money or that Mark Zuckerberg has so much money.

00:39:13.700 You know, here's the funny thing I wrote.

00:39:15.000 I wrote this back in 2012 during that election that Mitt Romney shouldn't be ashamed of his wealth.

00:39:20.020 Right.

00:39:20.140 Because Americans don't really hate rich people for being rich.

00:39:22.840 And the example I used was, look, they turned on their television to watch Donald Trump fire people.

00:39:27.840 I never thought we'd actually make him president.

00:39:30.000 Right, right.

00:39:30.860 When I read that.

00:39:33.300 Americans, there's some resentment and envy out there.

00:39:35.880 And anything that's old enough to have a prohibition against it in the Old Testament is part of human nature.

00:39:39.480 It's going to be there forever.

00:39:40.740 But I don't think we're going to let those things ultimately turn us into Venezuela or Haiti or Somalia or someplace like that.

00:39:47.900 I just don't think we're that dumb.

00:39:49.500 And I don't think we're that self-hating.

00:39:51.180 Did I read the opening first paragraph?

00:39:54.940 Americans are idiots as voters. 1.00

00:39:57.600 And they're not idiots as people, though.

00:39:59.720 That's the thing about our country where we are so mixed.

00:40:02.720 We're so mixed.

00:40:03.960 We do these amazing inventive things.

00:40:06.660 And then we have a 2016 presidential election.

00:40:09.440 It's Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, which would be embarrassing as a mayor's race of New York City, much less president of the United States of America.

00:40:16.820 Actually, it'd be a pretty good New York mayor's race.

00:40:18.320 I'd like you just to read.

00:40:22.160 What do you want me to read?

00:40:23.120 Well, this is about democracy.

00:40:24.240 People are stupid.

00:40:24.440 So this is this about the voting.

00:40:27.460 This is about the voting public.

00:40:29.300 Put on my glasses for this.

00:40:30.580 I'm sorry.

00:40:30.920 No, this is.

00:40:32.900 That there is no special virtue in consulting morons and cretins simply because they exist. 1.00

00:40:38.740 There's no special moral value in bundling together complex problems and policy ideas and asking 50 percent plus one of a sprawling and almost pristinely ignorant group of barely improved chimpanzees.

00:40:48.940 Only a relatively few generations of evolution removed from habitual public masturbation and ritual pooflinging what they think about those bundles and which of them they prefer.

00:40:57.780 Yeah, this is why I'm not a huge believer in democracy.

00:41:02.340 Well, neither will their founders.

00:41:03.680 Right.

00:41:04.420 And I quote extensively in there.

00:41:06.860 So democracy is really important procedurally because it's our substitute for violence.

00:41:12.780 You say you want this guy to be our representative.

00:41:14.760 I say we want that guy.

00:41:15.700 We have a vote.

00:41:16.180 We go on through it.

00:41:16.920 But the idea that policies or positions or principles or moral propositions become more true because a whole bunch of people believe in them at any given moment is preposterous.

00:41:32.060 I don't think any serious person can really can really believe that.

00:41:34.940 But we talk as though we believe that because we use democracy as a synonym for good stuff.

00:41:40.380 We believe in democracy.

00:41:41.980 Well, slavery was democracy. 0.75

00:41:43.640 If you had a vote on slavery, slavery would have won 70-30.

00:41:47.260 Yeah.

00:41:47.660 Probably.

00:41:48.080 So you have democracy and that's why we don't have a democracy.

00:41:52.280 Right.

00:41:53.060 And just because, you know, I love this.

00:41:55.100 Well, that's settled law.

00:41:56.640 What do you mean it's settled law?

00:41:58.660 It's settled law.

00:41:59.900 We can change those laws.

00:42:01.860 We can't change rights.

00:42:03.300 We can't change responsibilities.

00:42:04.620 But the laws, the interpretation, if somebody passed it because 90% of the American people said slavery was good, I wouldn't think slavery was good.

00:42:17.620 Right.

00:42:17.900 You know, everyone has to account for their own soul and think for themselves.

00:42:22.980 It's funny where we get with this stuff.

00:42:24.340 I was reading an essay the other day, some idiot writing in Slate, and he was coming down on Clarence Thomas about something.

00:42:29.800 And he was shocked, or at least pretended to be shocked, by the idea that Thomas didn't think himself bound by precedent in cases in which that precedent was unconstitutional.

00:42:40.340 So he wouldn't support the precedent if he thought the precedent was wrong.

00:42:43.800 So I thought, well, what is your alternative here?

00:42:45.980 That he's supposed to take something he thinks is plainly unconstitutional and support it because it exists?

00:42:52.020 And someone in 1830 thought this was a good idea?

00:42:55.100 Because we've got some decisions you might want to revisit if that's what you think.

00:42:57.800 We've had some awful precedents, and awful presidents, too.

00:43:01.440 And I'm glad they're both gone and are overturned.

00:43:03.700 And I think that the great thing about the American system of government and why I do wish we would return to something more like our actual constitutional architecture is kind of what we started talking about, which is that it says, whoa, you know, it keeps things from happening too fast.

00:43:20.880 And all of the best aspects of our government, I think all the ones I really admire the most, are the anti-democratic aspects of the government, like the Bill of Rights.

00:43:29.800 You know, the Bill of Rights always describes the great big list of stuff that you idiots don't get to vote on because we've already settled this, and it's done.

00:43:36.860 You don't like free speech?

00:43:38.640 Fine.

00:43:39.040 You don't like free speech.

00:43:40.360 We're not voting on it.

00:43:41.380 We've already decided on this.

00:43:42.820 Seventy percent of you don't like it.

00:43:44.220 Ninety percent of you don't like it.

00:43:45.960 Sorry.

00:43:46.800 You've got a right to free speech.

00:43:47.840 You don't get to vote on this.

00:43:49.580 The presidency, as it originally was conceived, was thought to be a break on the House of Representatives, which the founders thought would be too eager because it was too democratic.

00:43:57.980 The Senate, of course, was the same thing.

00:43:59.800 The Supreme Court is there to keep Congress from being too democratic, from being too demagogic, and responding to what the founders used to refer to as the passions of the moment.

00:44:10.660 And not only our constitutional architecture, but also our political culture, and I think our culture more broadly, would do well to return to some of that wisdom and to learn some of those lessons.

00:44:23.780 You know, if what's worse about Twitter, and I don't exempt myself, by the way, from any of this.

00:44:28.020 Social media never brought out the best in me.

00:44:30.380 It certainly doesn't bring out the best in most people, I think.

00:44:34.000 Is the immediacy of it.

00:44:35.100 I think our world would be completely different if we all just shut it off.

00:44:38.880 Yeah, and not any worse.

00:44:40.580 I haven't used any social media in a couple years now, and I don't find that I miss it.

00:44:46.040 You know, I thought it was good for marketing.

00:44:47.460 I was wrong about that.

00:44:48.420 It doesn't really affect my readership at all, as it turns out.

00:44:50.840 So I can't think of a good reason to do it.

00:44:52.820 Although the reason I really used to do it, of course, Twitter is great if you're a writer and you procrastinate.

00:44:57.220 Because you don't want to do your real work, so let's see who's being stupid tonight.

00:45:03.340 And, you know, and you always end up arguing and slapping around some undergraduate at Lehigh University or something like that, who's maybe not the best investment of your time.

00:45:13.000 And because they're at Lehigh, they're not educable.

00:45:16.400 And, oh, I'm sorry, I'm mean.

00:45:18.740 And I usually say Texas Tech, but I've had to start doing that.

00:45:22.240 So, you know, just was never a real good use of time, never brought out the best in me.

00:45:26.160 But this culture of immediacy, of wanting things immediately, needing immediate feedback, immediate attention, someone pay attention to me, listen to what I have to say right now, give me what I want from the government right now.

00:45:36.340 The time for debate has passed.

00:45:38.160 It's time for the government to act.

00:45:39.500 Well, the time for debate has passed.

00:45:40.840 Why?

00:45:41.040 Because you say so?

00:45:41.900 Because I want to debate about this stuff.

00:45:44.220 And that's always the mark of a demagogue, right?

00:45:47.660 Yeah.

00:45:47.920 Is that we must act right now or the world is ending.

00:45:51.800 But the world isn't ending.

00:45:53.200 It keeps just not ending.

00:45:54.340 I've been shocked on how resilient this country is.

00:45:59.700 Yeah.

00:46:00.380 Got a lot of money, a lot of smart people.

00:46:04.060 We've got a lot of accumulated social capital, which, unfortunately, I think we're spending down a bit of when we need to reinvest in some of that.

00:46:11.720 But I'm not a super jingoistic American.

00:46:16.360 You know, a lot of conservatives for some reason hate Europe.

00:46:18.380 You know, conservatives, like, France is a hellhole.

00:46:22.200 Well, it's not.

00:46:23.840 France is a perfectly nice place.

00:46:25.680 I like Switzerland a lot.

00:46:27.380 I kind of think about moving there sometimes.

00:46:29.580 And maybe I will.

00:46:31.020 But it is true that when you travel, and especially if you do business abroad, you come to appreciate certain things about the United States you do.

00:46:39.300 Oh, yeah.

00:46:39.860 Like, I heard not a super left wing, but a pretty up and down the line progressive Silicon Valley executive a year and a half or so ago who just sounds like Milton Friedman.

00:46:50.760 You can talk about doing business in Germany.

00:46:52.560 He's like, thank God for the United States.

00:46:53.980 It's the only place we can do business.

00:46:55.180 It's so hard abroad.

00:46:56.300 You know, the taxes are nuts and the regulation is nuts.

00:46:59.020 And we tend to think we have a pessimism bias.

00:47:02.840 We always notice all the worst stuff.

00:47:05.280 And because we're spoiled.

00:47:06.860 Well, because we're spoiled.

00:47:07.620 Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.

00:47:08.980 And we undervalue the good things.

00:47:11.640 And again, this is something I think conservatives especially really need to work on because conservatives hate a lot of the stuff that's successful about America.

00:47:19.720 You know, we hate Silicon Valley.

00:47:21.140 We hate Hollywood.

00:47:21.940 We hate Wall Street.

00:47:22.920 We hate the university system.

00:47:25.040 And there's criticisms being made of all those things, but they're also really, really valuable institutions that we should show a little love for from time to time.

00:47:33.060 I don't think I hate any of those things.

00:47:35.900 Maybe not you.

00:47:37.560 Read my mail.

00:47:39.120 Read your mail.

00:47:40.180 You got somebody to read your mail.

00:47:41.000 When you read the mail, do you get more optimistic or less optimistic?

00:47:45.380 Oh, I get less optimistic when I read the mail, obviously.

00:47:47.600 But you never read the comments and read the mail.

00:47:50.360 Although often you'll get, you know, some interesting, intelligent commentary from people, too.

00:47:55.140 It's not as though, you know, we're in some Hieronymus Bosch painting or something like that.

00:48:00.000 You know, that's not the actual country.

00:48:01.760 The one thing I can't figure out with our system that I haven't, I don't mind how much money you have.

00:48:28.280 I really don't.

00:48:29.420 I don't care.

00:48:30.260 You made it legally.

00:48:31.200 You made it ethically.

00:48:32.820 Fine.

00:48:33.800 Didn't do anything wrong.

00:48:34.820 You're guilty after you're, you know, you're innocent and then you're proven guilty.

00:48:40.400 So I have no problem with business and et cetera, et cetera.

00:48:46.440 However, I have tried to figure out, you know, the robber barons were not the robber barons, but they were also, they also had, you know, not enough Hank Reardon in them.

00:48:59.740 Sure.

00:49:01.140 And every time I look at the system, I think, okay, there's, there's a few things going on.

00:49:08.100 One, it's globalist and, and distorted capitalism.

00:49:14.700 And when I say globalist, what I mean is people are worrying about their jobs.

00:49:19.780 They're worrying, they're seeing their hometown, the white picket fence.

00:49:23.840 Everybody's moving away because there's no jobs there.

00:49:26.100 They're told, well, you're going to have to move someplace else.

00:49:28.140 Well, I don't want to leave my little town.

00:49:29.760 I like my little town, you know?

00:49:32.500 And so they're feeling disenfranchised and they're not, nobody's listening to them, et cetera, et cetera.

00:49:38.300 And then they're being told that they're racist, you know, or they're a Nazi or, or whatever.

00:49:44.320 So there's, there's that disenfranchisement that they're trying to, to get through.

00:49:51.020 Then they're worried with globalist, with globalization.

00:49:54.780 They're worried about just having a job.

00:49:57.000 You know, they're not, most are living paycheck to paycheck or pretty close to paycheck to paycheck.

00:50:02.380 Um, and they don't, they're worried about their job.

00:50:07.080 They're worried about their heritage.

00:50:08.480 They're worried about their town.

00:50:09.840 They're worried about their, um, uh, their kids.

00:50:16.160 What, what happens when you have the, the robber barons coming in, they made, they made things great.

00:50:23.700 You know, they did it.

00:50:24.820 They created a lot of jobs, but once you get to a certain level, you can kick the door.

00:50:32.380 Behind you closed, you're seeing it with, you know, you saw it with Vanderbilt and the railways.

00:50:38.560 You're seeing it now with, with Google and Facebook, they're going in for regulation.

00:50:42.960 So the little guy can't compete.

00:50:45.300 That's what I think they're worried about with globalization.

00:50:47.660 I think they're, they're seeing their towns, their heritage being destroyed.

00:50:54.260 The jobs changing.

00:50:56.320 Nobody's really talking to them about what your future is going to be.

00:51:00.040 Nobody's articulating this.

00:51:01.580 Politicians are only saying, I'm going to bring your job back.

00:51:05.060 No, you're not.

00:51:06.060 Yeah.

00:51:06.160 Because those jobs aren't going to exist.

00:51:07.820 They're not going to just exist for Chinese.

00:51:11.400 You know, it's just not going to happen.

00:51:13.140 Yeah.

00:51:13.260 One of the great ironies of our current politics is that the complaint you're talking about is essentially a complaint about corporatism, you know, where you've got a partnership between big business and big government and each of them trying to use the other for its own advantage.

00:51:31.340 And what's been offered as a cure for that is more corporatism.

00:51:37.080 It's corporatism with us in charge.

00:51:38.480 So these other right.

00:51:39.620 Sobs in charge. 1.00

00:51:40.820 And that, of course, is not going to work the way people want it to.

00:51:45.020 This is, of course, really the great rebirth of corporatism as a political idea is really the one of the characteristics of our time where you've got people on the left with these crazy Green New Deal things, people on the right saying, well, we're going to have government manage trade.

00:52:00.220 And we're going to have government oversee the technology companies so that they're being patriotic or whatever it's supposed to be.

00:52:06.720 And that's all, of course, nuts.

00:52:07.960 And it's all doomed to failure.

00:52:09.400 And I was going to tell people, have you flown recently?

00:52:12.520 Do you want the people who organize the TSA to try to run Silicon Valley or banking or anything or a two car parade?

00:52:21.260 You know, I don't want them.

00:52:22.720 I don't want them running the airports.

00:52:24.980 Yeah.

00:52:25.200 I think ultimately you end up with real market competition reasserting itself over attempts to try to quash it because it's just very difficult to keep that sort of thing down.

00:52:41.160 And, you know, when you're talking about these guys in Silicon Valley now taking a more open approach to being regulated, you're right.

00:52:48.440 They're worried about competition.

00:52:49.500 And you talk to these guys and they always say the same thing that we're not worried about any company you've ever heard of.

00:52:55.200 You know, we're worried about some guy in his garage because that's who we used to be 30 years ago.

00:52:58.620 We were some guy in the garage and we know what we did and how we, quote, unquote, disrupted things.

00:53:04.020 And that's another funny thing about our times.

00:53:06.480 Everyone loves the word disruption, but everyone actually hates disruption.

00:53:09.540 Hates it.

00:53:10.000 And if you actually are disruptive to an institution, if you are disruptive to your university or to a little magazine that employs you or something like that,

00:53:18.920 that's the one thing that corporations will not actually deal with.

00:53:22.440 And, you know, whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook, whether it's the New York Times, whether it's anyone else.

00:53:28.280 An odd period, I think, for that particular reason.

00:53:31.580 But I don't think these guys are ultimately going to be able to control what goes on in the markets because even if they really, really hold their regulators hostage,

00:53:40.160 and they often can, the power of markets and capital right now is such that the power of states can no longer really adequately control it.

00:53:51.620 And I think that's one of the things that Americans, American government's going to have to get used to,

00:53:55.420 is that there are a lot of these businesses that employ a lot of people and generate a lot of wealth that don't have to be in California.

00:54:02.300 They don't have to be in the United States at all.

00:54:05.800 If I were an American tobacco company, why are you incorporating the United States of America?

00:54:10.060 I'd be in Singapore or someplace like that, someplace that doesn't hate you.

00:54:14.560 You know, and there are a lot of places in the world that'd like to be home to these companies, and they're going to say, okay, I'm here.

00:54:19.720 And they'd like to be home to the next one, too.

00:54:21.880 You know, so Facebook's already out there.

00:54:24.040 But eventually they're going to get a real competitor, and they've already got competitors for some aspects of their business.

00:54:28.920 But, you know, in the same way that there was such a thing as MySpace, which no one really remembers,

00:54:32.840 that Facebook just sort of swept away, it's not as though Facebook is the utility company.

00:54:37.160 It's not U.S. Steel.

00:54:39.180 Even U.S. Steel isn't U.S. Steel anymore.

00:54:40.900 You know, it used to be a huge company.

00:54:41.960 Now it's a tiny little company.

00:54:44.020 These companies are not immune from competition, and that competition doesn't have to be any particular place.

00:54:49.860 You know, you can incorporate in Switzerland, or you can incorporate in Abu Dhabi, or Dubai, or Singapore.

00:54:55.900 Lots of places love to have the business.

00:55:00.440 Do you see anybody on the horizon that you say, that person's inspiring?

00:55:08.160 In politics, you mean?

00:55:09.820 Yeah.

00:55:12.500 I probably think more highly of Ben Sasse than I do of anyone else who holds public office, at least at the federal level.

00:55:19.860 I think he's the real deal.

00:55:21.240 For me, it's Ben Sasse and Mike Lee.

00:55:23.420 Yeah.

00:55:25.760 I'm more of a Sasse guy than a Lee guy, but maybe I don't know as much about Lee.

00:55:30.120 So, I think he is honest.

00:55:35.960 I think that he is a genuine patriot in the sense that he cares more about the country than it is about the party or his particular life.

00:55:44.780 He is one of the few people you meet in politics who doesn't have the psychological need for it.

00:55:49.780 There's some people who just need to be in office, or they need to be famous.

00:55:53.600 They need to be in the media.

00:55:55.200 They need to have that attention.

00:55:56.900 You know, Bill Clinton was famously this way, but he's not the only one.

00:56:00.360 I think Sasse could quit politics tomorrow and go back and do something that made a lot of money and spend more time with his kids back in Nebraska.

00:56:07.660 I think he'd like it more.

00:56:08.860 He probably would, yeah.

00:56:09.720 Yeah, I think he is one of the few people you can point to and say with some confidence that he really is there out of a sense of service and out of a sense of patriotism.

00:56:20.680 And so, I wish there were more like him out there, certainly.

00:56:26.100 You said that earlier, you said, you know, 40, 40, that's 80, there's 20%.

00:56:30.480 I think there's more than that myself.

00:56:36.320 But what do they rally around?

00:56:39.720 Anything?

00:56:41.860 I don't know.

00:56:45.060 I used to be a Republican.

00:56:46.820 I haven't been in a long time.

00:56:47.980 I quit the Republican Party over Arlen Specter, which seems quaint in retrospect.

00:56:52.920 It really does.

00:56:53.680 You were a Philly guy for a while.

00:56:54.980 Yep, yep, yep.

00:56:55.880 He was a...

00:56:56.800 Speaking of Philadelphia, you know, we were talking about being in Australia and no news on the televisions.

00:57:02.260 The thing I loved about the Union League in Philadelphia, there's no television anywhere, but you could go have lunch and not have a television.

00:57:07.360 And if someone took out a cell phone, they would make you put it away or ask you to leave, which I thought was great.

00:57:12.660 And more places should be like that.

00:57:14.760 They should have one of those James Bond injection sheet things for that sort of thing.

00:57:18.780 But if I were a Republican, what would I want to rally around?

00:57:23.120 I don't know.

00:57:25.520 And I think to some extent, the habit of looking for a person and a personality to rally around is part of the problem.

00:57:33.440 I agree.

00:57:34.280 And especially when it comes to the presidency, which is this weird, distorted thing now.

00:57:39.480 You know, after I wrote this book, I told myself I wasn't going to write another political book.

00:57:43.840 But I think I want to write a book about the presidency as a religious phenomenon in the sense that it...

00:57:49.220 People talk about the cult of the presidency.

00:57:50.560 There's a very good book called The Cult of the Presidency.

00:57:53.220 But the problem with the book The Cult of the Presidency, which, by the way, is an excellent book,

00:57:57.420 it doesn't actually treat the presidency as a cult.

00:58:00.000 And I think it actually has become a cult in the religious sense of that word.

00:58:03.120 Don't you think politics has?

00:58:04.720 I mean, you look at the left, the uber-left.

00:58:07.460 That's a cult.

00:58:09.200 That is an absolute God-worshipping cult.

00:58:13.180 I'm not God-worshipping, earth-worshipping.

00:58:16.000 Lowercase.

00:58:16.800 Yeah.

00:58:17.140 Lowercase g.

00:58:17.880 Yeah.

00:58:18.840 Yeah, I think that there is a...

00:58:21.340 Particularly when it comes to the presidency, there's an increasingly ceremonial aspect to it

00:58:26.680 and spiritual aspect to it.

00:58:28.340 So if you've ever read The Golden Bough by James Schwartz Frazier,

00:58:33.140 which it's one of the books Kurtz has on his desk when he's killed at the end of Apocalypse Now.

00:58:38.200 It's a wonderful book.

00:58:39.420 It's about a priest-king cult in the ancient world.

00:58:43.180 And essentially that if the rains didn't come and the crops didn't come in,

00:58:46.640 it was assumed that the priest-king hadn't propitiated the gods in the right way

00:58:50.040 and he'd be murdered and replaced by someone else.

00:58:53.040 We do just kind of a fancy version of that now.

00:58:54.960 It's a little less violent.

00:58:56.220 But, you know, if there's a 2% contraction in GDP,

00:58:58.100 you can be darn sure that Donald Trump's out

00:59:00.580 and we'll put in a new guy who's going to make it rain and make the crops grow

00:59:04.360 and make the cattle fertile and all the rest of it.

00:59:07.180 And I know you're clutching your head over there, but that is how we think about this stuff.

00:59:10.520 I know.

00:59:10.900 So I think I do want to write a book maybe about the presidency as...

00:59:13.960 There's a word I learned from George Will,

00:59:16.320 Caesaropapism, which I think is a great word.

00:59:18.340 So one part Roman emperor, one part pope.

00:59:21.280 And that's really how we think about that office now.

00:59:23.600 And I think that's a big part of actually what drives the politics I'm talking about in the book.

00:59:28.620 Because if you look at that swing back and forth we were talking about earlier,

00:59:31.620 what happens is 2012, or 2016 rather, the Republicans don't just want to beat the Democrat.

00:59:39.320 They are so frustrated and loathing of Barack Obama and they feel so humiliated by him

00:59:45.880 that they want someone who represents a national, cultural, and spiritual repudiation of Barack Obama.

00:59:53.180 They come up with Donald Trump, who's pretty good.

00:59:55.420 Actually, if that's what you're looking for, Donald Trump's a good candidate.

00:59:58.220 And the Democrats are going to fall into the exact same problem, I think, in 2016.

01:00:02.200 Or 2020, rather.

01:00:03.200 Where there are all sorts of normal people they could have picked and nominated for that job.

01:00:06.840 And if they would have picked one normal one?

01:00:09.460 They'd have won a huge one.

01:00:10.880 Probably, yeah.

01:00:11.940 But they won't.

01:00:12.720 What they want is someone who represents a repudiation of Trump.

01:00:16.720 And so they're going to come up with the craziest person that they can.

01:00:20.040 The most, you know, left-wing, confrontational, emotionally validating candidate they can find.

01:00:26.500 Probably.

01:00:27.120 I mean, I may be wrong about that, but that seems to be where they're leaning.

01:00:30.140 And, I mean, they're taking seriously people like Beto O'Rourke, who's, in no normal society, is a real presidential candidate.

01:00:38.400 No.

01:00:39.500 Or Bernie Sanders or people like that.

01:00:41.220 And so we get these swings back and forth because each of the tribes feels that if the other tribe has its man in the White House, then they are marginalized and disenfranchised and humiliated.

01:00:51.740 And so they have to swing back the other way.

01:00:54.400 And if we could ever come up with a way to get over that politics, which is what I try to point to a little bit in the book,

01:01:02.880 what's going to overcome that is reconceiving, among other things, the presidency as a guy who's there to act as a chief administrator.

01:01:12.160 And he's not the embodiment of the nation.

01:01:14.860 He's not an elected monarch.

01:01:16.460 He's not the symbol of the country.

01:01:18.160 He's not our national moral leader.

01:01:19.900 He's not the conscience of the country.

01:01:21.940 He's a guy.

01:01:22.600 He's just a guy with an administrative job to do who sometimes has some bigger things to do during courses of a national emergency.

01:01:29.580 And I've always quite liked the thing about the Swiss where they've got this weird presidency that's got sort of a nine-member rotating council.

01:01:39.100 And no one knows at any given time who the actual president is.

01:01:42.060 Like you ask the typical Swiss person, they'll be like, oh, oh, yes, that lady. 1.00

01:01:45.100 I forgot.

01:01:45.620 Yeah, this month.

01:01:46.660 And I was in Zurich some years ago.

01:01:48.420 And the lady who actually was the president of the Swiss Federation at the time apparently took the subway to work. 1.00

01:01:55.580 And, you know, when the deputy.

01:01:57.600 Where was that?

01:01:58.420 In Switzerland.

01:02:00.140 But, you know, if you go to Washington and, you know, the deputy under vice secretary's secretary of agriculture goes to lunch.

01:02:08.080 And it's like a Roman triumph, as imagined by P.T. Barnum.

01:02:11.560 You know, it's like 75 armored cars and traffic comes to a stop and everyone stops to look.

01:02:16.440 And secretary of agriculture.

01:02:18.200 Nobody cares about the secretary of agriculture.

01:02:20.600 He's the guy that we put in the little, you know, well upholstered hidey hole during the State of the Union because we don't think anyone would bother to murder him.

01:02:26.980 Right, right.

01:02:27.920 You know.

01:02:28.260 Kevin, what's on the horizon that excites you or keeps you awake at night?

01:02:45.720 Excites you in a good way.

01:02:46.720 Yeah.

01:02:47.020 Keep you awake at night.

01:02:47.620 I think that we are on the verge in terms of how we just live materially, particularly medically.

01:03:01.780 Of unprecedented and unimagined, in many cases, advances.

01:03:10.020 We're very, very close to a lot of things that are going to be really, very important, I think.

01:03:13.320 I told somebody, they said, last night, my husband just made it through another cancer test.

01:03:21.500 And I said, just make it to 2030.

01:03:25.560 Yeah.

01:03:26.240 And she said, why?

01:03:27.260 And I said, oh, it may happen way before that.

01:03:29.940 But we are so close to unlocking so many doors.

01:03:35.140 If we don't piss away freedom and don't hand it over to some system like China, it's freedom literally beyond our imagination, beyond anything you've ever read in any utopian book. 0.93

01:03:54.340 It's that kind of freedom and success and freedom, you know?

01:04:02.020 But if you look at my, you know, short lifetime, look at the time since I got out of high school even, which wasn't that long ago, the number of people who die of things like famine and collapsed.

01:04:10.180 The number of people who die in war.

01:04:11.600 Look at it.

01:04:12.140 Way down.

01:04:12.840 We, it made it worse this week because I just finished a book called The Volunteer.

01:04:18.860 And I don't know if you've read that or heard it, but it's fantastic.

01:04:22.660 And it's, you know, it's talking about this guy who was in Auschwitz and, and, you know, the, the typhus.

01:04:28.940 I come in in the morning and I look at the front page of the paper and it says Los Angeles suffering from typhus.

01:04:35.480 Yes.

01:04:35.860 And I'm like, that's, that's, that's, that's like saying, you know, the mayor's got scurvy.

01:04:40.460 Yes.

01:04:42.400 We have.

01:04:43.240 You see in the mayor of Los Angeles?

01:04:43.980 Look at where we, in the name of progress, we are going backwards so fast.

01:04:52.380 Yeah.

01:04:53.640 Yeah.

01:04:54.080 And that's a disease of affluence.

01:04:55.760 I think, you know, people who get afraid of things like vaccines, you're in a pretty fancy place in life when you're worried about.

01:05:02.320 Yes.

01:05:02.720 You know, vaccines where they're worried about having your whole country wiped out by, by something like that.

01:05:06.720 But on that same, you know, on that same token, if you look at some of the amazing things that have been done, you know, a bunch of Rotarians not that long ago got together at lunch and said, let's wipe out polio around the world.

01:05:19.280 They're pretty close to it.

01:05:20.840 They've gotten real close, except for a couple of places where they just can't operate, like parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the rural parts of Nigeria.

01:05:28.300 Pretty well did it.

01:05:29.680 There's a bunch of guys who sing goofy songs around lunch and, you know, who are, you know, local business leaders in Mayberry and places like that.

01:05:35.200 But people, and particularly American people, because we have so many resources at our disposal, can do remarkable things when they set their minds to it.

01:05:45.720 And I think that if more people spent more time doing that sort of thing, they would be a lot more satisfied than screaming at people and calling them Nazis on Twitter because they would be involved in something that actually was important.

01:05:57.920 It actually did change the world.

01:05:59.020 So I was at a VC conference about a year ago, and I was speaking—

01:06:03.420 Venture capitalist or Viet Cong? 1.00

01:06:05.200 Venture capitalist.

01:06:07.760 Or either way with you.

01:06:08.840 Yeah, I know.

01:06:09.460 You never know.

01:06:10.580 So I'm speaking.

01:06:12.740 The guy after me is the biggest VC guy probably in the world, and he's from India.

01:06:22.240 And he said—he gets up to speak, and he said, here's how the world's going to change.

01:06:30.420 And it was just this crazy view, and I read enough science now and technology, science and technology, to know that's not crazy.

01:06:43.300 That probably is going to be very close if we don't blow it.

01:06:46.080 And he said, the problem is going to be meaning.

01:06:51.720 Yeah.

01:06:51.840 And he said, people who have a religion, he said, they're going to make the first adaptation.

01:06:59.160 They will be the first adapters because it will free them up to do the things that their faith has taught them, gives them meaning.

01:07:07.360 Go serve.

01:07:08.940 He said, those without a service, faith, or something, he said, are going to have a real hard time adapting.

01:07:16.580 So when you look at this beautiful utopian world that we could be headed towards, how do we stop people?

01:07:26.000 Our problems now is we're fat.

01:07:28.040 We are well-fed.

01:07:29.500 We have a single problem among us.

01:07:32.420 I mean, real problem when you go to the rest of the world.

01:07:35.400 And look at what we're doing.

01:07:36.880 We're just flushing it all down the toilet because we're bored and spoiled.

01:07:41.240 We'll find some problems.

01:07:43.260 You always do.

01:07:44.100 No, I know.

01:07:44.580 What I'm saying is how do we, when you don't have to work and you can 3D print anything you want and it's no big deal, where do you, how does that work with a, in the transition, long-term maybe, in the transition, how?

01:07:59.980 This reminded me of a conversation I had 25 years ago with someone in India.

01:08:04.840 And I remember what he said.

01:08:06.100 He said, you know, we're poor, but you are barbarians.

01:08:09.560 And if we had your conception of family life, we would look worse than Somalia. 1.00

01:08:16.300 We'd be Lord of the Flies.

01:08:17.640 India was a lot poorer back in the 90s than it is now, but I think that's still true. 1.00

01:08:20.880 You know, I'm someone who thinks about things in economic terms a lot, and I think that's an important way to look at things from a public policy point of view.

01:08:32.360 Because you can have all sorts of disputes and conversations when you're well-fed versus when people are hungry and they're going to eat each other.

01:08:39.800 And, you know, you don't want that.

01:08:41.360 So, I think that material well-being is not the end-all be-all of life, obviously, but it's not to be sneezed at either.

01:08:49.900 And I think that, you know, if we continue to work on those things and we continue to press toward what we actually can achieve on that front, there's meaning in that as well.

01:08:59.320 You know, it may very well be that the last person who's ever going to die of cancer has already been born.

01:09:06.580 And that the person who are going to have a whole different world where cancer is like diabetes, you know, it's a pain, but you manage it.

01:09:14.900 And if you do the right things, maybe shorten your life a little bit, but it's not a death sentence.

01:09:20.760 There's a lot of meaning in that.

01:09:22.240 There's meaning in making the world a better place.

01:09:24.800 There's a guy I wrote about a couple of years ago, and there's also meaning in doing good work.

01:09:27.920 And I think people forget about this.

01:09:29.480 There's a guy I wrote about a couple of years ago.

01:09:30.940 It has a wonderful company in Brooklyn called Cut.

01:09:33.540 And he makes these very, very fancy kitchen knives.

01:09:36.220 And they cost like three grand a piece.

01:09:39.060 And you can't buy one.

01:09:40.680 You can't make them fast enough.

01:09:41.900 At least this was true a few years ago.

01:09:43.480 And he was a guy who had went and got an MFA and wanted to be a novelist and went and started writing.

01:09:48.760 Turns out he's not a very good writer.

01:09:50.080 And he didn't enjoy it very much because, you know, writing is being alone in a room, which I'm fine with.

01:09:55.320 That's where I belong.

01:09:56.880 It's not where he belonged.

01:09:58.280 And so he started making knives, and he wasn't very good at it.

01:10:00.740 But he got on YouTube and figured out how to get good at it.

01:10:03.860 And I don't know if he makes a lot of money.

01:10:05.620 I think he probably makes an okay living.

01:10:08.320 But he gets up every day, and he makes something that is one of the best examples of that particular thing that you can get.

01:10:15.300 And I think there is some real value in that.

01:10:17.260 There's a sense of accomplishment in that.

01:10:18.820 And whether you are someone who is out researching cancer cures or you're someone who's making fancy kitchen knives or you're someone who's detailing a car, there's honor and dignity and meaning in work and in being of service to people and of being productive.

01:10:35.980 And I think that we sneer at that too much.

01:10:38.340 We particularly sneer at people who work with their hands, which is really dumb because a lot of these people do make a lot of money.

01:10:42.940 They do real well for themselves.

01:10:45.460 But even the ones who don't, we should be, I think, more respectful of that.

01:10:48.780 But I've always been confused by these guys.

01:10:52.300 They work in offices, and they play with spreadsheets, and they make $62,000 a year.

01:10:55.920 And, well, they went to college, so there's something.

01:10:58.840 And they go home, and they watch television shows about guys who build motorcycles who make a million dollars a year.

01:11:05.040 And I think, well, if that guy had only gone to graduate school, he really could have amounted to something.

01:11:10.200 You know, and that's just, that's weird, but we're that way.

01:11:13.320 Anyway, I just, you know, there's a, I read a story a few years ago about a guy who was a federal attorney in Washington, D.C.

01:11:27.300 His mom was so proud.

01:11:28.240 He was the first African-American, he was an African-American family, first one in his family to go to college.

01:11:33.380 His mother had worked and slaved away to be able to pay for it.

01:11:38.200 He went to a good college.

01:11:39.160 He promised her when he was little that, yes, mom, I'll make something of myself.

01:11:42.740 Yes, ma'am, I'll go to college.

01:11:44.120 Yes, ma'am, I'll be an attorney.

01:11:46.880 And he did.

01:11:48.340 And he also loved to bake.

01:11:52.960 And he would bake birthday cakes for people and everything else.

01:11:57.040 And everybody just loved his cakes.

01:11:58.800 And that's where he really found his joy.

01:12:01.680 Well, as it turns out, he kind of became almost addicted to the baking thing.

01:12:07.740 He loved it so much.

01:12:09.280 And he ended up in the hospital.

01:12:10.960 And he was so torn.

01:12:13.340 He was working injuries.

01:12:14.560 No, baking so much all the time, making cupcakes and cakes for friends and families.

01:12:21.040 And he wasn't sleeping.

01:12:22.520 And he would have to do his work.

01:12:23.960 He'd work till late.

01:12:24.780 And then he'd cook till, you know, bake until four o'clock in the morning.

01:12:28.180 Crazy.

01:12:28.540 And then he'd get up and he was hospitalized.

01:12:31.100 And the doctor said, you have to choose.

01:12:34.260 You have to choose.

01:12:35.560 Are you going to please your mom and do that responsible job over there?

01:12:40.900 Or are you going to enjoy your life and be a baker?

01:12:44.600 And he opened up a shop called Cake Club and left.

01:12:48.420 And his mom was happy.

01:12:49.540 You know, he was just so afraid of seeing it.

01:12:51.080 But I think there's a lot of people that can do that and find that.

01:12:57.280 But like we said earlier, there's a lot of people that just want to be, they just want to punch in, do their eight hours to punch out.

01:13:04.760 They don't want to do that.

01:13:06.100 There's nothing wrong with that.

01:13:07.680 And the fact is that when you've got a really, really wealthy and enormously productive society like ours, there's room for people who have just regular punch-the-clock jobs to make a good living and have a good standard of living.

01:13:21.240 One of the things that I think is very interesting and strange about our time right now is we've spent all this time talking about inequality.

01:13:26.620 And I think it's the wrong conversation to have because what we should really care about is what's happening to the absolute standard of living for people at the bottom and how we can bring that up.

01:13:34.640 Not how much distance there is between them and the top.

01:13:37.540 But for people at the very top, you know, your Silicon Valley CEOs, your Wall Street CEOs and things like that, you know this probably from having been in New York and being in that world a little bit, their lives really have gotten strange.

01:13:53.060 Like their lives are radically different from, you know, people who are top 10%, top 5%, top 3%.

01:13:59.320 You look at Charles Murray's stuff, you know.

01:14:01.180 Back in the 1960s, the top and the bottom were not that different.

01:14:04.800 Now they are different worlds.

01:14:06.860 Yeah.

01:14:07.320 I mean, the sort of billionaire and up world is their lives have become really, really alien, I think, to a lot of people, including very wealthy people.

01:14:16.080 There's a difference between being wealthy and being like that guy.

01:14:19.940 What's the difference?

01:14:20.780 It's that there's literally nothing you can't have.

01:14:27.340 And your time gets taken care of.

01:14:31.660 You know, you don't do things like, you don't fly first class, you've got an airplane.

01:14:36.900 And it's on call and it goes when you want to go.

01:14:39.220 And if you want to go, I want to go to the top of Mount Everest next Wednesday and have a picnic.

01:14:44.400 Done.

01:14:45.360 There's a helicopter.

01:14:46.320 We'll go do it.

01:14:46.800 And I think that also causes some of this resentment.

01:14:51.980 There aren't that many of those people, but their lives are so alien and they get so insulated from people.

01:14:56.880 It's the Gwyneth Paltrow syndrome of, you know, her drinking some smoothie in the morning that costs $800 to make or something. 0.76

01:15:02.760 And you should try this, too.

01:15:04.000 Right.

01:15:04.280 It's really nice.

01:15:05.460 And I saw Jim Carrey.

01:15:06.900 It was a Jim Carrey.

01:15:08.640 And no, it was what Robin Williams, because I thought who else could get away with this but Robin Williams.

01:15:12.480 He was on television and he was promoting something.

01:15:16.600 And he said, you know, I come to New York once in a while.

01:15:19.380 And he said he's on the Today Show.

01:15:21.760 And he said, you guys, you know, you invited me to come out.

01:15:25.920 So I came out and I come here.

01:15:27.380 And and he said, you always hear talk about homelessness.

01:15:31.380 I just got I just left the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

01:15:35.460 There are rooms.

01:15:36.840 There's huge buildings.

01:15:38.160 The whole park is surrounded.

01:15:39.400 Why aren't these people just, you know, staying in the in the Mandarin Hotel?

01:15:44.780 Obviously joking.

01:15:45.860 But there are some people who are really like that.

01:15:48.740 Yeah.

01:15:48.960 They don't understand it at all anymore.

01:15:51.960 I played a prank on my dad with that.

01:15:53.280 He was going to take a cruise that was leaving out of New York.

01:15:55.540 He'd never been there before.

01:15:56.900 And he wanted me to recommend a hotel for him.

01:15:58.660 He's very cheap.

01:15:59.920 I said, there's a place actually over close to where the cruise ships live.

01:16:03.400 It's called the Mandarin Oriental.

01:16:04.400 You should call him up.

01:16:05.460 I think they quoted him $3,500.

01:16:07.560 Yeah, it's crazy.

01:16:08.460 It was crazy.

01:16:09.660 Yeah, he was not unamused.

01:16:12.200 He stayed out in a La Quinta by LaGuardia.

01:16:16.220 But yeah, and their lives really are very, very different.

01:16:20.040 I think that's kind of an interesting story.

01:16:21.500 And it's an interesting break in that, you know, Cornelius Vanderbilt wasn't as alienated

01:16:27.020 from the mainstream of American life as the top executive at Google or Facebook or someplace

01:16:31.860 like that is.

01:16:32.500 And we have a better life than Vanderbilt did in his age.

01:16:38.100 I mean, Calvin Coolidge's son died of a scrape toe.

01:16:41.460 He was president of the United States of America.

01:16:42.760 He had access to the best health care you could get in the world.

01:16:45.600 I have a letter from Booker T. Washington.

01:16:52.040 He's writing one of his speeches.

01:16:53.460 And so it's a whole bunch of his notes that he's trying to put together.

01:16:58.300 And one of the lines in it that I just thought was astounding.

01:17:01.140 He said, even the poorest among us that were slaves, we have a better education than the

01:17:08.800 son of the president of the United States when we were slaves.

01:17:12.480 And this was about 1910.

01:17:13.820 He wrote that.

01:17:15.040 You know, 50 years, 50 years later, his, he has a better education, better living conditions

01:17:21.200 than the son of the president.

01:17:23.480 Yeah.

01:17:24.880 I mean, it is funny how that world changes.

01:17:26.520 There's, um, there's a guy I know who's a very wealthy guy, finance guy, and he lives

01:17:31.860 in a very fancy place.

01:17:33.800 And a guy knocked on his door apparently a couple of months ago, said, I want to buy

01:17:37.600 your house.

01:17:38.900 And the guy says, my house isn't for sale.

01:17:41.320 Guy says, I'll give you a hundred million dollars.

01:17:43.440 This is a real story.

01:17:44.600 Real story.

01:17:45.440 Yeah.

01:17:46.920 That's something that only happens now at this point in history.

01:17:49.860 You know, people don't just go knocking on strangers doors.

01:17:52.260 No, I think we might be living in the great Gatsby times.

01:17:55.180 I think some of these big houses and things, I think we're far more gilded than the Gilded

01:18:00.040 Age was.

01:18:01.760 Uh, I think we, uh, yeah, but I think it goes farther down the ladder.

01:18:08.960 How so?

01:18:11.540 Uh, you had maybe what, six people that were in the Vanderbilt category at that time and

01:18:20.480 they would build these house.

01:18:22.140 I mean, you, you look at the, the Vanderbilt's mansion.

01:18:25.220 There's nothing like the Vanderbilt's mansion.

01:18:27.880 You know what I mean?

01:18:28.840 You go down to, uh, what is it?

01:18:30.560 North Carolina.

01:18:32.000 Um, I can't remember the name of the house down there.

01:18:34.780 That huge sprawling mansion.

01:18:38.280 There's nothing like that anywhere around it.

01:18:41.040 You know what I mean?

01:18:42.280 Once visited the, uh, Liberace house in Las Vegas.

01:18:45.360 And, uh, well, he was at one point the highest paid entertainer in the United States of

01:18:50.260 America.

01:18:50.460 Was he really?

01:18:50.980 Yeah.

01:18:51.880 And just, I mean, we live differently now and his house is kind of gross.

01:18:55.700 I mean, partly it's cause he's Liberace, you know, but, yeah.

01:19:00.120 It's a dump.

01:19:01.300 Graceland is a dump.

01:19:02.240 It's a dump.

01:19:02.980 Kind of low ceilings and stuff.

01:19:04.680 You walk into that house and you're really underwhelmed.

01:19:07.700 Yeah.

01:19:07.900 At least I was.

01:19:09.140 And it wasn't that different from like the shag carpeting was like the shag carpeting 0.98

01:19:15.280 that I had growing up in my house when I was little, you know, it was green, olive green,

01:19:20.960 avocado green.

01:19:22.800 Oh, no, no.

01:19:23.580 Avocado green.

01:19:24.300 Yeah.

01:19:24.440 Okay.

01:19:24.720 Avocado green.

01:19:25.840 That's a good.

01:19:26.760 Yeah.

01:19:27.240 That's good.

01:19:27.680 But Elvis had it in his.

01:19:29.360 Yeah.

01:19:29.580 I mean, it wasn't, there was that time period where it still was like that, but the gilded

01:19:36.240 age, they were, you couldn't relate to even a phone, you know what I mean?

01:19:42.920 Or, you know, you couldn't relate to, uh, the way they lived because it took a hundred

01:19:49.520 people to make it work now.

01:19:52.500 Yeah.

01:19:52.780 I mean, I knew, I felt like I really had, um, was really living a posh life when I could

01:20:02.400 have an assistant that just did whatever I needed to, you know, when she came to me one 0.99

01:20:07.860 day, cause you weren't wrong about that.

01:20:09.640 I know, I know, but you know what now?

01:20:12.920 Alexa.

01:20:13.860 Yeah, that's true.

01:20:14.960 You know, now, now the average person can have an assistant.

01:20:18.820 It can have somebody running to go for, you know, go for groceries.

01:20:23.160 Okay.

01:20:24.120 Alexa, I need this, this, this, this, this sent to the house.

01:20:27.320 Done.

01:20:27.960 Yeah.

01:20:29.360 No, that stuff is amazing.

01:20:30.500 And yeah, you don't have a chauffeur, you have Uber and you don't have, you know, full-time

01:20:33.960 staff.

01:20:34.380 You've got these, these other things.

01:20:35.480 And I think that's good and helpful and really has radically improved how people live.

01:20:40.100 It's a funny thing.

01:20:41.100 We were in France right after we got married on our honeymoon and my wife likes this particular

01:20:45.880 French tea.

01:20:47.340 And so we went looking for it at stores and we couldn't find it anywhere in, in, in France

01:20:52.800 where we were.

01:20:53.260 And so she ended up ordering it from Amazon from some company in Portugal that gets it

01:20:58.320 to Texas while we're, you know, on the highway and driving somewhere.

01:21:01.420 Just think of that.

01:21:01.780 Yeah.

01:21:02.120 Think of that.

01:21:02.720 When we were going to Australia, my son and I went and he's 15 and I'm like, Australia,

01:21:09.880 it's on the other side of the planet.

01:21:12.960 My wife said, as we were leaving, Hey, make sure you call me when you get there. 0.90

01:21:19.500 She also said, uh, text me when you're in the plane.

01:21:24.120 And, and, and I thought this used to be like going to Australia.

01:21:29.340 I may not see you again.

01:21:31.000 You know what I mean?

01:21:32.060 Don't cry kids.

01:21:33.380 Daddy will be home in two years.

01:21:34.980 One of those civil war letters to your Cordelia.

01:21:37.080 Yeah.

01:21:37.620 Right.

01:21:38.080 We have landed in South Africa.

01:21:39.420 Right.

01:21:40.040 And now you're just like 15 hours and you're there.

01:21:43.140 A mere 15 hours.

01:21:44.280 That's crazy.

01:21:45.140 Yeah.

01:21:45.880 No, that's true.

01:21:47.800 And when I first started college, like no one had ever sent an email really.

01:21:51.040 I mean, some people had, but it wasn't a normal thing and there wasn't web browsers

01:21:54.360 and things like that, which really makes me feel like an old dinosaur saying that stuff.

01:21:57.420 Are you ready for this?

01:21:58.160 I used to, I was on the air late in my radio career saying that's.com, not D-O-T, but period

01:22:06.680 C-O-M. 1.00

01:22:08.020 Yeah.

01:22:09.360 Right.

01:22:09.820 Yeah.

01:22:11.420 So these things really have changed the way we live.

01:22:15.140 And I think that, yeah, that, that weird alienation of the upper, upper, upper, upper

01:22:20.420 class has had an outsized cultural effect.

01:22:24.060 There aren't that many of those people, but the fact that they exist is sort of like if

01:22:28.060 you suddenly discovered that there really were dinosaurs living on an island off the

01:22:31.620 coast of Costa Rica, it'd just be a different conception of what the world is and what it's

01:22:35.580 like.

01:22:35.880 And they just have, I think, I think very strange lives, but we don't appreciate the material

01:22:42.740 progress that everyone else has gotten because we're just used to it.

01:22:45.240 We're just like, well, of course life gets better at this dizzying pace every year, year

01:22:49.200 after year.

01:22:49.940 But that's not really the case.

01:22:51.020 I mean, it doesn't happen by accident.

01:22:53.280 I mean, it's now kind of set in stone to where you're, we're not going to be, by 2030, you

01:22:58.840 won't be able to keep up with the amazing news.

01:23:02.000 Yeah.

01:23:02.260 You just won't be able to keep up.

01:23:03.700 And we're already seeing it.

01:23:04.820 Every week there's something you're like, I mean, there's something that's crazy.

01:23:08.400 And you're like, we did what?

01:23:10.780 But there's other things that you're, that you're like, wait, China landed on the dark

01:23:15.320 side of the moon.

01:23:16.000 When did that?

01:23:16.460 I didn't even know that.

01:23:17.280 I mean, there's crazy stuff that is happening that is remarkable.

01:23:21.300 And the closer we get to the singularity in 30, uh, 2030, it's, you're going to hear

01:23:26.800 cancer's gone, you know, uh, cerebral palsy, uh, cure.

01:23:32.700 You can, you know, we'll be telling our grandkids, there are poor children in China who only get 1.00

01:23:37.420 to land on the dark side of the moon, you know, it's going to be, uh, it's going to be

01:23:41.600 crazy.

01:23:42.140 You know, there's a story that people who, um, who came to adulthood before the automobile

01:23:47.400 became very common.

01:23:49.120 And a lot of them learned to drive, but they never really learned to drive well.

01:23:52.820 They never really got used to it.

01:23:54.560 And it was always an effort for them.

01:23:56.400 They just weren't native to it.

01:23:57.640 And every now and then now I walk around and see someone who's 19 typing with their thumbs

01:24:02.760 at 600 miles an hour.

01:24:04.480 We're not members of the same species because my thumbs can't do that.

01:24:08.020 And, um, so yeah, these things are going to get stranger and stranger.

01:24:11.180 I think in shorter periods of time will become more significant, I think.

01:24:15.460 So people who were born 10 years after me just really never knew a world without the

01:24:18.920 internet.

01:24:19.280 That was just part of their world.

01:24:20.380 People born 20 years after me, uh, certainly they are digital natives in a way that, that,

01:24:25.140 that will never be.

01:24:26.340 So it's interesting to think of what will happen to people who were born 20 years after

01:24:29.220 them.

01:24:30.020 And some, some people will be a year or two.

01:24:31.900 They're going to be just radical changes in the world.

01:24:34.220 Well, that's all we have to do is, I mean, just need Elon Musk to give us all the uplink

01:24:39.220 and then we can all understand it and understand it in any language that we want to, because

01:24:44.520 we're all part of the Borg.

01:24:46.040 I like him because he's, he's embraced it.

01:24:49.300 He's like, yeah, I'm a Bond villain.

01:24:51.100 I'm going with it.

01:24:51.940 Is he not like the billionaire that you'd like to be?

01:24:55.540 He's living the life of, yeah, he's living the life that I would want to, you know, if

01:25:00.380 you had that kind of money, you'd be like, yeah.

01:25:02.880 And you know what?

01:25:04.700 We're going to Mars.

01:25:06.460 You know, he just does it and he embraces it and he doesn't care.

01:25:10.180 He's smart enough too.

01:25:11.260 And that's the reason to have those sorts of resources, right?

01:25:13.200 I mean, cause like you can buy 600 Ferraris.

01:25:15.840 Sure.

01:25:16.580 But I mean, what's the point?

01:25:18.300 What's the return after the sixth or seventh?

01:25:20.540 Yeah.

01:25:20.700 I mean, I got 11 at home myself, but 12 would seem like a lot.

01:25:25.060 Yeah.

01:25:25.360 And, but no, I mean, the great thing about that kind of Silicon Valley ethos is that,

01:25:32.580 yeah, there's a lot of money to be made and they like being rich.

01:25:35.020 These guys like being rich, but it's also this, let's do something cool.

01:25:39.180 Let's do something no one's done before.

01:25:40.760 And I think that is just enormously valuable and admirable.

01:25:44.240 I think, uh, uh, I don't like what, uh, uh, what Bill Gates does with all of his money,

01:25:51.420 but he changed the world.

01:25:53.260 He made my life a lot better.

01:25:54.880 I think Steve Jobs was an absolute jerk.

01:25:59.120 He tried to get me fired at Fox.

01:26:01.420 Fine.

01:26:02.060 Did he really?

01:26:02.660 Yeah.

01:26:03.360 But I love Apple products.

01:26:05.440 I love what they've done.

01:26:07.440 Um, you know, I wrote an obituary of him when he died and people gave him grief for not

01:26:11.220 giving away a lot of money to charity.

01:26:13.020 He changed the world.

01:26:14.440 Yeah.

01:26:14.580 That's what I pointed out at the time.

01:26:15.500 It's like, if you want to look at his good works and what he gave to the world, it's right

01:26:19.840 there.

01:26:20.200 He just happened to make money doing it.

01:26:21.380 So losing money.

01:26:21.980 Right.

01:26:22.140 I think capitalism when it's done right is the greatest charity of all, because if it's done

01:26:29.460 right, you're sitting at home going, what is it that I could make that would make people's

01:26:35.180 life?

01:26:35.380 What do they need?

01:26:37.320 Hayek explained it in exactly that language.

01:26:39.020 The genius of the market is that what it really does is allow us to discover the most valuable

01:26:44.720 ways to serve other people.

01:26:45.980 Yes.

01:26:46.800 And, um, we often, when we talk about capitalism, we emphasize the competitive nature of it

01:26:52.440 because that's Americans and we're like, you know, it's dog eat dog and all that sort of

01:26:55.420 stuff.

01:26:55.800 But what's really remarkable about it is the cooperative aspect of it, where we now have

01:27:01.140 this thing where we've got just worldwide economic material cooperation among people who

01:27:07.600 don't speak the same languages, whose countries don't like each other very much, who don't have 1.00

01:27:11.340 the same economic incentives, but they do these remarkable things together.

01:27:15.420 And, um, you know, if you went back and tried to explain to some, you know, medieval British

01:27:20.600 king who was getting ready to invest half of his kingdom's assets in ships to keep the lines

01:27:26.800 of trade open.

01:27:27.780 Well, our problem in our country is that all the people from all the world bring us all 1.00

01:27:32.800 their best stuff at their own expense and they lay it down at our feet and they don't

01:27:37.820 charge us enough money for it.

01:27:39.260 And we're really upset by this.

01:27:41.480 We need to think of a way to make this stuff we buy from other people from all over the

01:27:46.020 world, a little more expensive because we're victimized by low prices and lots of selection.

01:27:54.440 Try explaining that to Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Henry II, you know, it's just not going to

01:27:58.920 happen.

01:27:59.420 Or worse yet, your grandchildren.

01:28:02.280 Yes.

01:28:03.560 Thank you.

01:28:04.440 Oh, thank you.

01:28:04.900 The name of the book is The Smallest Minority Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.

01:28:10.860 Kevin Williamson.

01:28:17.120 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend

01:28:22.760 so it can be discovered by other people.

01:28:24.400 So it can be discovered by other people.

The Glenn Beck Program - September 14, 2019

Ep 50 ｜ The Globalist Gilded Age of Twitter-Fed Misery ｜ Kevin Williamson ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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