It's been a year since Chris Hardwick was fired from his job as a reporter at CNN. In this episode, Chris talks about what he's grateful for in his new life as a public speaker, and why he doesn't have to work in the media anymore.
00:02:45.860And so there's just a really profound gratitude.
00:02:49.040So there's not this weird hypocrisy where they encourage you to have your brother on because he's famous in the news, is what CNN did to you.
00:02:55.220From my perspective, watching, they encourage you, hey, Chris, call your brother, have him on.
00:02:59.580And then, like, a year later, like, oh, wait, you were talking to your brother, you're fired.
00:03:35.640But I have a connection with News Nation and these guys where I am anxious to bleed for them.
00:03:43.240I am excited about putting it all on the line every day, anywhere in the world.
00:03:49.180Because, because of my upbringing and my disposition, when I know you're there for me when you don't need to be, it's not necessarily, you know, there are a lot of big names that you could grab in the media right now.
00:04:01.320But for News Nation to give me the chance and to let me do it and to support me and to support me when Andrew decides that he's got to be in public service, can't put a price on it, could never be grateful enough.
00:04:16.280So, from a year ago until today, I now know that.
00:04:22.320And there is something comforting about that.
00:04:32.640It's funny, I mean, I don't want to spend two hours beating up on the media because everyone hates them already, but it is, it's been almost two years for me since I haven't worked in the media.
00:04:44.620And it's weird how you, when you do work there for your whole life, you just accept that, like, yeah, everyone lies all the time and it's totally treacherous and people who claim to be your friends actually hate you and every dispute is settled with a lawyer.
00:04:57.580It's like, oh, it's so disgusting, but you just accept that's, like, the way things work, but that's not how things work outside the media.
00:05:05.740You know, it's part of politics and media, right?
00:05:10.440They're certainly related, if not married.
00:05:14.560And I think that the biggest frustration, look, you and I both know there are lots of great men and women who do the job for the right reasons.
00:05:21.960But as a culture, it's okay in the media for me to destroy you by a standard that I would never want imposed on me.
00:05:32.880And there is something that is really dangerous about that.
00:08:14.860But they seem pro-establishment defenders of the status quo.
00:08:18.740And I think that's a really dangerous place to be right now because I think power is shifting towards being disruptive of institutions and of the elites in a very real way.
00:08:31.160And digital media is much better positioned to be empowered by that than what they're now calling legacy media.
00:08:38.560I don't buy into that as a pejorative, but I see it.
00:08:42.440And I see that people are really open to getting a – two things are happening at the same time.
00:08:49.700But also, people are realizing that they can reach out and get different versions of events and takes on things in a way that they couldn't before.
00:09:00.240And I think that's really exciting, and the media doesn't know what to do with it.
00:09:05.440And, you know, I think the most influential people in media – I think you have to put Rogan at the top of that – you know, kind of don't work for anybody.
00:09:44.360Didn't work for her at NBC, which really wasn't a surprise to anybody in there.
00:09:48.860You know, it's being a network anchor, being a storyteller, being a host that is accommodative of broad audiences that are looking to be inoffensive.
00:10:53.660So there was that big wave of deals that you and I missed in the podcast space where people were just throwing money to have a footprint in it.
00:29:24.320I'm sure my therapist could have like a whole field day.
00:29:26.780I don't even open that box of chocolates with my therapist because I know I'd be paying for the rest of my life about just explaining that.
00:29:31.580But his problem with it was, why do you want to be part of a group that just criticizes people who are trying to get things done when you could actually be trying to get something done?
00:29:44.080And that's why he believes in public service.
00:31:32.300So, well, I think that maybe Trump is a lesson that there are limits to what the personal attack is.
00:31:36.680That's what I was going to say, is that I think that he's more of a symptom than he is a cause.
00:31:47.940People, the election message was, you guys are focusing on things that don't matter to us the way you want them to.
00:31:58.100And what does matter to us doesn't matter enough to you.
00:32:02.040And what they saw in Trump were two main things.
00:32:06.040One, the personification of this, that you are trying to destroy this guy on a basis that we are not really okay with.
00:32:14.020And the second thing is that he wants to disrupt all the things that we believe need disruption.
00:32:22.640And his views between the cancel culture and different cultural wars, as we call them, Donald Trump, for whatever you want to say about him negatively, approximated normal to the American voters more than the Democrats did.
00:34:41.920But if it happens once, it's something that never needed to happen.
00:34:45.620The purity test, the absolutist nature of binary politics, that if you are for something, you have to be all in on it beyond any conception of reason.
00:34:58.480That's what we're dealing with in our politics.
00:35:30.380So if the argument is, you know, there are people with weird sexual impulses who we shouldn't, like, scapegoat and hurt, I mean, I'm totally in agreement with that.
00:35:39.180It is a perversion of live and let live.
00:35:42.080But to force the rest of us to tell a lie...
00:36:04.240Now, I understand the political philosophy behind that.
00:36:09.020But once it entered a realm of where the people that you say you're trying to protect are now a problem for another group that need protection also, which are these kids, they didn't click into the common sense.
00:39:01.820And that's why I remember when I was in college, there were a lot of people who were gay in college who weren't gay afterwards.
00:39:08.200Now, a lot of them were gay in college and gay afterwards, but I think there's something to experimenting and certain people play out with identity.
00:39:14.440No, it's like, okay, but I just want to get to the core question, which is where does this come from, being gay?
00:39:29.820But you haven't noticed when you were raising your kids that there would be certain kids that you were like, I think this kid's going to be gay.
00:40:05.280I'd still believe that when people are gay, it's like the main descriptor of them.
00:40:09.040Whereas you and I don't identify or, oh, Tucker Carlson, you know him, straight guy, you know.
00:40:12.680But when you're gay, you still get labeled that way.
00:40:15.820But I think two things can be happening at the same time, that there is a culture of persuasion in, let's say, in a guided or misguided sense of acceptance.
00:40:26.460And I think it is safer for people to come out now than it was a generation ago.
00:40:32.260But I guess the point I'm making is it's really clear that the federal government, state governments, local governments, and NGOs are promoting homosexuality among kids.
00:40:45.080And my point is that is not acceptable.
00:40:48.940And when I was a child, if an adult went up to a kid in a park and started talking to him about his sex life, you could shoot the guy because that's not acceptable to talk to other people's children about sex, period.
00:41:00.740And now it's not only acceptable, it's the rule, and it's paid for by my tax dollars.
00:41:05.120And I'm just saying, like, that's really destructive.
00:41:08.400Look, it is a very persuasive argument.
00:41:22.740I mean, look, I don't remember it specifically.
00:41:25.440But even if they did, let's say they did, I can't prove that right now, but let's say they did, that to me is not the same thing as indoctrination.
00:41:34.720I have no problem with adults and children being exposed to different belief systems and different ways and different cultures.
00:42:51.700That's the rule of the law is, you know, people have to be able to live and be free and safe.
00:42:57.340It's different to you trying to teach my kid to be gay.
00:43:00.800If that's going on, obviously, it would be a problem.
00:43:02.760I mean, I think if I've never experienced a massive percentage of middle schoolers are gay in general, possessions are overrated.
00:43:09.300But there are some things you really would not want stolen.
00:43:13.080And to me, family shotguns, including a whole bunch of them I got from my father, are at the top of that list.
00:43:19.880So I keep my dad's shotguns in a Liberty safe because it's safe and it's also really attractive.
00:43:27.460Liberty safe just created something really cool.
00:43:29.120It's a limited edition safe that commemorates the inauguration of Donald Trump, America's 47th president.
00:43:34.560The original design celebrates Trump and his swearing in while upholding Liberty's commitment to building their safes right here in the United States.
00:45:49.960And then in January, you know, there was a scramble over who's going to get what jobs in the new administration.
00:45:54.720And at one point, there was someone who was being discussed for a job in the intel world.
00:46:00.460And a member of the SSCI, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Intel Committee, went to the people making the decision and said, you cannot hire this person because this person will be certain to push for the release of the JFK files.
00:46:45.840But that person is like completely lost to history except a specialist.
00:46:48.900And the CIA has already been through 50 years ago, the Church Committee hearings, 1975, where we sort of know they're sassing people, dosing people with acid, all this stuff.
00:46:56.900It's like the CIA has already been discredited.
00:46:59.660So if you're telling me that six weeks ago, a member of the United States Senate was trying to keep someone out of a job in order to keep these files secret, that is to protect the CIA, I don't believe that for a second.
00:47:46.400OK, somebody says something to Mike Pompeo that he then goes to the president of the United States and says, you can't release these things.
00:48:47.520I don't believe it's the Rockefellers, the Pope and I don't believe I'm not even guessing.
00:48:53.200All I'm saying is we can say with certainty that there is a force acting on these people, a very serious force to the point where they're embarrassing themselves because they promise they didn't release this and they haven't.
00:49:04.540Look, I don't I don't disagree with what the hell is that?
00:50:35.100He put out this weird tweet, you know, that was very general.
00:50:38.680Like, you know, things are going to change and we're going to do this.
00:50:41.560After we learn that someone under his control now, right, because he's the head of the FBI, in that office that's under him, why wasn't he there?
00:50:51.180Why didn't he go there and say, give me the files?
00:51:07.020But let's just use logic for one second.
00:51:09.200Clearly, if you watch this, in my case, for the same as you, 35 years, watching this stuff carefully and somebody, you know, gets in the office, I'm going to do this, that, and the other thing.
00:51:17.980And then, like, five days later, they're like, well, actually, someone has called that person to say there's something you didn't know.
00:51:25.920Here are the consequences of doing that.
00:51:27.940Someone has applied very serious pressure on this person.
00:51:30.960Pressure so serious that that person is willing to humiliate himself.
00:51:54.560So what I brought to it was the knowledge that a member of the Senate Intel Committee, I'm not guessing, called over and said, you cannot appoint this person.
00:52:02.880So why don't you expose that person, first of all, so we can start chasing after him or her?
00:53:25.180And I have been living with that ever since.
00:53:28.040I have nothing to do with any of that for whatever it's worth.
00:53:30.620But the number of people have texted me, but like, oh, you're working for the CIA.
00:53:33.660It's like, no, actually, nobody believes more strongly in radical reform at CIA than I do with, I would say, some knowledge of the subject.
00:53:43.280Look, I mean, people can think I work for the deep state.
00:54:34.880Let me put them in order to your family, to your community, to your voters, to your state, to your nation, and maybe Ukraine down there at the bottom.
00:54:44.500I am really concerned, not just because, you know, I am curious and I want to get to the bottom of mysteries, which is true.
00:54:54.000But I'm really concerned that the failure to disclose big things like details about the murder of a president in a democratic country, republic, that that will convince people that our system itself is fake.
00:55:09.240And it's kind of hard to argue that it's real.
00:56:09.080They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the programs.
00:56:11.440And then we get all our hopes up, right?
00:56:13.900The media loves Mocking News Nation about this because they think that, oh, Cuomo thinks they're little green men in the basement of some building.
00:56:55.140They may know that they don't really know, which is the scariest thing of all.
00:56:59.640And I've certainly called a lot on this topic.
00:57:01.920I've stopped talking about it in public.
00:57:03.240I've tried to stop thinking about it because it's just one of those things that drives you crazy.
00:57:07.700But my strong impression is that they don't really know, that there isn't a consensus on this and that they're not, you know, from Russia or China.
00:57:50.420And you don't shoot them down and then figure out what it was.
00:57:54.060Maybe you can't, you know, so that's so look, I mean, I think we're getting to the same answer.
00:58:00.920If if there is a very obvious mystery that's publicly known, there's public pressure to solve the mystery to divulge what, you know, and you don't.
00:58:18.360Because now that, you know, especially in this administration that was elected on the promise of transparency, there's there's a real reason because there's tons of counterpressure.
00:58:28.460People are aware, like, where the hell are my Kennedy files?
00:58:30.700What's going on these things over New Jersey?
00:58:32.220You said they were over your house in Bedminster.
00:59:06.140So I guess what I'm saying is if you take three steps back, you're like, wait, this really is.
00:59:10.280This isn't just, you know, maybe some of the details are wrong.
00:59:12.400Or certainly stories like this draw all the wackos like a bug light, for sure.
00:59:16.060And they come up with these fantastical theories to explain it.
00:59:18.980But just the knowable facts, the confirmed facts, suggest something really, really big.
00:59:24.440Like, the moment that I never thought much about the Epstein story until I realized that the Republican, two-time Republican Attorney General Barr lied about it.
00:59:54.160There's so much there that it starts to make you nervous.
00:59:56.340And it makes you think, like, maybe the – it's not just that things are screwed up on the margins, but maybe at the core is something really dark.
01:02:28.680I think Elon, you know, builds electric cars and rockets and tunneling equipment and telecom, you know, satellite-based telecom, etc., etc.
01:02:42.940You know, I'm not surprised he doesn't know the details of how Social Security is structured at all.
01:02:47.640And I'm not surprised that as a naturalized American, he's not, you know, didn't grow up a schoolhouse rock and doesn't understand the three branches perfectly.
01:02:56.920His job, from what I can tell, is to deal with the one thing that nobody has dealt with, which is, which will be the end of the country, which is the country's bankruptcy.
01:03:06.240So the debt is, what, 36.9, something like 37 trillion.
01:03:12.180Revenues last year, 2024, total federal revenues were under 5 trillion, okay?
01:03:22.820And at a certain point, you know, the people who are floating in the country, the bond buyers, the foreign bond buyers, like I'm not, you know, this doesn't, and everything will collapse.
01:03:30.200And that's been known for a long time.
01:03:42.020Well, get the spending down has to be in the budgeting process.
01:03:45.840To me, it's a penny-wise, pound-foolish notion.
01:03:48.940I'm okay with getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.
01:03:51.380You and I grew up listening to both parties argue when the other one was in power that there was all this waste, fraud, and abuse, and you had to curtail it.
01:04:05.920But I'll tell you what, if they had called up Carlson and Cuomo and said, would you guys like to serve your country and see what you can find in terms of waste, fraud, and abuse?
01:13:19.060And I kept hearing, boy, you know, it's like they're kind of like us, you know, they're fighting against this oppressor and trying to shut it off so they can be their own way and get away from the kleptocracy and everything else.
01:13:29.660And then Trump has that bad phone call with Zelensky leads to an impeachment that I thought was a complete waste of time.
01:13:55.060Now Trump comes back and all of a sudden all the people who are in favor of Ukraine on the right now say that it's a kleptocracy and Zelensky is a bad guy and Putin, you know, not so bad.
01:14:51.240And so they're just, I mean, that's just what they are.
01:14:55.120I don't think it's even worth being mad.
01:14:56.580I mean, they're like animals whose behavior is really predictable or machines.
01:15:01.080You know, you can program to do a certain thing and you know it's going to do that thing every time.
01:15:04.040So the fact that, like, these guys are standing up and being like, oh, you know, Zelensky, who was my blood brother last week, is now a bad guy.
01:15:11.360I've said the same thing, I think, since day one, which is this is not in our interest at all.
01:15:15.180And we've really hurt ourselves and we've dislodged the dollar from its preeminence.
01:15:21.220And that has consequences people are not thinking through.
01:15:24.480And Russia, of course, has an interest in what happens in Ukraine.
01:15:28.420And of course, they don't want American missiles on their border any more than we'd want Chinese missiles in Tijuana.
01:15:34.100Like, that's of course, of course, that's a real thing.
01:15:37.260And moreover, the thing that you want if you're thinking big and you should if you run America, the thing you fear most is the alignment of Russia with China, because then you unite the world's largest country, the largest nuclear arsenal with the world's largest economy and the world's largest population.
01:15:51.400And that becomes a block that many others gravitate to.
01:15:56.300And that becomes, you know, something that you can't resist, that controls global trade routes, that controls global currency, and that reduces you, the United States, to the bitch position very fast.
01:16:40.940For one specific reason, despite all the lying from Ann Applebaum and the Atlantic Council and the professional liars and morons in Washington who got us into the Iraq war and Libya and Syria and every other.
01:16:51.300I've never apologized or been penalized for it.
01:16:53.540The truth is that Russia's concern was that Ukraine remain not part of NATO.
01:16:59.360They want to control Ukraine to some extent.
01:17:02.300It's their neighbor in the same way that we want to control, I don't know, Canada or Mexico.
01:17:06.220You don't have to, you know, run the municipal elections in the country.
01:17:10.560But you don't want like if you had a government in Canada that was like bent on destroying the United States, you would overthrow the premier of Canada because you can't have that.
01:19:04.520But if you're being an adult about it, you understand that great powers have an interest in not having other people's nuclear weapons on their borders.
01:26:26.480And to your second point, he has absolutely, as a matter of fact, the Ukrainian military has sold those weapons on the black market around the world.
01:26:50.000And it's incredibly destabilizing, by the way.
01:26:52.360The United States did this years ago in Afghanistan, as you know, and sent a bunch of Stinger missiles to the Mahajidine in 1979 and 80 to fight the Soviets.
01:26:59.840And those missiles caused huge problems for all of Southwest Asia for, like, 20 years.
01:27:39.040Well, first of all, you would have to substantiate who it is that you knew.
01:27:42.840Do you believe the most corrupt country in Europe, which is so corrupt that NATO didn't want it as a member, you believe it's outside the realm of possibility that facing defeat, the leaders of that military would not sell the weapons that they're getting from the West?
01:27:55.740You cannot substantiate a claim on the basis of mere suspicion that because-
01:28:13.300Because the missiles that Russia put out those pictures of were from like 2014, and they didn't even have javelins then.
01:28:25.580So, the idea that Ukraine could have been selling weapons that were taken from a different time as an obvious ploy by Russia to make them look bad is, to me, propaganda.
01:30:17.900I'm just telling you that if this will be documented, and I got that directly once again from someone who purchased quite a few of those weapons who I know personally and in another country and knows a lot about this.
01:30:36.960It runs a military and it's just frustrating because I can't say beyond that.
01:30:44.700Look, my point is not to frustrate you, Tucker.
01:30:48.460It's to understand this mentality of framing Ukraine and Zelensky as the bad guy.
01:32:33.340And we're about to have more of a footprint because the mineral deal will put American companies on the ground in those areas that are right now war zones.
01:32:41.280All I'm saying is we've funded the worst war Europe has seen since World War II for three years.
01:32:47.200That entails an awful lot of weapons, including bioweapons.
01:34:13.440They took a big chunk of eastern Ukraine, and for three years we've progressed toward bankruptcy trying to stop it, and we've not been able to.
01:35:04.040But the idea that some woman who's never been in the armed service, like, setting military policy for the EU, you know, we're going to do this.
01:35:11.260We're going to—you can't do anything.
01:35:25.580So Americans are like, well, we can't allow this.
01:35:28.060Well, what are you going to do about it?
01:35:29.160I don't say that it's a fact because we are not fighting in earnest in that country.
01:35:32.860So what—okay, so what would you—I'm just—okay, here are the terms.
01:35:36.560We have a nuclear-armed power, largest nuclear arsenal in the world, that is fighting for its very life that is aligned with China, okay, which is the largest economy in the world.
01:35:43.000Well, I don't know that Russia is fighting for its life.
01:36:05.620The options are what President Trump is doing right now, which is to try to get the parties to the table and draw a line in the sand and make a deal, right?
01:36:42.940Because he doesn't want his citizens to have to fight an unpopular war because he's worried about his popularity because he wants to stay in power.
01:36:49.840So it's easier to send convicts to the front.
01:38:37.560Well, yeah, they're under siege right now.
01:38:39.300No, but I'm just saying, like, Russia actually, for a country at war, is thriving.
01:38:46.560You know, I think it's got deeper problems.
01:38:47.760War's not good for any economy over time or any country over time.
01:38:50.560But there's been such a massive infusion of Chinese investment into Russia in the past couple of years that people in, say, Moscow, city of 12 million, you know, they don't feel a privation that populations under war typically—
01:39:03.520But there's a reason he made that deal with North Korea to have their people backing them up on the battle lines.
01:39:11.400But here's the only point that I'm making from an American perspective.
01:39:15.480Americans fall into this trap, which is a childish trap, where they superimpose, like, a really clear moral dichotomy onto foreign conflicts where there's, like, a great guy and an evil guy.
01:39:26.460And they're able to do that because they don't know anything, because they've never been anywhere, and they don't actually—they're leaders I'm talking about—don't kind of take the time to understand that they don't understand.
01:39:35.960The more you know, the more you realize you really don't know, because do you speak Russian?
01:39:42.580The best you can do is, like, be open-minded and let evidence guide your conclusions.
01:39:46.700So, from an American perspective, what we've learned is the U.S. capacity for projecting strength through the military is a lot less than we thought it was.
01:40:14.960I mean, you know, because you've been studying the situation, I've been there twice during the conflict, and it's like World War I-level warfare there.
01:43:20.500Why—I mean, this war has, like most wars that we fight, been promoted by some of the richest people in our country.
01:43:29.040And I'll name one, Ken Griffin, who is a hedge fund billionaire, has really pushed hard, and I've seen it, behind the scenes to force Republican politicians to support bigger payments to the Zelensky government.
01:43:42.180And it's like, Ken Griffin's a multi-billionaire.
01:43:45.140He's probably, I don't know, millions of dollars on lobbying on this issue, but he hasn't spent billions on Ukraine.
01:43:50.120He could send billions of his own money to Ukraine.
01:43:52.380A lot of the Ukraine war supporters could do it.
01:44:11.060Why is Ken Griffin not sending billions to Ukraine?
01:44:13.340No, what they're doing is pressuring the U.S. media, pressuring the U.S. Congress to do something that they themselves are not willing to do.
01:44:21.080Up to and including sending American troops, which we have in Ukraine, risking their lives.
01:44:27.840I just want to say, I think it's one of the most immoral things I've ever seen.
01:44:30.840I think that you're headed in the right direction now, because I believe that that—
01:44:35.480You support the war, go pay for it, go fight it.
01:44:37.220That complaint that the wealthy and powerful are feeding off the rest of us, I think is the one untapped reservoir of populist sentiment in this country.
01:46:38.760Ken Griffin is like this independent multibillionaire who's got massive—and there are a lot of these guys—with massive political influence because of the money that he has.
01:47:12.880I don't know why you're not talking about Musk in the same way.
01:47:16.020All the tech bros, which I think is a really benign and casual label for these guys, he's doing everything that we're supposed to be worried about happening in this society right now.
01:47:32.460I think he's a genius, and I just—I think that there are things that are happening right now.
01:47:38.320I can answer your question, and I don't think it's an unfair question at all.
01:47:40.840Because I do think the world that produced Elon is a world you need to think about a little bit.
01:47:48.800I think there are some—definitely some threats.
01:47:51.380Elon specifically will always have my love because he did the most important thing, which is restore free speech in the United States through X.
01:48:01.140And he took—because, you know, free speech doesn't mean anything if you can't actually speak to an audience.
01:48:05.900Like, I can, you know, lecture the mirror in my living room, but it doesn't mean anything.
01:48:09.820I have to be able to talk to other people in order to convince them.
01:48:12.500And there was no place to do that at scale.
01:48:15.280All the social media apps were controlled, completely controlled.
01:48:18.820And he has given a real measure of free speech back to the United States, to its citizens, which is really the difference between slavery and freedom is being able to say what you think.
01:48:30.320I mean, there's kind of, like, a free man can say what he believes is true, and a slave can't.
01:48:46.680I mean, I'm highly opposed to immigration, but I have to say, including my best friend, a lot of the best people I know are immigrants, and they appreciate America for what actually makes it great, which is its core freedoms.
01:48:58.660What do you mean you're against immigration?
01:49:00.440We have too much immigration, and we've made the country totally unstable.
01:49:02.680No, there's a difference between too much and none.
01:49:06.980In theory, we need to shut down all immigration right now until we can retain or regain equilibrium and, like, figure out what it is that holds us all together as a nation.
01:51:03.780This is, and by the way, it's happening at exactly the time when technology is certain to, like, overturn our economy and employment structure.
01:51:11.100Like, AI is going to change everything.
01:51:14.080People's brains can't handle this much change.
01:51:16.100And whoever opened the spigot and flooded our country with 15 or 25 million illegals in the past four years should be in prison for the rest of his life.
01:51:27.120That's the worst thing that's ever been done to this country.
01:51:29.160And I don't know if we can recover from it.
01:51:30.980And I think it'll become obvious as soon as there's an economic downturn that, like, the fundamentals have not been tended to at all.
01:52:14.560It's too many people, and there's no effort.
01:52:15.580But even if you wanted to look at the people, even if you want to say there are 15 million people who aren't supposed to be here, they all came in illegally.
02:00:49.260And so every institution in American life to this day, the meaningful ones, the universities, the large corporations, the federal government, to this day has abandoned that and moved aggressively in the other direction.
02:01:04.600There are federal set-asides, the ladders of success, the merit badges that we require to enter these institutions, mostly in education, totally determined by race and sex.
02:01:16.260And that's the opposite of what you said.
02:01:19.160So then, and that's been going on for 60 years.
02:04:02.440What I'm saying is that the testing assumes equal starting points.
02:04:08.940If you and I are both going to take a standardized test right now in an area that I am prepared for and you're not, then we're not going to do the same.
02:04:17.320Well, go ahead and prepare for it then.
02:04:32.580I'm saying that you also have to be open to the reality that the kids aren't going to do the same on the test when one has had a good education and one has not had a good education.
02:04:41.560But it's not—you know, there's a lot of science behind that.
02:04:43.200And the truth is darker and harder to deal with, okay, which is that intelligence is the product of environment to some extent, but it's mostly genetic.
02:04:52.120And intelligence is a lot of factors in success, but intelligence is the single most important over time in big populations.
02:05:10.500If you have a meritocratic society, the smartest people will have most of the money and most of the success.
02:05:17.140And that doesn't seem fair to people is the truth, actually.
02:05:21.980And as we got better at sorting the smart people and sending them to Harvard and McKinsey and, you know, on to private equity, it became more obvious.
02:05:32.080It became obvious that the meritocracy was producing an incredibly lopsided society.
02:05:36.840And that freaked people out and it felt unfair to them.
02:05:39.900And two people in the early 1990s wrote a book on it, Dick Hernstein and Murray, and it was called The Bell Curve.
02:05:48.580And it had a chapter on race in it, which was, you know, made a lot of people mad.
02:05:52.740And they could have taken that chapter out and it would have been, I think, the transformative book ever because it described what I just said, which is the meritocracy produces an outcome that you may not be ready for, actually, because it's rooted in nature and you can't change it.
02:06:09.260And Head Start, which was designed to increase the IQ of poor kids, didn't work.
02:06:12.900And no one even wants to talk about it anymore.
02:06:15.020It's really hard to change people's intelligence.
02:06:17.380And intelligence turns out to be the main predictor of economic success.
02:06:20.840So these are super complicated questions, but I know that a system that rewards people on the basis of race and punishes others on the basis of race creates hatred and division.
02:06:32.000I don't think the point is, I don't think you have to do it that way is what I'm saying.
02:06:38.080If two people apply to college and they're different colors and the one with the lower SAT score is admitted because of his race, that's penalizing the one who was not admitted.
02:06:47.520I understand, which is why it's no longer the law of the country.
02:06:49.340It's true in every college in the United States, as you know, especially the selective ones, including the one you went to.
02:07:11.300What was interesting to me about the case is that it wasn't white people.
02:07:13.780It was Asian people who were saying that they were being discriminated against.
02:07:17.240So basically, the way they shut down the conversation is by making everyone feel guilty about slavery, which no living person anything to do with at all and no living person I've ever met supports.
02:07:26.640That's why I'm for free speech, because I'm against slavery.
02:07:28.340But it's also it's not a coincidence that people of color, specifically African-American, are at a different socioeconomic level, given how they were introduced to the country.
02:08:24.580So Italians have certain things that are more common because of that group of animals breeding with each other than you'll have with Irish people or with Polish people.
02:11:00.960But AI and transhumanism, transhumanism specifically, seeks to redefine what a human being is.
02:11:08.180When you merge people with machines, then you don't acknowledge the existence of a soul.
02:11:12.560If you believe that each person has a distinct soul, that God cares about each person, like a speck of sand on the beach, each person is accounted for and watched over by God and cared for by God and has a destiny.
02:11:23.420How could you merge that person with a computer?
02:11:28.840Because once you do that, then you don't have to acknowledge the soul.
02:11:31.760Then you can treat that person like the object that you've made him into.
02:11:35.580And, of course, we don't even discuss this.
02:11:38.200The point is, look, my only point is, this is a super complicated topic, as I think we're proving.
02:11:44.000And there are always unintended consequences of any system that you set up.
02:11:49.000But I know, from just watching the world and watching the United States, that the second you make race a key for appearance, whatever you want to call it, genetics, a key component in awarding or punishing, then you make everybody hate each other and you wind up like Rwanda.