The Tucker Carlson Show

00:00 The point of any system is protect the interests of the people it serves and governs. It's just the nature of it. So what's a preacher's job? It's to minister to the souls of his congregants. What's a president's job? It's to look out for, to protect the interests of his citizens. Really, really simple. 00:17 It's inherent to the definition. So it's been obvious for a while now that our system is not working as intended because the people in charge of it seem to be looking out mostly, not exclusively, but mostly for their own interests. And you see that all around you. 00:34 government workers make more than the average American. That kind of says it as clearly as anything, but you see it up and down every institution in American life. A lot of them seem to be run primarily for the benefit of the people who run them, and that is bad. 00:49 And they're less hidden about it than they've ever been. I mean, they're off buying private islands and exempting themselves from the rules that apply to you. And that has caused enormous frustration and resentment from ordinary people. It's like, wait a second, you're not following your own rules. I have to stay home during COVID and you're going to the French laundry because what are you a king now? And the answer is, yeah, kinda. 01:12 So that's a very recognizable degradation of a system. It just gets more corrupt over time. And the people with power use it to benefit themselves and their families and their friends. And after a while, you call it the Epstein class because that's exactly what it is. It's a group of self-interested people acting on their own behalf against yours. Okay. 01:32 And that's, again, bad. 01:35 But it can limp along for a long time because that's just the nature of systems. That's the Ottoman Empire went from conquering half the world to being kind of pathetic and just basically focused on the harem. 01:46 And in the end, well, it dissolved. 01:50 But something different has happened to our system, and it's obvious recently. So it's one thing to have a system run by people who are looking out for their own best interest and not yours. Again, we've had that. 02:02 It's another to have a system that's totally incapable of responding to reality that is basically paralyzed. 02:10 And unfortunately, ominously, that's the system that we now have. And we know that because the two greatest threats, arguably, in all recorded history, and those would be nuclear war and AI, are looming right in front of us. 02:27 And no one in our society in a position of authority seems capable of responding at all or even really acknowledging that this is happening. It's like they're frozen, staring at the trees that approaches the windshield at 70 miles an hour. 02:40 It really does feel that way. And if you listen carefully, that is where we are. 02:45 So we are moving toward, on this trajectory, if it holds, we are moving toward nuclear exchange because you have two conflicts one in the middle east and one in the near east eastern europe ukraine and iran that are suddenly somehow merging and what does that mean it means a world war And you have two sides with essentially inflexible positions. Not to get into the details, if you're following this, if you're one of the small percentage of Americans following this, you already know that there's no obvious resolution to either one of those conflicts anytime soon. 03:22 And yet the stakes couldn't be higher. 03:24 And of course, the key participants in both of those wars, now becoming one war, are nuclear armed. And they feel that this is, to use a very tired term, existential for them, And so unless, again, the angle of attack, the trajectory changes really soon, we are going to wind up inevitably with the use of weapons of mass destruction. And you have one participant, President of the United States, openly threatening that already on true social, on the internet, for everyone to see, we're gonna eliminate your civilization. 03:56 Well, of course you can't do that with tomahawks, but you can with nuclear weapons. So you have the President of the United States, whatever they tell you, openly threatening the use of nuclear weapons in a conflict that has no immediate or obvious resolution. So where is that going? Well, toward a nuclear strike. And what happens then? God knows. 04:15 But if you can even live with that fact If you can even say or just acknowledge without words that, yeah, this could wind up with people unleashing nuclear weapons on civilian populations, you're already around the bend. You've already proven yourself incapable of leadership because that's crazy. 04:33 That's beyond reckless. That's, well, it's literally suicidal and homicidal. 04:41 at very least you're paralyzed you cannot act in defense not simply of your country or civilization but even of yourself but that's where we are and the same goes for ai now of course it's unknown as with the wars in ukraine and iran where ai winds up and maybe it's just a big bubble you know it's the 2000 tech bubble it's pets.com 100x you know maybe or maybe the predictions of the people who are developing the technology turn out to be true, which is that it's like the end. 05:14 At best, we give up our ability to make important life decisions to machines. We put machines in charge of our lives. That's at best. And at worst, the machines decide to kill us all and do, and there's nothing we can do about it. That's what they're saying. 05:29 Not the doomsday prophets of Twitter, But the people who are developing this technology are saying, oh, by the way, this thing that we're making could kill everybody and at very least will make certain that your kids and grandkids and probably you don't have jobs. 05:42 And we're going to, I guess, do something about that, but it's not clear what. And that's coming in like a year. 05:48 Huh? 05:50 What's remarkable about that is not simply that the people doing it or admitting it, really trying to get our attention, telling us we're doing this. 05:59 but that no one is doing anything. They're just mesmerized, a fixed stare at this thing that might be the end of everything. 06:07 Who acts like that? 06:10 Well, normal people don't act like that, and certainly functional systems don't act like that. So without belaboring it, what does that tell you? It tells you that the system has reached the end. 06:18 That's not actually a system that's working on anyone's behalf. That's a system that is bound for probably pretty imminent destruction. 06:26 So that's going away. And we've probably known that, any system that elects 80-year-olds to run the place, cynical 80-year-olds, is not long for this world. Like it's not reproducing in the same way that 80-year-olds don't reproduce. 06:40 It's the end, and it is. 06:43 And that's sad, and certainly we've spent a lot of time complaining about it, But at this point, it's just obviously true, and so it's worth thinking about what comes next. Well, something, assuming we're all here, and you have to assume that. You certainly want to. 06:58 And even if it's not true, you still have to plan for it, because we don't know. 07:02 So something's coming next. Something will replace the system, and the highest hope is that that replacement, whatever does come next, will be the result of an incremental process that people have time to metabolize and buy into, approve of, that we don't get an abrupt change, because abrupt changes of political leadership are, well, they're called revolutions, and they're not typically an improvement over what they're replacing. 07:27 And they have their own downsides in any case. So you hope that this will somehow evolve into something less crazy, less cut off from, its core mission, which is to serve the people who live here, then more humane and more pro-human, et cetera. That it's just better in every way. You hope that. But in any case, we're getting something different. 07:50 And the question is, what will that be? And again, we don't know. 07:54 We know that changes in technology or power shifts globally, all of these facts on the ground are accompanied by, followed by, Political changes. Political changes follow those changes. They don't incite those changes, right? The response is to those changes. And so we're getting political changes. They will find political expression. 08:15 And will it be a third party? Probably. The most radicalizing fact of American politics in the last, I don't know, century is the confirmation that we got on or about February 28th that the parties on the big issues are identical. 08:31 Trump initiates the one thing he said he'd never do, a regime change war in the Middle East against Iran, a country much bigger and more powerful than the last regime change we attempted, which didn't work. 08:41 And there were no protests against it because, of course, the leaders of the other party, his supposed enemies, agreed with him completely, as they did with his budget fundamentally, certainly with the tax code that he endorsed. 08:52 And that tells us what? One thing at least, that on the issues that really matter, the most obvious and historically significant expressions of exertion of power, which would be foreign policy and the budget, tax code, the parties are aligned. They have the same agenda, exactly the same agenda. And they go through this whole song and dance to convince us, no, we're really blood enemies, but are they really? No, they're not. 09:17 And once again, just to restate the obvious, because you can't state the obvious enough, if Trump's opponents really opposed what he was doing well then we would have people in the streets famously and the party whose whole self-understanding is people taking to the streets and marching for this that or the other thing especially peace would be marching for peace and against this war but they're not and why aren't they because they're not against it that's why Not to complain about it, but just to sort of set the predicate for the next stage in our lives as American citizens. 09:55 We know that the parties are aligned on the issues that matter against the population. Now, how do we know it's against the population? Because we have public opinion polling. And it may not be precisely right, but over time, we get a pretty clear picture of people's priorities. 10:11 And the big things that the US government endorsed by both parties are doing, which is spying on you more, moving an ever-growing share of gross domestic product to a smaller percentage of the population, invading countries, spending $1.5 trillion a year on a military they can't win a war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the things that they're doing, the big things, population doesn't want those things. 10:33 And they're really concerned despite a lot of hectoring from their leaders about the price of burritos. And you could say, well, that's awfully small-minded of you and you shouldn't be eating $20 burritos, but maybe people wanna choose what they eat and they don't wanna pay 30% more for it over a year or whatever the number is, but it's a big hike. 10:51 And so if you really cared what people wanted, you would take that seriously. 10:57 But as noted, not only do the people in charge not care what you want, they're actively hostile to what you want. And the fact that you want it is evidence to them that it's illegitimate. Well, you shouldn't want that. You entitled little kid. What are you, a college student? The ones who aren't going to have jobs thanks to the AI? They're all invested in it. I mean, you see, this is like all, it's too disconnected to continue. 11:18 So probably going to get a third party or multiple parties. Is that the best system? I don't know. It's better than the one we have. 11:25 Will that be enough, is the question. And the answer, the hard answer is no. 11:30 Because when you hear people say, well, there's no political solution to this, well, of course you're rooting for a political solution because the alternative is something kinetic, as they say, and you don't want that, you don't want violence of any kind. 11:41 But you also know that there are no political solutions to anything, really, in any system. 11:48 because the society behaves consistent over time with the values and concerns of the people who live there, which is to say, if you wanna change human behavior, passing laws against it doesn't get you there. What gets you there is convincing people it's the right thing to do, obviously. There's no law against screaming the F word at your toddler in Walmart, probably, or certainly in the parking lot, can't be arrested for that. 12:12 There's no statute that says you can't use vulgar language with your kids, but who does that? Very few people. 12:18 Because if you try that, give the finger to an old lady in a crosswalk, probably not illegal. No one does that. Why? Because if you try it, obviously people are like, what are you doing? 12:27 That's disgusting. And so you don't. 12:31 So in other words, if you want to change a society, yeah, you definitely need more options on the ballot. You definitely, definitely need leaders. 12:41 who want to serve the citizens of the country because they care about the citizens of the country. And of course, service follows caring. If you love someone, you want to serve that person, obviously. 12:53 But more than anything, you need a population that has clear goals, that knows what the program should be. Don't give the finger to old ladies in a crosswalk. Just don't do that. We all agree. You need a consensus on what we're doing here. What is the whole point of this? 13:11 That's what you need to start. 13:14 And it turns out if you have that consensus, a lot of problems get solved over time, not immediately. Some problems are, if not intractable, very complex. 13:25 But if you get the fundamentals right, they tend to get better over time. And if you don't, they inexorably get worse. That we know. 13:34 And so any effort to fix America's systemic problems with technocratic solutions is by definition doomed to fail because it doesn't address how you got here in the first place. How did we wind up with trillion dollars in debt? Trillions and trillions, unpayable debt. 13:48 Well, because we kept electing people who added to it, including the current occupant of the White House. Now, why did we do that? Well, because we have a pretty distorted understanding about what debt is and what it does to people and nations. We just... We're not setting the right goals. 14:06 We don't think that's important to avoid debt. And if we did, we probably wouldn't over many decades have accrued a debt that is unpayable and in fact controlling us. 14:17 So all of this goes back to one of the things that nobody in politics ever admits out loud, but is just true, which is the most important thing you can do if you want to change a world a region, a civilization, a nation, a neighborhood, a person, the most important thing you can do is tell the truth out loud, always. 14:41 The words are the most important thing. They're not the whole solution, but they're the beginning of the change. Tell the truth out loud. Say what is true. 14:51 And there are a lot of ways to prove this, But the only meaningful relics we have of any former civilization are the ideas that they promoted, the words they said. And to the extent those have survived, they have affected and influenced subsequent generations. The most important legacy of the Roman Empire is not its aqueducts, some of which still stand, because they were awesome architects and great builders, and they used stone, not reinforced concrete, and that's all impressive. 15:16 But the most enduring legacy of Rome, of course, is Christianity, which with Constantine was a state religion, and it's still the world's biggest religion. So it's the words that matter. 15:25 Above all, and that's why tyrants famously, and all governments actually, try to constrain what you can say. That's the first thing they do before they try to disarm you, is they try to tell you what you can say. 15:37 And so we thought it'd be useful just to set down the goals of whatever comes next, and it'll find all kinds of expressions. 15:45 And hopefully it's better than what we have, but we know it'll be different from what we have because what we have literally doesn't work. It can't protect itself from the greatest threats in human history. 15:57 So here are the 10 things that when all is said and done, America should be, and probably has been in the past, but certainly should be. 16:06 And if you get these right, if you could buy in on these, and it shouldn't be hard because almost everybody agrees with these, then you can actually have hope that the system will be more responsive. It certainly won't be suicidal, that the country itself will be vibrant and alive and not dying. It won't be living off its cultural inheritance, which we still are, and it's getting a little lean. 16:31 When the best things in your society from the founding documents to the architecture are all things made before your grandparents were born, it's a problem. 16:40 In fact, it's the end. 16:43 So what is rebirth? Well, rebirth begins with stating the things you want to be. What should America be? Child trafficking is one of those issues that nobody wants to talk about because it's just awful. There's a lot of news on the topic, but it's so bad that some people decide to steer clear, including us, honestly, to be really transparent about it. It's just too ugly as a topic. It's too depressing. But it's important and it has to stop, and that's why the documentary Hidden War, now streaming on Angel, is worth watching. This film gives viewers a front row seat to undercover operations that begin in Ukraine and stretch across continents. 17:18 You'll see actual rescue missions, investigations, traffickers brought to justice, thankfully, and the extraordinary risks that good people take to save the lives of children. 17:28 This documentary is not a dramatization. It's an actual documentary. It's totally real. And the subject matter is the worst. The film ultimately is hopeful. And it shows that evil doesn't always win. Lives can be saved. Children can survive trafficking and in some cases thrive after. So from a big picture perspective, it's the kind of story that few filmmakers are going to want to tell. 17:52 And that's why we support Angel. They're never afraid to cover stories that Hollywood takes a pass on. 17:57 Angel's not in it for the glamour. They care about what the truth is. Join the Angel Guild today to stream Hidden War and explore Angel's big library, growing library of films and documentaries that tackle subjects that actually matter. Visit angel.com slash Carlson to sign up. 18:12 Why are men coming to a urologist to talk about their marriages? I'm Dr. Justin Hooman, a urologist practicing in Beverly Hills. And the answer is because ED doesn't stay in the bedroom. I get it. This isn't just physical. It's personal. That's why I recommend Rougiet Ready, a three-in-one treatment that works on your body and your brain. Fast-acting, long-lasting, prescribed by a licensed physician. Get started at rougiet.com slash Justin today. That's R-U-G-I-E-T dot com slash Justin. 18:42 And the very first thing America should be is fair. 18:47 America should be fair. Now, not only should America be fair, America was created to be fair. That's the entire point of America. Well, it never has been fair. Yeah, well, okay. 18:59 But that doesn't change the fact that that has always been the goal. And when you stop trying to find the goal, you have no hope of ever achieving it. 19:08 And so this country needs, first and foremost, a recommitment to fairness, which, to remind you, is your birthright. Fairness is promised you by God. 19:19 And how do we know that? Because we know that God created every person. The founders knew that. 19:25 Whether they were Orthodox Christians or not, not one of them doubted that the point of this project was to guarantee the inherent fairness of which derives from the inherent equality of all peoples because they share a common origin, which is God. 19:43 What does that mean? 19:44 It means that you have a right to be treated according to immutable objective principles and standards, standards that don't change depending upon who's being judged by them. 19:56 That's the key to everything. That's the key, of course, to our justice system was also at one point a guiding principle in our economic arrangements. 20:05 That some people were going to get paid more, some less, according to their ability or their work. This was always the goal. 20:11 But ultimately, everyone was a human being and deserved dignity. There was a fairness to that. And that it was considered totally outside the realm of the acceptable. 20:22 to live in a system where outcomes were determined by inside deals or who you know or where you were born. Of course, there's always been some of that, people being what they are, but that can never be acceptable. Fairness has to be the goal, fairness. And fairness, once again, derives from the knowledge that every person is on some basic level equal. And that means that we can judge the actions of any person by exactly the same standards. Nobody gets a pass. 20:52 And because nobody gets a pass, we can be united despite our differences. 20:57 And we know this because we know that the fastest way to divide people from each other, whether intentionally or not, is to treat them unequally. If you want to make your children hate each other, play favorites, and they will. 21:10 If you want your children to get along and love you after you're dead, you treat them equally. You treat them the same with the same amount of love. That is the key to making certain that your children love each other. is loving them equally, treating them according to the same standards. 21:26 And if you think about it, the failure to do this, or even acknowledge that this is the goal of the whole society, fairness, is the root of almost all of our frustrations. Why is Jeffrey Epstein so infuriating? Why is that story capable of enraging an entire population? Well, of course, are the crimes, or the suspected crimes, sex creep, possibly a kid toucher, clearly involved with Mossad and who knows what other foreign intel agency, was involved in the weapons trade. There's a lot about the guy that was obviously criminal. 22:00 But what rankles people so much by the Epstein story is not that he was bad, it's that he got a pass because of who he was. The rules did not apply to him. 22:12 And people can't tolerate that. It makes them crazy and it should. 22:17 because it gives a lie to the whole pretense that this is somehow a fair society. And people, when they live in unfair societies, start to behave in very different ways. In fact, if you want to inspire people, not just to hate each other, but to become criminals, to seek their own special deals, to engage in their own corruption, Don't punish Jeffrey Epstein and everyone like Jeffrey Epstein or have a college admissions system or a hiring system run by America's HR departments. That's very, very much the same as the Epstein story. 22:51 Certain people get a better deal because of how they were born or who they know. 22:56 That drives everybody crazy and gives a lie to the justice system, but not just the justice system, to the whole enterprise. 23:05 And so a daily reminder to the entire population that we are equal on the most fundamental level, not in ability, not in income, not in appearance, not in background, but in value and in core human rights. That's why they're human rights, because they attach to you as a human being. 23:24 A reminder of that, that you are every bit the equal of a US senator. 23:30 for example, or when the FBI shows up on your doorstep, you have the exact same rights as those agents. 23:38 They represent fairness and justice. They have that authority, but they have no more rights than you. You have identical rights. You don't have to cower before authority because you know in the end you're equal to it. That's the whole promise of the system. 23:54 And when that goes away, what do you get? Well, you get Epstein, you get cryptocurrency scams that are never punished, you get total endemic corruption, you get breakdown of society. 24:06 And that's what we're watching. 24:08 So restoring that, it's not enough to pass laws against corruption, okay? How do those work? 24:14 Ukraine has laws against corruption. You have to have a consensus that no person gets special rights ever. 24:22 And that would include the president of the United States down to, by the way, Jeffrey Epstein. 24:29 Fairness. 24:30 That's the inheritance of America from the Anglo world. That's what makes the West different from the East. 24:38 That's why the East is solidly hierarchical. And there's no hope that a poor person could ever get the same treatment or justice as a rich person. But in the West, there has been. And that's why people moved here. 24:51 We have to restore that first, fairness. 24:53 The second thing that you need America to be is sovereign. 24:59 What does sovereign mean? Sovereign means free from outside influence, the right to make decisions on your nation's behalf or your own behalf without being told what to do. 25:12 Sovereignty is a synonym for freedom. The opposite of sovereignty is slavery. 25:16 where you have no choice. 25:18 So when your nation is not sovereign, of course it leads to things like the Iran war, which you do under bribery or threat or both by Israel, which is exactly what happened. And everybody knows that, so you're not sovereign there. 25:33 But more than that, People lose confidence in their own country. What is my country worth if we can't even make our own decisions? Of course, it gives a lie to the idea of a representative democracy. They're not representing me, they're representing the lobbyists, and not just from Israel, by the way, from every big industry in the United States, from tech to pharma and telecom and all of them. 25:54 But certainly to Israel, I mean, that's taking place in real time. 25:58 And shouting at you that you're a Nazi or a bad person for noticing isn't really adequate. It doesn't answer the question, why is this okay? Because it's not okay. And everybody knows it's not okay. 26:09 So sovereignty is essential or else why have a country? 26:14 Even a monarchy, maybe especially a monarchy is sovereign. In fact, the monarch is called the sovereign. And that means he gets to make decisions on his own, hopefully with the interest of his people in mind. But certainly in a democracy, it's central to the whole project. 26:28 But it doesn't just matter to the state, it matters to the person. We have sovereignty as people. 26:35 We didn't create our own lives, but we're responsible for them while we're here, despite our many connections to other people. In the end, the promise is a free man gets to make free decisions. You can't be forced, I don't know, to take some experimental medicine you don't want. No one can force you to do that. How could they force you? 26:56 That means you're not in control. You don't own yourself. 27:00 And if you don't own yourself, who does? 27:03 So sovereignty is at the core of the country, of any country, but particularly ours. 27:11 And it's not just a question of the person's relationship to the government. 27:16 It's the person's relationship, I don't know, to the banks. 27:20 How can a sovereign person be underwater in debt? 27:25 Well, of course you can't because when you owe more than you can immediately repay, you're effectively owned by the person to whom you owe the money. 27:37 So debt is an attack on sovereignty. And it's important to say that because no one ever does. 27:44 And so you kind of move around this society and hear people talk about their credit scores. If it's a significant measure of something, gotta have a good credit score. What are you really saying? 27:53 You have to be worthy of losing your sovereignty to a bank, to a money lender. 27:58 So debt is of course, and this has been noted in previous societies really since the beginning of time, a form of slavery. 28:04 You do not have control over your life when you owe money to people. Well, of course it's unavoidable in America, unless you're very rich or extremely disciplined beyond what the average person can be expected to maintain, you're gonna be in debt. It's hard to do anything without debt. 28:18 But is that good? 28:20 Why are we participating in this? 28:22 Why are we accepting this as the natural order? It's the most unnatural thing ever devised and it's bad. And that's why every major religion acknowledges that it's not just unhelpful, it's sinful. 28:34 So it might be a good starting place to say that a society organized around debt at the sovereign, at the national level, but on the personal level is not a healthy society because it enslaves people. 28:50 And it's interesting that when you do say that, and if you're ever to use the U word, usury, which is lending money and interest, which is banned, has been banned in many countries throughout time because it is bad, even mentioning that puts you on some list, at least in the minds of the people you're talking to, as like a crazy person, if not a dangerous person. 29:10 That may be the real third rail is debt, complaining about debt. 29:17 noting that a 25% interest rate is totally immoral. And by the way, for generations, members of the mafia were put in jail for loaning money at that rate. It's called loan sharking. 29:28 And it was illegal, but suddenly it's common. That's approaching the average credit card interest rate. The credit card's in your wallet. If you don't pay every month, we'll charge you that. 29:39 And not only is it legal, it's more than legal, it's encouraged because your credit rating And by the way, so distorted is our system that you are penalized under our tax code for not having debt. How does that work? 29:55 Well, consider your mortgage. Let's say you were to pay off your mortgage. You would have to pay more in taxes every year, which is to say you'd be penalized by the US government for the privilege of not being in debt to a bank. 30:10 Who thought up that system? Is that real? Well, it is real. And not only is it real, it is once again almost never noted by anybody, but it's a form of slavery. 30:19 And over time, it gives people the perception, which is rooted in reality, unfortunately, that they're not really in control of their lives. 30:26 And if you do that across an entire population, it may be useful to you because you want to control what they do, but it's totally degrading to them. 30:36 And there's no reason that should continue. It doesn't mean you're against capitalism. By the way, what role does high interest lending play in free market capitalism? 30:45 Are you a communist if you're against it? 30:47 No. 30:49 The threat of communism, of course, is not that it's an ineffective economic system. The threat of communism is totalitarian control. 30:56 Well, if the entire country and every person in it is so indebted that they can't make free decisions, how is that not totalitarian control? Well, of course it is. 31:04 So stop with that communist stuff. 31:07 Debt is a form of slavery. 31:11 And our leaders are so invested in it that they'll attack you for noting it, but it's true and everybody knows it's true. And so it's important to say that the goal is sovereignty. 31:22 No more foreign lobbyists, none. 31:26 No more control of the agencies by industry, none. 31:30 and no more government promotion of debt to high-interest moneylenders. It's all of a piece. Third, productive. 31:39 A decent country is productive. 31:42 Productive means that you make things worth having, from which you derive joy, that improve the lives of other people, or that just are inherently beautiful. There was a thing called art at one point. that was appreciated because it was beautiful, and that's the only reason it was appreciated. It didn't do anything, but it uplifted people's spirits, and that was considered a worthy end in itself. 32:06 All these assumptions have kind of been erased over the past century and stages, and certainly in the last 20 years, the idea that it is your duty and pleasure to produce something worth having has kind of been lost. 32:20 and been replaced by the idea that the point of work is to make money to pay for all these things, mostly to pay interest on all these things, it's part of the debt cycle, and that it's your duty to do that, and you should forego, I don't know, getting married and having kids in order to do that, basically to service the debt. 32:39 And you can argue about how sick that is, obviously it's very sick, but you can't elide past the core assumption, which is that it doesn't matter what you make. 32:49 And that's a lie. It matters very much what you make. And if you doubt that, consider how we judge past civilizations. We judge them by what they make. In fact, there are many civilizations about which we know nothing, not even their name, not their language, nothing. All we have is the record, the physical record of the things they made, and we name the civilization after that, after the stone knife points or the bowls that they made. 33:14 The whole civilization to archeologists is summed up by their products or the fruits of their labor, the work of their hands. 33:24 But that's true for all civilizations and we judge them and we are right to judge them by the quality and the ingenuity and yes, the beauty of the things they made. 33:35 So if you wake up one morning and your country is really only producing weapon systems and surveillance technology, both of which are probably employed in the service of evil, so there's that, but both of which don't really exist long-term, weapons technology is by definition expended, surveillance technology is just ones and zeros, you're in a bad place. If your main drivers of the economy are those two things, plus real estate reselling the same land over and over, and finance lending money at interest, The sum total is what? 34:14 Nothing worth bragging about. And people can feel that. There's been, of course, this long debate about the manufacturing sector. Well, of course, it wasn't a debate. There were a couple of wackos like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan are like, wait, we need to make things. Oh, shut up. You don't understand capitalism, said Ben Shapiro's parents or whoever was arguing at the time. 34:33 No, you don't understand capitalism. It's really about efficiency. 34:37 and it's cheaper to make it over there, and then we reap the benefits, and Buchanan and people like him would say, but don't we kind of lose something? We don't make anything? Oh, shut up, you don't understand economics. 34:47 But you don't have to understand economics to know that they were absolutely right, that you are judged by the things you make, but you also judge yourself by the things you make, which is to say your dignity and self-respect come from doing something useful and or beautiful, something worth having. 35:08 At the height of the Cold War, let's say in the 1970s, what was the Soviet Union famous for? Now, of course, they had a larger nuclear arsenal than ours. They controlled a greater land mass than ours. It was enormous. 35:20 But the one thing they didn't do that we did do was produce beautiful, useful, well-made things. 35:25 American craftsmanship was probably close to its peak. 35:30 Certainly its reputation for craftsmanship was at its peak. 35:34 And the Soviet Union, meanwhile, churned out crap We didn't want a Soviet car. 35:41 You know, it ran on like kerosene and broke down at red lights. Like it was a joke because the system was a joke. And we knew the system was a joke because of what they made. 35:50 So what do you say about a system that makes money lending and real estate speculation and flock cameras and Tomahawk missiles? Like that's it? 36:01 That's what a great nation makes? 36:04 It's shameful and very hard to fix. 36:07 by the way, and there have been well-intended efforts to fix it. And again, this is the problem with beginning with the technocratic solution rather than the undergirding principle. The undergirding principle is you have to make beautiful, enduring, well-made things in order to respect yourself and have a nation worth defending. That's the fact. 36:25 Let's start there. What do you do about it? Well, re-industrializing is hard. 36:29 One place you could start, is with our natural resources, the greatest of which is called farmland. America is the greatest, most productive farmland in the world. 36:38 What does that produce? Well, food. 36:40 Why do we need food? Well, to survive. 36:43 That's not a small thing. That's not an ancillary fact about America. That's the core fact about America. 36:49 America the beautiful notes our fruited plains. What does that mean? Land that produces fruit. 36:56 That was considered really significant. It's something to boast about. In fact, sing a song that almost replaced the national anthem. 37:04 Having a fruited plain was something that people were really thrilled to know. 37:10 Now, the fruited plain is just a place to put data centers and windmills and make ethanol. 37:18 In other words, it's just a resource farm for the rest of the world, which is what America is becoming. 37:24 A resource is... 37:26 are collateral on our debt. 37:29 And by the way, if we ever default, we'll find out whether we can keep the Great Lakes, the largest store of fresh water in the world, or are those part of the collateral? 37:38 That's where we're going. 37:40 Unless Americans reorient around the things that actually matter, based on what we have been given. And the main thing that we've been given is America the landscape, not America the abstract idea, the theory, the free market capitalism, the defending democracy. No, the mountains and Big Sur and those fruited plains and the entire thing, the continent that we got that's the prettiest, most productive piece of land in the world. 38:14 And so you might start with farms. 38:17 You might start by actually growing the world's best food, which we no longer do by and large, at least for the mass market. But you could, it wouldn't be too hard. Well, that would be socialist if you had a federal agricultural policy. Well, we already do. 38:32 And we have for almost 100 years at scale. Almost no big farmers could exist without the agriculture department, the ag department. But what is that department doing? It's encouraging them to do things that are totally disconnected from the core mission, which is to grow great and healthy food. 38:49 That's not some like a Maha priority for like yoga moms in Marin County. It's not some esoteric rich person thing, it's food. 38:58 It's the basic thing, which along with water and energy are the three things you need to build any society to live. 39:05 And so if you reoriented your mind around reality, you would conclude, that the Great Plains are way more important than BlackRock, and no, BlackRock shouldn't own the Great Plains. 39:19 On a basic level, they're more important. You can't live without them, and they could be great. 39:25 Why is it hard to have pride in farms? 39:28 Why should that be considered the work of immigrant labor? 39:33 You can mechanize the farms, you can make them efficient, but why wouldn't you grow good food on them? Why wouldn't you be proud of them? Why wouldn't you talk about them in a non-sentimental way? Not the proud American farmer fleeing the Dust Bowl for California or some John Steinbeck nostalgia trip, but in a real way. This is unbelievable. Nobody has what we have. 39:52 And what are we doing with it? 39:54 Growing ethanol? Putting in windmills that don't work? Are you joking? Shame on you. You're desecrating the greatest thing we have, which is our land. 40:05 And why are we doing that? Because the people doing it are not tied to the land or even to the nation in any way. They see it once again, not as a farm, but as a resource farm. 40:14 And the rest of us go along with it, and we shouldn't. And it begins with just saying so out loud. No, you can't do that to a farm, to a ranch. 40:22 You can't do that to the most beautiful thing we have. 40:27 which is the thing that God made, our natural surroundings, not allowed. Home ownership has always been at the center of the American dream. It is an actual asset, a place people work their entire lives to build, a place of stability and security and real value. 40:42 Right now though, too many homeowners are stuck swiping credit cards to cover groceries. There's basically a survival tax of 20% interest or more. So why keep handing your money to the banks when you could keep it for your family? Interest is what kills you. Our friends at American Financing have a better way. They're helping homeowners use their hard-earned equity, and they're supporting Americans looking to fulfill the dream of owning a home with mortgage rates currently in the fives. American Financing saves its customers an average of $800 a month. That's about $10,000 a year. It's not just a loan. 41:13 It's a true financial reset. We recommend American Financing. They're called America's home for home loans for a reason. 41:21 So get out of credit card debt. I mean, it is just crazy to borrow money. No judgment, but it doesn't make any sense to borrow money at that rate. If you want out, call 800-685-5696. 800-685-5696 or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash... 41:41 Chocker. 42:10 And that leads to the next thing that America is, always has, and should continue to be, which is beautiful. 42:18 If you were to have left the United States, I don't know, 40 years ago, 1986, and you went somewhere far away, I don't know, Uzbekistan, and you came back, probably the first thing you would notice, other than it's way more crowded than it was 40 years ago, is that it's less attractive than it was 40 years ago. 42:35 And that was, and if you're old enough to remember, always one of the great appeals of this country Whatever the political system, whoever was running it at the time, almost kind of didn't matter because America was fundamentally a beautiful place with handsome people, attractive people by the way. 42:51 but also it was just nice. Little towns, pretty little buildings, pitched roofs. 42:57 People made an effort, it was clean. I remember going in the 1980s to a town called D'Lo, Mississippi, which I didn't check because Wikipedia didn't exist, but it had to have been one of the poorest per capita towns in the United States, D'Lo, Mississippi, D apostrophe L-O, who knows what that even means, but I've spent a good part of the summer there. 43:16 And the first thing I noticed was that the poor people in D'Lo, Mississippi, this is not patronizing, it's just a fact, went to extraordinary lengths to keep their little houses tidy and pretty. And they were. They had gardens in front and used tires painted white to make paths. I mean, it was really kind of amazing. 43:36 And it was the first time that I realized that it doesn't take that much other than self-respect and some determination to preserve our birthright, which is the beautiful surroundings around us. 43:48 Because it matters. Now, why does it matter? Kind of hard to quantify. I'm not sure the Treasury Department could give you a straight answer on why beauty matters, but I'll tell you what you already know, which because is this, beauty is ennobling. 44:02 Being around beautiful things makes you better. 44:06 Being around ugly things, being bombarded by ugly things, objects, A landscape, denuded of trees, filled with dollar stores, bad architecture, disposable crap, all through your house and your life and your office, that does not make you better. It demoralizes you. It cuts you off from what is true because beauty is truth. 44:30 And it's totally disrespectful to what we are inherited, to the things that were given to us. 44:38 And there's no reason for it. And of course you don't need to be conspiracy minded to wonder why were some of the prettiest buildings in America torn down all across the country within the space of 10 years in the 1960s and then replaced by some of the ugliest buildings, concrete brutalist architecture. Why is that? 44:57 The old Penn Station, Madison Square Garden. Look them up on the internet. It'll shock you that someone decided to tear those down and replace them with what you see there now. But that happened in every city in America. It was called urban renewal. But what it really was, was an uglification of the country. And again, clearly there was a design to this. There was a reason this happened. 45:19 It wasn't like urban planners and architects woke up one morning and said, I don't know, a concrete FBI building is just prettier than the one it replaced. No, of course not. They knew it was ugly. That was the point. And what was the point of that? Who knows? Probably not even worth speculating. 45:34 All that's worth saying is being around beautiful things makes you a better person, and it's within your control. It's certainly within your list of demands, and it should be near the top of that list. 45:47 And that would include, by the way, cleanliness. There's something about calls for cleanliness that set certain people on edge. Like only Nazis care about cleanliness. Really? 45:59 Travel around the world. It used to be that when you traveled to a country like Pakistan, for example, they would say, I'm gonna come to the United States. Why? Because it's clean. 46:09 People understand that cleanliness is better than filth. 46:13 And if you allow your city to become covered in graffiti or let people crap on the sidewalk or don't pick up the trash, That's bad. 46:22 In fact, it's a sign that things are falling apart. And maybe that's a sign that you want to send. Not clear why you'd want to send that. But it's bad for the people who live there, not just on public health grounds, not just because it spreads disease, because it's bad for their souls. That's why you make your bed in the morning. 46:37 And not only is there nothing wrong with that, it's important to say so. No, you're not Albert Speer because you care about pretty architecture and clean streets. 46:46 It's because why wouldn't you do that? If you love your country and your neighbor and yourself, the very first thing you would do is clean it up. That's the very first thing you would do, by the way. And then it goes for crime too, which is optional. 47:00 We have a panopticon. We have a totally comprehensive surveillance state. There's nothing you say that is hidden. 47:09 If you have a phone in the room, you can be monitored and likely you are. 47:13 There's nowhere you can go that isn't tracked. Your face is all over federal databases. Biometrics is real. If you haven't flown recently, let me reassure you, there's nothing you do that the authorities can't find out about, ever. 47:29 Well, that raises the obvious question, why are there still rapes? 47:33 Why are people assaulted on the street? Why is there any crime at all? I mean, as long as you're gonna live in a much more efficient East Germany, Why wouldn't you get rid of crime? It's called flock safety, flock safety. 47:46 So why isn't it safe? 47:49 Good question. And again, we're only speculating, but we can certainly notice. 47:56 The point is, it's all optional. Not every country has filthy cities. Not every country has people living on the sidewalk or doing drugs on the playground. You don't have to live like that. You could fix that in a day. There are a lot of complicated problems. How do you make social security solvent? I don't know. That's a tough one. Probably could if we tried. 48:16 But we can be dead certain. We don't have to have a lot of rapes or murders or armed robberies or car thefts or carjackings or junkies living on the street. It's not good for the junkies. It's not good for anybody else. And you certainly don't have to have graffiti on your buildings. What? No, it's not art. It's a desecration of art. 48:33 And it's on purpose. And anyone who tolerates it is part of the problem. That's a base level demand. If you went to someone's house and there was a pile of feces on the floor, you would leave. 48:43 I'm not going to eat in someone's house like that. It's disgusting. 48:47 But we put up with it. In fact, we browbeat anyone who complains about it as like a white supremacist. 48:53 Not clear why. Why is it bad to demand order? Not fascism, the opposite of fascism, order and cleanliness. 49:04 No crime. 49:06 The rest of the world looks on in total confusion. 49:09 Why do we tolerate this? Why do our leaders tolerate this? We shouldn't, and we should say so out loud without embarrassment. 49:16 It doesn't mean that you have to go fascist in the way you treat your population. In fact, allowing disorder and rape and murder and carjacking is itself a form of fascism. It is oppression of the population. 49:31 Allowing your public transit, your subways to be filled with urine and graffiti, what is that? It's an attack on your population. 49:39 So a call to fix that is liberation from what our leaders have done to us. And it should be a baseline, a baseline demand. 49:50 Do not build another ugly public building, period. 49:55 Do not use disposable materials to crowd our landscape with soul-destroying crap ever again, because we're human beings who need beauty. It feeds our soul. You don't have to be a liberal art major from Bennington to believe that. It is true for every human being at every point in time. 50:15 Beauty is essential, and a society that does not produce beauty probably won't continue. 50:20 And we want ours to continue. 50:23 The next thing that America needs to be, and it's worth saying so out loud, is healthy. 50:28 And that means that we're physically healthy, but also spiritually healthy, clear-eyed and bright. 50:36 It's not shameful to want that. 50:38 There was a time when health was taken for granted as a goal, when being physically robust and mentally alert were kind of expected. And of course, not everyone met those standards, very much including me, but those were the standards. 50:52 But at a certain point, as part of the general decay and perversion of the society, health became redefined into something that doesn't resemble health, and the goals changed. So it's important to restate them. What does health mean? It means being physically robust, capable to the extent you can be, active, And it means being clear-minded. It means being sober, actually. 51:16 And we're very far from both of those things because nobody seems to have the courage to just say it out loud. What is health? Well, health is sobriety, actually, and physical vigor. 51:25 So you can start, and Bobby Kennedy, to his great credit, has articulated this well with better food. 51:30 Shouldn't be eating poison. You should know what's in the food. The has since 1912, but hasn't done a very good job in recent decades, we could fix that easily. And of course, all kinds of manufacturers of poison food fight against that, but why do we have to listen to them? 51:47 And we should call that out again and again and again and again. 51:51 But it's too limited to say that's what health is. Health is much more than that. 51:57 Health conveys a joy of living, happiness to be here. And again, above all, a clarity. 52:04 Like you're happy to be here because you know what's going on. 52:07 And there is enormous societal pressure not to note that and to give in to the assumption that, well, there are some things that are just really tough, so tough that you need to be addled in some way by a pharma product. 52:23 Weed, you seem to un-relax with weed or alcohol or whatever, but not just that. In fact, those are hardly the most insidious because they're the most obvious. Drunk people are easy to spot, weed smells. 52:33 benzodiazepines are totally hidden and the effects aren't obvious either. 52:37 And they're prescribed up and down for everything, flying on airplanes, going to meetings, so are amphetamines, taking tests. 52:46 There's almost no natural human activity in the United States that doesn't seem to require a pharma product, whether it's having sex or going to sleep, the most basic functions of all, all require pharma products. And of course the result is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are on something. Is that a net win? 53:09 Well, of course not. 53:10 That's measurable through life expectancy, hospital stays, the rest, the cost of healthcare, all the normal ways to measure it, but it's also measurable in the way that you interact with other people. 53:23 If someone is using SSRIs, benzodiazepines, Valium, Xanax, amphetamines, Adderall, Is that person fully him or herself? Is it really that person? Well, no, obviously. 53:38 Any more than someone who's had 10 shots of vodka is the same person you saw this morning at breakfast. No, different person. 53:45 So if you have a whole society that's under the influence, if everybody's on something, what do you have? Well, it's not kind of the country you had before. 53:54 And it's a less human country. 53:56 Because the truth is some things are unpleasant and we are meant to endure them in order to learn something and grow and become better and hopefully survive. 54:05 But suffering is part of it. It's part of it. And no one wants to say that, but it is a fact. 54:12 And so, because people aren't willing to say that, sobriety is no longer the goal and it should be. It's not esoteric. It's not weird. It's not like some eccentric desire to be sober. Everyone should be sober all the time. 54:25 There's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is what we have now, where everyone's half addled and you talk to your boss at work, this has happened to me, and you see that kind of vacant shark-like stare that suggests like no real human emotion. What's that? Oh, it's called Xanax. 54:38 It's also physically addictive and you can die going off it. 54:42 But doctors are prescribing that for years, really? 54:44 Same with Adderall. 54:46 It makes you crazy. It gives you mental illness if you use it long enough, but people do. 54:51 Why is that okay? 54:53 And why the social sanction for saying so out loud? Again, you can impute your own motive. There's clearly something going on here. We can't even guess as to what it is. It almost looks like an intentional effort to wreck a population, but the point is we're participating in it and we shouldn't. It doesn't make you weird, some chia seed eating health nut to not take drugs, including drugs that are prescribed for serious illness. Like maybe all of those aren't necessary. I don't know, let's have the conversation. 55:25 It's not good. 55:27 And so how do you fix it? Again, by saying, once again, it's not good. Health is the goal. And the closer you are to natural design, the closer you are to health. 55:38 You weren't made for this stuff. 55:40 And just because someone tells you you've got this new life-enhancing thing doesn't mean it's actually life-enhancing. It may be new, but it definitely doesn't mean it's better. 55:50 And so as you think about this and assess it, I mean, it's all obvious stuff, But you begin to realize that we've been manipulated as citizens, but mostly as consumers. 56:03 And if you wake up and your main role in a society is as a consumer, it's a problem because you're diminished by nature. 56:12 Citizens have rights. You treat them with respect. 56:16 Consumers are pawns to be manipulated. 56:19 And so it's important to note that we have been manipulated and that health is the goal. A healthy society is a goal. 56:24 You go to an airport or Walmart and lots of people are fat and tattooed and kind of depressed looking. 56:32 And you think, well, you know, which came first? 56:37 Are you fat and tattooed because you're depressed? Or are you depressed because you're fat and tattooed? It's possible it's the latter. 56:44 Living with self-respect improves you and everyone around you. 56:50 And no one loves us enough to say that. Instead, they're like, be you. 56:59 You're wearing your pajamas with face tattoos at Walmart and that's okay, but it's not okay. And you know it's not okay. And no one thinks that's actually okay. And anyone telling you it is okay doesn't love you. In fact, probably just the opposite. Cozy Earth. There's got a big following because they make sheets that are so luxurious you feel kind of guilty sleeping in them, but ultimately pretty good about it. 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Use the code Tucker for 20% off. 58:17 That's code Tucker for 20% off your first order. And if you see a post-purchase survey, take a moment to mention you heard about it right here. Another thing you'd like America to be is honest. Honest. 58:30 Lying, which is part of the human condition. Of course, we all lie, hopefully less than we want. 58:39 But lying is bad, and it's always bad. It's one of those universal principles referenced earlier that never changes. It is always bad to lie. You may have excuses for it, and they may be valid or sound valid, but it's never a good thing. And you can never tolerate it, at least officially. We always have to say it is wrong to lie. And that has to be expressed, by the way, in the legal code. 59:04 So... 59:06 If it's a crime to lie to the government, which it is, you can't lie to a federal agent, lots of people have gone to jail for it, Martha Stewart famously, then it has to be a crime for the federal government to lie to you. 59:18 But is it a crime for the federal government to lie to you? No, in fact, it's encouraged. Every sting operation, every elaborate FBI scheme is based on lying. 59:27 Is it a safe country? Do you feel safe? Is there less fraud? 59:31 Of course not. It doesn't work. It hasn't worked. 59:35 But it's the law. The law reflects the truth as of right now, which is it's totally fine for your leaders to lie to you. It's a crime for you to lie to your leaders. And that has to be fixed in order to get back to equilibrium because it's insane. And it sends exactly the wrong message, which is it's their country, not yours. Well, of course, it's all of ours. 59:56 Lying is bad. And unless you continue to say that, in fact, it's an unacceptable disqualifying sin in a leader. 60:03 If you found out your spouse was lying to you, where were you last week? I was on a business trip, but actually you're in Barbados. 60:08 That will significantly affect your relationship. 60:11 But for some reason, when our leaders tell obvious lies to us, it's about the Iran nuclear program. No, really, it's the Iran nuclear program. 60:18 Nothing to do with the Iran nuclear program, which you told us you eliminated last summer. So clearly you're lying. 60:24 That's the moment at which we should stop and say, ah, not accepting this. 60:29 We are not continuing in this conversation until you admit you were lying and tell me why. In the same way, if you caught your spouse lying about pretending to be in Scottsdale but was in fact in Barbados, you would say, I'm not going to let this pass. Like, what were you doing in Barbados? 60:45 We do not have that posture with our leaders. We allow them to lie and to penalize us for lying. 60:52 And that's really the basis of... 60:55 a lot of the unfairness and corruption that we endure and that has sapped the faith of most people in their government and even in their nation. 61:05 The permission of lying. Again, it's realistic to accept that people do lie. When pressed, they tend to lie. That will never change. But our acceptance of it is what has to change. 61:17 And it can. 61:19 And the main place in a relationship with the federal and state government that can change is on classification. So what is classification? Classification is the lie that the majority of the big things government is doing are too important to tell you about. 61:36 You're not allowed to know because if you knew somehow we would all be less safe. Well, that's a lie. And of course, the main reason that over a billion federal documents are classified is in order to give the people running the government the ability to do whatever they want, including enrich themselves, steal, defraud your money, and strip you of the right to do anything about it because you don't know what's happening. 62:01 So this is noted by all normal people at all times, evil thrives in darkness and sunlight famously is what? The best disinfectant, but there's no effort to disinfect our rulers. 62:15 And instead they have constructed a, not overstatement to say, a Byzantine system of classification rules with one goal in mind, not to keep us safe or to end the Iranian nuclear program or to fight Hamas, but to allow them to behave with shameless corruption under double standards that secrecy affords them. That is the truth. And that's why 63 years after our president was murdered in Dallas, we can't know all the available facts about that murder. Now, on what grounds could we not know those facts? 62:47 National security, sources and methods. 62:50 The whole thing is a lie and it doesn't get better until people stop lying. And the only way they stop lying is by revealing to us the truth. 62:59 And this may be a kind of trap that the rest of us fall into. So something will happen, history-changing event like 9-11. 63:06 And parts of it will seem self-evidently obvious, like what happened, planes flew into buildings. But some of it, like Building 7, which collapsed for still no explicable reason, are totally confusing. 25 years later, like what was that? 63:21 And so people ask those questions, because why wouldn't they? Anyone who's awake looks at that and says, hmm, that's weird. 63:27 And then that person is screamed at as a conspiracy theorist, a wacko, you're an anti-Semite, you must be a Nazi if you have questions about Building 7. 63:36 Okay, well, there's a very fast way to settle that debate, and it's by declassifying the documents that might shed light, factual light, on what actually happened. But that never enters the mind of either side. 63:50 The people asking questions, slanderers, conspiracy theorists, just grumble to themselves. And the people who are continuing to hide the truth, assuming there's a different truth, just sort of keep on doing it. 64:02 And so if you want to restore honesty, and you really have to, because a lot of the things we're seeing now could not happen in an honest system. 64:11 So the corruption couldn't happen. The first thing you have to do is demand ownership of something you already own constitutionally, which is the government's work product. 64:21 The people hiding these things have no legal right to hide them other than rights they invented, but they're fake. They're not fundamentally true. 64:29 How do you as a federal bureaucrat have a right to lie to me? On what grounds are you doing that? No one ever asked them, so they continue to do it. 64:37 And not just that. 64:40 All the corruption that we see and the frustration that you feel seeing it stems from that. 64:47 What they do is hidden under the pretext of national security, national security. 64:53 But ask anyone who's lived in Washington or worked in government, it's all a lie. There's probably some tiny percentage of government activities, conceivably, that need to be hidden from public view because there are sources and methods. There's an operation in progress. Okay, fair. 65:09 But that's like 101% of what the government does and has done for the last 100 years. That's still classified. 65:15 End it. You could end it tomorrow. 65:17 but they won't, but we should demand they do. 65:21 The next thing you'd like America to be, we should demand that America is, is optimistic. Now, why optimistic? 65:28 People misunderstand the term. Optimism is not simply the product of an act of will. I'm choosing to be optimistic today. I'm gonna be in a sunny mood regardless. I'm choosing to be happy. 65:40 You can do that and you should do that if you can. But optimism is also the product of systems. The way things are structured either encourages optimism or it guarantees pessimism. 65:51 Why are people optimistic? Well, because, of course, they're hoping for a better future. But why are they thinking about the future at all? Now, to put them in stark contrast to our leaders, who, given their ages, don't have much of a future, chronologically. 66:07 People are thinking about the future, making plans for the future, expecting something better in the future, protecting against the possibility of something worse in the future, but they are living ahead of themselves. They're thinking about a time when they won't be here. 66:21 Why are they doing that? Because they have children. It's really simple, because they have children. 66:26 Countries that place value on children, and not just like little kids running around playing, but generations that think in terms of what might exist after I'm gone, that are rooted in some sort of historical continuity. I came from here, my descendants will be here. People who think in those terms are by definition optimistic. 66:50 But the first thing you notice about the people who run our country and increasingly some of the people in positions of authority throughout the country, in positions of economic authority for sure, is that they have no time horizon. 67:03 It's about the next quarter. They're day traders, basically. 67:06 And there's a lot about the finance economy that encourages that kind of thinking, thinking from earnings report to earnings report, because it's thinking based on what a share price reflects. 67:18 It's not to say that's insignificant. It is significant to some extent, but it's not the basis upon which you build a society because it's too limited. It's too here and now. If enough people in positions of authority start to think like that, what do you get? Well, you get what you have now. You have looting where people actually don't believe that any of this will exist tomorrow. And so they get a New Zealand passport. and they try to grab as much as they can while they can. And that's literally happening right now. Unfortunately, the promise of the real promise of cryptocurrency has been hijacked to some extent by people just like that. 67:55 It's a pump and dump scheme, of course. Talk it up, take the cash and run. 68:00 So you only behave like that not simply because you're a bad person, but because your time horizon is so short. It doesn't matter what happens tomorrow. You wouldn't flirt with nuclear war if you weren't 80. 68:14 Would a 40-year-old with four kids push his country to a point where there was a plausible chance that there'd be a nuclear strike? Where everyone gets incinerated in a fireball? 68:26 You would not even consider doing something like that if you had little kids at home, because you've got little kids at home. 68:31 And you care about them, which is to say you care about something other than yourself. 68:36 So a lot of the debates about birth rate and family either get hopelessly abstract, like we need to be a replacement rate or else we won't exist. It's too hard to conceive of that. Or they're too tinged by some specific moral code. And I certainly feel that way as a Christian. I have all kinds of views on the family as a Christian that are completely heartfelt. 69:00 But they don't necessarily apply to everybody because not everyone has my religious views. 69:05 What does apply to everybody is the way you think about yourself in relation to what came before and what comes next after you. 69:14 And the only thing that roots you to that kind of thinking is having kids. 69:19 And that's never really been apparent until a lot of the people in charge stopped having kids or got so old that there doesn't matter anymore. 69:28 what their kids do, because their kids are in their 50s, it only became apparent in its absence. A country that doesn't place children at the center of its concerns ignores the future. 69:44 A country that doesn't care about kids doesn't care about the future. 69:50 And in every possible way, this country, painful as to say, doesn't care about kids. And you can measure it any way you like, the number of kids who are reportedly abducted or raped or sexually abused. The Epstein story, just to give one among many possible examples, the state of our education system, the fact that AI is gonna eliminate any life possibilities for an entire generation of younger people and baby boomers are still thinking about how to put a new roof on their place in Sea Island, like the whole mindset not to be mean, but of that generation, that I'm the only thing that matters and kids don't matter. 70:29 That mindset is not only ugly and probably immoral, but it also gets you to a place where everything about your society is distorted because people are living for themselves in the here and now and not for tomorrow. 70:42 So no wonder nobody builds beautiful buildings. 70:46 No wonder people don't take the time to think about the aesthetic component of anything. Because does it really matter? Of course not. It's all fast food at that point. 71:00 So it's important to know that there haven't been many societies like ours in this way. 71:07 And even now, as you travel ever outside of our borders, one of the very first things you notice, there are little kids everywhere. Because people in a not out of a religious obligation or a sentimental attachment to children, but because that is the biological imperative of every person. That's like the main thing you do as you're alive is reproduce. 71:29 And it's really only in the United States and Western Europe and Canada and Australia that it's somehow obscene to say that out loud. It's considered weird or dirty, like you're an Amish person or want to strip women of their rights or something. You're a freak if you think that. barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. 71:49 No, normal people around the world care about their kids most, have as many kids as they can, take great joy in their children because they know what all people have always known, which is that is the main source of pleasure and achievement and joy in this life. 72:05 And in the end, those are the strongest ties that you'll have as a human being. Your children are apt to care about you a lot more than your employer or the federal government or Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is trying to save you from Islamic jihad. 72:19 Your kids are probably a little more important. 72:22 And so it's important to say that without shame, without feeling like you're a religious freak or some Orthodox Jew or Amish person or some religious minority that has like way too many kids and cry a lot on airplanes. Like, there's nothing embarrassing about any of that. That should be all of us. Why wouldn't it be? And any economic system that makes it harder to do that is evil by definition. 72:45 If you strip from people their main source of joy and satisfaction, their genetic inheritance, their ability to pass on their genes to another person, are you their friend? Are you their benefactor? Or are you their blood enemy? Well, of course, you're the last thing. You're their blood enemy. 73:02 It's important to say that. And you don't have to be Mennonite to do so. 73:07 We pray that the war with Iran ends immediately, but the truth is it doesn't seem to be. 73:12 If you're the head of household, you need to think through what this could mean for you and the people you're in charge of. Don't wait for disaster strike to ensure that you have the basics covered. Food, water, light, energy. And that's exactly why we started a company called Last Country Supply. It's our store that carries the same preparedness products that we have, well, in this barn, for example. The products that give any head of household peace of mind, knowing that if something bad happened, you could take care of the people you're responsible for. So continue to pray for an end to war and violence, but also at the same time, make sure that your family is ready. 73:47 Stock up on the products that we trust at lastcountrysupply.com slash Tucker. 73:53 Now, if you were to put children at the center of your thinking, which is to say the future, at the center of your thinking about the present, which you should always do, mindful of the past, aware of the present, but thinking about the future, which is to say consequences, one of the first things you'd wanna do is teach your children something of use in order to participate meaningfully in the future in order to help them. 74:20 And what would you wanna do to your kids? Educate them? 74:24 Obviously not. You'd want to make them wise. 74:27 So wisdom, is the goal. Living in a wise country is the goal. Now, how is it different from education? Well, education is what we have. 74:37 Education is a credentialing system whereby some tax-exempt institution issues you a document showing that you have been, quote, educated. 74:46 And lost in that process is any real check on whether you have an education, whether you know anything or understand anything of great value. 74:55 And increasingly, with some exceptions, but increasingly it is obvious to everybody that that system is completely broken. It turns out people without skills, without an understanding of how things work, and without the ability to make sensible decisions, otherwise known as wisdom. It just doesn't work. Now, this would be considered an emergency in a normal society, because of course the only way this continues is if you teach the next generation, pardon the banalities here, but it's too seldom said now, how things work. 75:31 And not just how systems work, though that is very important to teach kids a sense of physical reality. Well, how do we get energy? What is energy? 75:39 Where does it come from? You turn on the lights. What's the process that makes the bulb go on? How do you start a fire? 75:46 How do you make food? 75:49 Where does water come from? 75:52 Nobody has taught any of these things. 75:54 And instead they're outsourced to the specialty class, really a cast at this point, mixture of working class white and Central American contractors who answer all those questions for you in English or otherwise. But the effect is that for most middle-class and above Americans, there's no sense of how anything actually works. And that has implications over time because like, if we're gonna expand the size of the power grid, like who's gonna do that? Who understands electricity? 76:20 People go to trade schools? Well, it's not enough. 76:24 People need to understand the things around them, the physical reality that doesn't take place on the screen, but is rooted in unchanging fact, like the need for water, food, and electricity. So there's that. 76:36 But the main thing that you have to teach the next generation to understand are the things that don't change. 76:42 And you know this because any attempt to follow some tech fad has proven hilariously and disastrously a failure. So there was a push 15 years ago when the tablet came out, the iPad, every kid has to have an iPad to learn on the iPad. 76:59 And of course the results came in within the decade and they were totally predictable that kids who spent too much on iPads are actually way dumber and less informed than those who read books. 77:08 But none of the educrats who pushed that and demanded money to do it ever apologized or even acknowledged that it was wrong. Just like every educational fad, new math. I mean, this goes back 60 years. 77:20 We're gonna do it a totally different revolutionary way and your kids without really working hard are gonna learn a ton. 77:25 And of course, every successive generation has become more and more ignorant and the internet has accelerated that. 77:31 So what's the antidote to that? How do you fix that? And if they're your kids, it really matters. 77:36 despite the fact that almost no one in authority in the Congress, for example, or the White House ever talks about education anymore, except as a matter of funding and who's gonna control the funding. But the actual process of taking a child and making that child into an adult, guiding that child into a productive and happy life, like that's just, they've given up completely. Because you could just import people to do those jobs. 78:00 Or you don't need those jobs because AI or whatever. 78:04 Or it's just too complicated. The things we tried didn't work. 78:07 The assumptions we had were wrong and they don't want to admit it. So basically there's no effort to educate the next generation, except maybe in engineering or software coding. Oh, but wait, those are now irrelevant because of AI. So it just shows you the limits of trying to figure out what the next important thing is going to be. You're almost always wrong. In fact, it's hard to think of an example of Americans and university administrators getting the next important trend right. 78:39 So it might be worth just returning to the eternal goal instead of acquiring ephemeral wisdom, knowledge rather, instead of trying to like figure out how to code, it might be worth teaching your children about the things that don't change, like human nature. 78:57 Human nature is unchanging. The behavior of people in, say, the book of Chronicles written 3000 years ago is totally recognizable to us. Hammurabi's code, the first written law, addresses the way people behave on the basis of the way people still behave now, thousands of years later, which is another way of saying these, despite what they may have told you, are facts about people that have not changed in thousands of years and even with Neuralink are unlikely to change in the future. 79:35 And so why not explain them to children so that they can have the benefit of wisdom, so they can understand the world around them and make good decisions on the basis of what they see? Isn't that the whole point of the exercise? 79:50 Well, because there's an entire lobby, well-funded lobby, 60 years old, designed to prevent any of us from telling the truth to kids about the way people are. 80:01 And don't want to be divisive and name it, But basically the entire education establishment, and it's one of the best funded establishments in America, exists to lie to kids, to your kids, to their students, about the way people are. And begins with the assumption that everybody is born a blank slate and that we're all the products of whatever inputs from our society or systems enter our heads. 80:28 And that's a freaking lie. And if you actually believe that, if you believe, for example, that men and women are identical and that they're just like called men or women because their parents decided to call them that three weeks after they were born based on their mood that day, if you really believe that, you will not have a successful marriage. You will not be successful in the workplace. 80:48 You will not be a happy person because that's not true. 80:51 And if you spend your life at war with reality, at war with nature, you're not gonna win. 80:58 because it's not up to you. So it might be worth reorienting the whole project around reality. 81:06 And by the way, it's measurable. 81:08 None of this is a mystery. We know the way that men are, we know the way that women are, lots of studies have been done on this, and anyone who's lived in the world for more than 10 minutes can tell you. And we can debate whether the characterizations are right or wrong, but what we should never lie about and what we should tell our children from day one is that there are facts that we can't control There are preexisting facts about people and the world that we can influence and that you either roll with them or you don't. 81:36 You accept them or you fight them, but you can't change them. 81:40 That's the basis of wisdom. 81:42 And there's no organized effort to do that at the primary, secondary, or college level. And there should be wisdom. We want wise leaders replaced by the next generation of wise children. 81:57 The second to last thing America should be is decent. 82:01 Decent, pro-human, in favor of people, putting the needs of other people before the needs of, say, systems or machines or abstract concepts. 82:14 Decency, caring about individuals. 82:18 That's always been obvious that the United States was a decent country. There's no other country on earth where you can break down and ask directions and get them quicker from a larger group of eager to help strangers. There's no country that loves dogs more. There's no country that's sweeter in some ways than the United States. 82:38 But in recent years, decency has been under attack and not just sexual decency, the decency police, but human decency, kindness, regard for others. 82:50 When you see your secretary of war jumping around like a deranged, bloodthirsty monkey calling for the murder of innocence, and no one says anything about it, then you know we've taken a path that nobody can be proud of. And by the way, the idea that there is a department of war is itself an assault on decency, because what is the point of war? It's to defend yourself. 83:15 Only an indecent country wages wars if it doesn't have to. And the only reason ever to wage war, to kill people, is to defend yourself. That's why it was always called the Defense Department, at least for the past 80 years. 83:28 The Defense Department, we are defending ourselves. And if we can't say we're defending ourselves, we're not doing it because we're decent. 83:36 And in the course of defending ourselves, if we murder people, and it is murder, who committed no crime, posed no threat to us, who are non-combatants, women, children, we're gonna apologize for it. And we're gonna call it what it is, which is a crime against international law, but more importantly, it's a decency. 83:54 And when another country commits genocide against a population, kills tens of thousands of children, as our closest ally has, as countries tend to do, by the way, it's a recurring theme in history. Israel's not the only country that's committed genocide and neither is Nazi Germany, it's happened a lot. 84:12 But when that does happen, we're not going to pay for it because it's disgusting. 84:16 It's not hard to say that. In fact, it's a relief to say that because everybody knows it. And if you blow up a girl's school, you're going to say, I'm sorry we did that. In fact, we'll pay you restitution because no child, no school girl deserves to get blown up by a Tomahawk missile or double tapped. 84:33 And if we did it or the Iranians did it or Israel did it or Sri Lanka did it, it doesn't matter. It's always wrong. 84:39 And we uphold that standard not simply because we care about pupils at a girl's school in iran but because we're above that kind of behavior we won't tolerate a secretary of war and if we have a secretary of war we're sure not going to tolerate him jumping around like a hyena calling about talking about murdering people not because we dislike him we don't but because it's our country and we're better than that and other people may behave that way but they're savages and that's why they're not us So the point is you lose your self-respect, your capacity to respect yourself when you allow that kind of behavior. 85:15 And you also, it's totally possible, face some kind of eternal penalty when you allow that kind of behavior. Maybe some of this metaphysical stuff is real, and maybe there is punishment for people who blow up girls' schools. Just guessing. But what if there is? You want to risk that? But even if you don't believe in any of that, you could have an entirely materialist worldview and still know in your viscera that it's wrong to kill kids. They didn't do anything wrong. And if it's okay to kill people who did nothing wrong, then what is our justice system? 85:45 Which is based on the idea that we only punish the guilty. And if we punish the innocent, it's by definition not justice. 85:51 So if we're participating in something like that, we're risking everything. 85:56 And over time, why would you fight for that? 85:59 The only reason, short of Ukrainian-style gunpoint conscription, that people go to war, particularly in the West, in countries without a draft, is because they believe in the project. Well, who could believe in that? 86:11 So decency really matters, and it's not just expressed in war, it's expressed in every function of the government and in every part of our lives. 86:21 So if you have a tax code, for example, just to name one example, If you have a tax code that taxes wage earners at more than twice the percentage it taxes investors, what are you saying? 86:36 Well, you're saying it's twice as virtuous to invest money or to inherit money and keep it in the markets as it is to go to work in the morning. 86:47 Really? 86:48 Of course that's what you're saying. Because any tax code penalizes the impious acts, the bad things, the vices, cigarettes, cost $18 a pack because we're against smoking. 86:59 So if being an ordinary wage earner, driving in from the suburbs to make 80 grand a year, if that's taxed at twice the rate of being a private equity baron, what are we saying? 87:12 that it's twice as virtuous to be a private equity baron and to inherit money or to invest. 87:18 Well, that's not only distorted, it's indecent, it's disgusting. And why is it disgusting? Because it takes no account of the welfare of your own citizens. 87:28 It's literally indecent. 87:31 And if you keep it up, even if you don't have a revolution, even if they don't storm the Bastille over it, which they probably won't, because most people don't even know that that is happening, though they have a sense that this is out of whack, But if you keep that up, over time, nobody believes in the project. 87:47 You can't believe in something you have no respect for. So it's not just that you won't fight wars, it's you won't do anything to improve the country and it'll cease to be a country. 87:58 So requiring, demanding that our leaders and ourselves act with decency toward other people is absolutely essential. 88:07 It's not just something you pay lip service to in the way to getting rich. 88:11 It's the heart of everything. 88:13 And it's the only reason in the end that you can be proud to say you're American. 88:18 You're proud to be American because we have a more efficient economy, more fast food outlets than any other country. Like what is the reason to be proud of being American? 88:29 Well, it's a beautiful country and it's a decent country. 88:34 And that's kind of it because economies rise and fall. 88:38 Business cycles are real. 88:41 Wars are lost. 88:43 A lot of stuff happens on the way from here to 500 years from now. 88:47 But the things that we can control, beauty and decency, those are enduring and they matter more than anything else. 88:54 So if we give up on that, we've given up on everything. 88:57 And the last thing and maybe the most important thing that this country needs to be is united. 89:03 It needs to be a nation and Americans need to be a people by definition. It can't continue without that, it's too big. 89:12 No country can continue without a sense of itself as a nation and countries that fall didn't and that's why they fell. 89:20 And it's not easy because this nation doesn't have a working majority of almost anything, not a race, not a religion, ethnic background, history, culture. 89:32 And if it continues along that path, of course it will break up. 89:36 You will find parts of the country simply have nothing in common with other parts of the country. So why would the interstate highway system continue? 89:44 Why would you be able to fly from one city to another without a visa? 89:47 And you may scoff at the idea that could happen here, but it's happened in plenty of other places, why wouldn't it happen here? But it doesn't have to happen here. 89:55 A lot about America's disunity is already baked in the cake, and so arguments about immigration while relevant, won't change the mix of America, which is again, a country without an overwhelming majority of any one thing. 90:11 So in the absence of that, in the absence of an organic, obvious identity, one will have to be created in order to keep the country together. And it's worth doing. And there are a couple of things you can do to affect that. 90:24 And the very first is stop mass migration into the United States, because at this point there is no justification for it. And no, that's not a racist position. It's the position of a lot of non-white voters in the United States, but it's also a very common sense position for two reasons. One, there's been too much. 90:42 It hasn't been justified by our economic needs. Actually, there hasn't been a desperate need for labor, and that's why you brought in 50 million people from other countries. That's not true. 90:53 An awful lot of Americans will be looking for jobs soon. So that's not real. And for another, it's been too fast. And even if every person who's come into the United States over the last 60 years was an amazing person, and a lot of them are amazing people, It would still be change at a pace that people are not wired to metabolize. People cannot deal with this pace of change. It makes them crazy and it uproots them. It makes them feel no connection to their neighbors or to their nation, which is not a small thing because when the country comes under pressure, if it defaults on its debt, for example, and there's nothing holding the people together, they will come apart. 91:25 So it's a national security question, really, that you have some kind of national cohesion, some sort of shared culture. And culture is not race. 91:36 It can sometimes flow out of racial identity, but it doesn't need to. Culture is a shared set of assumptions that holds a big group of people together. 91:44 And the second reason you can't have any more immigration of any kind is because of AI. So you can't simultaneously say, we're gonna eliminate a third of all American jobs the next five years, but we need a lot more people coming into this country for work. It doesn't even make any sense at all. And so it's not an attack on any other country or group when you say, I'm sorry, we don't know what's going to happen in this country. We're gonna have 100 million people without work, probably not a great time to bring in new people. In fact, it would be crazy to bring in new people and it wouldn't be good for those people either, but that's not ever the point. 92:19 The point of running a nation is to protect that nation and the people who live there. 92:23 So there's no justification for any immigration into the United States of any kind until we understand the effects of AI. 92:33 So how do you fix the immigration system right now? 92:38 Well, one thing that no one's tried yet is... 92:42 Just take tax dollars and send them to American citizens instead of to people who aren't American citizens. It's really, really simple. And no, it's not racist or mean to say to people, if you come to our country for a better life, more promises, or whatever you say you're here for, and maybe you are here for those reasons, we're not going to subsidize you while you're here. 93:04 Why would we? Does the United States have an obligation to pay welfare benefits to the rest of the world? And if so, where does that obligation come from? And of course the answer is no. 93:13 And it was a little more confusing 10 years ago when most Americans felt they lived in the richest country in the history of the world and that prosperity would never end. But now that it's very obvious that the US is at its absolute limit in what it can pay for, that it's basically spent all of its money running around the world creating chaos, There is no justification for spending $1 on anyone who comes to this country illegally, not one. 93:39 And so if you just cut off benefits to people and check social security numbers, you probably wouldn't need to round anybody up or shoot anybody, just we're not paying you to be here illegally. That's not hard. 93:49 In fact, it's the easiest possible solution, which makes you wonder why no one's thought of it. 93:54 And by the way, there'd be some people who stayed anyway and made their own way, and they might be a net addition to your country, you never know. 94:02 But you would never, unless you were insane or hated yourself or your nation, you would never pay people to come here illegally, like ever do that. And anyone who disagrees could explain why you would do that. And no one can, of course, so they call you racist, but that's not racist. It's just obvious. 94:17 And the second thing you would do if you wanted to truly unite the country would be to pick a language, and that language is English. 94:24 There is no fact of a culture more important than the language that people speak. 94:31 In some ways, language is culture. It is the thing people from different backgrounds and yes, religions and races share. They're united in a language. They read the same books. 94:42 Language shapes the way that you think. So people who think in a language think a certain way. 94:47 If you haven't traveled a lot, maybe you don't know that, but when you go to countries, if you go to Finland or Hungary, countries in which a total of 15 million people globally speak between those two countries, and you'll notice people think a little bit differently. 95:02 So language unites. But one thing we know for certain is that different languages divide dramatically. That is always true. It was true in the Roman Empire, and it's true now. It's true in Canada. It's true in Belgium. It's true everywhere. 95:16 And so if you were serious about holding your country together, And keep in mind that if the country doesn't hold together, then it breaks apart, and that implies violence, also known as civil war. So the stakes couldn't be higher. If you were serious about holding your country together, you'd be serious above all about making certain that everyone in your country spoke the same language. And why wouldn't you? Because you were intimidated because somebody called you racist? 95:41 Really? 95:43 If that scares you, you're not fit for leadership. Right? 95:48 Not clear what you're fit for, but you're certainly not fit to lead a nation if you're intimidated out of doing the right thing by a false slur like you're racist because you like English. 95:59 By the way, more people speak English in Nigeria than do in Miami. So it is not tied to a race, obviously, but it is tied directly to the survival of a country. 96:12 So there is no reason, in fact, there are a lot of reasons to prohibit printing any federal document or ballot in any language other than English. And there are also a lot of reasons to resist multilingual announcements or road signs or airplane signs in other languages. 96:35 Well, what about people who can't speak English? Well, that might be a worthy national project. Any American citizen who doesn't speak English might be offered free English classes by the federal government or state governments or charities to which most decent people would contribute. If you want to learn English, we will help you learn English. Most of the world, the business world, the world of aviation and science, everybody speaks English. 96:58 So the idea that there are people in the United States who do not speak English It's hard to believe that's not voluntary. But whatever the cause, we can fix that, just like we can get everyone IDs too. 97:13 But the point is if we don't do that, then the current trend will continue. And if it's clear what the current trend is, whether it's toward nuclear war or replacement by machines in the AI development, or in the case of America breaking apart into components, The trend, if unaddressed, is really, really clear. That's where we're going. 97:38 And so somebody needs to begin work immediately on one question, which is what unites all of us? 97:47 It's probably not gonna be that hard because most of the divisions that we think are irreparable, they're chasms, there's no way I have anything in common with that person. If my daughter married him, I'd freak out. 98:00 Most of those divisions are artificial. 98:04 They were actually foisted on us by our leaders, whose incompetence and graph needed a cover. 98:12 There are smart people who have been saying this for a long time. That's not to say there aren't natural differences between people. Of course there are, including between races. Of course there are. 98:22 But are they bigger than the things we have in common? No, they're not. 98:27 but they've been exacerbated and inflamed and intentionally highlighted as part of a long-term project to divert our attention from what is now very obviously true, which is that both parties have colluded against the population to make their lives better and our lives worse. There's kind of no arguing that that's a fact at this point. 98:49 And unfortunately, they have been extremely successful. 98:53 So if you're going to fix it and rebuild this country and turn it into a place that the grandchildren you hopefully will have can inherit and thrive, you're gonna need to do something about the pressing question of American identity. What does it mean to be an American? 99:09 But it's fixable. 99:11 You just have to try. 99:14 And we will be trying. 99:16 And we'll tell you as we continue to do that. 99:20 Thanks for listening.