Tucker Carlson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 26

what i care about is living in a country where you know decent people can live happy lives actually i don't want to put 10 million men out of work and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country [Music] hey hey and welcome to the sunday special i am super excited to be joined by tucker carlson and we're going to jump into his brand new book ship of fools which is already a massive bestseller on the new york times charts and on charts that are more reputable than the new york times charts we'll get into all of that in just a second but first we have to talk about your imminent death so you're going to die at some point here and that's why you need life insurance life insurance isn't the most enjoyable thing to think about most people don't like thinking about dying but having life insurance is a really good feeling because you know that if you do plots your family won't have to start a gofundme to stay afloat policy genius is the easy way to get life insurance online in just 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it before you idiot go to policy genius right now and take care of it it is the easy way to compare and buy life insurance okay so let's start off with this a lot of people don't know your actual background like where you came from um because you know folks sort of exist in the immediate ecosystem so what is it where did you come from where'd you grow up how did you become tucker carlson the biggest host on i mean i um filled a job that was open i mean chance plays a massive role in life which is part of the thesis of my book uh and it's unacknowledged but i grew up here actually and i'm from southern california originally i lived right here in los angeles very close to where we are right now i actually went to first grade in this town and then i moved to la jolla and then i was went to high school and college on the east coast and kind of stayed in washington where my family had moved to work for the reagan administration and i've been there ever since i've had a series of jobs mostly in print a magazines newspaper and then website and then worked at cnn msnbc pbs and abc and fox so i've just kind of been always in the world that i occupy now with varying degrees of success based partly on the amount of effort i was exerting in the job i was in and also based on luck and things you can't control so so let's sort of shape where you are politically right now because if i look at your political career you you were much more aggressive on foreign policy in the early 2000s for example now now you're much more isolationist very on foreign policy how did you move can you kind of chart your political movement yeah i mean i have always tried to be um much more than right i've tried to be evidence-based i don't especially as i age i i believe less in theories or constructs and i believe more in results and then i also believe in honesty um and so if you think that the policy that you're proposing will you know reach a certain conclusion produce a certain result and it doesn't i think you should acknowledge that and i think you ought to change your views based on the evidence and so to bottom line in a sentence america has changed so dramatically in the 49 years that i've been here that like why wouldn't my politics change they've changed completely on all kinds of different issues i mean i was once pretty stridently pro-choice and for the death penalty and now i have you know very strong feelings in the opposite direction um i mean i've supported all kinds of things that turned out to be wrong but that's the point they turned out to be wrong so you should reassess and what drives me insane in living in washington for you know 35 years is watching people make these grand decisions with the best intentions by the way i think most of our policy makers have good motives i do think that i know them but they watch their policies fail they don't acknowledge that they have failed the extent they do they blame the population for their failure and then they repeat the mistake i have a bunch of children i'm never surprised when they make a bad decision ever because people do they're human i am too what i require is that they acknowledge that they've made a mistake that they say sorry and that they try better based on what they've learned from that mistake and that's exactly what doesn't happen in washington and that's why i'm mad so when it comes to ideology so i i actually am a stronger believer in ideology than you are um one of the reasons being it seems to me that the way that we determine whether an appropriate metric for success has been achieved is ideologically based meaning that we can both look at the same policy and i can say that its goal was achieved and if you're using a different ideology absolutely so what's your what's your metric for success in on particular issues so i guess i moved my instinct increasingly again as i age your view changes i think mine has um the way you measure things changes i increasingly distrust complexity in world view so i start with where i want to end up what's the goal what kind of society do you want to live in you want to live in a place where the family is basically unmolested where the human conscience is totally unmolested where you acknowledge you can control people's behavior you can tell people you can't do that we all have to live together you can't sleep in a crosswalk sorry it's not allowed but what you never do is try to control or mandate what people believe that that is a kind of you know that's a sphere that you would never violate and so in the end you want to live if you're in a democracy any democracy you want to live in a country where the middle class normal people you know 100 iqs making 80 grand a year can lead you know productive meaningful lives unbothered by the people in power and they have the hope at least that their kids can do slightly better than they have that was kind of the rule for a lot of the certainly the post-war period in this country and it no longer is so my question always is not like what party wins or you know is my economic theory validated or not it's can we get back to that or we can get as close to that as we possibly can and we're moving farther away from it that's my frustration so i i think that there are a couple issues that you mentioned there and i might want to bifurcate them for purposes of the discussion so issue number one is sort of the free speech issue people should be able to say what they want people should be able to you lead their families how they want to lead them they were in complete agreement right and i think that you know the the unity of the right is largely based on agreement on this particular point the foundational questions without which none of the rest is possible right and free expression would be one um of course in freedom of conscience right and you talk a lot in ship of fools particularly about the threat to these sorts of ideas from a left that is focused on a sort of forced diversity and you've been labeled racist by folks in media matters for this of course because they label everyone a racist i'm a nazi according to media matters because of my yamaka apparently but your your viewpoint on diversity is basically as i see it expressed in the book that diversity is a neutral it doesn't it's not good or bad inherently it's not a value description right and so where do you see the conflict lying between right and left on that particular so where i agree with you is that you know while as i noted i am distrustful of complex ideologies i do think that you need to start with certain things that you believe are true and act on them if you want to get to the place you desire to be so um what i just noticed just as an american and i'm not an intellectual i'm a talk show host so this is a very obvious thing that our national motto has been redefined to its mirror image so of course it was out of many one and now it is diversity is our strength so i think it's fair if you without asking my consent replace the core principle of our country it's fair for me to ask if that principle is worth organizing a country around so i'll just ask the obvious question is diversity our strength and of course like so much they say it's not only untrue it's the opposite of what is true it is never true that diversity is respect i'm for all kinds of diversity but they're not our strengths in other words is it true in your marriage the less you have in common with your wife the stronger your marriage is we don't speak the same language that's why we love each other is it true in your business we don't know what we're all doing it's true in the military you don't know it's insane actually it's the opposite once again of what is true what is observably true so i just noted that and by the way at the same time i noted it as i did you know 50 nights in the past 200 nights i made the case explicitly against racism which is you are not responsible for your immutable qualities you can't control your height your hair color your dna what your parents did none of that is your fault and you should not be punished for it or rewarded for it that is an argument against racism explicitly and so for that i'm a racist it's like no you don't understand i'm arguing against all kinds of racism i think it's a really dangerous way to see the world and anyway whatever it's they don't mean anything they say they throw at you the very things that they are doing in order to silence you and i just happen for this brief window of my life to have the freedom to say what i think is true and i'm going to it seems to me that this is actually the major rift in american politics and i want to get to your economics in a second because i think there we actually have some substantive disagreements yeah but um you know there's a lot of talk these days about political realignment and i wonder if it's not really political realignment that's taking place but a hunkering down of the far left into the diversity politics identity politics and then just the backlash to that because it seems to me that was the real dividing line between obama and trump is not even on economics where in some areas there's actually some sort of populist agreement but it's really on these sort of cultural divisions where president obama was was basically saying you know we can be divided into various ethnic groups all of whom have been victimized by america and then we can create a coalition of the dispossessed to come back in and sweep into power and the new demographic shift will will basically buoy our boat all the way to victory from now until the end of time and then the backlash to that was well wait a second you know you guys don't get to do identity politics when you've been saying that identity politics is what's wrong with america for generations correctly so why are you doing that now well it's a practical matter it just doesn't work i mean countries don't hang together by accident particularly large diverse ones that don't have a majority in any category so there's no if you don't even have a shared language or history or culture you know why would you coal you know why would you remain united as a country and the answer which i actually believe in is that you could hang together around a common idea a common set of beliefs here's what we're all for but our ruling class and i do think this is the least responsible the most reckless thing they have done is they have not only failed to come up with what that set of common beliefs is they have argued against the fact that it should exist and so like what they're doing clearly is i mean it's not complicated they're dividing in order to rule of course what the british did in india but that's the shortest term thinking i mean that's like day trader thinking do you know what i mean yeah yeah so what do you think is are those common ideals you say that you know there are certain things that you think are just basic to being american what are those common ideas i mean i guess i'd start with the bill of rights i mean that's not hard do you know what i mean since it is a founding document it's the foundational document um and i think look you'll notice the book is long on diagnostics and short on solutions because that reflects who i am and what i do i'm not a policy maker at all i'm an observer i'm not a deep systematic thinker again i'm a talk show host right so i'm pretty good at telling you what i think is wrong it's not as clear how you fix it other than go back to the obvious things like demand that everybody who comes to this country for economic opportunity for example um or for the safety of our rule of law also buy into the things that makes all of us americans like it's not it's not complicated really um so yeah i would start with the bill of rights like you have an absolute right as defined in 1967 by the supreme court but also by sort of centuries of tradition here in this country which we inherited from another culture across the ocean to believe what you believe unmolested period it's an absolute right you can't violate my conscience and that right is under assault not by a political party but by in effect a secular evangelical faith which we're calling progressive or liberal or whatever but it's not it's a species of religion that seeks to convert by force and that is deeply anguished and concerned that other people disagree so like i doubt you go home tonight and fret at any length over the idea that somewhere in williamsburg brooklyn someone disagrees with you on and she's just probably not thinking about exactly i'm not famous for my care but i can promise you somewhere in williamsburg right now someone is lying in a studio apartment fretting that in the you know the far reaches of red clay alabama someone's not fully on board with the bathroom program they're really bothered by that and they need to do something about it so actually it's an asymmetrical contest between one group that wants to affect policy outcomes and the other group that wants to convert by the sword so it's the religious people versus the political people and i don't even think we acknowledge that most of the time so one of the things that you do in the book and i want to ask for clarification on this because you've mentioned the words elites a few times yeah and when i talk about elites what i've really tried to do is distinguish elites from elitists because elites to me are folks who very often you have elite in every field you have elite in the nba because they're the best basketball players right you have elite economically many times because they went to a good school and because they have generated some sort of service or good that a lot of people want to buy into and then you have elitists who are in my opinion the people who are really the problem the folks who think that they ought to be able to cram down their values on somebody else are you conflating elite with elitist because obviously look you're an elite right you're a guy who's very wealthy you've done very well for yourself that's the whole point of the book is that and then i hope i one thing i try never to do is pose as something i'm not right no i'm not and that's not an accusation right no first no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no but i just want to be extra clear right man i mean we do also i grew up in la jolla and georgetown i'm not here to give you the view view from coal country i'm here to give you the view from the world i grew up in and have lived in always which is the world of the people making a disproportionate number of the key decisions in our country economic political cultural determine you know like who makes the most money so i guess the question was is that an economic status or is that a mindset because no no it's a practical reality every society is hierarchical i'm not arguing against that people are innately hierarchical so we're dogs it's a mammal thing okay so you're not gonna change that there'll always be people who are making more decisions than other people who are making more money than other people they are the people the top of your society what has changed from previous generations is not simply the magnitude of the concentration of wealth and power though i do think has like measurably that is more disproportionate than ever but that's not really what's changed what's actually changed is the mindset of the people in charge they no longer acknowledge they're in charge and they no longer acknowledge that they have a responsibility to the people whose lives they influence so the robber barons we learned you know carnegie and rockefeller and phipps and all the people that we learned to hate in ninth grade those people you know had a lot of flaws and i do think the concentration of their wealth was a threat that did justify what teddy roosevelt did you know i mean breaking up the trust was really important to allow capitalism to continue but one thing i would say in their defense is they knew they were in charge they admitted it and they understood that it came with obligations because it always does if you're a parent you know you're in complete in charge of your children you can do whatever you want to them you can make more funny hands hats dance on one foot you can make them speak in different languages you can do whatever you want they're your kids you're god but with those rights your rights as a parent come obligations to take care of the people over whom you have control and that is what has been lost and so travis the teenage billionaire who ran uber founded it oversaw the second biggest workforce employee workforce in the world and yet he didn't claim those employees he didn't pay their health insurance he did one third of them lost money working for him now you could say well it's the free market okay okay fine but it doesn't absolve him of his core responsible if you're creating a hierarchy of responsibilities first is to the people closest to you and that would include your children your spouse your employees and then to the world they've inverted that so travis was always lecturing the rest of us about police brutality or black lives matter or global warming or whatever what he was doing was displacing his responsibility from the real and the tangible to the theoretical and cost-free so i would get these notices on my on my uber app being like let's pause for a moment to remember the victims of police violence which you know that's fine but before you start lecturing me about my moral inadequacies and about how you care more than i do maybe you could pay for the health insurance your freaking employees pal mr teenage billionaire guy like so this is actually part of a much larger syndrome that grows out of the meritocracy the sct created 60 years ago that has convinced the people in charge that everything that and i trust me this is the world i'm from it's convinced them that of course they're richer and better educated and by the way more attractive than the people in the great middle of the country in the medieval parts of the country okay that's all true but they're convinced that they're succeeding because they're better they are better they're just a better person better choices than you this is where i think we come to the second half where we disagree so i talked about bifurcating sort of the conversation into elite control of your life in terms of family life and everything else with the economic suggestion the meritocracy itself is deeply flawed and that the meritocracy can only survive if the people on the top of the meritocracy start to essentially give things away to a certain extent so the the uber suggestion that you make for example the reason that uber operates with a bunch of independent contractors is obviously because it's less costly it's because it's less costly that uber is able to have an extraordinarily profitable enterprise that allows them to have all these independent contractors in the first place if you have employees then basically you have a taxi medallion company and that restricts supply obviously that leads to increased pricing which leads to more competitiveness with the taxi companies worse product for consumers so the question is when it comes to you know this idea that the meritocracy itself is deeply flawed i've read i want to read a quote from your book because it struck me because it's obviously a really well written book and it and it makes some arguments that struck me as actually very much in sync with for example some of the things that bernie sanders says so the quote is this let me just say because they are okay so that's exactly what i'm going to ask you in a second so here's the quote prosperity is a relative measure it doesn't matter how much brightly colored plastic crap i can buy from china if you can buy more you're the rich one i'm poor by comparison poverty doesn't cause instability envy does so i actually agree with the last couple of sentences that envy causes instability but my solution to that is people should actually it's it's actually against the ten commandments like you should stop worrying about what your buddy has if your life is better i couldn't agree more despite all the talk about economic stagnation in the united states since 1979 you get a lot better stuff that cheap colored plastic wrap is not just junk from china i mean you're talking about better cars better refrigerators better air conditioning bigger houses in many cases that's great i'm for that benefit for all that how's that worked what's this what's the suicide rate doing right now well i think the suicide so the question is what is this is that you selected donald trump president right as if you needed a clearer indication that there is profound not just dissatisfaction but unrest you would not elect donald trump president unless you were enraged and desperate and so we do not take this seriously that's that's the point so where do you draw the lines then on government control so for example there are many lines to look let me just say i'm not a secret socialist every view of mine is completely trending no no for sure i'm not accusing you of no i don't think you are i just want to be clear about it yeah i just think that policy makers never should avert their gaze from the goal which is a stable society stability is underrated it's underrated because we've always had it so it's it's almost like you know you don't appreciate a friend until he dies and you're like oh man i wish i'd you know told him i loved him or whatever we've had with a four-year exception almost continuous social stability the strata upon which we built our economy and our civil society all of that was possible because we had a stable society the middle class that was the majority and now we don't and so we're not thinking clearly about what's going to happen unless and until we regain that stability and the core factor driving it is expanding inequality not just the fact that our ruling class is richer than it's ever been including me but that the rest of the country is going in the other direction life expectancy for huge parts of the country is in decline like that's the most so so i guess i would just say the problem with the meritocracy is not that the idea of a meritocracy is bad i'm i'm completely for it i'm from southern california i mean talk about a region predicated on meritocracy nobody cares where you're from you know what it means what can you do that's right that is a core belief of mine i'm merely saying that if you have an economy that suddenly makes labor valueless physical labor valueless and rewards dramatically i'm not going to disproportionately dramatically cognitive ability what you're really saying is we have a class system based on iq now charles murray wrote a book on this 25 years ago that included a very controversial race chapter which he never should have included because it obscured the core point of the book which is what i just said right and then you're all coming apart which is basically the book without the race exactly because you always read it it's like actually the most brilliant thing i've read in the past 20 years those two books together explain what has happened we have a ruling class that has almost is becoming impenetrable actually you can't join unless you have inequalities that are the kind of price of membership i mean we do have seven million unfilled jobs in the economy right now we do people are moving less however than they have in the past 30 years so the the real question is you mentioned this suicide rate it seems to me that your explanation of a lot of the social discontent in the united states is economically based yes and for me i think that a lot of that social discontent is less economically based than spiritually based because we are more prosperous i'm i'm doubtful actually and the reason that i'm doubtful is because we are as a society more prosperous than any society in the history of humanity including the people at the lower end of the spectrum and that's not to say that there aren't people suffering but by comparison to any other time in human history it's not close no but i'm not making that argument though so this is the conv this is the heritage foundation argument like you're worried about the poor they you know they have three color tvs i get it and i believe that for a long time and i'm for whatever i don't right you're right that's great and i'm grateful that no one is starving and has never starved really in the last hundred years here including during the depression but that's missing the point what you want is a society that is cohesive where everyone feels part of the same thing you don't want the people who are making the huge majority of important decisions to be completely cut off from everyone else for a bunch of reasons one it will engender resentment inevitably as it has and the people who feel resentment since they still have the vote their labor is worth nothing okay that's why labor unions have collapsed the value of labor has declined over the past 10 years dramatically but they still have the franchise they still have political power and what are they going to do with that power they're going to punish you but it isn't the way populism and that trump is the beginning of that is but isn't the way that at least the founders thought of this that the way to prevent the elites you know an elite class from controlling other people's lives is to restrict the inherent power of government to control everybody's life when you suggested before that the goal of the society should be stability everyone wants a stable society but there are lots of different i mean you say this in the book there are lots of different types of stable societies i mean there are monarchies that are stable societies they're they're communist regimes they're most stable right exactly they're dictatorships that are incredible north korea is a very stable society that's right so is the goal of our society stability primarily or freedom and when do the two come in conflict because they often do and that's a that's an incisive question and you're exactly right and and i would say to narrow the goal down to a single thing as i did is probably stupid um stability makes a lot of other things that you want possible but i would say within the american context what you want is a country where the average person again with an iq of 100 and you know an income of 90 grand a year and three kids can sort of live the life that people lived under those circumstances in 1950 like you want you know the average person to feel like he's vested in the society that he can have a stable family without you know by the way let me just say the economic impetus behind family destruction is totally underappreciated by conservatives so they looked at the landscape of inner city america for 50 years and they're like no you know family formation's gone like the overwhelming majority of kids grow up without a father that's a cultural problem yeah well okay yeah it is a culture brothers want me to describe it but what's its root why did it happen well look at rural american now where you're seeing the incidence of childless of fatherlessness like spike yep it's unknown in my neighborhood i live in a rich neighborhood i'm sure you do too right everyone's married okay there's no divorce where i live in rural america divorce among white people is now the rule out of what luck burst and a lot of zip codes are the majority it's not why did that happen because the men make less than the women nobody wants then there's so much social science on this nobody wants to say it out loud because you're violating some unspoken rule of like unhappy feminism or something i don't care it's true study after longitudinal study has shown that when men make less women don't want to marry them now maybe they should ask ask i have three daughters ask them and they're not ideological at all and they're totally open-minded they're young people would you want to marry a man who makes less than you what no do you think that's because of structural changes in the america american economy or the counter argument which would be the welfare state which is when you start to see definitely the welfare state of course plays a huge role in this but i'm talking employed people so in when manufacturing dies what's left well in a lot of parts of the country huge swaths of rural america you have two main employers the schools and the hospitals those are the full-time year-round employers and those are traditionally female judge not exclusively there are many exceptions to all of this and there are plenty of women who are happy to marry a man who makes less than they do but i'm saying across large populations that is true and it's been shown to be true so when male wages decline below those of females marriage formation declines along with it but childbirth does not right in other words we're sort of hardwired to impregnate okay that continues so what the net effect is you have no families and more kids especially boys growing up in fatherless homes which all but guarantees that you repeat the process so like you have the disintegration of the family because of an economic factor there are other factors and i of course so are you calling for redistribution into these areas i mean because i'm calling for whatever it takes to stop this right so this is where i was asking about the bernie sanders crossover where do you see the bernie sanders i don't know sanders is a buffoon okay i know you're actually totally insincere but i'm saying conservatives go on and have for generations about how important the family they don't mean it at all i live in dc where the entire conservative non-profit infrastructure lives okay and i know what their priorities are and they're lowering marginal tax rates which i'm for by the way as someone who pays the majority of his income in taxes like of course i'm for that but the goal if the goal is preserving the family as the core building block of any successful society and it's got to be that goal because it has all kinds of effects that we want and it's just inherently good it's not going to explain it but i could but the point is if that's the goal what are you doing about it if if you wake up one morning and you find yourself in a society where 23 year olds with four-year college degrees and like initiative who aren't smoking weed every day if they can't make enough to buy a car much else a home much less get married muscles have children then why should you be surprised when half of them say they prefer socialism well you should not be surprised i agree to a certain extent i think that the the question is when the pedal hits the metal like you talk in the in the book about technology and how it's shifting and taking away jobs from folks and you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that they're going to be these automated cars on the roads so would you tucker carlson be in favor of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to you know sort of artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry are you joking in a second in a second in other words if i were president when i say the d.o.t department transportation we're not letting driverless trucks on the road period why really simple driving for a living is the single most common job for high school educated men in this country in all 50 states by the way that's the same group whose wages have gone down by 11 over the past 30 years the social cost of eliminating their jobs in a 10-year span five-year span 30-year span is so high that it's not sustainable so the greater good is protecting your citizens from look capitalism is the best economic system i can think of i think that anyone's ever thought of but that doesn't mean that it's a religion and everything about it is good no but there's no niacin creed of capitalism that i have to buy into what i care about is living in a country where you know decent people can live happy lives actually and so no i would say immediately no are you joking and i maybe would make up some pretext for public consumption like oh they're dangerous the technology is not quite finessed no no but the truth would be i don't want to put 10 million men out of work because you're going to have 10 million dead families and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country so i'm going to ask about the limiting principle there in just a second but first let's talk about talk space so if you're feeling a little bit nervous because of this conversation because you're one of these people in an industry that's being assaulted by technology or if you're just a person who is having trouble at home maybe you need to go to talkspace it's the online therapy company that lets you message a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time all you need is a computer with internet connection or the talkspace mobile app that means you can improve your mental health even if you had trouble making time for it in the past i'm a big advocate by the way of folks talking to somebody if you need to do so i think it's one of the stupidest stigmas in american life that you're supposed to sit there and try and grit your teeth and make your way through life without any help at all it's idiotic if you can't imagine fitting anything else into your life with talkspace therapy is as easy as sending your therapist a message get something off your chest whenever you need to talk about everyday challenges at work or at home and chat about life there are no extra commutes no leaving the office and no judgment it's a therapy remember that therapy isn't just about venting your innermost thoughts it's about practical everyday strategies for stress management living a happier life having a therapist simply provides you a designated person for you to talk to somebody trained to listen and help you make positive changes the talkspace platform has over 000 licensed therapists who are experienced in addressing life challenges we all face to match with a perfect therapist for a fraction the price of traditional therapy go to talkspace.com shapiro use that promo code shapiro you have 45 bucks off your first month and show your support for this show that's shapiro talkspace.com slash apparel you get that special deal so back to the the technology question so it's it's fascinating to me uh that you're so willing to restrict technology in this particular area not because it's not a justifiable policy not not willing eager to yeah so do that what's the limiting principle because obviously jobs are lost in industries through creative destruction and have been for the entire time the free market has existed right i mean wheel rights lost their jobs when when the automobile was created what's to prevent this principle that you're speaking up from just becoming ludditism that technology's destroying jobs i don't think it's freeze technology insane i mean there were massive costs to the industrial revolution look i'm for capitalism i'm for machines right you know they they all but guarantee i'll live way longer than my great grandparents i get it i'm four machines okay i'm just saying that there was a cost half the world was enslaved for 70 years under bolshevism because those countries didn't manage i would argue the transition from an agrarian economy into an industrial one that's what that was okay so we're on the cusp of a completely transformative revolution as or more transformative as the industrial revolution and no one is trying to take control of it at all or figure out how to channel these forces into an outcome that we want to live with realistically and because they're not you're going to see reactions and you're already seeing reactions against this stuff that are flat out extreme so the model again is teddy roosevelt who was a capitalist a patriot a man of deep faith he was not anti-business and yet he restrained american businesses he broke them up and was hated for doing it in the service of a higher goal which was a stable happy country where the traditions could be preserved if he didn't do that you know there's there's no telling like what would have happened to the the wobbly you know the iww or whatever we could have gone a totally different direction i mean so i will admit i'm not a teddy roosevelt fan and i would have opposed the trust busting but when it comes to the when it comes to the sort of politics we're talking about i guess my major question is is it a contributing factor to societal unrest to tell people that politics is to blame for the problem are we are we edging on political messianism the idea that if we just change a couple of policies here or there and we'll be able to fix everything when the reality is that as you talk about a little bit in the book what we may be suffering from is an actual spiritual malaise and maybe economics has something to do with it i would argue that it has a lot more to do with a generalized move away from social fabric driven by all of the factors who exist in churches and all these things and that if we're gonna if we are going to maintain both freedom and stability you know the john adams formulation was that this constitution was only built for moral and virtuous people it wasn't built for any other got it there are two ways to actually tackle that one is to say we are no longer moral and no longer virtuous so we have to change the freedom and the other is to say well if we want to maintain the freedom we have to become moral and virtuous again and i wonder if we as public figures we're in the same business more or less where we ought to be putting our focus should we be putting our focus on justifying people's fears about the economy and suggesting that a political messiah is around the corner or should we be saying to people listen the industry in your town may be dying and as a temporary stop gap perhaps we can stop technology from advancing perhaps we can stop trade from eating your job or should be saying to people listen america was built by folks who crossed mountains to go to the middle of nowhere in pure risk and you are guaranteed nothing in the united states but the adventure of your life there are seven million unfilled jobs maybe we need to actually move maybe you need to go to north dakota and get a fracking yeah leave yeah leave your parents graves in the town you grew up in to move to some soulless city and become a cog in some i think well i mean that's i mean the biblical mandate leave the land that you've known and go to some place for adventure i don't know it's it's a mixture of both and i and i would to answer your initial question anyone who argues that any of this is going to be fixed by a person or a bill that makes its way through congress or new supreme court justice is lying to you that's a grotesque and dishonest oversimplification of the sort that politicians and by the way talk show hosts specialize in and so to the extent i played a role in lying about that i'm sorry i never want to be that guy i always want to acknowledge how complex and multifaceted all of these problems are because they are i'm merely making a couple of very obvious observations that are downsides we are not servants of our economic system we are not here to serve as shareholders we're human beings and our concerns are real now they must be balanced against the concerns of shareholders and lots of other concerns but to say that you know if it's more efficient to have you move to some crappy suburb to serve some douchey company because that's what you know is best to increase value it's like it's okay for me to stand up and say you know there are other concerns here actually and there's a social cost to doing that anyway this all used to be obvious these things were actually debated during the industrial revolution the luddites are used for propaganda purposes to make the other side seem ludicrous you're literally smashing machines you're a dummy you're an animal you know what i mean but actually the concern is totally real if you spend i don't know just like roughly 5 000 years in one kind of economy that changes incrementally over time but basically living from what you grow living with your family and working 100 yards away for thousands of years and then in the space of i don't know 100 years after the steam engine is invented everything is completely different that's a lot it doesn't mean that you should stop it or smash the machines with a hammer but it means you should be thoughtful in the way you channel these awesome forces these awesome economic forces you are not a servant to them they are tools that thoughtful people use to increase the goodness of their society so i guess i'm just so struck by like if i would ever talk to liberals or conservatives market fundamentalists in washington they're like we can't stop this is technology it's inexorable like we have really no role in it other than to try to benefit from it it's like really you're talking about machines are they really in charge no we're in charge we're human beings with free will god created us to make these decisions but there is there is a balance obviously between increasing prosperity across all of humankind which has really been the result of free market capitalism over the past 40 years and redistribution of the benefits because the benefits obviously fall upon people deeply understand i'm not for taking stuff from people i don't want my stuff to be taken from me the regulations do that effectively i mean president trump has been very anti-regulatory i guess in a broad sense maybe i guess i mean i know that that's a talking point i'm not exactly i mean yeah a lot of regulations are unbelievably stupid and they benefit you know certain categories of rent seeker at the expense of everyone else like i'm very aware i live among it i know and a lot of this is totally corrupt and counterproductive okay for sure on the other hand you we have an obligation to think deeply about what's best for normal people that's all i'm saying that's that's it that's all i'm saying and we are not powerless in the face of these forces and if we decide that we are powerless in the face of them we're all just along for the ride we're not the authors of history we're merely just flotsam floating atop it it's like whoa that's a totally different way of thinking about it that's really bad and as we go through these changes the people benefiting most to whom much is given much is expected and they should feel an obligation to those beneath them in the way you feel true that's certainly i feel i mean you know they should feel guilty that's why charity exists but exactly they should you know we underestimate to your point and i think we're basically in agreement on almost everything especially on this that the your moral code determines how you behave and how you live and so the robber barons were deeply fraught and guilty in some ways about their success because they were like guilty wasps they were protestant like i get it do you know what i mean like they're my people so i know exactly what they used to think which was you know i not everything i've achieved is the result of choices that i made they were calvinist on some level like they understood that their other thing providence grace luck whatever you want to call it that determined the outcome so like the people now in charge your average private equity guy i know a million of them like them okay but they believe that they're rich because they're better because they made good choices and you're not because you didn't okay that's true in some sense like choices do matter for sure i quit drinking so i could like be more successful and it worked okay but how does that explain the girl in your fifth grade class who died of leukemia did she make bad choices was it her fault really is she just like what no a lot of this is random i have the job i have because of chance and when i start telling myself i have the job i have because i'm a genius that's when i my soul corrodes actually and i become a bad person so like we shouldn't allow people to lie about the way life really is that's that's all i'm saying so let's talk a little bit about another area where you've shifted um and i think most of america has shifted i think that your shift has reflected a huge majority of americans and that is in a more realist isolationist direction on foreign policies in the 90s you work with bill crystal obviously who's very interventionist very hawkish uh and uh you have an entire chapter in chip of fools devoted basically to max boot and bill crystal yeah yeah uh and um you know what are your when do you think that american intervention is appropriate when it serves american interests unambiguously and by the way speaking of complicated i mean this stuff is complicated yeah the one thing that is unknowable is the outcome you can only guess at its outlines and often you're wrong but you need to approach all of these questions with deep humility understanding that you know you think that x will produce y but it could produce k like you don't really know um if you do that it doesn't mean you won't make mistakes of course you will but you'll make fewer mistakes less profound mistakes hubris guarantees disaster every single time you know it in every context i mean it shafted david it will shaft you and the whole country no i'm serious when you start thinking that you're god you know you are going to fall from great heights and so the problem is not these are very human problems and they're long-standing problems they're eternal problems but when you have an entire city full of policy makers who don't acknowledge these problems that's when you want look i supported the war in iraq it made sense to me sort of and i was certainly willing to go on faith and then i went to iraq and i was like wait very soon after actually in the winter of 2003 and i was like this is not at all what i thought and we don't actually have control of this country we're not good colonialists because we're not willing to admit we have an empire the british were very effective and they could absorb losses like their laws in afghanistan because they were honest about what they were doing it was a colonial power that existed for the benefit primarily of great britain also for the edification of the peoples over whom they ruled like they had that it was a component to that it was a christian component an evangelical component to british colonialism but basically it was we're acting in the interest of civilization which we run we are totally unwilling as our ruling class is more broadly unwilling to admit we're in charge so we're not going to ever be good at it so your choices are you continue being bad at it or do you stop doing it to what extent do you think morality plays a role in foreign policy if any is it is it like again this is i guess it's back to our basics that's the heart of our foreign policy and the moral question is what's good for the people in our charge right so so again that goes back to the metrics of success so the so is the metric of success for let's let's take an obvious example where you know opinion is pretty fraud so take the intervention in syria right so i am not pro-intervention in syria i know you're not pro-intervention in syria by the same token you look at the human carnage that has taken place in syria what's in america's interest there are we judging that in terms of dollars and cents are we judging that in terms of what we would have to sacrifice in order to stop the carnage are we justifying that in terms of immigration as you say it's very complex and syria is maybe more complex than in certain other situations but frankly let's take let me take a different example so world war ii it's when we look at world war ii pretty much all americans agree we should have been involved we were attacked by japan germany declared war on us you have no choice when you look in retrospect and how we justify our involvement in world war ii most americans if asked why we were involved in world war ii would probably not say pearl harbor it would point to ending the holocaust and defeating hitler as a moral matter that these are these are these were evil regimes that needed to be defeated right when is humanitarian intervention justified not based on dollars and cents or based purely on self-defense concerns if at all you mean quite apart from self-defense concerns when just uh for example something something terrible is happening somewhere saving lives i mean you know you have to weigh that's a that's a a a christian impulse jewish impulse it's a it's a decent impulse i guess is what i'm saying to want to help people i think that's right and we have a robust ngo sector that makes its business doing that um to great counterproductive effect [Laughter] but anyway oh that's all dictators sees all money that's exactly right um but yeah life expectancy in post-colonial africa has gone down so how's that working for you but anyway um so i understand that impulse and i admire it and i think this is the bet not only the most prosperous but the best country in human history so like i get it i get it but you balance those impulses against what's actually achievable and always and everywhere the threat that you will unintentionally make things worse which is a very real present threat always americans have no appreciation of that at all they one thing that does bug me about my own people is they don't have much imagination for how things could be worse so you're always hearing americans say how could it be worse okay travel a little bit okay and you will see that almost always it can be worse so will you make it worse by trying to make it better that's a real question never concerned but but more broadly i mean look this a lot of this is situational a lot of life is situational but the main theme is that your foreign policy exists for the behalf of your own country to make your country stronger better safer more insulated happier right richer that's the point of it and if there's an ancillary benefit of helping other people i'm you know of course i'm totally for that okay so let's talk a little bit about the kind of distinctions when it comes to the philosophy of of intervention because we've talked about morality has to be component i agree we've talked about the the need to back american interest which is obviously first and foremost with which i also agree to take the max boot for for devil's advocate purposes take the max book bill crystal position for a moment their argument on the war on terror or interventionism is that as you say their counterfactuals that we can't actually assume so let's say that we don't intervene in afghanistan uh after 9 11 or we go in with a pinprick strike or something uh or let's say that we don't go into iraq and let's say that two years later there's another 911 style attack we would never know that because it never happened there's been a a decrease in the number of released mass attacks uh in the united states over time uh so their argument would be this is what i was getting at with the metrics question at the beginning by your metrics the war in iraq is a disaster the war in afghanistan has turned out to be basically a disaster by their metrics these have both been successes to the extent that it has prevented casualties on american soil assuming there would have been more casualties on american soil and one of the problems with trying to you know assess these issues in a looking forward fashion though right exactly like you talk in the in the book about american intervention with regard to the mushadin in in afghanistan under reagan and you point out that this was a an instrumental factor in the fall of the soviet union yes but should we have armed those people considering that they would go on can i get it these are judgment calls made under pressure at the time under public scrutiny often they're hard decisions to make i think heaven don't have to make them so i have deep empathy for people who make the wrong decision what i have contempt for is people who won't acknowledge having made the wrong decision and so there are many things that we can't know hypotheticals you know are by definition unknowable but i think any fair person assessing the aftermath of the iraq war would have to say deposing saddam empowered iran this was his main regional rival okay obviously and if you believe that iran is the single greatest threat to the west and i don't believe that but many people do everyone i know does um all people of good faith then you can't say the iraq war by that one standard that one measure which seems to be at the center of people's foreign policy understanding right now was a good idea you just can't so look i get it there are a lot of things we didn't expect though i think we should have anticipated that we take out someone's chief rival you empower him by definition but whatever we didn't but what i can't stand which actually grates on me is the self-righteousness with which they proceed forward as if that never happened so it's like really if you're not for this intervention or that intervention you just don't have a heart you just don't care you're just not a good person whoa whoa whoa whoa these are decisions these are big decisions that we can make without reference to my personal moral values or yours like we can just try to do the best thing for the country but you should at least acknowledge you the guy who's telling me that we need to go to war with iran now that the decision that you helped make created the problem that you now tell me we need to solve you should at least admit that or else you're a liar which they are okay so i do have one final question for you i want to ask you about president trump and how he's done so far if you want to hear the answer to that final question however you do have to be a daily wire subscriber to subscribe go to dailywire.com click subscribe give us money and you can hear the end of our conversation there well tucker it's just great to have you here i'm so glad you can make it out to the west coast and this book ship of fools you should definitely check it out i'm sure you already have a copy but if you do read it and if you don't go buy it and then read it because it'll give you a great window into the frisson of american politics right now tucker thanks so much [Music] the ben shapiro show sunday special is produced by jonathan haye executive producer jeremy boring associate producer mathis glover edited by alex zingaro audio is mixed by dylan case hair and makeup is by jessua alvera and title graphics by cynthia angulo the ben shapiro show's sunday's special is a daily wire forward publishing production copyright forward publishing 2018.

Channel: DailyWire+

Views: 1,611,695

Keywords: Tucker Carlson, ben Shapiro, the ben Shapiro show, daily wire, sunday special, Fox News, free speech, cultural leftism, socialism, interventionism, meritocracy, elites, ruling class, America, ship of fools

Id: Bh8vqof9hAk

Length: 50min 53sec (3053 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/MelGibsonDiedForUs]

The last question, and the one I was most interested in hearing the answer to... IS BEHIND A PAYWALL.

[u/Aldebaran333]

Such a great interview. Oh my god.

[u/skinny_reminder]

I just listened in the car this morning and really enjoyed the conversation. It was honest on the problems our country faces and i appreciate Tucker's recognition that sometimes he can be wrong and that that our opinions change over time with age and experience (as they should). I WISH WE HAD MORE ANSWERS. I really really want to hear about solutions and although I appreciate Tucker's honesty about his limitations as a policy person to prescribe answers I wish we had more of a pathway to follow to fixing the problems that surround us. looking forward to reading the book.