Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Stop Being Such a F*%#ing Baby!" with David Frum

Transcript

"Stop Being Such a F*%#ing Baby!" with David Frum · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  It's a funny experience having a thick enough skin to float across the surface of a deluge
• 0:06
  of hatred and bullshit. I strongly recommend it if you've never had the opportunity
• 0:14
  to insulate yourself from a whirlwind, a fire hose, a hurricane. Two weeks ago now I was on Joe
• 0:24
  Rogan's show and we had just one minor exchange in the course of an amicable three hour plus
• 0:31
  interview about the risk of myocarditis heart inflammation in young males as a result of MRNA
• 0:38
  vaccines. And the media picked up on that exchange and blew it out of all proportions saying that I
• 0:44
  had owned Joe in a fiery exchange that had proven him wrong and that CNN was calling him, you know,
• 0:51
  he was playing expert doctor like a kid. I mean, it was just ridiculous. And as a result of
• 0:58
  that, then of course, the backlash of dumb numbs on Twitter coming out of the woodwork,
• 1:04
  thinking that like I had staged that as some kind of a gotcha moment or that I'm behind the headlines
• 1:10
  that CNN writes or something, nothing could be further from the truth. And what's interesting
• 1:15
  is surreal about it that you might find interesting is that the way that the different
• 1:21
  means that people reach out to you sort of dictate what their tone and even their beliefs are
• 1:29
  going to be. So people who direct message me on Instagram are almost 100%. I mean, there have been
• 1:37
  hundreds, if not thousands by now, almost 100% super, super positive saying it's so nice to
• 1:43
  hear a refreshing voice to hear someone a bit different. It's so nice to see someone push back
• 1:47
  against Joe. You know, it can sometimes feel like a little bit of a same same kind of
• 1:54
  ditto climate when these podcasts have people who agree with them. So it's nice to see a little bit of
• 1:58
  honest debate and back and forth in an amicable way. Bloody blood. That's been the overarching
• 2:04
  sentiment. That's also the sentiment on like the Joe Rogan subreddit where lots of fans
• 2:11
  like the episode and everyone who I care about, who I respect, who's hit me up or email,
• 2:16
  has been really complimentary. And then there's this parallel universe of which is instructive
• 2:22
  about what social media is doing to our minds of people partially spewing hate and like offensive
• 2:30
  gaseleurs or something like that, which is fine. It doesn't like that says more to me about them
• 2:36
  than it does about me. But what's interesting is that they start getting into arguments with each
• 2:40
  other. Specifically, I mean, the worst has been Instagram comments, which is funny because
• 2:46
  Instagram direct messages have been so complimentary. But the comments, I guess, are from people
• 2:51
  who can't be bothered actually messaging me or following me, but are arguing with each other
• 2:56
  about how about whether to hate me. And then the Twitter thread, the Twitter comments are all
• 3:02
  just people getting into side arguments of their own and trying to own each other. It's really
• 3:07
  instructive about how bloody toxic these forums are in bringing out the worst in us.
• 3:15
  It's incredibly unseemly. I mean, if any of the people who are participating in the arguments on
• 3:21
  my Twitter threads could step back and see themselves in the aggregate instead of thinking of
• 3:28
  themselves as an individual who is who is fighting a good fight by proving a point. Regardless of
• 3:35
  whether or not they think that they're fighting on my behalf or whether they're attacking me,
• 3:39
  they'd be horrified. Like, I'm the only person who gets the God's eye view here in a way.
• 3:47
  So I'm the only person who sort of has the luxury of seeing what a hellhole under swamp it is
• 3:53
  and letting it float by me. I thank God I'm not in it. That would be terrible. And I strongly advise
• 4:00
  you not to be in it as well. You know, I don't just mean don't use social media. I understand
• 4:06
  that it'll sometimes be a distraction or a useful way for you to follow what your friends are up to.
• 4:12
  But I mean, don't get invested in it. Don't get invested in these conversations. Certainly not on
• 4:17
  my behalf. Although if you're going to get invested in these conversations, do it on my behalf,
• 4:21
  don't attack me. This is all just a long roundabout way of saying that the way that we should be
• 4:26
  engaging with each other in the 21st century is by sitting down face to face looking at each other's
• 4:31
  eyes, listening to each other's voices and having conversations. Conversations about things that
• 4:36
  are sensitive, conversations in which we're not trying to own each other but are trying to understand
• 4:40
  each other. Conversations that are timely, that are relevant. And yes, you guessed it,
• 4:46
  but sometimes it's just a little uncomfortable.
• 4:58
  Today on the show, what a big big get, what a great great chance.
• 5:02
  Gee, I loved this episode. Stick with this one. David from, you may know him as the man who coined
• 5:08
  the term the axis of evil in George W. Bush's 2002 State of the Union address the one that was
• 5:15
  probably the most important State of the Union above my lifetime. The post September 11th
• 5:22
  course setting on what the US administration was going to do with this horrendous tragedy.
• 5:29
  And that speech largely set the stage for the subsequent two decades of war in Afghanistan,
• 5:34
  the invasion of Iraq and so on. And David from was the senior speech writer behind putting the
• 5:40
  White House's ideas into words. He's now a senior editor at the Atlantic. He's really
• 5:47
  less a political figure, although he's thought of been those terms than he is a media figure
• 5:51
  and a journalist. He went to Yale University and did a Bachelor of Arts in the Master of Arts.
• 5:57
  He studied law at Harvard. He's Canadian originally. And he was a journal. I mean, he was an editor
• 6:04
  at the Wall Street Journal during the years of Bush senior. And it was only once George W. Bush
• 6:10
  was elected that he was invited to come into politics for the first time. That branded him and
• 6:15
  were well exploded him onto the national stage. And he's become a supposed more beloved figure in
• 6:22
  recent years for having taken a principled stance against Donald Trump and Trumpism and
• 6:27
  conservatism and sort of handing in his Republican card. He came out as having voted for Hillary Clinton
• 6:32
  in 2016 because he couldn't stomach the idea of voting for Trump. Nonetheless, he was a
• 6:38
  neocon hawk very much in the midst of the Bush administration. He was at the White House
• 6:45
  on 9-11. We talk about that. We talk about the culture wars. We talk about what he makes of
• 6:50
  wokeism and very, very interesting mind. And just one of those conversations where I love dancing
• 6:57
  around through the, through the daisies and jumping from lily pad to lily pad with no real idea
• 7:02
  exactly where I'm going. And at the end of it, you go, wow, what an adventure. So I hope you
• 7:05
  enjoy it as much as I did. Just a little bit of housekeeping about many of your questions which
• 7:11
  are getting a bit repetitious. No offense. There's just a lot of you on social media in the wake of
• 7:16
  the Joe Rogan campaign. I will tweet a tweet thread about this as well. But basically, if you have
• 7:25
  questions about who was right or who was wrong about myocarditis, I would never would have thought
• 7:32
  that such an arcane health question could cause so many people so much interest. I think the
• 7:40
  relevant thing to say is that we are talking about vanishingly, vanishingly small risks. Whether
• 7:46
  you are a 15-year-old male who gets vaccinated or whether you're a 15-year-old male who gets
• 7:51
  COVID, the only real thing that I would be thinking about is to what extent am I a vector for
• 8:00
  infection for other people? Omicron makes that a bit less of a pressing question because it's
• 8:05
  so contagious that you can be a vector for infection, even if you are vaccinated. However, you are
• 8:11
  likely at a test positive and you are likely to pass it on and you are likely to be symptomatic
• 8:16
  if you are not vaccinated. So if you do care about keeping your grandparents alive and you do
• 8:21
  care about increasing the amount of herd immunity and decreasing the amount of ambient
• 8:27
  pathogen in the community that deranges all of our lives by having flights cancelled because
• 8:32
  pilots are sick and having Broadway shows cancelled because stars are sick and having schools
• 8:37
  have to wear masks for long or all of the kind of nonsense that we've got. I'm so bloody bored
• 8:41
  of during the pandemic that the best way to put an end to such nonsense other than just saying,
• 8:47
  we'll let a rip and, you know, whoever is unvaccinated or old or fat or immune suppressed can just
• 8:53
  can cop the consequences and maybe die. The alternative to that is just say, well all of us just
• 8:58
  get let's get transmission rates as low as possible. So let's get vaccination rates as high as
• 9:04
  possible. They're not perfect. You can still catch it but you're somewhere in the range of two to
• 9:09
  three times likely to catch it and pass it on if you're not vaccinated and you're somewhere in
• 9:14
  the range of eight to 20 times likely to get really sick or die if you're not vaccinated.
• 9:20
  So for me, the focus, the relentless focus on myocarditis has this one node, this one data point
• 9:27
  is a little bit of a distraction. It feels like just sort of, you know, people who want to be
• 9:32
  contrarian, being contrarian. I think we just have to sort of check out confirmation bias here,
• 9:37
  folks. Like if you find yourself really wanting to consume lots of information about how the
• 9:43
  vaccines could be dangerous, just ask yourself why? What is the anti-establishment
• 9:52
  motivation that's going on here? And are you pecking yourself around like a little hen
• 9:59
  trying to search for nuggets in the dust? Trying to find things that reinforce what you already
• 10:08
  believe. I get that many of us are frustrated with how long this is going on for frustrated,
• 10:16
  with lockdowns, angry at misinformation, at chewing and throwing about masks, and the utility
• 10:25
  of various policies. I understand that people are suspicious of drug companies and bureaucrats.
• 10:35
  I understand that we're excited by the democratization of information.
• 10:39
  But all of those instincts can conspire to make us somewhat gullible towards alternative
• 10:44
  explanations. And just ask yourself if you might be giving a bit too much weight to outlier
• 10:50
  studies and outlier experts that buck the mainstream narrative. We may just want to check
• 10:58
  ourselves here. Last point before I get to David from the term alt-right. I mentioned briefly on
• 11:06
  Joe Rogan's show called Tim Pool alt-right. I was just sort of saying these alt-right agitators
• 11:12
  on Twitter saying that if you don't agree that Australia is running concentration camps and that
• 11:19
  it is sliding into authoritarianism, that it's an irredeemably fascist country, then we have
• 11:24
  nothing to talk about. The starting point has to be that Australia has fallen. And then once
• 11:30
  I have suitably genuinely reflected about the end of Australian democracy and the end of liberalism
• 11:36
  in Australia, then we can start having a conversation about how to redeem ourselves. I call that
• 11:40
  sort of behaviour alt-right behaviour. I call an uncompromising irrational click-bati attitude towards
• 11:50
  discourse alt-right. It's been pointed out many times. In fact, Joe Rogan pointed out in real time
• 11:55
  that Tim Pool is not right-wing. Yeah, I didn't say it was right-wing. For me, alt-right is not,
• 12:00
  maybe I'm using the term differently, but I think it's a useful phrase to use. It doesn't mean
• 12:04
  right-wing. I use it to mean a fake news-obsessed, anti-establishment troll who whips up followers
• 12:13
  by showing you in a very performative fashion how he's an angrier about tyranny than you are,
• 12:20
  than you the sheeple. Alt-right doesn't mean a right-wing person. They can be an occupied Wall Street
• 12:26
  person. They can be left-wing. They're not necessarily a member of the Republican Party. They are a
• 12:31
  keyboard warrior. They are a person who cares more about spraying clickbait that rails against the
• 12:38
  lame-stream media than about seeking wisdom through conversation. You don't have to accept that
• 12:44
  definition, but if Tim is going to dodge the punch, then he needs to disprove the behavior that
• 12:50
  I'm describing and demonstrate that that is not what he is. Another aside, I did not call
• 12:58
  Marjorie Noah's alt-right. I don't think he is. I said I included him in reference to
• 13:03
  some tweets that he made where I feel he was overly gullible in retweeting some Australian
• 13:12
  dissident voices about what was going on in the Northern Territory with indigenous communities,
• 13:18
  and I granted at the time that that might have just been a fact-checking mistake. I will retweet
• 13:24
  a great article. If you are interested in what was going on in the Northern Territory with
• 13:28
  indigenous communities being forcibly rounded up and incarcerated, and the calls that Marjorie
• 13:36
  had amplified to have Amnesty look into this, then I'll retweet on my Twitter thread,
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  an article by an Northern Territory journalist about that. All of that is a long round about
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  way of saying that I don't include Marjorie in the bad faith cluster of actors who I call
• 13:55
  alt-right, regardless of whether or not they think of themselves as right-wing or left-wing.
• 14:01
  And the last point I'd make is that it's important to remember that I've been very critical of
• 14:06
  Australian and overreach over the course of this pandemic. I wrote a piece in the main Australian
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  Sydney newspaper in December calling for a calmer conversation about human rights here.
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  There are simply degrees of inaccuracy about all of this ranging from high-level hysterical
• 14:30
  shit-stirring from American alt-right agitators to people who were just honestly baffled by
• 14:37
  police brutality in Australia. And I hate those instances of police brutality as well. I hate those
• 14:42
  videos of the police, you know, finding grandmas for not obeying mask mandates and so on.
• 14:50
  It's awful. It's silly. It's stupid. I hate that stuff. So, you know, the best way to
• 14:56
  undermine it is to support rational, critical voices like mine. And the best way to perpetuate
• 15:02
  brutality and authoritarianism to the extent that it exists is to embolden voices like Tim Pools,
• 15:08
  which require you to subscribe to an extremist binary that just allows the people who we all
• 15:14
  disagree with to get away with discrediting everybody on the reasonable side. You know, the easiest
• 15:20
  way to perpetuate a bad policy is to give the people behind that bad policy an easy tool to discredit
• 15:28
  you. And, you know, Australian policymakers who just want ever more closed borders and ever more
• 15:36
  punitive, aggressive anti-COVID measures that infringe on people's human rights. Those policy
• 15:42
  makers can just say, look, anyone who opposes our policies just is a crazy person who thinks
• 15:48
  that Australia is a fascist state for enacting emergency powers during a public health emergency.
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  You know, these people are not credible. So, thanks a lot, Tim Pool, and all such people for
• 16:00
  undermining the credibility of rational critics like myself and making it much, much harder for
• 16:04
  Australians to be free. Last, oh, yes. Also, Tim's welcome to come on this show anytime the
• 16:13
  invitation stands. I invited him on this show. He declined and invited me on his show. I said,
• 16:19
  yes, his producer said, told my producer, it has to be in person. My producer said, well, Josh is
• 16:25
  in Australia, so he's not going to come back to America for it. But let's go back to the original
• 16:30
  plan and Tim can come on this show. And then they went, there was Radio Silence. So,
• 16:35
  don't know if it's a cowardice, disorganization, whatever. But the invitation stands to come on this
• 16:42
  show and sort it out. That invitation has not yet been accepted. I hope you enjoy this show. And I
• 16:49
  hope that this is the last that we talk about all of this nonsense. It's a storm in a tea cup
• 16:53
  as far as I'm concerned. New South Wales, the most popular state in Australia where I live is
• 16:59
  essentially completely open with the exception of a few rules against groups singing and dancing
• 17:04
  at nightclubs and so on. You can do whatever you want. There are rules against unvaccinated people
• 17:12
  coming into the country, into the state without isolating. But if you're vast, then we are open
• 17:19
  for business, baby, and coming and going as we please. It's not a perfect situation. It's not without
• 17:24
  it's not without its problems. But as far as I'm concerned, all this hand wringing about,
• 17:31
  you know, who did what right and who did what wrong in the pandemic is a historical question
• 17:38
  now and is decreasingly a relevant one to actually be focusing on. So, let's focus on some
• 17:43
  more important things such as this conversation which I hope you will enjoy. Man, I did with the
• 17:50
  one an only day control. I'm interested at this point in asking people about their experience
• 18:04
  during the pandemic. Where have you been for the past two years and how was that?
• 18:12
  I have to confess, I have had quite an easy pandemic and I am a little guilty about it.
• 18:16
  As far as pandemics go. Yeah, so early in the pandemic, David Geffen posted an image of himself
• 18:26
  on a board, some yacht, got a lot of blowback from that. But my view is that the world is not divided
• 18:31
  between David Geffen and you. It's divided between those with small children and those who don't.
• 18:36
  And those who don't have small children at home have much more in common with David Geffen than we do.
• 18:41
  Anybody on the small children's side of the line, my heart breaks for that.
• 18:45
  As the father of four-year-old twins, I had a whole heartedly convened with this worldview.
• 18:50
  So my children are grown and so they came back home during COVID. They cooked for us.
• 18:58
  They were entertaining and amusing company for us. They stuffed the yacht. They brought it around
• 19:04
  to the canape. So it was a very different thing from then from your experience.
• 19:09
  Yeah, although I must say I also feel somewhat grateful that I don't have school aged kids.
• 19:13
  I think I somewhat dodge a bullet by having two-year-old, three-year-olds and four-year-olds over
• 19:17
  the course of the pandemic who really don't know what's happening. It's annoying for us, but
• 19:22
  we can still go to parks and play in rock pools and go to beaches and whatnot. At least we have
• 19:27
  been able to in Australia. I think if you had a 15-year-old or an eight-year-old,
• 19:33
  you probably get hit the worst. It's been so tough on children, the parents of children,
• 19:38
  on young people, but you know, we've got a comfortable house. I'm trapped in it with someone
• 19:46
  I like a lot. We don't have small children, so I have to say I just take my hat off to every
• 19:54
  and we didn't get sick, and so I take my hat off to everyone who's had a tougher time. I know
• 19:57
  that's many, many people. When you were speaking about kids, does that shape the way that you think
• 20:02
  about the pandemic response? I mean, there's been a lot of a lot of brujaha between Australia and
• 20:07
  the States, between zero COVID countries like New Zealand and jurisdictions like Western Australia
• 20:12
  and Taiwan and Hong Kong versus the more letter-writ policies of the UK and the US and one thing
• 20:20
  that I tend to point out to American critics of the zero COVID policy is that it has actually
• 20:27
  allowed a lot less fudzing around with children than the scenarios in which there is rampant widespread
• 20:36
  contagion that has led to long school closures, masking of kids and so on. You know,
• 20:42
  touch wood, it's generally been the case that schools have been open in the places that were
• 20:46
  a little bit more, let's say quote unquote authoritarian about forcing people not to transmit
• 20:52
  the pathogen, where are you on all that? I've tried not to have too many opinions about COVID actually,
• 21:00
  and I have just, I have deferred to the best scientific authority. I have been unshocked that
• 21:10
  the best scientific authority has different views at different times, that's the scientific enterprise.
• 21:17
  I've tried to, I've had some of my own judgment, I've tried to, I've tried to be a good citizen first,
• 21:27
  even when some I encounter a rule that seems to be maybe silly, I go along with it if most of the
• 21:34
  people around me seem to think it's a good idea. And I just, I think that everyone's been under a
• 21:40
  lot of pressure, so I know we're all kind of testy, but I really think that easy goingness is an
• 21:47
  important part of getting through a thing like this. My wife's family, you and I were talking
• 21:53
  about this yesterday before, my wife comes from a military family and then both the Australian
• 21:56
  and the Canadian forces, and my, her late stepfather, my father-in-law, he served in both Korea and
• 22:04
  World War II, and when he would say, you know it's the most important quality in the soldier,
• 22:10
  and you expect the answer courage, and you'd always say, cheerfulness. Cheerfulness is the most
• 22:15
  important quality in the soldier. And I think that's how you get through things, just be cheerful,
• 22:22
  and so, you know, I've been a little horrified, but even more amazed by the ability of people to have
• 22:32
  these culture war arguments over, how do you fight a pandemic? Exactly the kind of thing we just
• 22:38
  say, I want to say, you know, all those people who actually completed the biology courses that I
• 22:43
  didn't take and went on actually maybe even to excel at the subject, we should listen to them.
• 22:48
  What about the argument that it's all very well to be cheerful and easy going, but if you're
• 22:52
  cheerful and easy going while people are leading you towards tyranny, misinformation, and control,
• 22:57
  then you're asleep at the will, and you're your forefathers and mine who were in Europe during
• 23:04
  World War II or before, you know, my grandmother was not cheerful and easy going when she was
• 23:10
  rounded up by the French collaborationist Nazi allied police in Paris and instead escaped from
• 23:16
  the Jail and fled the Paris, she could go to Australia, you know, because there is this worldview that
• 23:20
  like this is a moment at which power is being sort of seized by author. Don't be such a fucking
• 23:26
  self aggrandizing baby is what I can say to people like that. Really? Really? Well, my soup isn't as
• 23:35
  warm as I'd like it, it's just like the Holocaust. Now, quit annexing, quit annexing the horrors of
• 23:45
  the 20th century that have been so real and so vivid. Just be grateful. Be grateful that the worst
• 23:50
  problem you have is this one. And it's a bad enough problem. I don't want to minimize it, but
• 23:57
  but you just have to sense to understand the difference in rules that are maybe excessively
• 24:02
  bureaucratic or, you know, that many of the rules, many of them are going to turn out to be ill judged,
• 24:09
  that it turns out we, you will know that as we've seen, the people knew more in June of 2020 than they
• 24:14
  did in January and February and knew more later. And yes, some of the rules were ill judged. And
• 24:22
  yeah, and absolutely, if rules are excessive and pedophogging and bureaucratic and unnecessary,
• 24:28
  raise fuss about them, but just understand that it's not like it's not tyranny, it's just bureaucracy.
• 24:37
  And it's not, it's not like you're right, you're, you're, it's annoying, but it's not oppressive.
• 24:43
  And have, just have some perspective and maybe that's something we, we really need.
• 24:48
  It sounds like you've been spying on my Twitter conversations with, with Tim Poole and other sort
• 24:53
  of annotators in the America. And look, I get that Australia had an especially stringent
• 25:00
  approach to the pandemic. And I can imagine that it was annoying and that a lot of
• 25:08
  probably was excessive. And I can see why people are mad about that. Those are, you know, I don't
• 25:12
  want to diminish any of that. I just, just knock off the self aggrandizing comparisons. They are,
• 25:19
  they, I would say the people who make them are, in most cases, too ignorant to be offensive.
• 25:27
  But if they were a little less ignorant, they would be, because it's the only history they know,
• 25:31
  so they can't, there's nothing else they have to compare it to. But, but really.
• 25:37
  Yeah, I mean, I try to give them a pass on the basis of ignorance as well, because I, at least,
• 25:41
  that's the most charitable interpretation of what they're doing. I mean, the, you know,
• 25:45
  the retort there, and this can, this can sort of bring us to your broader political philosophy.
• 25:51
  The retort from the people who are very, very agitated about government overreach during
• 25:56
  the pandemic in places like Australia is sure it might just be bureaucratic and a bureaucratic
• 26:05
  annoyance now. Even things as extreme, for example, as being essentially incarcerated in a hotel
• 26:11
  for two weeks by the Australian government, because you are a close contact of a person who has
• 26:17
  a coronavirus in a jurisdiction where there is no coronavirus and low rates of vaccination and,
• 26:22
  if first nations or indigenous communities or something like that, like that is a genuine
• 26:27
  infringement on a person's right to liberty to lock them up for two weeks. But the extra step
• 26:34
  that the people who I get into arguments with in the States take is that what I am not seeing is
• 26:40
  that this is the thin edge of the wedge. What I'm not seeing is that these hotels will never go away.
• 26:44
  What I'm not seeing is that these quarantine facilities are actually concentration camps where
• 26:48
  right now it's the person who was a close contact of a coronavirus patient. But tomorrow it'll be
• 26:53
  the person who chooses to be unvaccinated and the next day it'll be people who disagree politically
• 26:58
  with the Australian government. Now, I see no evidence of that as someone who's sort of
• 27:03
  broadly, progressively, libertarianly sort of centrist. I just sort of think, you know,
• 27:09
  you do, you take extreme measures when you need to take extreme measures because there's a public
• 27:13
  health emergency. And then as New South Wales has done over the past two months, the most
• 27:18
  popular state in Australia, you unwind those measures and you let Omicron rip because you've reached
• 27:24
  a level of vaccination and hospital capacity that you're comfortable with and you go, we're not
• 27:28
  going to live in an authoritarian regime forever. We're a liberal democracy. So let's go. Now is the
• 27:34
  moment to pull the trigger. It strikes me that these people are continually rebuffed by reality in
• 27:42
  their fears that authoritarianism is just around the corner. Yet that fear strikes me as quite
• 27:47
  common on the right. And I wonder whether you share it or whether you shared it, not in the context
• 27:51
  of the pandemic, but in the context of government, choir, government. A stop sign is not the first step
• 27:59
  on the slippery slope toward the total abolition of motion. You know, that there, we're reasoning people
• 28:09
  who live in a democracy, who are coping with a new problem. And we're having real battles and
• 28:18
  they're about how risk averse to be. And I'm not saying that and many of the thing, and I think
• 28:24
  when we look back on it, we'll discover that some jurisdictions may have been to risk averse.
• 28:28
  And that money was wasted. And the thing that, of course, I think ultimately worry about the most
• 28:35
  is the damage to the education of children at impressionable years. And that's going to be a huge
• 28:40
  debate whether whether we did too much about that. So I'm not saying everything was right. I'm just
• 28:44
  saying that the governments have been run by people of goodwill, people trying to do the best job
• 28:50
  they can within constraints with terribly imperfect information under a lot of conflicting public
• 28:57
  pressures. And that they've, there's been no malice here. There've been, I'm sure lots of
• 29:05
  mistakes, but there's been no malice. And the idea that everything is the first step on the so
• 29:09
  that that human human beings cannot say draw distinctions, I was trained as a lawyer. The whole
• 29:17
  point of law is to draw distinctions and distinctions are often arbitrary. And one last thing about,
• 29:22
  about politics. So I came of age in the late 1970s and that was a very formative period of my
• 29:29
  political life. The story of what I saw in the world when I was becoming politically aware
• 29:35
  was a world that was and not just in the United States and Canada where I was born but in country
• 29:40
  after country that was dismantling the restrictions left over from the Great Depression and World War
• 29:45
  2. And many of the some of these restrictions had been silly when they were put in place. Some of
• 29:51
  them were necessary. Most of them lasted longer than they should. But it was, it was not going to be
• 30:00
  true forever. I mean, so long as you have a democratic government, you have the ability to correct
• 30:04
  excessive regulations. And so, you know, it took the British a long time to repeal their
• 30:11
  World War pub licensing hour rules, but they did. It's still hard to get a beer in London after
• 30:18
  midnight. I'll tell you what, but yeah, but it used to be hard. It used to be you couldn't get one
• 30:23
  in the afternoon. They had these rules left over from the First World War where they closed the
• 30:29
  pubs during what should have been factory working hours. So the idea is you could go to the pub at
• 30:33
  lunch and have your pub lunch. But then, you know, whenever they were supposed to blow the factory
• 30:37
  whistle, the pubs all closed and they then didn't reopen until the factories were. And that lasted
• 30:42
  until I think the factory era. Okay, so time to get that should have, they probably should have got
• 30:47
  rid of that in the 50s instead of in the 70s. But that wasn't because the British government was
• 30:53
  proceeding along a pre-meditated plan to abolish pubs altogether and like slicing away an hour
• 31:00
  a year. It was, they had done something in 1917 that seemed like a good idea at the time and then
• 31:05
  they found it hard to change course. And that will be our real problem that we have built many
• 31:09
  bureaucracies to fight COVID. And it will be hard to dismantle them. I was going to be an authentic.
• 31:14
  Yeah, that's just, but just, just copy. Just understand what the, what the real problems of
• 31:20
  bureaucracy are because those are difficult enough without inventing the imaginary problems of,
• 31:25
  you know, it's going to be Logan's run and they're going to kill everybody at 30.
• 31:29
  So let's, yeah, so let's take the, let's pivot then from the, from the extreme hysterical trolls
• 31:36
  to the, you know, my, my reasonable friends, I never would have thought that in a conversation
• 31:39
  with David from I feel like the conservative. But here I feel a little bit like the conservative
• 31:43
  who says, yeah, even if it's not a willing path to, well, a willing road to surf them to, to,
• 31:50
  to quote a great, a great thinker, even if it's just the gradual accidental accretion of power that
• 31:55
  then becomes self-perpetuating, we've seen time and again from the war on terror, you know, to,
• 32:01
  to the powers that governments will, will take. It's very, very difficult to unwind. You often do
• 32:07
  need a Reagan or a Thatcher or someone like that to do that. And that is politically and
• 32:11
  electorally difficult. The, the tendency of government is to turn everything into the DMV
• 32:17
  and everything into the postal service. Government doesn't work very well, but make it small.
• 32:21
  Is, am I articulating something that motivated you? Well, why are you a conservative?
• 32:25
  Yeah, I, I think I agree with all of that or most of it. But what I would say is that means
• 32:31
  you have to understand that the problem is the problem with maintaining good government in a free
• 32:37
  society. It's much more like taking care of the lawn than it is like dealing with the invading
• 32:42
  visitors. So, you know, you, you just need to make constant micro-judgments about when do you
• 32:47
  cut the grass? You know, when do you weed? What, what, you know, you want to, you don't want to keep
• 32:53
  everything perfect. You want to have a little bit of chaos, but too much. And, and so that's a,
• 32:57
  that's a problem. It's always a problem with any kind of controls. I mean, when do you, you're,
• 33:02
  you know, you're, you're always engaged in a struggle where sometimes controls are growing and then
• 33:07
  sometimes they need to be shrunk and sometimes you shrink them too much and you realize that was a
• 33:11
  mistake. I mean, one of the things that I, I've lived through. So, the great era in all the
• 33:16
  democracies of decontrolled was the period from the middle 70s to the early 80s. And the first
• 33:22
  things that were decontrolled is in the United States, but in other countries too, were transportation,
• 33:26
  shipping, airlines, trucking. All of that had been controlled from, we could, during the
• 33:30
  depression of the war and we decontrolled all those things and it was a spectacular success. And
• 33:36
  it's, it's improved our lives in so many ways I could go on and on. And then the next thing that
• 33:41
  happened was we had this, these energy problems in the 70s that trace back to controls on the price
• 33:45
  of oil and natural gas. And those were decontrolled. And that was a tremendous success. It ended the
• 33:51
  shortages that brought up forth new supply. And, and people of my age who were, my generation,
• 33:57
  are a little older, people had a little bit more power said, okay, well, decontrolling transportation
• 34:01
  worked and decontrolling energy worked. Let's decontroll finance and let's deconstruct all the
• 34:07
  controls that were put in place during the Great Depression that separated banking from investment
• 34:12
  banking and investment banking from insurance. And that was a disaster. And the point is not that
• 34:19
  that, that proved that decontrolling was wrong or that, or that the early success proved that
• 34:25
  decontrolling was, the point was that decontrolling some things was good and decontrolling other things
• 34:29
  was bad. And sometimes you learn painfully, it's good if you can anticipate, but that's not always
• 34:34
  possible. And, and the task of politics, the thing that makes politics so incredibly difficult
• 34:43
  is it's a series of constantly making these estimated judgments within perfect information.
• 34:48
  And, and, and moving things along. And the, and the problem, I think, and COVID, the reactions
• 34:54
  on people to COVID has exposed this is they fundamentally anti-political minds. That what they see
• 35:00
  is that the world is like, it's like Dr. Frankenstein's huge switch. And when you pull it down,
• 35:07
  you're in total darkness. And if you push it up, you've got, you know, enough electricity to
• 35:11
  reanimate a corpse. It's a down or up, that's it, two positions. And that's not how it works.
• 35:17
  They're, they're just millions of constantly millions of choices. And we're always approximating. And
• 35:23
  they're often imperfect. And that is the conservative point of view is to understand that politics
• 35:29
  is a very approximate business. And, and you can get quite a lot of things wrong in a good society
• 35:35
  without it ceasing to be a good society. That's interesting. It's a, yes, it's an incremental
• 35:40
  question, isn't it, governance? This, you're reminding me a bit of this argument about whether
• 35:44
  or not Australia's quarantine facilities are quote unquote, concentration camps, which certain
• 35:49
  people insist that I call them to which I say, well, if you want to call a concentration camp,
• 35:53
  then we can have a semantic quibble. But like, let's actually talk about the underlying question
• 35:57
  of when it is and is not appropriate to quarantine individuals, like how bad the pathogen would
• 36:00
  have to be because I can, I'm sure I can invent a thought scenario in which Ebola breaks out
• 36:06
  in Alaska. And you don't want it to get to mainland United States. And so you invoke some kind
• 36:11
  of quarantine. And then if you're in support of that, then we all agree that concentration camps
• 36:15
  are good in some circumstances. And then let's just figure out exactly when and the critique of
• 36:19
  Australia. No, let's, let's not give them the other, let's say, obviously it's a total drag
• 36:24
  to be confined to a hotel room for two weeks. I wouldn't like it at all. Question, does it have
• 36:28
  pillows? Yes. It's not a concentration camp, free Wi-Fi, quite good catering for three
• 36:36
  meals a week. Yeah. But like, the thing you were talking to anyone who's over 14 years old,
• 36:42
  is you should be able to understand the difference between something being kind of a drag
• 36:45
  and something being a concentration camp. Yeah. Like, are you a teenager? Like, really? A lot of
• 36:52
  things are talking, you know, yeah, it's a drag. It's a drag. And maybe, and it's worse than a drag
• 36:58
  if later on, it turns out, you know, this was excessive and some things that were done that were
• 37:02
  not necessary. I think it's not only a drag, it's a waste of my time. And I hated that, but I did
• 37:08
  have pillows. Yeah, I did have pillows. And I think the other thing that people hate about it is
• 37:15
  anytime you're interfacing with government bureaucracy and there are rules that have to be enforced,
• 37:20
  the rules seem arbitrary at the edges. Like, there are videos that have gone viral of, you know,
• 37:26
  a woman who was a sort of anti, a very, a great, um, opponent of Australia's policies,
• 37:32
  who was in at how springs, which is this quarantine, these quarantine bungalows out in near Darwin
• 37:39
  in the Northern Territory. And she's on her balcony and she's saying she's arguing with one of the,
• 37:44
  health workers who's in protective gear about why she can't, if she's outside, why she can't
• 37:49
  cross this line that is demarcating her bungalow from the bungalow next door. And of course,
• 37:55
  it sounds horrendous to be told that you can't cross this line. Like, who gives a shit whether
• 37:59
  you cross the line? Like, what difference is it going to make if you cross the line? And all
• 38:03
  government rules are like that. Like, what differences it make, whether I take this stupid liquids
• 38:08
  onto the plane in 100 mil, you know, think bottles or 200 mil bottles. We all know it's stupid. And yet,
• 38:15
  that is like, that is how rules function. And if rules are going to operate at all, then they do
• 38:19
  have to be enforced at some point, annoying as it might be. Um, on this question of incrementalism
• 38:24
  versus the, the sort of 14 year olds immature attitude towards political science where there's
• 38:29
  an on and off switch between tyranny and, and non tyranny. I'm interested in that because your
• 38:35
  right, let's get to your political career here. I mean, the, the administration that you were a
• 38:38
  part of the, the first, uh, Bush administration, that is regarded as being one of the Republican
• 38:45
  administrations that was quite binary in its outlook. Um, perhaps with good reasons since 9-11
• 38:49
  happened. Uh, but this was not, uh, this was not your grandfather's Republican administration
• 38:54
  with very cautious, incremental ideas about the world. This was a, uh, uh, uh, a worldview
• 38:59
  that you helped to foster in that White House, which was there are good guys and bad guys,
• 39:03
  and we are in an existential fight. How do you place that now?
• 39:08
  Yeah. Um, uh, I always have, um, uh, sort of a, uh, cross imperatives when I talk about the
• 39:17
  Bush administration because, um, on the one hand, I'm certainly honored to have had the chance
• 39:22
  to serve it. Um, and, um, I respect my colleagues and I want to champion their work. So I speak out
• 39:30
  for them. On the other hand, um, there is a tendency. I see this a lot on Twitter to make it seem
• 39:33
  like it was me, George, me, Dick Taney and George Bush in the room. And so I, I don't want to say
• 39:39
  anything that disavowals responsibility, but I also need to keep in perspective my, my role in the
• 39:44
  scheme of things in that administration. So, um, not everything that the Bush administration did,
• 39:50
  they did. I agreed with not everything they did at very little of what they did. They did because
• 39:55
  of me. You went at the puppet master behind the strings, uh, pulling Dick Taney's. I'm sometimes,
• 40:01
  I'm sometimes, you know, uh, there's a line of Abraham Lincoln's, um, about the man who's written
• 40:08
  tarred feathered and written out of town on, on a rail. And, uh, he says afterwards, reflecting on
• 40:12
  the experience, if it weren't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather have walked. So, so, so I,
• 40:19
  I read about myself on Twitter. And I think, I mean, there are a lot of, there's actually a weird
• 40:24
  kind of, you know, compliment to me. So I'm not going to disavow it. What was your job title? David,
• 40:30
  what, how were you brought in? What, what, what job were you offered technically?
• 40:34
  So I, I will tell you the job that I need to introduce it by pointing out that in Washington,
• 40:38
  there's a rule, the longer your title, the less important your job and the shorter your title,
• 40:43
  the more important job. So, yeah, right. Potus, right. President is more important than Chief of Staff.
• 40:50
  I was special assistant to the president for economic speech writing.
• 40:56
  Is it true or apocryphal that you came up with the term axis of evil in, in the state of the union?
• 41:02
  It's, it's both, um, because, look, writing for writing a, writing any presidential speech,
• 41:07
  but especially instead of the union, it's like writing the script for Transformers 4.
• 41:11
  They don't exactly have authors. They have committees of authorship.
• 41:17
  And so, uh, so parts of that speech came out of things I wrote, including that section.
• 41:25
  But it's not like I wrote it and in it went. I wrote it and it went into a committee and
• 41:29
  it's another committee. And, and so, so, you know, I, I would say I take responsibility without
• 41:35
  taking credit. Right. And, and busy. You have, I have to be realistic about this.
• 41:40
  But about the binary, yeah, that's, that's true. That, that's, um, and one of the things where the
• 41:45
  Bush administration got, I think, into some trouble with the judgment of history is they didn't act
• 41:49
  in a binary way, but they spoke in a binary way. And that created, that just created a lot of
• 41:54
  political possibilities. We're, we're inviting, we're inviting a country that didn't have
• 41:57
  anything to do with the, the attack acting in a binary way in the sense that it had a mechanism.
• 42:01
  Let me give you a more modest, well, view. Before getting to that, let me give you a more modest
• 42:05
  example, and then we'll build it to the most controversial. President Bush said, you're either
• 42:09
  with us or you with the terrorists. And it's okay. Uh, so what about General Musharraf in Pakistan?
• 42:16
  He's sort of both. And they were able to say, yeah, okay, you know what, as a function, you know,
• 42:21
  we will say, and this is, this is the mismatch, they would say you're with us or you're with the
• 42:24
  terrorists. But then there was a lot of room for the Musharrafs of this world. They would deal
• 42:28
  with him. I know he's sort of with us and he's sort of, and he's sort of with the terrorists. So,
• 42:33
  so I think in general, one of the things, there's always an argument as
• 42:39
  administrations between more idealistic and less idealistic people. Do you say noble words and
• 42:44
  try to bring the actions of the line with the words or do you accept what the actions are
• 42:47
  going to be and then try to bring the words into line with the action? And my preference would be
• 42:52
  the second, but my job was the first. Right. My job, the only thing I had any control over was
• 43:00
  was the words. And because of the intense emotions of the time, yeah, I think as the words tended
• 43:08
  to get hot, but it's a little bit like what happens with COVID now is if the words hadn't been hot,
• 43:13
  we would have been in terror, but the country was hot. And it wanted hot words. And so politicians
• 43:18
  don't get to govern exactly the way they think they do. You know, with Iraq,
• 43:24
  yeah, they're, you know, I've written about this. There are a lot of things went terribly wrong
• 43:29
  without decision making process. And the most important part was, is that they never united
• 43:35
  the means to the end. So we never understood you never had the meeting where they said, look,
• 43:40
  this is what is involved. This is what it's going to cost realistically. And we're going to take
• 43:48
  the best advice, not which we're thinking. Is it worth it? My conversation as far as I know never
• 43:54
  happened. In fact, it's very hard to identify the moment where the decision to war was made. I was
• 44:00
  just writing about this this week for the Atlantic was we're coming toward the 25th anniversary of
• 44:03
  the axis of evil speech, which was at the end of January of 2002, that the subjective experience
• 44:09
  of being in that administration was for the longest time the decision about Iraq was in the future.
• 44:13
  And you say, well, if we do it, what should we do? And when we worked on the axis of evil speech,
• 44:18
  that was the question, if the president is going to talk about Iraq, what some language he might say.
• 44:23
  So you didn't write a speech about going to war with Iraq, you wrote, now he could say this,
• 44:27
  he could say, I wrote, and I wrote so many different things, he could take this approach,
• 44:31
  take that approach, here are some things he could say, if this is his decision. But it was
• 44:35
  conditional, it was in the future. Another came a moment when it was in the past that the decision
• 44:40
  had been made. But historians have gone through this. You can't find the moment where it was in
• 44:45
  the present where they went round the table and said, go, no go. And that's I think one of the
• 44:49
  reasons that war delivered such disappointing results is I mean, it's sort of it didn't it wasn't
• 44:55
  it wasn't really argued through. It's sort of in it's infuriating as a as a member of the
• 45:02
  demos to to hear that and think about that in the sense that there were people, I mean, you and I
• 45:09
  could easily, it would take us five minutes to find a hundred different names of people in
• 45:13
  Washington who was screaming from the rooftops trying to articulate the position that you're saying
• 45:19
  never got articulated in any meeting in the White House that there, you know, let's be realistic
• 45:24
  about the costs. I mean, I remember, you know, I was at university, but I remember the the
• 45:30
  opinion articles being written about what the cost was going to be. I remember actually being
• 45:33
  interviewed at the time on I was on a panel on a radio show and I was saying that I would support
• 45:39
  the war if I could see a trillion dollar Marshall plan on the table, but I can't support it in,
• 45:46
  you know, because of the chaos that it might produce. And I was just need it. I was just a young
• 45:50
  idiot like the idea that that didn't filter through can only be because the White House didn't
• 45:56
  want it to and that decision that you're saying never got made had been made in within the the
• 46:02
  craniums of the people in the White House long before it should have been made and outside of any
• 46:07
  to be processed. And I think one of the problems it had been made back in the 1990s when this takes
• 46:14
  there's a long history here, which is it's almost saying it had been a problem for a long time.
• 46:20
  And and I think there are a lot of people who thought if there's ever a chance to do anything,
• 46:27
  we should do. And then comes on 11 and people, okay, here's our chance. And they didn't absorb
• 46:33
  enough, look, this is a world changing event. And you need to take out some clean pieces of paper
• 46:39
  and start your thinking process all over again. So I think there are a lot of, but as if we're
• 46:46
  going to not be binary, it also needs to be said, look, since I'm saying was also an incredibly
• 46:52
  oppressive and dangerous person who who had plunged into who had started major wars against
• 47:01
  his neighbors. And he was a bad risk calculator. And he and he was a real global security
• 47:08
  challenge, maybe not the most important one that the world faced. But there is a kind of tendency
• 47:12
  now to say, oh, well, if only things things had been left alone, if we have in Syria a model of
• 47:18
  what happens with those kinds of dictatorships eventually collapse of their own weight.
• 47:24
  So it wasn't like there was some, you know, that was the most likely alternative future for a rack
• 47:30
  is that the Saddam Hussein regime would have collapsed of its own weight unleashing the kind of chaos
• 47:35
  a few years earlier, perhaps, that that came to it eventually and that would be more like the
• 47:40
  situation that we saw in Syria. So it remains to my mind a very hard call about what was
• 47:49
  how to think about it and what to say about it. And what we can now see is that ironically is that
• 47:54
  in Iraq, at this point, American policy looks a lot more successful than it did in Afghanistan,
• 48:00
  which is the war that everybody said at the time was the good war where all the resources should go.
• 48:04
  Right, because I mean, that may be partly because all of the resources were withdrawn from Afghanistan
• 48:07
  in order to focus on Iraq. And if there'd been some more nation building, I mean, who knows what
• 48:12
  would have happened in Afghanistan? Are you a fatalist about about that venture necessarily having
• 48:17
  filed? I am a fatalist about it. And I think one of the things I remember very keenly is one of the
• 48:24
  reasons I was and I was much more in favor of Iraq was I knew the administration was going to do
• 48:29
  things and Iraq seemed to me a better bet than Afghanistan always seemed to me a hopeless
• 48:34
  proposition that you couldn't modernize it and that it was very important not to get trapped there.
• 48:39
  And there's one other matter involving Afghanistan that takes us up to the crisis of the present.
• 48:45
  Or Afghanistan is landlocked and Western armies use a lot of supplies. So if you're going to keep
• 48:51
  an American and allied coalition force in the field living the way coalition forces do using the
• 48:56
  fuel they do and the weaponry they do, there are two ways to supply that army. One is by truck
• 49:00
  through Pakistan and the others by railway through Russia. So whatever if you have more than in
• 49:06
  the first month of the war when there are like a couple hundred special forces operators in
• 49:10
  Afghanistan you can do it by air. But once you had a big presence your the Western coalition
• 49:15
  was going to be hostage to either Pakistan or Russia or both and had always struck me as I remember
• 49:20
  confronting this I made two visits to Afghanistan not at the very beginning but you know in the
• 49:27
  earlier part of the 2000s and this was just so impressed on me that everything you touched had come
• 49:32
  either via Pakistan or via Russia and this was untenable and it just and I became convinced then
• 49:41
  I was and I was writing with this that America's over invested over committed to Afghanistan and
• 49:47
  it will never have any freedom in its foreign policy against too much bigger problems Russian
• 49:51
  Pakistan so long as it's got this large force based in Afghanistan. Why are you conservative David?
• 49:57
  Well according if you listen to a lot of people in the United States now I've been hooded from the
• 50:03
  club. You're a cock. So I don't use I now say I am conservative I'm a conservative minded person
• 50:12
  but to the extent that conservatism means belonging to a movement I mean I resisted this
• 50:17
  except for a long time but I have to accept I probably don't. Both the movement has changed
• 50:22
  and I have changed and that the things that most people who are agreed to be conservatives now
• 50:27
  would stand for I don't but when I came in I came in I I probably was formed by family memories
• 50:39
  of the totalitarian struggles in the middle 20th century I believed in world peace kept by
• 50:47
  Western power especially American power I believed in frantic rise and free trade.
• 50:51
  I believed in knitting together the democracies and ever closer connection.
• 50:57
  I was very opposed to big social experiments especially the economy and attempts to use
• 51:04
  state power to accelerate social development I believe you should let things grow on their own
• 51:10
  terms. So those were those are things that in the late 70s and early 80s pulled me into
• 51:15
  Republican and conservative politics. Today many of the things that I then believe in and still
• 51:22
  believe in are intensely rejected by the conservative world and meanwhile I think I have changed
• 51:28
  in some ways in that I am even more cautious about big projects than I was before and even more
• 51:40
  insistent on the importance of social peace so when people say I'm going to take my rifle and
• 51:46
  and to the ballot but I mean it makes me crazy I just find that utterly unacceptable and I
• 51:54
  have a lot of respect for knowledge and expertise in politics which in the world of Donald Trump
• 51:59
  that is yeah that disqualifies you right there. When you say it drives you crazy when people say
• 52:04
  they're going to take their rifle to the ballot box are you speaking literally about gun rights?
• 52:08
  I speak that people in the United States literally do take their rifle. We had a lot of this in 2016
• 52:14
  where you see people who will we have rules about balloting and you can only come so close but
• 52:20
  there'll be people who bring weapons and you think weapons are an important part of politics and
• 52:26
  oh who what you mean not when they're voting but you mean they'll stand by a ballot box with a weapon
• 52:30
  while other people vote yes yes we have a lot of that wow what what do they think they're doing
• 52:36
  oh they think they're protecting the voting system from what from people who might be misusing
• 52:41
  fake IDs or something to to vote yeah I put a lot of sarcastic emphasis on the or something there
• 52:47
  they that's not even protecting the ballot box from right it's extraordinary isn't it the yeah
• 52:58
  I mean I don't even know where to go I don't even know whether to open the can of worms about guns
• 53:01
  but why don't we just dip our toe into it for two minutes because the it it may tease out
• 53:06
  something about libertarianism versus small sea conservatism in your mind you know what are the
• 53:13
  what are the appropriate parameters of state control over weapons so to my way of thinking one of
• 53:25
  things that happens when you move from wildness to civilization is that people don't need to carry
• 53:31
  weapons around with them all the time that if you're in a dangerous situation whether because the
• 53:37
  society is unsettled or because like people on the front lines and in Ukraine facing a Russian
• 53:41
  invasion that you you have to valid questions about your security then it becomes both a right
• 53:47
  in a duty of the citizens to to prepare themselves and if authority breaks down they they're going
• 53:52
  to have to prepare themselves in whatever informal authority they can put together but if you have
• 53:58
  the good fortune to live in a settled democracy where the courts are open where your rights are
• 54:04
  protected where the police are honest and come one called I and you don't live and you're not living
• 54:11
  in a rural area protecting your chickens from the coyotes you're actually contemplating using your
• 54:16
  weapon against a fellow using a weapon that is intended against fellow human beings I think you
• 54:21
  really need to to check yourself you really need to check yourself and I'm less interested in what
• 54:26
  the the rules should be as to what how people should think about this themselves I mean we I
• 54:33
  I collect I've written about this sometimes now I collect just there are hundreds of terrible
• 54:37
  stories about Americans killing their children hurting themselves because they bought a weapon
• 54:42
  that they thought would protect their family they would make them a good husband a good father
• 54:46
  and they leave behind terrible tragedy which if they had just been more realistic didn't have to
• 54:54
  I can hear Californian Republicans saying that's all very nice from from your close to tower David
• 55:04
  from but over here in California there are people walking into Wal-Mart and just carrying out
• 55:10
  shopping trolleys with $900 worth of goods which apparently is now what you're allowed to steal
• 55:15
  without being prosecuted in in California there are homeless people getting into drug-induced
• 55:20
  fights all over the streets of Venice Beach and then I can hear the the left wing progressive
• 55:25
  woke person in my head also saying yeah it's all very nice to say that you live in a civilized
• 55:30
  society where police are honest and they come when they're called do you know how long it takes
• 55:33
  police to come when you're in New Orleans or the south side of Chicago that's not the world that we
• 55:37
  live in yeah okay there's I think there's there's some truth to both of those points of view well
• 55:42
  what I say so what's the plan you're going you and your friends are going to go to target and start
• 55:46
  shooting shoplifters like what's the plan you know my plan is that you or you and your friends get
• 55:54
  together and you elect some state legislatures legislators and a DA and you cost the shoplifters
• 56:00
  in jail where they belong and and if they are aggressive and violent you summon trained professionals
• 56:07
  who can control them ideally without the loss of human life and let them do the job but the I
• 56:14
  but the idea that you're going to that you are going to be like a figure in a western confronting
• 56:21
  the Apache that you are going to be the killer yourself well first you're probably not I mean I
• 56:26
  I think one of my replies to a lot of John enthusiast is you're not as good a driver as you think you
• 56:31
  are your jokes aren't as funny as you think they are and you're not as good with a gun as you
• 56:35
  think probably not as good a lover as you think you are we can we increase the list here as far as
• 56:40
  you want to go you probably don't make it just as well as you think you do your friends talk exactly
• 56:47
  you know I like many I've been to gun ranges and I get pretty good scores but never with someone
• 56:57
  you know never with hundreds of weapons going off at the same time and people shooting back at me
• 57:02
  I have no idea I'm sure I miss everything and so just I don't understand what is being
• 57:10
  achieved here and I agree I mean the breakdown of law and order in some of the cities of
• 57:14
  California and by the way where I live in Washington DC we we are having a car jacking a day at
• 57:18
  scenes I mean we have we have a real problem with I don't want to minimize that but the way we meet
• 57:27
  criminality is with effective law enforcement not with vigilanteism what do you make of the the
• 57:32
  cult I mentioned woke there which is a word that I try not to use but it does we all know what
• 57:37
  it's what it means at this point and as I mean in your capacity as a journalist I mean having
• 57:42
  been the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal during the we haven't even gotten to
• 57:46
  that part of your career but in case people are unaware you you you ran the opinion page of the
• 57:51
  Wall Street Journal was that during Bush seniors administration yeah long long ago yeah I guess
• 57:58
  you're in the first person yeah first push yeah first push and you know now you're at the Atlantic
• 58:05
  there has been this steady exodus of people leaving the storied institutions of American journalism
• 58:10
  from Andrew Sullivan to Barry Weiss and others who feel that the climate has just become impossible
• 58:16
  to have the kinds of I suppose the kinds of conversations that I like to have on this podcast as
• 58:20
  well and I'm constantly asked whether or not I'm on the precipice of being fired from my my role
• 58:26
  at a public broadcaster in Australia as well as a result of touching sensitive topics is the
• 58:31
  situation as dire as some say less dire where are you um I I think it's it's complicated I mean I
• 58:41
  look it is clearly true that there are a lot of subjects that are important where there are two
• 58:46
  sides of the question or multiple sides of the question where it's harder to have an honest
• 58:50
  conversation than it was 20 years ago I know you know in in Australia and in my native Canada how
• 58:58
  you can talk about the real problems of indigenous societies and the rights and wrongs of
• 59:04
  indigenous peoples that that's a harder harder thing to talk honestly about than it used to be
• 59:09
  and that's a problem because you need you need it makes it it's like a self self blinding their
• 59:14
  self-stupifying thing if you say we're gonna just take all kind we're gonna take all kinds of
• 59:18
  things that that are true or arguably true or there's evidence for we're not sure whether true
• 59:23
  or we're just gonna say you you know just this is what John Stuart Mill warned about a long time
• 59:27
  ago if you start saying they're just we're just gonna take huge things that might be true that
• 59:32
  people might want to say and forbid them to say I'm not by law but through social sanction you lose
• 59:37
  your job you lose your friends can you just give some some shape to the kind of huge things you're
• 59:41
  talking about because some people will be thinking oh but we talk much more about indigenous
• 59:45
  uh problems than what than we used to 20 years ago let me use a Canadian example so Canada has
• 59:50
  been rent by the discovery of graves in which students who attended boarding schools had been
• 59:57
  buried after they died and and this has been presented as if this is something that has just been
• 1:00:04
  discovered that nobody knew about it and that the students were all victims of malicious destruction
• 1:00:11
  um and that uh it implicated Canada in a form of genocide um and
• 1:00:20
  in fact these these things have been known about forever um the the the reason that great for
• 1:00:26
  example graves are described as unmarked the reason they're unmarked is because um these were
• 1:00:30
  often very rural places and the gravestones had disintegrated or fallen away it wasn't that people
• 1:00:35
  had been tossed in the ground it was the graves have been marked but not marked in a way that met
• 1:00:39
  the the passage of time over a century um or and and the people were dying from not because
• 1:00:45
  somebody was murdering them but because uh but because of diseases that were poorly understood
• 1:00:49
  that um where the medicines hadn't been invented yet um and that doesn't make any of it less heart
• 1:00:54
  rending and it doesn't mean that it it makes it a good idea to take people who have poor disease
• 1:01:00
  resistance and who live in isolated places and to group them together in schools with hundreds of
• 1:01:04
  other people where once a disease gets in it's going to have this terrible effect but you um but
• 1:01:08
  you just you just need to not present this as as a different thing from what it was and if we
• 1:01:14
  talked about this in 1996 we could say all those things and the things i've just said if i i don't
• 1:01:19
  know if you're sure listeners in Canada but if it does i will be in a lot of trouble because you
• 1:01:23
  you you can't say that um and there are many many other examples at the same time and this is
• 1:01:30
  what is called wokeism and i don't know exactly what it means a lot of the things that they say
• 1:01:35
  are true a lot of the things they say are important and uh and just as we make society dumber when we
• 1:01:42
  say there are things that you um can't say because they're insufficient and efficiently progressive
• 1:01:48
  we also make society dumber when you say you know one of the things that there's a huge argument
• 1:01:51
  about is how integral was slavery to the development of the united states not just
• 1:01:57
  after the creation of the the independence and the writing of the constitution but even before in
• 1:02:01
  the um first century so the american existence and one of the things that the so-called wokes have
• 1:02:06
  been very persistent about is it slavery was absolutely the country would not look the way it does
• 1:02:11
  it wouldn't have developed the way it did without it's you cannot tell the story of america with
• 1:02:14
  slavery as a sidebar it's integral and i think they're right about that and and that's good
• 1:02:20
  knowledge to have and and everyone involved is dead and that doesn't mean we have to say we're not
• 1:02:25
  going to be prosecuting people which is if we want to know ourselves and know where we came from
• 1:02:30
  we have to know that um and you know in in so many areas like um i think some of the woke i mean
• 1:02:38
  the me two episode has faded a little bit but there too you had a challenge of much of what happened
• 1:02:44
  in the name of me two was healthy um was was a way of bringing a kind of if not justice exactly
• 1:02:51
  wholeness to people who had been wronged and then their parts of it that were um
• 1:02:55
  accusatory and due process was trampled and i i i just want to go back to this incremental point that
• 1:03:01
  a lot of things can be true at the same time and things can be partially true and some one of the
• 1:03:06
  things that is hard for a certain type of mentality to deal with is that the partial truth the thing
• 1:03:11
  that that contains some good and some bad and you have to find some way to call the good from the bad
• 1:03:17
  there's also uh there's a large missed opportunity at the moment i think in the pushback against
• 1:03:24
  what's being called wokeness in the sense that a lot of great minds are essentially just
• 1:03:29
  expending a huge amount of intellectual effort and time in saying you're going too far here you're
• 1:03:35
  being a little bit hysterical there your emphasis is wrong right here you know i sort of have to
• 1:03:42
  keep checking myself as as well and it's useful to hear you articulate what you just did and other
• 1:03:47
  people i respect like tyla tyla cown wrote a piece about wokeness saying yeah of course it's
• 1:03:52
  going to be a little bit extreme but you know overall if you could if you could nudge the entire
• 1:03:56
  planet to be 5% more woke wouldn't that be a good thing and if america's greatest uh greatest
• 1:04:03
  ability is its culture is its ability to export its cultural norms and its memes then isn't that a
• 1:04:09
  bit of meme to be exporting than any other crazy thing that people who go too far in their ideology
• 1:04:15
  might want to believe in like q1on or something and i don't want it yeah i don't want to trample
• 1:04:21
  the like what happens in some of the worst of these woke excesses is that individual people
• 1:04:26
  get trampled and not the jk rowlings who are billionaires and world famous and have movie deals
• 1:04:32
  and i mean i'm sure it's upsetting and you know very rich people also are entitled to be treated
• 1:04:38
  like people but still she's got a certain amount of insulation but there are lots of much smaller
• 1:04:42
  versions of her and people get get bullied and trampled and and they're they lose the ability to
• 1:04:50
  publish a book that is meaningful to them then i i never want to sacrifice the individual for some
• 1:04:54
  larger cause of social justice the individual matters so i'm not going to say that make we make
• 1:04:58
  the world 5% more woke we can we can learn from it while protecting individual people from
• 1:05:05
  false accusations right but i mean but maybe you can't i mean cown's point i think is that any any
• 1:05:12
  almost revolutionary overhaul and maybe that's anathema to the years of a moderate incrementalist
• 1:05:17
  like you but any any real overhaul in the way that a culture thinks about itself is going to have
• 1:05:22
  people who get line innocent people getting lined up by the firing squad and there just will be
• 1:05:27
  examples of of that if you try to shift from a an environment in which it's normal for male
• 1:05:32
  employers to slap females on the arson to call them toots to one in which that person is truly
• 1:05:38
  held accountable there's going to have to be such an uprising of female rage that you're going
• 1:05:44
  to have the Aziz Ansaris and the Louis CK's whatever you think of them getting caught in the in
• 1:05:48
  the firing line do you do not believe that that may happen but we can we can as individuals in our
• 1:05:54
  own world we can we can try for both and we can say you know what this person had had their book
• 1:06:00
  book contract taken away for absurd reasons and and yet i i agree with you that certain kinds of
• 1:06:06
  language that once was common probably we shouldn't write it now but i want to say one more thing
• 1:06:10
  about the anti woke which is but the one of the main one of the things i've been really struck by
• 1:06:16
  is how many of the people who have identified themselves as anti woke have made that really central
• 1:06:20
  to their ideology and their self-definition have ended up in crazy places on covid and the vaccine
• 1:06:26
  and it's it's not one or two people i mean it is many many people so much so you begin to think
• 1:06:33
  there is something going on here and and if you want to say look there that one of the the evils
• 1:06:39
  that may be in here is in even the good parts of wakism is this tendency to pile on and bullying and
• 1:06:47
  point making an individual people carry the guilt of a whole society and humiliating them of that
• 1:06:53
  if that somehow there's something inherent in this set set of ideas at least that evil i want to
• 1:06:58
  what what is there something in the anti wokeness that makes people and they these are not unintelligent
• 1:07:05
  people are high often high maybe they'd be in less trouble if they were less intelligent highly
• 1:07:10
  intelligent people end up in crazy places and and i think the anti woke cause needs to think about
• 1:07:17
  that a little bit um you know is there something where when you say um i'm a persecuted victim
• 1:07:24
  of an unjust society and and everyone in any university is my enemy that you end up
• 1:07:31
  rejecting modern medicine right yeah yeah maybe maybe what's so what's the common thread there
• 1:07:38
  is it an anti elitism is it an anti authoritarianism a kind of a sense of being an outsider or
• 1:07:44
  a renegade who speaks truth to power and as a result of that binary worldview you find yourself
• 1:07:51
  on the wrong side of medical science as well as the right side of the cultural war i'm not sure
• 1:07:57
  it's anti elitism because a lot of the people involved here would think of themselves as much smarter
• 1:08:02
  than they're detractors and indeed that they think of themselves as so smart that
• 1:08:08
  whereas that the people they dislike say look i'm only as good as the other 30 people in the lab
• 1:08:14
  yeah they say no i i will be up alone at midnight uh by myself with my test tubes and beakers and
• 1:08:20
  my open web browser and i will do what teams of trained scientists and labs cannot do i will
• 1:08:26
  i will see through i'll pierce the falsehoods of the angiot you know medical biological establishment
• 1:08:32
  so it's it's not it's not anti elitism so there's it's not driven by some sense of humility
• 1:08:37
  that other people are clever me and i don't know they're giving me a hard time um i think there's
• 1:08:42
  a persecution complex i think there's a belief that knowledge that the truest knowledge is secret
• 1:08:47
  that the things that the things that most people agree on those are false and the things that most
• 1:08:53
  people reject those must be true there's something there but i think there's just a sense of
• 1:09:00
  knowledge as warfare right that you push people in this in this direction
• 1:09:04
  on the question of the culture wars and workness and the the so the Tyler Cowan and potentially
• 1:09:12
  partially david from attitude that the that in general movements like me too and movements like
• 1:09:20
  the racial reckoning around the recognition of slavery as fundamental to american history are
• 1:09:26
  are are useful are salientry and to whatever extent we can minimize their their excesses
• 1:09:34
  in terms of you know injuring individual human lives let's do it but overall they're good
• 1:09:40
  there's a another parallel i suppose interpretation of what's going on in culture at the moment
• 1:09:46
  which i am not sure what to think of which is that in actual fact these are the movements
• 1:09:53
  that are largely dragging us back towards an identitarian way of thinking about each other
• 1:09:57
  that undermine our individual autonomy that seek to group us in tribes that are eternally
• 1:10:03
  pitted against each other especially racially that require us to agree that white supremacy is so
• 1:10:09
  baked into the fabric of our thinking and our institutions that there's no way that we can escape
• 1:10:13
  it so the correct the correct sort of light on the hill to pursue is not a Martin Luther King
• 1:10:19
  junior we don't see color we judge people on the content of their character not the color of
• 1:10:24
  their skin but rather a recognition that the color of our skin is fundamental to who we are always
• 1:10:29
  will be and and you know we should engage with each other on its basis and so then that then
• 1:10:36
  that leaves me thinking well maybe it's not just about making sure that these movements don't
• 1:10:39
  break a few eggs on their path towards a better future maybe we do have to say no these things are
• 1:10:47
  sort of you know I suppose the the way that a Jordan Peterson would articulate it would be
• 1:10:51
  to say they're kind of a neo-Marxist identitarian movement and we need to oppose them using the
• 1:10:57
  tools of Gandhi and Mandela and Martin Luther King which is egalitarianism and colorblindness which
• 1:11:04
  sort of sounds very very stuffy in 1990s from this perspective do you see that those two alternatives?
• 1:11:12
  well um I would throw one other one other thing in the mix um you know you have to be really
• 1:11:20
  really careful about generalizing about periods and time but because you end up usually just
• 1:11:24
  doing is projecting onto a whole period based on a few artists and writers and works of art and
• 1:11:30
  that's that said I think there are periods where the prevailing style is sentimental and their periods
• 1:11:37
  prevailing style style is sardonic and the classic example this is the move from the pre-World War I
• 1:11:42
  generation to the post-World War I generation pre-World War I very sentimental time and post-World War I
• 1:11:47
  much much more hard bitten so I think we're living right now in a very sentimental time um that
• 1:11:53
  the late Christopher Hitchens used to say when someone said to him um you're you know I find your
• 1:11:58
  words deeply offensive he was like I'm still waiting for you to make a point oh I miss it
• 1:12:09
  that his point was how you feel about it doesn't prove anything so so I think when you say what
• 1:12:15
  is you know what is the common denominator and by the way this is not just this is this is true
• 1:12:19
  on many parts of the right wing I mean we live a time in which people will produce their feelings
• 1:12:23
  about something as as the most important fact about that something so when if people say look we
• 1:12:32
  need to have a much more sardonic culture we need to have one that that is much more committed to
• 1:12:38
  the truth value of things one in which a statement about your emotions your feelings of woundedness
• 1:12:45
  that that's not I mean to the people love you that's maybe important but if we're not you know
• 1:12:50
  if if if we're just if we're you know engaged in intellectual life it doesn't it's not
• 1:12:55
  interesting it's not important in fact it's something you you it's on you it's your problem if
• 1:12:58
  you're fine you're so upset that you can't continue this discussion you need to go to the bathroom
• 1:13:03
  and compose yourself and come back when you can continue continue the discussion um that part I
• 1:13:08
  think is is right um but you know if I'm asked to say um is
• 1:13:21
  if I'm asked to believe are we is there some true person inside of me that is completely separate
• 1:13:28
  from everything that's contingent you know that you uh take away you know my ethnic identity my religious
• 1:13:35
  affiliation my sexual orientation my um you know uh my uh my class position um you take away
• 1:13:43
  all those things and you get to like the pure me I I don't that's like craze that's played
• 1:13:50
  oh beyond but that's crazy I mean that I don't there is no me beyond those things I am I am the
• 1:13:56
  I am part of all those things so you can't say to people when people say um it's terribly important
• 1:14:01
  to me to understand me if you want to that I'm black or female or gay or Jewish or straight or
• 1:14:08
  born poor born rich um yeah those those probably are really important facts and and understanding
• 1:14:15
  those things about people can can be as any biographer will tell you those those are terribly
• 1:14:20
  enriching we're not just bundles of ideas where do our ideas come from and and I do often know
• 1:14:25
  that the people are most consistent on separating themselves from all these contingent aspects of
• 1:14:30
  their identities so they can live in a world of pure reason are the most emotional people I know
• 1:14:37
  they are so easily wounded they get upset so fast you think you know what maybe the reason you
• 1:14:43
  want to separate yourself from all of these aspects of your humanity is because actually they are
• 1:14:48
  bigger for you than they are for other people don't you think is it true that if you strip a whale
• 1:14:53
  of your identities there is nothing left inside I mean isn't part of the crisis of the current
• 1:14:59
  moment that we do lack an empathy between the tiny flickering candle of consciousness that
• 1:15:07
  religious people call a soul and that secular people can just sort of understand as being a deep
• 1:15:13
  sense of unity between between living creatures and especially between humans that like when we're
• 1:15:21
  bumping into each other as identities when we're bumping into each other as tribes when you know
• 1:15:26
  I'm sure you've had the experience I certainly had the experience as an interviewer where I'll
• 1:15:30
  be talking to somebody and I realize I'm not actually really talking to them I'm sort of talking
• 1:15:36
  to some kind of avatar that they've come up with of identities that are stuck onto each other
• 1:15:41
  where they're responding in a pro-form away and they're expecting me to respond in a pro-form away
• 1:15:46
  and if I blow up that script which is my won't then I get into all kinds of trouble or it goes
• 1:15:52
  viral in some way or you know and I'll have my lovers and I'll have my haters and I'll have to
• 1:15:56
  stay off social media for a few weeks because it'll be an absolute shit storm and the the accretion
• 1:16:04
  of these identities of these scripts on top of that flickering candle of soul is what I see as
• 1:16:10
  being one of the great impediments to us moving forward as as common humans so does that contradict
• 1:16:17
  what you're saying or is that consistent with it? No it's beautifully said I think I agree with
• 1:16:24
  all that I don't think there's nothing there after you scrape everything away I'm just saying that
• 1:16:28
  that you you can't scrape it away and because we we we are physical creatures as well as
• 1:16:41
  we are physical creatures too and just in doubt and inextricably and it's hard to know what what we
• 1:16:47
  be you know like one of the things I think about a lot I mean I'm now over 60 and people talk about
• 1:16:55
  privileges a various kind and and I realized through my life the most important privilege
• 1:17:00
  I have and I have I have many many privileges the most important was for reasons some
• 1:17:05
  arbitrary reason I was told a very good health hand I've never spent a night of my life in hospital
• 1:17:10
  I've never been seriously ill and what did I do to deserve that? I mean I exercise I don't smoke
• 1:17:19
  I do lots of people I know exercise I don't smoke and they get a bat I got a good health hand
• 1:17:25
  so that is an extraordinary important fact and and it puts a barrier between me and those who
• 1:17:31
  haven't had it I mean you know I'm very conscious that one of the you know that that my my late
• 1:17:37
  mother who died of 54 and had terrible all kinds of she was diagnosed with cancer 37 and that
• 1:17:46
  she used to say they're those who know and those who don't know and I through her I I know but I
• 1:17:54
  know intellectually I don't know and in the way that she meant to know and they're people who do
• 1:17:58
  so that's a barrier but and I can try to be empathetic and to cross it but at some level that
• 1:18:05
  that the barrier between the person who is not feeling pain at that moment of the person who is
• 1:18:09
  it's one of the most fundamental of all human barriers so we need empathy we need sympathy
• 1:18:15
  but we also need to say no there's just no there's if you feel pain that is yeah so central to who
• 1:18:23
  you are and if you don't that's also central to that's right and yes and we it's a really good
• 1:18:28
  analogy because we those of us who are not feeling pain or wandering around as if this is normal
• 1:18:33
  that our that our bodies should be pain free when an actual fact our bodies are going through these
• 1:18:38
  incredibly complicated systems to ensure that we don't collapse and fall apart and that our
• 1:18:43
  spleen doesn't interfere with our blood system in various weird ways that that that it would naturally
• 1:18:49
  do were it not for the herculean effort of our physiology to to keep us well and similarly I mean
• 1:18:55
  when we're talking about privilege you know people talk about white privilege or straight privilege
• 1:18:58
  or male privilege most of the privileges I always say that that we enjoy are invisible to us I mean
• 1:19:06
  you were born in Canada and I was born in Australia what greater privilege could you have to be
• 1:19:11
  born into these fluffy mild mannered wealthy ridiculously opulent democracies in comparison to
• 1:19:19
  anywhere else in the world at any other era like that and that's just a privilege that doesn't
• 1:19:25
  even sort of land in our you know our consciousness or our lexicon speaking of reality I'm just
• 1:19:31
  interested in reality intruding into that into that cotton wool world 9-11 where were you 9-11
• 1:19:39
  I was I was working in the Bush administration I was I was a very intense at the time our
• 1:19:47
  children were small so I had carpool was I was in a carpool so the White House day starts typically
• 1:19:55
  around 7 a.m. but I had a carpool that week so that day so I didn't get to the office until close
• 1:20:01
  to 830 and I after dropping off all these children I was driving silence
• 1:20:12
  so I had no idea of what was going on in the world and and I remember arriving at the complex
• 1:20:20
  and the complex being the White House the executive office yeah so the white is the the
• 1:20:25
  building you know is the White House most people there work beside it is something called the
• 1:20:30
  executive office yes a big gray limestone pile so I had an office there and you I parked my car
• 1:20:36
  and walked in there and and I remember the feeling of walking along the they had these very long
• 1:20:43
  quarters and suddenly hearing TVs coming on so it must have been this must have been eight about
• 1:20:49
  845 which is when the first plane hit the tower in New York but before the Pentagon because I
• 1:20:55
  the sense of walking past open door hearing TVs because people usually had the TV in their office
• 1:21:00
  on but silent so they could see you know the the crawl but not be distracted and then suddenly the
• 1:21:05
  volumes are getting out and and and then we and then I got to my office and you know I put on my
• 1:21:12
  TV and and oh and then my phone my primitive cell phone rang it was my wife calling she you
• 1:21:20
  um something and she has very um sharp intellect and intuition for these things she said
• 1:21:26
  something is seriously wrong you better get out of there and I said absolutely not absolutely not
• 1:21:31
  and uh first I don't know there is anything wrong and second I had all these you know
• 1:21:37
  grandiose visions of my role in the world you know you want to host back uh yeah exactly
• 1:21:43
  I'm saying you're gonna be on me and and and uh and then comes the second strike uh says about
• 1:21:51
  10 past nine and now there's just no mistake that something terrible is happening and I just
• 1:21:55
  and then we were flushed out of there I mean I remember um people the the uniform secret service
• 1:22:01
  the you were all familiar with the guys in the suits with the breath there's a big uniform secret
• 1:22:05
  service contingent the key sword and they were they were knocking on people's doors and saying
• 1:22:09
  everyone you have to leave you have to leave and people were resistant and you have to leave
• 1:22:12
  you have to leave and I remember um some people began to move quite fast through the quarters
• 1:22:17
  in very wide quarters and I remember secret service guy saying to everybody don't run don't run
• 1:22:21
  just just keep moving but don't run and then there was in my meant memories a short pause I don't
• 1:22:26
  know how long was I one of the officers I've already run yeah ladies pick off your heels yet
• 1:22:35
  out of there I mean I would have been like you know don't run I would have been like do you know
• 1:22:39
  how fast a seven five seven goes like if there's one coming we should probably run uh you know
• 1:22:45
  depending and and and we've all found ourselves milling around in the center of washing with all the
• 1:22:49
  uh pages and uh primitive cell phones and sorry were they telling when they were telling you to
• 1:22:54
  move to move were they taking you somewhere or were they just dislodging you out onto this right
• 1:22:58
  well this is this is the thing that was so crazy about what happened on that day we're just so
• 1:23:02
  the White House as I later learned the White House had an emergency plan that had been written
• 1:23:07
  during the Cold War and the contingency for which it was written was of course a decapitating
• 1:23:12
  nuclear strike against the White House and so the solution was there's a small in those days now
• 1:23:18
  it's much bigger but let's say there's a small bunker beneath the White House and that's
• 1:23:20
  where Vice President Cheney and a few other people went and the president was the plan was the
• 1:23:24
  president wouldn't put on a plane he happened to be on a plane anyway so you get the president up in
• 1:23:27
  the air and he would mastermind the war fighting and then everybody else would be left to be vaporized
• 1:23:32
  by the incoming Soviet nuclear warheads which would be very sad for them and their loved ones but
• 1:23:37
  didn't make it a big problem what do you do with these people after so the Cold War hands in 1991
• 1:23:46
  and no one gets around and we move into this new era and no one gets around revisiting the Cold
• 1:23:51
  War plan and so with no one had thought of what happens if everybody has to leave the White House
• 1:23:57
  because of a threat of a decapitating strike but they're all alive and well we know what to do with
• 1:24:02
  photos we know what to do with Cheney what the fact that we do with David from exactly so we
• 1:24:07
  end up being like excluded out onto the streets north of Lafayette Square if you know you're watching
• 1:24:11
  geography and we're also understanding they're saying now what do we do so we go all open our
• 1:24:14
  majors and they're dead we use our primitive cell phones and and they're dead um and and then
• 1:24:21
  and the traffic is and by now it's clear there's this giant global disaster and the traffic you
• 1:24:26
  know and some people I remember some people saying I'm gonna walk home and if anybody needs me
• 1:24:29
  maybe the page will be working and and some people want to a nearby hotel saying well they'll have
• 1:24:35
  cable and I went to the offices of the American Enterprise Institute which were nearby where I'd
• 1:24:42
  friends and I knew there'd be a TV and computer and I spent an hour there and then I was able my
• 1:24:47
  cell phones began to work again I was able to make contact and then we found a workspace and this
• 1:24:54
  is actually kind of a funny story about the day um the White House doesn't at least didn't then
• 1:24:59
  look like it at all like the West Wing it was not cool and sleek and modern even the the West Wing
• 1:25:05
  itself looked like a small town insurance company basically and I got profitable one but but it's
• 1:25:13
  not it's not cutting edge technology at all and and I'm sent to this address okay I'll do
• 1:25:20
  that we've taken it we've got a space a workspace and on the top floor and and you take the elevator
• 1:25:25
  and it was gorgeous this works great so we had these these doors that go we exit the elevator
• 1:25:32
  and okay this is like now it's like the movies now we see the secret headquarters but it turned
• 1:25:37
  up no no it was the Washington office of Daimler Chrysler and somebody on the other staff is married
• 1:25:41
  to somebody and they just abuse our offices and and so that's where I spent the afternoon
• 1:25:47
  private opulence and public squalor and how did you how did you how did you feel David like as
• 1:25:54
  it was unfolding I mean I remember watching it from here again as a as a university student
• 1:26:00
  and seeing it unfold and I had a love affair with New York where I would subsequently move for
• 1:26:05
  for 12 years and I had been there the previous summer and been on top of the world trade towers
• 1:26:11
  and was a fan of David Letterman and Woody Allen and so there was it felt like my heart was
• 1:26:15
  being ripped out but there was also that anxiety about what exactly does this mean for the world
• 1:26:19
  what exactly is happening how do I fit this into I mean I immediately had done enough global
• 1:26:25
  politics at university to immediately know that it was Afghanistan that it was bin Laden and you
• 1:26:31
  know would that a right was this the first salvo in a civilizational war like where was your
• 1:26:38
  heart at on that day well my children were my we then had two small children and my wife was
• 1:26:44
  pregnant with with her third and I wasn't able to reach her but I knew what she was doing she had
• 1:26:50
  she had gotten the car and raced up to the Jewish day school where they were at school to retrieve
• 1:26:54
  them and so my my mind was there I wouldn't be able to talk to her for a long time during the day
• 1:27:01
  and of course what they would the school had done is everyone was think everyone believed that
• 1:27:07
  there would be more attacks and no one knew quite knew where they were and it was pretty unlikely
• 1:27:12
  that the suburban Jewish day school would be on a target list but you couldn't rule it out there
• 1:27:18
  having enough attacks and maybe they were in indigenous sympathizers so they they my wife got
• 1:27:23
  up there the kids were all in the auditorium and a number of the children there were people from
• 1:27:31
  defense department and military families and by then we knew that the Pentagon had been or they
• 1:27:35
  knew the Pentagon had been hit and so these kids had to wonder whether their dad or mom was among the
• 1:27:40
  casualties in the Pentagon and so I so my heart was there until we made contact and we were all
• 1:27:48
  safe and sound and then I found that one of our closest friends in Washington but
• 1:27:52
  I don't know probably before in the afternoon one of our closest friends in Washington was on the
• 1:27:55
  plane that struck the Pentagon and who was that Barbara Olsen who was the wife of Ted Olsen the
• 1:28:03
  solicitor general I think she was on the way to to Bill Mars show was machine to do Bill Mars show
• 1:28:07
  in L.I. what was that someone else no that's exactly right although the bill mar people are
• 1:28:12
  very sensitive on the subject they said she was traveling she was she they said she was coming to
• 1:28:19
  L.A. anyway and that's why they invited her on the show because they there is like one of those
• 1:28:23
  things like I don't know that it makes a difference at this point but whenever you raise it with
• 1:28:27
  anyone involved no she was she was coming to L.A. anyway yeah right wasn't our fault we didn't get
• 1:28:31
  her killed yeah yeah yes Barbara Olsen was amazing and yeah I've interviewed I've interviewed her
• 1:28:39
  husband who's also an incredible person all right let's let's leave that I mean there you know
• 1:28:46
  we could go into the the fall out of that that tragedy and how it shaped your world view but
• 1:28:51
  I'd like to just sort of end by talking about the present day and what's next for American
• 1:28:55
  democracy you you've become something of a hero in recent years on the left I don't know if that
• 1:29:00
  has struck you as an unlikely Coda to your political career but in your principal
• 1:29:07
  opposition to Donald Trump you've become sort of one of the good Republicans on the left and
• 1:29:12
  at the same time as that has happened there's also been a counter narrative to that which is
• 1:29:18
  yeah he's the good guy now but he's a Johnny come lately to the party and the the work that he
• 1:29:23
  and his ideological colleagues did in the early 2000s laid the groundwork for the corruption of
• 1:29:29
  the Republican Party and it's it's descent into crazy because the George W. Bush administration
• 1:29:35
  was reactionary and pandering to that wing of of dumb Republican thinking how do you say your
• 1:29:44
  role in where we find ourselves today I actually I don't think about this question very much and I
• 1:29:50
  don't think I think it's a bad question to think about I mean I think every day you have work to
• 1:29:54
  do and you go do it and if you're constantly checking yourself in the mirror you're not going to
• 1:29:59
  do it and for sure there's no hero I mean I dislike terms like resistance remember that used to
• 1:30:10
  be used a lot my own view always was if there's no risk of torture you're not the resistance
• 1:30:16
  you're you're just that's that's not what's going on here what we and what we're what we were
• 1:30:23
  engaged in is a threat of corruption at a time of the American political system was for other
• 1:30:31
  reasons under terrible pressure you know so my role is you know I'm gonna as to try to
• 1:30:39
  show people as best I can what I think the world is like in a way that I hope will be useful to them
• 1:30:46
  and it doesn't matter what they they think of me and it really doesn't and it's not interesting to
• 1:30:53
  me and like I you know that's I saw we have personal lives what what is interesting to me is
• 1:31:02
  do and my is the work I do is it is it am I doing is it as honest as I can make it is it useful to
• 1:31:09
  people and is it trying to protect the country from some evils and so some things and it's not
• 1:31:16
  and I haven't I said on some things I have changed my views over time I've become much more
• 1:31:21
  sympathetic post the global financial crisis and the great recession to the importance of
• 1:31:26
  social insurance and I have definitely been affected by the Iraq and George W Bush experience
• 1:31:32
  to be more skeptical than ever and more and skeptical in a way that I probably wasn't
• 1:31:39
  than it should have been about the ability to make governments to use force to make positive
• 1:31:45
  changes but on many of the things I mean it's just it's like walking around when you it's like
• 1:31:50
  walking around you know any kind of physical object that you see different things from
• 1:31:56
  different angles so I think with all of us in politics that at different moments we find ourselves
• 1:32:01
  associated with different people that's sort of normal because they keep changing the questions
• 1:32:06
  so you know if in in 2015 when there was this huge immigration surge into Western Europe
• 1:32:14
  you know I was I thought that the Europeans and especially the Germans were taking too many
• 1:32:19
  people too fast I've always been conscious of the risk of political stability of too much mass
• 1:32:23
  migration at too fast array and so I was writing things that seemed very conservative and I had all
• 1:32:27
  these conservative friends and then Donald Trump's nomination became a reality and you know I
• 1:32:32
  strong feelings about integrity and politics and I knew the history of Donald Trump and I was very
• 1:32:36
  worried about his affinity for authoritarianism which was on the rise and across the developed world
• 1:32:43
  and and so then I developed new liberal friends and I'm sure I will have if I'm given life and
• 1:32:48
  health you know different kinds of arrangements in the future that's not important what's important
• 1:32:54
  is that we do the best work that we can and the best way that we can and we just try to be honest
• 1:32:59
  with our our readers one of the questions you're talking about you I'm still thinking the thing
• 1:33:03
  you said about talking to the avatar which is such a great way to think about it and a real
• 1:33:11
  tribute to your self-understanding you can see that one of the questions that all of us in journalism
• 1:33:16
  have to ask ourselves is who are you working for because a lot of people are not working for the reader
• 1:33:22
  and I think that the beginning of all good work is she said I don't care who well you know
• 1:33:27
  I'm working for the reader that's who I work for and I'm there to do the best job I can for
• 1:33:33
  the reader and and it doesn't matter what they think of me pretty I learn a lot from people I know
• 1:33:38
  nothing about I learn a lot from people I admire I learn things from people I don't admire
• 1:33:44
  I learn things from people I admire but wouldn't like personally I learn things from people I do like
• 1:33:49
  personally and don't admire it's just there's a lot of time to reach yeah exactly but I
• 1:33:57
  need to draw a flow chart of this yeah but just that's my job is to help people understand their
• 1:34:03
  world better David you've helped me understand my world a little bit better today I appreciate
• 1:34:09
  your time thank you thank you so much for articulating yourself it's a pleasure to talk
• 1:34:18
  uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma follow me Josh Zeps on Twitter and
• 1:34:24
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• 1:34:30
  and your conversations perfectly sparklingly delectably uncomfortable