Ep 82 | Vox Co-Founder & Glenn Agree: 'We Aren't That Far Apart' | Matthew Yglesias | The Glenn Beck Podcast

I don't know if I've ever told you this, but the working title for this podcast was Dangerous Conversations.

And

it started out with the idea that I'd find 10 or 12 people that I really, really wanted to talk to.

And kind of a tongue-in-cheek, playful jab at the growing hatred for civil discourse, because I know a lot of people that I really disagree with, that I really respect.

That was over two years ago.

And the hatred for civil discourse has mutated into something that we're not even supposed to laugh at anymore.

All the reason more to have dangerous conversations, like the one that you're going to hear.

This conversation probably would have been different two years ago, but I feel like our country is

at

such a crossroads with people who are actively calling for the destruction of America that

in retrospect,

I might have failed in this podcast because

I'm very open-minded and open-minded with his book, and I found so many places we could connect on.

But I don't think I necessarily made him feel as comfortable as I should have.

The motivation for this podcast was to connect with people who we're not supposed to connect with.

The more unlikely the pair, the better to have illuminating conversations with fascinating people.

And we've done that.

We've had people here who vehemently disagree with each other.

And we have brainstormed over and over for weeks on end, trying to compile lists of all the guests that we thought would be perfect, chalkboards filled with ideas and every aspect of every podcast.

We even designed a set to be kind of a place that kind of just lends itself to a quiet conversation.

It's

kind of a sacred, but somehow extravagant and minimal at the same time,

kind of a cathedral of thought.

When you walk in here, you just kind of feel calm.

Today's guest is Matthew Iglesias.

And he has, I mean, this is the vision that I had from the start.

Four years after I founded the Blaze, Matthew co-founded the left-leaning Vox.com.

He's a senior correspondent.

He's been fundamental in building Vox into a robust news outlet with sizable readership.

He's written exclusively for left-leaning outlets, American Prospect,

The Atlantic, Slate, Think Progress.

He was born in the liberal bubble of New York City, currently lives in the liberal bubble of Washington, D.C.

And in his latest book, One Billion Americans, he advocates for strengthened welfare state and fewer immigration restrictions.

So when I got this suggestion on the chalkboard, I was like, why would I do this interview again?

Because there's lots of reasons we could be bitter enemies.

And we are supposed to hate one another.

We're supposed to mock and belittle and insult.

But we don't, and we shouldn't have to, and neither should you.

And as I read this,

there were a lot of stuff in here I deeply agreed with.

And I don't think he knew that.

And we have, as you will see in today's podcast, an inability at times,

flashes of it, that is the real problem.

We can't

see the other side as anything other than a monolith.

So the big objective of today's show, Your Job, is to see me

and to see Matthew and try to truly understand us as individuals.

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Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

I think this is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, isn't it?

Where you're on my podcast and we're actually having a friendly conversation.

Well, you know, we're all having fun, trying to learn.

No, I, you know,

as I said in the intro, this is what

we need more of in America.

Because

as I look at

your case for a billion Americans,

I think you'd be surprised on how much we agree on,

and we do have disagreements, but

it's not the cartoon disagreements that I think everybody in the media wants everybody to have.

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to write a book that I thought people would agree with at least part of, sort of from all points on the political spectrum, and see where we can go.

But

I think where we connect, and I want to concentrate on that, where we connect on this, I think is a bigger solution than even what you were going for.

I mean, the book is One Billion Americans, the case for thinking bigger.

So let's just make that case.

But I think as we have a conversation,

a bigger problem

is even solved.

So let's start.

Your case for a billion Americans.

You know, you look at the United States today.

We're sort of the number one power in the world.

We have been for a long time, 100 years or more.

But that's slipping, right?

We are facing a sort of relative decline vis-a-vis China.

Their economy has grown very rapidly.

In a lot of ways, that's a good thing.

I mean, global poverty has gone down a lot.

It's good to see other people doing well.

But when you have a country of 1.2 billion people, it's four times our population, if they get to half of our per capita wealth, they become a much stronger economy than we are in the aggregate, right?

And so we should do something about that.

I think Americans, you know, want to be the world's number one power.

We don't want to be number two to China.

And, you know, nobody is talking about how do we settle for number two?

How do we accommodate ourselves to a world of Chinese hegemony?

But our political leaders aren't really talking about

solutions to that problem, right?

So President Trump, you know, he wants to ban TikTok, and he's got bipartisan support with that.

You know, Chuck Schumer's for it, and I'm for it too.

I mean, I think it's making sense, but cracking down on Chinese video meme apps is like not going to get the job done, right?

We need to do something bigger, you know, and there's nothing wrong with it.

It's good that we're having that conversation after sort of 20 years of wishful thinking.

So I don't like the fact that we've gotten into a place that China is leading us in 5G.

And

my solution for the last 15 years has not been more government involvement or uh or more regulation on china it's what are we doing to make ourselves the most competitive we we have to have the the desire to um to be the most competitive and to put the best product out with the least amount of interference uh from uh from the political side i mean whoever controls 5g is going to have an entrance to a pipeline of almost every piece of information the world could ever use.

For national security, I don't want China to have that.

Also, though, for

national pride and for the good of generations to come, I want us to lead the world.

But let me.

I mean, we've got to do what we can.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But let me.

I mean, at home, yeah.

Let me start with this.

And I think this is one of the things

that

I think you're sincere,

but

you are someone who is from the middle left,

and you've, in reading your work, it doesn't seem like you understand that there are a lot of people on the left that do have a problem with us being number two or number five or number 100.

We're constantly being told that America is evil, is racist, should be destroyed.

And that's caused us a lot of problems of being able to do anything because, quite frankly, I think a lot of people have lost faith that this is the place for the greatest opportunity in the world.

You know, I mean, yes, this is a patriotic book, right?

I mean, you look at it, right?

It's got red, white, and blue on the cover.

It's got a map of America.

It's got a lot of stars.

And, you know, some people on the left, I got a very harsh review from a left-wing guy in the New Republic because basically his point of view was like, why is this guy out here here saying America should stay number one?

You know, like, let's throw America in the trash.

And that's not me.

And I think it's not most people on the left.

You know, you look at a Joe Biden campaign event, he's up there with the little flag, same as anybody else, because this is a patriotic country, you know, and most people on it, on the left or on the right, like, they're for that.

So I think, you know, I write about in the book a fair amount is immigration, right?

Which is something that, you know, most people on the left are supportive of.

But I want people who agree with me about that to think about the meaning of immigration, right?

It is true that America has had problems with race and racism in its history and in its present day.

But what's also true is that millions of people from around the world would like to come here, right?

And not just white people, right?

Latin American people, African people, Asian people, all kinds of people know, and you see it in what they, their actions, right?

That America is a great land of opportunity for lots of different people.

And I want people on the left to embrace that, to see what that says about us and take that message to heart.

And I want people on the right to also take that to heart, right?

This is one of the great strengths of this country.

Mike Pompeo said in a speech, he said, you know, people aren't clamoring to move to communist China.

And he was absolutely right about that, right?

Like our system is better than theirs.

And we should take advantage of that.

So

this is a place.

where you have no argument with most of the conservatives that I know.

But in the way it's, and I don't, I don't, don't, I don't, I'm looking to understand.

I'm not looking to condemn.

I'm really am looking to understand.

I don't know where you get the view that conservatives don't want immigrants.

What conservatives are saying now,

Donald Trump is a symptom.

He's not a cause.

He's a symptom.

He's a symptom of

not listening to people who love their country,

you know, are worried about the culture of the country, worried about the Constitution.

We put the Constitution in the rearview mirror a long time ago, and both Republicans and Democrats have been part of that.

But we're worried about the loss of things, and so what happens with immigration is you have wild open borders, which after September 11th,

we all should know.

That's just stupid.

You just don't have the Wild West, and anyone can come in.

But you also have lost the idea of merit.

I think every conservative that I know has no problem with people coming in

if

they are going to come in and work and they want to

better their lives, which is almost every immigrant I have seen from Mexico and Latin America, they work far harder than most Americans, especially American kids.

It renews us.

It's good.

But we can't lose the culture, meaning we can't say we're two languages and it doesn't matter what you think of the United States.

If you came here and you know why you came here and you're willing to work, you are going to be the best American.

I mean, that's great.

I'm glad to hear you say that.

And, you know, I mean, I think, as with anything, right?

I think I've been doing some different shows with different conservatives and some of them say, oh, if only all the liberals, you know, like had flags on their books like you do.

And I say, great, you know, I mean, I wish we did.

And I wish that all conservatives thought the way you're thinking about immigration.

One of the things I write about in the book is the RAISE Act, right, which Tom Cotton and Senator Perdue proposed.

And their idea is, well, we should have immigration based on a merit system.

And I think it makes sense.

I have some quibbles with the details, but right now, whether you can get a visa has to do with do you have close relatives living in the United States and how many other people from your country have come here.

And, you know, that's fine, but it's not great.

Like, we can do better than that.

And

Cotton's idea, you know, basically you get extra points if you speak English.

You get extra points if you have technical skills.

You get points based on your age so that we get people who will work a whole career and contribute to Social Security.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

What doesn't make sense to me is he wants to take the number of

legal immigrants and cut it in half.

No, right?

Yeah.

I don't think we should do that, right?

Especially if we are getting better at making sure that the immigrants who come are net contributors to the tax base.

Like, let's bring them in.

And then, but we should talk about the cultural issues because this is what I think has been frustrating people.

A lot of people have concerns about the cultural impact of immigration, but they don't want to address it squarely, right?

So instead, we get stuff like like Trump says, oh, they're all murderers and rapists, right?

And that's not right.

But what is true, right?

It's like it changes your society when people come from foreign countries.

Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

We should think about who comes.

Wait, before you make more statements, let's address these as we go.

Not everybody is a rapist or a burglar or whatever.

I think if I were on the, and I've said this many times to my audience, if I were on the other side, we have to look at this from their side.

If I'm in a place where I can't grow,

my kids can't grow, there's no opportunity, and I've got a drug lord moving into town, I'm going to the United States, especially if they're like, hi, you know what?

Come on in, don't worry about it.

I'm rolling the dice, okay?

It's our fault because we don't take it seriously.

Because I would absolutely do exactly what they do.

However, when it comes to culture, it's not about,

you know, are we going to have more Mexican restaurants or whatever.

It's about becoming something that we're not.

So when people come here, it is a disadvantage for them not to speak English.

It's also a disadvantage in why my kids take Spanish in school.

It's a disadvantage to only speak English.

But if you're coming here to be able to say,

I want to be a part of this without shedding who you are and what you brought, but melt into this, you're still holding up the principles, not the flag.

By the way, you don't have a flag on it.

It's just red, white, and blue.

But

not the flag, not that jingoistic crap.

I hate that stuff because it obscures the principles.

The principles that made us different.

And if you hold up those principles, that's, I think, what most people are worried about, the deep change.

Yeah, and this is what we should do, right?

I mean, we should think about how we can address that, right?

Not just say, oh, I'm afraid, or say, oh, no, you're a racist if you're concerned about this, and have people get defensive and argue and argue and argue.

We should think about what we can do, right?

My grandmother used to tell me, she was born here, but her parents were immigrants, Yiddish-speaking.

She grew up, you know, not English-speaking in her household, and they had had programs at that time to sort of teach kids, this is how we're going to do things in America.

You know, and it was everything from English classes starting at a young age.

You would never get liberals to do that.

You would never,

you know, how to brush your teeth.

I don't know.

You know, would you, would you not, right?

The point is, this needs to be part of the bargain, right?

Liberals have a lot of humanitarian concerns, and conservatives have a lot of doubts.

And what we ought to do, right?

So, so often we make make compromises in America right now by doing nothing, right?

So we don't accomplish what the left wants and we don't accomplish what the right wants.

So what we ought to do is both.

Okay.

Agreed.

Let me tell you that

liberals aren't the only ones that care about humanitarian causes.

I was in Australia.

helping move Yazidis out of the Middle East who had been slaves and we went in and rescued them.

And America wouldn't take any of them.

So we worked out deals with countries all across the world.

And Australia was a great country and a great host country.

A year later, I go back to visit.

And we had a meeting with everybody like at four o'clock, and like nobody showed up.

And I'm like, what happened?

And they said, oh, they'll be here late.

They'll be here about 4:30.

And I said, why?

And they said, because Australia is really, really serious.

You must speak English if you come here.

You have to know the laws and the rules.

And

they go through a whole cultural thing to explain the culture of Australia.

When they finally did arrive,

They could speak, not all of them, especially the older ones, but the younger ones could speak English and they understood the country they were living in.

I don't think Americans, conservatives are against that.

They would be for that.

But you who on the right, on the left would never,

because that's saying America is different.

It has its own rich culture.

Culture is being dismantled by the left every step of the way.

You know, Glenn, I mean, I think this is a thing you sometimes do, right?

Where it's true, there's people on the left who think that way, but it's not the mainstream idea here, right?

You'd look at the level of the world.

Okay, so then let's stop talking about the left.

Wait, wait, let's stop talking about the left.

Let's define liberals and Democrats.

The old school Democrat and liberal, I don't think feels that way.

They may go along with it, but they don't necessarily feel that way.

The left is entirely different.

1619 project, BLM.

Come on.

Well, it's 1619.

Look, I've got some disagreements with that, but but I think you're entirely right about English, right?

If we want to say we should have more immigrants, which I think we should, it's incredible benefits to

our country from that.

Me too.

Right.

It makes a ton of sense.

Like, lots of people in the world speak English, and lots of people in the world learn English all the time, right?

You go anywhere in the world.

I went to Vietnam, right?

And obviously, most people there don't speak English, but lots and lots of young people are there learning English just because it's the language of international business.

Correct.

And if you say to people, look, if you want a visa to come to the United States, if you're young, if you learn English, if you get a college degree, we're going to make it possible for you to come here.

People will do that, right?

They want to get in on this.

And we had it, right?

In the 2013 immigration bill, right?

It was a bipartisan bill.

Stuff the Republicans wanted to get in there.

A lot of money for border security stuff and stuff for English classes, right?

So if you want to become a citizen here, you need to learn.

You need to, you know, learn your constitution, learn your founding principles.

I think that's all a great idea.

idea.

You know, you want to talk about the 1619 project.

I mean, I think

there's some good articles in that package, but I agree with you, right?

You know, I think.

I'm sure there are some good articles, but when you say, let's reimagine, there are more imagineers on the left than Disney has ever produced.

Let's stop reimagining our history and start actually dealing with real history because then we can deal with problems.

You know, I saw the movie.

I saw the movie.

I don't even know if it's about real real history, right?

It's about building a common culture, right?

So one of the things we've traditionally done in the United States is say, okay, look, we have a kind of a civic religion here, right?

And so we talk about George Washington.

We talk about Thomas Jefferson.

We talk about Alexander Hamilton.

We maybe idealize those guys a little bit more than 1920.

Most of our history, right?

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

You know, like it's fine to like build up a culture that says, you know, we, these are the best ideals of America about equality and other things like that, and tell a story about sort of fulfilling the American dream.

That's how Barack Obama always talked.

That's how people who want to win elections, frankly, talk.

It's, you know, I'm a journalist, right?

Sometimes we tell uncomfortable truths about things.

Sometimes heroes, you know, there's really some mud on their shoes and there's a role to be played for exposing that.

But I completely agree.

Like, we can't have a public culture that's dominated by this sort of hermeneutics of suspicion that's not how human societies work we have to look at what's good in the past and what's worth celebrating and talk about that all right i want to tell you a story about two different individuals they know each other one was driving a probably a eight-year-old car and the other one is driving a 10-year-old truck

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This may come as a surprise to you,

but I am a huge collector of American history.

And

I've put together a vault and a museum with some partners.

We have more

documents on the founding of America than anyone besides the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

However, what I brought to this was the negative.

I am so deeply offended by Wounded Knee and how Wounded Knee handed out medals like they were candy.

That was a massacre.

I own one of the seven guns from Wounded Knee, the only one in private hands.

And the reason why is because I believe to understand America, you must know the worst because you have to teach it.

Andrew Jackson was a son of a bitch.

So was Woodrow Wilson.

Unbelievable racists.

But we have to know the truth about it and then say,

so what is America?

America is somebody like to me, like Winston Churchill.

You look at him from the Western eyes, he's fantastic.

But you go over to India and you talk about Winston Churchill, and he is a bastard.

So which one is he?

The answer is both.

He's both of those.

It's which do you choose to grow and which do you choose to shed?

We're not teaching.

No, I think that's absolutely right.

I think that's absolutely right.

I remember, I think, remember watching you talking about Woodrow Wilson 10, 12 years ago.

Before you were canceling him before it was cool.

I wasn't canceling him.

I was just pointing out he's not the hero the left seemed to make him out to be.

Right.

And so it flips, right?

I mean, there's a certain temperament that wants everyone to be all good or all bad, right?

Right.

You know, like comic books might be rational.

My five-year-old was watching Star Wars, and

he was very frustrated that Han Solo didn't act like a good guy all the time, right?

And that's a five-year-old's view.

Correct.

You know, and the rest of us can understand, right?

History has some more complexity to it than that.

You know, so my book, right, this, I think, is very much in line with that.

Like, I want to appeal to some of the best moments in American history and the way in which this country was built up over time deliberately, right?

We could have taken the path that Canada took, which is a, it's a very nice country.

You know, you go to Canada, they're doing well.

They've got nice little towns, suburbs, things like that.

But it's 35 million people, right?

Canada has never been a major power on the world stage, and it has not been able to,

you know, stand up for Canadian values, right?

Any of those sort of nice, big things we say about America.

There have been dark sides, obviously, to America's larger role in the world.

When you do more, sometimes it doesn't work out.

But I think we have done really big, important things in the world.

One thing I think.

One thing I think.

The reason we think that is that, like, this is a big country, right?

Like,

you can't beat the Nazis if you're a little rinky-dink country.

You got to be, you got to be big, right?

And we should aspire to that.

Well, I think the one thing we agree on is,

and I could be wrong on this part of it, but overall, I think I'm right.

But

what

Eisenhower said in his farewell address is what the problems are right now.

Between Washington's farewell address and Eisenhower's farewell address,

I think we would solve 90% of the problems.

We got too big for our boots.

We went from

you know, France doesn't give people presents like the Statue of Liberty, especially to an arrogant group of people.

And we became arrogant in all of our foreign policy, saying, we're going to give this to you.

We can't do that.

We can help you if you're in trouble, but we can't give you.

You may not want it.

And you have to earn that on your own.

You have to be in the place to where you can earn that, and we could help you.

But we became so arrogant that

beating our chest, telling everyone, look how great we are, that of course the rest of the world has a problem with us because we say, look how great we are.

We stand up for values.

Oh, by the way, I'll ghost plane you to another country and have the crap tortured out of you forever.

But we don't do torture.

That's ridiculous.

That's where we've made our mistakes.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

You know, there have been big mistakes there.

And I think,

you know,

I think the challenge of China should cause us to refocus a little bit, right?

It's not about going around the world, picking fights, having wars, having big problems.

But there is a question of weight on the international stage, right?

There was this great report that PEN America did, and it came out after my book was all done, so I can now only talk about it on podcasts.

But they were looking at how...

People's Republic censors influence Hollywood movies.

That it used to be, well, they would make changes to the China release, right?

They could say, okay, if you cut this scene, you can put it out in China.

But now the Chinese box office is bigger than the American box office.

That's the number one market that Hollywood cares about.

So they say, look, you got to change the movie like this, right?

For everywhere, for the global release.

So now they are dictating what, quote unquote, our movies look like.

You had Daryl Maury, right, Houston Rockets general manager.

Very innocuous.

He just like said on Twitter, solidarity with protesters in Hong Kong.

And, you know, why not, right?

I mean, Twitter is even more like Why not?

So it's not even.

How not?

In America, how do you not side with them?

Right.

And so why not?

But it becomes this huge thing, right?

And so China takes the NBA games off Chinese television.

All kinds of NBA owners, NBA players, they're yelling at him.

Now you have a situation where, you know, American athletes, American celebrities are all on notice.

You can't do this.

A couple years earlier, Mercedes-Benz had an ad that quoted the Dalai Lama and some kind of ad.

I mean, what does the Dalai Lama have to do with luxury cars?

I I don't know.

But it's what they wanted to do, right?

The Chinese government threw a fit and you get the CEO of Daimler.

He's apologizing for this offensive act of quoting, you know, a well-regarded spiritual leader.

Lots of people quote him.

And that's the world that we are headed for, right?

There was this hope that economic integration between the United States and China would spread our values to their shores, that they would want to use the internet.

They would use computers.

And Bill Clinton said, and I think a lot of people believe, like, well, you can't censor the Internet, right?

It's too wild.

It's too open.

And we now know that's completely wrong, right?

It's an incredibly powerful tool of authoritarian surveillance domestically.

And it's created a situation where when our companies depend on that market, they export their values to us.

And we should be armed about that, right?

It's why population matters and why, you know, the size of the families that we have and the number of immigrants we take in, not tripling the population tomorrow, but planning for growth, right?

Planning for success is going to be crucial to maintaining freedom, to maintaining the stuff.

Liberals and conservatives, like we disagree about all kinds of things, but there's nobody left or right who thinks you shouldn't be able to say a tweet that the Chinese government doesn't like, right?

Everybody was upset about that.

They were.

You know, it's across the board.

And

if the cancel culture hadn't come from the left,

I might be more apt to agree with you on that.

But you know, look, you look at like who's vocal about this genocide happening in Xinjiang, right?

I hear conservatives talk about it.

I hear liberals talk about it.

It's horrible.

You know, like we have different values left and right in the United States, but the gap is just not that big.

So I believe.

So let me see if we can agree on this.

Maybe you're right.

It's just these vocal minorities and these giant corporations that are using slave labor and kowtowing to China.

And I mean, when, what was it, Disney thanked,

thanked the profit.

Thank them for Milan, right?

Right.

I mean, are you kidding me?

But look, you know, I mean, capitalism, which I think we probably both support on some level,

it's a miraculous thing, right?

I mean, you know,

the profit motive can be harnessed to do great things.

Yes.

Unfortunately, it can also do bad things.

It is.

People do bad things for money.

And they're not.

Adam Smith was absolutely right in his book, Moral Sentiments.

Everybody took wealth of nations and said, let's run with that.

No, no, no.

Read moral sentiments first.

If you read moral sentiments, then you understand capitalism is a reflection of you as a society.

And, you know, we need to think about, you know, how do we deal with that, right?

So today, HM, right, Swedish company, but they announced they're going to stop using the Xinjiang cotton slave labor in their stuff.

And that's great to see, right?

And so why do they do that?

It's not because they're all nice guys.

It's because more people have been talking about this in the West, right?

There's concern.

They want us to shop there.

So that's good.

That's important.

But one reason why that works is that the U.S.

market is a big deal.

So doing things that appeal to American customers makes sense.

And that scale, right, that weight between the United States and China is going to be not the only, but one of the drivers in the calculus that businesses from all over the world, whether it's America, whether it's Sweden, whether it's Korea, what they make.

And, you know, I don't think we can afford to be so blasé about it as we have been.

The Trump administration is taking some good steps now on Xinjiang, on sanctions, but the fundamentals really matter.

And that's what this book is about, right?

Is can we spend a little less time fighting with each other?

And politicians, right, they want to win elections.

One good way to win elections is to kind of pick at the scabs of division inside this society.

And

it's hard to blame them.

They're trying to win.

But we don't do great things, right?

We don't face down the Soviet Union.

We don't face down Nazi Germany by fighting amongst ourselves, right?

You need leaders, you need statesmen who will try to elevate.

And we have not had that recently.

And I hope that one good thing that can come out of a more challenging environment is to sort of elevate people's eyes, right?

Elevate their vision and see what really matters.

I agree with that.

And I think that most Americans on both sides are hungry for that, but they don't see it on

a reasonable horizon.

You know,

I mean,

do you see, do you, do you, when, when I say, oh, that uplifting politician that's going to get past all of this, does one pop to your mind on any side?

Lucky, it's a tough time out there.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

I'm not disagreeing with you.

Yeah.

I think, but we, but we ebb and flow a little bit on these things.

And I'm hoping for some, I actually forget which one is ebbing and which one is flowing, but I'm hoping for the good one.

Right.

And I feel the same way.

And

that's the reason why we're having this conversation is because I don't believe we are that far apart.

We are, we disagree on a lot of things, but we're not that far apart that you and I couldn't live next door to each other and have perfectly great relationship and have each other over without, you know, being in each other's face.

At least I think.

Because, as I have said before, and I think you would agree.

Look, can you give me nine out of the ten Bill of Rights?

Can you just give me nine of them?

Maybe you disagree with the state's rights, or maybe you disagree with the Second Amendment.

Can you give me nine?

Can you give me nine of them?

I'm good.

But it's the

rub is that the extremes have been

have been uh grinding us down to where we don't believe

we're not fighting for anything real i mean i i want to fight for the constitution and the rights of all men to be equal all men and we're not fighting for those things

well you know i mean look it's it's it's hard to know you know social media has been good for for me in my career it's been good for a lot of people over the years but it does encourage extremist voices, extreme ideas, right?

It's not a place for discussion.

It's not a place for compromise.

It encourages very sort of micro-tribes, dunking, things like that.

And we've been fragmenting, you know, elements of our media landscape for a long time, right?

Cable news and talk radio and now onto the internet.

And, you know, it's risky.

It's been informative to me, right?

If you come out with a book,

the publicists, like, they want you to go anywhere you can go, right?

And it's gotten me a little bit out of my comfort zone in terms of whose shows I'm on and who I'm talking to.

And that in and of itself is a really educational experience.

You know, I think it's not something that a lot of us in the media do as much as we really should, right?

It's a little easier.

You don't have to prep as much if you just talk to people you agree with all the time

or do stuff like that.

But it's, you know, it's educational.

And, you know, you were talking about neighbors, right?

One One of the things that's changed is that we're more sorted geographically than how we are, right?

I live in a big city.

It's a very diverse neighborhood on one level, right?

We've got lots of African Americans, lots of immigrants from Central America, lots of LGBT folks,

regular straight white guys like me, but it's all Democrats, right?

And it's like you can count, right?

You just know, right?

There's no Republicans living here in Lowell's Circle.

And,

you know, that's too bad because when you deal with your neighbors, right, you talk to them about stuff like, how can we clean the trash up in the playground?

What are we going to do about these potholes?

Right?

Practical things where people work together, not ideological things, not things that inspire people to scream.

And it's an educational experience across certain kinds of divides.

But there's an important divide that, like, it doesn't exist in this neighborhood.

And so it's missing, right?

And it's easy to get into stereotypes, things like that.

My wife's parents, they live in rural Texas, out in Kerr County, in the Hillcucks.

And it's so different, right?

I mean, it's a very different lifestyle, very different people.

Everybody drives big trucks.

You know, they've all got guns.

Nice folks.

You know, it's good to spend time out there.

You get to know different people, people who have their preconceptions about me and where we live.

I've got my own preconceptions about them and where they live.

But there's no substitute for that kind of practical experience of dealing with people on a social level, dealing with people on a personal level, rather than just sort of politics all the time.

Yeah, and

we don't get that often enough.

I mean,

I feel that I am

not as sharp intellectually living in Texas as I was when I was in Manhattan.

And the only reason why I was...

ground every day, no matter where I went, man, I had to be razor sharp because I wasn't exactly popular there.

And here in Texas, while it is more balanced than people might think, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where I am,

it's still much more conservative.

It's much less confrontational for me.

And I don't enjoy that as much.

I like honest people.

I enjoy going to Silicon Valley and talking to people who are real libertarians, so they don't really have a dog in the fight, and they're thinking gigantic thoughts.

That's what inspires, that's what America used to be.

Gigantic thoughts.

And people would stand around and say, you can't do that.

And they're like, oh yeah,

let's do it.

And a group of people would do it.

No, I mean, and look, that, you know, big thoughts, right?

That's what the book is about.

That's right there in the subtitle.

And I thought, you know, I was watching President Trump's nomination speech, his acceptance speech a few weeks ago at the convention.

And he has some whole riff in there about pioneers and covered wagons and going to the moon.

And I was like, oh man, like those exact things are in my book.

That's those illusions are right in the last

chapter.

But, you know, that's good.

You see something people have in common, right?

And that's something that I think a lot of us look back to aspirationally, right?

Not that like everything was better in 1969, because God knows they had some very

big problems back then.

Yeah.

But they did have some really high aspirations, right?

Like they were going to take on crazy challenges and they were going to meet them.

So many places I've gone, so many shows I've gone on to talk about this book.

People want to say to me, well, if we had a billion people, wouldn't there be more traffic jams?

And

there probably would be.

But stop flying over 90% of the country.

If you drive it, it's pretty wide open.

Exactly.

There's lots of space.

And also, like, okay, is a great nation, are we going to say, okay, we're going to be a number two power in the world?

We're going to be a second-class country because we can't handle the traffic jams, right?

Like, let's think about it.

Let's...

build some express lanes on the roads, right?

Let's let's get a train in the big dense coastal cities and let's get some more people into the wide open spaces in the middle of the country, right?

Like we can handle this.

If we could go to the moon, like we can handle traffic jams.

Because the population density we're talking about, even with a billion people, that's a lot of people, but we'd still be about half as dense as Germany, maybe a third as dense as the UK.

Like we can handle it, right?

But it's a question of like, can we set a big goal?

And then can we think, okay, what are the problems here?

But they're practical problems.

And how can we address those problems?

But the problems aren't what they were even two years ago.

I mean, COVID has shown you don't have to live on top of each other.

The internet, look at this.

We couldn't have done this at this quality two years ago unless you were on satellite.

You know, you don't have to live in these big urban centers.

You can live wherever you want as long as there's a job there for you.

If there's a job, you know, and you're based, you can base your work online, you can live anywhere.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

I mean, we'll have to see where this technology goes now that everyone's experimenting with it, right?

It's been difficult in some settings.

I've got a kindergartner and they're trying to do, you know,

school over Zoom for five-year-olds.

I'm like, I don't think that's going to work, right?

Uh, but so much of what you and I do, like, yeah, like, you know, I'm doing great stuff on the internet.

Frankly, like, I've been able to do more shows.

Like, I'm in DC, right, which is a big media hub, but still, there's lots of people.

Like, you're in Texas.

I was Ben Shapiro.

He's in California because he's moving to Tennessee soon.

New York, Seattle.

He's on the phone with people in the U.K.

Like, it's great, right?

And we are developing, I think, the ability to have a more decentralized economy, which is going to mean less.

We've had these growth choke points, right?

In the Bay Area, just on the Hudson River, right?

How many people can get from New Jersey into Manhattan and then get away?

That's a really tough problem, right?

But it's a big country.

Like, we don't need to let...

those Hudson River tunnels like constrain everything that we can do.

And I do think, you know, we're seeing COVID has been horrible, obviously, but faced with a really big problem, we do have some resources of ingenuity that I think we might not have realized we have.

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What does America look like on its current path in 10 years?

I mean, it's not great, right?

If we keep having a politics that's dominated by culture war in fighting, we are just not going to tackle big issues.

We're going to keep having fewer children because people can't handle the childcare needs.

We're going to not address environmental concerns.

We're going to not address international concerns.

We're, you know, I'm hopeful nonetheless.

Like, we are a great center of innovation, a great center of talent, a great center of business.

That strength should not go away.

But I don't think we're taking as much advantage of that as we could be, right?

Like, we are making a lot of money at Google and Facebook, but we're not necessarily using that money or using that technology to really solve problems that impact most people's lives, right?

Like it's a privilege to be in a country that has so many internationally successful businesses.

That's better than the opposite.

But, you know, one of the things you saw

when Trump was out on the campaign trail and people responded to him is that most communities were not feeling the benefits of that kind of thing.

And now that he's been president, I think he's given voice to a lot of people's concerns, but he hasn't really

solved them, right?

He's a symbol.

People see him as your champion, but has the

issue, right?

Has the thing that was making people feel left out really changed yet?

And I don't think it has, right?

There's more we can do on a tangible level rather than a symbolic level to have an inclusive country.

And you see now, you know, so many African-Americans feel that they're not cut in, right?

And some of the policy ideas that come out of the Black Lives Matter world, you know, defunding police, I'm 100% against.

And I don't think that's what most people want.

I don't think it really addresses those concerns.

At the same time, you have incredibly high poverty rates.

You have people who are saying, but look, we don't have broadband internet in my neighborhood, right?

And I hear that in inner-city neighborhoods, and I hear it in rural neighborhoods.

Very, a lot of cultural distance between those people, but a similar issue, right?

And like, is our government doing what it takes to get everybody hooked in and loaded on to the American dream and American possibility.

And it isn't, right?

And instead of

being angry, right, and giving expression to that anger and saying who to blame for this, we ought to try to fix it so people can be satisfied.

I agree with you, but I don't know if you can, in today's political world, who is incentivized to fix it.

I mean, I'd love to tie all their salaries to bonuses.

The country does does well on these metrics, you get this.

The country is doing horribly on these metrics.

No, you don't get anything.

And, you know, all of us get together and figure out the metrics because

all they're doing now is they're measuring success on if the Rs or the Ds are elected and how long they can stay and how much money they can make for themselves.

I see very, I mean, they are there on both sides that really do want to make a difference, but that's not Washington.

So

how do you empower the country to do it without having to regulate it, to do it because it's the right thing to do?

Everyone in Washington is so frustrated.

And like, maybe not everyone, but so many people I speak to, I speak to Democrats in Congress, I speak to Republicans in Congress, and so many of them say the same thing.

Like, we don't do any real work here.

Everything is led by the party leaders.

All I do all day is make fundraising phone calls.

And I do, I say to them, right?

I say to them, it's like, well, why don't you do something about it?

Yeah, right.

Right.

Right.

Like, you need to speak to some people who are similarly frustrated on the other side.

Amen.

And then, and then both of you need to agree to prioritize, because there's different things, right?

So all the Democrats have one view on abortion.

All the Republicans have the other view, right?

And as long as you prioritize that topic or whatever else divides them, you can't get anything done because you say, well, we're deferring to the leaders, we're deferring to the leaders.

Now, you have to say, look, what are we both angry about?

We are both angry about how tightly the leadership controls the floor, about how little real amendments there are out there.

And you have to say, look, we are going to make that our priority.

We're going to say we will give floor control to whoever will meet our demands here.

And there's no substitute in politics for leadership.

I read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt a few months ago, and it was interesting.

I hadn't known, you know, I'd known about him.

I went to the Natural History Museum in New York when I was growing up.

But what a coincidence it was.

You know, he was never meant to be president, right?

The Republican Party bosses elevated him to the vice presidency because they thought he was too annoying.

And then McKinley died.

And so he becomes president by coincidence.

And he chooses to exercise that unique moment in a visionary way, right?

He could have said, well, the bosses didn't really like me, but now that I'm here, the easiest thing to do is just go along, get along.

And we could have continued with stalemate Gilded Age politics forever.

But he chose to act as a disruptor.

And it made a really big difference to the trajectory of American politics.

And we just have not had that happen, right?

So Donald Trump, you know, he reminds me of Roosevelt in certain ways, that he was not the person who conservative leaders wanted.

He was not the person who Republican Party leaders wanted.

He

had a connection with people.

He used new communications technologies.

He's a rash New York guy.

But in office, he has,

you know, he's done his tweets.

He's like, he's done his antics, but he's governed on a policy level, very, very conventional way, because that's the easiest way for him.

Because Washington's tough, right?

It's like, it's a snake pit out there.

And I, to an extent, understand why he just kind of felt, look, I'm going to do what Mitch says.

I'm going to do what Paul Ryan says.

I'm going to do a big corporate tax cut.

But he's got to know, right?

That's not why people voted for him, right?

It wasn't because they wanted Mitt Romney's economic policies.

People who hadn't been voting Republican before said they liked the idea of a kind of a strong cultural politics, maybe too far for my taste, at least to their taste, right?

But they wanted a brand of conservatism that would take care of the economic needs of working class Americans, right?

And Trump has not, like on his healthcare stuff, he hasn't done that.

On his tax stuff, he hasn't prioritized that.

He hasn't prioritized middle-class and working class families.

And he should have, right?

He just should have displayed a little more imagination, a little more creativity.

And there's been stirrings of that in the Republican caucus.

You know, Josh Hawley talks about it.

Marco Rubio talks about it a little.

I hope next time we can get a little more polish and detail there.

You know, so Biden maybe, I think, will be the next president.

He's an interesting guy, right?

He's a throwback, like literally an old guy.

He practices a style of politics that rubs a lot of young left-wing people the wrong way.

But it was very popular.

It turned out to be like lots of Democrats, working-class African-American, Latino Democrats.

That's what they wanted, was this kind of, you know, JFK, RFK-style back-to-the-future Democratic Party.

And can he deliver on that, right?

You know,

I hold out some hope.

I understand why some people are skeptical.

And, you know, we're going to have to see what happens.

I'm not even going to touch politics with you.

I'm just going to let it sit where it was

where it was.

I appreciate

your willingness to come on.

And I know you're trying to sell a book,

but there are many places that I don't go when I have a book to sell,

that I just won't cross the threshold.

I've been in that lion's den long enough to learn you don't win

if somebody is not open-minded.

You just don't win.

And

I am

impressed with many of the things that you have written in the book because I think

you

believe it

and work for it.

And I think that

there is a problem in America where,

and Jonathan Haidt talks about this, but our language is so different now.

that the way we express ourselves sometimes just set the other side off.

And we have to have patience and listen to one another.

I am in complete agreement that a billion Americans would be a great goal.

That

more legal immigration would be really good.

To be able to find the people who know why they want to live here or what's wrong with the place that they're currently living at and why this is such an advantage, I think it would be a game changer for us.

But it would require us to not only look at the problems,

but also then pick yourself back up and say, okay,

but look at the assets we have and let's learn from our mistakes and let's just go out and win.

Just go out and win.

One for all of mankind, quite honestly.

You know,

going to the moon was not just an American thing.

That was a success for all humanity.

Absolutely.

Matthew, thank you very much.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

The name of the book is 1 Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.

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