In this episode, Jeffrey Tucker joins Karol to discuss his latest book Spirits of America and the lessons he’s drawn from the digital age and post-pandemic world. Tucker reflects on how lockdowns exposed deep social divides and why rediscovering the value of routine and ordinary life is essential for resilience. He highlights the importance of gratitude in daily tasks, shares concerns about society’s direction after COVID, and offers timeless advice to his younger self about risk-taking, courage, and perseverance. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Wednesday & Friday.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome back to Carol Marca Wich Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Jeffrey Tunger. Jeffrey is president of the
Brownstone Institute and the author of the new book Spirits
of America.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
So nice to have you on, Jeffrey.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
It's nice for you to have me on. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Well. I got to know your work during COVID and
I associate you pretty closely with healthcare policy and that
kind of thing. But Spirits of America isn't a book
about healthcare policy, is that right?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
That's right. I went in a completely different direction. I'm
at like twenty books now. Yeah, and all my of
the books, I don't care about any of them. Actually,
they're all kind of silly and retrospect. I mean, some
of them are flat out wrong, some of very interesting,
some are yeah, yeah, I mean, but some are just,
you know, just wrong. I was a techno utopian, for example.
(00:55):
I mean, I'll just admit it. I fell for the
whole bit. You know, in the early two thousand oh
we're going to get digital media's and emancipate us all
from the physical world, and then you know, all humanity
will be free.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
No, that didn't happen.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
It work out the way I expect it. I yeah,
I feel a lot of humility for having been terribly
wrong on that. There's two books in particular that are terrible.
One is called It's a Jetson World. I mean that's
a better of the two. It's a Jetsons World is
a decent book. For example, I think I was a
little more sober when I wrote that, like if.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
You watched it, and more drunken for the other one.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, I mean literally sober. But if you watch the
show the Jetsons, one of the things that's interesting about
is they have a lot of cool new gizmos and tools,
but it's still a bourgeois family and they still face
all the normal problems of human life. And that was
the theme of that book. So gap good check. My
next book was the crazy one. It's called A Beautiful Anarchy.
(01:59):
That's when I went chapter by chapter celebrating every social
media platform, you know, every new watchdoodle out there. And
I had this sort of whiggish view as my dog
bothering the curtains there of my apology, I had this
whiggish view of humanity that you know, we had just
settled onto a new course of progress that was going
(02:21):
to be infinite, and we're going to improve everything and
get rid of all the barriers and problems of the
past through technological means. And this is an inevitable trajectory upwards,
you know, to the light and the very view that that,
you know, against which my mentor warned me, who is
Murray Rothbarty said, you know, they believe this nonsense in
(02:42):
the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, right, and that didn't
prepare them for the catastrophe of the Great War. They
just forgot about, you know, basic principles of human nature
and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Well, do you think that's what happened here.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Too, Well, it certainly happened to me, you know. I
mean I just I didn't I don't know. Something. There
was a there was a period where there was like
a delusional sort of attachment to the glories of digital
life and how it's can fix everything, and it took
lockdowns to break break me of that and reality. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, what was it about lockdowns that broke that?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Well, I think it was when I saw my friends
of mine who are sort of ideological, but I guess
allies used to say, well, hey, if it weren't for
laptops and digital media and cell phones and all the
rest of this kind of stuff, we would not have
been able to have the capacity to stay home stay
(03:45):
safe from the virus. And I thought, yeah, that's that's
a weird thing to say.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Well, but to be fair, right, like I you know,
I was super anti lockdowns with you pretty early on.
But you know, in March twenty twenty, I wrote a
column celebrating screens. Also, it kept us connected in a
crazy time where we wait, wait.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
We didn't know what was going to happen. Look.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
By by early April, I'm like, you know, this all
needs to end. And I wouldn't go to people's zoom
birthday parties and I didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Do any of that.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
But we did have a moment where we couldn't be together. Foolishly, yes,
but and we were kept together with screens.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Why is that so bad?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I grant you everything you just said, but what I
don't like is the idea that we would abuse this
technology and safety. Now we can dismantle society because we
enable it. The other thing that troubled me very much
was the way in which these digital companies participated with
the lockdown elites to lock everybody down to drive people
(04:53):
to the online schooling platforms. So there's no question this
is true. I mean, like one of the major propagandas
for lockdowns was the owner of an line teaching platform,
so that was early on, and so you know, there's
that problem. The other thing is something that was very
revealing about this period is for me intellectually speaking, was
(05:14):
the way in which it revealed huge class differences in
people's experiences. I mean, there were the.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Laptop class, and there was the pajama class.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Yeah. Yeah, and that was like what a third of
the country or something like that. Then you had the
other two thirds. I had to continue to treat the
sick and grow the vegetables and slaughter the cows and
could drive them to the grocery stores and then deliver them. Yeah,
deliver them, my god. And it was really there was
(05:44):
moments in there. And by the way, my intellectual tradition
kind of forbid me for thinking about class stratificational class
differences or class antagonism or class conflict. It's like I
always thought that that was sort of Marxist, but I watched,
you know, I would read the New York Times and
they would say, well, putting in your zip could find
(06:05):
out what you should do. And then you put in
your zip code and said, oh, clearly you need to
stay home and get your groceries delivered to you by
whom I mean, by whom I mean not readers of
the New York Times, clearly, and this blindness that I
saw among the media elite towards the way regular people
(06:28):
were experiencing life. The other thing that was strange to
me was this division of essential and unessential, which was
a complicated division that came from the Department of Film
and Security. But the people who were not essential were
things like, okay, the people who give you your Manny's and petties,
or preachers or artists playing you know, or bartenders. I mean,
(06:55):
this was the people that were just sort of thrown out.
They were just like, get you know, we don't need you.
We've got a pandemic, we don't care what happens to you.
Oh you're sad, here's some money. I mean that literally happened.
And there was this weird blindness of the entire period
towards this extreme class antagonisms that had developed, and people
(07:18):
used to say this to me. I remember I was
very good friends with the chef once who was serving
a thing that I was doing, and he just said, offhanded,
he goes, well, this, this whole this whole thing is
not a big deal for you because you want those
people who works on the computer, right, And I was
shocked when he said that. I thought, you know, you
(07:40):
really do think of me and you as having completely
different life experiences. And I was trying to connect with
him like, oh, yeah, how is that, you know, but
he wasn't having it, and I realized I needed to
upgrade my sense of things right. So yeah, So Carol,
So what happened to me with this latest book? As
(08:02):
I went back and read some earlier works on American
history trying to understand exactly how we got here, not
to the digital age, but everything that preceded it, the
eighteenth century, nineteenth century history, and wrote a short reflection
(08:23):
on all these virtues, you know, with its work or
frugality or at time management, and and just going through
this discipline of sort of rethinking the practicalities of life
at their fundamental level revealed some things to me that
I had never seen before, and I just couldn't wait
(08:43):
to convey them to other people. The article the book
has written in very simple language on purpose. I don't
reference Schumper and smaller and smaller you know, whatever you
know or Chopenauer like, there's nothing like that in here.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Was the biggest revelation to you.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
My biggest revelation is the way in which our culture
has instructed us to kind of regret anything that is
tedious or problematic or troubling or routine. Uh, and that's
kind of everything, you know. So, and they do this
to sell us products, ever better products. What is routine?
(09:27):
What is tedious? What is broken that you have to
fix in your life? Those are all the things we
don't We're we're strange people. We've come to regret them.
We think that that our whole object of life is
to save time from the thing we're doing so that
we can go on to do somebody else that we
also regret, and try to speed up so that we
(09:47):
can go on to the next thing which we also regret. Like,
you can't live this way. And I wrote a chapter
on here that I think it was originally called the
Spirit of is called be like a Farmer, but I
think I changed to chapter title to the Spirit of Forbearance.
And it was a reflection on a time when I
(10:08):
was about twenty years old. A good friend of mine
took me to his farm and I just had me
go through it one day of daily routines with the
farmer and his family. And the thing that struck me
most about that experience was the absence of frustration on
the part of everyone for everything.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
If the fence, you weren't trying to move on to
the next thing, because you were focused on what you're.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Doing, dedicated to their work, and saw their mission in
life as fixing things. Like they didn't get angry when
the glass would fall from the from the cabinet to
the floor. They would just simply go, oh, well, now
there's something I have to clean up. Or when they
go out to the fence and see the fences broken
because the cow hit it, right, you fix the fence.
(10:58):
And if the nail doesn't if the wood doesn't fit,
then you cut a new piece of wood. If the
wood cutting machine is broken because it needs a new screw,
then you try to figure out. And this is what
you do. You do You do it without without harry,
without without frustration, without anger. You just come to fall
(11:18):
in love with the routine and discipline of improving the
world a little bit and every way you possibly can.
And I realized this is completely different outlook from our
dopamine obsessed culture, where we, you know, our whole lives
consist of just scrolling and looking for the next hit,
the next sort of news, narcotic or whatever await. This
(11:42):
is very bad for us spiritually, and it causes us
not to grow our own lives and our own communities
and our and our society. And so this is what
this shocked me, Carol. This was so shocking when I
realized this that it changed everything about my day. You're
pretty much instantly.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
So you got off line, you drop.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
The X that's going too far. My point is that
I got up in the morning and I like to
do floor exercises, but I usually rested them, like oh
it's a stupid as waste. Yeah. Well now I kind
of like embraced it and said, Okay, this is what
I'm going to do, and now it's time to make
up the bed. I'm going to do a really good
job and I'm not going to regret. I'm not going
to rush it and go. I can't wait to get
(12:26):
to the things they say no, I'm going to embrace
what the moment, be aware of what's around me, and
be very precise. Maybe I hope this doesn't sound dumb
to you. Or when you make breakfast, Yeah, everybody loves
eating their breakfast. They don't like cleaning up. Okay, so
now you have to like cleaning as much as you
like eating. Now you spend time in the kitchen, make
(12:48):
sure the kitchen is absolutely immaculate, and you're done and
closed after breakfast, and so then you start to love
every moment of life. It's not us slowing down. It's
a matter of adopting a new attitude towards the normal
(13:08):
pacing of life. And the weird thing is, after doing
this for one day, I found myself happier. Maybe maybe
that sounds extreme, but I think before then I had
culturated myself maybe just absorbed it from around me to
kind of regret everything that I was doing because it
(13:28):
was taking time away from the next thing I was
supposed to be doing, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
And this is for just a simpler existence. Is this
part of it?
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Or was longing? I was longing to fall in love
again with with with routine, with what I actually do
you know, to find happiness and satisfaction out of small achievements.
Like people don't think of cleaning the bathroom as and achievement,
(13:57):
but it is a great thing. You should take a
great pride in it, or walking the all grow any
kind of boring thing you have to do. I mean,
think about it, Carol, how much in our life consists
of doing things that you don't like doing that. That's
not a good way to go. What if you just
(14:18):
changed and you just said, Okay, now I'm gonna I'm
going to express gratitude for the opportunity to be given
these hands, given this energy, given this time to do
what needs to be done.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
And Pirds of America comes from this.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Yes, the entire book is written around this theme. Right,
So it's engaging with this is this book is like
a reversal of my book called Beautiful Anarchy. It's a
celebration of the physical you know, of of of nature,
of of of of bakers, of butchers, of loving this
(15:00):
small achievements in life, having a greater appreciation for the
world around you, all these things. It's yeah, so in
that way, it is a reversal. Now you asked specifically,
do I spend last time on digitally, Well, my job
is it's online. That's sort of thing. But I have
to tell you I'm getting more disciplined about it, so
(15:20):
that you know, when the evening time comes and the
cocktail hits, you know, you just don't spend the rest
of the night going like this, scroll scroll, what what
is this? What are you actually learning? But on the
other hand, if you shut down and pick up that
book that you've been minding to read for years but
never have started on page one, and I tell you
(15:41):
the intellectual experience of that we shut down everything and
just have words in your hand and a book, there's
something magical that it burns into your brain in a
way that all the posts on XT just fly by.
It's a different experience that you merge from that experience,
(16:02):
more insightful, more aera diite, more scrupulous as a thinker,
a better observer. You develop and cultivate these virtues that
I talked about in the book, these habits, these more as,
these the routines that built American life. And so that
that was the intuition that led me to write the book.
I have to tell you my other books I published,
(16:25):
I didn't care what anybody thought. It's like a screw
you is my book, this one. I find myself deeply
interested in what people's.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Experiences with reviews.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I want I want to hear what people read into
the book, because this was the most I would say
honest book. I dug really deeply to tell every everything
I knew about what I believe to be true in
a lot of what I've learned over the lockdown period
(16:57):
and what's followed. So it's it's it's very sincere, and
I took away. There's no footnotes. There's not even index.
That was a decision I made too, which is unbelievable.
I would have done that, but no index, no footnotes,
no fancy pants references to all the philosopher's economists, nothing
(17:20):
like that. It's gritty, it's tactles, it's I hope it's
real life. I honestly think, Carol, and I'm not sure.
Maybe I forecasting broadcasting now from my own experience for
the rest of the world, but I think that the culture,
our world today and our culture many most people I
know have a problem dealing with real life. There's you know,
(17:43):
I mean, just like normal life things.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Absolutely I don't like it.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
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Speaker 1 (19:44):
You didn't read my three questions in advance, so you're
going to get to be surprised.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
But one of the things is that people write in for.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Kind of advice sometimes, and some of the major things
that people write about, I mean, the number one thing
people write about is how to make friends, either for
themselves or for the kids, or for their grown kids,
or for their spouse. I'm talking, this is the top
subject that I get written about, and I think that
that is it's a crisis.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
People live their lives entirely online.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
They don't know how to connect in person, and what
you're saying is absolutely right.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
You know, I worried when I saw maybe a decade
ago that participation in church communities or yeah, that was
was going down. My first thought was what happens now?
So now you have your family, if you have one,
(20:41):
and now you have your job, but there's no there's
no other place they can go. But what do these
look like? Okay, you can talk about civic associations and
that seemed to hey, but Lockdown's kind of shattered a
lot of those. I mean, it broke up a lot
of garage bands, it broke up the bridge clubs, people moved,
(21:04):
and so you left this sort of isolated person living
in a you know, in a digital world.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
I'll never forgive them for what they did.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
I you know, whenever I get to talking with somebody
who was also you know, anti lockdowns and really cared
about that, we always get right into it. My other
show with Mary Catherine Ham normally, you know, we have
a segment called Still Mad bro where we often talk about,
you know, how all the things that went wrong during
that time, all the things that were caused to go wrong,
(21:37):
and yeah, it's hard to recover from.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Yeah. The other thing, Carols, I wrote two very fiery anger.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
You write a lot of books.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
I wrote two books about the lockdowns, one in October
of twenty twenty and then one about two years later.
One's called Liberty or Lockdown. The other one is called
Life After Lockdown. And those books are they're heated there earning,
they're angry, They're just furious. And a lot of science,
(22:08):
a lot of detail, a lot of you know, health stuff,
a lot of virology, immunology, epidemiology, a lot a lot
everything I know about the subject, and economics and politics
are all crammed in their class analysis everything. But you know,
you just can't be angry forever. So I my reason
for writing, yeah, I know, it's me. My reason for
(22:30):
writing The Spirits of America was trying to figure out, Okay,
if it's not just all anger and hate all the time,
what is it we can fall in love with? And
what I discover is that we can fall in love
with the normal course of life. Like the routines that
advertising in our culture, everything deprecates and says you shoulgret
Maybe we shouldn't regret it. Maybe we should just be
(22:51):
revel in it and be happy with it.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I love that. What do you worry about?
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Let's see a bigger small like in my own life.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
For it could be any anything that you that comes
to mind.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Okay, the first thing that comes to mind right now
is the thing I worry about a lot is is
whether the dramatic changes we're seeing in the world today
are are sustainable. I think as Americans we are very fortunate,
like we've entered on a on a better path. Uh,
the censorship has died down. There's a kind of a
(23:28):
normalcy that's that's dawning. We're seeing the reduction and the
decline of media power, and the elites are no longer
dictating scripting the public mind in the way they were
just a few years ago. And and and the bureaucrats
that did the lockdown, so you know, they all seem
to be running away. These the censors are are fleeing.
(23:49):
And this is all good. But I worry that it's
that something will break it and it won't be sustainable
and will bounce back to the This is my I
think my number one biggest there and in fact is
Brownstone Instant. We our main job is to rescue people
out of professional displacement, like intellectuals in particular. That's really
(24:09):
what we are founded to do, and that's what we
continue to do. But I'm I'm right now preparing for
a possibility to some of the very very brave people
who are who are all over the federal bureocracies now,
like HHS and FDA and NIH and so on, so
(24:31):
you know, if something should happen politically or otherwise that
would break their positions were displaced and professionally, I need
to be in a position to sort of absorb this
and go into a kind of a sanctuary situation. Again,
this is my number one biggest concern, and this is
(24:51):
what I'm trying to prepare for right now with Brownstow
is just in case we have to take you.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
You have to worry about that, absolutely have to.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Take an eight twelve fifteen people. There aren't enough think
tanky refuges places where these people can go. So they're
taking grave risks with their careers. They're doing what they're
doing right now, and I hope it works. What I
want right now is for what's happening in the US
(25:21):
to be a kind of beacon to the world, you know,
a light under the world there can be life after lockdown,
we can restore our societies, we can get back our health,
we can get back our clarity.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
We're in a very optimistic moment.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
Yeah, the US our freedom. So I just want, like
all the other countries in the world, to do this.
And when I look at the world right now, I
see that there's many places of the world that are
teetering between the two. You know, You've got tremendous political
upheaval right now in Europe and in the UKA. And
are they going to go the way of the US
(25:56):
or is the US going to be squeezed out and
be drawn back into the CCP style regime that we
just left?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
You know, yeah, I could really go either way.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
When you look back at your life, what advice would
you give your sixteen year old self having to do
this all over again? What is sixteen year old Jeffrey
you need to know other than definitely don't lock down.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure that I would have taken
the advice. In fact, I think my father gave me
a lot of advice that I ignored.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
That's every kid, right, But this is you giving yourself advice.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
What would you tell me? I think I would have
would have prepared myself for two things. One is to
take more risks and be prepared to experience more pain
than you could ever even imagine.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Really, what kind of pain?
Speaker 3 (26:51):
What's do disappointment, trail terror, grave of shock that things
aren't going to go the way you plan them. This
is I've experienced this again and again and again in
my life, and on an increasingly intense basis, Like the
more risks that take, the more pain I've suffered. But
(27:14):
then also, you know, on the other side of that
has been I was a great achievement, knock on would
but I think great stuff, but only and it's only
come after this dark night of the soul, which has
happened repeatedly in my life. And I don't think I
(27:34):
was prepared for that. At a young age, when just
starting thinking about a career, thinking about what my life
is like, I was just this happy, naive guy. You
know it's saying, and you know, I whistled by way
through everything life is just a happy adventure. And nobody
told me that if life is good to be an adventure,
(27:57):
and it should be, there will also be a lot
of disappointment and pain and difficulty and disorientation. And you
will make a lot of really bad decisions, and you
will be wrong a lot of the time.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
I love that you own that so much.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I love that you say, like all these two books
are we're wrong and I made mistakes, and I really
don't feel like I hear that very often in our
public world and our public life, where people admit to
errors like that.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Well, you know, part of the problem, Carol, in the
in the in this in this intellectual space, we like
to think of as as whole lives, you know, as
one unit with one message. Like we think, what did
John Locke believe? What did Sigmund Freud believe? Yes, I've
(28:49):
seen that, yeah, Uh, tell me about the thoughts of
Saint Thomas whatever the thing?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Right?
Speaker 3 (28:57):
What is Schopenhauer? And and we clump their whole lives
into this one homogeneous bucket and say this is what
he believed. But the truth is that intellectual life is
always learning. It's iterative. That means you're wrong sometimes, you're
right sometimes and you're wrong again, you make a misjudgment,
(29:19):
you reverse yourself. That's like it's impossible to separate a
body of ideas from biography, right, Yeah, people change, Yeah,
And so I think part of the reluctance of people
like me, influencers or intellectuals or journalists whatever, to admit
error is for fear that people won't be able to
(29:40):
make sense of their lives. Like you just have to
have one tag on your head, you know, right, this
is my lifetime message. Well, I finally had to give
up on that because I you know what it is.
I think it traces to my own desperate desire for sincerity.
And I'm not a I'm not some paragon of truth,
(30:02):
but I want to believe that I strive to say
true things.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Is best and telling the truth is messy. It's not
such an organized easy thing to do. We're going to
take a quick break and be right back on the
Carol Marcowitch Show. Well you're super interesting, Jeffrey. I've loved
this conversation. I really think your work is amazing and
I'm so glad you came on. Leave us here with
(30:28):
your best tip for my listeners on how they can
improve their lives.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Oh yeah, I'm going to go back to what I
said earlier. Start right now. Whatever you're doing next that
you normally regret and hate because it's something because it's
getting in the way of the next thing you want
to do, figure out a way to love that thing,
to appreciate the opportunity to do it, Be grateful that
(30:53):
you have the energy, the thought, the mentality, the capacity
to make a difference, and however small a way it is,
and do it with diligence, persistence and love. That will
start making your life happier instantly.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
All right, I'm going to go clean the kitchen and
have a really positive outlook about that. He's Jeffrey Tucker.
Check out his new book, Spirits of America.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Check him out.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
He is the president of Brownstone Institute. Follow him on
x He's really fantastic. Thank you so much, Jeffrey.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Goo
Welcome back to Carol Marca Wich Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Jeffrey Tunger. Jeffrey is president of the
Brownstone Institute and the author of the new book Spirits
of America.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
So nice to have you on, Jeffrey.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
It's nice for you to have me on. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Well. I got to know your work during COVID and
I associate you pretty closely with healthcare policy and that
kind of thing. But Spirits of America isn't a book
about healthcare policy, is that right?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
That's right. I went in a completely different direction. I'm
at like twenty books now. Yeah, and all my of
the books, I don't care about any of them. Actually,
they're all kind of silly and retrospect. I mean, some
of them are flat out wrong, some of very interesting,
some are yeah, yeah, I mean, but some are just,
you know, just wrong. I was a techno utopian, for example.
(00:55):
I mean, I'll just admit it. I fell for the
whole bit. You know, in the early two thousand oh
we're going to get digital media's and emancipate us all
from the physical world, and then you know, all humanity
will be free.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
No, that didn't happen.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
It work out the way I expect it. I yeah,
I feel a lot of humility for having been terribly
wrong on that. There's two books in particular that are terrible.
One is called It's a Jetson World. I mean that's
a better of the two. It's a Jetsons World is
a decent book. For example, I think I was a
little more sober when I wrote that, like if.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
You watched it, and more drunken for the other one.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, I mean literally sober. But if you watch the
show the Jetsons, one of the things that's interesting about
is they have a lot of cool new gizmos and tools,
but it's still a bourgeois family and they still face
all the normal problems of human life. And that was
the theme of that book. So gap good check. My
next book was the crazy one. It's called A Beautiful Anarchy.
(01:59):
That's when I went chapter by chapter celebrating every social
media platform, you know, every new watchdoodle out there. And
I had this sort of whiggish view as my dog
bothering the curtains there of my apology, I had this
whiggish view of humanity that you know, we had just
settled onto a new course of progress that was going
(02:21):
to be infinite, and we're going to improve everything and
get rid of all the barriers and problems of the
past through technological means. And this is an inevitable trajectory upwards,
you know, to the light and the very view that that,
you know, against which my mentor warned me, who is
Murray Rothbarty said, you know, they believe this nonsense in
(02:42):
the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, right, and that didn't
prepare them for the catastrophe of the Great War. They
just forgot about, you know, basic principles of human nature
and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Well, do you think that's what happened here.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Too, Well, it certainly happened to me, you know. I
mean I just I didn't I don't know. Something. There
was a there was a period where there was like
a delusional sort of attachment to the glories of digital
life and how it's can fix everything, and it took
lockdowns to break break me of that and reality. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, what was it about lockdowns that broke that?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Well, I think it was when I saw my friends
of mine who are sort of ideological, but I guess
allies used to say, well, hey, if it weren't for
laptops and digital media and cell phones and all the
rest of this kind of stuff, we would not have
been able to have the capacity to stay home stay
(03:45):
safe from the virus. And I thought, yeah, that's that's
a weird thing to say.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Well, but to be fair, right, like I you know,
I was super anti lockdowns with you pretty early on.
But you know, in March twenty twenty, I wrote a
column celebrating screens. Also, it kept us connected in a
crazy time where we wait, wait.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
We didn't know what was going to happen. Look.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
By by early April, I'm like, you know, this all
needs to end. And I wouldn't go to people's zoom
birthday parties and I didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Do any of that.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
But we did have a moment where we couldn't be together. Foolishly, yes,
but and we were kept together with screens.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Why is that so bad?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I grant you everything you just said, but what I
don't like is the idea that we would abuse this
technology and safety. Now we can dismantle society because we
enable it. The other thing that troubled me very much
was the way in which these digital companies participated with
the lockdown elites to lock everybody down to drive people
(04:53):
to the online schooling platforms. So there's no question this
is true. I mean, like one of the major propagandas
for lockdowns was the owner of an line teaching platform,
so that was early on, and so you know, there's
that problem. The other thing is something that was very
revealing about this period is for me intellectually speaking, was
(05:14):
the way in which it revealed huge class differences in
people's experiences. I mean, there were the.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Laptop class, and there was the pajama class.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Yeah. Yeah, and that was like what a third of
the country or something like that. Then you had the
other two thirds. I had to continue to treat the
sick and grow the vegetables and slaughter the cows and
could drive them to the grocery stores and then deliver them. Yeah,
deliver them, my god. And it was really there was
(05:44):
moments in there. And by the way, my intellectual tradition
kind of forbid me for thinking about class stratificational class
differences or class antagonism or class conflict. It's like I
always thought that that was sort of Marxist, but I watched,
you know, I would read the New York Times and
they would say, well, putting in your zip could find
(06:05):
out what you should do. And then you put in
your zip code and said, oh, clearly you need to
stay home and get your groceries delivered to you by
whom I mean, by whom I mean not readers of
the New York Times, clearly, and this blindness that I
saw among the media elite towards the way regular people
(06:28):
were experiencing life. The other thing that was strange to
me was this division of essential and unessential, which was
a complicated division that came from the Department of Film
and Security. But the people who were not essential were
things like, okay, the people who give you your Manny's and petties,
or preachers or artists playing you know, or bartenders. I mean,
(06:55):
this was the people that were just sort of thrown out.
They were just like, get you know, we don't need you.
We've got a pandemic, we don't care what happens to you.
Oh you're sad, here's some money. I mean that literally happened.
And there was this weird blindness of the entire period
towards this extreme class antagonisms that had developed, and people
(07:18):
used to say this to me. I remember I was
very good friends with the chef once who was serving
a thing that I was doing, and he just said, offhanded,
he goes, well, this, this whole this whole thing is
not a big deal for you because you want those
people who works on the computer, right, And I was
shocked when he said that. I thought, you know, you
(07:40):
really do think of me and you as having completely
different life experiences. And I was trying to connect with
him like, oh, yeah, how is that, you know, but
he wasn't having it, and I realized I needed to
upgrade my sense of things right. So yeah, So Carol,
So what happened to me with this latest book? As
(08:02):
I went back and read some earlier works on American
history trying to understand exactly how we got here, not
to the digital age, but everything that preceded it, the
eighteenth century, nineteenth century history, and wrote a short reflection
(08:23):
on all these virtues, you know, with its work or
frugality or at time management, and and just going through
this discipline of sort of rethinking the practicalities of life
at their fundamental level revealed some things to me that
I had never seen before, and I just couldn't wait
(08:43):
to convey them to other people. The article the book
has written in very simple language on purpose. I don't
reference Schumper and smaller and smaller you know, whatever you
know or Chopenauer like, there's nothing like that in here.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Was the biggest revelation to you.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
My biggest revelation is the way in which our culture
has instructed us to kind of regret anything that is
tedious or problematic or troubling or routine. Uh, and that's
kind of everything, you know. So, and they do this
to sell us products, ever better products. What is routine?
(09:27):
What is tedious? What is broken that you have to
fix in your life? Those are all the things we
don't We're we're strange people. We've come to regret them.
We think that that our whole object of life is
to save time from the thing we're doing so that
we can go on to do somebody else that we
also regret, and try to speed up so that we
(09:47):
can go on to the next thing which we also regret. Like,
you can't live this way. And I wrote a chapter
on here that I think it was originally called the
Spirit of is called be like a Farmer, but I
think I changed to chapter title to the Spirit of Forbearance.
And it was a reflection on a time when I
(10:08):
was about twenty years old. A good friend of mine
took me to his farm and I just had me
go through it one day of daily routines with the
farmer and his family. And the thing that struck me
most about that experience was the absence of frustration on
the part of everyone for everything.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
If the fence, you weren't trying to move on to
the next thing, because you were focused on what you're.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Doing, dedicated to their work, and saw their mission in
life as fixing things. Like they didn't get angry when
the glass would fall from the from the cabinet to
the floor. They would just simply go, oh, well, now
there's something I have to clean up. Or when they
go out to the fence and see the fences broken
because the cow hit it, right, you fix the fence.
(10:58):
And if the nail doesn't if the wood doesn't fit,
then you cut a new piece of wood. If the
wood cutting machine is broken because it needs a new screw,
then you try to figure out. And this is what
you do. You do You do it without without harry,
without without frustration, without anger. You just come to fall
(11:18):
in love with the routine and discipline of improving the
world a little bit and every way you possibly can.
And I realized this is completely different outlook from our
dopamine obsessed culture, where we, you know, our whole lives
consist of just scrolling and looking for the next hit,
the next sort of news, narcotic or whatever await. This
(11:42):
is very bad for us spiritually, and it causes us
not to grow our own lives and our own communities
and our and our society. And so this is what
this shocked me, Carol. This was so shocking when I
realized this that it changed everything about my day. You're
pretty much instantly.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
So you got off line, you drop.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
The X that's going too far. My point is that
I got up in the morning and I like to
do floor exercises, but I usually rested them, like oh
it's a stupid as waste. Yeah. Well now I kind
of like embraced it and said, Okay, this is what
I'm going to do, and now it's time to make
up the bed. I'm going to do a really good
job and I'm not going to regret. I'm not going
to rush it and go. I can't wait to get
(12:26):
to the things they say no, I'm going to embrace
what the moment, be aware of what's around me, and
be very precise. Maybe I hope this doesn't sound dumb
to you. Or when you make breakfast, Yeah, everybody loves
eating their breakfast. They don't like cleaning up. Okay, so
now you have to like cleaning as much as you
like eating. Now you spend time in the kitchen, make
(12:48):
sure the kitchen is absolutely immaculate, and you're done and
closed after breakfast, and so then you start to love
every moment of life. It's not us slowing down. It's
a matter of adopting a new attitude towards the normal
(13:08):
pacing of life. And the weird thing is, after doing
this for one day, I found myself happier. Maybe maybe
that sounds extreme, but I think before then I had
culturated myself maybe just absorbed it from around me to
kind of regret everything that I was doing because it
(13:28):
was taking time away from the next thing I was
supposed to be doing, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
And this is for just a simpler existence. Is this
part of it?
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Or was longing? I was longing to fall in love
again with with with routine, with what I actually do
you know, to find happiness and satisfaction out of small achievements.
Like people don't think of cleaning the bathroom as and achievement,
(13:57):
but it is a great thing. You should take a
great pride in it, or walking the all grow any
kind of boring thing you have to do. I mean,
think about it, Carol, how much in our life consists
of doing things that you don't like doing that. That's
not a good way to go. What if you just
(14:18):
changed and you just said, Okay, now I'm gonna I'm
going to express gratitude for the opportunity to be given
these hands, given this energy, given this time to do
what needs to be done.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
And Pirds of America comes from this.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Yes, the entire book is written around this theme. Right,
So it's engaging with this is this book is like
a reversal of my book called Beautiful Anarchy. It's a
celebration of the physical you know, of of of nature,
of of of of bakers, of butchers, of loving this
(15:00):
small achievements in life, having a greater appreciation for the
world around you, all these things. It's yeah, so in
that way, it is a reversal. Now you asked specifically,
do I spend last time on digitally, Well, my job
is it's online. That's sort of thing. But I have
to tell you I'm getting more disciplined about it, so
(15:20):
that you know, when the evening time comes and the
cocktail hits, you know, you just don't spend the rest
of the night going like this, scroll scroll, what what
is this? What are you actually learning? But on the
other hand, if you shut down and pick up that
book that you've been minding to read for years but
never have started on page one, and I tell you
(15:41):
the intellectual experience of that we shut down everything and
just have words in your hand and a book, there's
something magical that it burns into your brain in a
way that all the posts on XT just fly by.
It's a different experience that you merge from that experience,
(16:02):
more insightful, more aera diite, more scrupulous as a thinker,
a better observer. You develop and cultivate these virtues that
I talked about in the book, these habits, these more as,
these the routines that built American life. And so that
that was the intuition that led me to write the book.
I have to tell you my other books I published,
(16:25):
I didn't care what anybody thought. It's like a screw
you is my book, this one. I find myself deeply
interested in what people's.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Experiences with reviews.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I want I want to hear what people read into
the book, because this was the most I would say
honest book. I dug really deeply to tell every everything
I knew about what I believe to be true in
a lot of what I've learned over the lockdown period
(16:57):
and what's followed. So it's it's it's very sincere, and
I took away. There's no footnotes. There's not even index.
That was a decision I made too, which is unbelievable.
I would have done that, but no index, no footnotes,
no fancy pants references to all the philosopher's economists, nothing
(17:20):
like that. It's gritty, it's tactles, it's I hope it's
real life. I honestly think, Carol, and I'm not sure.
Maybe I forecasting broadcasting now from my own experience for
the rest of the world, but I think that the culture,
our world today and our culture many most people I
know have a problem dealing with real life. There's you know,
(17:43):
I mean, just like normal life things.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Absolutely I don't like it.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
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(19:34):
should carefully consider and review all risks involved. More Coming
up with Jeffrey Tucker after thists.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
You didn't read my three questions in advance, so you're
going to get to be surprised.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
But one of the things is that people write in for.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Kind of advice sometimes, and some of the major things
that people write about, I mean, the number one thing
people write about is how to make friends, either for
themselves or for the kids, or for their grown kids,
or for their spouse. I'm talking, this is the top
subject that I get written about, and I think that
that is it's a crisis.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
People live their lives entirely online.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
They don't know how to connect in person, and what
you're saying is absolutely right.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
You know, I worried when I saw maybe a decade
ago that participation in church communities or yeah, that was
was going down. My first thought was what happens now?
So now you have your family, if you have one,
(20:41):
and now you have your job, but there's no there's
no other place they can go. But what do these
look like? Okay, you can talk about civic associations and
that seemed to hey, but Lockdown's kind of shattered a
lot of those. I mean, it broke up a lot
of garage bands, it broke up the bridge clubs, people moved,
(21:04):
and so you left this sort of isolated person living
in a you know, in a digital world.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
I'll never forgive them for what they did.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
I you know, whenever I get to talking with somebody
who was also you know, anti lockdowns and really cared
about that, we always get right into it. My other
show with Mary Catherine Ham normally, you know, we have
a segment called Still Mad bro where we often talk about,
you know, how all the things that went wrong during
that time, all the things that were caused to go wrong,
(21:37):
and yeah, it's hard to recover from.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Yeah. The other thing, Carols, I wrote two very fiery anger.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
You write a lot of books.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
I wrote two books about the lockdowns, one in October
of twenty twenty and then one about two years later.
One's called Liberty or Lockdown. The other one is called
Life After Lockdown. And those books are they're heated there earning,
they're angry, They're just furious. And a lot of science,
(22:08):
a lot of detail, a lot of you know, health stuff,
a lot of virology, immunology, epidemiology, a lot a lot
everything I know about the subject, and economics and politics
are all crammed in their class analysis everything. But you know,
you just can't be angry forever. So I my reason
for writing, yeah, I know, it's me. My reason for
(22:30):
writing The Spirits of America was trying to figure out, Okay,
if it's not just all anger and hate all the time,
what is it we can fall in love with? And
what I discover is that we can fall in love
with the normal course of life. Like the routines that
advertising in our culture, everything deprecates and says you shoulgret
Maybe we shouldn't regret it. Maybe we should just be
(22:51):
revel in it and be happy with it.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I love that. What do you worry about?
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Let's see a bigger small like in my own life.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
For it could be any anything that you that comes
to mind.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Okay, the first thing that comes to mind right now
is the thing I worry about a lot is is
whether the dramatic changes we're seeing in the world today
are are sustainable. I think as Americans we are very fortunate,
like we've entered on a on a better path. Uh,
the censorship has died down. There's a kind of a
(23:28):
normalcy that's that's dawning. We're seeing the reduction and the
decline of media power, and the elites are no longer
dictating scripting the public mind in the way they were
just a few years ago. And and and the bureaucrats
that did the lockdown, so you know, they all seem
to be running away. These the censors are are fleeing.
(23:49):
And this is all good. But I worry that it's
that something will break it and it won't be sustainable
and will bounce back to the This is my I
think my number one biggest there and in fact is
Brownstone Instant. We our main job is to rescue people
out of professional displacement, like intellectuals in particular. That's really
(24:09):
what we are founded to do, and that's what we
continue to do. But I'm I'm right now preparing for
a possibility to some of the very very brave people
who are who are all over the federal bureocracies now,
like HHS and FDA and NIH and so on, so
(24:31):
you know, if something should happen politically or otherwise that
would break their positions were displaced and professionally, I need
to be in a position to sort of absorb this
and go into a kind of a sanctuary situation. Again,
this is my number one biggest concern, and this is
(24:51):
what I'm trying to prepare for right now with Brownstow
is just in case we have to take you.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
You have to worry about that, absolutely have to.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Take an eight twelve fifteen people. There aren't enough think
tanky refuges places where these people can go. So they're
taking grave risks with their careers. They're doing what they're
doing right now, and I hope it works. What I
want right now is for what's happening in the US
(25:21):
to be a kind of beacon to the world, you know,
a light under the world there can be life after lockdown,
we can restore our societies, we can get back our health,
we can get back our clarity.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
We're in a very optimistic moment.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
Yeah, the US our freedom. So I just want, like
all the other countries in the world, to do this.
And when I look at the world right now, I
see that there's many places of the world that are
teetering between the two. You know, You've got tremendous political
upheaval right now in Europe and in the UKA. And
are they going to go the way of the US
(25:56):
or is the US going to be squeezed out and
be drawn back into the CCP style regime that we
just left?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
You know, yeah, I could really go either way.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
When you look back at your life, what advice would
you give your sixteen year old self having to do
this all over again? What is sixteen year old Jeffrey
you need to know other than definitely don't lock down.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure that I would have taken
the advice. In fact, I think my father gave me
a lot of advice that I ignored.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
That's every kid, right, But this is you giving yourself advice.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
What would you tell me? I think I would have
would have prepared myself for two things. One is to
take more risks and be prepared to experience more pain
than you could ever even imagine.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Really, what kind of pain?
Speaker 3 (26:51):
What's do disappointment, trail terror, grave of shock that things
aren't going to go the way you plan them. This
is I've experienced this again and again and again in
my life, and on an increasingly intense basis, Like the
more risks that take, the more pain I've suffered. But
(27:14):
then also, you know, on the other side of that
has been I was a great achievement, knock on would
but I think great stuff, but only and it's only
come after this dark night of the soul, which has
happened repeatedly in my life. And I don't think I
(27:34):
was prepared for that. At a young age, when just
starting thinking about a career, thinking about what my life
is like, I was just this happy, naive guy. You
know it's saying, and you know, I whistled by way
through everything life is just a happy adventure. And nobody
told me that if life is good to be an adventure,
(27:57):
and it should be, there will also be a lot
of disappointment and pain and difficulty and disorientation. And you
will make a lot of really bad decisions, and you
will be wrong a lot of the time.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
I love that you own that so much.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I love that you say, like all these two books
are we're wrong and I made mistakes, and I really
don't feel like I hear that very often in our
public world and our public life, where people admit to
errors like that.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Well, you know, part of the problem, Carol, in the
in the in this in this intellectual space, we like
to think of as as whole lives, you know, as
one unit with one message. Like we think, what did
John Locke believe? What did Sigmund Freud believe? Yes, I've
(28:49):
seen that, yeah, Uh, tell me about the thoughts of
Saint Thomas whatever the thing?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Right?
Speaker 3 (28:57):
What is Schopenhauer? And and we clump their whole lives
into this one homogeneous bucket and say this is what
he believed. But the truth is that intellectual life is
always learning. It's iterative. That means you're wrong sometimes, you're
right sometimes and you're wrong again, you make a misjudgment,
(29:19):
you reverse yourself. That's like it's impossible to separate a
body of ideas from biography, right, Yeah, people change, Yeah,
And so I think part of the reluctance of people
like me, influencers or intellectuals or journalists whatever, to admit
error is for fear that people won't be able to
(29:40):
make sense of their lives. Like you just have to
have one tag on your head, you know, right, this
is my lifetime message. Well, I finally had to give
up on that because I you know what it is.
I think it traces to my own desperate desire for sincerity.
And I'm not a I'm not some paragon of truth,
(30:02):
but I want to believe that I strive to say
true things.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Is best and telling the truth is messy. It's not
such an organized easy thing to do. We're going to
take a quick break and be right back on the
Carol Marcowitch Show. Well you're super interesting, Jeffrey. I've loved
this conversation. I really think your work is amazing and
I'm so glad you came on. Leave us here with
(30:28):
your best tip for my listeners on how they can
improve their lives.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Oh yeah, I'm going to go back to what I
said earlier. Start right now. Whatever you're doing next that
you normally regret and hate because it's something because it's
getting in the way of the next thing you want
to do, figure out a way to love that thing,
to appreciate the opportunity to do it, Be grateful that
(30:53):
you have the energy, the thought, the mentality, the capacity
to make a difference, and however small a way it is,
and do it with diligence, persistence and love. That will
start making your life happier instantly.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
All right, I'm going to go clean the kitchen and
have a really positive outlook about that. He's Jeffrey Tucker.
Check out his new book, Spirits of America.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Check him out.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
He is the president of Brownstone Institute. Follow him on
x He's really fantastic. Thank you so much, Jeffrey.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Goo
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