#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Tucker Carlson, a highly influential and often controversial political commentator. When he was a Fox, Time Magazine called him the most powerful conservative in America. After Fox, he has continued to host big impactful interviews and shows on X, on the Tucker Carlson Podcast, and on tuckercarlson.com. I recommend subscribing, even if you disagree with his views. It is always good to explore a diversity of perspectives. Most recently, he interviewed the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. We discussed this, the topic of Russia, Putin, Navalny, and the war in Ukraine at length in this conversation. Please allow me to say a few words about the very fact that I did this interview. I have received a lot of criticism publicly and privately when I announced that I will be talking with Tucker. For people who think I shouldn't do the conversation with Tucker or generally think that there are certain people I should never talk to, I'm sorry, but I disagree. I will talk to everyone as long as they're willing to talk genuinely in long form for two, three, four more hours. I will talk to Putin and to Zelensky, to Trump and to Biden, to Tucker and to Jon Stewart, AOC, Obama, and many more people with very different views on the world. I want to understand people and ideas. That's what long form conversations are supposed to be all about. Now, for people who criticize me for not asking tough questions, I hear you, but again, I disagree. I do often ask tough questions, but I try to do it in a way that doesn't shut down the other person, putting them into a defensive state where they give only shallow talking points. Instead, I'm looking always for the expression of genuinely held ideas, and the deep roots of those ideas. When done well, this gives us a chance to really hear out the guest, and to begin to understand what and how they think. And I trust the intelligence of you, the listener, to make up your mind, to see through the bullshit, to the degree there's bullshit, and to see to the heart of the person. Sometimes I fail at this, but I'll continue working my ass off to improve. All that said, I find that this no tough questions criticism often happens when the guest is a person the listener simply hates, and wants to see them grilled into embarrassment, called a liar, a greedy ego maniac, a killer, maybe even an evil human being, and so on. If you are such a listener, what you want is drama, not wisdom. In this case, this show is not for you. There are many shows you can go to for that, with hosts that are way more charismatic and entertaining than I'll ever be. If you do stick around, please know, I will work hard to do this well, and to keep improving. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for your support. I love you all. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We've got ZipRecruiter for hiring, Listening for, well, listening to academic papers, Hidden Lair for securing your AI models, Element for delicious electrolytes that I'm drinking right now, and AG1 for other kinds of delicious nutrition. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or in general, just get in touch with me, please go to lexfriedman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. Speaking of hiring, this episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter, a site that connects employers and job seekers. So if you're looking to hire, if you're looking to get hired, that's the place to go. I think one of the most important things in life is optimizing, controlling, deciding, figuring out the people you surround yourself with. And for those of you, like me, that spend most of their life working and love what they do, but actually whether you love it or not, if you spend most of your time working, it's really important to choose the place you work correctly. And if you're hiring, it's really important to build the kind of team where everybody really enjoys hanging out with each other. I think that's not just for productivity sake, that's also for the happiness of everybody involved. You know, most of my life I spent working with engineers and scientists, and that's a different kind of breed of people. And I've gotten to know that world, but these days I get to work with creative people and they're different. They're quite different. I would say, it's more complicated. I had to learn a lot of difficult lessons the hard way, I would say. But I got to meet a lot of incredible people, a lot of different kinds of incredible. I've gotten to figure out that people can be incredible in all kinds of different ways. That full diversity of incredibleness, it just brings me joy. And you should use the best tools for the job to build that team. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go to ziprecruiter.com/lex to try it for free. That's ziprecruiter.com/lex. The smartest way to hire. This episode is also brought to you by Listening, another new sponsor. It's an app that allows you to listen to academic papers, not just academic papers, all kinds of stuff, books, PDFs, webpages, articles, even email newsletters. The really powerful thing is that it uses AI voices that can pronounce really challenging words. Also, for academic papers, that's the way I use it. It skips all the stuff you don't want to read, and that's not a trivial thing to figure out how to do, by the way. So they have figured it out. And so you can listen to academic papers, and it pronounces stuff like it's pleasant to listen to. You do have to like really focus your mind. I would say so. I don't like to do it during running, but I like to do it in a bunch of other contexts. Like there's something just more compelling to listening in certain kinds of contexts. Sometimes I like printing it out and reading. Sometimes I like listening. Both are really, really good. Anyway, you can also do note taking. You click the add or whatever it's called, plus note button, and then it automatically grabs the last two or three sentences and then saves them. And you don't need to type anything. It's just really simple. One click. And the uploading of the paper or whatever you want to listen to is super simple too. So it just the whole pipeline is done well. It's easy. I recommend you at least try it. Normally, you would get a two week free trial, but listeners of this very podcast, you get one month free. So go to listening.com/lex. That's listening.com/lex.