Tucker Carlson (44:11)
the implications are to me that I am an episcopalian? Actually, after 51 years, I switched and became a Methodist two months ago. So I'm not sure how different it is, but at least not the Episcopal Church, which I've really come to despise, the church of my ancestors, but I hate it anyway. So I am the last person you want to have a theological discussion with. I'm not deeply grounded in theology. I've read the New Testament and the Old Testament in their entirety, but I'm not a theologian at all. And in fact, the older I get, the less interested in theology I am and the more interested I am in the basics. And the basics to me are these ones. You're not in control. You can't. You didn't control when you're born, you're not going to control when you die. You can't extend your life a single day. That was true when Jesus said it. It's true now. So recognizing the limits of your own control is the essence of everything. Okay? That's the. It is the essence of wisdom. That's the first thing. The second thing is if you don't recognize that and you imagine that you're in charge of everything, you will be humiliated, proved wrong, and super unhappy in the meantime. And the third thing is the only unchanging fact of life is its end is death. And I just think it's amazing. We've constructed this entire society, you know, that considers everything fair inquiry or did until recently. And that's the one topic nobody ever talks about. Everybody on earth will die. No one acknowledges that. And increasingly, you're not even really allowed to talk about what might happen after. Now, I don't have a super clear sight picture of what happens after. I believe in God. I think there. I'm positive there is an afterlife. Its nature is murky to me, but I believe that it's clearly true. But I just, I can't believe that you could have a society, the west more broadly, that's at its core secular, which is another way of saying, ignores the key fact of life, which is death. Like, and then thinking, well, how can that work? How can you have a study like that? Well, we've never had one. That's the truth. There's never been a secular society at scale in human history till after the Second World War. And that's only been 80 years. You never had it. And maybe the reason you've never had it is because it absolutely doesn't work. And this is not a pitch for the Episcopal Church or the Methodist Church or even Christianity. It's an acknowledgement that you need to have meaning. And meaning is not vacation. And it's not, do you know what I mean, like truffle pasta. Much as I love it, meaning isn't the answer to the most basic question. What happens when you die? That's it. It's right there. That's the question. And if you don't even bring that question up, you can't persist. People will go insane and they'll become incredibly neurotic. And that's what I noticed, how neurotic everybody is. People are totally free. Last thing I'll say, I was a fearful flyer from. I grew up in California, went to boarding school on the east coast, so I had to fly all the time across the country. And I started to get freaked out by flying. I was on a couple of bad flights, whatever that was 1983, almost 20 years, I was really afraid of flying. I used to get super loaded on planes, just really drunk on planes. And I would always smoke back when you could smoke on planes, even as a child. And then 2001, 9, 11 happens. I go over, I'm in the news business. I go over to the Middle East, I'm in a commercial air, air crash. The plane I was in crashed and it crashed in a kind of slow motion way where we knew it was crashing for like, I don't know, 20 minutes. So it was like the most terrifying possible experience of your flyer could have. It was like ridiculous. Pakistan International Airways. And anyway, whatever, I survived, obviously. But that changed my life. I came home, I quit drinking, I had a fourth child. My life just totally changed because of that one event. But the main thing that happened in addition to those two things was I stopped being afraid to fly. And the reason I stopped being afraid to fly was I had been forced to face for 20 minutes, like the thought, really the certainty I was going to die. Like I thought we were going to die. Everyone the plane thought we're going to die. It was like, you can imagine. And I didn't die. And then I realized what I was afraid about on the plane was dying. It wasn't the turbulence or whatever, being trapped in this aluminum tube, it was the idea of dying. And once that was clarified for me and I focused on it directly, what I'm really afraid of is dying. And all neurosis comes from that fear. Of course that's. That's what it is, the fear of dying. Once I focused on that directly, it went away. And I would just get on planes and be like, am I ready to die? I don't want to die. I've got all these kids and I really like my life and all this stuff. But like, at some point I will. And once I address that directly in my head every time I get in a fight, am I ready to go? And even now, like text all four kids, text my wife, can't text the dogs, but I would. And it just goes away. I'm like, I'm ready. I am, I'm ready to die. So in a small, very small bore way, that's what's going on with society at large. If you have hundreds of millions of people who've never addressed directly the core fact of their life, which is imminent and fast approaching death, of course they're completely freaked out and superstitious and neurotic and weird and irrational and just like hopped up, right?