A Ten-Page Memo Told Tucker Carlson Not to Interview Putin

Lex Fridman opens by defending the decision to have Tucker Carlson on at all: he will talk to anyone willing to sit for hours, including people his audience hates, because long-form conversation is how you find out how someone actually thinks. Carlson’s first impression of Vladimir Putin, when they finally sat down, was that the Russian president seemed nervous. He looked, Carlson says, like an over-prepared student with a plan — the wrong way to walk into an interview. Carlson’s own rule, after decades of doing them, is to know what you think, say as much of it honestly as you can so you are not confused by your own lies, and then be yourself.

He asked what he calls the most obvious, dumbest question: why did you do this? He had in mind Putin’s speech at the start of the war, in which Putin said he feared a preemptive attack by NATO and the Biden administration. Instead of answering, Putin launched into what Carlson first heard as a tiresome greatest-hits tour of Russian history, with the implication that Ukraine, or at least eastern Ukraine, was already Russia’s. Carlson interrupted a couple of times, politely he thought. Putin was not having it. Then Carlson changed his mind. He was not there to prove he was a great interviewer. A Western and global audience had a right to know more about the man, so he calmed down and let him talk. In retrospect he found the monologue interesting: whether you agree, and whether it is relevant to the war, it was Putin’s answer, and that made it significant.

The goal, he says, was information for the public, not a performance about himself. He rejects the American premise of the war: that a small group in Washington decided to do this, will not really explain why, and that citizens paying for it — whose children might be drafted — should shut up and obey. The idea that Ukraine would inevitably win, never precisely defined, struck him as the tell of a lie. Russia has a hundred million more people than Ukraine and, he says, is turning out artillery shells at seven times the rate of all NATO countries combined. In Hungary he asked Viktor Orbán off camera whether Ukraine would win. Orbán looked at him, Carlson says, as if he were congenitally deficient.

Putin later said he was not fully satisfied because Carlson had not been aggressive enough. Carlson does not understand the remark, except as the one Putin line Western media was happy to take at face value. He had, unusually, written questions during three years of trying to book the interview himself — almost all about internal Russian politics and Navalny — and then, on the fly, decided the war was the world-historical subject. He did ask about the reporter Gershkovich and wanted Putin to release him; Putin’s talk of a trade, Carlson said, made the man a hostage. Beyond that he stuck to the war. At fifty-four, he says, he no longer needed to prove he could snap “answer the question” at a head of state.

Fridman turns to Alexei Navalny, who died in prison after Carlson had left Moscow. Carlson’s first reaction is human: dying in prison is awful, and he has known people in prison, including close friends. From a geopolitical perspective, he says, he knows no more than that. What he resents is American politicians — “the dumbest politicians in the world,” in his phrase — standing up immediately to explain what the death means. As a factual matter, he says, we do not know what happened.

His position has two layers. He does not think you should put opposition figures in prison, period, in any country, including the United States. Separately, do we know how Navalny died? The short answer is no. If he had to guess, the timing bothers him: killing Navalny during the Munich Security Conference, in the middle of a debate over $60 billion in Ukraine funding. “Maybe the Russians are dumb. I didn’t get that vibe at all.” Maybe they did kill him. They certainly put him in prison, which Carlson opposes. What he insists on is that policy not be built on things that are not knowable.

Fridman lists possible killers if it was a killing: Putin, someone in Russia who is not Putin, Ukrainians, even the United States. Carlson’s first reflex is to say America does not kill people in other countries to affect elections — then he catches himself. It does, and has for eighty years, and he is offended because it is done in his name with his money. He grew up in Cold War Georgetown dismissing that charge as a slander from the hard left, including “the wacko MIT professor” Fridman has interviewed. In middle age he found it substantially true, and the shock still sits with him.

Jailing the most famous opposition figure bothers him; it is a basic measure of political freedom, and Russia fails it. A childhood friend, an American married to a Russian and living in Moscow, told him the city is great if you stay out of Russian politics — you could get hurt, “you could wind up like Navalny,” and the whole thing is too complicated. Carlson also noticed no cult of personality: no Putin statues, no portraits on every building, unlike Jordan, where the king’s family is on the walls, which he reads as a sign of insecurity. He asked a senior Putin adviser when the election was; she did not know the date. He asked people in Moscow who Putin was running against; nobody knew. That is not an election as the West would recognize one. It is also, he says, not Stalinism in any form you can see by going there.

Fridman asks whether, sitting across from Putin, Carlson felt there were things he should not say. Carlson says he felt not one twinge of concern for the eight days he was in Moscow. He makes decisions on instinct, and the instinct never fired. The fear was on the American side. Before he left, lawyers at one of the biggest firms in the world told him he was going to get arrested by the U.S. government for sanctions violations. He gave them a lecture: he is an American, he does not recognize the legitimacy of being told whom he may talk to, and he planned to exercise a freedom he thinks he was born with. They said they were just lawyers.

It cost many thousands of dollars to get that conclusion. The firm put a lot of people on the question, checked a lot of precedent, and sent a ten-page memo whose sincere advice was: do not do this. Of course it made him mad. On a second call, a senior lawyer went further. A lot would depend on the questions he asked Putin. If he was seen as too nice, he could be arrested when he came back. Carlson said the lawyer was describing a fascist country — that the U.S. government would arrest him if he did not ask the questions it wanted. The lawyer’s reply, as Carlson remembers it, was that based on what had already happened, they thought that was possible.

He did not think for a second he would be arrested in Moscow. Ignorance, he says, is a kind of protection: he does not speak Russian, had never been there, and when you have no idea what is going on you are not as worried. It is completely possible he was in grave peril and did not know it. What scared the people around him was the American legal risk, plus the practical hoops of traveling to a sanctioned country — cash only, no credit cards. He was willing to jump through them because he wanted the interview, and because they had told him he could not have it.

Carlson says he was being intensely surveilled by the U.S. government. The NSA had already admitted, a couple of years earlier, that it was in his Signal account and had leaked the contents to the New York Times. It happened again before he left. He had told almost no one he was going to interview Putin — his wife and two producers. Two New York Times reporters then called other people to confirm that he was going. He concludes they got it from the government.

In Moscow he had dinner with Edward Snowden in his room at the Four Seasons. Snowden did not want publicity; Carlson told no one and did not text it to anyone except Snowden. Semafor then ran a piece, citing U.S. intelligence, saying they had met, as if the meeting were a crime. Carlson’s interest, he keeps repeating, is in preserving freedoms in the United States. If the media establishment acts as an auxiliary of the national security state, you do not have a free country. He spent thirty-three years in big news companies. He says he knows how it works and can name the people.

Before the trip he decided to stop theorizing about which apps were safe and ask two people who would know. Both said the same thing: are you joking? Nothing is secure. You can probably keep the Malaysian mafia out of your texts; you cannot keep the big intelligence services from reading them or listening to calls. Carlson’s response was that he did not care. He resents having no privacy, because privacy is a prerequisite for freedom, but he cannot change it. He still carries a surveilled phone and swaps it when there is too much spyware, because — this is true, he insists — it wrecks the battery. He learned that in North Korea, when someone on the National Security Council told him the South Korean government was on his phone and the battery started dying in forty-five minutes.

Being watched, at fifty-four, with taxes paid and no secret life, would not make him actively angry. The leaking would. Intelligence services engaged in U.S. politics and media, he says, make democracy impossible, and there is no defense of it — not on NBC, and not on the supposedly conservative channels either. People externalize the anxiety, he thinks: they get exercised about Russia, a place they have never been, as a way of ignoring what is happening at home. Russia is not free. Neither is Burkina Faso. Most countries are not. The United States was supposed to be different, and that is the thing he wants to preserve.

The main takeaway from eight days in Moscow, Carlson says, was not Putin. Leaders, in his experience, are not that different from one another. Moscow blew his mind. His father had worked there on and off in the 1980s and 1990s for the U.S. government and came home talking about a nightmare with no electricity. Carlson arrived almost exactly two years after sanctions cut Russia off from Western finance — kicked out of SWIFT, no dollars, no banking, no credit cards. He found, he says, a city of thirteen million, the largest in Europe, with no graffiti, no homeless people, no one using drugs in the street, no garbage on the ground, and none of the postmodern steel-and-concrete architecture he calls soul-destroying. It did not make him love Putin. It made him hate his own mayors, governors, and president, because he grew up in a country that had cities like that and no longer does.

Fridman objects: cleanliness and architectural design are not the entirety of the metrics that matter, and dictatorships can achieve them more easily, often as a show. Carlson agrees with the second point vehemently. This is not, he says, a defense of the Russian system; if he felt that way he would move there and announce it. He has never been ashamed of his views. Freedom of speech matters enormously to him, and Russia has less of it; the United States is superior in that way. What he will not accept is the line, which he associates with Jon Stewart, that filth and chaos are the price of freedom. He is fifty-four. He remembers a country that was both free and clean and orderly. That is not a trade-off he thinks Americans have to make. Crime, he says, is optional: you have as much as you put up with, and refusing to tolerate murder does not make you less free.

The grocery store shocked him on prices, even after adjusting for exchange rates, two years into total isolation from the West. He had expected supply chains to be crushed; they were not, which he reads as a verdict on American sanctions — not hurting Russia in the way promised, while pushing the rest of the world into BRICS and off the dollar. The metro was built under Stalin on the eve of the Second World War. He is not endorsing Stalin. He is asking why a society can keep frescoes and chandeliers for eighty years, and why young women he knows in New York are afraid to ride the subway. If that is freedom, he says, it looks like slavery.

He tells viewers that if they sincerely care, they should spend about $800, get on a plane, and look. Fridman offers his own direct experience: in wartime Kyiv he saw beautiful architecture, working restaurants, supply chains that held, and crime that went to nearly zero after guns were handed out. Carlson has tried to interview Volodymyr Zelensky and been denounced instead; he would go to Ukraine tomorrow if he could. What shames him most is the bigotry he absorbed from decades of television toward Slavs and toward Muslims. After eight days he found a thick culture, shared by Russia and Ukraine, not “a gas station with nuclear weapons.” He is not moving to Russia. Snowden, he notes, does not want to live there either. The lesson he wants is for the United States: you do not have to live like this.

Asked how he hopes the war ends, Carlson says with a reasonable settlement — one in which both sides give a little and can live with it. He was struck that Putin refused to criticize Joe Biden or NATO. Carlson did not push it; even though he does not think Biden is a “real” president, he would find it weird to sit with a foreign leader and pile on the American one. He reads the restraint as evidence that Putin wants a deal, not because Russia is about to collapse — a media claim he calls so dumb that even the people who made it have stopped — but because war is sad, unpredictable, and worth avoiding. What Russia wants, and what Carlson thinks it probably has a right to, is not to have NATO missiles on its border. He does not understand what the United States gets out of putting them there. If he were president, he would pull out of NATO immediately. He thinks it is an attack on American sovereignty.

He has attacked Zelensky for cavalier talk about nuclear exchange, which would kill Carlson’s family. He also feels for him. Zelensky did not run for president to have this happen. Carlson thinks he has been misused by the State Department, by Victoria Nuland, by the secretary of state, by policymakers who used Ukraine as a vessel for geopolitical ambitions, by American businesses fleecing taxpayers, and by “independent ghouls” such as Boris Johnson hoping to get rich from interviews. Zelensky, in this telling, is not driving history. NATO, the United States, and Putin are. Carlson tried to ask Johnson about being sent to stop a near peace deal; Johnson’s team, Carlson says, demanded a million dollars. Putin, “widely recognized as a bad guy,” did the interview for free. The comparison is the point.

Fridman calls Zelensky a hero for staying in Kyiv when tanks were pointed at the city. Carlson’s first jab is that Zelensky seems to be in the United States an awful lot, and that a foreign president does not need to address Congress in person. Then he agrees: to the extent Zelensky is in Ukraine, good. Carlson’s test of leadership is father-like care for the people you lead, which requires physical courage. He wrote at the time that George W. Bush was cowardly for fleeing Washington on September 11 for an Air Force base. If you are president and your capital is attacked, he says, you cannot run. The U.S.-backed leader of Afghanistan got on a plane with dollars when the Taliban came. Stalin, Russians told Carlson, never left Moscow when the Germans surrounded it. That, to him, is table stakes.

He does not think this is a contest between Putin and Zelensky. It is Putin versus the U.S. State Department. The United States, he says, is literally paying the pensions of Ukrainian bureaucrats, which means there is no Ukrainian government independent of Washington — a fact you cannot endorse in the same sentence as “democracy.” The near settlement, he adds, would not even be known if Israelis had not talked about it. Johnson was dispatched to stop it; the lines have not really moved; more Ukrainians are dead. Carlson is not implicated in what Russia or Ukraine do. He is implicated in what is done in his name. “We are the impediment to peace,” he says, which is another way of saying the United States is responsible for people being pulled out of parks in Kyiv and sent to die.

Fridman asks what Carlson made of Putin’s justification that the war continues for “denazification.” Carlson thought it was one of the dumbest things he had ever heard. He hates the conversation because it is not real: it is a way of associating someone with an evil regime that no longer exists. Nazism, whatever it was, was inseparable from the German nation; there is no portable doctrine you can pick up in 2024. Putin, Carlson thinks, does not like nationalist Ukrainians, and hates nationalism in general — understandable, Carlson says, if you run a country of many republics and fought a war in Chechnya over it. Carlson himself is for American nationalism, so he disagrees. Calling people Nazis still struck him as childish.

He also thinks Putin believes it. He sat through about eight minutes of it and concluded this was not a line cooked for American television, where everyone calls everyone else a Nazi. Fridman, who has talked to people living in Russia, says many of them believe it too. World War II is in the blood of Russians and Ukrainians in a way it is not for Americans; the death totals are tens of millions versus less than half a million. The word is a political instrument, the way “racism” is used in the United States, and it touches a nerve. There are neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine, Fridman adds; they are tiny, and he has seen no data that they have influence on Zelensky’s government. When Putin says denazification, Fridman thinks he means nationalist movements. Carlson agrees with the whole analysis.

What troubles Fridman is that Putin called this the primary objective of the war. An aim not grounded in a list of people cannot be negotiated. What does it mean for the Nazis to be gone? Can you list them? Carlson adds the darker corollary: can you negotiate with a Nazi? If the answer is no, the frame itself closes the table. Fridman suspects the language is partly for a domestic audience and partly a way to avoid naming NATO as the justification. Carlson thinks that is probably right, and that it points to a larger failure. As a public-relations matter, Putin is not good at telling his own story. The story of the war, as Carlson would tell it, is the eastward expansion of NATO — something Carlson says does not help the United States. Putin told a different story that Carlson, who is not Russian, did not fully understand.

On Putin’s health, Carlson is not a reliable witness and says so: he can gain thirty pounds and not notice. Putin seemed fine. His walking, a tell for Parkinson’s, seemed fine; they walked and talked off camera. He has had some work done. At seventy-one or seventy-two he looked younger than Carlson, who is fifty-four. What Carlson will say about the off-record conversation is that his claim Putin wants a settlement is, in his word, informed. Then he lays out a history. Russia tried to join NATO in 2000. NATO exists to contain Russia; a Russian application is, by definition, a sign the job is done. The alliance turned him down. Putin then approached George W. Bush with a missile deal that would have designated Iran a common enemy. Bush thought it interesting; Condoleezza Rice, Carlson says, killed it. Iran is now effectively in league with Russia, “thanks to our insane policies.”

How did the 2022 war start, in this telling? Joe Biden and Antony Blinken dispatched Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference in February 2022. In a public press conference she told Zelensky the United States wanted Ukraine in NATO. Putin had said thousands of times he did not want American or NATO nuclear weapons on his western border. Days later he invaded. Carlson raised that sequence in his previous job and was called a traitor. Fine, he says — what is the answer? NATO did not even want Ukraine, which did not meet the criteria. Saying it in public anyway looks, to him, like trying to get a war. Victoria Nuland, whom he knows and does not call stupid, was an architect of Iraq and of this, and one of the people he says destroyed the dollar. The war has enriched a lot of people by billions. Tell him how he is wrong.

Who is behind it? Not a cartoon cabal, he says, but the hive mind. He spent 1985 to 2020 in Washington. The Soviet Union dissolved in August 1991, on his honeymoon in Bermuda. The receptionist in his office was getting a master’s in Russian from Georgetown, bound to be a Sovietologist, one of thousands on that track. When the thing they existed to oppose vanished, the budgets, careers, and forward momentum did not. People cannot reassess. Rice, in his caricature, spent a life treating Russia as the center of evil and cannot picture a new threat that is economic and eastern — China building the infrastructure in Tijuana — rather than a tank war over Taiwan. The thinking is inelastic.

World War II is the other template. Nobody in Washington, he suspects, knows much about the Battle of Stalingrad; they know the clichés of 1938 to 1940. Every problem is weakness. Everyone is Chamberlain. Germany would never have gone into Poland and Czechoslovakia if England had been stronger. Maybe that is true, he says; he does not know. It is not always true. If you walk up to someone in a bar and say you hate his necktie, that is a strong posture, and you might get beaten or shot. Aggression does not always get the outcome you want. Sometimes the moment needs a more sophisticated “Mediterranean” posture. Washington does not acknowledge time and place. Fridman asks whether Carlson would have interviewed Hitler in 1939, 1940, or 1941. Carlson says the cost might destroy his life, as interviewing Putin may yet be recorded as serving Russia. He would still ask the question he asks everyone: why did you do this? You cannot force an honest answer. You can shut up, let them talk, and let other people judge.

Carlson is not against all technology. Back surgery worked; he likes the electric pump and water heater that ran his shower. He wants one hard question answered: can you name a big technology of the last twenty years that we can say conclusively improved people’s lives? Fridman offers Google Search — world knowledge, available to anyone. Carlson loves the idea and doubts the result. Are people better informed, or more superstitious and misled, than twenty years ago? In his view it is not close. Fridman thinks the internet revealed ignorance that was already there, and that most of Wikipedia is non-political and the fastest way to learn a thing. Carlson agrees that you can quickly imagine you are an expert, which may be the problem. Digital sources left him unprepared for Moscow. Reproduction, life expectancy, and sobriety are, for him, the obvious signs. A society that does not want children and dies younger is suicidal, whatever it tells itself about innovation.

Why, he asks, were the greatest buildings in any European city built before electricity and the machine age? Why has no one built a medieval cathedral in the modern era? Pick a city, he says, and tell him there is a prettier building than Notre-Dame before it burned. Fridman answers that beauty has many sources, that people raised online may see digital beauty, and that modern bridges can rival old ones. Carlson is willing to believe in digital beauty — he has photos of dogs and children on his phone — but in architecture, a pure expression of the need to live, work, and worship, he thinks the industrial age decreased quality. He has machines in his woodshop that no fifteenth-century cathedral builder had, and neither he nor anyone he knows could begin to understand a flying buttress.

Fridman says the thing creating this technology is unstoppable; if you do not, someone else will, as with the Manhattan Project. Was the Manhattan Project a good idea? For Carlson that is an easy no. Fridman, in retrospect, says yes, because mutually assured destruction seems to have stopped world wars. Carlson is counting: seventy-nine years without a world war, and one nuclear exchange would kill more people than all wars in human history combined. Nuclear weapons are evil, their use is evil, and the technology itself is evil. Then he assigns a number. If there is even a 15 percent chance that AI gets away from us and we are ruled by machines, why would we not use force to stop that? He offers a midnight scene in midtown Manhattan: a man fifty feet away raises a gun. You are armed. Do you wait to get shot because he has not fired yet?

Fridman says the metaphor falls apart when other nations are in the game: if the United States does not build the bomb, the Soviet Union, China, or Nazi Germany will. Carlson’s answer is that the last president who tried in a meaningful way to keep nuclear proliferation under control was John F. Kennedy, “and look what happened to him.” The 1962 position was that it was not inevitable, or that you fight the dying of the light anyway. What he does not get is the casualness about applications in the hands of people who mean harm. Fridman is more terrified of technology used to manipulate minds in the next few years, which could lead other humans to start nuclear wars. Carlson’s darker joke about why he was not afraid in the Putin interview: it is all ending anyway. Might as well dance on the deck of the Titanic.

Fridman asks about a leaked private text in which Carlson said he passionately hated Donald Trump, after which Carlson said he actually loved him. Carlson’s explanation is specific. On election night 2020, vote counting stopped, and what followed was mail-in ballots and electronic machines. He thought then, and thinks now, that the election was rigged. He would not say so on television without evidence. The Trump campaign was making fraud claims; everyone else was telling Trump to go away. Carlson saw it as his job to check. The people around Trump, he says, were astonishingly incompetent. They claimed dead people had voted. The dead are unusually easy to verify. The campaign sent names. He went on air with Caroline Johnson, seventy-nine, of Waukegan, Illinois, and a death certificate. Of six names, two people were still alive. He corrected it the next night. CNN did a segment on his spreading disinformation. In that one case, he says, they were right, and he was furious at the campaign, which is what the text was.

He had broken his own rule against taking material directly from campaigns, because campaigns lie. He also, in a civil case he was not even named in, turned over the texts. He should have said come and arrest me; a lawyer talked him into it, and he calls that his own weakness. Asked whether the election was stolen, he does not hedge: “It was a hundred percent stolen.” His case is not one ballot box. It is that voting rules were changed on the eve of the election in the name of COVID, and that information was censored. Democracy, as he defines it, is people ruling through representatives they can reassess every few years, which requires unfettered access to information. No one already in power is allowed to tell them what they may know. The second you do not have that, you do not have a free election.

He says Biden is senile, cannot talk or walk, and that a senile man does not get elected in the most powerful country on earth without fraud. Fridman thinks half the country does not hear senility — they hear an old man with difficulty speaking, a gradual degradation of cognitive ability. Carlson asks what the difference is. Fridman says senility is a threshold beyond which someone cannot function as a leader. Carlson will accept “degraded cognitive ability” and keep the conclusion: this man has the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal, and even someone who grunted at a microphone would be more reassuring than a man who does not know where he is. Two candidates near or past eighty is a failure of the system. The money vested in the federal apparatus, he thinks, explains more than ideology. The federal government is the monopoly that oversees the other monopolies.

Then they raided Mar-a-Lago on a documents charge. Carlson has been around classification in Washington; he calls the charge absurd. At that point it stopped being about Trump. If you can use the justice system to take a presidential candidate out of the race on a fake charge, you no longer have representative democracy. He thinks a lot of Republican voters felt that, and that without the indictments he is not sure Trump would be the nominee. You can dislike Trump, he says; you cannot let the Justice Department run the political system. On intelligence services, he applied to the CIA in college and was rejected for drug use. He did not then see the Agency as a threat, because he thought it was outwardly focused. He now says it plays in domestic politics and was involved in the Kennedy assassination — not speculation, he says, but something he confirmed with a person who had read still-unreleased documents. If you subvert democracy abroad in the name of democracy, you will, over time, subvert it at home.

On Hamas’s attacks on Israel, Carlson warns that he is a non-expert and, unlike most Americans, not emotionally invested in other countries. He loves visiting them. Jerusalem may be his favorite city in the world. That is not attachment. He believes in sovereignty: each country should decide from its own interests, capabilities, and long-term good. He is not a fan of too many treaties. American military aid to Israel, and the implied and sometimes explicit security guarantees that come with it, have probably not helped Israel much in the long run. It is a rich country with a highly capable population. Like every other country, it is probably best off deciding what it can do by itself.

If he lived in Israel he would be concerned. Social media has public sentiment in the region boiling, and it will be hard for governments in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey to contain their own populations. Those governments do not want a conflict with Israel. They were, he says, pretty pleased with the trend toward a Saudi peace deal that was never signed and would have been good for everybody — trade, normal relations. John Bolton does not like it; Carlson does. That deal is now impossible. A coalition of countries against a small nuclear-armed Israel, even with American backing, is a reason to worry. He sees no advantage in it for the United States. He thinks a wider conflict could happen easily, probably right after Ramadan, and he prays it does not.

He does not trust American foreign-policy leadership. These are, he says, the architects of the Iraq war, of the destruction of Libya and Syria, of a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan that returned to the status quo, of Vietnam and Korea — eighty years of uninterrupted failure. When was the last time they improved another country? Someone will say the Marshall Plan. Look at Europe now, he says, and even if it worked, that was eighty years ago. Netanyahu is in a politically impossible place; Carlson is glad he is not him, and not sure he is capable of wise long-term decisions. Open-minded, relatively pro-Israel Arabs Carlson has just spoken with in the Middle East, merchants who want stability, told him this could get ugly fast. American leadership, in that account, is all posturing.

He names Nikki Haley. A self-confident advanced society, he says, would not promote someone like that. The impression is not from television, which he does not watch; it is from knowing her. Fridman jokes that Carlson holds back. Carlson laughs and says the world’s life-or-death questions are not ones you take to Haley. He has enormous interest in interviewing Xi Jinping, and his team is working on it. Getting out of America’s geographic isolation has changed his perspective. He also says he would sit with Joe Rogan, whom he has met once, because Rogan’s curiosity — asking when the pyramids were built and not caring that the front row wants him to sit down — is the opposite of the American media’s teacher’s-pet reflex.

Carlson has been with his wife for forty years; they married in August 1991, the month the Soviet Union collapsed. He has four children, five counting a daughter-in-law, and tells them he loves them every day. He has not been fully transformed by fame, he says, because of structure, not virtue: a stable family, stable friends, a love of nature, and a series of rituals, including almost no social media. The desire for power and money will kill you; the desire for the love of strangers is as poisonous, maybe more. The secret of the marriage, he will not claim. In forty years both of them became different people — he was using drugs and drinking when they met — in complementary ways. He calls it luck. Humility, as he defines it, is not a pose. It is what you get from a reality-based worldview: once you see clearly, you know you are not the author of all your successes or failures. The opposite implication, that you have powers you do not have, is what he hated in the smoking debate and the COVID debate.

The best leader he has ever met, and it is not close, is Sheikh Mohamed of Abu Dhabi, MBZ — a Muslim monarch, while Carlson is a Protestant who does not agree with the religion or with monarchy. The reason is an ever-present knowledge of limits: of his power, of his foresight. World leaders troop through the palace for counsel. Carlson reaches for Solomon and then pulls back, but he notes that nobody is going to Ottawa to ask Justin Trudeau what he thinks. MBZ runs a tiny country that was not a country fifty years ago. The gap between that and America’s leadership class — not just Biden, but the advisors and “throne sniffers” — is that Carlson is not impressed by them. They are not that capable. Great leaders are rare, and when you see one, he says, everyone in the world knows it, even if American television never files the story.

Advice for young people, including people in high school: have children immediately. On your deathbed you never wish you had spent more time at work; he thinks that sentence is no longer even allowed, and from his vantage it is completely true. Nothing else matters but family. Men, he says, do nothing until they have to, and once they have to they will do anything. That was him. He grew up among rich people and is rich; they are not happy. Seeking money for its own sake is a dead end. What you should seek for its own sake is creation, and its purest form is children. Corporate America telling people to freeze their eggs and have abortions is, in his words, evil, because it takes from them the only thing that can give enduring joy.

Hope for civilization, fifty or a hundred years out, rests on people. He likes people; he has never been in a country where, given a week, he did not. Bad leaders are a recurring theme, and the current set is unusually bad, but there will be better ones — as long as nobody tampers with the human recipe. Nuclear weapons and AI bother him. The thing that really bothers him is using technology to change the human brain permanently. He sat with Klaus Schwab, whom he calls a figurehead reading Davos talking points, and heard a line about ethically using technology to improve the mind and implant chips. What shocked him was that no one in the room said: wait, you are talking about people’s brains, who do you think you are? Fridman agrees the mind is special. Carlson’s last moral requirement for people with power is long-term thinking: is this a net gain or a net loss? He does not see that thinking. They all seem like children, and you do not give children handguns.