David Marchese
Appearances
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
I think we're in the middle of a period that will settle that question. I do not think that's a settled question. If agencies send bogus cuts to Doge, will Doge accept them and does that allow them to avoid real cuts? It's part of the same open question as that email that Elon Musk sent out to all federal workers asking, you know, what were the five things you did last week?
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
The first time he tried it, about a million government workers responded. but also a lot of them didn't, and a lot of agencies told their people, don't respond. That was the first time that Elon Musk had tried to do something with his very large power within the government, and it failed. And so this is a power struggle. I don't think we're seeing it in public.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
In public, everybody's getting along. What you're seeing there when Doge fails to catch a bogus cut that an agency sends it, you're seeing that kind of battle going out right at the trench level between who will shape the future of these agencies, the people who run them or Elon Musk. And I don't think I see Elon Musk giving up anytime soon.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
I think there's two things to keep in mind. One is what we mean when we talk about Twitter surviving. Yes, Twitter exists. There's still people posting posts there and reading it. It's not the same thing that it was. The audience has changed. The content has changed. The experience of being on Twitter has changed. And I think some people left because of that. So Musk sees that as a success.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
And it seems like he is trying to apply that like slash it, cut everything and then see what breaks and then rebuild the things that broke that approach to federal government. The thing that stops me and when I think about whether that approach can really be carried forward with the federal government is it's so different from Donald Trump's view of the federal government. He's not a cutter.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
He didn't run on cutting the federal government. He didn't govern this way the first time. His vision of government was one that basically continued to give people the benefits that they wanted, Medicare, Social Security. He doesn't ask people in his campaign to make sacrifices. He was saying, you know, I'm going to fight inflation. I'm going to fight illegal immigration.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
It does. It looks like something where you're about to trade some kind of coin named after a cat or something. But the main feature of it, if you scroll down a little bit, is what they call the wall of receipts. It is about 2,200 different federal contracts and lists details about what agency held the contract, what vendor held the contract, and how much was saved by canceling it.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
But for everything else, things are not going to change that much. We're not going to touch these big expenditures. We're not going to touch the Defense Department. Donald Trump didn't say, hey, I'm going to run for president. I'm going to slash the government back so deeply that, you know, it'll just be barely alive. That's Musk's vision.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
And if it continues and it changes the experience for the worse of average folks, Trump is going to be faced with the question of, do I stop my most powerful ally or do I defend my own vision of what government ought to be and the vision that voters sort of elected me to carry out?
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
That's the fundamental difference here, right? You can delete your Twitter account, you can stop reading Twitter, and life goes on. But now, if you apply that same sort of, like, cut first, measure later approach to government... Then you're talking about people don't get their Medicare. People don't, you know, the IRS doesn't answer your phone call when you have a question about your taxes.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
The park that you're going to visit doesn't open. I don't think that the public and Trump's voters were prepared for this kind of change and to make it risks huge political pullback for Trump and pretty big disruptions for regular people.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Look, to me, this is a question about trust. An enormous amount, historic amount of trust has been placed in Doge.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
This tiny little group of people, many of them with no government experience, has been given an unprecedented amount of data about government, an unprecedented amount of data about us, about Americans, and an unprecedented amount of power to change the way the government's going to look for years, for decades. And the question is, do they deserve that trust?
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
And the one way we have to start to answer that question is to look at this little slice of data that they've made available about how they see the world, about the work that they're doing. And so sloppy mistakes, obvious mistakes in the first thing they show to the public raises questions about whether they deserve the huge amount of trust they've been given.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
It is also an effort to gamify it. There's a leaderboard of the agencies that have cut the most and agencies that have cut the least. And at the top of the page, highlighted in yellow, is sort of the main dollar figure, the top line number. It says that overall, Doge has saved, as of Friday morning, $65 billion.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
No, it's a lot of money. It's about 1% of the overall federal budget, but it's a pretty small fraction of the $2 trillion that Musk said during the campaign that Doge could save. But what's valuable for us is not just the top line number.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
More valuable is this wall of receipts because that's the only part of Doge's cuts that it has itemized, that it's backed up, that it sort of explained how it got to those numbers. And that's the one place where you can see step-by-step Doge showing its work.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Well, I worked with the Times upshot desk, a team of incredibly good data analysts and reporters. We downloaded all the contracts that were on that wall of receipts and started looking through them. And the first thing you realize really quickly is that there are not $65 billion worth of cuts on this wall of receipts.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
The original list, which was posted in the middle of February, had about $16 billion worth of receipts. So this public accounting of what they did only accounts for a small portion of this much bigger number they're claiming. So then we start to look at the individual line items, the individual contracts they're saying they canceled.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
And you notice one thing, which is that many of them, even by Doge's own accounting, accounted for zero savings. The original list had about a thousand entries, more than 400 of them. They said the contracts hadn't actually saved taxpayers a dollar.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Yeah. And again, that was on a small percentage. It was almost half of the original contracts. So once you move on from the surprising fact that so many of these contracts have zero savings, you start to notice some really sloppy accounting, some really sloppy mistakes. And in many cases, those mistakes make the savings seem much, much bigger on the wall of receipts than it was in reality.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Like what? Right off the bat, number one, the first biggest contract listed on the wall of savings when they first put it out was something that had an obvious problem in it. So they had claimed that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, had cut an $8 billion contract.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
And what's curious about that cut right off the bat and tells you that maybe there's something wrong there is that the entire budget of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is about $8 billion.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Yeah, it's implausible that one contract with one vendor would account for their entire budget. And also implausible that if that contract did exist, that you would cut it because it would mean their entire budget would be gone.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
What my colleagues at the Upshot figured out was that it actually was $8 million, which is, again, a lot of money, but it's one thousandth of what they had claimed. And it was just a typo in the system. Somebody in the federal contracting tracking system had listed this at $8 billion at some point, and really not the number was $8 million.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
So Doge's response to that was, well, yeah, this was a typo. And we knew all along it was a typo. But they put $8 billion on this wall of receipts. That was about half of the initial total savings they were claiming in the wall of receipts. And again, if you knew anything about ICE or the federal budget, that's a mistake you wouldn't make.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Right. And that was the start of a pattern. Just going on the list of the largest contracts they were claiming credit for canceling, we found other sloppy mistakes that often seem to indicate a real lack of familiarity with the government contracting system, with how government contracting works.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Basically, they had taken on this job to be experts in federal contracting, and they didn't seem to have learned the basics about how it worked.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Well, for the next example of a kind of mistake we found, all we have to do is go from number one to number two on the list. It turns out that number two on the list was $655 million contract was an example of another kind of error we saw throughout the list of receipts, which was it was the same contract and number two, number three and number four counted three different times.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Well, I'll take you through it. Each one of those, two, three, and four, were all U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, contracts with vendors who did basically quality control. They would go around and make sure that USAIDs work in Africa and other places, but just achieving the goals that they wanted. And they all shared the same contract.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
But then when the Doge people looked at it, they thought that every one of them had a separate contract and then every one of them was entitled to the whole money set aside for that effort. So when three of those vendors had their contracts canceled, they counted that as three different cancellations. Each were $655 million.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Yeah, there was another kind of mistake we found all over the wall of receipts, which was that Doge was claiming credit for quote-unquote canceling contracts that had actually been canceled before President Trump took office. Hmm. The biggest dollar amount for one of those is a $1.9 billion cut that the Department of Treasury made. And you can actually see this happening.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
You can see how it gets on the wall of receipts, which is that Treasury, which oversees IRS, tweets at Doge and says, hey, Doge, look at this incredible contract. We canceled a $1.9 billion IT contract. Doge says, hey, that's fantastic.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
They retweet it, post a screenshot from the federal procurement data system that shows a terminated contract, and then put that savings, $1.9 billion, onto the wall of receipts. The problem is that when you call the vendor that was listed as having its contract canceled, that contract was canceled under President Joe Biden. It was canceled last fall for reasons that had nothing to do with Doge.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Oh. And that's not the only example of that. One of the bigger contracts for more than $50 million in savings is a Department of Homeland Security contract that Doge says was canceled. It was an IT contract that the Coast Guard had entered into. But all you got to do is click on the link to see the page from the federal procurement system and you'll see that contract ended in 2005.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Well, what we know is that the cuts that are on the wall are suggested by the agencies. The agencies send them to Doge and then Doge posts them on the wall.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
I can't get into the head of the people at the agencies to know if this is their incompetence or if they are trying to maybe avoid having to make real cuts by, you know, sort of placating Doge with some bogus cuts that don't cost them anything. What we can tell, though, from looking at this is something about Doge's own quality control and interest in quality control.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
The amount of effort it takes to figure out that some of these claims are wrong is not huge. Like, you don't need a master's degree in government contracting. All you'd have to do is click on the link and realize, oh, wait, this contract expired in June 2005. And if they're missing that kind of mistake, it doesn't really seem like anyone is looking at these things.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
They're just sort of posting them on the wall and claiming credit for them.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
So I have not been through every single cut on the list. We're still working through them. But after we did some initial reporting, Doge deleted what had been the top five items on their original wall of receipts. They got rid of all of them. And the savings they had claimed from that, which had been over $10 billion, declined to a few million.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
That doesn't give me a huge amount of confidence for the accuracy of the rest of the data that we haven't gone through yet.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
The Times had a great story about the people who work for Doge. They identified more than 40 people who are working either at the central Doge office, which is within the White House, or out in agencies sort of under the control of Doge. And they're, by and large, not people who have experience in government there.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
They're coders, they're software engineers, they're sort of people who are close to Elon Musk and go from company to company. And to the degree that they have experience managing large organizations, it's something like Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX, very different organizations. And as big as they are, much smaller organizations than the one they're in charge of now.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Well, look, in the grand scheme of the federal government's budget and in the cuts that Doge is proposing to make, these mistakes are relatively small. But there's something bigger at stake here. Doge is, of course, a team of people within the White House, but it's also an idea, a bigger idea about the shape of government, and it's an idea about how to cut government.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
That's why this look is so important, because this is our one chance, the one window we have to see the world as Doge sees it, to see what they know, what they don't know, to see what they understand and what they don't understand. And looking closely at that,
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Well, so I should start by saying that it's really hard to know most of what Doge is doing. Doge is really opaque. It's operating in a lot of different places at once, operating almost in total secrecy. So we've been looking for a window, any sort of window, to see the kind of analysis they're using to justify all the things they're cutting and the things they want to cut.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
I think gives us a lot of clues about what actually motivates Doge, what actually motivates the cuts they're making, and some sense of where their effort is going to go from here.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
The most important lesson I think we can learn from the mistakes we're seeing here is that we should throw out the idea that Doge is somehow able to process this huge amount of government data and find insights that no other people have had. What Doge has been sold to us as is like it's tech support. That's what Elon Musk calls it. You know, these are like the geek squad for the government.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
We're going to bring them in and they're going to find examples of waste and inefficiency that other people hadn't. That's not really what we're seeing here. You know, we're starting to see patterns in the choices they're making.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
So far, it seems like they're focused less on the really big federal contractors, the defense contractors, the health contractors that make up the huge portion of federal spending. Instead, they're going after larger numbers of smaller contracts with smaller firms, often owned by women or minorities.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
Often, when the cuts are real, and there are many cuts that are real on this list, they're motivated by ideology. They're political decisions. They're cutting USAID not because they've found some great fraud or waste or ineffectiveness at USAID doing the mission it was supposed to do. They just don't like USAID. They think that mission, foreign aid, is not worthy of taxpayer money. Mm-hmm.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
That's a political view some people have, people in the government have. But to say that it is some sort of analysis that goes beyond or above politics, there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence of that kind of analysis in the data we've seen.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
That's right. They've sent a lot of messages to that end that if you disagree with them, you could be a target. You could have your funding. You could have your job taken away. It's a very aggressive view of the way that a president imprints his ideology, his political goals on the government, but also on society at large.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
And I think that's the real impetus behind what Doge is doing, despite its name, efficiency, despite Elon Musk's characterization of it as sort of the government's geek squad. It's a political project, a very aggressive political project to carry out a political ideology, not some sort of analysis that's outside of politics.
The Daily
DOGE Has a Math Problem
And a couple of weeks ago, they actually gave us one window into their work. They set up a website. Hmm. Basically, it's a kind of a primitive looking website. It looks a little bit like something off the dark web. That's the vibe.
The Daily
Elbows Up: Canada’s Response to Trump’s Trade War
Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
As he sat in Haynes' glass-walled office, Mitchell wondered what his friend had gotten himself into. Mitchell was not interested in sending $12 million to a mysterious crypto operation in Hong Kong. Go there, hire an interpreter, and get a cashier's check, he told Haynes. If you think you've got $40 million in an account, go get it. But Haynes seemed to have stopped listening.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The bank had fallen victim to a scam, and now it was insolvent. What was especially remarkable about this scam was how big it was. And that's because the primary victim wasn't some random employee. It was the bank's president, a guy named Shane Haynes. And he had access to tens of millions of dollars, the bank's money. And when Haynes fell victim to this scam, he ended up stealing that money.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
He was staring past Mitchell into the bank lobby, where his staff was arriving to start the day. He barely reacted when Mitchell offered his verdict. Shane, I think you're in a scam. Haynes was still in thrall to the people on the other end of his phone, whoever they were. That day, he sent a further $8 million to his crypto account. In a town as small as Elkhart, secrets rarely hold for long.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Troubled by what Haynes had told him, Mitchell alerted some contacts at Heartland, and within weeks, the board was holding its crisis meeting, demanding an explanation. By the end of July, the Kansas banking regulator was examining Heartland's accounts, and a procession of state and federal agencies descended on Elkhart. Heartland was insolvent.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
On July 28, 2023, cargo vans and black SUVs surrounded the bank building on Morton Street. Staff members gathered in the lobby where David Herndon, the Kansas banking commissioner, told them that Heartland would shut down. On Monday, he said, it would reopen with a new owner, a company called Dream First, based a couple of counties over. None of the bank's customers would lose their deposits.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Those federally insured accounts would move over to Dream First. But shares in the bank's holding company were now worthless, erasing years of investment gains. Many of the shareholders lost the bulk of their savings, retirement nest eggs and emergency funds. The day of the closure, Tucker and his father joined the staff in the bank lobby.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
An hour earlier, Tucker helped the older man find the signature line on the government paperwork that dissolved the business their family started in 1984. It was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, Tucker said. We still didn't understand why. We didn't understand what happened.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The Tuckers lost $1.4 million worth of shares, and with them, a source of wealth that Jim had hoped to pass on to his children. In the lobby, he and his father listened as the president of Dream First delivered a pep talk to Heartland's staff, telling them, if you dream it, we can help you achieve it. At the teller's counter, two young women were crying.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The building was full of people Tucker didn't recognize, presumably government officials overseeing the bank's closure. Some of them carried step stools, ladders, and power tools. They pushed the furniture to the perimeter of the room and took apart the bank's security system, removing the cameras.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Then they fanned out into the rest of the bank and carried away laptops and computers, piling the hardware into the cars parked outside. The two Tuckers watched it all unfold in front of them. Just watching it melt, Jim Tucker recalled, burned to the ground right there before our eyes. The failure of Heartland thrust Elkhart into a state of fear and confusion.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Nobody could quite believe what happened, but everyone seemed to agree that the money was gone. Wire transfers out of the bank spiderwebbed into an array of untraceable crypto wallets, a federal investigator explained in court last year. There is no indication that anyone knows where it is at this point, he said, or how to access it.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Still, a few clues emerged on the blockchain, a public ledger of crypto transactions. Many crypto scammers are based in Southeast Asia, where organized crime rings run pig butchering operations out of abandoned hotels and casinos. At least some of the money that Haines stole may have ended up in the hands of an organization that targeted other Americans.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
In 2023, the scammers who approached Haynes appear to have orchestrated a similar plot that ensnared a wealthy Minnesotan, according to the crypto forensics firm Chainalysis, which analyzed the Heartland case at the request of the New York Times. The man was approached on LinkedIn by a woman who urged him to invest in crypto and to leave his wife for her. He lost more than $9 million.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Last May, Haynes pleaded guilty to a federal charge of embezzlement by a bank officer, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. He also faces local charges that are still pending against him. When he was sentenced in August, Heartland's shareholders drove four and a half hours to the federal courthouse in Wichita to attend the hearing.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
One by one, they walked up to the courtroom lectern and called for Haynes to receive the longest possible sentence. They could muster sympathy for a scam victim, but not for someone who stole from his neighbors. If he is released the day he dies, that will be one day too early, one of them told the judge. No one in Elkhart has managed to make sense of the mystery at the center of the betrayal.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Why did a successful, financially sophisticated banker, a man the whole town trusted for decades, gamble his life away for a shot at crypto riches? Tucker wondered whether Haynes had been hiding something, some secret problem that only money could solve. On the surface, Shane Haynes was an upstanding and very involved member of our community, he told the judge in Wichita.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The total amount that he stole from the bank came out to $47.1 million. Shane Haynes was just about the last person anyone in Elkhart thought would fall for a scam like this. He had been part of the community for decades. He'd worked his way up from a loan officer to become president of the bank.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Now we're all left to wonder how sincere any of that ever was. Haynes declined requests for an interview, and the legal system has offered little clarity. At the sentencing, Judge John W. Brooms, who was overseeing the case, said he hadn't heard anything that helps me understand it. Even Haynes' defense lawyer, John Stang, seemed to be grasping for an answer.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
I keep hearing the question why, he said in court. Was it greed? Was it being gullible? Apparently he wasn't intelligent enough. In the Wichita courtroom, Haynes offered his only public reflection on the bank collapse. Wearing a gray suit, he walked up to the lectern, glancing nervously at his former friends in the gallery. I'm sorry, he told the judge.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Until the very end, he explained, he thought he was involved in a legitimate business deal. In January 2024, he told the court... he made a futile attempt to recoup the lost money, flying to Perth, Australia, where some of his non-existent business partners had supposedly been based. He was in touch with them until the moment he landed at the airport, but no bailout materialized.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
It was only then, months after the bank shuttered, that he accepted he had been tricked. I'll forever struggle understanding how I was duped, Haynes said. I should have caught it, but I didn't. After Haynes finished speaking, Judge Brooms rocked backwards in his chair and turned to face the shareholders. The best thing for you is to forgive this man, he said. Leave matters of retribution to me.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
That's my job, and I'll see that it's done. He sentenced Haynes to 24 years and five months in prison, a punishment even greater than federal prosecutors had requested. A chorus of yeses echoed from the shareholders. Haynes' shoulders slumped. As two U.S. Marshals approached him, he undid his tie, slipped off his suit jacket, and emptied his pockets. Behind him, the shareholders went quiet.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Haynes' sister and one of his daughters clung to each other, their sobs breaking the silence. Haynes looked at them once, quickly, before the Marshals handcuffed him and let him out of the room. One day last October, Tucker got a call from an investigator at the FBI. It was good news.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Federal officials had recovered $8 million of the stolen funds, which had been hidden in an account full of Tether, a popular cryptocurrency. The stash was a small fraction of what Haynes stole, but it would be enough to reimburse the shareholders for nearly all the money they had invested in the bank. The jubilation Tucker might have expected to feel was tempered by sadness.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
His father had been in and out of the hospital, and a doctor warned that he had only days left to live. That night, Tucker went to his father's hospital room and shared what he had heard. Bill Tucker blinked a few times and then said, Oh my. He died a week later. In Elkhart, Tucker and the other shareholders were still searching for answers, an explanation that makes sense.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
For decades, they felt bound to their neighbors by ties of family and friendship, ties that turned out to be weaker than they supposed. And then their lives were upended by a chain of connections they had never imagined, invisible links to villains on the other side of the world. After the bank collapse, Tucker started therapy, hoping he could reach a sense of equilibrium.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
For now, though, he relishes the idea that Haynes will suffer in prison, enduring sleepless nights and days filled with misery. The demise of Heartland is still a source of pain. The last 15, 16 months of my dad's life, this was what was on his mind, Tucker said. He lived a good life, he was a good person, and then that's what he goes out with.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Everyone in town thought he was super smart, financially astute, a really good and reliable leader of this important community institution. Shane volunteered at high school football games. He served on the school board, preached at the local church, and he also represented the community in Washington.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Elkhart was once just a little farming town in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everything but the land itself. It was a place whose isolation was part of its charm, where neighbors prayed together and relied on each other. Now, every time Tucker drives past the bank, he's reminded of a globe-spanning betrayal. The trust that was broken, he said, his voice trailing off. That one stings.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
He even once testified in front of the House of Representatives about the needs of small-town banks. This wasn't any ordinary bank either. Its shareholders were all locals. In many cases, people's shares in the bank made up the core of their emergency savings and retirement funds. So when the bank collapsed, people lost the money they had been hoping to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
And the person to blame was one of their own neighbors. So when I came across this story, my big question was, how did Shane Haynes, this pillar of the community who everyone in Elkhart knew and trusted, get ensnared in a scam like this, one that would lead to the downfall of an entire bank? And what does a traumatic event like this do to a small community?
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
That's what this week's Sunday Read is about. Our audio producer today is Tali Abacasis. The music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. So here's my story. Thanks for listening. Jim Tucker could hardly believe what he was hearing. It sounded like fiction, a nightmare too outlandish for an unassuming town like his.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
It was July 2023, and Tucker was hosting a meeting of the board of Heartland Tri-State Bank, a community-owned business in a small Kansas town called Elkhart. Heartland was a beloved local institution and a source of Tucker family pride. Jim served on the board with his elderly father, Bill, who founded the bank four decades earlier.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
All the board members, the Tuckers and several other farmers and business people, had known one another for years. That evening, however, they were gathering to discuss what seemed on its face an epic betrayal.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The town of Elkhart is one of those really tight-knit, isolated communities whose charm and whole sense of itself kind of derives from the way that it's cut off from the outside world. Everyone in town knows each other. Everyone in town trusts each other. But a bank collapse is really serious business. The federal government has to step in.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Over the past few weeks, the bank's longtime president, a popular local businessman named Shane Haynes, had ordered a series of unexplained wire transfers that drained tens of millions of dollars from the bank. Haynes converted the funds into cryptocurrencies. Then the money vanished.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Tucker's first inkling that something was wrong came from a friend, an investor in the bank who was close to Haynes. A few days before the board meeting, he confided to Tucker that Haynes had messed up. A wire transfer went out, supposedly to help a struggling customer, and now the bank was $30 million in the hole.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
By the time the board members gathered, it was clear that Heartland was caught up in some sort of financial scam, a sophisticated grift that delivered its assets into the clutches of an overseas crypto crime network. At the meeting, Haynes seemed oddly nonchalant, exuding the air of an overconfident salesman.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Tucker had heard that he had spent the past week at an out-of-state leadership conference. Guys, I'm sorry, Haynes told the board, but we're going to get it fixed. Haynes promised that he could recover the money, a total of $47.1 million. All he needed was the board's approval to borrow another $18 million.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
With the help of some business contacts, he said, he would use those funds to recoup the many millions he had already lost. His banking career was probably finished, he acknowledged, but the deal came with a sweetener that would allow him to start over. The people I'm working with have built in money for me, Haynes explained. Tucker, a 50-year-old farmer, had no special expertise in finance.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Hi, I'm David Yaffe-Bellini, and I cover the cryptocurrency world for The New York Times. Last year, I came across a strange and really interesting story. It was about a bank in Kansas that collapsed. The bank was called Heartland Tri-State Bank, and it was located in this tiny rural community in the southwestern corner of Kansas called Elkhart.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
He grew up in Elkhart, graduated from Elkhart High School, and returned after college to work on his family's farm, a 12,000-acre expanse that he had helped manage for nearly 30 years. He was accustomed to people deferring to Haynes, whom his father considered a brilliant executive, the banking equivalent of Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs' three-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
But then Haynes was telling the board that someone in Hong Kong had frozen millions in crypto holdings that he had acquired while working with a couple of internet acquaintances. A banker named Rob, who had good relationships in Washington, and a woman named Bella with family in Australia.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Haynes was a confident speaker, and Tucker worried that these explanations, far-fetched as they were, might sway some of the older members of the board. He could sense that his 92-year-old father was listening closely, straining to keep believing in the man he had trusted for so many years. Haynes seemed hopeful that his pitch had worked.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
When the board reconvened the next morning, he showed up in shorts and flip-flops, put down his briefcase, and started passing out paperwork, laying out ways for the bank to borrow more money. But Jim Tucker had had enough. He slid the forms back to Haynes. "'Shane, I don't even know who you are right now,' Tucker said. "'I don't believe anything you've said.'"
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Lodged in the state's southwestern corner, Elkhart is unusually remote, about as far from the capital city Topeka as it is possible for a Kansas town to be. Many of the roughly 1,900 people who live there work in agriculture, tending to rows of crops that seem to stretch endlessly in every direction, like an ocean. People come here with a dream, Tucker said, and find out it's a lot of work.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
They have to orchestrate a takeover really quickly, almost under the cover of night, to stop panic from spreading in the markets. On the day that Heartland collapsed and that it was taken over in July 2023, a really dramatic scene played out on the streets of Elkhart. There were blacked-out SUVs surrounding the bank, cargo vans with license plates that nobody in town recognized.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
For decades, Elkhart's emotional center was Heartland, a source of stability in a rapidly changing world. In 2016, Haynes testified at a banking hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives, describing the town as an old-fashioned community built on trust.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Some mornings, he said, members of his bank staff woke up to find piles of cash sitting in their unlocked pickup trucks, informal loan payments from loyal customers who knew the money would end up in the right place. That is what it means to be a community rural banker, Haynes declared.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Heartland was founded in 1984 after a group from Elkhart, including Tucker's father, banded together with some outside investors. They wanted to create an alternative to another bank in the area, a business they felt had made it too difficult to secure loans.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The new bank became a point of pride for Elkhart, even after it was taken over in the early 1990s by a holding company called Kansas Bank Corporation. Around that time, Haynes, who grew up in nearby Keys, Oklahoma, started at the bank as a loan officer.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
He rose up the ranks and was eventually named president in 2008, earning acclaim for his fluency in both the language of finance and the farming vernacular of his neighbors. A part-time preacher at a local church, Haynes embodied a certain small-town ideal. He lived in a nice house with his wife and three daughters and volunteered at high school football games.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
But in 2011, the leaders of the Kansas Bank Corporation grew concerned about Haynes, according to Tina Call, who served on the company's board at the time. They had discovered problems in his loan portfolio, borrowers who lacked sufficient collateral, financial paperwork that didn't seem to add up. Haynes was eventually fired for reasons that remain in dispute years later.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
A lawyer for Haynes says he was simply a casualty of downsizing at the bank. Call says that explanation is completely false. Regardless, Haynes still had a powerful network in Elkhart, local allies who helped him turn a career setback into a business opportunity.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Just as Bill Tucker had 30 years earlier, Haynes assembled a group of local investors who started a bid to buy the bank and restore control of the most important institution in Elkhart to people who actually lived there. In 2012, Haynes returned as president of Heartland, which adopted an ownership structure that has become common across America.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The bank was controlled by a group of roughly 35 local investors, including Haynes and his wife, as well as Jim Tucker and his father. No one outside Elkhart would dictate the bank's future, and all the profits would flow back into the area.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
For years, under Haynes' leadership, Heartland generated a reliable dividend, money the bank's shareholders invested in their farms, saved for retirement, or spent on nursing home care for aging relatives. Elkhart's financial culture was the polar opposite of the crypto ethos that began to go mainstream around the time this new iteration of Heartland was founded.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Early crypto proponents envisioned a fully automated form of exchange. No bankers, no middlemen, just lines of computer code whose techno-rationality would eliminate any need for interpersonal trust. As a career banker, Haynes was skeptical. He once told a colleague that anyone who used crypto must have, quote, something they are trying to hide.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Yet, in December 2022, after the woman using the name Bella approached him on social media, Haynes began buying cryptocurrencies himself. Bella claimed that her aunt ran a crypto firm in Australia, and she introduced Haynes to a website that resembled a crypto investment platform. Soon, she and Haynes were exchanging frequent messages on WhatsApp, usually multiple times a day.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
By the standards of Elkhart, Haynes was already a wealthy man, but this investment apparently required colossal sums. Within months, he had dipped into his daughter's college fund, spending $60,000 on digital currencies.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Online scams are as old as the internet, but the rise of crypto has given con artists a valuable new tool, digital coins that can be transferred instantly without oversight from banks legally obligated to monitor transactions for malfeasance. In 2023, crypto fraud cost American investors an estimated $4.8 billion, according to the FBI.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
You had government officials walking into the bank building with power tools and ladders, pushing all the furniture to the perimeter of the room, taking down the security system, removing laptops and computers and piling all that hardware into the vans parked outside. And then a state banking official got up in front of the staff and made an announcement.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The scams are so common that law enforcement authorities have taken to calling them by a pithy name, pig butchering, a rough translation of an expression widely used in China where these scams have proliferated in recent years. The scammer's victim is the pig, slowly fattened for slaughter.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The scams typically begin with messages on LinkedIn, Facebook, or WhatsApp from an unknown number or someone posing as a romantic prospect. Sometimes the conversations lead to business introductions, a connection to a banker or asset manager with a slick headshot and a fictional resume.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
The target is offered an investment opportunity, often backed up by a fraudulent website masquerading as an actual crypto business or an app that displays fake profits on fake account statements. Eventually, the scams all end the same way. The money disappears. After draining his personal savings, Haynes began stealing from his local investment club, from his church, and finally from the bank.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Over a few weeks, he ordered a series of large wire transfers, telling his bewildered colleagues that he was helping a client In May 2023, Haynes transferred $3 million from Heartland to an account at a company called Kraken, which offers trading in digital currencies.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
To buy more crypto, he directed Heartland to borrow about $21 million from a network of regional lenders and siphoned a similar amount using a credit line that the bank maintained with another institution. Over four weeks in June, Haynes sent $31 million of the embezzled funds to his Kraken account.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Later, as his friends and colleagues sorted through the wreckage, Haynes would be called a thief, a liar, and pure evil. But his lawyer eventually put it differently. He was the pig that was butchered. On July 5th, 2023, not long before Heartland's board meeting, Haynes sent a text to a farmer in Elkhart named Brian Mitchell. He needed Mitchell's help with something.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Mitchell didn't have any role at the bank, but he was used to fielding requests from friends in town. With a diamond stud in one ear, Mitchell stood out among the other farmers. He was one of the most successful people in Elkhart, a veteran businessman who owned a regional chain of movie theaters, including one a block from Heartland.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
When Mitchell walked into the bank that morning, he wasn't sure what to expect. Haynes was a longtime friend and neighbor. Their children had grown up across the street from each other. Maybe he wanted advice about a medical problem. But what Haynes actually wanted was $12 million. Immediately. It was surreal, Mitchell recalled. Like, okay, am I in a loan office in Elkhart, Kansas?
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Or am I in a back alley in Chicago with a loan shark? Haynes told Mitchell a confusing story. Not long ago, Haynes explained, he started investing in cryptocurrencies with the help of some people he met online. First, he and his partners deposited money on a reputable U.S. platform for buying and selling crypto. The profits were enormous, he said.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
He took out his phone to show Mitchell his account balance, which seemed to indicate that the investment was worth $40 million. But a problem arose after Haynes and his partners moved the funds to a Hong Kong trading platform that charged lower fees, he told Mitchell. The money had somehow gotten stuck, and the only way to unfreeze it was to send more.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
You know, and it's like, everyone knows he made Station to Station or whatever when he was like... thought he was being chased by witches because he was out of his mind on cocaine and only eating hot peppers and drinking milk. And his life was insane. He was probably pretty unhappy, but he did make a great album. But we don't have as many cultural legends about when happy artists make great art.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Good. It's nice to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Were there times where you felt like you didn't make something that was authentic to yourself?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
So in an announcement that I saw for Mayhem, it must have been on social media somewhere, you referred to your fear of going back to the pop music that your earliest fans love. Why is that something you were scared of?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
There are a lot of ways in which I think of your music as, in a way, sort of a comment on authenticity. Have your ideas about what it means to be authentic changed over time?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
You know, if you look at the history of pop music, there's not a ton of... People who don't end up becoming like, as they get older, don't end up becoming, you know, legacy acts or chasing trends or something like that. Are there people you look to and say like, oh, they forged a trail that looks comfortable for me to go down?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Do you feel like you, you might have a different attitude about the idea of winning if you hadn't already won in a sense?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
You know, I think of your music as celebrating difference, but I wouldn't say in the larger culture right now, it feels like difference is something that's being celebrated. Do you think about how your music fits into the larger culture that you're putting it out into?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I'm thinking of the Grammys and when you accepted an award, I think you were the only artist who said something was explicitly in support of trans rights. Do you see your mission as an artist in 2025 is to Is there a political aspect to it?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
You know, I think kindness is... of a hugely underrated value. Do you have thoughts about how we might sort of promote or embody? Yeah, so that people see it as a valuable thing that it is?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I want to go back to more music-specific subjects for a second. Is it harder with the amount of options you have in the studio to know when to stop experimenting? You know, there's one thing if you're sitting with like a little tape recorder on top of your piano and you can only do so much.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
But when you're actually in a professional studio and the possibilities are kind of endless, how do you figure out when something is ready?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Do you have that experience when you're listening to other people's music?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Oh, yeah. The Beck album from, I think it was like 2014. Yeah.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
In what way? Why did it affect you at that time?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
What other beautiful music do you like?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
You made reference a couple times to your fibromyalgia. Yes. Is that something that's under control for you right now? What is your relationship with the illness?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
You know, the music video for Abracadabra looks to me like a very physically intense music video. Is that something you would have been able to do when the fibromyalgia was less under control?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
There's a great story. Maybe it's apocryphal that when you were very young, you were playing at some bar in Manhattan and there were some like loud frat boys there and they weren't paying attention. Do you know where the story is going?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
And then the way you got them to pay attention was you basically stripped down to your underwear and performed. And that showed you new possibilities for the kind of artist that you could be. There could be a performance art aspect to what you were going to do. And I am just very curious to know if...
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
More recently, you've had any other sort of similar artistic epiphanies or where your own perspective on what you're capable of opened up?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. Lady Gaga is undoubtedly one of pop culture's great shapeshifters. She's tried on, with great success, a whole range of different musical styles, from the dance pop of her earliest albums, like The Fame. To the country rock of Joanne.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
After the break, Lady Gaga and I sit down in person and talk about the kind of mom she'd like to be.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
How do you characterize that sound for people?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Do you have much experience with microphones?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
But thank you for doing this in person.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
But we talked earlier about... the idea of how there was a point in your career when you were particularly interested in sort of playing with artifice and sort of trying on different personas. And I was wondering if There was any way in which that was ever psychologically destabilizing or hard to manage? You're nodding, yeah.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Let me ask you this though. Do you have any skepticism internally about whether the person you are now is just another persona that you're trying on?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Because like the I am authentic now is a thing that people do.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
And you brought up a period five or so years ago when it seems like your mental health was not in a great place. Are you able to tell me more about what was going on with you then?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
How did it, were there turning points? Like, how did you turn it around?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I was thinking about the title, Mayhem. And I thought, mayhem is, it can be an exciting...
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Before the interview officially started on Tuesday and we were just making small talk, I mentioned my kids and you in a very wistful way said like, you know, I would love to have kids one day. Do you have any apprehension about that? having kids and still being able to be the Lady Gaga you need to be?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I suspect the only answer is through living it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Any last words? Did I miss anything?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Thank you for being cool, Lady Gaga. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Thank you. That's Lady Gaga. Her new album Mayhem is out now. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Afim Shapiro. Original music by Dan Powell, Rowan Nemisto, and Marian Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and Seth Kelly is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Matty Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash theinterview, and you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com. Next week, Lulu talks with Senator Chuck Schumer. I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
And when you said there were ways in which you sort of felt bridled together, in the way that people thought about women in pop music? What did you mean by that?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
To her albums of jazzy duets with the great crooner Tony Bennett.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Were there ways in which you felt like You were in an exploitative relationship?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
Or just treated as a commodity?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
So when I heard that Gaga's new album, Mayhem, was a return to the pop sounds of her early work, I wondered why a master of reinvention would be making that move. Was it a back-to-the-basics turn? A nostalgia play? Was Lady Gaga revisiting her own earlier style, meant to be some sort of meta comment on what it means to be Lady Gaga?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I'm curious what you made of Chapel Roan's speech at the Grammys where she talked about sort of the ways in which the record labels are not supporting the artists with, you know, healthcare or living wage.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
And your partner, Michael Polanski? Yes. He's an executive producer on the album? Yes, he is. Can you just sort of talk to me about how that role played out for him? Like, what impact does he have on the music?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
But as she explained it, the answer, in a way, is all of the above. She and I talked about that new album, as well as how her relationship with her fiancé helped shape its music. And we talked, too, about the loneliness of fame and how it's taken her 20 years to learn how to be a boss. Here's my conversation with Lady Gaga.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I could imagine that relationships are tricky for someone in your position because, you know, you might have questions about someone else's, you know, whether or not their feelings are genuine or if they have ulterior motives or, you know, sort of if they really want to be with you or their idea of who you are. How did you realize that, like, Michael was genuine?
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I hope this doesn't sound trite. I don't mean it tritely. I'm very glad that you found that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Lady Gaga's Latest Experiment? Happiness.
I could imagine that the sort of feeling of contentment might be a feeling that artists can mistrust because of the idea that, you know, great artists created under sort of tense circumstances. Or I'm sure you are aware of albums that people love, and part of the legend of them is that they were recorded when the artist was struggling. Like, you're a David Bowie fan, right?
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. So many of Denzel Washington's greatest performances have been defined by a riveting sense of authority, an absence of any pandering or need to be liked. There's something deep down inside his characters that feels unassailable, a little enigmatic, and theirs alone.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I'd be interested to hear what you say now.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And no excuse is good enough. Do you feel like you have insight into sort of what the drinking was about?
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Yeah. Is it right that you used to carry around your acceptance letter from the American Conservatory Theater?
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I'm just trying to fish around for things that might be engaging. I don't mean to fish around. I'm not trying to get all up in your business.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I'm too easy is the problem.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
um i'm just thinking can i be honest with you go ahead sure i just want to might as well i don't know where to go conversationally with you i feel like i'm just jumping around and it's not i'm not connecting but and i don't know what i'm supposed to what if there's a different like maybe i should ask you a question sure why do you feel that way oh you know um can i give you two answers to that
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Okay, I'll allow two answers, yes. Well, the first answer is why I feel that way is because the answers have sort of been short and, you know, often people sort of are a little more expansive.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Well... Go ahead. All right, so not too long ago you finished filming a film with Spike Lee, is that right?
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
You tricked me again. No, no.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
So, and I think it's your first time. Hi, hello. Yes, your first time working with him since Inside Man, which is almost 20 years ago. How has your relationship with him changed over time? What was different about it?
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Can I tell you the second reason why I'm having a hard time today? I like to ask philosophical questions about why people do what they do and sort of the meaning of it. There's nothing wrong with that. I enjoy it. And it seems like when I've asked you those types of questions, it just hasn't seemed interesting to you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
The same steely qualities that have helped Washington become a legend also, as I learned firsthand, make for an unusual and unusually complicated conversationalist. The first of our two discussions was done remotely. He was at a photo studio in Los Angeles, as the fires were still raging there, and I was home in New Jersey. This discussion felt as if it were being conducted entirely on his terms.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And I think as a result, I feel like I've been flailing a little, just trying to say, what about this? What about that?
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Now you're just liking making me squirm, but that's fine. That's fine. What's the question? So I'm always curious about the interplay, okay, between the life and the work.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And I just rewatched Flight, which that's my favorite performance of yours.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Interesting. Yeah. In that one, you play an airline captain named Whip Whitaker. Right. Who is struggling with alcohol. Alcohol. Managed to save a flight in sort of semi-miraculous fashion. And, you know, the thing that I was thinking about in watching that one was how it fit in with your life at the time, because it was in that timeline, I think, when you were drinking.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And I did wonder, did playing that character show you anything about your own situation or... Yeah, I'll stop there.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Yeah, did sort of you learn anything about yourself from doing a role like that?
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
You're saying you sort of gained some understanding maybe after the fact, not when you're doing it. Well... Yeah.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Yeah. What kinds of things do you think I should ask me? I want to know more about you. OK, I we can switch roles. I would love to do that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Aside from interviewing Denzel Washington?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I'll tell you. I'll tell you. The thing that I need to work on more than anything else is I have an assertiveness problem and a problem with conflict. You mean you're being assertive or you're too assertive? With being assertive.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Or let me put it like this. I didn't feel like we ever quite figured out how to connect. The second time we talked, a little over a week later, things were different. I met him in person at a space in Manhattan where he was rehearsing for a rare Broadway appearance. He's playing Othello in a new production that co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago and is directed by the Tony Award winner Kenny Leon.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I think that means, I mean, nobody's perfect. Maybe you're not. I didn't say I was perfect.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Well, two things. Can I say two? All right, go ahead. This is going to sound so corny. The second one's not as corny. But the first one that came to mind was laughing.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Great. That's a great thing. And then the second thing is intellectual stimulation. I hate being bored.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Can I do my version of the kinds of questions you've been asking me?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
How do you think evil works in the world?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Where do you think evil comes from?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
The last question for this time. What should I go away and... think about in preparation for when we talk again?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I can't really say why with any certainty, but things just felt easier with him this time. What I do know, though, is that after it was all over, I was left with an experience just as memorable as one of his performances. Here's my conversation with Denzel Washington. Hello, I'm David. How are you, David Denzel? Nice to meet you.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
All right. I think that is something for me to think about for next time.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
After the break, Denzel and I sit down in person, and he digs a little deeper into this moment in his career.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Thank you for giving me another run of this. I appreciate it. Thank you. And so we're in this rehearsal space where you're working on Othello. How are the rehearsals going so far?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
So that's helpful for me because I really felt like I was flailing. But at the end of our conversation, I had asked you if there was anything that maybe I could reflect on before we spoke again. And you told me this very short little parable about a man standing at the edge of the water.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Yeah. But the way I was thinking about that parable was that I felt like in our first conversation, I was too stuck in my own head, wrapped up in expectations of how the conversation was supposed to go rather than just being with you in the moment, you know, and sort of meeting you where you were.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
But my question also is, where did you learn that lesson that sometimes you just got to jump in the water rather than think about the water?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
You know, you also spoke last time about the value for you of helping people. Does acting help people?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Just to start, I saw that right at the end of last year, you were baptized and earned your minister's license?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I got two. You want to hear them?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
One's Iago. Othello is who can control his fate. And then my favorite line of all of Shakespeare is Iago's line, I am not what I am.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
You just said Jake Gyllenhaal was complicated. Do you think?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
You know, you said everything now is kind of about seeing it through the lens of what God thinks. Or at least through the lens of faith, yeah.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Can you tell me about the decision to go through that process at this point in your life?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
But you just got to use it. You just got to use it.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Yeah. This is, you know, I've really been thinking a lot lately about David Lynch, who just died. He was velvet. Oh, what about?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
But the thing that—one of the reasons—I mean, I loved his movies, but one of the reasons that he was really meaningful to me and why I've been thinking about him so much is that, you know, probably about 15 or so years ago, maybe even a little longer, I was really low, you know, sort of just really struggling. And I thought, I got to change something. My life can't go on like this.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And I, because I liked his movies, I, you know, I saw that, I was in a bookstore and I saw that David Lynch had this book, you know, called Catching the Big Fish. It's about creativity. And in there, he has a bit where he's talking about why he meditates. He said, one of the benefits of meditation is that it helps you become more you.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And then I started meditating about 15 or so years ago, maybe even longer, and it's completely changed my life. You know, like just seeing that one little, sentence in that one book I picked up one day by David Lynch, changed my life. Have you ever had an experience like that where just some, you know, from afar, someone changed your life?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Your father was a preacher, is that right?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Do you feel like you're sort of following in a family tradition in some sense or connecting with him?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I've seen you refer to the prophecy. Can you tell folks the story?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
This is Mount Vernon, New York, right?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
But was your gift for acting and the career that you've had, do you feel like any sort of message was being delivered through that? Or was acting totally, you know, did it turn out that it was totally separate from the... No, I wouldn't say it's either or.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Do you think there might come a time when you move to speaking mostly through ministry and not through acting? I don't know. I don't know. And, you know, this is just a bit of a shot in the dark that it's based on just some reading I was doing that I think, you know, sparked some connections for me. But I was just reading a book by James Baldwin called The Devil Finds Work.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And in there, he makes connections between the church and theater. Does that comparison ring true for you? Do you see similarities between the church and theater? Yeah.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
He says, you know, both are about people sort of experiencing an event together, communally creating the event as it happens, when all these people are together in the moment experiencing the same thing. It sounds like James Baldwin is saying there is an energy and, you know, sort of a spirit that is created that for him was sort of similar between the church and the theater. I can agree with that.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. The reason, of course, I ask about theater is because you're going back to the theater to do Othello. Can you tell me about the rewards for you of doing Shakespeare?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
That's a thing that I've heard actors say a fair bit, that there is an energy or a joy that comes from doing theatrical work. An immediacy. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you can help someone like me who has no experience acting understand sort of the emotional difference of performing in the different mediums. Yeah.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I was wondering, you know, I also watched the commencement speech you gave at Penn. It was probably, I don't know, 10 years ago, something like that. And you talked to the students about the necessity of, you have to be willing to fail, which is another way of saying you have to be willing to take risks.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And are there ways in which doing Othello or even just doing theater feels like a risk for you?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Yeah, yeah. What has your experience been with the fires out there? Have they come near you?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I mean, it's going to change that city for decades.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Does it make you want to live somewhere else? What do you mean, live somewhere else? What do you mean, like run? Well, it's just the reality of the danger in California is, it's scary.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Let me shift gears for a second. I want to ask you about family. Did having children change your perspective on the work at all?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
A thing I'm always curious about with actors is, and just artists generally, is when they realize it is also a business and a money-making enterprise. And, you know, it's not just this pure thing where you follow your artistic bliss all the time. And it's sort of what you're describing a little bit. Like at some point you thought, well, I got to take money-making jobs.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Does that affect how you approach the work itself?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
But does it affect the work? Like, if you know that something is a money job, basically, do you go about doing that job any differently? If you're asking me, did I ever take a job for money?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
I think you're... There's got to be a difference in the calculus when you say yes to Mississippi Masala or even Malcolm X as opposed to Virtuosity or... Ricochet, action movies.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
You know, going back to the subject of... Your children? They all work in the business, right? Mm-hmm. Was that something that you felt like you had to navigate with them or talk with them?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Why didn't they tell you?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Yeah, the piano competition.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
What have you learned about being an artist from her?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
So do you still not look at yourself as an artist?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
Can I ask you about the piece?
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
That was my next question. Yeah, I know. Go ahead. You were going to ask me about what? The first person piece you did for Esquire last year, sort of tied to Gladiator 2. You know, you talked sort of a... almost like a memoiristic piece. You talked about your whole life and your career. And I think that was the first place, at least that I've seen, where you really talked about drinking.
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'The Interview': Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose
And in there, you said there was this long period. I think you pegged it as like 1999 to 2014. When you put the beverage down, you were bitter. Bitter about what?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
And further back, directors and co-stars like Geena Davis, Lucy Liu, Richard Dreyfuss, and Harold Ramis have said Murray was, to put it lightly, not always the easiest to work with. So how do all these sides of Bill Murray fit together? Well, at a hotel in Manhattan, accompanied by my producer Annabelle and a publicist named Charlie, I got a chance to find out.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
There are all these urban legend stories that I'm sure you're familiar with of, you know, you showing up and playing kickball with people on Roosevelt Island or, you know, commandeering a golf cart in Scandinavia somewhere. There's the one where...
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
People said you would come up behind them on the street, put your hands over their eyes, and then when they turn around, you tell them no one will ever believe you. And I realized in preparing for this interview that those stories don't seem to pop up anymore. And I wondered if you... Did you stop doing that sort of stuff? Did you change your behavior?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Did the world change and it felt less fun to do? Did it start to become the expected thing?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
What sort of memories kicked up for you in Tokyo?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
From the old days? Yeah, you obviously went back there to feel something.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Here's my interview with Bill Murray. Are you David? I'm David. I'm Bill.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Wait, I want to ask you a couple more questions about The Friend, but before I do, I want to tell you a quick story. You're a co-star in The Friend. She's really the star of the film Naomi Watts. Ten years ago, I was supposed to do an interview with her, and I got off the train because I was going in to do the interview, and my phone buzzed, and it was my wife, and she had gone into labor once.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
With our first child. So, of course, I got back on the subway, went back home, furiously getting our go bag ready. And then my phone rings. It's a number I don't recognize. And I think, oh, maybe it's a doctor or something. I pick it up. And I say, like, agitatedly, hello? Hello? And I hear, hi, this is Naomi. I don't know a Naomi. Who— Who are you? And she said, I'm Naomi.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
I think we're supposed to do an interview now. And I said, oh, God, I'm so sorry. And then she was so nice. It was like, no, no, go. Just hang up immediately and go. And then we named our daughter Naomi. Oh. Well. The last part's not true, but everything up to that is true.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Yeah, she was very sweet about it.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Oh, no. A colleague of mine pinch-hit for me and did the interview. So The Friend, it's a beautiful novel. It's about a woman played by Naomi Watts who's sort of a pivotal figure in her life, Walter, played by you, dies from suicide. This all happens in the first couple minutes of the movie, so I'm not giving anything away.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
And then, Naomi Watts' character has to take care of Walter's dog, which is a giant Great Dane. So, what was interesting to you about this project and the role of Walter in particular?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
After the break, Bill and I talk about a darker chapter in his career.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
There's an anecdote about Samuel Beckett in both the film The Friend and the book. It's sort of a famous anecdote about Beckett where he's out walking with a friend and it's a beautiful day and the friend says to Samuel Beckett something along the lines of, isn't a day like this enough to make you glad to be alive? And Samuel Beckett says, I won't go as far as that.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
And I wondered about how a line like that jibes for you, because it seems to me to capture something about you, both the sort of awareness of the beautiful aspects of life, and then there's also a melancholy to it, because I really think a lot of your best dramatic work touches on some real melancholy, like Lost in Translation, Rushmore, of Do you relate to a line like that?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Your part in The Friend, in a way, uh, reminds me of some other relatively recent parts from your career in that he's sort of a charismatic, charming guy who's also been sort of a selfish ding-dong. Sort of what? Selfish ding-dong is the way I put it. And I just recently saw something where you had done a Sundance interview with Elvis Mitchell, who was a film critic for The Times for a long time.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
And he brought up the film On the Rocks. And I thought, oh, the On the Rocks character and Walter, there's some similarities between them. And in your interview with Elvis Mitchell, you know, you referred to taking on roles like the On the Rocks role as a kind of penance. And I thought, well, penance could mean making amends. It could mean Punishment.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
What would it mean to say taking on a role is like a form of penance? And did that apply to Walter also?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Would it be helpful if I gave you a little spiel at the beginning about what we're doing? Do you feel like you need some... A spiel? A spiel. Give me a spiel. So this is for the New York Times where we have a recurring interview feature we call The Interview. And I know you're doing this at the end of a long... tiring, probably kind of tedious day. So I appreciate that you're doing it.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
You know, something that also stood out for me with the film, and it's connected maybe to what we were just talking about, there is a parallel between Walter and you in that Walter in the film has been accused of some inappropriate misconduct. And a couple years ago on Being Mortal, there was some... It was described as inappropriate misconduct. I mean, surely those parallels... occurred to you?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Were you, did you think about them during the film or were you trying to work through something?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
And you said you think about this often.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Do you feel like you learned something from that experience?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Would you be more comfortable?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Maybe like an old-fashioned?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
And by the way, Iris lives alone in a modest apartment in Manhattan, so not exactly ideal for a dog the size of a small horse, and not exactly nice of Walter. Like so many of Murray's late career characters, Walter is funny and charismatic, but he's also kind of a jerk. He's resentful and self-centered, and he's caused some real damage.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Annabelle, are we ready to start? We're good, yeah. First, can you tell me what's in a lion's tail? We just ordered drinks.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Sounds good. It's tasty. You know, at the Times earlier today, your co-star in The Friend, the dog, was in the building getting its photo taken.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
you only have one or maybe two scenes with Bing in the movie. Right. But I felt like even in that brief time on screen, it looked to me like you kind of got a kick out of the dog. And in a weird way, it reminded me of, bear with me, of Larger Than Life, the movie in which you co-starred with an elephant. And then Not to Insult Children was, But I then rewatched What About Bob?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
And there's a dinner scene, and it looks like you're just enjoying making the kids laugh. And it made me wonder what's fun about working with sort of non-professional actors or unseasoned actors.
The Daily
'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
From the New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. In Bill Murray's new movie, The Friend, which is based on a great novel by Sigrid Nunez, he plays Walter, Walter's best friends with Iris, played by Naomi Watts. Through a surprising course of events, Iris winds up having to take in Walter's Great Dane.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Now, I'm a huge Bill Murray fan, and I sometimes imagine those more recent roles as kind of like alternate world versions of the comedy characters that made him a superstar. Because Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters or Phil Connors in Groundhog Day depict just two examples. They could be selfish and even cruel, but in the end, they always get away with it.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
I hope our bosses don't care about this. Wait, can I ask maybe a bit of a question that comes at kind of an angle to what we were just talking about. But when you're talking about Bing and the elephant, whose name was? Ty. Ty. And how they play the scene and how they're sort of consistent. When you are in a scene with a human, are you also looking for consistency from the person in that scene?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Or what are you looking for?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Maybe this is a little too much cosmic thinking on my part, but it's almost as if latter-day Bill Murray characters are suffering the karmic payback owed to his earlier ones. That tension between being beloved and leaving damage behind him is something that's come up in Murray's off-screen life, too.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
I can really dedicate myself to it. My understanding was on Friday or something, you were in Japan for a baseball game or something. Well, I wasn't playing, but yeah, I was there. You weren't playing. You know, and now we're here in New York, and then tomorrow you're going to Austin to play with your band.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Yeah. And this is all related to the idea of sort of being— present and in the moment. So learning that you, Bill Murray, were just sort of gallivanting around, it fits in with this idea of you as a guy who's following his bliss wherever that leads. What are the ways in which being present and open in life are different or similar to being present and open as a performer? Is it all the same game?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Just a few years ago, in 2022, he was alleged to have behaved inappropriately with a female staff member on the set of the film Being Mortal. She said that he straddled her and kissed her through masks, which they were both wearing as part of COVID protocols. The production was shut down, and eventually they reached a settlement.
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
Did you always have the desire or maybe it's a need to have that sense of presence? Or is that something you consciously tried to seek out?
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'The Interview': Bill Murray Says He's Not the Man He Used to Be
I know a couple people who lost parents fairly early, and you lost your dad at 17. Right. And I think for them, it set them on a direction, you know, where they realized there's certain things they want from life. Do you think your dad's passing put you on a particular path?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
There are so many things I want to talk to you about. Also, maybe I'll squeeze in a little attempt at getting free therapy from you.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Right, they didn't realize it was a possibility.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
And the book had the COVID era boost, but it continues to be popular, particularly on social media. What might the book's ongoing popularity say about the culture now?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
You know, the broad definition of emotionally immature parents are parents who refuse to validate their children's feelings and intuitions. They might be reactive, lacking in empathy or awareness. Can you... Maybe give me a couple sort of specific examples of emotionally immature behaviors from parents.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
But is there – I think it's fair to say that one of the real problems with contemporary life is the way we label other people in ways that are reductive or sort of don't really acknowledge human beings' multidimensionality, whether it's right or left or a believer versus a nonbeliever.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Is there any part of you that thinks, like, maybe it's not a good thing for the two million people or whoever many people have read your book to be thinking, like, oh, you're emotionally immature, and that is what defines you now?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
And, you know, this – I'm not sure quite how to bring this up, but it's sort of to do with, like, where compassion for the harmful person fits into all of this. Because I'll use a personal example. So, you know, I have – very distant relationship with my biological father. You know, there's a lot of pain there. You know, I honestly have seen him twice in the last 20 years.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Maybe we email four times a year or something like that. It's sort of a distant relationship through my choosing. But I don't think that that relationship is evidence of any, like, great... moral position on my part or particularly ethical, or I don't think that it really is showing the best side of who I am.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
I think somebody who's more developed and more compassionate would probably figure out a way to have a relationship that isn't so distant. How do we think of the idea of compassion in that kind of example?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Yeah, what's the answer?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
I think there's some fundamental level on which, like... Really, this is all about happiness. How should people set expectations for happiness in their lives? Because, you know, they could decide, hey, like this, my unhappiness has to do with being raised by emotionally immature parents. And I'll work on that.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
And then six months down the line, they realize, well, there's still a bunch of things that they're unhappy about. So how do we understand, like, what our expectations should be for what it means to be happy?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
After the break, I called Dr. Gibson back, and we talk more about compassion and also how people can know if they're truly happy.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Hi, Lindsay.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
I'm good. I'm good. So I have to admit that I am thinking a lot about when I brought up the idea of compassion. You know, you cautioned against the idea of compassion, you know, that the emotionally immature person can kind of use compassion as like a, almost like a honey trap. And I say this as someone who is personally fully aware of the pitfalls of extending compassion to the hurtful parent.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
But at the same time, I want to hold on to the idea that, you know, the emotionally immature person, they're probably struggling and they're not just boogeymen. Like they too deserve grace. So how do we open up the door to the possibility of change and reconciliation and understanding without compassion?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
So here's a question that I think would elicit different answers from a philosopher or a scientist or a psychologist. How much can people really change?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Oh, I ask your opinion of Dr. Jennifer Melfi in a little bit.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
When you're... Talking about truth that's really based on relationships between people, is there such a thing as the truth? I mean, even just to use my own example, I have my own, what I think is truthful understanding of my relationship with my biological father and why it was the way it was and how it affected me as an adult. I think he has his own interpretation that is true for him.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
So what does truth mean in your context?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Well, it doesn't even have to be that extreme. The truth could be, what if I've come up with something that is most palatable and easiest for me?
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
I had asked also about the problem of happiness. Your reply was sort of in terms of childhood and how children's default mode is happy. They're sort of wired for happiness. I was wondering if... that actually might be a kind of idealization of childhood and if there might be any pitfalls to that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Because, you know, I have two little kids and I take them to the playground and I sit and they go play. And if I scan the playground, you see anger, you see fear, you see conflict, in addition to the happy feelings. And I couldn't help but wonder if, like, our expectation when we think about childhood is one of...
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
sort of where happiness is the default, might that lead as adults to feelings of disappointment when we think retrospectively about what childhood is, given that, of course, childhood is not all about happiness.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Of course, as any parent knows, those characteristics show up even among the best parents sometimes. How do people distinguish between normal, flawed parental behavior and behavior that's detrimental enough to sort of rise to the label of emotionally immature? Yeah. Like, where's the line? It's not a clinical diagnosis, so where's the line?
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Yep. Sounds familiar.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
53%.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
That's Dr. Lindsay Gibson. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Sophia Landman. Original music by Diane Wong and Marian Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and Seth Kelly is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Matty Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik. And you can email us anytime at theinterviewatnytimes.com. Next week, Lulu talks with political commentator Megan Kelly about her years at Fox and transitioning to YouTube.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you. That rings true for me, and I bet I'm not alone. But what do we do with that knowledge? For help answering that question, a lot of people have turned to the work of clinical psychologist Lindsay C. Gibson.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
My hunch, and you tell me if I'm wrong, is that people are generally arriving at the conclusion that their parents were emotionally immature in their adulthood. I think it's sort of like a hindsight situation. If that's true and the adults are feeling, you know, a lack of fulfillment or unhappiness, how do they know that those feelings are the result of
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
their parents' behaviors and not the result of any number of other factors that might be causing them to feel the way they do in the current moment.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
From the New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. There's a poem by Philip Larkin called This Be the Verse, and it's been buzzing around in the back of my mind the entire time I've been working on today's interview. The poem starts like this, though literary fans will know I'm swapping in a clean word for a foul one. They mess you up, your mom and dad.
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'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
Her book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, has been a slow-burning bestseller with over a million copies sold since it was published in 2015. It's also a viral presence on social media where it fits in with the larger trend of children reconsidering their relationships with their parents or even if they want to have a relationship with them at all.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
But isn't labeling someone's parents emotionally immature also a kind of pathologizing?
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
I also am curious about the idea of whether self-identifying as the child of an emotionally immature parent might lead to feelings of victimhood. Is there any risk in self-identifying as a child of emotionally immature parents and then feeling disempowered or a lack of agency in your own life and in how you manage your emotions?
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
So I had lots to ask Dr. Gibson, and some skepticism to bring her to. We talked about what emotional immaturity looks like in a parent, how much parents really shape the adults we become, whether we owe problematic parents compassion, and a bunch of other very easy topics. Parents, oi. Here's my conversation with Lindsay C. Gibson. Hi, Lindsay. How are you?
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
How often is it the case that you'll be with a client and say, I don't think your parents were emotionally immature, or like, this doesn't pass the smell test for me?
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
It's not the most elegantly phrased way of putting it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
And how would, you know, if somebody goes to their parent and says, you know, I think you were an emotionally immature parent, and the parent disagrees, how would a parent ever disprove that they're emotionally immature?
The Daily
'The Interview': Dr. Lindsay Gibson on What We Owe Our 'Emotionally Immature' Parents
has emotionally immature parents and they've tried to address their relationship in whatever fashion. And then they conclude that the relationship is still ultimately harmful to them. When is estrangement sort of the best option for someone?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Can you put me back in that life-changing moment? Do you remember the day?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
When you're watching birds or being in their environment, and I imagine this could apply to awareness of the natural world writ large. Sure. There just is so much about what's going on that is basically beyond our comprehension. Yes. Just because of our sense capabilities as human beings, we're sort of condemned to only having an ankle deep understanding of what it is to be alive on Earth.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And to me, that's that's like such a humbling and kind of like mind blowing thing. It's almost hard for me to wrap my head around. But what do you think?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I have a curmudgeonly question to ask about this. Sure, yeah. Sort of developing an awareness of the magic that's happening all around us at any given moment and understanding that there's this... vast cosmic dance playing out around us. You know, and sort of in the abstract, you can see how kind of internalizing those perspectives might change one's perspective on their own life.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And I think sometimes I'm able to get in that place. You know, it's almost like the way I'm picturing it in my head now is like, you know, it's like I blow up a beautiful... I'm carrying that balloon around and looking up at the balloon. What an incredible, beautiful balloon that I'm carrying around with me every day.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
And then I get to the office and the balloon pops on the halogen light and I'm just back in this shit again, you know? Like, did you find that your understanding of the bigger existential stuff you were writing about... was actually able to help you in the moments when you were really struggling?
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I think it's almost definitionally, yeah.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
After the break, I call Ed back, and we talk about how hummingbirds aren't as sweet as they seem.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Ed. Hello. Hi. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me again. Yeah, of course. You know, as I'm sure you're well aware, we're obviously in an era of increased skepticism toward scientific authority. And does the reality of that affect how you think about communicating scientific information with the public? Yeah.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah. Do you think there's any way in which writing or doing journalism from almost what you could say is an explicitly moral place has any drawbacks? Like, do you think it's harder to be persuasive for those who might disagree with your ideas if your ideas are presented as sort of like morally correct or other ideas are morally incorrect?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Or implicating them somehow.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah. So, putting work aside, I think... one could very reasonably feel a sense of moral injury just as a result of living in the world right now. We can change our work situation, or at least try to, but changing the bigger problems is kind of beyond our scope.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Yeah. Now I would like to sort of wrench the conversation away from heavier topics. I just want you to tell me a really cool scientific fact that you learned about life on Earth while you were researching your next book. Something that gave you some delight.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
That's Ed Yong. His most recent book is An Immense World. A version of that book for young readers will be published on May 13th. And he also has a newsletter called The Ed's Up, which features a lot of his photos of birds. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme with help from Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Sophia Landman.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Original music by Diane Wong and Marian Lozano. Photography by Devin Yelkin. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Barelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Matty Maciello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash theinterview. And you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com. Next week, Lulu talks with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.
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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Do you feel like you have any good answers for how to contextualize your own feelings in a larger world where people are struggling for subsistence or struggling with the threat of violence on a daily level? Yeah. I often think, well, I'll be low or complaining about something. And then, you know, in the back of my head, I'm just being the most pampered person in the world.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
What right do I have to complain about anything? You know, no right, really. I'm sure you must have had similar thoughts.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
His reporting for The Atlantic magazine on the pandemic, from its earliest stages to the plight of those suffering from long COVID, earned him a Pulitzer Prize. During that same period, his book, An Immense World, about animal perception, became a bestseller.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I don't mean to laugh, but there is something kind of absurd about it. There's a ridiculousness to it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
The necessity for empathy that you just described, in some ways, it can be easy to think of empathy as in tension with the idea of objectivity. How do you think about... empathy and objectivity in the context of journalism. Because there could be a way of thinking about it where maybe the idea is, you know, you're not supposed to put yourself in the shoes of the person you're writing about.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
But despite having achieved a level of success that most writers could only dream of, Yang's COVID reporting had left him emotionally drained. In 2023, he quit his day job at the Atlantic. Since then, one of the things that helped him recover is birding, a pastime that boomed in popularity during those years of social distancing and too much time stuck at home.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
You're supposed to be like a camera's eye and keep a distance a little bit.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
I think you've been very clear in saying that COVID has not gone away. You still ask people to wear masks at your events. But I think it's fair to say that that attitude is Not necessarily where the rest of the world is at the moment. So how do you think about continuing to take precautions and advising others to take precautions when society kind of feels like it's moved on?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. Even now, five years after it started, it's not an easy thing to understand all the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. That's the case even, and maybe especially, for people whose job it was to help the rest of us understand it. The award-winning science journalist and author Ed Yong was one of those people.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
It was Yang's experience with those two subjects, burnout and getting back to nature, that I wanted to discuss, as well as his perspective on the lessons we learned, or maybe more accurately, didn't learn, from COVID-19. Here's my conversation with Ed Yang. I wanted to start with a subject that I think a lot of people can relate to, which is burnout.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
You know, I just have to ask this because it's been blaring in the back of my mind. How worried are you about a bird flu pandemic happening?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Did you say very or not much? I'll rephrase the question. How worried should I be about bird flu?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
So, you know, you were dealing with the feelings we've talked about and, you know, you sort of got to a point where you decided your life had to change. And as I understand it, one of the things that changed your life was discovering birding. Yes. How did you find birding?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
How did you realize that you'd hit that point that you'd given what you had to give?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Oh, I 100% agree with everything you just said. No, but it's true.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Well, not quite true. I mean, talking at the March for Life.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Which I should explain is a pro-life, I'll also call it anti-abortion rally that happens every year in Washington.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Tease that out for me.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
So you've been playing Jesus on The Chosen for five seasons now. What sort of conversations did you and Dallas have about the kind of Jesus that you wanted to show?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Why is abortion the issue where you chose to make your voice public and not other things that are central to Jesus' teachings, like in treatment of the poor, for example?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
I realize you just made a comment about trying to find relaxation as a peace of mind. But I have another question about the March for Life.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
There's one moment in the speech you gave there where you sort of pivot and say, you know, you know about the world of entertainment. I'm paraphrasing all of this. So if I'm misremembering, just correct me. I'll help you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Because your Jesus, it's a very different portrayal than Jim Caviezel's Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, or Willem Dafoe's in The Last Temptation of Christ, or you know what else is a good one but also very different than yours is... Max von Sydow.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Yes, and you're sort of diagnosing the cultural landscape, and you say, you know, there's just sort of an increase in, you know, occult imagery, depictions of witchcraft. And you say some of this is even subliminal, and you know it when you see it. And I don't know exactly what you mean. Can you give me examples of the kind of stuff you're talking about?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
You know, it's funny because I said, you know, I don't see it. And of course, you know, it's like, I enjoy the music of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, you know what I mean?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
But to me, you know, that kind of imagery, it feels benign to me. Like... it's on the same level as like science fiction movies or horror films. You know, it's like, this is, this is entertainment.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
You know, the greatest story ever told. Very austere. But all of those Jesuses or Jizai, I don't know what they are, would... There's a solemnity to them. And your Jesus is a much more, in some ways, contemporary feeling Jesus.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
But do you think the kind of iconography you're talking about is the natural outcome of a corroded culture, or do you think it's the intentional result of darker forces?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
if you think about the work you're doing in terms of mission, how much of that mission feels to you evangelical in nature? Like, if somebody watches the show and is merely entertained and nothing more, do you feel that something has been left on the table?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
You know, actors who have been on successful TV shows, I think it's not uncommon for them to have been typecast because of the familiarity that people had with the characters that they played. Sure. And that's not even taking into account playing Jesus. Do you have any concern about the industry typecasting you in that role? Yeah. Are you getting any clues out there in the world about that or—
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'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
After the break, I call Jonathan Rumi back, and he tells me why he thinks that shows should make Hollywood less wary of religion.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Thank you for taking the time to do this again.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
So, let me just ask a seasonally appropriate question. Okay. At this point in American culture, Christmas is sort of like a secular holiday. Yeah. Do you have feelings about how secular Christmas has become?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
And you told this interesting anecdote about a discussion with a crew member about how discussing faith at work was sort of a no-go. What might account for why faith is tricky for Hollywood?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
You talked about the idea of surrendering to God. And I think that for non-believers...
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
the idea of surrender and what that actually means in practice, I think, you know, it can just sound like a well-meaning cliche, I think, you know, in the way that, you know, when you hear an athlete talk about, oh, you know, we're just taking it one game at a time and giving it 110%, you know, it's not untrue, but it's not really helping you to understand what's going on.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
And I wonder if you can try to explain a little bit more concretely about what it actually looked like for you to surrender and sort of let go? Because you're still a person walking around with ideas and you're trying to accomplish things and you have judgments about things. So what does it mean in practice to let go?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Did you have any apprehension about showing a version of Jesus that isn't one that's typically shown?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
But Jonathan Rumi is dealing with an unusually charged version of this dynamic in his role as Jesus Christ. And yes, this is our version of Christmas season programming. Since 2017, Rumi has been the star of the global hit series The Chosen. The series takes a prestige TV approach to the story of Jesus, full of sharp dialogue, interpersonal drama, unexpected humor, and high production values.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
You're so firmly on your path now, but are there ways in which your faith is still being tested?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
But give me the nitty gritty.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Jonathan, thank you and happy holidays.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
That's Jonathan Rumi. Season 5 of The Chosen comes out next year. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon. Mixing by Sophia Landman. Original music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, and Marion Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and our producer is Wyatt Orr. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Afim Shapiro, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Matty Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash theinterview.
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'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
And you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com. Next week, we're off for the holidays, but we'll share a conversation with Jeff Bezos from The New York Times Dealbook Summit. And we'll be back with more interviews in the new year. I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.
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'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Just in my head, I was thinking of the sort of cliche of an actor saying, oh, what's my motivation? In your case, the answer was, you've got to bring about the salvation of the world. Play it like that. Saving souls. I've got to save more souls. And so the decision was made that you were going to do The Chosen.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Before that, you know, maybe scuffling is too strong of a word, but you were just sort of a jobbing actor.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Struggle bussing. Yeah. How does it happen that a struggle-bussing actor makes it big playing Jesus?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
I know that you're a practicing Catholic. What does your faith allow you to give to the role that a non-believer or a non-Catholic might not be able to give?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. It's common, maybe even natural, for audiences to blur the lines between actors and their famous roles, to assume that a beloved on-screen doctor might know something about medicine or that an action hero is a tough guy off-screen too.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
You know, it's interesting because you're saying that who you are allows you to play the role of Jesus with a particular authenticity. Do you feel that someone who is a non-believer could credibly and authentically play that part?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
That slickly appealing modern style, centered on Rumi's warm and relatable portrayal, has helped the show to become a massive success. It's been watched by more than 250 million people and will return for its fifth season under creator Dallas Jenkins next year. That success has also helped turn Rumi, a devout Catholic, into a kind of public faith leader.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Yeah. Yeah. He came to be a sword.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Yes. Yeah. When I watch videos of you giving talks for crowds, you come out and very often it seems a wave of applause, like really an overwhelming response. And the idea that you're getting that sort of attention from combined with the fact that you're getting it for playing Jesus, strikes me as a potentially psychologically and spiritually combustible situation. Does it feel that way to you?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
You're saying essentially that you become a human icon for people. The thing that I don't quite understand is how you separate the idea that, as you said, you're nothing here.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
But then also feeling like you've been put here for a reason. You're saying there is something special about you. Those seem to me like somewhat contradictory ideas. How do you reconcile them? And then also, there was never some small part of you that's like, oh, I am special. None of that little sort of ego gratification temptation ever creeps into your head?
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
At public events for The Chosen, he's swamped by fans looking to, as it were, touch the hem of his garment. He gets asked to speak at faith-based events, and in the online world, he has a partnership with the prayer app Halo, where listeners can hear him read scripture and lead meditative reflections.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
So, you know, you go to these events and like you described, thousands of people are cheering or coming up to you. And you also are asked to come and speak at things like the National Eucharistic Congress or you gave a commencement address at the Catholic University of America. You spoke at the March for Life in Washington last year. These sort of demands on your life. time and on your being.
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'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Do you feel like you're being asked to give more than you have to give?
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'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
Was there a particularly difficult encounter that comes to mind?
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'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
As Rumi is well aware, his is a complicated and just plain unlikely situation for an actor to be in. But it's also, he believes, part of a greater plan. And for me, as someone who is sincerely curious about faith, and even if I'm being honest, a little envious of those who have it, his belief is something I wanted to understand. Here's my conversation with Jonathan Rumi.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
There's a way in which experiences like that call to mind for me a kind of, you could almost call it like a category error about the position that you find yourself in where you're an actor. And because you play this role, you are put into positions that probably an actor shouldn't be in. put into. You know, and it seems like increasingly you are becoming a figure of authority.
The Daily
'The Interview': Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.
When you're asked by people to come talk to groups of Catholics, what do you think they want from you in that setting? And is there a part of you that thinks, this is messed up, I'm an actor. Why ask me? Ask a theologian. Ask a priest.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Um, I think what you just described, uh, might be something that Peter Thiel would agree with. And there was... I think a progressive could agree with it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And there was reporting that I saw, I think it was 2017, reporting done by BuzzFeed, where they published some emails, I think, between you and the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, where you talked about watching the 2016 election with Peter Thiel and referred to him as, as fully enlightened. What would fully enlightened have meant in that context?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I've been aware of Yarvin's work for years and was mostly interested in it as a prime example of growing anti-democratic sentiment in particular corners of the internet. Until recently, those ideas felt too fringed to really take seriously. But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can't be so easily dismissed anymore.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And this absence of belief is what you call enlightened.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
You're basically saying there's a historical and political recency bias that people are susceptible to.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But I think the thing that you have not quite isolated yet is... why having a strong man figure would be better for people's lives.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
This is an example you use a lot where you say, and if Apple ran California, wouldn't that be much better?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
How can I make that... By answering the questions more directly and succinctly, I think it would be the simple reply.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But the thing I'd like to say, just to tie this back a little bit to something we spoke about a minute ago, is there is this idea that the incoming Trump administration is interested in the idea of a more powerful executive office. Are there things that...
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
If you saw them, it would be hints that the Trump administration is taking the right steps, as you might see it, towards actually enacting that reality and becoming a stronger executive, a more monarchical executive office.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Here's my conversation with Curtis Yarvin. To my understanding, one of your central arguments is that America needs to I think the way you've put it in the past is sort of get over our dictator phobia that American democracy is a sham beyond fixing and having sort of a monarch style leader or call it a CEO or call it a dictator. That's the way to go.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
you know, your ideas, and I guess it's been called like sort of a neo-reactionary cast of mind, are seemingly increasingly popular in the Silicon Valley world. Don't you think there's some level on which That world is responding to your ideas because you're just telling them what they want to hear. If more people like me were in charge, things would be better.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It's an ideologically useful set of arguments for them to latch on to.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
When I hear you talk about the need for a monarch, and we'll just use that term, encompassing CEOs or dictators, I'll just say monarch.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It would be an understatement to say that sort of humanity's record of with monarchs is mixed at best. Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius, seems like it went pretty well. Under Nero, not so much. Spain's Charles III is a monarch you point to a lot, you know, sort of your favorite monarch. Louis XIV, you know, he's like starting wars like they're going out of business.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So those are all sort of before the age of democracy.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Terrible. I can't believe I'm saying a phrase like this. If you put Hitler aside and only look at Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, we're looking at people responsible for the deaths of something like 75 to 100 million people. So given that historical precedent, do we really want to try dictatorship?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What we don't see in human history, what? You didn't finish the talk.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So why is democracy so bad and why would having a dictator solve the problem?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But one thing I noticed when I was going through your stuff is that, you know, you make these historical claims, like the one you just made about sort of no genocide in Europe between 1000 AD and the Holocaust, essentially. And then, you know, I poke around and think, huh, is that true? And then you think, well, there was Tamerlane.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Well, okay, on the edges of Europe. And that's sort of like a goalpost shift there. But then, or you think, well, there were the French wars of religion. They killed millions of people, including the massacre of the Huguenots.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
My skepticism comes from what I feel like is a pretty strong cherry picking of historical incidents to support your arguments. And then I look and I go, there's the incidents that you're pointing to are either not necessarily factually settled or there's a different way of looking at them. But I actually want to just because some of the historical references. are now actually making my head hurt.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I just want to ask a couple very concrete questions about some of the stuff you've written about race, for example, which seems pretty provocative, to say the least. I'll read you some examples. This is the trouble with white nationalism. It is strategically barren. It offers no effective political program.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
To me, the trouble with white nationalism is that it's racist, not that it's strategically unsophisticated.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone's life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves. Come on.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to fuck.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And this is a guy who's saying, let's go. Let's go through.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I mean, maybe the more relevant point is that Nelson Mandela was in jail for opposing a viciously racist apartheid regime.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But again, your quote was, if you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik but adore Nelson Mandela— I'd prefer to condemn them both.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What does this have to do with equating Anders Breivik, who shot people on some bizarre deluded mission to rid Norway of Islam with Nelson Mandela?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Martin Luther King, nonviolent.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Anyway, the thing is basically like, you know— But you're saying there are historical examples in slave narratives where the freed slaves themselves expressed regret at having been freed. But this to me is another prime example of how you selectively read history because if you read other slave narratives where they talk about the—
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
How does that justify anyone's life more pleasant? Difficult to argue that anyone's life was, including freed slaves.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But abolition was a necessary step to get through that period towards to make people free.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Now, maybe you think, I haven't been red-pilled or whatever, or, you know, I'm not thinking through these issues enough. But I feel like, to me, you call it cartoonish. I call it very morally clear. I can say something like, you know, I think slavery was bad. I'm glad there are no longer enslaved people. And then to hear... You then say, well, you have to look at it from this other perspective.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
You know, this is a one-dimensional view of history. I think, well, that's a—no, I think it's pretty cut and dry. It just is very fascinating to me that your ideas, which strike me as pretty extreme, you know, they were fringe ideas to me that apparently are no longer on the fringe. And that's—I don't know. What do you think that says about conservatism today? Ah.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And when you say it's a fraud, I take that to mean insofar as its conservatism is just... The Washington generals are never going to win the game.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
After the break, I call Curtis back to ask more about the incoming administration.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me again. I appreciate it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
You know, you do so often draw on the history of the pre-democratic era, which is a historical period sort of exactly coterminous with, for example, women being treated as second-class citizens. And sort of the status of women in that time period, which, you know, you sort of valorize, is not something I've really seen come up in your writings.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But do you feel like your arguments take enough into account the way that monarchies and dictatorships historically tend not to be great for big swathes of demographics? Yeah.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Who are desperate to land a husband because they have no access to income without them. Well, you know, I...
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But are you not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Do you think it's better that women got the vote?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So you're. So the solution that you propose has to do with, like we've said multiple times now, installing, you call it a monarch, you call it a CEO figure. And the result of investing an individual with the power of a CEO would be hopefully a more efficient, more responsive, more effective government. Right. Why do you seem to have such faith in the ability of CEOs? I mean, most startups fail.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
We can all point to CEOs who are effective, CEOs who have been ineffective. And it seems to me unlikely that putting that aside, that a CEO or dictator is much more likely to think of themselves.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
estate citizens as economic units rather than living, breathing human beings who, you know, have want to flourish in their lives, who deserve, you know, the dignity of a secure retirement or meaningful leisure time. So why are you so confident that a CEO would be the kind of leader who could bring about better lives for people? It just seems like such a simplistic way of thinking.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he's called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The thing is, the things that make companies succeed or fail... I will say Apple and Tesla, by the way, though, have both benefited greatly from government help in various forms, so...
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Yeah, but again, we've gotten away from the central question a little bit, which is, why are you so confident that CEOs... That's the question of efficiency.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Well, no, just the idea that that a company has goals that are not necessarily the same goals as humans. what a government might have insofar as providing for its citizens?
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Earlier, you had said that you believe that regardless of what his goals are or what he says, Trump isn't likely to actually get anything transformative accomplished just because of the entrenched government bureaucracy that exists. But sort of putting that aside, what is your opinion of Trump generally?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What's your Achilles heel?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Are there ways in which you think your insecurity manifests itself in your political thinking?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Do you think you're trolling instinct? Has maybe gotten out of hand?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Do you think your trolling has now become a political program?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
You know, I just I got to say there are a lot of things to do with your ideas that we just didn't get to. But the thing that I still find myself deeply unconvinced about is why blowing up democracy rather than trying to make it better would somehow lead to better lives for the people who are struggling the most.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So as I understand it, the point you're trying to make is that we have had something like a dictator in the past in American history, and therefore it's not something to be afraid of now. Is that?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
That's Curtis Yarvin. He writes on Substack. His newsletter is called Gray Mirror. And he has a new book called Gray Mirror, Fascicle 1, Disturbance. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme, with help from Elisa Gutierrez. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and Seth Kelly is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Matty Maciello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnick. I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I feel like I'm asking you, what did you have for breakfast? And you're saying, well, you know, at the dawn of man, when...
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And then answer the question, what's so bad about democracy?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what sympathetic ears might hear as a helpful serving of historical references, but which others hear as a distorting mix of gross oversimplification, cherry-picking, personal interpretation presented as fact, and just plain inaccuracy. But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect J.D.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer, had been writing online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme, that institutions like the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So why is democracy so bad?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
You know, your ideas are ones that have been – pointed to by people in real positions of power in the Republican Party. You know, I think it's probably overstated the extent to which you and J.D. Vance are friends, but he has... It's definitely overstated. He has mentioned you by name publicly and... referred to de-wokification ideas that sort of are very similar to yours.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
You know, you've been on Michael Anton's podcast, and Michael Anton has been tapped by Trump to be high up in the State Department, talking with him about how to install an American Caesar. Peter Thiel, a major Republican donor, said, you know, you're an interesting thinker. And so let's say people in actual positions of power said to you, Curtis, we're going to do the Curtis Yarvin thing.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What are the steps that they would take to change American democracy into something like a monarchy?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Vance has alluded to his notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Your point is he can't, the way the system is set up, he can't actually get that much.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Do you think you're maybe overstating the inefficacy of a president? You could point to, you know, the repeal of Roe is something that's directly attributable to Donald Trump being president. One could argue that the COVID response was attributable to Donald Trump being president.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an American Caesar might be installed into power.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
In one of your recent blog posts, or I guess it's a newsletter, not a blog at this point, you referred to J.D. Vance as, I think, as a normie. Yeah. What do you mean?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The question was, why did you call J.D. Vance a normie? Because he contains within him norminess.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And what you just said about, you know, the administration could do a better job of reaching out to progressives. We're all human beings. As you well know, it's a pretty different stance than the stance you often take in your writing. Right, you're laughing because you know it's true. Where, you know, you talk about things like de-wokification.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
People who work at places like the New York Times should all lose our jobs. We should, you know, you have an idea for a program called RAGE, retire all government employees. You know, you have... which I hope are satirical about, you know, how to handle nonproductive members of society that involve basically locking them in a room forever. So why is your tone, has your thinking shifted?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
No, no, no.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And Yarvin has also found fans in the powerful and increasingly political ranks of Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It's a little on the nose. from a Freudian perspective, but yeah, go on.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But how invested do you think J.D. Vance is in democracy?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Yeah, yeah.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Well, no, I 100% agree with that aspect of it. The aspect of the film that to me feels very much like a time capsule and representative of a specific Gen X attitude that has basically disappeared is the anxiety about the possibility of selling out. And I think now young creative people, it's like maybe just because they've realized it's so hard to actually make a living, the concept of...
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Selling out is a total phantom that doesn't exist for people anymore. Because it's almost like... It's like, anybody's going to give me money? Of course I'll take it.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
I don't know what's the connection. I don't.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
And, you know, another project I think you wanted to make for a long time was an adaptation of what makes Sammy run. Yeah. Bud Schulberg novel. Yeah. You tried for years to get that made. Yeah. And I thought, this...
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
So for people who don't know the book, it's a story about a Jewish character named Sammy Glick, who's sort of a conniving, amoral striver in Hollywood and his unquenchable thirst to succeed in that world. And I thought that's an interesting movie for a young, successful Jewish man in Hollywood to want to make. What was it about that book that resonated with you?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
You know, I was thinking about severance and sort of where it fits in the arc of your career. Are there specific things that working on comedy gave you the tools for when it comes to working on something like severance, which I would describe as maybe comedy-adjacent?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Do you think that was the resistance to making it? I think so.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Do you think there are ways in which after October 7th, being Jewish in Hollywood has been trickier to navigate or have things felt different?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
But has any of that reality in any way filtered into your working life? Um...
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
I have no smooth segue to get out of the anti-Semitism portion of this conversation. So I'm just going to take a hard left there. You know, in my reading of your career, around 2010, there's a real change happens. Starting 2010, you really did a lot fewer of kind of like the big, broad comedies. And you started to do films like you did, I think, three Noah Baumbach movies.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
You did Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Brad Status. And these are all movies that are really about middle-aged guys working through the big questions. Was doing those films the result of a conscious decision that you wanted to start doing a different kind of film and stop doing what you had been doing before?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Yeah. You mentioned your marriage was in a bad place and you and your wife, Christine Taylor, separated for a while and reconciled. And I saw her talking on Drew Barrymore's talk show, and she brought up the idea of sort of the separation and reconciliation being the result of what she called adult growth spurts, which I thought was a nice way of putting it.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
What was your growth spurt during that time?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
It was an act of God. Yeah.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Yeah. My understanding is you're working on a documentary about your parents, Ann Mira and Jerry Stiller, the comedy team. People don't know the comedy team, they certainly know that your dad played George Costanza's dad on Seinfeld. And I was thinking about the fact you're working on a documentary about them.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
And it sort of occurred to me that kind of outside of like a therapeutic setting, there aren't a lot of opportunities for people to sort of in a structured way sit and think about their parents. So what has working on the documentary revealed to you about your understanding of your parents?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Just talking into a tape machine?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
You think of the second season as still in the vein of a workplace comedy? Yeah.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Really, the conflict between understanding that people had affection for your father and also your not wanting to be your father, but wanting people's affection?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
So you're sitting on a couch. So this is all appropriate for this. I'm going to lie down now. But that was your dad. Your mom was a tougher critic?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Yeah. There's a New Yorker profile of you from around the time of Walter Mitty. And the writer mentioned that you had been developing a project, I want to say it was called The Mirror, about a Hollywood success who was worried he was a sellout and wanted to become like a truth teller or something. And kind of the writer made hay of this as like a parallel for you.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
But the little tidbit in there is that your mom vetoed the project?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
You mentioned Saturday Night Live. You were on it sort of famously or infamously for about four episodes or something like that. Because you kind of wanted to make short films for them and you could tell it wasn't going to work out.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
You know, there were a couple news stories that came out about Severance being a difficult production with delays and creative differences. Was it a particularly difficult production? And do you find that there is any link between how difficult something is to make and the uniqueness of that thing? Because Severance is sort of a...
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
But the thing that I'm curious about is, what is the conversation like when you go into Lorne Michaels' office and tell him, I'm leaving the show that every young comedian in the country aspires to being on? What was his response? He was like, okay.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
I know the word you were going to say.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Sorry to jump around, but I read your dad's memoir. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Married to Laughter. And there was a little segment in there that I wanted to read to you and have a question about. It's nothing weird. Okay. This is supposed to be heartwarming and sort of whimsical here at the end. He wrote, what words of wisdom can I give my children?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
See past the hype and the glitz and ask yourself why you want to perform. It may take years to arrive at the answers, but understanding the reasons will help you to keep the dream alive and reach your goals. Do you feel like you understand your reasons for why you do what you do?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
I probably should have brought this up when it was more thematically appropriate, but I thought maybe it's a good place to end also. But I love a movie you made in the mid-90s called Heavyweights, which is about a lunatic named Tony Perkis, played by you, who buys, for lack of a better term, a fat camp. This is a Disney movie, by the way. A Disney movie. They're not making this movie today.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Essentially tries to torture the kids into losing weight. My sister and I used to watch the movie over and over again. We had the VHS tape. I still remember lines from it, which I'm not going to subject you to. And then about 10 years later, Dodgeball, you did a character named White Goodman, who's also the bad guy, who's trying to sort of professionalize a dodgeball league. Yeah.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Even the voice is the same.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
So it's not just me. Thank you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
unique show and I wonder if it just is going to be trickier than if you're doing like a traditional sitcom or something.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Yeah. Poor long-term thinking.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Well, thank you very much for taking all the time today. I appreciate it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
And you know we're supposed to talk again. We are?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Please don't refer to it as the little follow-up.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I really think about it. I'm sorry. After the break, I called Ben back with a few more questions about how comedy has changed.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Hi, Ben, how are you?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Just because you said little follow-up, I'm going to rake you over the coals. Ben, I'm determined to elicit a nugget of severance information that'll make the obsessives on the internet go nutty. So without giving too much away, there's an episode in the season, in the upcoming season, where someone, and it's not clear who, is walking and whistling a melody.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
which I believe is the melody of Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Is that correct?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Wait, but do you deny that that song's lyrics are perhaps a Rosetta Stone for deciphering exactly what Severance and Lumen are up to?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Let me shift gears. I was thinking about how when you came back to a certain kind of comedy with Zoolander 2, the way you put it was, you know, that was an example of you thinking people wanted something, you gave it to them, and then it turned out they didn't want it. And it made me curious if, sort of despite Zoolander 2, if you have gotten or still get pitches for a new Fockers movie.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Basically, are you saying sort of the stakes feel a little bit lower when you're just acting in it?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
And I was thinking about how when we were talking about your comedies from the 2000s, you said there were a lot of great things in them that we don't have now. And also that you don't know if that can be recreated. But what don't we have now in comedy that we did have back then?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
You know, I just was thinking about this lately in a different context and thinking about how there's, like, this whole universe of comedy podcasts now where people are saying whatever the hell they want to say, seemingly with no regard for who's going to be upset about it or not. I just wonder, is it your experience that, like, comedy feels trickier? Um...
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
you know part of who i am um let me try and uh i'm trying to sort of wrap things up with a bit of a bow here but i i i saw somewhere that your ambition early on was to try to make movies as good as albert brooks's movies have you lived up to that oh god no
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
By way of a reminder, that story is about a rebellious group of employees at the mysterious and probably malevolent Lumen Industries. Those employees are office drones whose consciousness has been artificially separated between their work selves, also known as their innies, and their outies, their selves away from the office.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Do you have specific ambitions for what you do with your career?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Ben, thank you very much for taking all the time to talk with me. I appreciate it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Well, good luck with your little TV show. My little thing.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
That's Ben Stiller. The second season of Severance airs January 17th on Apple TV+. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Maddy Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash the interview. And you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com. Next week, I talk with Curtis Yarvin, a controversial blogger whose ideas have gained traction among powerful Republican figures.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Do you know how the series ends? Do you have the arc all plotted out?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Would it be a spoiler to tell me the ending?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Do you know what you're working towards?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Can you say something enigmatic that seems like it reveals a clue to the ending?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
I knew it. Yeah. So what you were saying a beat before about people being at work and on some level sort of mystified about the fact that, you know, things seem opaque. You don't really feel like you have control. You don't know who's really making the decisions. I was thinking that maybe Hollywood is like that in some ways. It's not clear who's calling the shots or where the power really lies.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Did your work experience inform the show in any way?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. The long-awaited Emmy Award-winning series Severance returns for its second season next week. I've seen a bunch of the new episodes, which have some real surprises in them. And I can say that I'm very eager to see other fans' reaction to how the show has moved forward with its story.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Hearing you say that brings to mind sort of in the late 90s into the 2000s, sort of the your bread and butter were these big Hollywood comedies. And in a lot of those films you played, it was kind of a type, you know, like you were sort of a well-meaning, often outsider in some sense, who is made to suffer a bunch of indignities, but ultimately kind of comes out on top at the end.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
That sense of a divided self is one to which Ben Stiller, who co-directed and co-executive produces the series, can probably relate. It's actually one of the things that's most intriguing to me about him. He's a hugely successful comedic actor from mainstream hits like Meet the Parents and Night at the Museum, who's gradually stepped away from acting in favor of his first love, directing.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Was there any part of you that... felt like you understood why audiences responded to you in that role in particular? Like, was there any part where you're like, why do they want to see me again?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
You know, you did have this real string of big movies from like something about Mary sort of like through the night at the museum. Did you feel like because those movies were hitting, you kind of got swept up in something that was sort of out of your control a little bit? Like, what was your thinking about the work in that period?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
I sort of don't believe you when you want to say that, because I suspect you were very strategic throughout your career, thinking about what was going to potentially work at different times. But what do I know?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
As a director, he's a much more subversive and distinctive stylist than his biggest acting roles might suggest. Take, for example, more serious projects like his crime drama series Escape at Dannemora, as well as Severance, of course, and also his off-the-wall comedy satires like Cable Guy and Zoolander, the latter of which he also starred in.
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
The tension between knowing that there were movies that you wanted to make and then you also had opportunities to be in other movies. How alive was that tension for you at the time? Do you remember experiences where you might have been thinking like, oh, I want to make this, but this offered to do Along Came Polly or whatever the movie might have been. I'm going to go with that one.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
So what was a fear-driven decision?
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'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
And has what you're afraid of changed over time?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Just hearing you talk about your thinking in the context of the audience and also what you want to do. I was just, in my mind, I remember how I did one of these interviews with Eddie Murphy. Yeah. And he said he only wants to do projects that he knows will work. Like he's not interested really in doing something that might be off-putting or alienating.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
So I don't think I'm overreaching in suggesting that there is some innie-outie, Severance-style tension, if you will, running through Stiller's own story. As I found out while speaking with him at his Manhattan office, that's something he was trying to make sense of, too. Here's my conversation with Ben Stiller.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
If he's going to spend time on doing something, he wants to feel confident that it's going to work, which doesn't quite sound like how you think about it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Reality Bites was the first film you directed. That's a film that really seemed to speak to Gen X both then and still continues to speak to them. Do you think that film is representative of any specific generational values that you hold?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ben Stiller on 'Severance,' Selling Out and Being Jewish Today
Oh, I strongly disagree. Really? Yeah. Really? Well, why do you think they're evergreen?
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
Well, let's start with what the old policy was. The old policy was the United States will do everything it can, short of sending troops, to help support the Ukrainians against an invasion that they neither prompted nor saw. That was the Biden position.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
I was going to ask you if you really wanted to hear these, but now you know I'm really immune. No, you're not faking it.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
You were saying? So the old strategy also was whenever we are ready to go into a negotiation to end the war, It will be nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. And that means that the Ukrainians will be at the center of the negotiation. And no one's going to give away their country the way one did in colonial times. This is going to be the Ukrainians working it out with the Russians.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
That's right. And imperialism will not be rewarded meant that Vladimir Putin couldn't come away from this with more land or a better situation than he had before. Vladimir Putin couldn't come away from this in a situation where he would be ready a few years from now to finish the job and take the rest of Ukraine. So fast forward to what happened. After dancing around each other for weeks,
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Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
Putin and President Trump finally get on the phone for 90 minutes. When it's all done, Trump comes out and says, we're on the way to a peace deal. There's going to be a negotiation. Missing from all of this, the Europeans and the Ukrainians. Right. And we're talking to you on Thursday midday.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
But earlier in the day here in Europe, Zelensky came out and said, I'm not going along with any agreement about my country that I'm not involved in negotiating.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
And, you know, what else it does is it takes you back to what Donald Trump has been saying was his favorite era, right? The McKinley era, the 1890s, where we're taking lands, in that case, the Philippines, Guam, and so forth. Now what he wants is Greenland, the Panama Canal, and to own Gaza. But what that really tells you is that everything that we have done since World War II
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
to build up alliances and basically establish that people should ally with the United States on a basis of principle, not on basis of American power, is out the window.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
Michael, there's another through line. Think of the Ukrainians and think of the Palestinians. So in both cases, they're, in Trump's mind, not major players here. They are pawns to be moved around. Trump has never once, since he's raised this idea, gone and tackled the question that the Geneva Convention actually forbids the mass movement of ethnic groups
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
So he views international treaties, international law as obstacles to his plan. And the way he's going to get past it, he believes, is by pressuring allies over whom he's got some leverage. And that would be, in this case, Jordan and Egypt. Right.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
As I was getting off the plane here from Munich, I ran into a European diplomat I'd known for a long time. And we were discussing this dynamic, what we've seen in Ukraine, what we've seen in Gaza. And he said, you know, it goes back to Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
And that famous quote we all had to learn in 11th grade, which is the powerful do whatever they can and the weak do whatever they must. I'm sure I've got the phrasing slightly wrong there. But that's the world that Donald Trump sees at home and abroad.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
Yeah, I'd never seen anything like it covering five presidents. And I would have to say that two things really jumped out at me. The first was that I think one of the reasons that Trump let this go on was that he thought that having the world's richest man talk about this cost-cutting move gave him some credibility. Huh. Musk or Trump? Who got the credibility?
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
That Trump got credibility from having Musk saying, basically, I'm bringing the cost-cutting strategies of X and Tesla and SpaceX and those efficiencies to your government and doing this on a scale that has never been done before. The second part that was fascinating to me was what was missing from it. What was what was missing from it was what is the purpose of having these government agencies?
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
What is the purpose of government? So in describing USAID. Right. Right.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
That was the plan, but you changed location since we... Oh, that was two days ago with Vice President Vance, yeah.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
You're right, Michael. There is a sort of Damocles that is hanging over Eric Adams with every decision that he has to make. Every decision about whether to let an ICE raid proceed in his city. every decision about whether or not he is going to oppose the president of the United States on a policy that might affect New York City residents.
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Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
And with each one of those, he's going to have to say, is it worth it to stand up to this man if he can bring the Justice Department back on me on these cases at any given moment?
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Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
it not only end his career, but if you look at some of these charges, you know, there's the possibility of jail time out here. So, um, I have never seen a roarer exercise of presidential power. He could have just given him a pardon, in which case Adams would be free to go do whatever he wants to go do.
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Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
Now, instead, he has simply, or the Justice Department, we don't know if the president was directly involved, has simply suspended the case.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Musk in the Oval, a Gift to Mayor Adams and a Win for Putin
It certainly looks that way. In fact, that sort of underrates Machiavelli, I think, in some degree.