Megyn was out in Los Angeles to start the week to speak at the All-In Summit. The annual conference – hosted by All-In Podcast hosts Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg – seeks to bring together “the world’s most influential thinkers to shape the future of business, politics, and society.”
This year’s guests included the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Kyrsten Sinema, Bari Weiss, and, of course, Megyn. She joined the All-In guys to discuss the state of media and politics in this historic election year and offered her prescription for how to get the country back on track (hint: it doesn’t involve politicians in Washington, D.C.). Below is a partial transcript of what she had to say on the subject.
[Editor’s Note: You can watch a portion of Megyn’s sit-down in the first five minutes of the video above.]
Megyn’s Rx
Look, I supported the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and I think big money in politics was always going to happen. But it has corrupted the system in a way that most politicians only have to answer to their one group of big donors or their one small constituency in their one very red or very blue town. There is no more incentive to compromise. There is only incentive to get reelected, which is one of the frustrations we have when we watch Washington: Nothing gets done…
Right now, I’m all about going back to the original founding version of this country, where government was as small as possible, the presidency was as small as possible, and these people do as little as humanly possible while they are in office…
I think [the fix for] this does have to be bottom up. If we are going to change the way we elect politicians and the way we govern ourselves… it is so much more complex than just what laws are written down.
Tech has a lot to do with how divided we are, how disconnected we are, how lonely we are. The latest strain of the argument is interesting, which is all the processed foods are making us weird and unhealthy and dividing people further because it’s driving our hormones nuts and our behavior is getting weirder.
There is just a lot we need to reconsider about the way we are living, and I do think one of the main things is we need to see each other again. We need to look each other in the eye across from the table. We need to ban our kids from playing on devices when they get together for play dates. We must insist that they play outside and actually connect with nature… We must get out of the coastal cities and go to ‘flyover’ country. Go to a rodeo in Montana or something like that. We all have to start loving our country again. That is a huge piece of it. And that, again, is community.
Speaking of rodeo in Montana… we have a little ski cabin there… and we went one summer and brought our kids to a rodeo. They started playing the National Anthem and my little guy, at the time, was like five and he was a little slow to get up. He knows to get up, but he was five. And there was this old cowboy sitting right behind us with the big hat, and the jeans, and the belt, and he goes, ‘Boy, you better get on your feet.’ My son was like, ‘Oh, yes, sir.’ I was like, right on! That is what we need.
We need more of that. We need more of looking out for one another, not with forced taxes through the eyeballs and all that nonsense, but rather when your neighbor is sick, go make him a casserole. When your older neighbor is housebound, go mow her lawn.
That is the stuff that used to make us us. And as we just retreat into our devices and our television screens and all of it, we lose that and we lose us.