We're about to play you an interview we did with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee two days ago in Israel.

In general, it's never worth talking about the backstory behind an interview.

It's kind of not the point. It makes it about the interviewer, not the person being interviewed.

For one thing, for another, it's not that interesting most of the time.

And for another, it's kind of off the record.

You know, the other person hasn't consented to you telling the story.

So in general, we don't do that.

Who'd want to hear that?

Let the interview speak for itself.

But in this case, we want to tell you just a few

things about how this interview came about because they are pretty interesting, revealing,

and now weirdly relevant, apparently. So this interview with Mike Hockabee came about a couple

of weeks ago on Twitter. One of our producers showed me. He said something to the

effect of, you're talking to Middle Eastern Christians, Tucker Carlson. Maybe you should talk to me.

Why don't you come do an interview? And I paused for a minute. I thought in the past about

trying to interview Mike Huckabee, whom I've known for over 30 years and worked adjacent to at Fox. And I had mixed feelings about it,

mostly because it's hard if you're me to interview Mike Huckabee because of just the personal

affect. Mike Huckabee is jovial, comes off as friendly, he's a grandfather. When annoyed, I can be

nasty in interviews. And so it's, it takes a lot of self-control to interview

someone like Mike Huckabee, not because I hate him, but because it's hard to ask him tough questions

and not come off as a jerk, which I often am. So, but I thought in this case, yeah, I should

definitely do this for a bunch of different reasons. Mainly,

...