The Tucker Carlson Show

00:00:00.000 welcome to tucker carlson show it's become pretty clear that the mainstream media are

00:00:13.840 dying they can't die quickly enough and there's a reason they're dying because they lie they lied

00:00:19.520 so much it killed them we're not doing that tucker carlson.com we promise to bring you the

00:00:24.240 most honest content the most honest interviews we can without fear or favor here's the latest

00:00:30.520 do you know james carville yes so he got stuck at a roast one time when we worked together

00:00:35.780 in new orleans and had to take a leak and it was on c-span and on the tape which i have seen he's

00:00:42.480 sitting there and he's kind of shuffling in his seat all of a sudden he takes this water pitcher

00:00:45.540 off the table and sort of sticks a leak in the water oh gosh so what what is that thing moving

00:00:56.240 on your lapel on your pocket that's the debt that's my anxiety generator so it's actually making me

00:01:03.240 really anxious is that is that real time yes so it's synced to treasury it gets the debt to the

00:01:10.120 penny once a day and then it looks at what the debt was a year ago and it comes up with rolling average

00:01:15.060 debt per second and it interpolates on weekends and holidays when the when the treasury is not

00:01:20.060 paying attention i am so i think you're the only one who wants to know yes and i want my colleagues

00:01:25.600 to know and it's great to wear this thing in an elevator with like adam schiff and he's got nowhere

00:01:29.840 to look um i once caught a female congresswoman staring at it and had to tell her my eyes were up here

00:01:36.240 she asked me why i didn't make a belt buckle out of it can you say who it was because i like no i cannot

00:01:44.680 oh she's funny that's that's very impressive so what's the message of it the message is this is

00:01:52.320 urgent you know it's it's hard to comprehend 14 digits of debt but when you see the last five

00:01:58.420 digits are moving so fast you can't you know perceive them with your eyes then you kind of

00:02:03.560 understand whoa we got a problem here i mean it's a hundred thousand dollars a second roughly

00:02:09.120 so imagine we had this catapult and we were launching uh cyber trucks once a second into

00:02:15.200 the ocean that's how much debt we're taking on uh continuously now there is some good news i noticed

00:02:21.860 last month it went down and i'm like is my debt clock broken why is it going down and i realized oh

00:02:28.740 it's april 15th everybody's paying their taxes right so the good news is we balanced it for a month

00:02:35.060 the bad news is april 15th is the only reason that happened and now the debt's going back up again

00:02:40.780 so maybe it when it gets so big it becomes something that you have to ignore it's almost

00:02:46.780 like if you fall off the wagon from drinking you you binge if you fall off your new year's diet you

00:02:52.140 just eat the pizza and a great bet and jerry's like why do you care you know you sort of go crazy

00:02:56.360 and it feels like we're there um i am trying to make people feel very uncomfortable i wear this on

00:03:03.220 the floor of the house yeah and um people literally they'll they'll press the button that says yay or

00:03:08.880 nay i've i've argued we should relabel the voting button spend and don't spend yeah they're red and

00:03:14.480 green if you got that far and can't read i say it's like stop and go but i've seen people press the

00:03:20.060 spend button then turn around and look at my debt badge and ask did it just go up but i want them to

00:03:25.400 realize there are consequences to what they're doing because they have been i think as you said just

00:03:29.980 ignoring it putting it off to the side it almost feels like you know it's so big that why even deal

00:03:36.160 with it that's where we are we're kind of i think a lot of lawmakers are apathetic they're like well

00:03:43.540 we can't fix it we're not going to fix it we might as well indulge in it and i'll see what i can get

00:03:48.620 exactly yeah so where does it end um right now we're able to finance it because we're the world's

00:03:55.820 reserve currency right and when we print more money which we're doing all the time the fed is

00:04:01.840 doing that we're actually taxing the world everybody in the world who holds dollars gets

00:04:07.360 like a three percent transaction fee i say we're kind of like the credit card at the gas station

00:04:12.340 that gets three percent because you're using that credit card right well we get three percent from

00:04:16.880 inflation we cause because the world is using our currency and we can do that as long as they use

00:04:23.160 our currency but i think it's going to end at some point they're going to quit using our dollars as

00:04:28.360 reserve currency i mean i watched your interview with putin and one of the things you know whether

00:04:33.700 you hate him or not uh one of the things he said that is true is when we sanctioned him before we

00:04:39.720 sanctioned russia 70 percent of their transactions were in u.s dollars and after the sanctions it's less

00:04:45.940 than 20 percent of their transactions are in u.s dollars so what we're doing with all these sanctions

00:04:51.500 ironically we're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we sanction a country and say you can't

00:04:56.260 use our currency to have a transaction we're we're taking away our ability to charge them three percent

00:05:02.060 for that transaction because when we print three percent more dollars we're just taking that money

00:05:07.260 and we're also sending a really clear signal which is the dollar is not safe for you right that's

00:05:12.400 the reserve currency because it's a safe haven because it's a stable country it's the most stable

00:05:16.240 country in the world and we're not going to weaponize the dollar because that would be

00:05:19.340 shooting ourselves but suddenly we are and they'll they'll tolerate like three percent because

00:05:25.180 if we're not backed by dollars we're backed by aircraft carriers right now so they'll sort of

00:05:30.200 tolerate that three percent but one of the things we recently did in congress we passed something

00:05:34.160 called the repo act where we said we're just going to seize all of russia's sovereign assets in the

00:05:39.700 united states well it turns out a lot of that is treasury debt that they've agreed to buy so that

00:05:44.820 they can hold dollars and um here's here's the problem with that when people see that we've

00:05:50.860 seized their money that they gave us in exchange for these treasury notes then other countries won't

00:05:56.960 want to buy our debt it's already happening and the price of a long-term bond that the treasury puts

00:06:02.640 out will go it's already gone above four percent it's like over four and a half percent and they don't

00:06:07.720 want to buy them anymore because you know we probably wouldn't seize great britain's assets but

00:06:13.660 i could see a seizing china's assets why would i mean that seems like theft just like take a country's

00:06:19.700 assets i mean that belongs to the people of the country right it's not just putin it is theft like

00:06:24.100 it's immoral but even if you're okay with the the amorality or immorality of it it's short-sighted

00:06:31.220 because eventually it'll catch up with us so do any of the dumbos you work with understand that did

00:06:36.060 you say wait a second if we do this first of all it's wrong and if we're going to be a beacon of

00:06:41.140 light and order and justice in the world we should abide by those principles but even if you don't

00:06:46.260 care about the even if as you said you're immoral like it's self-defeating to do this do they

00:06:51.120 understand that some of them understand it but it doesn't matter they'll still vote for something

00:06:56.020 like the repo act anyway because it's popular and with whom um with voters they think yeah take

00:07:02.800 russia's money like you know let's take yeah yeah that'd be great let's take their money and

00:07:07.780 use it in a war against them it kind of feels good but the problem is it's it's not moral in the long

00:07:14.200 run and it won't work in the long run even if you were okay with it why are we in a war with russia

00:07:18.800 i've never figured that out um why russia it almost seems like they picked it off a map like why would

00:07:23.180 it be a war with russia you know what's interesting is we were in afghanistan and i was tracking this i

00:07:28.020 i talked to the special inspector general john sopko about twice a year about the money that was

00:07:34.000 being wasted in afghanistan it was about 50 billion dollars a year and i was glad to see us get out of

00:07:39.980 afghanistan but kind of like feathering the clutch and shifting gears we just went from second gear to

00:07:45.260 third gear because as soon as we quit spending 50 billion dollars a year in afghanistan we started

00:07:50.180 spending more than 50 billion dollars a year in ukraine there's a military industrial complex they call it

00:07:55.720 the defense industrial base now in the united states they say we have to they're hungry and we got to

00:08:00.820 keep them fed and since we don't have any of our own wars and we don't have a reason to deplete our

00:08:05.660 stocks and our bombs and weapons that we have we engage in these other things to keep them healthy and

00:08:11.380 thriving in fact the biden administration even made that argument in a letter to congress for why we should

00:08:18.040 do this supplemental foreign aid to israel to ukraine to taiwan they made the argument that the defense

00:08:26.380 industrial base needs to be strong and so we need to spend this money and they gave a list of all the

00:08:30.780 states in the united states that would benefit from this spending and that's why they said we should do

00:08:35.780 it but if you're if i mean look everyone who lives here wants to be proud of the country i always have

00:08:40.660 been um and i i'm proud of its people still but if your main export is death you know that i mean what

00:08:48.860 it doesn't work in the long run i mean there is a blowback wrong we're engendering a lot of ill will

00:08:54.760 look 10 years ago even more recently than that the only way we could get to the space station was on a

00:09:01.680 russian rocket right and we you know we had a collaboration with them we were able to get to

00:09:07.300 space that way and um now we don't i mean it's and the bad thing that's you know like in the middle east

00:09:14.760 israel is creating tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of of people who are going to hate the

00:09:23.280 united states and and you know they're going to hate israel also but because we're giving israel the

00:09:28.640 weapons to do what they're doing we're creating a lot of people who hate us in this country but

00:09:33.660 we're told that it's essential to our national security to do that do you believe that no i don't see

00:09:39.600 that i mean one of one of the reasons like i said the biden letter said well we need to keep our

00:09:44.560 industrial base strong so let's fund all these weapons and send them over but i don't see how it's

00:09:50.080 strengthening our country in fact we're getting weaker by doing it so you've been um i think the lone

00:09:56.520 republican to dissent from a lot of these votes can you how many votes have there been oh my on this

00:10:01.920 question and where have you voted on them oh i i've tried to keep track there were something like

00:10:07.560 18 votes on ukraine and i voted against every one of them since like 2014 when we started you know saber

00:10:16.480 rattling we do these non-binding resolutions whereas you know russia's evil and you know whereas

00:10:23.480 we support democracy now even then we knew that ukraine was just corrupt as hell but you know

00:10:30.740 like the most corrupt country in europe by far yeah so i started you know there's been 16 or 20 votes

00:10:37.620 on ukraine i've been against all of those just in the last seven months there have been probably 30

00:10:44.400 votes on israel in the middle east 30 30 there were somebody votes on the u.s border during that time

00:10:50.500 oh maybe maybe four show votes that you know where we know they're going nowhere in the senate

00:10:58.500 um look we haven't named 30 post offices like in last month we voted like 15 or 16 times on issues

00:11:08.080 related to israel and you know i've been hit because i voted no on all of those why do you

00:11:13.840 because you hate israel or is there another reason no because i'm against uh sending our money overseas

00:11:19.140 i'm against starting another proxy war i'm against sanctions because it's going to weaken the dollar

00:11:25.240 uh i'm for free speech like all of these resolutions run afoul of those things and that's why i can't vote

00:11:32.300 for them tell us what the free speech part of it so recently they brought a bill to congress and this

00:11:39.180 was actually a binding bill not a non-binding resolution like this was going to have the effect

00:11:43.420 of law and people would get you know prosecuted if they um engaged in anti-semitism on campuses

00:11:50.300 and the problem with this bill is they use some international definition of anti-semitism on a

00:11:55.920 website somewhere my first question is why don't you just put the definition in the bill why are you

00:12:00.840 pointing to somebody's url in a piece of legislation you are the congress right right we are the right the

00:12:07.260 laws we should be instead we're referencing a website some that's not even you know uh hosted

00:12:13.700 in the united states and so but so i went to this website and it's got a you know fairly short

00:12:19.940 definition but it's also got examples of things that would be considered anti-semitism and some of

00:12:26.540 these are actually passages in the new testament if you will would be banned by this international

00:12:32.420 definition of anti-semitism for instance saying that uh jews killed jesus which is you know in the bible

00:12:41.060 he was he was not welcome among his own people okay um and so that would be anti-semitism and if you

00:12:49.420 engaged in that on campus or just offered that as a thought let's say in a classroom you would be

00:12:55.040 anti-semitic and you would run afoul of the department of education and some federal laws and you know

00:13:01.660 there were other examples in there that were hard to believe for instance comparing the policies of

00:13:08.060 israel to to the nazi regime would be anti-semitic but the question is what if their what if their

00:13:14.920 policies ever became the same is this a static definition or what if we just have different

00:13:20.100 opinions and your opinion is now a crime right i mean even if it's abhorrent even if it's wrong and

00:13:25.880 stupid yeah it's it's still legal it should be you may have come to the obvious conclusion that the

00:13:32.240 real debate is not between republican and democrat or socialist and capitalists right left the real

00:13:40.020 battles between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth

00:13:45.580 it's between good and evil it's between honesty and falsehood and we hope we are on the former side

00:13:52.180 that's why we created this network the tucker carlson network and we invite you to subscribe

00:13:56.580 to it you go to tucker carlson.com slash podcast our entire archive is there a lot of behind the

00:14:02.320 scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iphone is running tucker carlson.com

00:14:09.160 slash podcast you will not regret it so your colleagues i think it passed right oh yeah it passed with

00:14:18.180 uh flying colors but at least a few people woke up to this i mean so but the the members of congress

00:14:24.200 who you know go to church on sunday who just voted to ban the new testament on campus make it illegal to

00:14:30.660 quote from the new testament the christian bible um like how did they square that um i think their

00:14:38.160 voters let them get away with it i mean they they don't have to square it unless they're but why would

00:14:43.080 they want to do something like that because there's a lot of pressure in congress to vote for these

00:14:48.120 things and our republican leadership thinks they're so smart you know we're in an election year and they

00:14:54.160 want to bring up issues they want to put them uh in front of congress and make us vote on them whether

00:14:59.220 they're going anywhere in the senate or not and they want to split the democrats they want to show that

00:15:04.220 republicans are united and then split the democrats that's one of the reasons they do it another reason

00:15:09.120 they do it is there's a foreign interest group called a pack that's you know got the ear of this

00:15:14.820 current speaker and demanded 16 votes in april on on israel or the middle east we haven't had 16 votes

00:15:21.980 in april on the united states in congress so what's a pack a pack is the american israel public affairs

00:15:30.280 committee and um they didn't start out as a pack in in the sense of a political action committee but now

00:15:37.540 they have a political action committee um ostensibly it's a group of americans who lobby on behalf of

00:15:45.860 israel they're for anything israel um and they're very effective lobbying group they get in there they

00:15:53.520 uh they try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate for instance for congress they almost get

00:15:59.900 on what on israel like and i wouldn't do it and they said why and i'm like i don't do homework for

00:16:06.900 lobbyists right i'm like i didn't learn i didn't like writing term papers at college i'm not writing

00:16:12.140 one for you what did they say they said oh well here just copy ran paul's term paper and put your

00:16:19.640 name on it we'll accept that and i'm like no i'm still not cribbing somebody else's homework to do

00:16:25.340 homework i'm not turning in my homework for you and what you're laughing but you know what i bet

00:16:34.200 i may be the only republican in congress who hasn't done homework for apac and it's just what it is

00:16:40.760 it's conditioning they want you to do something very simple and benign and you know for them they

00:16:45.740 don't really they don't really grade your term paper they just want to know that you'll do

00:16:49.960 something for them and if you'll do something for them as a candidate you're more likely to do

00:16:53.880 something for them as as a congressman when you get in there so this my rift started out in 2012

00:17:01.480 when i refused to turn in an israel how did they respond to that um well they kind of got in my

00:17:09.000 race a little too late there in the beginning and because it was hard to tell that i was actually going

00:17:13.880 to win and when they saw i was going to win that's when they tried to get me to do the term paper

00:17:17.560 um they didn't have a political action committee at the time they couldn't spend hundreds of thousands

00:17:24.080 or millions of dollars against me at that time um it was just sort of like a whisper campaign

00:17:29.000 to try to hey don't vote for him blah blah blah that's why uh because at that point they sensed

00:17:35.720 i wouldn't do what they wanted but what did they whisper against you what were they saying about you

00:17:39.640 um well they would do it through for instance churches evangelical churches they've got an

00:17:45.560 organization called christians united for israel where they sort of co-opted evangelicals uh people

00:17:52.360 think it's a grassroots movement in kentucky it's actually a top-down movement from apac so that people who

00:17:58.680 aren't even jewish will feel like they've got to support israel you know no matter what and even

00:18:05.720 if it's a secular state that funds abortions they you know just sort of forget that part and we've

00:18:11.000 got to fund israel so they have networks so it's more than just about the money so you get elected um

00:18:18.840 despite their efforts and then what happens do you talk to them after that and by the way let me just

00:18:25.160 put a little footnote here i'm not against israel i've never voted to sanction israel i've never said

00:18:31.640 anything particularly you know critical of israel uh you know uh other than for instance right now

00:18:38.840 they're bombing they've killed one percent of the civilian population in gaza that's concerning to me

00:18:44.200 but um so what do they do now uh yeah you get elected 2012 do you hear from them again i vote my

00:18:52.040 conscience um which they won't tolerate so they ran with their 501c4 before they had a super pack

00:19:00.760 they were they were running educational advocacy ads against me saying that you know i'm bad on israel

00:19:07.800 they didn't say don't vote for him they just said he's he's a bad guy and so i said all right well

00:19:13.240 you're not welcome in my office anymore because for years i i invited him into my office let's talk this

00:19:18.360 through let me explain to you i'm a libertarian leaning republican i don't vote for foreign aid

00:19:23.720 for anybody so don't be offended when i don't vote for your foreign aid i don't vote for wars anywhere

00:19:29.560 so don't be offended if i do that i'm for free speech even if it's abhorrent uh and you know we used

00:19:36.440 to talk but now they're banned from my office uh situation went from bad to worse this election

00:19:42.440 cycle they spent four hundred thousand dollars against me ninety thousand dollars last fall

00:19:47.160 running tv ads in my district and facebook ads and whatnot trying to equate me with the squad

00:19:53.400 and then um this most recently in fact as i'm speaking to you today even though my election is

00:19:59.480 over they're still running hundreds of thousand dollars of negative ads it's a little weird though

00:20:03.960 because as you said you're probably the only republican in the house who hasn't done homework for

00:20:08.600 them who isn't on their side um and but and that's okay i mean you can have you know you're a

00:20:14.920 libertarian oriented republican from northern kentucky you're probably not going to single-handedly

00:20:20.200 determine our foreign policy so you i think you should but you don't thank you and you're not going

00:20:25.560 to so why do they care why not just let thomas massey be thomas massey in northern kentucky like

00:20:31.960 why the need to crush you i don't know i think it's they don't want one horse out of the barn

00:20:37.240 if one person starts speaking the truth they're afraid it could be contagious perhaps or it's like

00:20:42.680 a new car they they go to mike johnson and they say we want a cadillac you know escalade uh with

00:20:49.160 pearl white paint and here's you know here's the rims we want and mike johnson puts that bill on the

00:20:54.840 floor it passes with the unanimous vote except for one guy votes no and i think they feel like it's a

00:21:01.240 scratch on their car they wanted a brand new car and it got scratched by this guy named massey they

00:21:06.920 were going to drive it over to the senate and ask for unanimous consent but now the senators are

00:21:11.160 saying wait why this wasn't unanimous in the house why should we do it unanimously in the senate and it

00:21:17.240 starts raising questions and i think that's why they get mad what i find interesting is that it's not

00:21:22.440 just um that they disagree with your views which they do and i think they have an absolute right to

00:21:27.560 disagree with anybody's views we all do but they've called you a bigot and they call you an anti-semite

00:21:35.400 and say you're a hater and try to destroy your character that seems like a very different

00:21:39.720 level of response to me right they there's no need to do that i'm not anti-semitic i don't have an

00:21:45.560 anti-semitic hair in my head okay it's i i mean i don't like a pack anymore like i used to be neutral

00:21:53.960 toward a pack right but i i have no antagonistic feelings toward jewish people i i am the last thing i

00:22:03.400 think i'm probably the least xenophobic person in congress i mean these are the guys that my

00:22:08.280 colleagues want to sanction everybody you know declare them terrorist states you know come up

00:22:13.400 with these strongly worded resolutions i don't vote for any of that crap right i'll unless somebody does

00:22:19.000 harm to me i'm not going to call them anything so i get called names just for staying out of

00:22:24.360 all of this political posture that's that's disgusting though isn't it

00:22:27.080 well you know i guess that's your character they can they can disagree with your views

00:22:31.560 right but but to call you like the worst thing you can be in america like that's disgusting

00:22:37.800 you know i have a thick skin um apparently and and here's the good news tucker my my constituents

00:22:44.600 aren't falling for it you know two weeks ago i just had a primary and got 76 of the vote

00:22:49.880 with apac running hundreds of thousand dollars of ads so it's it's not working against me i i think

00:22:56.600 it's short-sighted uh on their you know on their side to do this they're just burning money but they're

00:23:03.240 trying to make an example of me but they're also exposing their weakness i think they are i think

00:23:08.280 they've exposed a real weakness here and you know it used to be just me voting against some of these

00:23:13.800 resolutions but recently where they tried to ban passages in the new testament i think we got like

00:23:19.160 almost two dozen republicans who said wait hold on there there's a question though there's a

00:23:23.720 fundamental question so the biden administration has put a bunch of people in jail for violating

00:23:27.640 something called farah the foreign agent registration act 1936 ish it's been on the books for

00:23:33.240 you know 90 years um and it's never been enforced ever until recently until really the trump

00:23:40.440 era and biden era so but the law requires people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments to

00:23:46.600 register it's that simple and this is the largest lobby in the most effective lobby in

00:23:51.800 the united states on behalf of a foreign government are they registered with farah

00:23:54.520 they're not but they should be well how how can that how can that be how can they put paul

00:23:59.000 manafort in jail which they did on a farah violation and a bunch of other people in jail on

00:24:04.520 fair violations but the largest and most effective and most feared foreign lobby working for a

00:24:09.720 foreign government doesn't have to register under the law that's insane oh man don't make me take

00:24:15.240 their side but i'll explain as best as i can what their argument i mean maybe i'm wrong maybe we should

00:24:20.600 take their side i don't know well i'm going to agree with you in a second but let me at least offer

00:24:25.320 what i think is their argument they they would say we are americans you know the members of apac

00:24:32.360 are americans and that they have the right to free speech paul manafort's an american right right yeah

00:24:38.760 that so there's the good rebuttal is farah applies not to foreigners to foreign agents right

00:24:45.080 it's of foreign principles agents of foreign prince americans lobbying on behalf of foreign

00:24:49.800 government correct so this is apac is exactly what far is meant for now they would say and we have

00:24:55.320 a first amendment right okay well i i agree with you there but we also have election laws and to the

00:25:02.600 it's disclosure right we're they're not farah doesn't say you can't say thomas massey's you know

00:25:08.840 an ignorant hillbilly you're allowed to say that if you want to but we just want to check where your

00:25:13.720 money's coming from tell us where it's coming from what you're spending it on and if you are lobbying

00:25:19.160 on behalf of a foreign country so they should be now to your point they should be registered with farah

00:25:26.360 this is what farah is is where there's gray area where it's an american representing a foreign country

00:25:32.360 let's let's look and see if you're getting any money from that foreign country are you a dual citizen with

00:25:37.720 that foreign country uh are you being directed by for instance is netanyahu speaking to your group

00:25:44.440 advising you on your next move those are you getting money from the military industrial complex

00:25:50.360 like because to understand apac i think it's easiest to model them as a uh military industrial lobby

00:25:59.880 like their biggest thing is they want more equipment more military equipment from the united states going

00:26:08.040 to israel in fact when they used to be allowed in my office the thing they the argument they would make

00:26:14.600 is oh we're just stimulating the u.s military industrial complex because every single penny

00:26:21.960 of the 3.8 billion that they nominally get now they're getting way more than that but that israel

00:26:26.840 nominally gets goes to u.s military contractors now that didn't make me warm and fuzzy okay but that is their

00:26:35.160 argument and if you notice what they advocate for i think sometimes they advocate for things that even

00:26:41.160 israelis wouldn't advocate for i believe that like they would i think be okay with a war with iran like

00:26:47.480 an all-out you know apocalyptic war with iran whereas there are people in israel say whoa hold

00:26:52.520 on a second we we'd rather not have a war with iran but apac does things that lead us in that direction

00:26:59.000 and so they're kind of like what the nra is to gun owners apac is to israel or what the farm

00:27:06.440 bureau is to farmers apac is to israel in other words a faction right they represent a faction but

00:27:12.920 usually a corporate faction that uh and they're using the imprimatur of grassroots that they've

00:27:20.360 diluted or confused into bullying congressmen and the nra does that and farm bureau does that i'm i'm

00:27:27.480 picking on some you know other right-wing groups here well for for sure and by the way i think there

00:27:32.680 are probably a lot of things that apac is for that i'm for and farm bureau nra same thing right it's

00:27:38.600 i just the idea of a foreign government playing in our political campaigns openly openly in that

00:27:47.960 they're showing you they're doing it but opaquely in that you can't track it because they're not

00:27:54.440 registered is is there any other republican who has your views on this well i have republicans who come

00:28:01.080 to me on the floor and say i wish i could vote with you today yours is the right vote but i would just

00:28:08.440 take too much flack back home and i have republicans who come to me and say that's wrong what apac is

00:28:16.200 doing to you let me talk to my apac person by the way everybody but me has an apac person what does that

00:28:23.320 mean an apac person it's like your babysitter your apac babysitter who uh is always talking to you

00:28:30.040 for apac they're probably a constituent in your district but they are you know firmly embedded in

00:28:37.080 apac and every member has something like this every i don't know how it works on the democrat side

00:28:44.120 uh but that's how it works on the republican side and when they and when they come to dc you

00:28:49.560 go have lunch with them and they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them so i've

00:28:55.560 had like that's absolutely crazy i've had four members of congress say i'll talk to my apac person

00:29:02.920 and it's clearly what we call them my back guy i'll talk to my apac guy and see if i can get them to

00:29:09.480 you know dial those ads back why if i never heard this before it doesn't benefit anybody

00:29:16.200 why would they want to tell their constituents that they've basically got a buddy system with somebody

00:29:22.440 who's representing a foreign country it doesn't benefit the congressman for people to know that

00:29:28.360 so they're not going to tell you that it's it's in have you seen any other country do anything like

00:29:33.480 this like no russia russia obviously determines the outcome of our elections we keep hearing that

00:29:39.000 does anyone have a putin guy that they talk to not only do they not have a putin guy

00:29:43.800 look they don't they they don't have a britain guy they don't have an australian guy they you know

00:29:51.560 they don't have a germany dude like it's the only country that does this that has somebody that like

00:30:00.280 uniformly i guarantee there's some spreadsheet at apac where where you know the the apac dude is who's

00:30:08.440 matched up with the congressman is there and then all the congressman's votes on the issue oh has the

00:30:13.960 congressman been to israel they they pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to israel

00:30:19.880 i may be i mean i don't i'm not the only republican who hasn't taken the apac trip to israel but i'm

00:30:27.400 probably one of a dozen that hasn't taken that trip and the other ones just haven't got around to it

00:30:32.360 what's the trip like do you know um it's kind of like i think vacationy

00:30:37.240 you go see the wall you go see the you know the sights uh things like that it's such a great i

00:30:44.440 must say it's such a great country jerusalem especially it's just such a wonderful place

00:30:49.320 that that's got to have a big effect you go like swim in the dead sea yeah yeah i've done that yeah

00:30:54.600 not on an apac trip but i would recommend it to anyone are you sure it wasn't an apac trip paid for

00:30:59.800 it myself no i mean it's it's just funny i mean i am a like a legit lover of israel of the place

00:31:06.040 israel i like the people and i love the food and like the whole thing is so great look they have

00:31:10.280 they've but that's distinct from the government of israel which is a foreign government my my sense

00:31:14.760 is the people are very entrepreneurial yeah that uh they're uh publicly minded you know they care

00:31:22.920 about their country um that that they're generally good people right that's certainly been my experience

00:31:29.160 in trips there for sure it's great it's just that's i mean i think it's probably one of my favorite

00:31:33.880 maybe my all-time favorite place to go um with my family but that's just a completely different

00:31:40.600 thing from taking orders from its government right i mean right now though again they'll say it's these

00:31:46.680 are american citizens who are you know coordinating all it's just again this is almost a rhetorical

00:31:51.800 question but in your whatever 12 14 years in congress 12 years um have you ever seen any indication

00:31:59.640 that russia is influencing election outcomes or candidates or members not not in a uh quiet way

00:32:07.240 like um you know they'll put out statements russia obviously has russia today rt yeah i think it's been

00:32:15.080 banned but yeah i like i think you know kentucky fried chicken of which i'm a big fan being from

00:32:20.120 kentucky right they realized that fried was became sort of a pejorative and yeah they want to eat fried

00:32:26.040 food so they changed the name to kfc so you don't have to say fried okay russia today changed their

00:32:31.880 name to rt so you don't have to say russia but there's a strong analogy there but i mean there are

00:32:38.280 efforts you'd be a fool to think that they're not trying to influence things here just like we are there

00:32:45.320 we you know we have uh what is it radio free europe and voice of america we we have i mean we spend a

00:32:53.240 billion dollars oh well over a billion dollars on the foreign propaganda that's out in the open

00:32:58.360 that we know about right so there are foreigners spending money on propaganda over here as well i

00:33:03.560 don't want to say they're not involved but people don't say oh i need to go talk to my russia guy but

00:33:08.600 but you've never like in the cloak room or on the floor at dinner you've never heard another republican

00:33:13.400 member say i'd love to vote for this but putin doesn't want me to i have never heard that you have

00:33:18.200 in my life okay what about china no there's i mean unless it's a spy sleeping with a democrat

00:33:25.960 i'm sure there's some of that going on yeah but that's not that's not in public so how do you think

00:33:31.800 it's it's just interesting because you're you're clearly not a bigot uh i think it's very obvious

00:33:37.320 and they've called you one and they've spent you know millions of dollars against you over the

00:33:42.520 years and it has had no effect you get re-elected the primary in the 70s so like why are they still

00:33:48.840 spending against you and in your state statewide and can you just continue to serve in congress

00:33:54.200 while disobeying well uh they say that they don't want me to run statewide they're worried that i'll

00:34:01.000 run for mcconnell's seat and so they're trying to send me a message that's what they would tell you

00:34:05.960 um but what why i don't know what the message is maybe it's a little presumptuous to decide

00:34:14.120 i've never said that i'm running for the senate right yeah i i'm pretty much disinterested in it

00:34:20.600 personally and publicly but just in case they're running ads statewide now mind you there are six

00:34:26.760 congressional districts in kentucky and i only represent one of them they're running the ads

00:34:31.400 in all six congressional districts just in case amazing what do you think of mitch mcconnell after

00:34:37.960 all these years of being in the delegation with him um he's a shrewd guy yep he's quick he's uh

00:34:45.960 let me let me give you an example of how quick he is so we had a congressman jamie comber who's now

00:34:51.000 chair of the oversight committee he got elected in a special election which means you come in in the

00:34:54.920 middle of a term and you have to boot up with no staff and so it's it's kind of uh you know

00:35:00.920 disorienting so mitch mcconnell had a uh had an event for jamie comber on his first day in congress

00:35:07.480 it was in a townhouse it was like 200 lobbyists by the way i'm never going to get invited to one

00:35:11.640 of these now that i tell you the story uh and so jamie's there and mcconnell goes i believe jamie

00:35:18.440 took his first vote tonight and that's such a perfect imitation and i wasn't supposed to speak but

00:35:26.520 i interrupted senator mcconnell who was at the time the majority leader and i said yes uh senator

00:35:32.360 mcconnell he did take his first vote and i know he has no staff so i advise jamie when you walk into

00:35:37.960 the chamber look at how i vote and then vote the other way and you'll be just fine and every you

00:35:45.640 know 200 lobbyists thought it was a pretty good joke and they were laughing and as the laughter died

00:35:50.760 down mcconnell goes well thomas i'm glad you and i are giving jamie the same advice

00:35:59.160 and then the the place just the walls almost no he's good he's good that funny so um but i think

00:36:06.280 it's time for new leadership in the senate i mean he's obviously it's way past time and and this is

00:36:12.120 just a fact i'll say it i'll get in trouble for saying it you know i'm in races in kentucky so we poll

00:36:18.680 things in case you know we poll trump's popularity we hold the senator's popularity in case they get

00:36:24.040 involved in your race yeah and senator mcconnell's favorabilities are lower among republican primary

00:36:31.080 voters than our democrat governor's favorabilities seriously yes lower than governor beshear yeah

00:36:36.120 beshear is around 40 percent among republican primary voters and mcconnell's around 30 percent

00:36:42.040 well deserved well deserved so i'm glad to hear that because i like kentucky and i think it's

00:36:48.680 its voters are sensible what do you think it counts for in the final months and years of his

00:36:54.040 public career his public statements that all that matters is ukraine like what is that i have no idea

00:37:02.280 by the way i have so many fights in the house yeah that i try to avoid every fight in the senate that i

00:37:07.560 can and you're trying to draw me in and i love you and i'll indulge these questions but for 12 years my

00:37:14.520 strategy has been pick my fights in the house smart let let ram paul and mike lee and ted cruz and and

00:37:21.240 you know jd vance uh rick scott let those guys figure out the senate because i haven't been able

00:37:27.080 to fix the house so i'm damn sure not going to be able to fix the senate but it's just interesting um

00:37:33.240 okay taking mcconnell out of it yeah and even the senate out of it but some of the committee chairman in

00:37:39.240 the house for example seem like ukraine is all that matters to them and there's of course the

00:37:45.560 question as you noted of donations from lockheed etc the military industrial complex but it almost

00:37:50.840 seems messianic to me it seems heartfelt to me it seems sincere that they think that this is all that

00:37:56.840 matters winning this war against russia what do you have any sense of why they feel that way i don't

00:38:02.600 and um the hardest ones to understand are people like mike johnson who used to be against the you

00:38:09.720 know sending more money to ukraine but now that he's the speaker he's like you said he seems strongly

00:38:15.320 convicted that uh we should be sending money there almost like it's a religious calling or something i

00:38:21.400 mean it seems totally real to me it doesn't seem fake i've heard the argument i think it's immoral but

00:38:27.400 i've heard the argument that oh this is a great deal we just spend money and we're grinding up

00:38:32.040 russia's uh capacity to wage war particularly lots of russians are dying and so we're told that's

00:38:38.440 that's a good thing you know for since the cold war began we've been taught that it would be good for

00:38:44.520 russia to be diminished but they're they've go so so far as to say russians dying you know to the tune

00:38:52.680 of 300 000 casualties they say is just such a great thing that we need to keep this this thing going

00:38:59.000 and my answer to that is why don't you tell us the ukrainian casualties they you know i have been

00:39:06.440 in classified settings with cia uh the secretary of state secretary of defense not not their assistants

00:39:16.920 but those people in the room and they're they're bragging about how many russians have died and been

00:39:22.760 injured and i asked them how many ukrainians have died and been injured and they claimed they didn't

00:39:28.040 know i mean that's just a flat-out lie and they said they would get back to me and they've never

00:39:33.400 gotten back to me like not only is our americans being fed propaganda about this war congress is being

00:39:40.600 fed propaganda by our state department or and our secretary of defense and our intelligence agencies

00:39:47.240 and you can just ask a few questions in these classified hearings if nothing else my colleagues

00:39:52.040 should be convicted of a lack of curiosity like they they sit there and they believe everything

00:39:57.400 they're told because these are supposed to be the authorities and they know things we don't

00:40:01.480 but you can expose them with two or three questions like how many ukrainians have died

00:40:05.640 and they refuse to answer i've asked that very same question um to mike johnson actually directly

00:40:10.280 hillsdale college offers many great free online courses including a recent one on marxism socialism

00:40:20.760 and communism today marxism goes by different names to make itself seem less dangerous names like

00:40:26.760 critical race theory gender theory and decolonization no matter the names this online course shows it's the

00:40:33.400 same marxism that works to destroy private property and that will lead to famines show trials and gulags

00:40:40.280 start learning online for free at tucker for hillsdale dot com that's tucker f-o-r hillsdale dot com

00:40:51.240 tucker says it best their credit card companies are ripping americans off and enough is enough

00:40:57.320 this is senator roger marshall of kansas our legislation the credit card competition act would help in the

00:41:04.280 grip visa and mastercard have on us every time you use your credit card they charge you a hidden

00:41:10.200 fee called a swipe fee and they've been raising it without even telling you this hurts consumers

00:41:16.120 and every small business owner in fact american families are paying eleven hundred dollars in hidden

00:41:22.360 swipe fees each year the fees visa and mastercard charge americans are the highest in the world double

00:41:29.400 candidates and eight times more than europe's that's why i've taken action but i need your help to

00:41:35.160 help get this passed i'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the credit card

00:41:41.960 competition act paid for by the merchants payments coalition not authorized by any candidate or candidates

00:41:46.920 committee www.merchantspaymentscoalition.com but i've also asked him and a number of committee

00:41:56.520 chairman just in personal conversations do you do you believe your intel briefings because only a child

00:42:02.040 would believe an intel briefing take it at face value there may be truth in there right maybe largely

00:42:06.760 true but you're being spun you're being manipulated and if you don't know that then you're a moron but

00:42:13.720 they seem to believe them they um because they have no other reference and then here's what else happens

00:42:20.120 tucker when you go into a classified setting like a skiff you lock up your phone you take off your fitbit

00:42:27.960 you take every electronic device they even make me take off my debt badge what yeah i know do you feel

00:42:33.720 naked i feel exposed i mean i do feel naked if i'm not wearing this i've been wearing it for a year

00:42:40.360 every day of my life okay um but they make you they strip you of every outside reference okay and now

00:42:49.560 your staff is not allowed in that meeting either remember congressman our primary

00:42:55.960 roles are like raising money uh being friendly to constituents you know putting on a good face

00:43:02.920 campaigning and then then you know once a day or maybe twice a day we roll in there and press the

00:43:08.040 vote buttons based on what staff advises you well when you go into a skiff you don't have your smartphone

00:43:14.120 so you're not very smart they start using acronyms that you don't know remember what the acronym

00:43:19.240 stands for you can't just like okay what are what's the idgfbz i don't know man i must be stupid

00:43:25.880 like but you know if you were in a regular setting you just pull your phone out and like oh okay that's

00:43:31.160 what that is i know what that is and then you also can't ask your staff a question while you're in that

00:43:36.680 setting you know we have legislative staffers who handle certain specific areas of course you can't

00:43:43.080 bring them in and then when you go back to the office you can't tell them what you heard

00:43:46.680 so it's really quite an experience uh it's sort of it's you know it's a deprivation

00:43:53.960 experience of any outside reference so it's designed to produce stockholm syndrome it sounds

00:43:58.680 like yes and when you get in there they really don't give you classified information i say there's

00:44:03.800 three levels of classification in the skiff there's facebook level there's a twitter level and there's new

00:44:09.960 york times level like and the new york times level is the highest level of classification

00:44:15.320 i mean it's you're getting to the good stuff when they're telling you what's in the new york times

00:44:19.720 that week have you ever heard anything you thought was genuinely secret occasionally just a few times

00:44:26.600 and obviously i can't say what that is but they slip up and commit candor occasionally in there and

00:44:32.600 you're like whoa i didn't know that you know nothing like what's at area 51 right but occasionally

00:44:38.920 you're just like what do people think is that area 51 by the way i don't know i'm not a you but you

00:44:44.360 guys passed this law the uap disclosure act of 2023 and then they never disclosed anything

00:44:49.800 what is that not my area of expertise yes don't know but do members of congress ever say wait a second

00:44:56.680 we're a co-equal branch we're a legislative branch we have as much power as the president collectively

00:45:00.520 and you can't keep this stuff secret from us you're not allowed to do that but see like i have

00:45:05.560 this in hearings all the time they'll say i'll ask atf director this is this happened just last week

00:45:11.240 uh dedelbach or i'll ask merrick garland something or christopher ray like i've asked all them this and

00:45:18.040 they give you the same answer it's long-standing doj policy not to comment on on ongoing investigations

00:45:26.520 and you know what that's fine to tell a reporter but you can't tell the branch of government that

00:45:32.040 created you that that funded you you can't tell them that that's why the omnibus was so disappointing

00:45:39.320 to me is the only way these three-letter agencies are going to come to heel is if we cut their funding

00:45:44.920 in some specific area i've joked we could just withhold one toner cartridge for one printer at the fbi

00:45:51.160 and they would come over with a whole binder full of information but we can't even bring ourselves

00:45:56.120 to deprive them of a toner cartridge so we put 200 million dollars for new fbi building in the omnibus

00:46:03.400 bill and you know to their credit jim jordan and jamie comer wouldn't didn't vote for that and they're

00:46:09.560 chairman of committees but they are completely frustrated with the fact that the fbi just thumbs

00:46:14.360 their nose so is that the speaker who allowed that to happen oh he absolutely allowed it to happen

00:46:19.320 so to what extent are members of congress committee chairman leadership controlled by blackmail

00:46:27.480 i really don't think there's much blackmail like if there is i'm not aware of it the i have people

00:46:35.240 come up to me you know i travel around the country i go to texas and you know other states and speak to

00:46:42.440 groups food freedom groups you know first amendment second amendment groups uh and they come to me and

00:46:49.160 they say why did my congressman sell out like i'll just you bob was such a great guy and i campaigned

00:46:55.800 for him i made phone calls i put up signs and then we sent bob to congress and he he votes the wrong way

00:47:01.720 every time why is it what do they have his kids in a basement somewhere does he have kitty porn on him

00:47:07.880 like what is it why did bob go bad and and i have to look him in the eye and say bob just wanted to be

00:47:14.680 liked yeah like there is a a gene inside of um congressman i think they if you look for a common

00:47:22.760 denominator uh they they like people and they want to be liked for the most part and if and they're

00:47:31.560 likable if they're not likable they it's hard to get elected okay so this self-selects for likable people

00:47:38.520 but likable people want to be liked and they're not surrounded by their wives and children who usually

00:47:43.640 give them plenty of like right when they're in dc it's like who am i going to go to dinner with

00:47:48.360 tonight well i want to eat food with somebody that likes me right so if you're not going to eat alone

00:47:54.280 and you have to be liked and you generally have to be like to get elected to congress

00:47:58.280 you you um better be liked and uh and so it's literally it's almost like kindergarten when somebody

00:48:03.800 says i won't be your friend anymore if you don't you know give me your lunch uh congressmen fall for

00:48:09.640 that you know they're in their 30s 40s 50s and they fall for that how do you have it's interesting

00:48:14.200 you like people i've asked around you don't seem to have any real enemies in the congress i don't even

00:48:19.640 think apac hates you they just want you to obey but it's not it doesn't seem personal right you

00:48:24.840 don't seem to be a personal war with anybody uh that's my take on i have a mutation so you like

00:48:32.200 people okay obviously you're not some weird autist who doesn't care about other people you like other

00:48:36.760 people i love people i can tell and your colleagues say that but you also don't feel like you need

00:48:44.520 to fit in right same time like what is that it's a mutation that chromosome the like the liking people

00:48:51.160 and likability chromosome usually has another gene on it right next to it which is the need to be liked

00:48:58.120 and i'm missing the need to be liked gene i don't know what happened like i can go like on the cares act

00:49:05.960 okay this was under president trump the 11th day to slow the spread of 15 right uh they said we're

00:49:13.880 going to pass a 2.2 trillion dollar package and you all just stay home it's dangerous like we'll just

00:49:21.240 do it by unanimous consent and it was 11 p.m i'm sitting in my living room and and they send us this

00:49:27.240 message and i'm like wtf like this is the space this is twice the size of the omnibus bill right this is

00:49:33.960 going to cause massive inflation the policies in it are going to cause shortages and if we don't show

00:49:39.000 up to vote we're sending a message to all 50 states that you don't have to show up to vote in this

00:49:43.480 election so it was like we i gotta do i got my car and i drove eight hours i slept one hour in a rest

00:49:50.040 stop because i knew i had to be there by 9 a.m this was march 27th 2020 actually the 25th is the day i got

00:49:57.640 to congress to stop it and um i got there and i said it's not going by unanimous consent and i was

00:50:03.480 literally sleeping in my wife's suv eating those uh peanut butter filled pretzels like i had a big

00:50:09.480 jug of those are good yeah for my three days of nourishment i'm sitting in an suv eating that big

00:50:15.400 tub of pretzels with peanut butter in the middle like waiting just waiting for them to try to call

00:50:20.440 it in session and sneak this bill past and they're like shit massey's gonna do it so they they loaded

00:50:27.640 up congressmen you know the airports were shut down for the most part there were some planes coming from

00:50:32.200 california they only had two passengers and they were both congressmen so they they roll them all

00:50:36.600 back to congress it takes them two days to assemble a quorum because i like they went to the parliamentarian

00:50:43.240 and they're like is there any way around this and he's like nope massey's right the constitution requires

00:50:47.800 a quorum if one you know he didn't call me an asshole but if one just shows up objects and says

00:50:53.960 there's no quorum here so they brought every back i go to the floor uh actually got a everybody was

00:51:00.840 hating me i mean everybody did you know what it's like to be in a room of 434 people and they're all

00:51:07.800 staring at you like there i had maybe 10 friends who were like looking at me like that guy is dead

00:51:15.640 like we've never seen harry carrie like this they were worried for me but the rest of them hated me

00:51:21.800 there they would come up to me and say i i live with my mother and when i go back home you're going

00:51:27.560 to cause me to take covid to her and she's going to die and i'm blaming you for this and i said that's

00:51:33.800 your face yeah oh yeah well like no it wasn't just one it was like when he was done there was a line of

00:51:39.240 people i just like stood there and they're all coming to hate on me and um i was like but what

00:51:45.960 about the guy that's going to the grocery store and bagging your groceries and carrying them out to

00:51:50.120 the car does he live with his mother too like what about the trucker who's out there driving and

00:51:56.040 interacting with people in order to get the goods to where you need to be what about the nurse who's

00:52:00.280 going to work every single day taking care of people is she going to kill her parents like

00:52:05.320 like where why are you special like you're supposed to you know they they carved a hole in the side of

00:52:10.760 a mountain in west virginia for us in the case of emergency yes that well the sad but but realistic

00:52:16.760 thing is now they don't have a place for us we're so useless right it's like well here's where we were

00:52:21.800 going to keep them if shit hit the fan but now we we've realized they're like useless we can declare

00:52:28.440 war without them in the event of a nuclear strike so you know they're just a rounding error in the

00:52:34.200 three branches we can operate with two yes i've noticed so anyways these are the kind of people

00:52:39.560 who are supposed to respond in an emergency and they all wanted to stay home they all hated me for

00:52:43.480 for recognize our constitutional duty and and trump called me three times on the floor of the house

00:52:50.680 while i was getting ready to make the motion to object and i let it go to voicemail three times in a

00:52:55.880 row which is probably not good but i couldn't leave the microphone because i was asking people would you

00:53:01.720 make this motion if i go to the restroom they're like oh no no not me so i uh i sat there i i

00:53:09.560 finally they yielded time for debate i go off the floor and called the white house switchboard back

00:53:14.600 and and um you know i didn't have his number i just like if you want to tour the white house

00:53:19.560 you call the number i called right and like the intern is like oh is this congress of massey i'm

00:53:24.200 putting you through to trump right now and so he comes off he goes i'm coming at you like you've

00:53:30.680 never seen never in your life before have you seen the way in which i will come at you i'm more popular

00:53:36.840 than you in kentucky and you know it i'm back in your primary opponent and you gotta lose

00:53:45.080 and i'm like oh crap i probably will lose i mean he had 95 percent popularity in among my republican

00:53:52.760 electorate who i had to face in about eight weeks in my primary and i had a well-funded opponent and

00:53:58.840 here now is trump was mad at me so he screamed at me for two or three minutes i kept trying to talk

00:54:04.840 and he just screamed louder then he repeated it all he goes no this is the second time you've done

00:54:10.600 something like this and they took me out of it before but not this time and then you're gonna lose

00:54:17.560 and he hangs up and like the thing is like i had he said he thought it was the second time i'd done

00:54:23.320 that like eight times since he was president he just started realizing it's the same guy

00:54:29.960 the time before that was on war with iran the democrats were in the majority and you know he had

00:54:37.240 just vaporized solomani yeah and we were worried that he would attack mainland iran without a vote of

00:54:43.480 congress so the democrats actually insincerely there aren't too many anti-war democrats left i've

00:54:48.520 noticed but they realized this was a chance to make a statement so they put a bill on the floor

00:54:53.720 saying trump you can't go to war with iran without a vote of congress which is constitutionally obvious

00:54:58.840 so i had to vote for it but i was only one of three republicans to do it so he remembered that time

00:55:04.120 but he didn't remember the fake obamacare repeal and some of the other things that uh i was kind of uh

00:55:09.560 you know the turd in the punch bowl on did did it change your views at all no uh the president

00:55:17.560 tweeted that i was a third-rate grandstander and that like this is before i got back to my seat

00:55:24.360 i go back from the speaker's lobby to go to my seat to get ready to make the motion

00:55:28.600 and uh one of the congress was like you better look at your phone massey look at your twitter and i turn

00:55:33.080 it on he's like tweeting hard and heavy against me said i should be thrown out of the party

00:55:37.800 then he the best one is i'm chairman of the second amendment caucus so his third tweet was

00:55:43.480 he's terrible on guns it's like what where did that come from have you seen my christmas card picture

00:55:51.400 what's your christmas card picture oh well it's a little infamous no i i've actually seen it but i

00:55:58.120 for the benefit of those who have not so you know i got my family together for christmas and we got

00:56:03.080 bluegrass instruments out we play uh music together and we took a christmas card picture

00:56:07.960 with bluegrass instruments and i said hey wouldn't it be kind of neat if we just like change these all

00:56:12.920 out for machine guns and took a picture and that was supposed to stay on my phone for eternity but i

00:56:19.640 had had a couple medical margaritas one night i don't do medical marijuana but i had a few medical

00:56:25.320 margaritas and i looked at that picture and i thought well that's pretty good picture be ashamed if

00:56:29.720 nobody ever saw it and i tweeted it and no i caught all kinds of hate for that the arch it's a great

00:56:36.600 picture the archbishop of canterbury condemned it this is the head of the church of england condemned

00:56:42.040 my tweet i'm like oh my gosh are you an episcopalian i'm a methodist good so you can ignore him yes yeah

00:56:49.480 he's a disgrace um so so anyways i you know the press asked me as i'm we're talking about the need to be

00:56:56.600 like gene right if i had that i would have been devastated that day if i had needed to be liked

00:57:03.720 i couldn't have carried that through and um i walked out of that chamber everybody's hating me in

00:57:09.800 the chamber nancy pelosi called me a dangerous nuisance cnn called me the most hated person in dc

00:57:15.480 john kerry called me an asshole or something uh and uh president trump called me a third-rate

00:57:21.480 grandstander this is all in the course of a few minutes right i walk out of the chamber of the house

00:57:26.440 and the reporters like swarm me you know like they do and i'm just trying to run back to the suv with

00:57:31.080 the pretzels with peanut butter in them and get out of there and um that's the the uh press said what do

00:57:39.720 you have to say for yourself your own president just called you a third-rate grandstander and i paused

00:57:45.320 for a second and i said i was offended i'm at least second rate so what happened to your relationship

00:57:52.120 with trump it um you know i think he respects people that stand up yep even if i think you're

00:57:58.760 absolutely right disagrees with you that's correct and um two years later he did endorse me no way yep

00:58:06.280 do you get along with him okay now yeah i mean i did endorse ron desantis not out of spite

00:58:11.640 uh or animosity because we had already patched things up uh just because i served with ron desantis

00:58:18.120 for six years and he and i were really good friends we talked about bills when he was in congress

00:58:22.840 you know he entered he and i fought over who was going to introduce the bill to eliminate congressional

00:58:27.720 pensions you know and he won and i co-sponsored it now i'm the sponsor now that he's a governor

00:58:33.480 but i knew he was a good person and he thinks things through and he was smart so i i endorsed him

00:58:38.440 um but you know because i have i call it natural immunity i have trump antibodies at this point

00:58:44.280 they may wear off at some point i don't know do you think if you did run for say just pulling us

00:58:49.960 out of a hat but governor of kentucky do you think trump would endorse you um i don't know you'd

00:58:56.600 probably do some polling and see who was winning fair fair totally fair i wouldn't turn down an

00:59:02.840 endorsement yeah yeah so it's it's not so are you at war with anybody in the congress no i get along

00:59:10.280 with everybody i mean and people try to use this against me you know when apac was running those

00:59:16.200 ads that say i always vote with aoc um and rashida talib and ilhan omar you know so i introduced an

00:59:24.280 amendment and forced to vote on eliminating the kill switch in automobiles that's mandated oh thank you

00:59:30.520 yeah well i was losing republicans on that i lost like 20 republicans so i knew i needed some

00:59:36.840 just to be clear for the people who don't know what you're talking about new in new vehicles this

00:59:40.680 has been the case for years they can be turned off remotely by the authorities which is like the most

00:59:47.000 north korean thing ever to happen that's what you're talking about yeah by 2026 every new automobile

00:59:53.160 sold has to be able to turn itself off if it doesn't like your driving so i'm like how do you

01:00:01.320 appeal this conviction at the roadside right maybe you swerve to miss a deer and pulled over for an

01:00:06.040 ambulance and you got your kids in the car and it stops anyone vote for something that evil i don't

01:00:10.600 understand because again they know it's a that i'm right but they're worried about for instance mothers

01:00:17.800 against drunk driving or that they don't have the bravery wait worse we just let in millions of

01:00:23.880 illegal aliens who are allowed to drunk drive right and biden has told us that drunk driving is not a

01:00:28.440 big deal it's not grounds for deporting yeah yeah so who mothers against drunk driving as far as i know

01:00:34.600 said nothing about this like who cares what they think i i know and but there may be let's say one

01:00:39.480 constituent in your district who gets a hold of you and they lost a child to drunk driving which is

01:00:43.400 terrible and they say well you know you don't care about me if you vote for massey's amendment and you

01:00:51.000 know they make that personal phone call that congressman doesn't have the fortitude to say

01:00:55.720 or knowledge to say look this technology can't work i really care about your child i think drunk

01:01:02.360 driving is a scourge and i want to fix it but this is a false promise and it's only going to increase

01:01:08.200 the price of automobiles and give the government more control so i'm going to vote with

01:01:13.240 massey they don't have the courage to say that so long story short i lost 20 republicans i needed

01:01:20.120 some democrats so i went over to aoc who i get along with just fine don't hate me for saying that i don't

01:01:27.480 and i said aoc they're running ads right now that say you always vote or that i always vote with you

01:01:32.680 just once could you vote with me could you vote for my kill switch amendment since they're running ads

01:01:37.720 the other way and she did she voted to defund the automobile kill switch good for her

01:01:50.200 so she um ran it's interesting i mean obviously i don't like her um but i think she's talented

01:01:57.400 uh she she is definitely talented but she ran as a radical as someone from the outside which i'm of

01:02:02.760 course very sympathetic to but she doesn't seem to actually be that person so like for example

01:02:09.080 on the foreign aid stuff how often does she vote with you on quite quite frequently but i had a

01:02:15.960 funny moment you know this 15 or 16 votes we had on israel in april well the squad and i and i know this

01:02:24.120 is going to be used in the next ad against me this clip from tucker but i was the only no sometimes

01:02:30.200 sometimes the most of the squad voted with me but i noticed aoc wasn't always there with me

01:02:36.120 so i went over to the squad on the democrat side of they literally sit together they they hang out

01:02:40.760 together yeah they kind of it's really cliquish even you know the freedom caucus sits together the

01:02:47.880 texas delegation sits together there are different cliques the appropriators sit together it's the the

01:02:54.200 military guys the intel guys sit together you know sometimes it's by state sometimes it's by click a

01:02:59.880 lot of the congressional black caucus sits together uh i can't get the second amendment caucus to sit

01:03:05.640 together that's my call they're too independent independent but so i go over to their this is just

01:03:10.520 high school cafeteria it's high school cafeteria that's what it is and why would you again they

01:03:15.080 need to be liked right they don't want to sit next to people they don't like or who don't like them

01:03:19.320 so i go over i went over to the squad a few weeks ago and i said i told aoc for the squad i said we're

01:03:25.000 gonna kick you out if you don't keep voting with this more consistently what did she say she laughed

01:03:30.200 she thought it was funny i mean she has a sense of humor these people are humans there are 435 i

01:03:35.880 call them goldfish in the aquarium you have to get 218 of them to pass a bill so it doesn't benefit me

01:03:42.680 to hate on any of them someday that you know on some days they may vote with well they're also people

01:03:48.040 and you shouldn't if you can help it you shouldn't hate people period we've we've formed coalitions on the

01:03:52.680 first amendment on the fourth amendment on war sometimes like to eliminate cluster bombs delivering

01:03:59.160 cluster bombs even though the democrats almost to a person actually to a person want to give ukraine

01:04:05.080 more aid some of them are like well the cluster bombs maybe we shouldn't do that okay and so you can

01:04:11.320 form coalition so i try to do that when i can but why aren't there anti-war democrats since it was

01:04:18.520 the anti-war party for like 40 years i don't know and we've lost a lot of them on privacy and

01:04:24.920 and free speech as well um i think with russia you asked this before there's there's this element that

01:04:32.120 i didn't answer it's sort of a proxy against trump for them now they in their in their file folders in

01:04:39.000 their brain trump and russia are in the same file folder yes even though that's a false narrative that's

01:04:44.840 been dispelled long ago um it's still in their same file folder so when they see ukraine is fighting

01:04:51.240 russia they use that as a proxy for their hate for trump and so they'll they'll vote for that

01:04:57.560 and they did they waved i don't know if you saw this they were waving ukrainian flags after mike

01:05:02.600 johnson put their bill on the floor and every democrat voted for it this was premeditated somebody had to go

01:05:08.040 buy you know 200 ukrainian flags and hand them out and um i filmed it which you're not supposed

01:05:16.200 to do but you're also not supposed to wave flags of other countries on the floor of the house so i'm

01:05:20.760 like all right i'm gonna expose this so i filmed it and i put it on twitter to show what like the

01:05:27.640 humiliation that mike johnson brought upon us by bringing their the democrat bill to the floor without

01:05:34.360 any and it was leverage too even if you're a republican and you're okay with sending money to

01:05:38.520 ukraine that's a leverage point get do something for our country and require that as a condition of

01:05:44.680 doing whatever that is but he gave up all the leverage i put that video on twitter three days

01:05:49.560 later the sergeant at arms tracks down one of my staffers in kentucky because we're no longer in

01:05:56.040 session and says he needs to delete that video from twitter or we're going to take a fine out of his

01:06:02.520 salary out of his congressional salary and so mr stafford he knew what i was going to do he told

01:06:08.440 me what they had just said i said all right i'm retweeting it did you oh yeah and it got like eight

01:06:15.720 million views it went from four million to eight million and then you know sometimes you just got

01:06:20.600 to double down and the speaker had to announce on twitter that i wouldn't be fined for that

01:06:27.240 but there but no one was considering finding any member who waved the flag of a foreign nation on

01:06:32.920 the floor of the house of representatives right and they were taking selfies of of them with their

01:06:37.560 foreign flags too and no none of them got a phone call only i got a phone call because i exposed the

01:06:42.680 humiliation it wasn't just a humiliation of those of us in congress it was a humiliation of our country

01:06:49.480 i mean it's one of the most corrupt countries in the world and they got every thing they wanted for

01:06:57.320 them and the democrats are waving the flag even though the ukrainian flag even though they're in

01:07:01.160 the majority and we just have to like sit there and take that it was it was horrible do you think any

01:07:08.680 i mean the leader of ukraine is not elected anymore he had his term has ended he's not having a new

01:07:15.400 election he's in the unelected maximum power in some places we call that a dictator and yet they're

01:07:22.200 still hitting us with a democracy pro-democracy talking points do you think i mean have they

01:07:27.000 thought this through at all do they are they just lying like what is that um they're lying yeah i mean

01:07:33.640 they know it and the good news is some republicans are waking up to it remember when we started

01:07:39.160 voting on these ukraine resolutions even you know as soon as the war started

01:07:44.520 i was the only no there was like this open-ended promise in a in a non-binding resolution that said

01:07:49.800 well give them whatever they need and there were only like two other republicans that joined me on

01:07:55.240 this but now we've got a majority of republicans in congress are saying wait this is they aren't using

01:08:02.120 this money like we thought they were and we're giving them money to fund pensions of retired politicians

01:08:11.480 in ukraine who were most certainly corrupt and we're paying their pensions with this money but

01:08:16.280 most republicans don't support it so that means that your speaker the republican speaker of the house

01:08:20.840 mike johnson is working for the democrats yeah it's that simple i mean and that's one of the reasons we

01:08:26.840 went through with the motion to vacate paul goes are nice co-sponsored marjorie's motion to vacate there

01:08:32.600 were ultimately 11 of us who voted for it motion would be to fire him to fire speaker johnson just like they had

01:08:39.480 done kevin mccarthy although i thought inappropriately and at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons

01:08:46.440 they did that to mccarthy but here we had speaker johnson who was doing all the things people were

01:08:51.560 afraid mccarthy might do they they pre-convicted mccarthy for things they thought he would do

01:08:57.480 and here mike johnson came and did all these things he put an omnibus on the floor he passed

01:09:02.200 the foreign intelligence surveillance act re-upped that without warrants built the fbi a new building and

01:09:08.200 gave ukraine all this money so what what happened what marjorie and i and paul decided ultimately

01:09:15.480 is we needed to expose the uniparty and never before have you had democrats vote for a republican

01:09:22.040 speaker and that's why we forced the question nancy pelosi voted for him hakeem jeffries went on national

01:09:28.920 tv and said why would we want to get rid of him he's given us everything we want i mean the the uniparty

01:09:36.200 has never been so exposed as it was when we called that motion to vacate i know some people got mad at

01:09:41.960 us that we shouldn't have done it but uh it's a long game which we certainly hope that he doesn't

01:09:48.200 become speaker next january and hopefully people will have seen with nancy pelosi rushing to speaker

01:09:54.280 johnson's aid that he's not the speaker you want when trump wins the white house and we keep the majority

01:10:01.480 do you think he will be um a lot of this depends on what the people want and if they can see it

01:10:07.880 hopefully also trump sees it that mike johnson is would be even worse than paul ryan paul ryan

01:10:15.000 put while he was still in the while we were still in the majority paul ryan sent like a dozen crs or

01:10:22.040 omnibus bills to president trump's desk that didn't have any money for a wall in it

01:10:26.680 like he had no intention of ever funding a wall paul ryan did it you know and so i think mike

01:10:34.040 johnson's gonna be similarly the same way he's basically working for the deep state at this point

01:10:38.840 in the uniparty how did that happen do you have any idea the uh the paul ryan bit or no well paul ryan is

01:10:45.320 a change you know is a sinister person i happen to know but also you know not just kind of not a genius

01:10:52.360 and an ideologue at the same time which is like a bad combination dumb ideologues are the scariest

01:10:57.320 but mike johnson seemed like kind of a moderately conservative kind of sincere decent guy

01:11:04.360 you know maybe he would babysit your kids and do an okay job i'm like paul ryan and but he just and

01:11:10.840 then he immediately just becomes a tool of cia and jake sullivan and the biden administration

01:11:17.000 well how did that happen so fast well one of the things he claims which i don't believe is true

01:11:22.680 and i have reason to say this is that he says he went in a skiff like he's had some 180 degree

01:11:30.040 turns on some things like for instance whether you need a warrant to spy on americans using the foreign

01:11:34.520 intelligence surveillance act 702 program well he used to be on judiciary committee with me and jim

01:11:40.840 jordan trying to reform that trying to get so he understood what it was he knew completely what we

01:11:46.040 were talking about he's an attorney too right and he knows the constitution he knows this is

01:11:50.680 required but he claims he spent time in a skiff and he learned things skiff that's secure compartmentalized

01:11:57.560 information facility or something um it's where we go we have to leave our phones locked up you know

01:12:03.400 no staff in there he claims he spent time in skiff and learned things that changed his mind here's

01:12:08.600 the problem tucker i was in skiff with him like we we had we had dni not just the the current dni but

01:12:18.200 the former dni john radcliffe trump's dni we had cia we had fbi we even had a fisa judge in there and we

01:12:27.960 spent three and a half hours it was a four hour meeting and after three and a half hours it's basically

01:12:33.160 a psyop where they're just trying to beat you down and do the things and i was like this is

01:12:39.400 ridiculous you get you haven't given they didn't give us one example of any time ever since fisa was

01:12:45.960 created that getting a warrant would have kept them from solving or preventing an act of terrorism

01:12:52.040 they gave hypotheticals but they had no specific and i think fice has been in place since 1978

01:12:57.640 since the 70s right so almost 50 years and they couldn't give you one example not one example now

01:13:03.320 they also expanded it after uh 9-11 and to to do the the program to go against civilians to spy on

01:13:11.960 civilians and and and actually that product came out of the judiciary committee here's another place where

01:13:18.840 the speaker betrayed us uh fisa 702 was created by john conyers and jim sensebrenner conyers was the

01:13:26.920 chairman and since and brenner was the the ranking member and what mike johnson said this year was

01:13:33.320 well even though the judiciary committee created this and is responsible for overseeing it i'm going

01:13:40.120 to let the intel committee bring the bill to the floor without warrants in it it wasn't even their

01:13:45.160 jurisdiction they have jurisdiction over fisa as long as it's for the cia but not for the fbi

01:13:52.520 so that was frustrating and but it's shocking it's it's shocking it is shocking so he said you know

01:14:00.040 like end of civil liberties level stuff so yes yes but it's not like he learned new information the skiff

01:14:07.960 no he did not i was there so what so that's so that's like that's the problem right the problem

01:14:13.320 the fact that i was there and right so that's telling people on your show that i was there for

01:14:19.240 three and a half hours and mike john go ask mike johnson he'll say yep he was there three and a

01:14:23.560 half hours so what is the truth what do you think changed um i think he's kind of a lost ball in tall

01:14:32.840 weeds i think he's in a position of power he never imagined he would get to at this point in his life

01:14:39.320 he's not done anything in private practice or political uh arena that's prepared him for this

01:14:45.400 he took the job with a very small staff he didn't have uh people to put in all positions on the field

01:14:53.240 and he had to accept a lot of uh suggestions in areas he didn't know a whole lot about although he

01:14:59.960 gets no pass on fisa yes um he gets no pass on ukraine because he does as you pointed out he doesn't

01:15:06.760 even know how many casualties have been incurred on the ukrainian side i mean he's the second person in

01:15:13.720 line for president after kamala harris this is this is scary to me he's he's basically getting moved

01:15:21.320 around it's great you said nothing he did in his life before this prepared him for it um but that

01:15:31.240 itself may be kind of a more charitable explanation because i'm trying to be charitable i mean i gotta go

01:15:38.520 back to work with your life prepared you for this so just for those who don't know you went to mit

01:15:44.760 your high school girlfriend joined you at mit you married her whilst while she was still there and

01:15:50.040 then together you started a company based on a very sophisticated invention that you came up with

01:15:57.320 maybe the first of about 30 patents that you now have you ran this company for a long time then you

01:16:01.720 move back to kentucky and a lot of things happen and you end up running for congress so like that's not

01:16:07.560 the background well um so nothing in the political arena but in my private life you know i raised 32

01:16:14.520 million dollars of venture capital and i swam with the sharks yeah like the i had lots of moral dilemmas

01:16:21.480 in the course of creating that company i could have taken money off the table and gone and done other

01:16:26.600 things but instead i felt a commitment to my staff and to other investors i had investors who said if you'll

01:16:33.320 just shit can that guy you hired as president will double our investment and i'm like no he's my

01:16:40.360 partner i'm not like he helped me get to this point i'm not going to abandon him good for you and so um

01:16:46.600 you know i had experiences in life that and then also just put my hands in the dirt on my farm

01:16:52.760 like so tell me about that so you live tell us about how you live and where you live because i think

01:16:57.800 it's one of the most unusual things about you so i spent um you know i grew up as a hillbilly

01:17:03.880 in eastern kentucky what county lewis county lewis county how many people in your town 13 000 people

01:17:09.480 13 000 cattle it's a huge land mass um and it's a great county there's it's one of the 21 counties

01:17:19.000 that i represent it's actually the poorest county per capita income that i represent but it's the one

01:17:24.760 i grew up in so it's very unlikely that the congressman for the district would come from the poorest

01:17:29.240 county so i grew up as a little nerd i love taking stuff apart because i was bored there were no malls

01:17:36.120 you couldn't ride your bicycle to any you know store to of and if you did you didn't have any money

01:17:42.680 so i had to find things to do at home i took apart things built things entered science fairs built

01:17:47.960 robots made it to the international science fair as a as a little you know hillbilly um one in a

01:17:54.600 award from nasa there and at the age 15 like i won the high school level awards um and got into mit

01:18:05.000 never visited the campus didn't really have the money to go visit it um but i read about it there was

01:18:11.800 no internet seemed like a good place i got there i'd lived in a town of 1900 people all my life

01:18:18.200 um and i i was there for six hours in cambridge massachusetts i cross uh massachusetts avenue they

01:18:25.160 had a crosswalk and a stoplight you know never really seen two of those things together i'd seen

01:18:30.600 crosswalks and stoplights but so i walked through the the crosswalk and a car honked like that short

01:18:36.120 little boston meep meep and i thought oh my gosh i've been here six hours and already run into somebody

01:18:42.840 from kentucky and i turned around and waved at the car as big as i could was it people from kentucky

01:18:49.080 i don't think so i think they had one finger up waving back

01:18:54.680 so uh and people are like that's not a true story i said not only is it true it took me a month to

01:19:01.480 quit waving at cars to beat like it was just 18 years of conditioning you thought beeping was hey hey

01:19:08.840 there i mean that's what we thought that little thing in the middle of your steering wheel was for

01:19:12.680 if you saw somebody and they couldn't see you through the windshield just toot the horn

01:19:16.280 then you throw your hand up and wave and they roll down the window oh that's bob

01:19:21.320 and if you didn't wave i mean you were pariah you were probably an axe murderer who was in our town

01:19:26.600 right or you were just an a-hole i wasn't so i didn't want to be either so i waved at that car in

01:19:32.680 massachusetts uh and and kept waving for about a month but anyways long story short as you said

01:19:39.160 i invented a virtual reality device that lets you touch three-dimensional objects started a company

01:19:43.800 raised venture capital did that for 10 years moved to the live free or die state new hampshire

01:19:49.000 new hampshire my company was in massachusetts i couldn't move the center of gravity too far out

01:19:53.720 of cambridge i got it up to 128 on woburn and then i commuted 40 miles every day so i could live in a

01:19:59.880 state we'll let you have machine guns and old cars and you know cool stuff redneck sports um the best

01:20:07.480 the best sports so uh why'd you move back to kentucky after 10 years you know of of doing it

01:20:15.160 it was you know we had three kids and we wanted to raise them like we were raised in kentucky and we

01:20:23.160 wanted to be near their grandparents like both my parents were still alive both my wife's parents were

01:20:27.160 still alive and you learned so much from your grandparents because your parents are really busy

01:20:31.640 just you know trying to earn a living or whatever and if you're lucky enough to have a relationship

01:20:35.720 with your grandparents that's where i think the generational stuff carries on yes and um i had

01:20:41.960 a great relationship with my grandparents so we wanted our kids to live in that environment and we

01:20:46.440 came back we bought the farm that my wife grew up on we built a house off the grid it runs on a wrecked

01:20:52.840 model s tesla battery it's been running continuously for six and a half years so you built the hat like

01:20:57.640 who built the house i did like i we had an ice storm and a lot of trees fell down how big is the

01:21:04.440 property it's um 1500 acres and it's wooded it's all almost all woods like and it's too steep i don't

01:21:13.400 want you to think this is like valuable iowa no no no i know the part of the state yeah pack your lunch

01:21:18.280 if you're on the ridge and you fall off the ridge because you're going to be hungry by the time you

01:21:21.720 get to the bottom you're going to be grabbing like tree roots and stuff to keep from sliding

01:21:25.960 but it grows trees and some of it is flat and you know in the bottom but this is not plantation land

01:21:31.240 no these are hollers yeah so uh in fact interestingly enough it's been a republican county since the civil

01:21:38.520 war even though all the counties around it have been democrats since the civil war because the

01:21:42.760 geography because the geography yes the topography did not allow for consolidation of farms right so

01:21:48.760 there was no scale at which slavery made sense you could you basically in your holler you only had

01:21:54.600 enough land that your family if you had enough kids could farm yes and so that's the way people

01:22:00.760 grew up and by the way it's kind of libertarian you know i'll do my thing in my holler you do your

01:22:06.360 thing in your holler that's right if you need some help let me know i'll come over and help you

01:22:10.040 southwest virginia is like this west virginia is like this yeah because the topography right it's

01:22:13.960 the reason west virginia was republican and and seceded from uh virginia so by the way half my

01:22:21.320 family's from west virginia and half my family's from kentucky my mammals who's 97 right now is still

01:22:27.960 alive her grandfather was union soldier amazing isn't that crazy from west virginia from west virginia yeah

01:22:36.280 she still lives in west virginia but like we're not that far away from the civil war no i know i know

01:22:42.120 i know you you can talk to people who were alive when people who fought in the civil war i i worked

01:22:48.040 with a guy when i was at the newspaper in arkansas the guy shared a desk with bob salee from texarcana

01:22:53.800 arkansas uh he said i knew confederate veterans that's in my lifetime i knew a man who knew confederate

01:22:59.960 veterans or civil war veterans that's just absolutely crazy but my whole point of that was she's a

01:23:04.120 republican she's been republicans my mammal since the civil war and like nobody marries into our

01:23:09.800 family if you're a democrat you got to go see mammal and she'll either approve or disapprove

01:23:15.640 and she's been had pretty good luck at sniffing out the liberals rats yeah the liberals so so you had

01:23:21.880 an ice store there was an ice storm on your property how does that figure into your so i already had a

01:23:25.560 bulldozer so i got a winch so i could drag these trees out i got a sawmill cut these into timbers

01:23:31.080 built a timber frame house what kind of wood it's 17 kinds of wood because we did it was whatever

01:23:37.000 fell down in the ice storm we've got oak yellow poplar hickory beach so hardwood hardwood yep and

01:23:45.560 then we wanted to be self-sustaining well how did she know how to timber frame

01:23:50.760 i found a class on ebay for 500 in tennessee and i bought it now and i drove to tennessee and took a

01:23:57.320 one-week class and we built a little shed slash cabin and i'm and i called my wife from a pay

01:24:02.840 phone and i said i want to do this like instead of going to get a job we had just ended like left

01:24:09.640 our company after 10 years of working there and we'd moved back to kentucky and i said well just

01:24:14.680 build a timber frame house like full-time yes woke up every morning had my coffee and started chiseling

01:24:21.800 away or going up in the woods and dragging more trees out that had fallen down so you you built

01:24:27.480 your house full-time like as a job every day and this and this is what our kids saw too like the

01:24:33.000 flooring for our kitchen came out of the creek we call it a creek um what do you mean the flooring came

01:24:38.040 out of the creek the there are rocks in the creek that are flat that they look like the stuff you buy

01:24:45.240 at lowe's that's fake and i'm like oh this is what they modeled the fake stuff after we it's free let's

01:24:51.320 just go pick it up now if we probably have we're paying ourselves about three dollars an hour compared

01:24:57.080 to if we just gone to you know one of the box stores and bought it in terms of harvesting it but

01:25:02.520 our kids i think in addition to being with their grandparents learned a big lesson that wow mom and

01:25:08.600 dad are growing our food they are uh collecting the materials for the house here from the environment

01:25:16.280 um that you don't have to rely you know neighbors are good though right we actually sent them to

01:25:21.880 public school which was and we let them ride the bus it was only three miles away but we figured the

01:25:28.120 bus ride was important too because when you get to school they sort of separate you oh yeah but you've

01:25:32.760 got can be 15 terrifying minutes on the bus where you interact with everybody right i remember my son

01:25:41.080 he was like 10 years old he traded some yugioh cards on the bus and uh for this like awesome the best

01:25:49.640 yugioh card ever and he showed it to us and was a little plastic thing and we're like well did you

01:25:54.520 want to take it out of plastic no no he told me to leave it in here and we take it out and it was a fake

01:26:00.280 and he was so mad but it turns out his dad had sold me a leaky bulldozer and said there was no

01:26:06.040 leaks in it so like it ran in the family the same kid who stiffed my son and stiffed me on this dozer

01:26:14.120 so where i mean but you learn these these are life lessons right they didn't lead a sheltered life

01:26:19.720 and so we grew up you know they grew up there uh wait what percent of the timbers

01:26:24.680 in the timber frame came from your property all of it in fact they never left the farm really so you

01:26:31.960 milled it there milled it there chiseled it there made the mortise and tenons and the dovetails

01:26:37.480 it was a lot of work personally yes

01:26:46.840 how did you you know cutting a mortise and tenon cutting a dovetail joint these are having done it

01:26:53.720 very difficult how did you learn to do that i kept telling myself look farmers without calculators

01:26:59.640 pulled this off 200 years ago and so surely if i've got a computer and some you know electricity

01:27:07.160 i should be able to do this as well um just dent of will but she'd been like a

01:27:15.320 electrical engineer software programmer right but not uh nothing that scale yeah nothing i mean the

01:27:23.960 the only thing i had built before that was a tree house right and even that didn't get finished so but

01:27:30.680 i mean some of that stuff is very complex like actually complex timber framing some some of the

01:27:37.000 joints are difficult to cut and the design itself is is complicated yeah you don't like you have to

01:27:45.240 plan it all ahead you don't like hold the timber up there like you would a two by four we need a

01:27:50.280 salt balloon framing right yeah totally right or oh that 45 needs to be a 42 degree angle let's you know

01:27:56.760 saw off a little bit more you can't do that while it's you know you're up in the middle of the air

01:28:00.920 on scaffolding trying to get two pieces to fit together it's actually it's a fun math problem so

01:28:06.200 i enjoyed it but is there something honest about it because all the fasteners are wooden too

01:28:11.000 so it's one medium that you learn there's no like bolts so it's all peg nails all pegs

01:28:16.840 and once you realize that and there are no metal fasteners in the frame correct none i mean we had to

01:28:23.480 nail the floor i got it and the walls on it of course but the frame itself the frame that no

01:28:29.000 metal fast structure and it's 46 feet tall it's 46 feet tall yes from the basement slab which i

01:28:35.640 timber framed the basement too i still don't even know how to stick frame like i'm like well i'm going

01:28:41.640 to build one house i'm going to learn one tech which is the framing that your house is yeah if

01:28:45.480 you're watching this it's stick frame it's stick frame so i was like well let's build the basement

01:28:49.880 timber frame too and the dormers like if you paid a company to build timber frame they would stick

01:28:54.360 frame the dormers well of course or or buy them and just bolt them on right yeah um i i timber framed

01:29:00.440 that i'm just like let's just be pure the whole way and there's it's as an engineer i thought well

01:29:06.920 i want to build a house with timbers i like how timbers look but too but you know uh we'll just bolt

01:29:12.200 them together we'll use iron brackets that's the best way to do it but in the course of this one

01:29:16.840 week class i came to realize wow if you just let go and make everything out of wood it solves problems

01:29:24.040 that you would create when you start using metal fasteners like wood shrinks right it takes like

01:29:29.800 six or eight years for a big timber to fully dry out so how do you deal with metal fasteners and

01:29:36.360 shrinking wood well the metal fasteners can rip out but if you build your fasteners out of wood

01:29:41.240 like it can all work it moves together and there's you know if you go to germany you know

01:29:46.760 there's homes that are four or five hundred years old to show that it can work so so all the timbers

01:29:53.160 came from the property what about the stone there's a lot of stone in the house yep we we got some of it

01:29:57.480 out of the creek we dug some of it out of the ground all of the stone is from the property how did

01:30:01.960 you dig it out of the grant what does that mean you started a stone quarry on your on your own property

01:30:06.120 in my front yard it's now a pond uh but i there was an old logging road and the erosion had exposed

01:30:13.240 this layer of rock and i thought well that layer of rock must go pretty far so i started digging using

01:30:20.680 a backhoe i started digging the dirt off of that layer of rock and i'm like wow there are lots of

01:30:25.480 rocks here and i just i almost giggled out loud when i shoved on that layer of rock with my backhoe and

01:30:32.760 all these rocks started rolling out in front of the blade and they looked like rocks you could

01:30:36.760 buy at the store you know like well why would i go buy them like i can just like shove three tons

01:30:44.120 of them out of here and you know a few minutes um and then i had people coming and visiting obviously

01:30:51.320 we looked like a bunch of weirdos building this timber frame house up on the hill and people would

01:30:56.680 come up and where were you living at this point we lived in a mobile home like we just pulled in a

01:31:01.480 mobile home and we i told my wife we don't live in it for like six months we ended up two years

01:31:06.920 in a 900 square foot mobile home with four kids no way it's but i mean it's actually not that bad

01:31:14.280 you get to know your family really well you can hear it's like being on a boat yeah you try to go

01:31:19.400 to the bathroom and if you're gone for more than five minutes like the wall between the kitchen and

01:31:23.640 the bathroom is so thin you're just enjoying private moment there on the throne trying to read a

01:31:30.680 magazine about timber framing or something right and you can hear the kids at the dinner table saying

01:31:35.880 where'd daddy go where daddy where's daddy and then start trying to find daddy anyways it was a good

01:31:43.560 comfy experience and now we actually kept the mobile home and we lease it to deer hunters

01:31:49.400 really yeah it's a double wide it's so it's full of deer heads and bunk beds now and uh the hunters call

01:31:56.120 it the lodge which we find amusing my wife calls it the double lodge since it's a double wide do you

01:32:01.560 have a lot of deer on your land we have yeah trophy deer all over what do you charge to rent it just

01:32:07.480 in case people are interested uh we were booked up you don't want any weird internet people on your land

01:32:15.320 yeah we are booked up yes so how long did it take you to finish this house it's not finished

01:32:21.960 i've been criticized you know in the campaigns people try to use this against me some guy goes

01:32:27.320 he doesn't even have doors on all his rooms he's some kind of weirdo great well we haven't made that

01:32:34.040 door yet right you're making the doors we have made a few of them yeah we're kind of breaking down

01:32:39.880 now and buying a few doors now that the kids are gone so this that was like your kids wait so what

01:32:47.080 what year did you start how long has this process been so we started in 2003 so we're 21 years and

01:32:53.560 we've been that off the grid that long too again now when you say off the grid what do you what do

01:32:57.960 you mean we're not connected to any public utility not electricity not water not sewer not phone the

01:33:06.280 the house is totally disconnected from everything did you build those systems yourself yeah using a

01:33:13.080 lot of it's off the shelf stuff but some of it's improvised field expedient so so like for like the

01:33:19.080 tesla battery the car battery that runs the house you can't buy that out of a catalog you go to a junkyard

01:33:24.680 and say how much you want for that wrecked model s and like or i'll sell you the battery for 15 000.

01:33:31.000 why not why can't you just buy the battery separately they won't like tesla wouldn't

01:33:35.800 sell me a power wall i would i tried to buy one for years why because it has to be connected to

01:33:41.400 the grid for some reason their business model involves that so i was like all right well i'll

01:33:47.400 get a battery how much different can it be from the batteries in their car so i drove to lakeland

01:33:53.000 near georgia with a little trailer landscaping trailer the battery weighs i think 1200 pounds

01:33:59.240 um but here's the funny thing it's considered hazardous material if you pull it on a trailer

01:34:06.840 but if it's in a car it's just fine

01:34:10.920 so i i hurried up and got back to kentucky with the trailer i don't have a hazmat license so it was a

01:34:15.640 wrecked tesla model s and you pulled the battery out of it yeah and what'd you do with it disassembled

01:34:21.880 it i paid 15 000 cash but this is like you know i'm i count this probably like 15 or 20 years

01:34:28.200 hopefully it'll last and so i brought it home took it apart actually i made a youtube video of this

01:34:35.320 and what's kind of funny is i had these big rubber gloves that a friend who had worked on power lines

01:34:39.880 you know they were leftovers and he gave to me and so like in the youtube video i try to make sure like

01:34:45.400 i'm using big rubber gloves and stuff and i did like this fast forward you know of the disassembly

01:34:51.720 of the battery and i forgot like my two little boys are in there helping me and they don't have

01:34:55.960 the gloves on they haven't earned the right to have gloves don't put stuff on the internet like i once

01:35:03.880 i i have a tesla model s one of the very first ones made and i've got friends of coal license plates

01:35:10.360 on it like in kentucky you can get friends of coal it's a totally black coal coal

01:35:15.160 coal yeah sorry so because in kentucky that's if you plug into the grid that's likely where

01:35:20.120 your electricity is where i would think yeah so i'm driving this thing back from dc this was when

01:35:24.360 gas was you know getting close to five dollars a gallon it was over four dollars a gallon and i and

01:35:29.400 i stopped in west virginia to charge my tesla at a supercharging station just to kind of troll people

01:35:35.000 on the internet and i made sure to get a picture of my friends a coal license plate and i said i'm just

01:35:39.160 charging up with coal here in west virginia and uh within 30 seconds i knew i'd made

01:35:45.000 a mistake because somebody had zoomed in on the picture and my tags were expired

01:35:50.680 and they started tagging the kentucky state police my local sheriff the the dmv in kentucky like they

01:35:58.440 were trying to get me in trouble and i'm like there's no way to stop this now and so they were

01:36:04.040 relentless and um but then somebody realized they had been expired for 18 months that i'd actually made

01:36:10.280 it a year without paying taxes and was maybe likely to get out of a year of taxes well it's

01:36:15.960 your win then yeah but uh in kentucky i think they make you go back and pay the old taxes anyways what

01:36:22.120 i learned there is like search everything in the picture before you put it on the well yes and and

01:36:27.080 others with zestier personal lives then you have learned this the hard way

01:36:30.520 no it doesn't seem you've got enough minor minor tax evasion issue here you don't have time to be

01:36:38.600 too weird so so you get the tesla battery back to your off-grid house and what do you have to do

01:36:45.400 because it's not made for this it's a car battery it's a car battery it's made to run 400 volts all of

01:36:50.680 my uh existing system was made to run on 48 volts but there were 16 modules each nominally 25 volts and i

01:36:57.720 realized if you put two of those in series you could make 50 volts so i put uh eight sets of two

01:37:03.480 in series and so we put eight parallel a paralleled eight sets of two in series so i got 50 volts at a

01:37:10.360 lot more amperage than what the tesla car would normally draw it was capable of doing that and how hard

01:37:17.400 is that to do but well i mean it took a few days but it's lasted for six and a half years i wouldn't

01:37:26.920 advise doing this at home like why put it in an outbuilding i mean if it catches on fire it's

01:37:33.320 probably like chernobyl that mini series like don't look at the reactor god cannot put out he

01:37:38.440 created lithium ion but he can't put the fire out if it starts so i would not attach it to your house

01:37:44.440 mine is like is it attached to your house kind of yeah it's like a basement room that's not under the

01:37:52.440 house like i don't want to get into everything under my house right now okay so my wife says

01:37:58.680 our house is my science project and she's the mouse and she doesn't mind that but i keep rearranging the

01:38:04.360 maze on the weekends when i come back from dc and then she has to find the cheese while i'm in dc

01:38:10.600 but it's she's more like the astronaut i think in a rocket i think that's exactly she's the only same

01:38:15.800 trust level required correct yes she trusts me while i'm in dc and i trust her to fly the house while

01:38:21.560 she's in kentucky so what um she's also an mit graduate so i assume she is like kind of understands

01:38:27.080 some of the stuff oh yeah yeah although she would like to have just one thing in the house where if

01:38:32.600 something went wrong she could call somebody but she can't she's got to like call me and then i walk

01:38:38.040 her through it by the way it's a good like marriage security but it's just like if we ever

01:38:44.760 if we ever broke up or if let's say she put something in my coffee and i didn't wake up

01:38:49.560 the next day she'd have a hard time running the house so so you put these you put the nodules which

01:38:57.240 is basically just separate batteries yeah right okay within that within the big battery full battery

01:39:01.720 then i put a computer on it um a raspberry pi and i made a little graphic screen and the raspberry pi

01:39:08.680 using uh an arduino talks to the can bus which is a proprietary tesla communication system so i use the

01:39:17.320 battery management system that's native to the tesla battery modules if there's a nerd listening

01:39:22.600 to this this makes complete sense and they'll be like oh well why wouldn't you do that and everybody

01:39:27.080 else is gonna be like uh he's just bsing so did you have to add new software to this to run it i had

01:39:33.160 to write software from scratch yeah but it's fun like this is what i do look i've been in congress for

01:39:40.840 12 years my brain has atrophied to the size of a walnut um it actually to a raisin and it it expands

01:39:48.440 to a walnut if i can go home and do these projects and then i go back to dc and it's back down to the

01:39:53.160 raisin i believe i believe that i don't understand how these projects work but i i know what brain

01:39:58.760 atrophy looks like and i know that congress induces it it's not a worm it just shrinks oh so how does it

01:40:04.840 work like it works great we can run the air conditioner like for the first 11 years we had

01:40:10.360 lead acid batteries and they didn't work that great you had to add water to them oh for sure

01:40:14.520 they put off hydrogen gas which is explosive i know they put off a sulfide gas that can kill you

01:40:20.920 like lead acids or batteries are bad and they're like over 100 years old but by the way i love

01:40:27.240 solar panels like republicans are like they look at me like you have solar panels you have an electric

01:40:32.600 car like are you sure you're one of us i'm like well the solar panels are rocks that make electricity

01:40:39.240 like they are amazing things they they take sunlight and turn it into something we can all use

01:40:46.440 so you could hate i tell republicans you can hate the subsidies you can hate the bailouts

01:40:52.040 you can hate the mandates i hate all of those things as well but don't hate solar panels they don't

01:40:57.000 hate the technology right because it's actually given me given me and can give other people

01:41:02.440 a license to be independent so let's get specific about it so you have this this tesla battery that

01:41:07.640 allows you to do everything a normal house can do you can run air conditioning you've got a dishwasher

01:41:11.480 you got washer dryer i'm assuming all this four deep freezers refrigerator four deep freezers full

01:41:16.680 of peaches beef and chickens running continuously continuously so um so your power draws significant

01:41:23.320 on all those appliances obviously yeah and the battery handles it fine how much propane or how much

01:41:30.440 diesel or what i assume you have a generator to recharge backup generator that runs occasionally

01:41:35.400 in the winter but i keep every time so your solar panels recharge the battery yeah for nine months

01:41:42.360 out of the year the backup generator doesn't run except for it's like test run every friday yeah yeah

01:41:46.760 exactly when we bust out the machine guns like who's in the driveway okay back down to level one

01:41:52.120 that's just the backup generator so your electricity is i mean as long as you know how to operate the

01:41:58.840 system which apparently only you do but if you can do that then you're just living a completely normal

01:42:05.000 life correct with electricity how do you do heat how do you heat your house so in one of the greenest

01:42:11.160 ways possible like i think the whole carbon thing is a scam of course it's a scam but if you do care

01:42:16.920 about carbon neutrality i wish we had more carbon we need more co2 yeah um and at periods in earth's

01:42:22.280 history we had more co2 and plant life was doing better and we've seen plant life uh we've seen the

01:42:28.120 coverage of green on the globe increase as co2 levels go up crop production goes up as co2 levels

01:42:34.040 go up but if you did care about co2 i am using wood on my farm like just trees that fall down i'm not even

01:42:42.840 going out and cutting a living tree there's enough trees falling down deadfall deadfall that if i don't get

01:42:49.560 to them the termites do that's right and they they turn them into co2 and methane but i can get

01:42:55.000 to them and cut them up and bring them to my house and burn them in a wood gasifying boiler which is

01:43:00.120 super efficient by the way once you start cutting wood for heat efficiency like if you figure out a

01:43:06.920 boiler is twice as efficient you can cut half as much so would get can you because anyone who's made it

01:43:11.480 this far in the interviews probably interested in wood gasification can you explain what that is

01:43:15.240 how is it different from a normal wood-fired boiler or wood stove yeah and a normal

01:43:19.240 wood stove you you put the wood in there it can be green um you you light it on fire you get it going

01:43:25.080 and then you control the air that goes to it to keep it from getting too hot and uh a lot of smoke

01:43:31.400 comes out especially when it's idling because it's an inefficient combustion process and it's at a

01:43:36.760 relatively low temperature under let's say a thousand degrees right but in a wood gasifying boiler you get

01:43:42.440 the fire started and it basically turns the wood into charcoal and drives the gases out of it

01:43:48.360 into a secondary chamber that's ceramic because it's burning at over 1500 degrees so some of the

01:43:55.160 stuff that would do you get wood to burn that hot you just you deprive it of oxygen at first

01:44:00.520 and and get it hot and then you drive all the gases off and you put more oxygen in in that secondary

01:44:07.240 chamber and it it looks like it's burning gas like it'll be a blue flame

01:44:11.240 flame um and then it'll turn into a yellow flame um it starts out actually and this is just oak maple

01:44:18.920 beach this is just conventional firewood i burn near wood nearest wood to the house right like

01:44:24.600 near what i mean i don't remember that near wood yeah near wood nearest you burn softwood in it

01:44:30.680 you can but the bt again if you're doing this yourself oh care about efficiency like if you look at the

01:44:37.160 old timers they were the greenest people on the planet right they didn't waste a thing and they

01:44:43.720 figured out the most efficient way to do things because it was minutes out of their lives yes so you

01:44:49.240 start figuring out how to be more efficient when you're trying to be self-sustaining so i've got on

01:44:54.920 my twitter bio uh i used to say it may still say this on their greenest member of congress that doesn't

01:45:01.160 mean i just got there and i'm green nobody i never got any of the fact checkers to come after me on

01:45:07.160 that nobody wants to fact check me because i probably am the greenest member of congress who's

01:45:13.000 who is has self-sustaining food self-sustaining uh without externalities right uh self-sustaining power

01:45:21.160 self-sustaining water so you heat with wood how much would you burn would you say a season

01:45:28.920 the size of this table maybe four stacks of wood the size of this table so this is about a cord this

01:45:37.960 is about a cord is four by four by eight so it's like roughly that so yeah four cords a year yep

01:45:43.240 that's not much that's impressive uh how do you get hot water we've got three ways to make hot water

01:45:49.480 when our geothermal unit's running in the summertime doing the air conditioning it takes the heat out of

01:45:54.200 the living room and puts it in the hot water tank so we have free hot water from like

01:45:58.760 may until september when the air conditioner's running and then in the winter when the boiler

01:46:04.360 the wood boiler is running that makes hot water and then if there's ever not the air conditioner

01:46:09.400 running or the boiler running we have an on-demand this is where we cheat on-demand propane hot water

01:46:14.840 heater that makes up the difference amazing but you could pretty easily set up a wood-fired outdoor you

01:46:21.800 could yeah but in in the summer again you get it for free from the air conditioning i actually have a

01:46:27.000 fourth way to make hot water too um so when we're not connected to the grid a lot of people who have

01:46:34.680 solar panels are connected to the grid and if they have extra power they sell it back right

01:46:40.200 i'm always depressed when i have extra power my solar panels just turn off and i'm like

01:46:45.000 run around turn on some lights you know turn on something i don't want to waste this free electricity

01:46:51.320 so i got extra hot water heater elements that run on dc so that when the sun when our house is full

01:46:59.160 the first thing it does is it tries to charge the tesla that's sitting in the garage so the tesla

01:47:04.600 is sitting there at half full and a solid state breaker in my breaker box comes on and starts the

01:47:09.960 tesla charging then when the tesla gets full and the house battery is full i create hot water with the

01:47:16.920 electricity so i've got like a fourth way to make hot water hot water is almost as good as water i

01:47:23.480 mean if you've ever gone without water you know it's bad yeah but going out without hot water is

01:47:28.680 almost just as bad yeah i i have experience with that yes where do you get your water so i dug a well

01:47:41.560 um and dug not not drill dug it there's there are lots of old dug wells on our farm so i knew it could

01:47:50.120 work yeah the way they would do it they would dig a big pit yes they didn't dig it just straight down

01:47:55.320 they dug a big pit and then they laid up stones in a circle you know the stones you see when you look

01:48:01.240 in an old well but then they backfilled the pit with stones so that extra area becomes like a reservoir

01:48:07.800 and then they put dirt on top of that so that you know when a raccoon poops next to your well it

01:48:12.680 doesn't necessarily go right into the reservoir so i did a very similar thing but i hit uh bedrock

01:48:20.120 and i borrowed a friend's jackhammer and spent a day inside of that hole with a jackhammer trying to

01:48:25.320 get even deeper through the bedrock i finally took my friend's jackhammer back and said okay that's deep

01:48:30.280 enough what was the jackhammer like i mean that's the best argument for for public health care

01:48:36.520 that exists because uh i don't i i have a new appreciation for somebody that's running the

01:48:45.000 jackhammer those are those would wear your body out quickly like really quickly yeah did you lose a

01:48:51.880 crown i did not lose a crown so does the does the well the dug well work it works um one month out

01:48:59.160 of the year we're kind of short on water yeah august yes august how'd you know that have you ever i

01:49:05.400 have a dug well lived in this situation yes i have a dug well so i'm aware of that but again you

01:49:10.280 conserve right of course if you have if you're connected to city water and it seems what's on

01:49:16.040 the other side is opaque to you you just use as much as you want and what happens is during those

01:49:23.400 peak periods that's when the utility company has to work extra hard that's when the the price and

01:49:29.000 the inefficiency goes way up is in those peak periods when people aren't cutting back in response to

01:49:34.200 the supply because the the actual cost of producing it isn't known when you're making it yourself it's

01:49:40.040 known but um i've argued that water and electricity even when they come from especially when they come

01:49:46.840 from utilities should have variable pricing based on the instant the the cost at that very instant to

01:49:52.680 produce it and then you can have appliances not mandated but smart appliances if you're rich you don't

01:49:59.400 care when the price of power goes up you don't just you don't know what it costs if you're poor

01:50:04.040 and you've got a little screen it says the power just went up you'll go turn it off right 100 you'll

01:50:08.440 you'll say well we'll do the dishes tonight right when it's cheaper and if you're middle income you'll

01:50:14.120 probably eventually the market will respond to this and automate these things so that you know if if you

01:50:21.000 know the price of electricity your appliance can know the price i don't want the utility company to

01:50:25.560 know what you're doing with it of course not but you can have these smart systems that make a lot

01:50:31.000 more efficient use of our resources so because you're not connected to the grid to any public

01:50:37.320 utility at all i mean you're actually independent in a way that no one outside of alaska i've ever met

01:50:43.080 is and it sounds like you're not giving up anything you're not living in a not too much there are some

01:50:49.240 sacrifices like well you know uh if it's cloudy for a lot of days and hot we may turn the thermostat up

01:50:57.160 yeah just so we don't have to hear the backup generator run that doesn't seem like a crazy

01:51:02.120 sacrifice there's some people wouldn't think the instant they had to turn the thermostat from 72 to

01:51:07.480 75 was be screw it i'm out of here i'm going i'm going back to the grid it means that the state

01:51:13.080 kind of has no control over your land correct they or me or so when i go to dc and they threaten me

01:51:22.680 or try to bribe me it's like i know once friday comes i'm going to be back on my farm and i don't

01:51:29.400 need them like it's not that i don't want to do things for people i help my neighbors and my neighbors

01:51:36.280 help me and i i want to you know do public service but because i have this comfort level that i'm going to

01:51:42.440 go back home to this i don't need the job we're self-sustaining um it gives you an extra dimension

01:51:50.520 of independence i think when you're in dc what about food they can they starve you out

01:51:59.240 i don't think so like they can cut off my fish supply because we don't raise fish and we don't

01:52:04.280 raise pork but we raise chicken you know meat and eggs we raise beef and we usually raise a pretty good

01:52:11.480 garden and i have an orchard uh peach peaches lots of peaches my first peach is going to be ripe here

01:52:19.480 in a few weeks and my last peach will be ripe in september so i've planted 14 kinds of peach trees

01:52:24.920 so they get ripe different weeks and they taste nothing like the cardboard peaches you buy at the

01:52:30.280 supermarket so you don't need to leave actually your farm no are you trying to talk me out of like i mean

01:52:36.920 this is a crisis i have some weeks i bet oh man on mondays it's like i you know you know you're going

01:52:44.520 to get hit with a two by four as soon as you you know walk in the door in dc um it's like is it weird

01:52:51.320 that i mean i guess what i'm struck by i don't live off grid though i do have an off-grid camp but the

01:52:57.880 amount of skills you need to build something like that is is really really striking like you actually

01:53:03.880 have to know how to do things complex things i mean timber framing is another level but electrical

01:53:10.840 plumbing masonry agriculture heavy equipment operation like you can do all of that

01:53:17.880 obviously so is it weird to be in a room with 434 people who can't do

01:53:24.440 shit who can't operate a micro i mean they're like actually incapable and maybe that's why they're in

01:53:28.760 politics so they can externalize their their self-loathing is that weird um i don't i really

01:53:37.320 don't think about it that much good i don't think about it where'd you pick up plumbing skills

01:53:44.760 so my rule is buy three books for everything um because you can you can go to a hardware store and

01:53:51.560 buy a book on plumbing but i don't trust one book so you buy two books and then if the two books disagree

01:53:58.520 what are you going to do well you got to have a third book so i've got three books on plumbing

01:54:02.680 three books on wiring three books on septic systems three three books on your septic to roofing yep

01:54:09.480 three i get three books on everything and you read them and i read them and then there's the code book

01:54:14.920 which is like you know the the it's almost like international housing code thing that some

01:54:21.480 municipalities have adopted and you have to abide by i just look at that as like a suggestion manual

01:54:29.320 so do you think now we're way in the weeds i don't know if anyone's watching but they're like

01:54:34.200 four handymen carpenter general contractors are still in this but do you think that code which

01:54:41.000 really determines how people live in this country the code it's not up to code is it is it real i mean is

01:54:48.440 it knowing what you do about all those different trades does the code protect people actually um

01:54:55.400 um it protects the contractors well i know that and so they help write it the unions do

01:55:03.080 so for instance um the roofers union and the plumbers union i think have conspired to put as

01:55:10.120 many holes in your roof with plumbing as possible right because all the venting yeah all the vents

01:55:16.280 right if you try to build a house to code you you likely to have four or five perforations in your

01:55:21.560 roof i've noticed and and that keeps the roofers busy like they're guaranteed to get a call every

01:55:27.000 few years to fix that leak and it's also very expensive it's it's fairly cheap to do roofing but

01:55:33.000 it's all the exceptions that cost money and then if you're a plumber that's one more thing like all

01:55:36.920 thing like all the flashing and all the oh yeah every time you have an aperture in a roof yes like

01:55:41.640 that's a vulnerability so i my my roof has no holes in it like i looked at this i'm like well

01:55:47.080 that's a good suggestion but who who benefits if i believe you vent your stove at the side of the

01:55:51.640 building not the no no holes in my roof no holes out the side have you seen that opera house in uh

01:55:57.400 i think it's sydney australia famous is it sydney or melbourne sydney okay the opera house yeah

01:56:01.880 there's no holes in that there's bathrooms in there how do they do it they have the the one-way

01:56:07.480 admittance valves like you have under your kitchen counter they have giant ones of those that work for

01:56:11.800 the whole system and they're not to code but i think that's stupid because why would i want to put

01:56:17.400 a bunch of holes in my roof well i couldn't agree more i'm interested in this topic so but

01:56:21.960 nobody else is now well but for the four people who are i've always wondered that why with wood

01:56:29.560 stoves i live everyone has lots of wood stoves and some of them i have wood stoves that vent out

01:56:34.680 the side of the building like next to a window and then do an l up it's not quite as efficient you know

01:56:41.800 because you've got to turn in the run but you don't have a hole in your roof and in a climate with like

01:56:46.600 lots of snow for example you don't want any holes in your right but how do you vent your furnace for

01:56:51.800 example um so that i just run in a typical flue and it goes up in the chimney with my

01:56:59.640 pizza oven flue my wood cook stove flue and my rumford fireplace flue so i have four flues

01:57:05.080 through the chimney on the gable end no they're in the middle of the house i put the chimney in the

01:57:09.560 middle of the house because it it's a big thermal mass and i wanted to smooth out the changes in

01:57:15.400 temperature in the house and so there's where i did accommodate one hole in the roof is the chimney

01:57:22.920 because if you put a big stone mass on the side of your house there's no way to insulate it

01:57:27.800 from the outside so but by the way let me say something like i know there are some women

01:57:33.400 watching this wondering like i want to live in a house like that that sounds like a lot of fun

01:57:38.520 talk to my wife first occasionally we have like some crisis that i have to solve and become macgyver

01:57:47.000 so the first time i got elected to congress for instance the day before i went to go get sworn in

01:57:53.080 the well pump failed and i'm like i can't leave my wife and four kids at home without water

01:57:59.720 and we have a very unique well pump what do you mean by that well i didn't buy the one at the hardware

01:58:07.960 store so you can't go replace it so i went down there and what did you buy it's like in a catalog

01:58:13.880 somewhere like at the engineer in me found the best one okay it's not the most common one but i had to

01:58:19.240 fix it so what i did is i found one of my uh drills you know like you drill holes with yeah and i took it

01:58:26.200 down to the well and i took the motor off the well pump and i chucked the drill to the well head and

01:58:33.880 because it's not submerged it's off the side in a pump house and i wired this you know had an outlet

01:58:39.560 on it but i just wired it into the well pump wiring and the drill pumped water for our house i believe

01:58:45.480 that long enough for me to go get sworn in i've seen i've seen that i've seen drills run winches

01:58:51.320 yes well i forgot it was there like i did my congress thing for you had it on continuously

01:58:57.480 yeah and then the the uh accumulator uh in the basement that controls the pressure would turn

01:59:03.400 the drill off and on whenever it needed more water pressure and so it ran continuously i forgot about

01:59:10.280 it i just got busy and like a year later a freaking water quit working again because the makita died

01:59:16.520 right right it was actually a milwaukee hole was the whole hog you know one of those yeah yeah yeah you

01:59:21.640 know i totally do with the handle on the side yeah those are cool drills so you um last night i just

01:59:28.280 want to end with this last night we were having dinner and which was really one of the most

01:59:33.080 interesting amusing dinners i've ever had but you made reference to a story but you we didn't get it

01:59:39.400 you didn't get a chance to finish it because i interrupted you but about putting new plumbing in a

01:59:44.440 county jail i think yeah tell that story yeah so quickly i got into politics because we were living

01:59:52.440 off the grid and i read this little newspaper and it said they were going to raise our taxes to fund

01:59:58.440 this cronyism in the county the conservation district which was building stuff for themselves

02:00:03.960 and not for other farmers they wanted to tax other farmers to help their farm right it wasn't really

02:00:08.680 about conserving farmers are the biggest best conservationists there are so let's don't punish

02:00:13.400 them anymore okay good call so i fought that tax and then i actually fought zoning in our county they

02:00:19.240 wanted to zone our county i mean zoning is to keep the smokestacks out of the cul-de-sacs right okay my

02:00:24.920 county didn't have any smokestacks and didn't have any cul-de-sacs right we did the like the neighborhood

02:00:30.680 in et you know that movie where the kids ride the bikes through the neighborhood we didn't have

02:00:34.440 neighborhoods like that so we didn't need zoning but somebody thought if we zoned the county

02:00:39.480 that we would get prosperity because they saw all the prosperous counties had zoning

02:00:43.640 it's like it's cargo cult totally it's like saying we should import some homeless because then we'll

02:00:49.240 have banks right right jp morgan will move here because in midtown they're homeless right so that

02:00:55.720 was i was fighting that and writing letters to the editor and then um finally i quit fighting the guy

02:01:02.040 who was doing all this he's called the county judge executive in kentucky like the mayor of the county

02:01:06.280 and i decided to run against him so you've never been in politics never in my life uh also there

02:01:12.200 was this guy named rand paul who was inspiring who was taking on the establishment it was his first run

02:01:17.800 for senate and it decided to get involved in his race too so just like with my house i didn't go in

02:01:22.840 part way i went in all in okay on politics one fall actually one spring because i had to win the primary

02:01:29.080 and rand did too and so um actually did a fundraiser for rand at my house when nobody wanted to do a

02:01:36.840 fundraiser for rand paul because he was running against the establishment my house wasn't finished

02:01:41.160 we weren't even living in it yet sorry little sidebar traipsed up from the double wide yes we went to the

02:01:46.360 double wide and we said for a hundred dollars you can come to our pizza party i did have the pizza oven

02:01:52.360 working and um you built the pizza oven before the bedrooms yes priorities that's right had to test

02:01:59.560 it out make sure it was inhabitable so um the funny thing too we didn't have doors on the bathrooms at

02:02:06.200 the time we had no doors so we we did run to lowe's the day before rand paul came and put a door on the

02:02:12.680 bathroom good call because i was like look this guy could be a senator someday and he might need to go

02:02:18.680 to the bathroom and we need something more than a curtain here so we call it the rand paul door on

02:02:23.400 the bathroom it's the one room that had a door from the very beginning anyways uh we did by the

02:02:30.440 way also this was in january and rand is cheap as hell he had a two-wheel drive suv so i had to plow all

02:02:38.120 my driveway so that he could get up there and the problem is it's gravel so i had to plow all my gravel

02:02:43.720 off practically just to get so for what it costs to upgrade to the four-wheel drive for rand paul

02:02:48.600 i like my gravel costs way more than that anyways i went all in on politics helped rand get elected

02:02:55.480 in his primary i was on the ballot the same day and in 2010 the primary may 22nd 2010 rand was on

02:03:02.360 the ballot and i was on the ballot but i was running for this little county executive seat trying to take

02:03:06.920 a republican out because he's trying to raise our taxes and bring in more government and so i won the

02:03:12.040 election and it was like the most terrifying thing when they handed me the key to the courthouse

02:03:17.160 like it's a small town and if the janitor didn't show up to open the courthouse and start the boiler

02:03:23.320 which looked like the african queen right it was like you had to kick it and do all this stuff to get

02:03:29.640 it started the sheriff's office wouldn't be heated the clerk's office wouldn't be heated and my office

02:03:34.520 wouldn't be heated if i couldn't get the african queen to start so anyways i it was like the dog that

02:03:40.680 caught the bus and i had promised i wouldn't raise taxes and i was immediately confronted with all

02:03:46.120 these problems that had accumulated over the years in our county government and the jailer came to me

02:03:52.920 who's an elected official in kentucky his name's chris and he he got elected the same day i got elected

02:03:59.480 and he was all in on my you know let's reform this county but he had some bad news for me that by the

02:04:05.720 the way the state government had sold the county government a bill of goods they said if you'll

02:04:09.640 keep our state inmates we'll pay you 32 a day and you'll make all kinds of money and the county was

02:04:15.960 a million dollars in debt because this did not work out and i wasn't going to spend another penny

02:04:21.880 you know on this throwing good money after bad and but we had 30 30 state inmates who go out and pick

02:04:28.680 up trash and you know mow around the courthouse and they they get real sweaty and the hot water

02:04:35.560 heater had quit working at the jail ooh and so the jailer chris comes to me and says um judge they

02:04:43.000 call me judge even though i'm not an attorney it was the county judge executive he said judge i got

02:04:47.480 some bad news he said what's that he said well hot water heater quit working on the state inmate side

02:04:52.360 and i can't mix state inmates with local inmates you know you get murderers along with non-support

02:04:57.640 you know for child totally in diy cases yeah it's like this we can't have them taking showers

02:05:02.760 together it's not gonna work and i said okay we'll just buy another hot water heater and he said well

02:05:08.920 i tried that i got a quote we only had one licensed plumber in the county and i said well what was the

02:05:14.360 quote he said twelve thousand dollars i said i mean this is a small county for a hot water heater

02:05:20.520 all of our property taxes together were like four hundred thousand dollars i mean twelve thousand dollars

02:05:25.240 for hot i'm not paying twelve thousand dollars for a hot water heater you tell that guy to get

02:05:30.120 lost and he said well what are you going to do it's like i'll go buy one at you know the hardware

02:05:35.400 store or something so i go look at this hot water heater at the jail it is not the kind you buy at the

02:05:40.440 store it's like a boiler almost and it's fairly involved it's got like inch and a quarter copper

02:05:46.920 lines it's not household plumbing but i had plumped i had three books on plumbing right i felt fairly

02:05:53.000 confident i said well if i could find one of these i'll put it in myself so i got on ebay and i looked

02:06:00.760 for this model hot water there was one buy it now for fifty five hundred dollars and i'm like i can

02:06:06.200 save the county like sixty five hundred dollars so i called an emergency meeting of our fiscal court

02:06:11.800 brought in the magistrates noticed it to the newspaper did it all legally and made a motion to buy

02:06:17.240 it now on ebay then i hit the button i bought this hot water heater they bring it in a tractor

02:06:23.800 trailer i didn't pay extra for the lift gate because i had inmates the the inmates take this

02:06:30.280 thing out of the tractor trailer and we go in and we take the old hot water heater out and um there were

02:06:37.160 three inmates in that closet right working on that hot water heater just demolishing everything so they

02:06:43.160 dragged that thing out of there and i had to go in the closet with the inmates to put the new one

02:06:48.840 in i'm like uh i only want one inmate in that closet with me fair the hot water heater needs plumbed i

02:06:55.560 don't need plumbed so as the other two inmates that were smelling pretty rank at this point i said you guys

02:07:03.640 go strip the old hot water heater i want anything of value on that besides you're in here for stripping

02:07:09.560 copper and other things like you're good at they're like we can do this judge we know we know

02:07:15.400 short irons bringing this tens bringing this copper will bring this aluminum they could quote every

02:07:20.360 price at the salvage seriously yeah so they i leave the two inmates stripping the old hot water heater

02:07:26.440 and it had a computer on it and stuff and i'm installing the new hot water heater and i noticed for

02:07:31.560 instance even like the the plumber had left off this water trap that keeps gases from escaping like a

02:07:38.360 safety device so i made sure to do it completely safe by the book or by the three books that i had

02:07:44.840 and um i come out of the closet by the way there's like 30 inmates i had to walk by the rec room that

02:07:51.800 had a piece of glass and they could all watch me changing this hot water heater and there's like 30

02:07:56.760 inmates like in disbelief with their hands and faces pressed to the glass like we have never seen a

02:08:01.640 county judge executive to get a callous on his hand or do anything so uh i go back out and the

02:08:09.560 inmate said we got everything of value there was this hulk of an old hot water heater sitting there

02:08:16.280 they had stripped the copper they had stripped all of the useful iron off of it and i said guys you left

02:08:23.000 the most valuable thing on it and they said no judge we've done this all our lives we stripped these

02:08:27.960 things there's nothing on here they'll bring anything down at livingston's that was the junkyard

02:08:32.600 place recycling place and um i said no you left the most valuable thing i said come over here and they

02:08:39.480 walk over and i said you see this lime green inspection sticker get it wet and peel it off and

02:08:46.360 glue it on the new hot water heater remember i refused to hire the only licensed plumber in the county

02:08:53.800 and they go judge you could go to jail for this i said i'll have a hot shower won't i

02:09:01.640 you actually did that i did that and the only reason i'm telling you this publicly is this was

02:09:09.560 how long was it like 15 years ago or something and uh no 14 years ago i think the statute of limitations

02:09:17.000 you know practicing it without a license as a plumber on a public building is probably expired if not the

02:09:22.440 doj will be at my house as soon as this airs but they have also since closed down the jail like a

02:09:28.520 few years later they it was a good move did they take the water heater with them i have you know

02:09:33.640 it's on my bucket list it may still be in there so what are they using it for now it's um i think

02:09:39.640 it's just vacant maybe they'll use it for drug rehab or something at some point which would make more

02:09:45.080 sense did it work did your oh yeah oh yeah it booted up the computer came on and everybody got

02:09:51.720 i mean 30 inmates just waiting to take a hot shower and it worked and worked it worked until they shut

02:09:56.600 the jail down that's incredible but um anyways that set the tone like you could say well you're the

02:10:04.840 executive of the county and you shouldn't be wasting your time on that but i i mean i had four

02:10:09.160 hours of effort in it and i saved the county sixty five hundred dollars and i'm like no this is worth

02:10:15.400 my time and it also shows the inmates like okay we're buying you dollar fifty lunches instead of

02:10:21.640 the two dollar lunches now because we fired the crony who was doing the food system totally and and

02:10:27.320 they were less likely to complain when they saw that the judge himself was actually willing to change

02:10:32.440 the hot water heater but it also set the tone for the sheriff and the county clerk and everybody else who

02:10:38.440 sees that and it's like man he is a cheap bastard like i'm not going to go ask him at the next fiscal

02:10:45.000 court meeting for anything why don't you tell the story to apac and maybe they'll leave you alone

02:10:49.480 it's not personal i'm not against you or your country i just don't want to spend more money

02:10:53.000 by the way i'm probably there would be some plumbing lobby against me next week after they see this well the

02:10:59.240 one thing i know for a fact is that you will bravely stand up to the irate plumbing lobby i will one

02:11:05.640 one more story about lobbies uh so i introduced this uh raw milk bill in congress and i you know

02:11:13.400 food freedom empower small farmers it's more nutritious i thought there was nothing to hate

02:11:18.040 about it i got 20 co-sponsors i put it in the hopper i got my hr number and that day the milk lobby

02:11:24.440 comes after me like they said there wouldn't be enough hospital rooms for all the children who were

02:11:29.000 going to die from raw milk if my bill passed and um this is kind of weird you've got a lobby going

02:11:35.240 after its own product the milk lobby so my wife saw all these things come up on her alerts on her

02:11:41.720 phone and she texted me she was worried about me and she says omg i didn't realize the lactose lobby

02:11:47.000 was this intolerant oh that's brilliant you said that that's pretty awesome

02:11:53.080 thomas massey thank you hey thank you tucker amazing thanks for listening to tucker carlson show

02:12:01.880 if you enjoyed it you can go to tucker carlson.com to see everything that we have made the complete

02:12:07.320 library tucker carlson.com

Rep. Thomas Massie： Israel Lobbyists, the Cowards in Congress, and Living off the Grid

Summary

Transcript