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Rep. Thomas Massie on Tucker Carlson (Full Episode) https://t.co/m4IkiJKmVS
Video Transcript AI Summary
James Carville once humorously shared a story about needing to relieve himself during a roast, leading to an awkward moment on C-SPAN. The conversation shifted to a unique anxiety device that tracks national debt in real-time, emphasizing the urgency of the issue. The speaker expressed frustration over lawmakers' apathy towards the growing debt, comparing it to ignoring personal problems until they become overwhelming. They discussed the implications of U.S. sanctions on foreign countries and the potential long-term consequences of such actions. The speaker also highlighted their off-grid lifestyle, detailing their self-sustaining home built from local materials and their commitment to independence from government control. They shared anecdotes about their journey into politics, emphasizing the importance of practical skills and community involvement in governance.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Do you
Speaker 1: know James Carville?
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: So he got stuck at a roast one time when we worked together in New Orleans and had to take a leak. It was on C SPAN. And on the tape, which I have seen, he's sitting
Speaker 0: there and he's kinda shuffling
Speaker 1: in his seat. All of a sudden, he takes this water pitcher off the table and sort of
Speaker 0: takes a leak in the water bottle. Oh, Josh.
Speaker 1: So what what is that thing moving on your lapel on your pocket?
Speaker 0: That's the debt. That's my anxiety generator.
Speaker 1: So it's it's actually making me really anxious. Is that is that real time?
Speaker 0: Yes. So it's synced to treasury. It gets the debt to the penny once a day, and then it looks at what the debt was a year ago, and it comes up with a rolling average debt per second. And it interpolates on weekends and holidays when the treasury is not paying attention, I am.
Speaker 1: So I think you're the only one who wants to know?
Speaker 0: Yes. And I want my colleagues to know, and it's great to wear this thing in an elevator with like Adam Schiff, and he's got nowhere to look. I once caught a a female congresswoman staring at it and had to tell her my eyes were up here. She asked me why I didn't make a belt buckle out of it. Can you say who it was?
Because I like No.
Speaker 1: I cannot. Oh, well, she's funny. That's very impressive. So what's the message of it?
Speaker 0: The message is, this is urgent. You know, it's it's hard to comprehend 14 digits of debt. But when you see the last 5 digits are moving so fast, you can't, you know, perceive them with your eyes, then you kinda understand, woah. We got a problem here. I mean, it's a $100,000 a second roughly.
So imagine we had this catapult, and we were launching, cyber trucks once a second into the ocean. That's how much debt we're taking on, continuously. Now there is some good news. I noticed last month, it went down. And I'm like, is my debt clock broken?
Why is it going down? And then I realized, oh, it's April 15th. Everybody's paying their taxes. Right. So the good news is we balanced it for a month.
The bad news is April 15th is the only reason that happened, and now the debt's going back up again. So maybe it, when it
Speaker 1: gets so big, it becomes something that you have to ignore. It's almost like if you fall off the wagon from drinking, you you binge. If you fall off your New Year's diet, you just eat the pizza and the gluten and dairy. It's like, why do you care? You know, you sort of go crazy.
And it feels like we're there.
Speaker 0: I am trying to make people feel very uncomfortable. I wear this on the floor of the house. Yeah. And, people literally, they'll they'll press the button that says yay or nay. I've I've argued we should relabel the voting button spend and don't spend.
Yeah. The red and 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 spend button then turn around and look at my debt badge and ask, did it just go up? But I want them to realize there are consequences to what they're doing because they have been, I think, as you said, just ignoring it, putting it off to the side.
Speaker 1: It almost feels like, you know, it's so big that why even deal with it?
Speaker 0: That's where we are. We kind of I think a lot of lawmakers are apathetic. They're like, well, we can't fix it. We're not gonna fix it. We might as well indulge in it, and I'll see what I can get.
Well, exactly. Yeah. So where does it end? Right now, we're able to finance it because we're the world's reserve currency. And when we print more money, which we're doing all the time, the Fed is doing that.
We're actually taxing the world. Everybody in the world who hold holds dollars gets like a 3% transaction fee. I say, we're kinda like the credit card at the gas station that gets 3%, because you're using that credit card.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: Well, we get 3% from inflation we cause because the world is using our currency. And we can do that as long as they use our currency. But I think it's going to end at some point. They're going to quit using our dollars as reserve currency. I mean, I watched your interview with Putin, and one of the things, you know, whether you hate him or not, one of the things he said that is true is when we sanctioned him, before we sanctioned Russia, 70% of their transactions were in US dollars.
And after the sanctions, it's less than 20% of their transactions are in US dollars. So what we're doing with all these sanctions, ironically, we are shooting ourselves in the foot every time we sanction a country and say you can't use our currency to have a transaction. We're we're taking away our ability to charge the 3% for that transaction because when we print 3% more dollars, we're just taking that money.
Speaker 1: And we're also sending a really clear signal, which is the dollar is not safe for you. Right. That It's the reserve currency because it's a safe haven, because it's a stable country. It's the most stable country
Speaker 0: in the world, and we're not gonna weaponize the dollar because that would be shooting ourselves. But suddenly, we are. And they'll they'll tolerate, like, 3% because we're not backed by dollars. We're backed by aircraft carriers right now. So they'll they'll sort of tolerate that 3%.
But one of the things we recently did in congress, we passed something called the Repo Act, where we said we're just going to seize all of Russia's sovereign assets in the United States. Well, it turns out a lot of that is Treasury debt that they've agreed to buy so that they can hold dollars. And, here's the problem with that. When people see that we've seized their money that they gave us in exchange for these, treasury notes, then other countries won't want to buy our debt. It's already happening.
And the price of a a long term bond that the treasury puts out will go it's already gone above 4%. It's, like, over 4 a half percent. They don't wanna buy them anymore because, you know, we probably wouldn't seize Great Britain's assets. But I could see a seizing China's assets.
Speaker 1: Why would I mean, that seems like theft. Just like take a country's assets when it belongs to the people of
Speaker 0: the country. Right? It's not just Putin. It is theft. Like, it's immoral, but even if you're okay with the amorality or immorality of it, it's shortsighted because eventually it'll catch up with us.
Speaker 1: So do any of the dumbos you work with understand that? Did you say, wait a second, if we do this, first of all, it's wrong. And if we're gonna be a beacon of light and order and justice in the world, we should abide by those principles. But even if you don't care about the even if, as you said, you're amoral, like, it's self defeating to do this. Do they understand that?
Speaker 0: Some of them understand it, but it doesn't matter. They'll still vote for something like the Repo Act anyway because it's popular. And with whom? With voters. They think, yeah, take Russia's money.
Like, you know, let's take yeah. Yeah. That'd be great. Let's take their money and use it in a war against them. It kinda feels good, but the problem is it's it's not moral in the long run, and it won't work in the long run even if you were okay with it.
Why are we in a
Speaker 1: war with Russia? I've never figured that out. Why Russia? It almost seems like they picked it off a map. Like, why would it be a war with Russia?
Speaker 0: You know what's interesting is we were in Afghanistan, and I was tracking this. I I talked to the special inspector general, John Sopko, about twice a year about the money that was being wasted in Afghanistan. It was about 50 $1,000,000,000 a year, and I was glad to see us get out of Afghanistan, but kind of like feathering the clutch and shifting gears, we just went from 2nd gear to 3rd gear because as soon as we quit spending $50,000,000,000 a year in Afghanistan, we started spending more than $50,000,000,000 a year in Ukraine. There is a military industrial complex. They call it the defense industrial base now in the United States.
They say we have to, they are hungry and we got to keep them fed and since we don't have any of our own wars and we don't have a reason to deplete our stocks and our, bombs and weapons that we have, we will engage in these other things to keep them healthy and thriving. In fact, the Biden administration even made that argument in a letter to congress for why we should do this supplemental foreign aid to Israel, to Ukraine, to Taiwan. They made the argument that the defense industrial base needs to be strong, and so we need to spend this money. And they gave a list of all the states in the United States that would benefit from this spending, and that's why they said we should do it.
Speaker 1: But if you're if I mean, look, everyone who lives here wants to be proud of the country, I always have been, and I'm proud of its people still. But if your main export is death, you know, that
Speaker 0: I mean, what It doesn't work in the long run. I mean, there is blowback wrong. We're engendering a lot of ill will. Look, 10 years ago, even more recently than that, the only way we could get to the space station was on a Russian rocket.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 0: And we, you know, we had a collaboration with them. We were able to get to space that way, and, now we don't. I mean, it's and the bad thing that's, you know, like in the Middle East, Israel is creating tens of 1,000 or 100 of 1,000 of people who are going to hate the United States. And they're going to hate Israel also. But because we're giving Israel the weapons to do what they're doing, we're creating a lot of people who hate us in this country.
Speaker 1: But we're told that it's essential to our national security to do that. Do you believe that?
Speaker 0: No. I don't see that. I mean, one of one of the reasons, like I said, the Biden letter said, well, we need to keep our industrial base strong, So let's fund all these weapons and send them over. But I don't see how it's strengthening our country. In fact, we're getting weaker by doing it.
Speaker 1: So you've been, I think the lone Republican to dissent from a lot of these votes. Can you how many votes have there been
Speaker 0: Oh my
Speaker 1: gosh. On this question, and where have you voted on them?
Speaker 0: Oh, I've I've tried to keep track. There were something like 18 votes on Ukraine, and I voted against every one of them since like 2014 when we started saber rattling. We do these non binding resolutions, whereas Russia's evil and, you know, whereas we support democracy. Now even then we knew that Ukraine was just corrupt as hell. But, you know, I the most corrupt country in Europe by far.
Yeah. So I started you know, there's been 16 or 20 votes on Ukraine. I've been against all of those. Just in the last 7 months, there have been probably 30 votes on Israel and the Middle East. 30?
30. There were somebody How
Speaker 1: many votes on the US border during that time?
Speaker 0: Oh, maybe maybe 4 show votes that you know, where we know they're going nowhere in the senate. Look, we haven't named 30 post offices. Like, last month, we voted, like 15 or 16 times on issues related to Israel. And I've been hit because I voted no on all of those.
Speaker 1: Why do you, because you hate Israel or is there another reason?
Speaker 0: No. Because I'm against, sending our money overseas. I'm against starting another proxy war. I'm against sanctions because it's gonna weaken the dollar. I'm for free speech.
Like, all of these resolutions run afoul of those things, and that's why I can't vote for them. Tell us what the free speech part of it. So recently they brought a bill to Congress, and this was actually a binding bill, not a non binding resolution. This was going to have the effect of law and people would get prosecuted if they, engaged in antisemitism on campuses. And the problem with this bill is they use some international definition of anti Semitism on a website somewhere.
My first question is, why don't you just put the definition in the bill? Why are you pointing to somebody's URL and a piece of legislation?
Speaker 1: You are the Congress, right?
Speaker 0: Right. We are
Speaker 1: the Congress. Write the laws.
Speaker 0: We should be. Instead, we're referencing a website, some that's not even hosted in the United States. And so I went to this website and it's got a fairly short definition, but it's also got examples of things that would be considered antisemitism. And some of these are actually passages in the New Testament, if you will, would be banned by this international definition of antisemitism. For instance, saying that, Jews killed Jesus, which is, you know, in the bible.
He was he was not welcome among his own people. Okay? And so that would be be antisemitism. And if you engaged in that on campus or just offered that as a thought, let's say, in a classroom, you would be antisemitic and you would run afoul of the Department of Education and some federal laws. And, you know, there were other examples in there that were hard to believe.
For instance, comparing the policies of Israel to to the Nazi regime would be anti Semitic. But the question is, what if their what if their policies ever became the same? Is this a static definition? Or what if we just
Speaker 1: have different opinions and your opinion is now a crime?
Speaker 0: Right. I mean, even if it's abhorrent.
Speaker 1: Even if it's wrong and stupid.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It's it's still legal. It should be.
Speaker 1: You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalists, right, left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood, and we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network.
And we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tucker carlson.com/podcast. Our entire archive is there. A lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn, when only an iPhone is running. Tuckercorrellson.com/podcast.
You will not regret it. So your colleagues I I think it passed. Right?
Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. It passed with, flying colors, but at least a few people woke up to this. I mean, they were.
Speaker 1: So but the the members of congress who, you know, go to church on Sunday, who just voted to ban the New Testament on campus, make it illegal to quote from the new testament, the Christian bible. Like, how did they square that?
Speaker 0: I think their voters let them get away with it. I mean, they they don't have to square it unless they're,
Speaker 1: But why would they wanna do something like that?
Speaker 0: Because there's a lot of pressure in congress to vote for these things. And our republican leadership thinks they're so smart. You know, we're in an election year, and they wanna bring up issues. They wanna put them, in front of congress and make us vote on them whether they're going anywhere in the senate or not. And they wanna split the democrats.
They wanna show that republicans are united and then split the democrats. That's one of the reasons they do it. Another reason they do it is there's a foreign interest group called APAC that's, you know, got the ear of this current speaker and demanded 16 votes in April on on Israel or the Middle East. We haven't had 16 votes in April on the United States in congress. So what's APAC?
APAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And, they didn't start out as a PAC in in the sense of a political action committee, but now they have a political action committee. Ostensibly, it's a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of Israel. They're for anything Israel. And they're a very effective lobbying group.
They get in there. They, they try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate, for instance, for Congress. They almost get On on what? On Israel. Like, the and I wouldn't do it.
And he said, why? And I'm like, I don't do homework for lobbyists. Right? I'm like, I didn't I didn't like writing term papers at college. I'm not writing one for you.
Speaker 1: What did they say?
Speaker 0: They said, oh, well, here, just copy Rand Paul's term paper and put your name on it. We'll accept that. And I'm like, no. I'm still not cribbing somebody else's homework to do homework. I'm not turning in my homework for you.
And and what you're laughing, but you know what? I bet I may be the only Republican in congress who hasn't done homework for APAC. And it's just what it is, it's conditioning. They want you to do something very simple and benign and, you know, for them. They don't really they don't really grade your term paper.
They just wanna know that you'll do something for them. And if you'll do something for them as a candidate, you're more likely to do something 2012 when I refused to turn in, and Israel turned the paper. Respond to that? Well, they they kinda got in my race a little too late there in the beginning and because it was hard to tell that I was actually going to win. And when they saw I was going to win, that's when they tried to get me to do the term paper.
They didn't have a political action committee at the time. They couldn't spend 100 of 1,000 or 1,000,000 of dollars against me at that time. It was just sort of like a whisper campaign to try to, hey, don't vote for him, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: That's why?
Speaker 0: Because at that point they sensed I wouldn't do what they wanted when I
Speaker 1: But what did they whisper against you? What were they saying about you?
Speaker 0: Well, they would do it through, for instance, churches, evangelical churches. They've got an organization called Christians United for Israel. We've sort of co opted evangelicals. People think it's a grassroots movement in Kentucky. It's actually a top down movement from APAC so that people who aren't even Jewish will feel like they've got to support Israel, you know, no matter what, And even if it's a secular state that funds abortions, they, you know, just sort of forget that part, and we've got to fund Israel.
So they have networks. So it's more than just about the money.
Speaker 1: So you get elected, despite their efforts, and then what happens? Do you talk to them after that?
Speaker 0: And by the way, let me just put a little footnote here. I'm not against Israel. I've never voted to sanction Israel. I've never said anything particularly, you know, critical of Israel, you know, other than, for instance, right now, they're bombing they've killed 1% of the civilian population in Gaza. That's concerning to me.
But, so what do they do now?
Speaker 1: Yeah. You get elected 2,012. Do you hear from them again?
Speaker 0: I vote my conscience, which they won't tolerate. So they ran with their 501c4 before they had a super pack. They were they were running educational advocacy ads against me saying that, you know, I'm bad on Israel. They didn't say don't vote for him. They just said he's he's a bad guy.
And so I said, alright. Well, you're not welcome in my office anymore. Because for years, I I invited him into my office. Let's talk this through. Let me explain to you.
I'm a libertarian leaning Republican. I don't vote for foreign aid for anybody, so don't be offended when I don't vote for your foreign aid. I don't vote for wars anywhere, so don't be offended if I tell you that. I'm for free speech, even if it's abhorrent. And we used to talk, but now they're banned from my office.
The situation went from bad to worse. This election cycle, they spent $400,000 against me, $90,000 last fall running TV ads in my district and Facebook ads and whatnot, trying to equate me with the squad. And then, this most recently, in fact, as I'm speaking you to you today, even though my election is over, they're still running 100 of $1,000 of negative
Speaker 1: It's a little weird though, because as you said, you're probably the only Republican in the house who hasn't done homework for them, who isn't on their side. And but and that's okay. I mean, you can have you know, you're a libertarian oriented Republican from Northern Kentucky. You're probably not gonna single handedly determine our foreign policy. So you I think you should, but you don't.
Thank you.
Speaker 0: And you're not going to. So
Speaker 1: why do they care? Why not just let Thomas Massie be Thomas Massie at Northern Kentucky? Like, why why the need to crush you?
Speaker 0: I don't know. I think it's they don't want one horse out of the barn. If one person starts speaking the truth, they're afraid it could be contagious, perhaps. Or it's like a new car. They they go to Mike Johnson, and they say, we want a a Cadillac, you know, Escalade, with pearl white paint, And here's, you know, here's the rims we want, and Mike Johnson puts that bill on the floor.
It passes with a unanimous vote except for one guy votes no, and it I think they feel like it's a scratch on their car. They wanted a brand new car, and it got scratched by this guy named Massey. They were gonna drive it over to the senate and ask for unanimous consent, but now the senators are saying, wait. Why this wasn't unanimous in the house. Why should we do it unanimously in the senate?
And it starts raising questions, and I think that's why they get mad.
Speaker 1: What I find interesting is that it's not just, that they disagree with your views, which they do, and I think they have an absolute right to disagree with anybody's views. We all do. But they've called you a bigot, and they call you an anti semite and say you're a hater and try to destroy your character. That seems like a very different level of response to me.
Speaker 0: Right. They there's no need to do that. I'm not anti semitic. I don't have an anti semitic hair in my head. Okay?
It's I I mean, I don't like APAC anymore. Like, I used to be neutral toward APAC. Right? But I I have no antagonistic feelings toward Jewish people. I am the last thing.
I think I'm probably the least xenophobic person in congress. I mean, these are the guys that my colleagues wanna sanction everybody, you know, declare them terrorist states, you know, come up with these strongly worded resolutions. I don't vote for any of that crap. Right? I'll unless somebody does harm to me, I'm not gonna call them anything.
So I get called names just for staying out of all of this political posture.
Speaker 1: That's disgusting, though, isn't it? You know, I guess character. They can
Speaker 0: they can disagree with your views. Right.
Speaker 1: But but to call you, like, the worst thing
Speaker 0: you can be in America, like, that's disgusting. You know, I I have a thick skin. Apparently. And and here's the good news, Tucker. My my constituents aren't falling for it.
It. 2 weeks ago, I just had a primary and got 76% of the vote with APAC running 100 of $1,000 of ads. So it's it's not working against me. I I think it's shortsighted, on their, you know, on their side to do this. They're just burning money.
But they're trying to make an example of me.
Speaker 1: But they're also exposing their weakness.
Speaker 0: I think they are. I think they've exposed a real weakness here. And you know, it used to be just me voting against some of these resolutions, but recently where they tried to ban passages in the new testament, I think we got, like, almost 2 dozen Republicans who say, wait, hold on there.
Speaker 1: Can I ask a question though? Just a fundamental question. So the Biden administration has put a bunch of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, 1936 ish. It's been on the books for, you know, 90 years. And it's never been enforced ever until recently, until really the Trump era and Biden era.
So but the law requires people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments to register. It's that simple. And this is the largest lobby in the United most effective lobby in the United States on behalf of foreign government. Are they registered with FARA?
Speaker 0: They're not, but they should be.
Speaker 1: Well, how how can that how can that be? How can they put Paul Manafort in jail, which they did, on a FARA violation and a bunch of other people in jail on FARA violations, but the largest and most effective and most feared foreign lobby working for a foreign government doesn't have to
Speaker 0: register under the law? That's insane. Oh, man. Don't make me take their side, but I'll explain as best as I can what they're arguing.
Speaker 1: May I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should take their side.
Speaker 0: I don't know. Well, I'm gonna agree with you at a second, but let me at least offer what I think is their argument. They would say, we are Americans. The members of APAC are Americans. And that they have the right to free speech.
Speaker 1: Paul Manafort's an American.
Speaker 0: Right. Right. Yeah. That so there's the good rebuttal as FARA applies not to foreigners, to foreign agents Right. Of foreign principles.
Speaker 1: Agents of foreign principles. Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign government.
Speaker 0: Correct. So this is APAC is exactly what FAR is meant for. Now they would say, and we have a first amendment right. Okay. Well, I I agree with you there, but we also have election laws.
And to the it's disclosure. Right? We're they're not FARA doesn't say you can't say Thomas Massey is, you know, an ignorant hillbilly. You're allowed to say that if you want to, but we just wanna check where your money's coming from. Tell us where it's coming from, what you're spending it on, and if you are lobbying on behalf of a foreign country.
So they should be now to your point, they should be registered with FARA. This is what FARA is, is where there's gray area, where it's an American representing a foreign country. Let's let's look and see if you're getting any money from that foreign country. Are you a dual citizen with that foreign country? Are you being directed by, for instance, is Netanyahu speaking to your group, advising you on your next move?
Those are you getting money from the military industrial complex? Like, because to understand APAC, I think it's easiest to model them as a, military industrial lobby. Like their biggest thing is they want more equipment, more military equipment from the United States going to Israel. In fact, when they used to be allowed in my office, the thing they the argument they would make is, oh, we're just stimulating the US military industrial complex because every single penny of the 3,800,000,000 that they nominally get, now they're getting way more than that, but that Israel nominally gets goes to US military contractors. Now that didn't make me warm and fuzzy.
Okay? But that is their argument. And if you notice what they advocate for, I think sometimes they advocate for things that even Israelis wouldn't advocate for.
Speaker 1: I believe that.
Speaker 0: Like, they would, I think, be okay with a war with Iran, like a all out, you know, apocalyptic war with Iran. Whereas there are people in Israel who say, woah. Hold on a second. We'd we'd rather not have a war with Iran, but APAC does things that lead us in that direction. And so they're kind of like what the NRA is to gun owners, APAC is to Israel.
Or what the Farm Bureau is to farmers, APAC is to Israel. In other
Speaker 1: words a faction.
Speaker 0: Right. They represent a faction, but usually a corporate faction. That, and they're using the imprimatur of grassroots that they've diluted or confused into bullying congressmen. And the NRA does that and Farm Bureau does that. I'm picking on some other right wing groups here.
Speaker 1: For for sure. And by the way, I think there are probably a lot of things that APAC is for that I'm for and Farm Bureau NRA, same thing. Right. It's I just the idea of a foreign government playing in our political campaigns openly.
Speaker 0: Openly in that, they are showing you they're doing it, but opaquely in that you can't track it because they're not registered.
Speaker 1: Is is there any other Republican who has your views on this?
Speaker 0: Well, I have Republicans who come to me on the floor and say, I wish I could vote with you today. Yours is the right vote, but I would just take too much flack back home. And I have Republicans who come to me and say, that's wrong what APAC is doing to you. Let me talk to my APAC person. By the way, everybody but me has an APAC person.
Speaker 1: What's that mean, an APAC person?
Speaker 0: It's like your babysitter, your APAC babysitter, who, is always talking to you for APAC. They're probably a constituent in your district, but they are firmly embedded in APAC. And Every member has something like this? Every rep I don't know how it works on the Democrat side, but that's how it works on the Republican side. And when they and when they come to DC, you go have lunch with them.
And they've got your cell number, and you have conversations with them. So I've had, like That's absolutely crazy. I've had 4 members of congress say, I'll talk to my APAC person. And, like, it's clearly what we call them, my APAC guy. I'll talk to my APAC guy and see if I can get him to, you know, dial those ads back.
Speaker 1: Why have I never heard this before?
Speaker 0: It doesn't benefit anybody. Why why would they wanna tell their constituents that they've basically got a buddy system with somebody who's representing a foreign country, it it doesn't benefit the congressman for people to know that, so they're not gonna tell you that.
Speaker 1: It's it's in have you seen any other country do anything like this?
Speaker 0: Like No.
Speaker 1: Russia Russia obviously determines the outcome of our elections. We keep hearing that. Does anyone have a Putin guy that they talk to?
Speaker 0: Not only do they not have a Putin guy, but they don't they don't have a Britain guy. They don't have an Australian guy. They, you know, they don't have a Germany dude. Like, it's the only country that does this, that has somebody that, like, uniformly I guarantee there's some spreadsheet at APAC where where, you know, the the APAC dude is who's matched up with the congressman is there, and then all the congressman's votes on the issue. Oh, has the congressman been to Israel?
They they pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to Israel. I may be I mean, I don't I I'm not the only Republican who hasn't taken the APAC trip to Israel, but I'm probably one of a dozen that hasn't taken that trip, and the other ones just haven't got around to it.
Speaker 1: What's the trip like? Do you know?
Speaker 0: It's kind of like, I think vacationy. You go see the wall. You go see the, you know, the sites, things like that. It's such a great
Speaker 1: I must say, it's such a great country. Jerusalem, especially, is such a wonderful place that that's gotta have a big effect.
Speaker 0: You go, like, swim in the Dead Sea. Yeah. Yeah. I've done that. Yeah.
Not on an APAC trip, but
Speaker 1: I would recommend it to anybody.
Speaker 0: I'm sure it wasn't an APAC trip.
Speaker 1: Possible. I paid for 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 Israel.
I like the people, and I love the food, and, like, the whole thing is so great. But they they've But that's distinct from the government of Israel, which is just a foreign government.
Speaker 0: My my sense is the people are are very entrepreneurial. Yeah. That, they're, publicly minded. You know, they care about their country, that that they're generally good people. Right?
Speaker 1: That's certainly been my experience in trips there for sure. It's great. It's just that's I mean, I think it's probably one of my favorite maybe my all time favorite place to go, with my family. But that's just a completely different thing from taking orders from its government. Right.
I mean, right?
Speaker 0: No. They'll again, they'll say it's these are American citizens who are, you know, coordinating all He
Speaker 1: has just again, this is almost a rhetorical question, but in your whatever, 12, 14 years in congress, 12 years, have you ever seen any indication that Russia is influencing election outcomes, or candidates, or members?
Speaker 0: Not not in a, quiet way. Like, you know, they'll put out statements. Russia obviously has Russia Today, RT.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think it's been banned, but
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. I I like they, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken, of which I'm a big fan being from Kentucky. Right? They realized that fried was became sort of a pejorative, and people didn't wanna eat fried food, so they changed the name to KFC.
So you don't have to say fried. Okay? Russia today changed their name to RT, so you don't have to say Russia. But there's a strong analogy there. But, I mean, there are efforts.
You'd be, a fool to think that they're not trying to influence things here just like we are there. We, you know, we have, what is it? Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. We we have I mean, we spend a $1,000,000,000 over well over a $1,000,000,000 on the foreign propaganda that's out in the open that we know about. Right?
So there are foreigners spending money on propaganda over here as well. I don't wanna say they're not involved, but people don't say, oh, I need to go talk to my Russia guy.
Speaker 1: But you've never, like, in the cloakroom or on the floor or at dinner, you've never heard another Republican member say, I'd love to vote for this, but Putin doesn't want me to.
Speaker 0: I have never heard that. You have in my
Speaker 1: life. What about China?
Speaker 0: No. There's I mean, unless it's a a spy sleeping with a democrat, there's some of that going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But that's not that's not in public. So how do you think it's it's just interesting because you're you're clearly not a bigot. I think it's very obvious. And they've called you 1 and they've spent, you know, 1,000,000 of dollars against you over the years, and it has had no effect.
You get reelected in the primary in the seventies. So,
Speaker 0: like, why
Speaker 1: are they still spending against you in in your state, statewide? And can you just continue to serve in congress while disobeying?
Speaker 0: Well, they say that they don't want me to run statewide. They are worried that I will run for McConnell's seat, and so they are trying to send me a message. That is what they would tell you. But why I don't know what the message is. Maybe It's
Speaker 1: a little presumptuous to decide against the bees.
Speaker 0: I've never said that I'm running for the senate. Right? Yeah. I I'm pretty much disinterested in it personally and publicly. But just in case, they're running ads statewide.
Now mind you, there are 6 congressional districts in Kentucky, and I only represent one of them. They're running the ads in all 6 congressional districts just in case.
Speaker 1: Amazing. What do you think of Mitch McConnell after all these years of being in the delegation with him?
Speaker 0: He's a shrewd guy. Yep. He's quick. He's, let me let me give you an example of how quick he is. So we had a congressman Jamie Comer, who's now chair of the oversight committee.
He got elected in a special election, which means you come in in the middle of the term, and you have to boot up with no staff. And so it's it's kind of, you know, disorienting. So Mitch McConnell had a, had an event for Jamie Comer on his 1st day in congress. It was in a townhouse with, like, 200 lobbyists. By the way, I'm never gonna get invited to one of these now that I tell you the story.
And so Jamie's there, and McConnell goes, I believe Jamie took his first vote tonight. And that's such a perfect invitation. And I wasn't supposed to speak, but I interrupted senator McConnell, who was at the time the majority leader. And I said, yes, senator McConnell. He did take his first vote, and I know he has no staff.
So I advised Jamie, when you walk into the chamber, look at how I vote and then vote the other way and you'll be just fine. And every, you know, 200 lobbyists thought it was a pretty good joke, and they were laughing. And as the laughter die died down, McConnell goes, well, Thomas, I'm glad you and I are giving Jamie the same advice. And then the the place just the walls almost collapsed.
Speaker 1: He's good. He's good. Funny.
Speaker 0: So, but I think it's time for new leadership in the senate. I mean, he's obviously it's way past time. And and this is 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 things in case, you know, we poll Trump's popularity, we poll the senator's popularity, in case they get involved in your race. Yeah. And senator McConnell's favorabilities are lower among Republican primary voters than our Democrat governors' favorabilities.
Speaker 1: Seriously. Yes. Lower than governor Bashir.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Bashir is around 40% among Republican primary voters and McConnell's around 30%.
Speaker 1: Well deserved. Well deserved. So, I'm glad to hear that because I like Kentucky and I think its voters are sensible. What do you think it counts for in the final months years of his public career, his public statements that all that matters is Ukraine? Like, what is that?
Speaker 0: I have no idea. By the way, I have so many fights in the house Yeah. That I try to avoid every fight in the senate that I can. And you're you're trying to draw me in, and I love you, and I'll indulge these questions. But for 12 years, my strategy has been pick my fights in the house.
Smart. Let let Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and and, you know, JD Vance, Rick Scott. Let those guys figure out the senate because I haven't been able to fix the house. So I'm damn sure not gonna be able to fix the senate.
Speaker 1: But do you it's just interesting. Okay. Taking McConnell out of it and and even the Senate out of it, but some of the committee chairman in the house, for example, seem like Ukraine is all that matters to them. And there's, of course, the question
Speaker 0: is you noted of donations from Lockheed, etcetera, the military industrial complex, but it it almost seems messianic to me. It seems heartfelt to me. It seems sincere that they think that this is all that matters, winning this war against Russia. What do you have any sense of why they feel that way? I don't.
And, the hardest ones to understand are people like Mike Johnson who used to be against the you know, sending more money to Ukraine. But now that he's the speaker, he's like you said, he seems strongly convicted that, we should be sending money there.
Speaker 1: Almost like it's a religious calling or something. I mean, it seems totally real to me. It doesn't seem fake.
Speaker 0: I've heard the argument. I think it's immoral, but I've heard the argument that, oh, this is a great deal. We just spend money, and we're grinding up Russia's, capacity to wage war, particularly lots of Russians are dying, and so we're told that's that's a good thing, you know, for Since the Cold War began, we've been taught that it would be good for Russia to be diminished. But they've gone so far as to say, Russians dying, you know, to the tune of 300,000 casualties, they say, is just such a great thing that we need to keep this thing going. And my answer to that is, why don't you tell us the Ukrainian casualties?
I have been in classified settings with CIA, the Secretary of State, Secretary of defense, not not their assistants, but those people in the room, and they're they're bragging about how many Russians have died and been injured. And I asked them how many Ukrainians have died and been injured, and they claimed they didn't know. I mean, that's just a flat out lie. And they said they would get back to me and they've never gotten back to me. Like, not only are Americans being fed propaganda about this war, congress is being fed propaganda by our state department or and our secretary of defense and our intelligence agencies.
And you can just ask a few questions in these classified hearings. If nothing else, my colleagues should be convicted of a lack of curiosity. Like, they they sit there and they believe everything they're told because these are supposed to be the authorities and they know things we don't, but you can expose them with 2 or 3 questions like how many Ukrainians have died? And they refuse to answer.
Speaker 1: I've asked that very same question, to Mike Johnson, actually, directly. But I've also asked him and a number of committee chairman just in personal conversations. Do you, like, do you believe your intel briefings? Because only a child would believe an intel briefing. Take it at face value, there may be truth in there.
Right. Maybe largely true, but you're being spun. You're being manipulated. And if you don't know that, then you're a moron. But they seem to believe them.
Speaker 0: They, because they have no other reference. And then here's what else happens, Tucker. When you go into a classified setting, like a SCIF, you lock up your phone, you take off your Fitbit, you take every electronic device. They even make me take off my debt badge. What?
Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1: Do you feel naked?
Speaker 0: I feel exposed. I mean, I do feel naked if I'm not wearing this. I've been wearing it for a year every day of my life. Okay? But they they make you they strip you of every outside reference.
Okay? And now your staff is not allowed in that meeting either. Remember, congressman, our primary roles are like raising money, being friendly to constituents, you know, putting on a good face, campaigning, and then then, you know, once a day or maybe twice a day, we roll in there and press the vote buttons based on what staff advises you. Well, when you go into a SCIF, you don't have your smartphone, so you're not very smart. They start using acronyms that you don't know remember what the acronym stands for.
You can't just, like, okay. What are what's the IDGF b z? I don't know, man. I must be stupid. Like but, you know, if you were in a regular setting, you just pull your phone out and, like, oh, okay.
That's what that is. I know what that is. And then you also can't ask your staff a question while you're in that setting. You know, we have legislative staffers who handle certain specific areas.
Speaker 1: Of course.
Speaker 0: You can't bring them in. And then when you go back to the office, you can't tell them what you heard. So it's really quite an experience. It's sort of it's a deprivation experience of any outside reference.
Speaker 1: So it's designed to produce Stockholm Syndrome, it sounds like.
Speaker 0: Yes. And when you get in there, they really don't give you classified information. I say there's 3 levels of classification in the SCIF. There's Facebook level, there's, Twitter level, and there's New York Times level. Like and the the New York Times level is the highest level of classification.
I mean, it's you're getting to the good stuff when they're telling you what's in the New York Times that week. Have you ever heard anything
Speaker 1: you thought was genuinely secret?
Speaker 0: Occasionally. Just a few times. And, obviously, I can't say what that is. But they slip up and commit candor occasionally in there. And you're like, woah.
I didn't know that. You know, nothing like what's at Area 51. Right. But occasionally, you're just like
Speaker 1: What do people think is at Area 51, by the way?
Speaker 0: I don't know. I'm not a
Speaker 1: You but you guys pass this law, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, then they never disclosed anything. What is that?
Speaker 0: Not my area of expertise.
Speaker 1: Yes. Don't know. But do members of congress ever say, wait a second. We're a coequal branch for the legislative branch. We have as much power as the president collectively, and you can't keep this stuff secret from us.
You're not allowed to do that.
Speaker 0: But see, like, I have this in hearings all the time. They'll say, I'll ask the ATF director, this is this happened just last week. Dettelbach or I'll I'll ask Merrick Garland something or Christopher Wray. Like, I've asked all them this, and they give you the same answer. It's long standing DOJ policy not to comment on an ongoing investigations.
And you know what? That's fine to tell a reporter, but you can't tell the branch of government that created you that, that funded you. You can't tell them that. That's why the, Omnibus was so disappointing to me is the only way these three letter agencies are gonna come to heel is if we cut their funding in some specific area. I've joked we could just withhold 1 toner cartridge for 1 printer at the FBI, and they would come over with a whole binder full of information.
But we can't even bring ourselves to deprive them of a toner cartridge. So we put $200,000,000 for new FBI building in the omnibus bill, And, you know, to their credit, Jim Jordan and Jamie Comer wouldn't didn't vote for that. And they're chairman of committees, but they are completely frustrated with the fact that the FBI just thumbs their noses.
Speaker 1: So is that the speaker who allowed that to happen?
Speaker 0: Oh, he absolutely allowed it to happen.
Speaker 1: So to what extent are members of congress, committee chairman, leadership controlled by blackmail?
Speaker 0: I really don't think there's much blackmail. Like if there is, I'm not aware of it. I have people come up to me. I travel around the country to Texas and, you know, other states, and speak to groups, food freedom groups, you know, first amendment, second amendment groups. And they come to me and they say, why did my congressman sell out?
Like, I'll just Bob was such a great guy. And I campaigned for him. I made phone calls. I put up signs. And then we sent Bob to congress, and he he votes the wrong way every time.
Why is it? What do they have his kids in a basement somewhere? Does he have kiddie porn on him? Like, what is it? Why did Bob go bad?
And I and I have to look him in the eye and say, Bob just wanted to be liked. Yeah. Like, there is a a gene inside of, congressmen. I think they if you look for a common denominator, they they like people, and they want to be liked for the most part. And if and they're likable.
If they're not likable, then it's hard to get elected. Okay? So this self selects for likable people, but likable people want to be liked. And they're not surrounded by their wives and children who usually give them plenty of like. Right?
When they're in DC, it's like, who am I gonna go to dinner with tonight? Well, I wanna eat food with somebody that likes me. Right? So if you're not gonna eat alone and you have to be liked and you generally have to be liked to get elected to congress, you you, better be liked. And, and so it's literally it's almost like kindergarten when somebody says, I won't be your friend anymore if you don't, you know, give me your lunch.
Congressmen fall for that. You know, they're in their thirties, forties, fifties, and they fall for that.
Speaker 1: How do you it's interesting. You like people. I've asked around. You don't seem to have any real enemies in the congress. I don't even think APAC hates you.
They just want you to obey. But they don't it's not it doesn't seem personal.
Speaker 0: You
Speaker 1: don't seem to be at personal war with anybody. That's my take on
Speaker 0: it. I have a mutation.
Speaker 1: So you like people. Okay? Obviously, you're not some weird autistic who doesn't care about other people. You like other people. I love people.
I can tell. And your colleagues say that. But you also don't feel like you need to fit in
Speaker 0: Right. At the
Speaker 1: same time. Like, what is that?
Speaker 0: It's a mutation. That chromosome, the like the liking people and likability, the chromosome usually has another gene on it right next to it, which is the need to be liked. And I'm missing the need to be liked gene. Like, I don't know what happened. Like, I can go, like, on the CARES Act.
Okay? This was under president Trump, the 11th day to slow the spread of 15. Right? They said we're gonna pass a $2,200,000,000,000 package and you all just stay home. It's dangerous.
Like we'll just do it by unanimous consent. And I it was 11 PM. I'm sitting in my living room, and and they send us this message. And I'm like, WTF. Like, this is the this is twice the size of the omnibus bill.
Right? This is gonna cause massive inflation. The policies entered are gonna cause shortages. And if we don't show up to vote, we're sending a message to all 50 states that you don't have to show up to vote in this election. So it was like, wait.
I gotta do I got my car and I drove 8 hours. I slept 1 hour in a rest stop because I knew I had to be there by 9 AM. This was March 20 7th 2020. Actually, 25th is the day I got to congress to stop it. And, I got there and I said it's not going by unanimous consent.
And I was literally sleeping in my wife's SUV, eating those, peanut butter filled pretzels. Like, I had a big jug of those. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah.
For my 3 days of nourish shots in an SUV, eating that big tub of pretzels with peanut butter in the middle, like, waiting just waiting for them to try to call it in session and sneak this bill passed. And they're, like, shit. Massey's gonna do it. So they they loaded up congressman. You know, the airports were shut down for the most part.
There were some planes coming from California. They only had 2 passengers, and they were both congressmen. So they they roll them all back to congress. It takes them 2 days to assemble a quorum because I like, they went to the parliamentarian, and they're like, is there any way around this? And he's like, nope.
Massey's right. The constitution requires a quorum if 1 you know, he didn't call me an asshole, but if one asshole just shows up, objects, and says there's no quorum here. So they brought every back. I go to the floor. Actually got a everybody was hating me.
I mean, everybody. Did you know what it's like to be in a room of 434 people, and they're all staring at you? Like, there I had maybe 10 friends who were, like, looking at me, like, that guy is dead. Like, I've we've never seen Harry Carey like this. They were worried for me, but the rest of them hated me.
There they would come up to me and say, I I live with my mother, and when I go back home, you're gonna cause me to take COVID to her, and she's gonna die, and I'm blaming you for this. And I said
Speaker 1: Send it to your face?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Oh, yeah. What like, no. It wasn't just one. It was like when he was done, there was a line of people.
I just like stood there and they're all coming to hate on me. And, I was like, but what about the guy that's going to the grocery store and bagging your groceries and carrying them out to the car? Does he live with his mother too? Like, what about the trucker who's out there driving and interacting with people in order to get the goods to where you need to be? What about the nurse who's going to work every single day taking care of people?
Is she gonna kill her parents? Like, where why are you special? Like, you're supposed to you know, they they carved a hole in the side of a mountain in West Virginia for us in the case of emergency. Yes. That well, the sad but but realistic thing is now they don't have a place for us.
We're so useless. Right? They're just like, well, here's where we were gonna keep them if shit hit the fan. But now we we've realized they're, like, useless. We can declare war without them in the event of a nuclear strike, so, you know, they're just a rounding error in the in the three branches we can operate with too.
Yes. I've noticed. So, anyways, these are the kind of people who are supposed to respond in an emergency, and they all wanted to stay home. They all hated me for for recognize our constitutional duty. And and Trump called me 3 times on the floor of the house while I was getting ready to make the motion to object, And I let it go to voice mail 3 times in a row.
It was probably not good, but I couldn't leave the microphone. Because I was asking people, would you make this motion if I go to the restroom? And they're like, oh, no. Oh, no. Not me.
Mm-mm. So I, I sat there. I I finally they yielded time for debate. I go off the floor and called the White House switchboard back. And and, you know, I didn't have his number.
I just, like, if you wanna tour the White House, you call the number I called. Right? And, like, the intern is, like, oh, is this congressman Massey? I'm putting you through to Trump right now. And so he comes off and goes, I'm coming at you like you've never seen, never in your life before.
Have you seen the way in which I will come at you? I'm more popular than you in Kentucky, and you know it. I'm back in your primary opponent, and you're gonna lose. Come on. And I'm like, oh, crap.
I probably will lose. I mean, I had 95% popularity in among my Republican electorate who I had to face in about 8 weeks in my primary. And I had a well funded opponent, and here now is Trump was mad at me. So he screamed at me for 2 or 3 minutes. I kept trying to talk, and he just screamed louder.
Then he repeated it all. He goes, no. This is the second time you've done something like this. And they took me out of it before, but not this time. And then, you're gonna lose.
And he hangs up. And, like, the thing is, like, I had he said he thought it was the second time. I've done that, like, 8 times since he was president. He just started realizing it's the same guy. The the time before that was on war with Iran.
The Democrats were in the majority and, you know, he had just, vaporized Soleimani. Yeah. And we were worried that he would attack mainland Iran without a vote of congress. So the Democrats actually, insincerely, there aren't too many anti war Democrats left. I've noticed.
But they realized this was a chance to make a statement, so they put a bill on the floor saying, Trump, he can't go to war with Iran without a vote of congress, which is constitutionally obvious. So I had to vote for it, but I was only one of 3 Republicans to do it. So he remembered that time, but he didn't remember the fake Obamacare repeal and some of the other things that, I was kind of, you know, the turd in the punch bowl on.
Speaker 1: Did did it change your views at all?
Speaker 0: No. The the president tweeted that I was a 3rd rate grandstander and that like, this is before I got back to my seat. Like, I go back from this to go to my seat to get ready to make the motion, and, one of the congress was like, you better look at your phone, Massie. Look at your Twitter, and I turn it on. He's, like, tweeting hard and heavy against me.
He said I should be thrown out of the party. Then he the best one is, I'm chairman of the 2nd Amendment caucus. So his third tweet was, he's terrible on guns. I was like, what? Where did that come from?
Have you seen my Christmas card picture? What's your Christmas card picture? Well, it's a little infamous. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No. I I've actually seen it, but I
Speaker 0: just for the for
Speaker 1: the benefit of those who have not.
Speaker 0: So, you know, I got my family together for Christmas, and we got bluegrass instruments out. We play, music together, and we took a Christmas card picture with bluegrass instruments. And I said, hey, wouldn't it be kinda neat if we just, like, change these all out for machine guns and took a picture. And that was supposed to stay on my phone for eternity, but I'd had a couple medical margaritas one night. I don't do medical marijuana, but I had a few medical margaritas and I looked at that picture and I thought, well that's pretty good picture.
It'd be ashamed if nobody ever saw it, and I tweeted it. And No. I caught all kinds of hate for that. The arch That's a great picture. The archbishop of Canterbury condemned it.
This is the head of the Church of England condemned my tweet. I'm like, oh my god.
Speaker 1: Are are you an Episcopalian?
Speaker 0: I'm Methodist.
Speaker 1: Good. So you can ignore him. Yes. Yeah. He's a he's a disgrace.
Speaker 0: So so anyways, I you know, the press asked me as I'm we're talking about the need to be liked, Gene. Right? If I had that, I would have been devastated that day. If I had needed to be liked, I couldn't have carried that through. And, I walked out of that chamber.
Everybody's hate me in the chamber. Nancy Pelosi called me a dangerous nuisance. CNN called me the most hated person in DC. John Kerry called me an asshole or something, and, President Trump called me a 3rd rate grandstander. This is all in the course of a few minutes.
Right? I walk out of the chamber of the house and the reporters, like, swarm me, you know, like they do, and I'm just trying to run back to the SUV with the pretzels with peanut butter in them and get out of there and, that's the the, press said, what do you have to say for yourself? Your own president just called you a 3rd rate grandstander. And I paused for a second, and I said, I was offended. I'm at least second rate.
Speaker 1: So So what happened to your relationship with Trump?
Speaker 0: It, you know, I think he respects people that stand up. Yep. Even if he
Speaker 1: I think you're absolutely right.
Speaker 0: Disagrees with you. That's correct. And, 2 years later, he did endorse me. No way. Yep.
Speaker 1: Did you get along with him okay now?
Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, I did endorse Ron DeSantis, not out of spite, or animosity, because we had already patched things up, just because I served with Ron DeSantis for 6 years and he and I were really good friends. We talked about bills when he was in Congress. He and I fought over who was gonna introduce the bill to eliminate congressional pensions. You know, and he won and I cosponsored it.
Now I'm the sponsor, now that he's a governor. But I knew he was a good person, and he thinks things through, and he was smart. So I I endorsed him. But, you know, because I have I call it natural immunity. I have Trump antibodies at this point.
They may wear off at some point. I don't know. Do you think if you
Speaker 1: did run for, say, just pulling this out of a hat, but governor of Kentucky, do you think Trump would endorse you?
Speaker 0: I don't know. He'd probably do some polling and see who was winning.
Speaker 1: Fair. Fair. Totally fair.
Speaker 0: I I wouldn't turn down an endorsement. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's it's not are you at war with anybody in the congress?
Speaker 0: No. I get along with everybody. I mean, and people try to use this against me. When APAC was running those ads that say I always vote with AOC, and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. You know?
So I introduced an amendment and forced to vote on eliminating the kill switch in automobiles that's mandated
Speaker 1: in the body. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, I was losing Republicans on that. I lost, like, 20 Republicans. So I knew I needed some
Speaker 1: Just to be clear for the people who don't know what you're talking about. New in new vehicles, this has been the case for years. They can be turned off remotely by the authorities, which is, like, the most North Korean thing ever to happen. That's what you're talking about.
Speaker 0: Yeah. By 2026, every new automobile sold has to be able to turn itself off if it doesn't like your driving. So I'm like, how do you appeal this conviction at the roadside? Right? Maybe you swerve to miss a deer and pulled over for an ambulance and you got your kids in the car and
Speaker 1: it stops vote for something that evil? I don't understand.
Speaker 0: Because, again, they know it's that I'm right, but they're worried about, for instance, mothers against drunk driving. Or they they don't have the bravery.
Speaker 1: Wait. Worse, We just let in millions of illegal aliens who are allowed to drunk drive. Right. And Biden has told us that drunk driving is not a big deal. It's not grounds for deport reporting.
Yeah. Yeah. So who mothers against drunk driving, as far as I know, has said nothing about this. Like, who cares what they think?
Speaker 0: I I know and but there may be, let's say, one constituent in your who gets a hold of you and they lost a child to drunk driving, which is terrible. And they say, well, you know, you don't care about me if you vote for Massey's amendment. And, you know, they make that personal phone call, that congressman doesn't have the fortitude to say or knowledge to say, look, this technology can't work. I I really care about your child. I think your drunk driving is a scourge and I want to fix it, but this is a false promise and it's only gonna increase the price of automobiles and give the government more control, so I'm gonna vote with Massey.
They don't have the courage to say that. So long story short, I lost 20 Republicans. I needed some Democrats. So I went over to AOC, who I get along with just fine. Don't hate me for saying that.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 0: And I said, AOC, they're running ads right now that say you always vote or that I always vote with you. Just once, could you vote with me? Could you vote for my kill switch amendment since they're running ads the other way? And she did. She voted to defund the automobile kill switch.
Speaker 1: Yeah. For her. So she, ran it's it's interesting. I mean, obviously, I don't like her, but I think she's talented. She she is definitely talented.
But she ran as radical as someone from the outside, which I'm, of course, very sympathetic to, but she doesn't seem to be actually be that person. So, like, for example, on the foreign aid stuff, how often does she vote with you on? Quite quite frequently.
Speaker 0: But I had a funny moment, you know, this 15 or 16 votes we had on Israel in April. Well, the squad and I and I know this is gonna be used in the next ad against me, this clip from Tucker. But I was the only no sometimes. Sometimes the, most of the squad voted with me, but I noticed AOC wasn't always there with me. So I went over to the squad on the democrat side of the aisle.
Literally sit together? They they hang out together. Yeah. They kinda it's really cliquish. Even, you know, the Freedom Caucus sits together, the, Texas delegation sits together, there are different clicks.
The appropriators sit together, It's the the military guys, the intel guys sit together. You know, sometimes it's by state, sometimes it's by click. A lot of the Congressional Black Caucus sits together. I can't get the 2nd amendment caucus to sit together. That's my caucus.
They're too independent minded. But so I go over to their But
Speaker 1: this is just high school cafeteria.
Speaker 0: It's high school cafeteria. That's what it is. And why would you again, they need to be liked. Right? They don't wanna sit next to people they don't like or who don't like them.
So I go over I went over to the squad a few weeks ago, and I said I told AOC and for the squad, I said, we're gonna kick you out if you don't keep voting with this more consistently. What did she say? She laughed. She thought it was funny. I mean, she has a sense of humor.
These people are humans. There are 435, I call them goldfish in the aquarium. You have to get 218 of them to pass a bill. So it doesn't benefit me to hate on any of them. Someday, you know, on some days they may vote with.
Speaker 1: Well, they're also people.
Speaker 0: And you shouldn't
Speaker 1: if you can help it, you shouldn't hate people, period.
Speaker 0: We've we've formed coalitions on the First Amendment, on the Fourth Amendment, on war sometimes, like to eliminate cluster bombs, delivering cluster bombs, even though the Democrats almost to a person, actually to a person, want to give Ukraine more aid, some of them are like, well, the cluster bombs, maybe we shouldn't do that. Okay? And so you can form coalitions, so I try to do that when I can. But why aren't
Speaker 1: there anti war Democrats? Since it was the anti war party for, like, 40 years?
Speaker 0: I don't know. And then we've lost a lot of them on privacy and and free speech as well. I think with Russia, you asked this before, there's this element that I didn't answer. It's sort of a proxy against Trump for them now. They, in their in their file folders, in their brain, Trump and Russia are in the same file folder.
Yes. Even though that's a false narrative that's been dispelled long ago, it's still in their same file folder. So when they see Ukraine is fighting Russia, they use that as a proxy for their hate for Trump, and so they'll they'll vote for that. And they did. They waved I don't know if you saw this.
They were waving Ukrainian flags after Mike Johnson put the bill on the floor saw. And every democrat voted for it. This was premeditated. Somebody had to go buy, you know, 200 Ukrainian flags and hand them out. And, I filmed it, which you're not supposed to do, but you're also not supposed to wave flags of other countries on the floor of the house.
So I'm like, alright. I'm gonna expose this. So I filmed it, and I put it on Twitter to show what like, the humiliation that Mike Johnson brought upon us by bringing their the democrat bill to the floor without any and it was leveraged too. Even if you're a republican and you're okay with sending money to Ukraine, that's a leverage point. Get do something for our country and require that as a condition of doing whatever that is, but he gave up all the leverage.
I put that video on Twitter. 3 days later, the sergeant at arms tracks down one of my staffers in Kentucky because we're no longer in session and says he needs to delete that video from Twitter or we're gonna take a fine out of his salary, out of his congressional salary. And so, mister Stafford, he knew what I was gonna do. He told me what they had just said. I said, alright.
I'm retweeting it. Did you? Oh, yeah. And it got, like, 8,000,000 views. It went from 4,000,000 to 8,000,000.
And then, you know, sometimes you just gotta double down, and the speaker had to announce on Twitter that I wouldn't be fined for that.
Speaker 1: But there but no one was considering finding any member who waved the flag of a foreign nation on the floor of the house of representatives.
Speaker 0: Right. And they were taking selfies of of them with their foreign flags too. And no none of them got a phone call. Only I got a phone call because I exposed the humiliation. It wasn't just a humiliation of those of us in congress.
It was a humiliation of our country. I mean, it's one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and they got everything they wanted for them, and the Democrats are waving the flag even though the Ukrainian flag even though they're in the majority, and we just have to, like, sit there and and take that. It was it was horrible.
Speaker 1: Do you think any I mean, the leader of Ukraine is not elected anymore. His term has ended. He's not having a new election. He's the unelected maximum power. In some places we call that a dictator.
And yet they're still hitting us with a democracy, pro democracy talking points. Do you think I mean, have they thought this through at all? Are they just lying? Like, what is that?
Speaker 0: They're lying. Yeah. I mean, they know it. And the good news is some Republicans waking up to it. Remember when we started voting on these Ukraine resolutions, even, you know, as soon as the war started, I was the only no.
There was like this open ended promise in a non binding resolution that said, we'll give them whatever they need. And there were only like 2 other Republicans that joined me on this. But now we've got a majority of Republicans in Congress who are saying, wait, this is they aren't using this money like we thought they were, and we're giving them money to fund pensions of retired politicians in Ukraine who were most certainly corrupt, and we're paying their pensions with this money.
Speaker 1: But most Republicans don't support it. So that means that your speaker, the Republican speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, is working for the Democrats.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It's that simple. I mean, and and that's one of the reasons we went through with the motion to vacate. Paul Gosar and I cosponsored Marjorie's motion to vacate. There were ultimately 11 of us who voted for it.
Speaker 1: Motion to vacate would be to fire him.
Speaker 0: To fire speaker Johnson, just like they had done Kevin McCarthy. Although I thought inappropriately and at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons, they did that to McCarthy. But here we had speaker Johnson who was doing all of the things people were afraid McCarthy might do. They they preconvicted McCarthy for things they thought he would do, and here, Mike Johnson came and did all these things. He put an omnibus on the floor.
He passed the foreign intelligence surveillance act, reupped that without warrants, built the FBI a new building, and gave Ukraine all this money. So what what happened what Marjorie and I and Paul decided ultimately is we needed to expose the uni party. And never before have you had democrats vote for a republican speaker. And that's why we forced the question. Nancy Pelosi voted for him.
Hakeem Jeffries went on national TV and said, why would we want to get rid of him? He's given us everything we want. I mean, the the Uniparty has never been so exposed as it was when we called that motion to vacate. I know some people got mad at us, said we shouldn't have done it, but, it's a long game, which we certainly hope that he doesn't become speaker next January. And, hopefully, people have seen with Nancy Pelosi rushing to speaker Johnson's aide that he's not the speaker you want when Trump wins the White House and we keep the majority.
Do you think he will be? A lot of this depends on what the people want and if they can see it. Hopefully also Trump sees it, that Mike Johnson is gonna would be even worse than Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan put while he was still in the while we were still in the majority, Paul Ryan sent, like, a dozen CRs or omnibus bills to president Trump's desk because it didn't have any money for a wall in it. Like, he had no intention of ever funding a wall.
Paul Ryan did. It you know? And so I think Mike Johnson is gonna be similarly the same way. He's basically working for the deep state at this point in the Uniparty.
Speaker 1: How did that happen? Do you have any idea?
Speaker 0: The, the Paul Ryan bit or No.
Speaker 1: John? Paul Paul Ryan is a Change. You know, is a sinister person, I happen to know. But also, you know, not just kind of not a genius and an ideologue at the same time, which is like a bad combination. Dumb ideologues are the scariest.
But Mike Johnson seemed like kind of a moderately conservative, kind of sincere, decent guy. You know, maybe he would babysit your kids and do an okay job. Mhmm. I'm like Paul Ryan. And but he just and then he immediately just becomes a tool of CIA and Jake Sullivan and the Biden administration.
Like, how did that happen so fast?
Speaker 0: Well, one of the things he claims, which I don't believe is true, and I have reason to say this, is that he says he went in a skiff. Like, he's had some a 180 degree turns on some things, like, for instance, whether you need a warrant to spy on Americans using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 702 program. Well, he used to be on judiciary committee with me and Jim Jordan trying to reform that, trying to get So he understood what it was. He knew completely what we were talking about. He's an attorney too.
Right? And he knows the constitution. He knows this is required. But he claims he spent time in a SCIF and he learned SCIF, that's Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility or something. It's where we go.
We have to leave our phones locked up, you know, no staff in there. He claims he spent time in SCIF and learned things that changed his mind. Here's the problem, Tucker. I was in SCIF with him. Like, we we had we had DNI, not just the the current DNI, but the former DNI, John Radcliffe, Trump's DNI.
We had CIA. We had FBI. We even had a FISA judge in there, and we spent 3 and a half hours. It was a 4 hour meeting, and after 3 and a half hour it's basically a psyop where they're just trying to beat you down and and do the things. And I was just like, this is ridiculous.
You you haven't given they didn't give us one example of any time ever since FISA was created that getting a warrant would have kept them from solving or preventing an act of terrorism. They gave hypotheticals, but they had no specific
Speaker 1: And I think FICE has been in place since 1978, since the seventies, exactly. So almost 50 years. And they couldn't give you one example?
Speaker 0: Not one example. Now they also expanded it after, 9 11, and to to do the the program to go against civilians, to spy on civilians. And and and actually that product came out of the judiciary committee. Here's another place where the speaker betrayed us. FISA 702 was created by John Conyers and Jim Sensenbrenner.
Conyers was the chairman Oh, yeah. And Sensenbrenner was the the ranking member, and what Mike Johnson said this year was, well, even though the judiciary committee created this and is responsible for overseeing it, I'm gonna let the intel committee bring the bill to the floor without warrants in it. It wasn't even their jurisdiction. They have jurisdiction over FISA as long as it's for the CIA, but not for the FBI. So that was frustrating.
And but It's shocking. It's it's shocking. It is shocking. So he said, you know Like
Speaker 1: end of civil liberties level stuff. So Yes. Yes. But it's not like he learned new information in the skiff. No.
He did not.
Speaker 0: I was there. So what So that's so that's a lie. Problem. Right? The problem the fact that I was there.
Right. So that's a lie on your show that I was there for 3 and a half hours. And Mike John go ask Mike Johnson. He'll say, yep. He was there 3 and a half hours.
So what is the truth? What do you think changed? I think he's kind of a lost ball in tall weeds. I think he's in a position of power he never imagined he would get to at this point in his life. He's not done anything in private practice or political, arena that's prepared him for this.
He took the job with a very small staff. He didn't have, people to put in all positions on the field, and he had to accept a lot of, suggestions in areas he didn't know a whole lot about, although he gets no pass on FISA. Yes. He gets no pass on Ukraine because he does, as you pointed out, he doesn't even know how many casualties have been incurred on the Ukrainian side. I mean, he's the 2nd person in line for president after Kamala Harris.
This is this is scary to me. He's he's basically getting moved around.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. You you said nothing he did in his life before this prepared him for it. But that itself may be kind of a more charitable explanation because-
Speaker 0: I'm trying to be charitable. I mean, I got to go back to
Speaker 1: work with you. Not working your life prepared you for this. So just for those who don't know, you went to MIT. Your high school girlfriend joined you at MIT. You married her whilst while she was still there.
And then together, you started a company based on an a very sophisticated invention that you came up with, maybe the first of about 30 patents that you now have. You ran this company for a long time, then you moved back to Kentucky. And a lot of things happened, and you end up running for Congress.
Speaker 0: So,
Speaker 1: like, that's not the background.
Speaker 0: Well, so nothing in the political arena. But in my private life, you know, I raised $32,000,000 of venture capital, and I swam with the sharks. Yeah. Like, the the I had lots of moral dilemmas in the course of creating that company. I could have taken money off the table and gone and done other things, but instead I felt a commitment to my staff and to other investors.
I had investors who said, if you'll just shit can that guy you hired as president, we'll double our investment. And I'm like, no. He's my partner. I'm not like, he helped me get to this point. I'm not gonna abandon him.
Good for you. And so, you know, I had experiences in life that and then also just put my hands in the dirt on my farm.
Speaker 1: Like So tell me about that. So you live tell us about how you live and where you live because I think it's one of the most unusual things about you.
Speaker 0: So I spent, I grew up as a hillbilly in Eastern Kentucky. What county? Lewis County. Lewis County.
Speaker 1: How many people in your town?
Speaker 0: 13,000 people, 13,000 cattle. It's a huge land mass. And it's a great county. There's it's one of the 21 counties that I represent. It's the actually, the poorest county per capita income that I represent, but it's the one I grew up in.
So it's very unlikely that the congressman for the district would come from the poorest county. So I grew up as a little nerd. I love taking stuff apart because I was bored. There were no malls. You couldn't ride your bicycle to any, you know, store to of and if you did, you didn't have any money.
So I had to find things to do at home. I took apart things, built things, entered science fairs, built robots, made it to the International Science Fair as a as a little, you know, hillbilly, won an award from NASA there and at at the age 15, like, I won the high school level awards, and got into MIT, never visited the campus, didn't really have the money to go visit it, but I read about it. There was no Internet. Seemed like a good place. I got there.
I'd I'd lived in a town of 1900 people all my life, and I I was there for 6 hours in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I crossed, Massachusetts Avenue. They had a crosswalk and a stoplight. You know, I'd never really seen 2 of those things together. I'd seen crosswalks and stoplights, but so I walked through the the crosswalk and a car honked, like that short little Boston, meep meep.
And I thought, oh my gosh. I've been here 6 hours and already run into somebody from Kentucky. And I turned around and waved at the car as big as I could. Was it people from Kentucky? I don't think so.
I think they had one finger up waving it back. So, and people are like, that's not a true story. I said, not only is it true, it took me a month to quit waving at Cars That Beep, like, it was just 18 years of conditioning.
Speaker 1: You thought beeping was, hey.
Speaker 0: Hey there. I mean, that's what we thought that little thing in the middle of your steering wheel was for. If you saw somebody and they couldn't see you through the windshield, just toot the horn. Then you throw your hand up and wave, and they roll down the window. Oh, that's Bob.
And if you didn't wave, I mean, you're a pariah. You were probably an axe murderer who was in our town. Right? Or you were just an a hole. I wasn't so I didn't wanna be either, so I waved at that car in Massachusetts and and kept waving for about a month.
But, anyways, long story short, as you said, I invented a virtual reality device that lets you touch three-dimensional objects, started a company, raised venture capital, did that for 10 years, moved to the live free or die state. New Hampshire. New Hampshire. My company was in Massachusetts. I couldn't move the center of gravity too far out of Cambridge.
I got it up to 128 on Woburn and then I commuted 40 miles every day so I could live in a state that lets you have machine guns and old cars and, you know, cool stuff. Redneck Sports. The best. The best sports. So, why'd you move back to Kentucky?
After 10 years, you know, of of doing it, it was you know, we had 3 kids, and we wanted to raise them like we were raised in Kentucky. And we wanted to be near their grandparents. Like, both my parents were still alive, both my wife's parents were still alive, and you learn so much from your grandparents because your parents are really busy just, you know, trying to earn a living or whatever. And if you're lucky enough to have a relationship with your grandparents, that's where I think the generational stuff carries on. Yes.
And, I had a great relationship with my grandparents, so we wanted our kids to live in that environment. And we came back. We bought the farm that my wife grew up on. We built a house off the grid. It runs on a wrecked Model S Tesla battery.
It's been running continuously for 6 and a half years.
Speaker 1: So you built the like, who built the house?
Speaker 0: I did. Like, I we had an ice storm, and a lot of trees fell down. How how big is the property? It's, 1500 acres. And it's wooded.
It's all almost all woods, like and it's too steep. I don't want you to think this is, like, valuable Iowa No.
Speaker 1: No. No. No. I know the part of the state you're in.
Speaker 0: Pack your lunch if you're on the ridge and you fall off the ridge, because you're gonna be hungry by the time you get to the bottom. You're gonna be grabbing, like, tree roots and stuff to keep from sliding. But it grows trees and some of it is flat and, you know, in the bottom.
Speaker 1: But this is not plantation land.
Speaker 0: No. These are hollers. Yeah. So, in fact, interestingly enough, it's been a Republican county since the Civil War, even though all the counties around it have been Democrats since the Civil War.
Speaker 1: Because the geography.
Speaker 0: Because the geography. The topography did not allow for consolidation of farms. Right. So there was no scale at which slavery made sense. You could basically, in your holler, you only had enough land that your family, if you had enough kids, could farm.
Yes. And so that's the way people grew up. And by the way, it's kind of libertarian, you know, I'll do my thing in my holler. You do your thing in your holler.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 0: If you need some help, let me know. I'll come over and help you.
Speaker 1: Southwest Virginia is like this. West Virginia is like this. Yeah. Because of the topography.
Speaker 0: Right. It's the reason West Virginia was Republican and and se seceded from, Virginia. So, by the way, half my family is from West Virginia and half my family is from Kentucky. My mamaw's, who's 97 right now, still alive, her grandfather was a union soldier. Amazing.
Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 1: From West Virginia.
Speaker 0: From West Virginia. Yeah. She still lives in West Virginia. But, like, we're not that far away from the Civil War. Oh, I know.
I know. You you can talk to people who were alive when people who fought the civil war.
Speaker 1: I I worked with a guy when I was at the newspaper in Arkansas. The guy I shared a desk with, Bob Salee from Texarkana, Arkansas. He said I knew Confederate veterans. That's in my lifetime. I knew a man who knew Confederate veterans or Civil War veterans.
That's just absolutely crazy.
Speaker 0: But my whole point of that was she's a Republican. She's been Republicans by Mamaw since the Civil War, and, like, nobody marries into our family if you're a democrat, you gotta go see Mamaw, and she'll either approve or disapprove. And she's been had pretty good luck at sniffing out the the the Liberals. Yeah. The Liberals.
Speaker 1: So so you had an ice storm. There was an ice storm on your property. Yeah. How does that figure into your house?
Speaker 0: So I already had a bulldozer, so I got a winch, so I could drag these trees out. I got a sawmill, cut these into timbers, built a timber frame house. What what kind of wood? It's 17 kinds of wood because we did it was whatever fell down in the ice storm. We've got oak, yellow poplar, hickory, beech.
So hardwood? Hardwood. Yep. And then we wanted to be self sustaining.
Speaker 1: Well, how did she know how to timber frame?
Speaker 0: I found a class on eBay for $500 in Tennessee, and I bought it now. And I drove to Tennessee and took a 1 week class, and we built a little shedcabin, and I called my wife from a pay phone, and I said, I wanna do this. Like, instead of going to get a job, we had just ended, like, left our company after 10 years of working there, and we'd moved back to Kentucky. And they said, well, just build a timber frame house. Like, full time?
Yes. Woke up every morning, had my coffee, and started chiseling away or going up in the woods and dragging more trees out that had fallen down.
Speaker 1: So you you built your house full time, like, as a job, every day?
Speaker 0: And this and this is what our kids saw too. Like, the flooring for our kitchen came out of the creek. We call it a creek. What do
Speaker 1: you mean the flooring came out of the creek?
Speaker 0: There there are rocks in the creek that are flat that they look like the stuff you buy 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 just go pick it up. Now if we had probably have we're paying ourselves about $3 an hour compared to if we had just gone to, you know, one of the box stores and bought it in in terms of harvesting it. But our kids, I think, in addition to being with their grandparents, learned a big lesson that, wow, mom and dad are growing our food, they are, collecting the materials for the house here from the environment, that you don't have to rely you know, neighbors are good though.
Right? We actually sent them to public school, which was and we let them ride the bus. It was only 3 miles away, but we figured the bus ride was important too because when you get to school, they sort of separate you.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 0: But you've got can be 15 terrifying minutes on the bus where you interact with everybody. Right? I remember my son, he was like 10 years old. He traded some Yu Gi Oh cards on the bus, and, for this, like, awesome, the best Yu Gi card ever. And he showed it to us in this little plastic thing, and we're like, well, did you wanna take out the plastic?
No. No. He told me to leave it in here. And we take it out, and it was a fake. And he was so mad.
But it turns out his dad had sold me a leaky bulldozer and said there was no leaks in it. So, like
Speaker 1: It ran in the family.
Speaker 0: In the family. The same kid who stiffed my son had stiffed me on this dozer.
Speaker 1: So where I mean, so learned
Speaker 0: these these are life lessons. Right? They didn't lead a sheltered life. And so we grew up, you know, they grew up there. What percent of the
Speaker 1: timbers in the timber frame came from your property?
Speaker 0: All of it. What percent? That never left the farm. Really?
Speaker 1: So you milled it there?
Speaker 0: Milled it there, chiseled it there, made the mortise and tenons and the dovetails. It was a lot of work.
Speaker 1: Personally. Yes. How did you you know, cutting a mortise and tenon, cutting a dovetail joint, these are, having done it,
Speaker 0: very difficult. How did you learn to do that? I kept telling myself, look, farmers without calculators pulled this off 200 years ago. And so, surely, if I've got a computer and some, you know, electricity, I should be able to do this as well. Just dent of will.
Speaker 1: But she'd been like a Electric engineer. Electrical engineer software programmer. Right.
Speaker 0: But not, a platformer. Scale. Yeah. Not I mean, the the only thing I had built before that was a treehouse. Right?
And even that didn't get finished.
Speaker 1: So but, I mean, some of that stuff is very complex, like, actually complex. Timber framing, some some of the joints are difficult to cut, and the design itself is is complicated.
Speaker 0: Yeah. You don't like you have to plan it all ahead. You don't, like, hold the timber up there like you would a 2 by 40. It's not renewed a salt to It's not
Speaker 1: balloon framing. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Totally right. Or, oh, that 45 needs to be a 42 degree angle. Let's, you know, 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 on scaffolding trying to get 2 pieces to fit together. It's actually it's a fun math problem.
So I enjoyed it, but is there something honest about it? Because all the fasteners are wooden too. So So it's one medium that you learn. There's no, like, bolt So it's all pegs. Nails, all pegs.
And once you realize that and then So
Speaker 1: there are no metal fasteners in the frame? Correct. None. I mean,
Speaker 0: we had to nail the floor
Speaker 1: to I got it.
Speaker 0: And the walls on it.
Speaker 1: But the frame itself the frame that'll
Speaker 0: no metal fast structure. And it's 46 feet tall.
Speaker 1: It's 46 feet tall?
Speaker 0: Yes. From the basement slab, which I timber framed the basement to. I still don't even know how to stick frame. Like I'm like, well I'm gonna build one house, I'm I'm gonna learn one texture.
Speaker 1: Framing that your house is if you're watching this. It's stick frame.
Speaker 0: It's stick frame. So I was like, well, let's build the basement timber frame too and the dormers. Like, if you paid a company to build timber frame, they would stick frame the dormers. Well, of course.
Speaker 1: Or or buy them and just bolt them on. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 0: I I timber frame to that. I'm just like, let's just be pure the whole way. And there's it's as an engineer, I thought, well, I wanna build a house with timbers. I like how timbers look. But but, you know, we'll just bolt them together.
We'll use iron brackets. That's the best way to do it. But in the course of this 1 week class, I came to realize, wow, if you just let go and make everything out of wood, it solves problems that you would create when you start using metal fasteners. Like, wood shrinks. Right?
It take it takes, like, 6 or 8 years for a big timber to fully dry out. So how do you deal with metal fasteners and shrinking wood? Well, the metal fasteners can rip out. But if you build your fasteners out of wood, like, it can all work. It moves together.
And there's, you know, if you, go to Germany, you know, there's homes that are 4 or 500 years old to show that it can work. So
Speaker 1: So all the timbers came from the property. What about the stone? There's a lot of stone in the house.
Speaker 0: Yep. We we got some of it out of creek. We dug some of it out of the ground. All of the stone is from the property.
Speaker 1: How did you dig it out of the ground? What does that mean? You started a a stone quarry on your on your own property?
Speaker 0: In my front yard. It's now a pond. But I there was an old logging road, and the erosion had exposed this layer of rock. And I thought, well, that layer of rock must go pretty far. So I started digging using a backhoe, I started digging the dirt dirt off of that layer of rock, and I'm like, wow.
There are lots of rocks here. And I just I almost giggled out loud when I shoved on that layer of rock with my backhoe, and all these rocks started rolling out in front of the blade, and they looked like rocks you could buy at the store. You know? Like, well, why would I go buy them? Like, I can just, like, shove 3 tons of them out of here in, you know, a few minutes.
And then I had people coming and visiting. Obviously, we looked like a bunch of weirdos building this timber frame house up on the hill, and people would come up and then Where
Speaker 1: were you living at this point?
Speaker 0: We lived in a mobile home. Like, we just pulled in a mobile home, and we I told my wife we don't live in it for, like, 6 months. We end up 2 years in a 900 square foot mobile home with 4 kids. No way. It's but I mean, it's actually not that bad.
You get to know your family really well. You can hear
Speaker 1: It's like being on a boat. Yeah.
Speaker 0: You try to go to the bathroom. And if you're gone for more than 5 minutes, like, the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom is so thin. You're just enjoying private moment there on the throne, trying to read a magazine about timber framing or something. Right? And you can hear the kids at the dinner table saying, where daddy go?
Where daddy? Where's daddy? And then they start trying to find daddy. Anyways, it was a good comfy experience. And now, we actually kept the mobile home, and we leased it to deer hunters.
Really? Yeah. It's a double wide. It it's so it's full of deer heads and bunk beds now. And, the hunters call it the lodge, which we find amusing.
My wife calls it the double lodge, since it's a double wide. Do you have a lot
Speaker 1: of deer on your land?
Speaker 0: We have, yeah, trophy deer
Speaker 1: all over. What do you charge to rent it just in case people are interested?
Speaker 0: We we're booked up. You're booked up. You don't
Speaker 1: want any the weird Internet people in Atlanta.
Speaker 0: We are booked up. Yes. So how
Speaker 1: long did it take you to finish this house?
Speaker 0: It's not finished. I've been criticized. You know, in campaigns, people try to use this against me. Some guy goes, he doesn't even have doors on all his rooms. He's some kinda weird Great.
Well, we haven't made that door yet.
Speaker 1: Right? You're making the doors?
Speaker 0: We, made a few of them. Yeah. We're kind of breaking down now and buying a few doors now that the kids are gone.
Speaker 1: So this that was, like, your kids wait. So what what year did you start how long has this process been?
Speaker 0: So we started in 2003. So we're 21 years? 21 years. And we've been off the grid that long too.
Speaker 1: Again Now when you say off the grid, what do you what do you mean?
Speaker 0: We're not connected to any public utility. Not electricity, not water, not sewer, not phone. The the house is totally disconnected from everything.
Speaker 1: Did you build those systems yourself?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Using a lot of it's off the shelf stuff, but some of it's improvised, field expedient. So so, like, for Like the Tesla battery, the car battery that runs the house. Well, let's just buy that out of a catalog. You go to a junkyard and say, how much do you want for that wrecked model s?
And I'm like, alright. I'll sell you the battery for 15,000.
Speaker 1: Why not? Why can't you just buy the battery separately?
Speaker 0: They won't, like, Tesla wouldn't sell me a Powerwall. I would I tried to buy one for years. Why? Because it has to be connected to the grid for some reason. Their business model involves that.
So I was like, alright, well, I'll get a battery. How much different can it be from the batteries in their car? So I drove to Lake Lanier, Georgia with a little trailer, landscaping trailer. The battery weighs, I think, £1200. But here's the funny thing.
It's considered hazardous material if you pull it on a trailer, But if it's in a car, it's just fine. So I I hurried up and got back to Kentucky with the trailer. I don't have a hazmat light.
Speaker 1: So it was a wrecked Tesla Model S, and you pulled the battery out of it.
Speaker 0: Yep. And what'd you do with it? Disassembled it. I paid $15,000 cash. But this is like, you know, I'm I carry this probably, like, 15 or 20 years, hopefully it'll last.
And so I brought it home, took it apart. Actually, I made a YouTube video of this. And what's kind of funny is I had these big rubber gloves that a friend who had worked on power lines, you know, they were leftovers and he gave to me. And so, like, in the YouTube video, I try to make sure, like, I'm using big rubber gloves and stuff, and I did, like, this fast forward, you know, of the disassembly of the battery. And I forgot, like, my 2 little boys are in there helping me, and they don't have the gloves on it.
Speaker 1: They haven't earned the right to have gloves.
Speaker 0: Don't don't put stuff on the Internet. Like, I once I I have a Tesla Model S, one of the very first ones made. And I've got Friends of Coal license plates on it. Like in Kentucky, you can get Friends of Coal. It's a totally bad Oh, Coal, c o a l?
C o a l. Yeah. Sorry. So because in Kentucky, that's if you plug into the grid, that's likely where your electricity is coming.
Speaker 1: I would think. Yeah.
Speaker 0: So I'm driving this thing back from DC. This was when gas was, you know, getting close to $5 a gallon. It was over $4 a gallon. And I and I stopped in West Virginia to charge my Tesla at a supercharging station just to kind of troll people on the Internet, and I made sure to get a picture of my friend's a coal license plate, and I said I'm just charging up with coal here in West Virginia. And, within 30 seconds, I knew I'd made a mistake because somebody had zoomed in on the picture, and my tags were expired.
And they started tagging the Kentucky State Police, my local sheriff, the the DMV in Kentucky. Like, they were trying to get me in trouble. I'm like, there's no way to stop this now. And so they were relentless. And, but then somebody realized they had been expired for 18 months, that I'd actually made it a year without paying taxes and was maybe likely to get out of a year of taxes.
Speaker 1: Well, it's your win then.
Speaker 0: Yeah. But, in Kentucky, I think they make you go back and pay the old taxes. Anyways, what I learned there is, like, search everything in the picture before you put it on the Internet.
Speaker 1: Well, yes. And and others with zesty or personal lives than you have learned this the hard way.
Speaker 0: Even I'm very zest. No. It doesn't seem You've got enough minor minor tax evasion issue here. Right.
Speaker 1: You don't have time to be too weird. So so you get the Tesla battery back to your off grid house. And what do you have to do? Because it's not made for this. It's a car battery.
Speaker 0: It's a car battery. It's made to run 400 volts. All of my, existing system was made to run on 48 volts. But there were 16 modules, each nominally 25 volts. And I realized if you put 2 of those in series, you could make 50 volts.
So I put, 8 sets of 2 in series, and so I put 8 parallel a parallel to 8 sets of 2 in series. So I got 50 volts at a lot more amperage than what the Tesla car would normally draw. It was capable of doing that. And How hard is that to do? Well, I mean, it took a few days, but it's lasted for 6 and a half years.
I wouldn't advise doing this at home, like, why? Put it in an outbuilding. I mean, if it catches on fire, it's probably like Chernobyl, that mini series. Like, don't look at the reactor. God cannot put out he created lithium ion, but he can't put the fire out if it starts.
So I would not attach it to your house. Mine is like Is it attached to your house? Kind of. Yeah. It's like a basement room that's not under the house.
Like, I don't wanna get into everything under my house right now. Okay. So my wife says our house is my science project, and she's the mouse. And she doesn't mind that, but I keep rearranging the maze on the weekends when I come back from DC, and then she has to find the cheese while I'm in DC. But it's she's more like the astronaut, I think, in Iraq.
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly
Speaker 0: right. She's the only It's the
Speaker 1: same trust level required. Correct.
Speaker 0: Yes. She trusts me while I'm in DC, and I trust her to fly the house while she's in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: So what? She's also an MIT graduate, so I assume she assume, like, kind of understand some
Speaker 0: of the stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Although she would like to have just one thing in the house where if something went wrong, she could call somebody, but she can't. She's got to, like, call me and then I walk her through it.
By the way, it's a good, like, marriage security. But it's just like, she if we ever whoever broke up or if so let's say she put something in my coffee and I didn't wake up, you know, the next day, she'd have a hard time running the house. So so you put these you put
Speaker 1: the nodules, which is basically just separate batteries.
Speaker 0: Right?
Speaker 1: Okay. Within the at a
Speaker 0: full battery. Battery. Then I put a computer on it, a Raspberry Pi, and I made a little graphic screen and the Raspberry Pi using, an Arduino talks to the CAN bus, which is a proprietary Tesla communication system. So I use the battery management system that's native to the Tesla battery modules. If there's a nerd listening to this, this this makes complete sense, and they'll be like, oh, well, why wouldn't you do that?
And everybody else is gonna be like, he's just BS ing.
Speaker 1: So did you have to add new software to this to run it?
Speaker 0: I had to write software from scratch. Yeah. But it's fun. Like, this is what I do. Look, I've been in congress for 12 years.
My brain has atrophied to the size of a walnut. It actually, to a raisin. And it it it expands 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 raisin.
Speaker 1: I I believe that. I don't understand how these projects work, but I I know what brain atrophy looks like, and I know that congress
Speaker 0: induces it. It's not a worm. It just shrinks. So So how does it work? Like It works great.
We can run the air conditioner. Like, for the 1st 11 years, we had lead acid batteries, and they didn't work that great. You had to add water to them. Oh, for sure. They put off hydrogen gas, which is explosive.
Oh, I know. They put off a sulfide gas that can kill you. Like, lead acids or batteries are bad, and they're, like, over a 100 years old. But by the way, I love solar panels. Like, republicans are, like they look at me like, you have solar panels?
You have an electric car? Like, are you sure you're one of us? I'm like, well, the solar panels are rocks that make electricity. They are amazing things. They they take sunlight and turn it into something we can all use.
So you could hate I tell republicans, you can hate the subsidies. You can hate the bailouts, you can hate the mandates. I hate all of those things as well. But don't hate solar panels.
Speaker 1: Don't hate the technology.
Speaker 0: Right. Because it's actually given me given me and can give other people a license to be independent.
Speaker 1: From the car. So let's get specific about it. So you have this this Tesla battery that allows you to do everything a normal house can do. You can run air conditioning, you've got a dishwasher, you've got washer dryer, I'm assuming all this. Four deep freezers, refrigerator.
Four deep freezers.
Speaker 0: Full of peaches, beef, and chickens. Running continuously. Continuously.
Speaker 1: So, so your power draw is significant on all those appliances, obviously. Yeah. And the battery handles it fine. How much propane or how much diesel or would I assume you have a generator to recharge?
Speaker 0: Backup generator that runs occasionally in the winter. But I keep every time, you know
Speaker 1: So your solar panels recharge the battery?
Speaker 0: Yeah. For 9 months out of the year, the backup generator doesn't run except for it's, like, test run
Speaker 1: every Friday. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 0: When we bust out the machine guns, like, who's in the driveway? Oh, okay. Back down to level 1. That's just the backup generator.
Speaker 1: So your electricity is to I mean, as long as you know how to operate the system, which apparently only you do. But if you can do that, then you're just living a completely normal life
Speaker 0: Correct.
Speaker 1: With electricity.
Speaker 0: How
Speaker 1: do you do heat? How do you heat your house?
Speaker 0: So in one of the greenest ways possible, like, I think the whole carbon thing is a scam.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's a scam.
Speaker 0: But if you do care about carbon neutrality, I wish we had more carbon. We need more CO2.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: And at periods in the Earth's history, we had more CO2 and plant life was doing better. And we've seen plant life, we've seen the coverage of green on the globe increase as CO 2 levels go up, crop production goes up as CO 2 levels go up. But if you did care about c o two, I am using wood on my farm, like just trees that fall down. I'm not even going out and and cutting a living tree. There's enough trees falling down.
Deadfall. Deadfall. That if I don't get to them, the termites do. That's right. And they they turn them into c o two and methane.
But I can get to them and cut them up and bring them to my house and burn them in a wood gasifying boiler, which is super efficient. You by the way, once you start cutting wood for heat efficiency, like, if you figure out a boiler is twice as efficient, you can cut half as much
Speaker 1: So wood get can you cause anyone who's made it this far in the interview is probably interested in wood gasification. Can you explain what that is? How is it different from a normal wood fired boiler or a wood stove?
Speaker 0: Yeah. And a and a normal wood stove, you you put the wood in there. It can be green. You you light it on fire. You get it going, and then you control the air that goes to it to keep it from getting too hot.
And, a lot of smoke comes out, especially when it's idling because it's an inefficient combustion process and it's at a relatively low temperature under, let's say, a 1000 degrees. Right. But in a wood gasifying boiler, you get the fire started and it basically turns the wood into charcoal and drives the gases out of it into a secondary chamber that's ceramic because it's burning at over 1500 degrees. So some of the stuff
Speaker 1: that would How do you get wood to burn that hot?
Speaker 0: You just you deprive it of oxygen at first and and get it hot, and then you drive all the gases off, and you put more oxygen in in that secondary chamber, and it it looks like it's burning gas, like it'll be a blue flame, and then it'll turn into a yellow flame. It starts out actually
Speaker 1: And this is just oak maple beach, this is just conventional firewood?
Speaker 0: I burn near wood, nearest wood to the house. Right? Like Near wood?
Speaker 1: I mean,
Speaker 0: I don't remember that. Near wood.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Near wood. Nearest You burn softwood in it?
Speaker 0: You can, but the BT again, if you're doing this yourself, care about efficiency. Like, if you look at the old timers, they were the greenest people on the planet. Right? They didn't waste a thing, and they figured out the most efficient way to do things because it was minutes out of their lives. Yes.
So you start figuring out out how to be more efficient when you're trying to be self sustaining. So I've got on my Twitter bio, I used to say, it may still say this on there, greenest member of congress. That doesn't mean I just got there and I'm green. It nobody I never got
Speaker 1: any of the fact checkers to come after
Speaker 0: me on that. Nobody wants to fact check me. Who is has self sustaining food, self sustaining, we who is has self sustaining food, self sustaining, without externalities, right? Self sustaining power, self sustaining water.
Speaker 1: So you heat with wood. How much wood do you burn, would you say, a season?
Speaker 0: The size of this table, maybe 4 stacks of wood the size of this table.
Speaker 1: So this is about a cord, so this is about a cord is 4 by 4 by 8, so it's just like roughly that. So Yeah. 4 cords a year. Yep. That's not much.
That's impressive. How do you get hot water?
Speaker 0: We've got 3 ways to make hot water. When our geothermal unit's running in the summertime, doing the air conditioning, it takes the heat out of the living room and puts it in the hot water tank. So we have free hot water from like May until September when the air conditioner's running. And then in the winter, when the boiler the wood boiler is running, that makes hot water. And then if there's ever not the air conditioner running or the boiler running, we have an on demand, this is where we cheat, on demand propane hot water heater that makes up the difference.
Speaker 1: Amazing. But you could pretty easily set up a wood fired out outdoor.
Speaker 0: You could. Yeah. But in in the summer, again, you get it for free from the air conditioning. I actually have a 4th way to make hot water too. So when we're not connected to the grid, a lot of people who have solar panels are connected to the grid.
Yes. And if they have extra power, they sell it back. Right. I'm always depressed when I have extra power. My solar panels just turn off.
And I'm like, run around, turn on some lights, you know, turn on something. I don't want to waste this free electricity. So I got extra hot water heater elements that run on DC so that when the sun, when our house is full, the first thing it does is it tries to charge the Tesla that's sitting in the garage. So the Tesla is sitting there at half full, and a solid state breaker in my breaker box comes on and starts the Tesla charging. Then when the Tesla gets full and the house battery is full, I create hot water with the electricity.
So I've got like a 4th way to make hot water. Hot water is almost as good as water. I mean, if you've ever gone without water, you know it's bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: But going out without hot water is almost just as bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I I have experience with that. Yes.
Speaker 0: Where do you get your water? So I dug a well, and Doug not not drill? Doug it. There's there are lots of old dug wells on our farm, so I knew it could work. Yeah.
The the way they would do it, they would dig a big pit. Yes. They didn't dig it just straight down. They dug a big pit. And then they laid up stones in a circle, you know, the stones you see when you look in an old well.
But then they backfilled the pit with stones.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 0: So that extra area becomes like a reservoir. And then they put dirt on top of that so that, you know, when a raccoon poops next well, it doesn't necessarily go right into the reservoir. So I did a very similar thing, but I hit, bedrock and I borrowed a friend's jackhammer and spent a day inside of that hole with a jackhammer trying to get even deeper through the bedrock. I finally took my friend's jackhammer back and said, okay, that's deep enough.
Speaker 1: What was the jackhammer like?
Speaker 0: I mean, that's the best argument for for public health care that exists because, I don't I I have a new appreciation for somebody that's running the jackhammer. Those are those would wear your body out quickly. But really quickly?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Did you lose a crown?
Speaker 0: I did not lose a crown.
Speaker 1: So does the does the well the DOUG well work?
Speaker 0: It works. 1 month out of the year, we're just kinda short on water. Yep. August. So yes.
August. How'd you know that? Have you ever
Speaker 1: I have a dug well.
Speaker 0: Lived in this situation? Yes. I have a dug well, so I'm aware of that. But again, you can serve. Right?
Of course. If you have if you're connected to city water and it seems what's on the other side is opaque to you, you just use as much as you want. And what happens is during those peak periods, that's when the utility company has to work extra hard. That's when the the price and the inefficiency goes way up is in those peak periods when people aren't cutting back in response to the supply because the actual cost of producing it isn't known. When you're making it yourself, it's known, but, I've argued that water and electricity even when they come from especially when they come from utilities should have variable pricing based on the instant the cost at that very instant to produce it.
And then you could have appliances not mandated, but smart appliances. If you're rich, you don't care when the pricing power goes up. You don't know what it costs. You don't know what it costs. If you're poor and you got a little screen that says the power just went up, you'll go turn it off.
Right? A 100%. You'll you'll say, well, we'll do the dishes tonight, right, when it's cheaper. And if you're middle income, you'll probably eventually, the market will respond to this and automate these things so that, you know, if you know the price of electricity, your appliance can know the price. I don't want the utility company to know what you're doing with it.
Speaker 1: Of course not.
Speaker 0: But you can have these smart systems that make a lot more efficient use of our resources.
Speaker 1: So because you're not connected to the grid, to any public utility at all I mean, you're actually independent in a way that no one outside of Alaska I've ever met is, And it sounds like you're not giving up anything. You're not living in a
Speaker 0: Not too much. There are some sacrifices. Like Well, you know, if it's cloudy for a lot of days and hot, we may turn the thermostat up. Yeah. Just so we don't have to hear the backup generator run.
Speaker 1: That doesn't seem like a crazy sacrifice.
Speaker 0: There's some people who wouldn't take the instant they had to turn the thermostat from 72 to 75 was be screwed. I'm out of here. I'm going I'm going back to the grid.
Speaker 1: But it means that the state kinda has no control over your land.
Speaker 0: Correct. Or me. Or you So when I go to DC and they threaten me or try to bribe me, it's like, I know once Friday comes, I'm gonna be back on my farm, and I don't need them. Like, it's not that I don't wanna do things for people. I help my neighbors, and my neighbors help me, and I want to do public service, but because I have this comfort level that I'm going to go back home to this, I don't need the job.
We're self sustaining. It gives you an extra dimension of independence, I think, when you're in DC. What about food?
Speaker 1: They can they starve you out?
Speaker 0: I don't think so. Like, they can cut off my fish supply because we don't raise fish, and we don't raise pork, but we raise chicken, you know, meat and eggs. We raise beef, and we ray usually raise a pretty good garden. And I have an orchard, peach peaches, lots of peaches. My first peach is gonna be ripe here in a few weeks, and my last peach will be ripe in September.
So I've planted 14 kinds of peach trees, so they get ripe different weeks. And they taste nothing like the cardboard peaches you buy at the supermarket.
Speaker 1: So so you don't need to leap, actually, your farm? No. Actually,
Speaker 0: your farm? No. Are you trying to talk me out of, like I mean, this is a crisis I have some weeks. I bet. Man.
On Mondays, it's like, I you know, you know you're gonna get hit with a 2 by 4 as soon as you, you know, walk in the door in DC. It's like.
Speaker 1: Is it weird 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 amount of skills you need to build something like that is, is really, really striking. Like you actually have to know how to do things, complex things. I mean, timber framing is another level, but electrical, plumbing, masonry, agriculture, heavy equipment operation. Like, you can do all of that, obviously. So is it weird to be in a room with 434 people who can't do shit, who can't operate a micro I mean, they're, like, actually incapable, and maybe that's why they're in politics so they can externalize their their self loathing.
Is that weird?
Speaker 0: I don't I really don't think about it that much. Good. I don't think about it. Where'd you pick up plumbing skills? So my rule is buy 3 books for everything.
Because you can you can go to a hardware store and buy a book on plumbing, but I don't trust one book, so you buy 2 books. And then if the 2 books disagree, what are you gonna do? Well, you gotta have a 3rd book. So I've got 3 books on plumbing, 3 books on wiring, 3 books on septic systems, 3 3 books on You
Speaker 1: do your septic too.
Speaker 0: Roofing, yep. 3 I get 3 books on everything. And you read them. And I read them. And then there's the code book, which is like, you know, the the it's almost like international housing code thing that some municipalities have adopted and you have to abide by.
I just look at that as, like, a suggestion manual. Like
Speaker 1: So do you think now we're way in the weeds. I don't know if anyone's watching, the which really determines how people live in this country, the code, it's not up to code, is it is it real? I mean, is it knowing what you do about all those different trades, does the code protect people actually?
Speaker 0: It protects the contractors.
Speaker 1: Well, I know that.
Speaker 0: And so they help write it, the unions do. So for instance, the roofers union and the plumbers union, I think have conspired to put as many holes in your roof with plumbing as possible. Right? Because
Speaker 1: All the venting.
Speaker 0: Yeah. All the vents. Right? If you try to build a house to code, you'd you'd likely to have 4 or 5 perforations in your roof.
Speaker 1: What I've noticed.
Speaker 0: And and that keeps the roofers busy. Like, it's a guarantee to get a call every few years to fix that leak, and it's also very expensive. It's it's fairly cheap to do roofing, but it's all the exceptions that cost money. And then if you're a plumber, that's one more thing. Like all the
Speaker 1: flashing every time you have an aperture in a roof Yes. Like, that's a vulnerability.
Speaker 0: So, my my roof has no holes in it. Like, I've looked at this. I'm like, well, that's a good suggestion, but who who benefits if I believe
Speaker 1: what you're doing? At the side of the building, not the No.
Speaker 0: No holes in my roof. No holes out the side. Have you seen that opera house in, I think it's Sydney, Australia?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Famous opera.
Speaker 0: Is it Sydney or Melbourne? Sydney. Okay.
Speaker 1: Sydney Opera House.
Speaker 0: Yeah. There's no holes in that. There's bathrooms in there. How do they do it? They have the the one way admittance valves like you have under your kitchen counter.
They have giant ones of those that work for the whole system. And they're not to code, but I think that's stupid because why would I wanna put a bunch of holes in my roof?
Speaker 1: Well, I couldn't agree more. I'm interested in this topic. So
Speaker 0: But nobody else
Speaker 1: is now Well, but for the the 4 people who are, I've always wondered that. Why with wood stoves? Right? I live everyone has lots of wood stoves. And some of them, I have wood stoves that vent out the side of the building, like, next to a window, and then do an l up.
It's not quite as efficient, you know, because you can kinda turn in the run, but you don't have a hole in your roof. And in a climate with like lots of snow for example, you don't want any holes in your roof. But how do you vent your furnace, for example?
Speaker 0: So that I just run-in a typical flu, and it goes up in the chimney with my pizza oven flu, my wood cook stove flu, and my Rumford fireplace flew. So I have 4 flues through the chimney.
Speaker 1: On the gable end?
Speaker 0: No. They're in the middle of the house. I put the chimney in the middle of the house because it it's a big thermal mass, and I wanted to smooth out the changes in temperature in the house. And so there's where I did accommodate one hole in the roof is the chimney. Because I if you put a big stone mass on the side of your house, there's no way to insulate it from the outside.
So, but by the way, let me say something, like, I know there are some women watching this wondering, like, I wanna live in a house like that. That sounds like a lot of fun. Talk to my wife first. Occasionally, we have, like, some crisis that I have to solve and become MacGyver. So the first time I got elected to congress, for instance, the day before I went to go get sworn in, the well pump failed.
Oh. And I'm like, I can't leave my wife and 4 kids at home without water, and we have, a very unique well pump. What do I mean by that? Well, I didn't buy the one at the hardware store, so you can't go replace it. So I went down there.
And what did you buy? It's like in a catalog somewhere like at the engineering, they found the best one. Okay? It's not the most common one, but I had to fix it. So what I did is I found one of my, drills, you know, like you drill holes with.
Yeah. And I took it down to the well, and I took the motor off the well pump, and I chucked the drill to the well head and because it's not submersed, it's off the side in a pump house and I wired this, you know, had an outlet on it, but I just wired it into the well pump wiring And the drill pumped water for our house I believe that. Long enough for me to go get sworn in.
Speaker 1: I I've see I've seen that. I've seen drills run winches.
Speaker 0: Yes. Well, I forgot it was there. Like, I did my congress thing for
Speaker 1: You had it on continuously?
Speaker 0: Yeah. And then the the the, accumulator, in the basement that controls the pressure would turn the drill off and on whenever it needed more water pressure. And so it ran continuously. I forgot about it. I just got busy.
And, like, a year later, a freaking water quit working again. Because the Makita died? Right. Right. It was actually a Milwaukee hog.
It was? The whole hog. You know, one of those Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Like, you know what? Totally. Do what they handle on the side. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Those are cool drills. So you, last night I just wanna end with this. Last night, we were having dinner and which was really one of the most interesting amusing dinners I've ever had. But you made reference to a story, but you we didn't get it. You didn't get a chance to finish it because I interrupted you.
But about putting new plumbing in a county jail,
Speaker 0: I think. We can
Speaker 1: tell that story.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So quickly, I got into politics because, we were living off the grid. And I read this little newspaper, and it said they were going to raise our taxes to fund this cronyism in the county, the conservation district, which was building stuff for themselves and not for other farmers. They wanted to tax other farmers to help their farm. Right?
It wasn't really about conserving. Farmers are the biggest best conservationists there are, so let's don't punish them anymore. Okay. Good call. So I fought that tax, and then I've actually fought zoning in our county.
They wanted to zone our county. I mean, zoning is to keep the smoke stacks out of the cul de sacs. Right. My county didn't have any smoke stacks and didn't have any cul de sacs. Right?
We did the the like, the neighborhood in ET, you know, that movie where the kids ride their bikes to the neighborhood. We didn't have neighborhoods like that. So we didn't need zoning, but somebody thought if we zone the county, that we would get prosperity because they saw all the prosperous counties had zoning. It's like, it's cargo cult.
Speaker 1: Right? No. Totally. It's like saying, we should import some homeless because then we'll have banks.
Speaker 0: Right. Right.
Speaker 1: JPMorgan will move here because in Midtown, they're homeless.
Speaker 0: Right. So that was I was fighting that and writing letters to the editor, and then, finally, I quit fighting the guy who was doing all this. He's called the county judge executive in Kentucky, like the mayor of the county. And I decided to run against him.
Speaker 1: So And you've never been in politics?
Speaker 0: Never in my life. Also, there was this guy named Rand Paul who was inspiring. He was taking on the establishment. It was his first run for senate, and he decided to get involved in his race too. So just like with my house, I didn't go in partway.
I went in all in, okay, on politics one fall. Actually, one spring because I had to win the primary, and Rand did too. And so, actually did a fundraiser for Rand at my house when nobody wanted to do a fundraiser for Rand Paul because he was running against the establishment. My house wasn't finished. We weren't even living in it yet.
Sorry, little side bar. But you
Speaker 1: traipsed up from the double wide. Yes.
Speaker 0: We went to the double wide, and we said for $100 you can come to our pizza party. I did have the pizza oven working. And, So you built the pizza oven before the bedrooms? Yes. It's priorities.
That's right. Had to test it out, make sure it was inhabitable. So, the funny thing too, we didn't have doors on the bathrooms at 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 bathroom, he'd call.
Because I was like, look. This guy could be a senator someday, and he might need to go to the bathroom. And we need something more than a curtain here. So we call it the Rand Paul door on the bathroom. It's the one room that had a door from the very beginning.
Anyways, we did by the way, also, this was in January, and Rand is cheap as hell. He had a 2 wheel drive SUV. So I had to plow all my driveway so that he could get up there. And the problem is it's gravel. So I had to plow all my gravel off practically just to get so for what it costs to upgrade to the 4 wheel drive for Rand Paul, I like, my gravel cost way more than that.
Yeah. It's Anyways, I went all in on politics, helped Rand get elected in his primary. I was on the ballot the same day in in 2010, the primary, May 22, 2010. Rand was on the ballot and I was on the ballot, but I was running for this little county executive seat trying to take a republican out because he's trying to raise our taxes and bring in more government. And so I won the election, and it was, like, the most terrifying thing thing when they handed me the key to the courthouse.
Like, it's a small town, and if the janitor didn't show up to open the courthouse and start the boiler, which looked like the African queen, like, it was, like, you had to kick it and do all this stuff to get it started. The sheriff's office wouldn't be heated. The clerk's office wouldn't be heated, and my office wouldn't be heated if I couldn't get the African queen to start. So, anyways, I was like the dog that caught the bus, and I had promised I wouldn't raise taxes. And I was immediately confronted with all these problems that had accumulated over the years in our county government.
And the jailer came to me, who's an elected official in Kentucky. His name's Chris, and he he got elected the same day I got elected. And he was all in on my, you know, let's reform this county, But he had some bad news for me. The by the way, the state government had sold the county government a bill of goods. They said, if you'll keep our state inmates, we'll pay you $32 a day, and you'll make all kinds of money.
And so, like, the county was a $1,000,000 in debt because this did not work out. And I wasn't gonna spend another penny, you know, on this throwing good money after bad. And but we had 30 30 state inmates who go out and pick up trash and, you know, mow around the courthouse, and they they get real sweaty, and the hot water heater had quit working at the jail. Oh. And so the the jailer, Chris, comes to me and says, judge they call me judge even though I'm not an attorney.
It was the county judge executive. He said, judge, I got some bad news. He said, what's that? He said, well, hot water heater quit working on the state inmate side and I can't mix state inmates with local inmates. You know, you get murderers along with non support, you know, from child
Speaker 1: Totally in DUI cases.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It's like this we can't have them taking showers together. It's just not gonna work. And I said, okay. We'll just buy another hot water heater.
And he said, well, I tried that. I got a quote. We only had one licensed plumber in the county. And I said, well, what was the quote? He said, $12,000.
I said, I mean, this is a small county. For a hot water heater? For hot water like, all of our property taxes together were, like, $400,000. I mean, $12,000 for a hot I'm not paying $12,000 for a hot water heater. You tell that guy to get lost.
And he said, well, what are you gonna do? I was like, I'll go buy 1 at at, you know, the hardware store or something. So I go look at this hot water heater at the jail. It is not the kind you buy at the store. It's like a boiler almost, and it's fairly involved.
It's got, like, inch and a quarter copper lines. It's not household plumbing.
Speaker 1: But I had plum
Speaker 0: I had 3 books on plumbing. Right? I felt fairly confident. I said, well, if I can find one of these, I'll put it in myself. So I got on eBay, and I looked for this model hot there was one buy it now for $55100.
And I'm like, I can save the county, like, $65100. So I called the emergency meeting of our fiscal court, brought in the magistrates, noticed it to the newspaper, did it all legally, and made a motion to buy it now on eBay. And then then I hit the button. I bought this hot water heater. They bring it in a tractor trailer.
I didn't pay extra for the lift gate because I had inmates. The the the inmates take this thing out of the tractor trailer, and we go in and we take the old hot water heater out. And, there were 3 inmates in that closet, right, working on that hot water heater, just demolishing everything. So they drag that thing out of there, and I had to go in the closet with the inmates to put the new one in. I'm like, I only want one inmate in that closet with me.
Fair. The the hot water heater needs plumbed. I don't need plumbed. Like so as the the other 2 inmates that were smelling pretty rank at this point, I said, you guys go strip the old hot water heater. I want anything of value on that.
Besides, you're in here for stripping copper and other things like
Speaker 1: you're good at their
Speaker 0: lives. We can do this, judge. We know we know short iron's bringing this, tin's bringing this, copper will bring this, aluminum. They could quote every price at the salvage. Seriously?
Yeah. So they I leave the 2 inmates stripping the old hot water heater, and it had a computer on it and stuff. And I am installing the new hot water heater. And I noticed, for instance, even, like, the the plumber had left off this water trap that keeps gases from escaping like a safety device. So I made sure to do it completely safe, buy the book or buy the 3 books that I had.
And, I come out of the closet. By the way, there's, like, 30 inmates. I had to walk by the rec room that had a piece of glass, and they could all watch me change in this hot water heater. And there's, like, 30 inmates, like, in disbelief with their hands and faces pressed to the glass. Like, we have never seen a county judge exact get get a callous on his hand or do anything.
So, I go back out and the inmate said, we got everything of value. There was this hulk of an old hot water heater sitting there. They had stripped the copper. They had stripped all of the useful iron off of it. And I said, guys, you left the most valuable thing on it.
And they said, no, judge. We've done this all our lives. We stripped these things. There's nothing on here that'll bring anything down at Livingston's. That was the junkyard place recycling place.
And, I said, nope. You left the most valuable thing. I said, come over here. And they walk over, and I said, you see this lime green inspection sticker? Get it wet and peel it off and glue it on the new hot water heater.
Remember, I refused to hire the only licensed plumber in the county. They go, judge, you could go to jail for this. I said, I'll have a hot won't I? You actually did that? I did that.
And the only reason I'm telling you this publicly is this was, how long was it, like 15 years ago or something? And, 14 years ago, I think the statute of limitations, you know, practicing it without a license as a plumber on a public building has probably expired. If not, the DOJ will be at my house as soon as this airs. But they have also since closed down the jail. Like, a few years later, they it was a good move.
Speaker 1: Did they take the water heater with them?
Speaker 0: You know, it's on my bucket list. It may still be in there. So what are they using it for now? It's, I think it's just vacant. Maybe they'll use it for drug rehab or something at some point, which would make more sense
Speaker 1: to get that done. Did your hot Oh, yeah.
Speaker 0: What? Oh, yeah. It booted up. The computer came on, and everybody got, I mean, 30 inmates just waiting to take a hot shower. And it worked and worked and worked until they shut the jail down.
So Incredible. But, anyways, that set the tone. Like, you could say, well, you're the executive of the county, and you shouldn't be wasting your time on that. But I I mean, I had 4 hours of effort in it, and I saved the county $65100. And I'm like, no.
This is worth my time. And it also shows the inmates, like, okay. We're buying you dollar 50 launches instead of the $2 launches now because we fired the crony who was doing the food system. Totally. And and they were less likely to complain when they saw that the judge himself was actually willing to change the hot water heater.
But it also set the tone for the sheriff and the county clerk and everybody else who sees that. And it's like, man, he is a cheap bastard. It's like, I'm not gonna go ask him at the NEST Fiscal Court meeting for anything.
Speaker 1: Why don't you tell the story to APAC, and maybe they'll leave you alone? It's like, it's not personal. I'm not against you or your country. I just don't wanna spend more money.
Speaker 0: By the way, I'm sure there would be some plumbing lobby against me next week Sure. After they see this.
Speaker 1: Well, the one thing I know for a fact is that you will bravely stand up to the irate plumbing lobby.
Speaker 0: I will. One one more story about lobbies. So I introduced this, raw milk bill in congress. And I you know, food freedom, empowers small farmers. It's more nutritious.
I thought there was nothing to hate about it. I got 20 cosponsors. I put it in the hopper. I got my HR number. And that day, the milk lobby comes after me.
Like, they said there wouldn't be enough hospital rooms for all the children who were gonna die from raw milk if my bill passed. And, this is kinda weird. You've got a lobby going after its own product, the milk lobby. So my wife saw all these things come up on her alerts on her phone, and she texted me. She was worried about me.
And she says, o m g. I didn't realize the lactose lobby was this intolerant.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's brilliant. You said that? That's pretty awesome. Thomas Massi, thank you. Hey.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Tucker. Amazing.
Speaker 1: Thanks for watching. You can go to tucker carlson.com for our entire library of everything we've done, and we hope you will.
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@dom_lucre Remember. If Alex Jones says something, there’s probably some factual evidence of it that exists. https://x.com/hpnnetwork/status/1733807067948040288?s=61
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#SHOCKING: Israelis gun down a Palestinian teenager in the street and then his father when he runs up to him. #IsraelAttack #Gaza_Genocide #GazaCity #Gaza https://t.co/uh7Y4ItZQy
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@Norther66916489 @Graham_dePenros A Gaza resident on the ground confirmed this teenager along with another victim was shot today.
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Here’s a video comparison of what type of missiles Hamas Normally strikes buildings with vs What was heard in the #Gaza Hospital bombings. Their missiles are not near powerful enough to level a building and result in that many casualties. https://t.co/tzWZYrp2nU