Rep. Thomas Massie: Israel Lobbyists, the Cowards in Congress, and Living off the Grid

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Speaker 4 Do you know James Carville? Yes. So he got stuck at a roast one time when we worked together in New Orleans and had to take a leak and was on C-SPAN.

Speaker 4 And on the tape, which I have seen, he's sitting there and he's kind of shuffling in his seat. And all of a sudden, he takes this water pitcher off the table and sort of sticks a leak in the water.

Speaker 4 Oh, gosh.

Speaker 4 So what is that thing moving on your lapel on your pocket? That's the debt. That's my anxiety generator.
So it's actually making me really anxious.

Speaker 4 Is that real time? Yes. So it's synced to Treasury.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I am. So I think you're the only one who wants to know.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I once caught a female congresswoman staring at it and had to tell her my eyes were up here.

Speaker 4 She asked me why I didn't make a belt buckle out of it.

Speaker 4 Can you say who it was? Cause I like it. No, I cannot.
Oh, well, she's funny. That's

Speaker 4 very impressive. So what's the message of it? The message is this is urgent.

Speaker 4 You know, it's hard to comprehend 14 digits of debt, but when you see the last five digits are moving so fast, you can't, you know, perceive them with your eyes Then you kind of understand whoa We got a problem here.

Speaker 4 I mean it's a hundred thousand dollars a second roughly so imagine we had this catapult and we were launching cyber trucks once a second into the ocean.

Speaker 4 That's how much debt we're taking on continuously now. There is some good news.
I noticed last month it went down

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So maybe when it gets so big, it becomes something that you have to ignore. It's almost like if you fall off the wagon from drinking, you binge.

Speaker 4 If you fall off your New Year's diet, you just eat the pizza and a bed and Jerry. It's like, why do you care? You know, you sort of go crazy.
And it feels like we're there.

Speaker 4 I am trying to make people feel very uncomfortable. I wear this on the floor of the house.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And people literally, they'll press the button that says yay or nay. I've argued we should relabel the voting button, spend and don't spend.

Speaker 4 They're red and green if you got that far and can't read.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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. sky.

Speaker 4 It almost feels like, you know, it's so big

Speaker 4 that why even deal with it?

Speaker 4 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 going to fix it.
We might as well indulge in it and I'll see what I can get.

Speaker 4 Well, exactly. Yeah.
So where does it end?

Speaker 4 Right now, we're able to finance it because we're the world's reserve currency.

Speaker 4 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 holds dollars gets like a 3% transaction fee.

Speaker 4 I say we're kind of like the credit card at the gas station that gets 3% because you're using that credit card. Well, we get 3% from inflation we cause because the world is using our currency.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I mean, I watched your interview with Putin.

Speaker 4 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 U.S.

Speaker 4 dollars. And after the sanctions, it's less than 20% of their transactions are in U.S.
dollars.

Speaker 4 So what we're doing with all these sanctions, ironically, we're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we sanction a country and say you can't use our currency to have a transaction.

Speaker 4 We're taking away our ability to charge them 3% 3%

Speaker 4 for that transaction because when we print 3% more dollars, we're just taking that money for it. And we're also sending a really clear signal, which is the dollar is not safe for you.
Right.

Speaker 4 It's the reserve currency because it's a safe haven because it's a stable country. It's the most stable country in the world.

Speaker 4 And we're not going to weaponize the dollar because that would be shooting ourselves. But suddenly we are.
And they'll tolerate like 3%

Speaker 4 because we're not backed by dollars. We're backed by aircraft carriers right now.
So they'll sort of tolerate that 3%.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Well, it turns out a lot of that is Treasury debt that they've agreed to buy so that they can hold dollars. And

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It's already happening. And the price of a long-term bond that the Treasury puts out will go, it's already gone above 4%.
It's like over 4.5%.

Speaker 4 And they don't want to buy them anymore because, you know, we probably wouldn't seize Great Britain's assets, but I could see a seizing China's assets. Why would, I mean, that seems like theft.

Speaker 4 Just like take a country's assets. I mean, that belongs to the people of the country, right? As such as Putin.
It is theft. Like it's immoral.

Speaker 4 But even if you're okay with the amorality or immorality of it, it's short-sighted because eventually it'll catch up with us. So do any of the dumbbos you work with understand that?

Speaker 4 Did you say, wait a second, if we do this, first of all, it's wrong. And if we're going to be a beacon of light and order and justice in the world, we should abide by those principles.

Speaker 4 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? Some of them understand it, but it doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 They'll still vote for something like the Repo Act anyway, because it's popular.

Speaker 4 With whom?

Speaker 4 With voters. They think, yeah, take Russia's money.
Like, you know, let's take, yeah, that'd be great. Let's take their money and use it in a war against them.

Speaker 4 It kind of feels good, but the problem is 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 war with Russia?

Speaker 4 I've never figured that out.

Speaker 4 Why Russia? It almost seems like they picked it off a map. Like, why would we be at war with Russia? You know, what's interesting is we were in Afghanistan, and I was tracking this.

Speaker 4 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 billion a year.

Speaker 4 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 second gear to third gear because as soon as we quit spending $50 billion a year in Afghanistan, we started spending more than $50 billion a year in Ukraine.

Speaker 4 There's a military industrial complex. They call it the defense industrial base now in the United States.
They say we have to, they're hungry and we've got to keep them fed.

Speaker 4 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'll engage in these other things to keep them healthy and thriving.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They made the argument that the defense industrial base needs to be strong, and so we need to spend this money.

Speaker 4 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 4 But if you're, if, I mean, look, everyone who lives here wants to be proud of the country. I always have been.

Speaker 4 And I'm proud of its people still. But if your main export is death,

Speaker 4 you know, that, I mean, what? It doesn't work in the long run. I mean, there is a blowback.

Speaker 4 We're engendering a lot of ill will. Look, 10 years ago,

Speaker 4 even more recently than that, the only way we could get to the space station was on a Russian rocket. Right.
And we, you know, we had a collaboration with them. We were able to get to space that way.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 now we don't. I mean, it's, and the bad thing that's, you know, like in the Middle East,

Speaker 4 Israel is creating

Speaker 4 tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who are going to hate the United States. And, you know, they're going to hate Israel also.

Speaker 4 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 4 Aaron Powell, Jr.: But we're told that it's essential to our national security to do that. Do you believe that?

Speaker 4 No, I don't see that. I mean, 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.

Speaker 4 But I don't see how it's strengthening our country. In fact, we're getting weaker by doing it.

Speaker 4 So you've been, I think, the lone Republican to dissent from a lot of these votes.

Speaker 4 How many votes have there been

Speaker 4 on this question and where have you voted on them?

Speaker 4 Oh, 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,

Speaker 4 you know, saber-rattling. We do these non-binding resolutions, whereas, you know, Russia is evil.
And, you know, whereas we support democracy.

Speaker 4 Now, even then, we knew that Ukraine was just corrupt as hell.

Speaker 4 But, you know, 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 seven months there have been probably 30 votes on israel and the middle east 30 30.

Speaker 4 there were somebody how many votes on the u.s border during that time

Speaker 4 oh maybe

Speaker 4 maybe four show votes that you know where we know they're going nowhere in the senate um look we haven't named 30 post offices.

Speaker 4 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.
Why do you, because you hate Israel or is there another reason?

Speaker 4 No, because I'm against sending our money overseas. I'm against starting another proxy war.
I'm against sanctions because it's going to weaken the dollar.

Speaker 4 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 about the free speech part of it.

Speaker 4 So recently they brought a bill to Congress and this was actually a binding bill, not a non-binding resolution. Like this was going to have the effect of law and people would get

Speaker 4 prosecuted if they engaged in anti-Semitism on campuses. And the problem with this bill is they use some international definition of anti-Semitism on a website somewhere.

Speaker 4 My first question is, why don't you just put the definition in the bill? Why are you pointing to somebody's URL in a piece of legislation? You are the Congress, right? Right. We are the Congress.

Speaker 4 Right, the laws. We should be.
Instead, we're referencing a website that's not even

Speaker 4 hosted in the United States. And so

Speaker 4 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 anti-Semitism.

Speaker 4 And some of these are actually passages in the New Testament, if you will, would be banned by this international definition of anti-Semitism. For instance, saying that Jews killed Jesus, which is

Speaker 4 in the Bible,

Speaker 4 he was not welcome among his own people, okay?

Speaker 4 And so that would be anti-Semitism.

Speaker 4 And if you engaged in that on campus or just offered that as a thought, let's say in a classroom, you would be anti-Semitic and you would run afoul of the Department of Education and some federal laws.

Speaker 4 And, you know, there were other examples in there that were hard to believe. For instance, comparing the policies of Israel to the Nazi regime would be anti-Semitic.
But the question is,

Speaker 4 what if their policies ever became the same? Is this a static definition? Or what if we just have different opinions and your opinion is now a crime? Right. I mean, even if it's abhorrent.

Speaker 4 Even if it's wrong and stupid. Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's still legal. It should be.

Speaker 4 You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left.

Speaker 4 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.

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And we invite you to subscribe to it. Go to tuckercarlson.com/slash podcast.

Speaker 4 Our entire archive is there.

Speaker 4 A a lot of behind-the-scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn uh when only an iphone is running tuckercarlson.com slash podcast you will not regret it so your colleagues i i think it passed right oh yeah it passed with uh flying colors but at least a few people woke up to this i mean so but the the members of congress who you know go to church on sunday who've just voted to ban the new testament on campus make it illegal to quote from the new testament the Christian Bible.

Speaker 4 Like, how did they square that?

Speaker 4 I think their voters let them get away with it. I mean, they don't have to square it unless they're...
But why would they want to do something like that?

Speaker 4 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 want to bring up issues.

Speaker 4 They want to put them in front of Congress and make us vote on them, whether they're going anywhere in the Senate or not. And And they want to split the Democrats.

Speaker 4 They want to show that Republicans are united and then split the Democrats. That's one of the reasons they do it.

Speaker 4 Another reason they do it is there's a foreign interest group called APAC that got the ear of this current speaker and demanded 16 votes in April on Israel or the Middle East.

Speaker 4 We haven't had 16 votes in April on the United States in Congress.

Speaker 4 So what's APAC? APAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And they didn't start out as a PAC in the sense of a political action committee, but now they have a political action committee.

Speaker 4 Ostensibly, it's a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of Israel. They're for anything Israel.

Speaker 4 And they're a very effective lobbying group. They get in there.

Speaker 4 They try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate, for instance, for Congress. They almost get

Speaker 4 on Israel.

Speaker 4 And I wouldn't do it. And they said, why? And I'm like, I don't do homework for lobbyists, right? I'm like, I didn't learn, I didn't like writing term papers at college.
I'm not writing one for you.

Speaker 4 What did they say? They said, oh, well, here, just copyright Paul's term paper and put your name on it. We'll accept that.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And what

Speaker 4 you're laughing, but you know what? I bet

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They don't really grade your term paper.

Speaker 4 They just want to 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 for them

Speaker 4 as a congressman when you get in there. So this, my rift started out in 2012 when I refused to turn in an Israel term paper.
How did you respond to that?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 they kind of got in my race a little too late there in the beginning

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They didn't have a political action committee at the time. They couldn't spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars against me at that time.

Speaker 4 It was just sort of like a whisper campaign to try to, hey, don't vote for him, blah, blah, blah. That's why.

Speaker 4 Because at that point, they sensed I wouldn't do what they wanted.

Speaker 4 But what did they whisper against you? What were they saying about you?

Speaker 4 Well, they would do it through, for instance, churches, evangelical churches. They've got an organization called Christians United for Israel, where they've sort of co-opted evangelicals.

Speaker 4 People think it's a grassroots movement in Kentucky.

Speaker 4 It's actually a top-down movement from AIPAC so that people who aren't even Jewish will feel like they've got got to support Israel, you know, no matter what.

Speaker 4 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 4 So you get elected

Speaker 4 despite their efforts. And then what happens? Do you talk to them after that? And by the way, let me just.
put a little footnote here. I'm not against Israel.
I've never voted to sanction Israel.

Speaker 4 I've never said anything particularly critical of Israel

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 so what do they do now?

Speaker 4 Yeah, you get elected 2012. Do you hear from them again? I vote my conscience,

Speaker 4 which they won't tolerate. So they ran with their 501c4 before they had a super PAC.
They were running educational advocacy ads against me saying that, you know, I'm bad on Israel.

Speaker 4 They didn't say don't vote for him. They just said he's a bad guy.
And so I said, all right, well, you're not welcome in my office anymore because for years I invited them into my office.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And, you know, we used to talk, but now they're banned from my office.

Speaker 4 The situation went from bad to worse.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 this most recently, and in fact, as I'm speaking to you today, even though my election is over, they're still running hundreds of thousands of dollars of negative ads.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And that's okay. I mean, you can have, you know, you're a libertarian-oriented Republican from Northern Kentucky.
You're probably not going to single-handedly determine our foreign policy. So

Speaker 4 I think you should, but you don't. Thank you.
And you're not going to. So why do they care? Why not just let Thomas Massey be Thomas Massey in Northern Kentucky? Like, why the need to crush you?

Speaker 4 I don't know. I think 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.

Speaker 4 They go to Mike Johnson and they say, we want 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.

Speaker 4 It passes with a unanimous vote, except for one guy votes no. And I think they feel like it's a scratch scratch on their car.
They wanted a brand new car and it got scratched by this guy named Massey.

Speaker 4 They were going to drive it over to the Senate and ask for unanimous consent. But now the senators are saying, wait,

Speaker 4 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 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.
Right.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 I mean, I don't like APAC anymore. Like, I used to be neutral toward APAC, right? But I have no antagonistic feelings toward Jewish people.

Speaker 4 I am the last thing. I think I'm probably the least xenophobic person in Congress.

Speaker 4 I mean, these are the guys that my colleagues want to sanction everybody, you know, declare them terrorist states, you know, come up with these strongly worded resolutions.

Speaker 4 I don't vote for any of that crap, right?

Speaker 4 Unless somebody does harm to me, I'm not going to call them anything. So I get called names just for staying out of all of this political posture.
That's disgusting, though, isn't it?

Speaker 4 You know, I guess.

Speaker 4 They can disagree with your views, but to call you like the worst thing you can be in America, like, that's disgusting.

Speaker 4 You know, I have a thick skin.

Speaker 4 Apparently.

Speaker 4 And here's the good news, Tucker.

Speaker 4 My constituents aren't falling for it. Two weeks ago, I just had a primary and got 76% of the vote with APAC running hundreds of thousands of dollars of ads.
So it's not working against me.

Speaker 4 I think it's short-sighted

Speaker 4 on their side to do this.

Speaker 4 They're just burning money but they're trying to make an example of me but they're also exposing their weakness 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 two dozen republicans who said wait hold on there's a question though there's a fundamental question so the biden administration has put a bunch of people in jail for violating something called farah the foreign agent registration act 1936-ish It's been on the books for 90 years.

Speaker 4 And it's never been enforced ever until recently, until really the Trump era and Biden era.

Speaker 4 But the law requires people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments to register. It's that simple.

Speaker 4 And this is the largest lobby in the United States, most effective lobby in the United States on behalf of a foreign government. Are they registered with FARA? They're not, but they should be.
Well,

Speaker 4 how can that be?

Speaker 4 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 register under the law?

Speaker 4 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 4 I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you should take their side.
I don't know. Well,

Speaker 4 I'm going to agree with you at a second, but let me at least offer what I think is their argument.

Speaker 4 They would say, we are Americans. You know, the members of AIPAC are Americans and that they have the right to free speech.
Paul Manafort's an American. Right, right.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so there's the good rebuttal: FARA applies not to foreigners, to foreign agents

Speaker 4 of foreign principles, agents of foreign principles. It's Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.
Correct. So this is, APAC is exactly what FARA is meant for.

Speaker 4 Now, they would say, and we have a First Amendment right. Okay, well,

Speaker 4 I agree with you there, but we also have election laws. And

Speaker 4 it's disclosure, right? They're not, FARA doesn't say you can't say Thomas Massey's, you know, an ignorant hillbilly.

Speaker 4 You're allowed to say that if you want to, but we just want to check where your money's coming from.

Speaker 4 Tell us where it's coming from, what you're spending it on, and if you are lobbying on behalf of a foreign country.

Speaker 4 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 foreign country.

Speaker 4 Let's look and see if you're getting any money from that foreign country. Are you a dual citizen with that foreign country?

Speaker 4 Are you being directed by, for instance, is Netanyahu speaking to your group, advising you on your next move?

Speaker 4 Are you getting money from the military-industrial complex?

Speaker 4 Because to understand AIPAC, I think it's easiest to model them as a military industrial lobby. Like their biggest thing is

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 the argument they would make is, oh, we're just stimulating the U.S.

Speaker 4 military industrial complex because every single penny of the 3.8 billion that they nominally get, now they're getting way more than that, but that Israel nominally gets goes to U.S.

Speaker 4 military contractors. Now, that didn't make me warm and fuzzy, okay? But that is their argument.

Speaker 4 And if you notice what they advocate for, I think sometimes they advocate for things that even Israelis wouldn't advocate for. I believe that.

Speaker 4 Like, they would, I think, be okay with a war with Iran, like an all-out, you know, apocalyptic war with Iran. Whereas there are people in Israel who say, whoa, hold on a second.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Or what the Farm Bureau is to farmers, APAC is to Israel. It represents a faction.
Right. They represent a faction, but usually a corporate faction that,

Speaker 4 and they're using the imprimatur of grassroots that they've deluded or confused into bullying congressmen. And the NRA does that, and Farm Bureau does that.

Speaker 4 I'm picking on some other right-wing groups here.

Speaker 4 For sure. And by the way, I think there are probably a lot of things that AIPAC is for that I'm for and Farm Bureau, NRA, same thing.
Right.

Speaker 4 The idea of a foreign government playing in our political campaigns openly.

Speaker 4 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. Is there any other Republican who has your views on this?

Speaker 4 Well, I have Republicans who come to me on 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.

Speaker 4 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 4 What does that mean, an AIPAC person? It's like your babysitter, your APAC babysitter, who

Speaker 4 is always talking to you for APAC. They're probably a a constituent in your district, but they are

Speaker 4 firmly embedded in APAC.

Speaker 4 Every member has someone like this.

Speaker 4 I don't know how it works on the Democrat side,

Speaker 4 but that's how it works on the Republican side. And when they come to D.C., you go have lunch with them and they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them.
So I've had like...

Speaker 4 That's absolutely crazy. I've had four members of Congress say, I'll talk to my APAC person.
And it's literally what we call them, my APAC guy. I'll talk to my APAC guy and see if I can get him to

Speaker 4 dial those ads back. Why have I never heard this before?

Speaker 4 It doesn't benefit anybody.

Speaker 4 Why would they want to tell their constituents that they've basically got a buddy system with somebody who's representing a foreign country?

Speaker 4 It doesn't benefit the congressman for people to know that, so they're not going to tell you that.

Speaker 4 Have you seen any other country do anything like this? Like, Russia, Russia obviously determines the outcome of our elections. We keep hearing that.

Speaker 4 Does anyone have a Putin guy that they talk to? Not only do they not have a Putin guy, look,

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 it's the only country that does this, that has somebody that like uniformly, I guarantee there's some spreadsheet at APAC where,

Speaker 4 you know, the APAC dude is, who's matched up with the congressman is there, and then all the congressmen's votes on the issue. Oh, has the congressman been to Israel?

Speaker 4 They pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to Israel.

Speaker 4 I may be, I mean, I don't, I'm not the only Republican who hasn't taken the APAC trip to Israel, but I'm probably one of a dozen that hasn't taken that trip, and the other ones just haven't got around to it.

Speaker 4 What's the trip like? Do you know?

Speaker 4 It's kind of like, I think vacation-y.

Speaker 4 You go see the wall, you go see the, you know, the sights,

Speaker 4 things like that. It's such a great, I must say, it's such a great country.
Jerusalem especially is just such a wonderful place that that's got to have a big effect. You go like swim in the Dead Sea.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, I've done that. Yeah.
Not on an APAC trip, but I would recommend it to anyone. Are you sure it wasn't an AIPAC trip?

Speaker 4 I paid for it myself. No, I mean, it's just funny.
I mean, I am 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.

Speaker 4 Look, they have, they, but that's distinct from the government of Israel, which is just a foreign government. My, my sense is the people are, are very entrepreneurial.
Yeah. That

Speaker 4 they're publicly minded, you know, they care about their country, um, that that they're generally good people, right? That's certainly been my experience in trips there for sure. It's great.

Speaker 4 It's just that's, I mean, I think it's probably one of my favorite, maybe my all-time favorite place to go

Speaker 4 with my family. But that's just a completely different thing from taking orders from its government.
Right.

Speaker 4 I mean, right? Now, again, they'll say it's, these are American citizens who are, you know, coordinating all. His just, again, this is almost a rhetorical question, but in your

Speaker 4 12, 14 years in Congress, 12 years,

Speaker 4 have you ever seen any indication that Russia is influencing election outcomes or candidates or members?

Speaker 4 Not in a quiet way. Like,

Speaker 4 you know, they'll put out statements. Russia obviously has

Speaker 4 Russia Today, RT. Yeah, I think it's been banned.
Yeah, I like, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken, of which I'm a big fan, being from Kentucky, right?

Speaker 4 They realized that fried became sort of a pejorative and people didn't want to eat fried food. So they changed the name to KFC.
So you don't have to say fried. Okay.

Speaker 4 Russia Today changed their name to RT, so you don't have to say Russia.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 We have.

Speaker 4 what is it, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. We have, I mean, we spend a billion dollars, well over a billion dollars on the foreign propaganda that's out in the open that we know about, right?

Speaker 4 So there are foreigners spending money on propaganda over here as well. I don't want to say they're not involved, but people don't say, oh, I need to go talk to my Russia guy.

Speaker 4 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 4 I have never heard that. You haven't.

Speaker 4 What about China?

Speaker 4 No, there's, I mean, unless it's a spy sleeping with a Democrat, I'm sure that there's some of that going on. Yeah, but that's not

Speaker 4 in public. So how do you think

Speaker 4 it's just interesting because you're clearly not a bigot.

Speaker 4 I think it's very obvious. And

Speaker 4 they've called you one and they've spent millions of dollars against you over the years and it has had no effect. You get re-elected in the primary in the 70s.
So

Speaker 4 why are they still spending against you in your state, statewide? And can you just continue to serve in Congress while disobeying?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 they say that they don't want me to run statewide. They're worried that I'll run for McConnell's seat.
And so they're trying to send me a message. That's what they would tell you.

Speaker 4 But why? I don't know what the message is.

Speaker 4 It's a little presumptuous to decide to get to be. I've never said that I'm running for the Senate, right? Yeah.
I'm pretty much disinterested in it personally and publicly.

Speaker 4 But just in case they're running ads statewide, now, mind you, there are six congressional districts in Kentucky, and I only represent one of them.

Speaker 4 They're running the ads in all six congressional districts just in case.

Speaker 4 Amazing. What do you think of Mitch McConnell after all these years of being in the delegation with him?

Speaker 4 He's a shrewd guy. Yep.
He's quick.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He got elected in a special election, which means you come in in the middle of a term and you have to boot up with no staff. And so it's kind of,

Speaker 4 you know, disorienting. So Mitch McConnell

Speaker 4 had an event for Jamie Comer on his first day in Congress. It was in a townhouse with like 200 lobbyists.
By the way, I'm never going to get invited to one of these now that I tell you the story.

Speaker 4 And so Jamie's there and McConnell goes,

Speaker 4 I believe Jamie took his first vote tonight.

Speaker 4 And that is such a perfect invitation.

Speaker 4 And I wasn't supposed to speak, but I interrupted Senator McConnell, who was at the time the majority leader.

Speaker 4 And I said, yes, yes, Senator McConnell, he did take his first vote, and I know he has no staff.

Speaker 4 So I advise Jamie, when you walk into the chamber, look at how I vote, and then vote the other way, and you'll be just fine.

Speaker 4 And every, you know, 200 lobbyists thought it was a pretty good joke, and they were laughing.

Speaker 4 And as the laughter died down, McConnell goes, Well, Thomas, I'm glad you and I are giving Jamie the same advice.

Speaker 4 And then the place just, the walls almost collapse. Oh, he's good.
He's good, though.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 but I think it's time for new leadership in the Senate. I mean, he's obviously, it's way past time.
And this is just a fact. I'll say it.
I'll get in trouble for saying it.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And Senator McConnell's favorabilities are lower among Republican primary voters than our Democrat governor's favorabilities. Seriously.
Yes. Lower than Governor Bashir.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Bashir's around 40% among Republican primary voters, and McConnell's around 30%.

Speaker 4 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 accounts for in the final months and years of his public career?

Speaker 4 His

Speaker 4 public statements that all that matters is Ukraine.

Speaker 4 Like, what is that? I have no idea. By the way, I have so many fights in the House that I have tried to avoid every fight in the Senate that I can.

Speaker 4 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 Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and

Speaker 4 J.D. Vance,

Speaker 4 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 going to be able to fix the Senate.

Speaker 4 But it's just interesting.

Speaker 4 Okay, taking McConnell out of it and even the Senate out of it, but some of the committee chairmen in the House, for example, seem like Ukraine is all that matters to them.

Speaker 4 And there's, of course, the question as you noted of donations from Lockheed, et cetera, the military-industrial complex, but it almost seems messianic to me. It seems heartfelt to me.

Speaker 4 It seems sincere. that they think that this is all that matters, winning this war against Russia.
Do you have any sense of why they feel that way? I don't.

Speaker 4 And the hardest ones to understand are people like Mike Johnson, who used to be against

Speaker 4 sending more money to Ukraine. But now that he's the speaker,

Speaker 4 like you said, he seems strongly convicted that we should be sending money there. Almost like it's a religious calling or something.
I mean, it seems totally real to me. It doesn't seem fake.

Speaker 4 I've heard the argument. I think it's immoral, but I've heard the argument that, oh, this is a great deal.

Speaker 4 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 a good thing.
You know,

Speaker 4 since the Cold War began, we've been taught that it would be good for Russia to be diminished.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And my answer to that is, why don't you tell us the Ukrainian casualties?

Speaker 4 I have been in classified settings with CIA,

Speaker 4 the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense,

Speaker 4 not their assistants, but those people in the room. And they're bragging about how many Russians have died and been injured.
And I asked them how many Ukrainians have died and been injured.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like, not only is our Americans being fed propaganda about this war, Congress is being fed propaganda by our State Department and our Secretary of Defense and our intelligence agencies.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like 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.

Speaker 5 but you can expose them with two or three questions like how many ukrainians have died and they refuse to answer i've asked that very same question um to mike johnson actually directly a incredible nutritional supplement called immuno 150 is now available to the public it contains 13 vitamins 17 herbs 18 amino acids 17 antioxidants nine exotic fruits coq10 turmeric and 70 plant-derived colloidal minerals it may be the best health supplement in the world because of its 70 minerals.

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Speaker 3 Rules and restrictions apply.

Speaker 4 But I've also asked him and a number of committee chairmen, just in personal conversations,

Speaker 4 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, maybe largely true, but you're being spun.

Speaker 4 You're being manipulated. And if you don't know that, then you're a moron.
But they seem to believe them.

Speaker 4 They, um, because they have no other reference. And then here's what else happens, Tucker.
When you go into a classified setting, like a skiff,

Speaker 4 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. Do you feel naked? I feel exposed.
I mean,

Speaker 4 I do feel naked if I'm not wearing this. I've been wearing it for a year, every day of my life.
Okay.

Speaker 4 But they make you, they strip you of every outside reference. Okay.
And now your staff is not allowed in that meeting either. Remember, congressmen, our primary

Speaker 4 roles are like raising money, being friendly to constituents, you know,

Speaker 4 putting on a good face, campaigning. And then,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You can't just like, okay, what are, what's the IDGFBZ?

Speaker 4 I don't know, man, I must be stupid.

Speaker 4 But, you know, if you were in a regular setting, you just pull your phone out. I'm like, oh, okay, that's what that is.
I know what that is.

Speaker 4 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.
Of course. You can't bring them in.

Speaker 4 And then when you go back to the office, you can't tell them what you heard.

Speaker 4 So it's really quite an experience.

Speaker 4 It's sort of, it's, you know, it's a deprivation experience of any outside reference. So it's designed to produce Stockholm Syndrome, it sounds like.
Yes.

Speaker 4 And when you get in there, they really don't give you classified information. I say there's three levels of classification in the SCIF.

Speaker 4 There's Facebook level, there's Twitter level, and there's New York Times level.

Speaker 4 And the New York Times level is the highest level of classification. I mean,

Speaker 4 you're getting to the good stuff when they're telling you what's in the New York Times that week.

Speaker 4 Have you ever heard anything you thought was genuinely secret? Occasionally, just a few times. And obviously, I can't say what that is, but they slip up and commit candor occasionally in there.

Speaker 4 And you're like, Whoa, I didn't know that. You know, nothing like what's at Area 51.
Right. But occasionally, you're just like, what do people think is at Area 51, by the way? I don't know.
I'm not a.

Speaker 4 But you guys passed this law, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, and then they never disclosed anything.

Speaker 4 What is that?

Speaker 4 Not my area of expertise. Yes.
Don't know. But do members of Congress ever say, wait a second, we're a co-equal branch.
We're a legislative branch. We have as much power as the president collectively.

Speaker 4 And you can't keep this stuff secret from us. You're not allowed to do that.
But see, like, I have this in hearings all the time. They'll say, I'll ask the ATF director, this happened just last week.

Speaker 4 Detelbach, or I'll ask Merrick Garland something, or Christopher Wray. Like I've asked all them this, and they give you the same answer.

Speaker 4 It's longstanding DOJ policy not to comment on 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.

Speaker 4 that, that funded you. You can't tell them that.

Speaker 4 That's why the omnibus was so disappointing to me is the only way these three-letter agencies are going to come to heal is if we cut their funding in some specific area.

Speaker 4 I've joked we could just withhold one toner cartridge for one printer at the FBI and they would come over with a whole binder full of information.

Speaker 4 But we can't even bring ourselves to deprive them of a toner cartridge. So we put $200 million for a new FBI building in the omnibus bill.

Speaker 4 And, you know, to their credit, Jim Jordan and Jamie Comer didn't vote for that.

Speaker 4 And they're chairman of committees, but they are completely frustrated with the fact that the FBI just thumbs their nose out. So is that the speaker who allowed that to happen?

Speaker 4 Oh, he absolutely allowed it to happen. So to what extent are members of Congress committee chairman leadership controlled by blackmail?

Speaker 4 I really don't think there's much blackmail. Like if there is, I'm not aware of it.

Speaker 4 I have people come up to me. You know, I travel around the country

Speaker 4 to Texas and, you know, other states and speak to groups, food freedom groups, you know, First Amendment, Second Amendment groups.

Speaker 4 And they come to me and they say, why did my congressman sell out? Like, I'll just, you know, Bob was such a great guy. And I campaigned for him.
I made phone calls. I put up signs.

Speaker 4 And then we sent Bob to Congress and 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?

Speaker 4 Why did Bob go bad? And

Speaker 4 I have to look him in the eye and say, Bob just wanted to be liked.

Speaker 4 Like

Speaker 4 there is a gene inside of congressmen. I think if you look for a common denominator,

Speaker 4 they like people and they want to be liked for the most part.

Speaker 4 And they're likable.

Speaker 4 If they're not likable, it's hard to get elected. Okay, so this self-selects for likable people, but likable people want to be liked.

Speaker 4 And they're not surrounded by their wives and children who usually give them plenty of like, right? When they're in D.C., it's like, who am I going to go to dinner with tonight?

Speaker 4 Well, I want to eat food with somebody that likes me, right?

Speaker 4 So if you're not going to 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Congressmen fall for that. You know, they're in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and they fall for that.
How do you, it's interesting. You like people.
I've asked around.

Speaker 4 You don't seem to have any real enemies in the Congress. I don't even think AIPAC hates you.
They just want you to obey, but it's not, it doesn't seem personal.

Speaker 4 You don't seem to be at personal war with anybody.

Speaker 4 That's my take on it. I have a mutation.

Speaker 4 So you like people, okay? Obviously, you're not some weird autist who doesn't care about other people. You like other people.
I love people. I can tell.
And your colleagues say that.

Speaker 4 But you also don't feel like you need to fit in at the same time. Like, what is that? It's a mutation.
That chromosome,

Speaker 4 the liking people and likability 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.

Speaker 4 I don't know what happened.

Speaker 4 I can go like on the CARES Act, okay?

Speaker 4 This was under President Trump, the 11th 11th day to slow the spread of 15, right?

Speaker 4 They said, we're going to pass a $2.2 trillion package and you all just stay home. It's dangerous.
Like, we'll just do it by unanimous consent. And it was 11 p.m.

Speaker 4 I'm sitting in my living room and they send us this message and I'm like, WTF, like this is the space. This is twice the size of the omnibus bill, right? This is going to cause massive inflation.

Speaker 4 The policies in it are going to 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.

Speaker 4 So it was like, I got to do this. I got in my car and I drove eight hours.
I slept one hour in a rest stop because I knew I had to be there by 9 a.m. This was March 27th, 2020.

Speaker 4 Actually, the 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

Speaker 4 peanut butter-filled pretzels. Like I had a big jug of those.
Those are good. Yeah.
For my three days of nourishment.

Speaker 4 I'm sitting in the 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.

Speaker 4 And they're like, shit, Massey's going to do it.

Speaker 4 So they

Speaker 4 loaded up congressmen. You know, the airports were shut down for the most part.
There were some planes coming from California. They only had two passengers and they were both congressmen.

Speaker 4 So they roll them all back to Congress. It takes them two days to assemble a quorum because

Speaker 4 they went to the parliamentarian and they're like, is there any way around this? And he's like, nope, Massey's right.

Speaker 4 The Constitution requires a quorum if one, 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.

Speaker 4 I go to the floor.

Speaker 4 I actually got a, everybody was hating me. I mean, everybody.

Speaker 4 Did you know what it's like to be in a room of 434 people and they're all staring at you? Like,

Speaker 4 there, I had maybe 10 friends who were like looking at me like, that guy is dead. Like, we've never seen Harry Carey like this.
They were worried for me, but the rest of them hated me.

Speaker 4 They would come up to me and say, I live with my mother. And when I go back home, you're going to cause me to take COVID to her.
She's going to die. And I'm blaming you for this.

Speaker 4 And I said, that's your face? Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Well, like, no, it wasn't just one. It was like when he was done, there was a line of people.

Speaker 4 I literally 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?

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 What about the nurse who's going to work every single day taking care of people? Is she going to kill her parents? Like,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Well, the sad, but, but realistic thing is now they don't have a place for us. We're so useless, right? It's like, well, here's where we were going to keep them if shit hit the fan.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 In the three branches, we can operate with two. Yes, I've noticed.
So, anyways, these are the kind of people people who are supposed to respond in an emergency, and they all wanted to stay home.

Speaker 4 They all hated me for

Speaker 4 recognizing our constitutional duty.

Speaker 4 And Trump called me three times on the floor of the House while I was getting ready to make the motion to object.

Speaker 4 And I let it go to voicemail three times in a row, which is 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?

Speaker 4 And they're like, oh, no, no, not me.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I sat there. I I finally, they yielded time for debate.
I go off the floor and called the White House switchboard back. And,

Speaker 4 you know, I didn't have his number. I was just like, if you want to tour the White House, you call the number I called, right? And the intern is like, oh, is this Congressman Massey?

Speaker 4 I'm putting you through to Trump right now.

Speaker 4 And so he comes off and he goes, I'm coming at you like you've never seen.

Speaker 4 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 going to lose.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, oh, crap, I probably will lose. I mean, I had 95% popularity among my Republican electorate, who I had to face in about eight weeks in my primary.

Speaker 4 And I had a well-funded opponent, and here knows Trump was mad at me. So he screamed at me for two or three minutes.
I kept trying to talk, and he just screamed louder. Then he repeated it all.

Speaker 4 He goes, no, this is the second time you've done something like this and they talked 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'd done that like eight times since he was president he just started realizing it's the same guy

Speaker 4 the time before that was on war with iran the democrats were in the majority and you know he had just vaporized solemani Yeah.

Speaker 4 And we were worried that he would attack mainland Iran without a vote of Congress.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So they put a bill on the floor saying Trump, you can't go to war with Iran without a vote of Congress, which is constitutionally obvious.

Speaker 4 So I had to vote for it, but I was only one of three Republicans to do it.

Speaker 4 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 4 Did it change your views at all?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 The president tweeted that I was a third-rate grandstander and that

Speaker 4 this is before I got back to my seat.

Speaker 4 I go back from the speaker's lobby to go to my seat to get ready to make the motion. And one of the congressmen was like, you better look at your phone, Massey, look at your Twitter.
And I turn it on.

Speaker 4 He's like tweeting hard and heavy against me. He said I should be thrown out of the party.
And then the best one is, I'm chairman of the Second Amendment Caucus.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 What's your Christmas card picture? Oh, well, it's a little infamous.

Speaker 4 No, I've actually seen it, but I took it.

Speaker 4 For the benefit of those who have not. So, you know, I got my family together for Christmas and we got bluegrass instruments out.

Speaker 4 We play music together and we took a Christmas card picture with bluegrass instruments.

Speaker 4 And I said, hey, wouldn't it be kind of neat if we just like changed these all out for machine guns and took a picture? And that was supposed to stay on my phone for eternity.

Speaker 4 But I had 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 a pretty good picture.

Speaker 4 It'd be ashamed if nobody ever saw it. And I tweeted it.
And

Speaker 4 I caught all kinds of hate for that.

Speaker 4 It's a great picture.

Speaker 4 The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it this is the head of the church of england condemned my tweet i'm like oh my god are you an episcopalian i'm a methodist good so you can ignore him yes yeah he's a he's a disgrace um so so anyways i you know the press asked me as i'm

Speaker 4 we're talking about the need to be liked gene right if i had that

Speaker 4 I would have been devastated that day. If I had needed to be liked, I couldn't have carried that through.

Speaker 4 And I walked out of that chamber. Everybody's hating me in the chamber.
Nancy Pelosi called me a dangerous nuisance. CNN called me the most hated person in D.C.

Speaker 4 John Kerry called me an asshole or something.

Speaker 4 And President Trump called me a third-rate grandstander. This is all in the course of a few minutes, right?

Speaker 4 I walk out of the chamber of the house and the reporters like swarm me, you know, like they do.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 the press said, what do you have to say for yourself your own president just called you a third-rate grandstander and i paused for a second and i said i was offended i'm at least second rate

Speaker 4 so what happened to your relationship with trump it um you know i think he respects people that stand up yep even if he i think you're absolutely right disagrees with yes that's correct and um two years later he did endorse me No way.

Speaker 4 Yep.

Speaker 4 Do you get along with him okay now? Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, I did endorse Ron DeSantis, not out of spite or animosity, because we had already patched things up.

Speaker 4 Just because I served with Ron DeSantis for six years and he and I were really good friends. We talked about bills when he was in Congress.

Speaker 4 He and I fought over who was going to introduce the bill to eliminate congressional pensions.

Speaker 4 And he won and I co-sponsored 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 endorsed him.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Do you think if you did run for, say, just pulling this out of a hat, but governor of Kentucky, do you think Trump would endorse you?

Speaker 4 I don't know. He'd probably do some polling and see who was winning.

Speaker 4 Fair, fair, totally fair. I wouldn't turn down an endorsement.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So it's, it's not, are you at war with anybody in the Congress? No. I get along with everybody.
I mean, and people try to use this against me.

Speaker 4 You know, when APAC was running those ads that say I always vote with AOC

Speaker 4 and Rashida Talib and Ilhan Omar, you know, so I introduced an amendment and forced a vote on eliminating the kill switch in automobiles. It's mandated.
Oh,

Speaker 4 thank you. Yeah.
Well, I was losing Republicans on that. I lost like 20 Republicans.
So I knew I needed some.

Speaker 4 Just to be clear, for the people who don't know what you're talking about,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That's what you're talking about. Yeah, by 2026, every new automobile sold has to be able to turn itself off if it doesn't like you're driving.

Speaker 4 So I'm like, how do you appeal this conviction at the roadside, right? Maybe you swerved to miss a deer and pulled over for an ambulance and you got your kids in the car.

Speaker 4 How does anyone vote for something that evil? I don't understand. Because again, they know

Speaker 4 that I'm right, but they're worried about, for instance, mothers against drunk driving or they don't have the bravery.

Speaker 4 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 deporting you.
Yeah. So

Speaker 4 mothers against drunk driving, as far as I know, has said nothing about this. Like, who cares what they think?

Speaker 4 I know. But there may be, let's say, one constituent in your district who gets a hold of you and they lost a child to drunk driving which is terrible and they say

Speaker 4 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 really care about your child.

Speaker 4 I think drunk driving is a scourge and I want to fix it. But this is a false promise and it's only going to increase the price of automobiles and give the government more control.

Speaker 4 So I'm going to vote with Massey. They don't have the courage to say that.

Speaker 4 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.
I don't.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.
For her.

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Speaker 4 So she

Speaker 4 ran, it's interesting. I mean, obviously, I don't like her, but I think she's talented.

Speaker 4 She is definitely talented. But she ran as a radical, as someone from the outside, which I'm, of course, very sympathetic to, but she doesn't seem to actually be that person.

Speaker 4 So, like, for example, on the foreign aid stuff, how often does she vote with you?

Speaker 4 Quite frequently, but I had a funny moment, you know, this 15 or 16 votes we had on Israel in April. Well, the squad and I,

Speaker 4 and I know this is going to be used in the next ad against me, this clip from Tucker, but I was the only no sometimes. Sometimes the

Speaker 4 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 that.
Do they literally sit together? They hang out together. Yeah.

Speaker 4 They kind of it's really clickish even you know the freedom caucus sits together the uh

Speaker 4 texas delegation sits together there are different cliques 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 clique a lot of the congressional black caucus sits together uh I can't get the Second Amendment caucus to sit together.

Speaker 4 That's my caucus. They're too independent mindset.
They're too independent. But so I go over to their...
This is just high school cafeteria. It's high school cafeteria.
That's what it is.

Speaker 4 And why would you again? They need to be liked, right? They don't want to sit next to people they don't like or who don't like them.

Speaker 4 So I go over, I went over to the squad a few weeks ago and I said, I told AOC for the squad, I said, we're going to kick you out if you don't keep voting with us more consistently. What did she say?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So it doesn't benefit me to hate on any of them. Someday, you know, on some days they may vote with me.
Well, they're also people, and if you can help it, you shouldn't hate people, period.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But why aren't there anti-war Democrats? Since it was the anti-war party for like 40 years.

Speaker 4 I don't know. And we've lost a lot of them on privacy and free speech as well.

Speaker 4 I think with Russia, you asked this before.

Speaker 4 There's this element that I didn't answer. It's sort of a proxy against Trump for them now.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 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 vote for that. And they did.

Speaker 4 They waved, I don't know if you saw this, they were waving Ukrainian flags after Mike Johnson put the bill on the floor

Speaker 4 and every Democrat voted for it. This was premeditated.
Somebody had to go buy, you know, 200 Ukrainian flags and hand them out.

Speaker 4 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, all right, I'm going to expose this.

Speaker 4 So I filmed it and I put it on Twitter to show what, like, the humiliation. that Mike Johnson brought upon us by bringing the Democrat bill to the floor without any, and it was leverage too.

Speaker 4 Even if you're a Republican and you're okay with sending money to Ukraine, that's a leverage point.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Three 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 going to take a fine out of his salary, out of his congressional salary.

Speaker 4 And so my staffer, he knew what I was going to do. He told me what they had just said.
I said, all right, I'm retweeting it.

Speaker 4 Did you? Oh, yeah. And it got like 8 million views.
It went from 4 million to 8 million. And then, you know, sometimes you just got to double down.

Speaker 4 And the speaker had to announce on Twitter that I wouldn't be fined for that.

Speaker 4 But no one was considering finding any member who waved the flag of a foreign nation on the floor of the House of Representatives. Right.

Speaker 4 And they were taking selfies of them with their foreign flags too. And none of them got a phone call.
Only I got a phone call because I exposed the humiliation.

Speaker 4 It wasn't just a humiliation of those of us in Congress, it was a humiliation of our country.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and they got everything

Speaker 4 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 take that.

Speaker 4 It was, it was horrible.

Speaker 4 Do you think any, I mean, the leader of Ukraine is not elected anymore.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Are they just lying? Like, what is that?

Speaker 4 They're lying. Yeah.
I mean, they know it. And the good news is some Republicans are waking up to it.

Speaker 4 Remember, when we started voting on these Ukraine resolutions, even, you know, as soon as the war started, I was the only no.

Speaker 4 There was like this open-ended promise in a non-binding resolution that said, well, give them whatever they need. And there were only like two other Republicans that joined me on this.

Speaker 4 But now we've got a majority of Republicans in Congress. They're saying, wait, this is, they aren't using this money like we thought.

Speaker 4 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 4 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.
Yeah. It's that simple.

Speaker 4 I mean, and that's one of the reasons we went through with the motion to vacate. Paul Gosar and I co-sponsored Marjorie's motion to vacate.
There were ultimately 11 of us who voted for it.

Speaker 4 Motion to vacate would be to fire him. To fire Speaker Johnson, just like they had done Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 4 Although I thought inappropriately and at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons, they did that to McCarthy.

Speaker 4 But here we had Speaker Johnson who was doing all the things people were afraid McCarthy might do.

Speaker 4 They pre-convicted 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.

Speaker 4 He passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, re-upped that without warrants, built the FBI a new building and gave Ukraine all this money. So

Speaker 4 what happened, what Marjorie and I and Paul decided ultimately is we needed to expose the Uniparty. And never before have you had Democrats vote for a Republican speaker.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 We certainly hope that he doesn't become speaker next January.

Speaker 4 And hopefully people will have seen with Nancy Pelosi rushing to Speaker Johnson's aid that he's not the speaker you want when Trump wins the White House and we keep the majority.

Speaker 4 Do you think he will be?

Speaker 4 A lot of this depends on what the people want and if they can see it. Hopefully also Trump sees it, that Mike Johnson would be even worse than Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan

Speaker 4 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 that didn't have any money for a wall in it.

Speaker 4 Like he had no intention of ever funding a wall. Paul Ryan did.

Speaker 4 And so I think Mike Johnson is going to be similarly the same way. He's basically working for the deep state at this point in the Uniparty.
How did that happen? Do you have any idea?

Speaker 4 The Paul Ryan bit or

Speaker 4 Paul Ryan is a change.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Dumb ideologues are the scariest. But Mike Johnson seemed like kind of a moderately conservative, kind of sincere, decent guy.

Speaker 4 You know, maybe he would babysit your kids and do an okay job, unlike Paul Ryan. And, but he just, and then he immediately just becomes a tool of CIA and Jake Sullivan and the Biden administration.

Speaker 4 Like, well, how did that happen so fast? 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.

Speaker 4 Like he's had some 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.

Speaker 4 Well, he used to be on Judiciary Committee with me and Jim Jordan trying to reform that, trying to get

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But he claims he spent time in a SCIF and he learned things. Skiff, that's a pure compartmentalized information facility or something.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I was in SCIF with him. Like

Speaker 4 we, we had, we had DNI, not just 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 three and a half hours.

Speaker 4 It was a four-hour meeting. And after three and a half hours, it was basically a PSYOP where they were just trying to beat you down and do the things.

Speaker 4 And I was like, this is ridiculous.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They gave hypotheticals, but they had no specific. And I think FISA has been in place since 1978, since the 70s.
Right. So almost 50 years.
And they couldn't give you one example? Not one example.

Speaker 4 Now, they also expanded it. after 9-11

Speaker 4 to do the program to go against civilians, to spy on civilians.

Speaker 4 And actually, that product came out of the Judiciary Committee. Here's another place where the speaker betrayed us.

Speaker 4 FISA 702 was created by John Conyers and Jim Sensenbrenner. Conyers was the chairman, and Sensenbrenner was the ranking member.

Speaker 4 And what Mike Johnson said this year was, well, even though the Judiciary Committee created this and is responsible for overseeing it, I'm going to let the Intel Committee bring the bill to the floor without warrants in it.

Speaker 4 It wasn't even their jurisdiction. They have jurisdiction over FISA as long as it's for the CIA, but not for the FBI.

Speaker 4 So that was frustrating.

Speaker 4 It's shocking. It's shocking.
It is shocking. So he said, you know, like end of civil liberties level stuff.
So

Speaker 4 yes.

Speaker 4 But it's not like he learned new information in the SCIF. No, he did not.
I was there. So what, so that's a whole lot of people.

Speaker 4 problem right the problem the fact that i was there

Speaker 4 right so that's telling people

Speaker 4 on your show that i was there for three and a half hours and mike johnson go ask mike johnson he'll say yep he was there three and a half hours so what is the truth what do you think changed um

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He took the job with a very small staff. He didn't have

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 i mean and he's the second person in line for president after kamala harris this is this is scary to me he's he's basically getting moved around

Speaker 4 it's crazy you said nothing he did in his life before this prepared him for it um but that itself may be kind of a more charitable explanation because i'm trying to be charitable i mean i got to go back nothing in 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.

Speaker 4 You married her while she was still there. And then together you started a company based on a very sophisticated invention that you came up with, maybe the first of about 30 patents that you now have.

Speaker 4 You ran this company for a long time. Then you moved back to Kentucky.
And

Speaker 4 a lot of things happened and you wound up running for Congress. So like, that's not the background.

Speaker 4 Well, so nothing in the political arena, but in my private life, you know, I raised $32 million of venture capital and I swam with the sharks. Yeah.
Like

Speaker 4 I had lots of moral dilemmas in the course of creating that company.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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, like, he helped me get to this point.

Speaker 4 I'm not going to abandon him. Good for you.
And so,

Speaker 4 you know, I had experiences in life that, and then also just put my hands in the dirt on my farm.

Speaker 4 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.
So I spent,

Speaker 4 I grew up as a hillbilly in eastern Kentucky. What county? Lewis County.
Lewis County. How many people in your town? 13,000 people, 13,000 cattle.
It's a huge land mass.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's a great county.

Speaker 4 It's one of the 21 counties that I represent. It's actually the poorest county per capita income that I represent, but it's the one I grew up in.

Speaker 4 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 loved taking stuff apart because I was bored. There were no malls.

Speaker 4 You couldn't ride your bicycle to any

Speaker 4 store.

Speaker 4 And if you did, you didn't have any money. So I had to find things to do at home.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 at the age of 15, like I won the high school level awards

Speaker 4 and got into MIT, never visited. the campus, didn't really have the money to go visit it.

Speaker 4 But I read about it. There was no internet.
Seemed like a good place. I got there.
I'd lived in a town of 1,900 people all my life.

Speaker 4 And I was there for six hours in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I crossed Massachusetts Avenue.
They had a crosswalk and a stoplight. You know, I'd never really seen two of those things together.

Speaker 4 I'd seen crosswalks and stoplights. But so I walked through the crosswalk and a car honked, like that short little Boston memp, memp.

Speaker 4 And I thought, oh my gosh, I've been here six hours and already run into somebody from Kentucky. And I turned around and waved at the car as big as I could.

Speaker 4 Was it people from Kentucky? I don't think so. I think they had one finger up waving back.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 and people are like, that's not a true story.

Speaker 4 Not only is it true, it took me a month to quit waving at cars that beeped. Like, it was just 18 years of conditioning.

Speaker 4 You thought beeping was, hey, hey there. I mean, that's what we thought that little thing in the middle of your steering wheel was for.

Speaker 4 If you saw somebody and they couldn't see you through the windshield, just toot the horn. You throw your hand up and wave.
And if they roll down the window, oh, that's Bob.

Speaker 4 And if you didn't wave, I mean, you were pariah. You were probably an axe murderer who was in our town, right?

Speaker 4 Or you were just an a-hole.

Speaker 4 So I didn't want to be either. So I waved at that car in Massachusetts

Speaker 4 and kept waving for about a month.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 My company was in Massachusetts. I couldn't move the center of gravity too far out of Cambridge.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The best. The best sports.
So

Speaker 4 why did you move back to Kentucky? After 10 years, you know, of doing it, it was, you know, we had three kids and we wanted to raise them like we were raised in Kentucky.

Speaker 4 And we wanted to be near their grandparents. Like, both of my parents were still alive, both my wife's parents were still alive.

Speaker 4 And you learn so much from your grandparents because your parents are really busy just, you know, trying to earn a living or whatever.

Speaker 4 And if you're lucky enough to have a relationship with your grandparents, that's where I think the generational stuff carries on. Yes.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It runs on a RECT Model S Tesla battery. It's been running continuously for six and a half years.
So you built the house. Like, who built the house? I did.
Like,

Speaker 4 we had an ice storm and a lot of trees fell down. How big is the property? It's

Speaker 4 1,500 acres. And it's wooded.
It's almost all woods.

Speaker 4 And it's too steep. I don't want you to think this is like valuable Iowa.
No, no, no, no. I know the part of the state you're in.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Pack your lunch if you're on the ridge and you fall off the ridge because you're going to be hungry by the time you get to the bottom.

Speaker 4 You're going to 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.
But this is not plantation land.

Speaker 4 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 4 Because the geography. Because of the geography.
The topography did not allow for consolidation of farms. So there was no scale at which slavery made sense.

Speaker 4 You 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.

Speaker 4 I'll do my thing in my holler. You do your thing in your holler.
That's right. If you need some help, let me know.
I'll come over and help you. Southwest Virginia is like this.

Speaker 4 West Virginia is like this. Yeah.
Because the topography. Right.
It's the reason West Virginia was Republican and

Speaker 4 seceded from Virginia. So, by the way, half my family's from West Virginia and half my family's from Kentucky.
My mammals,

Speaker 4 who's 97 right now, is still alive. Her grandfather was a Union soldier.
Amazing. Isn't that crazy? From West Virginia.
From West Virginia, yeah. She still lives in West Virginia.

Speaker 4 But like, we're not that far away from the Civil War. No, I I know.
I know. You can talk to people who were alive when people who fought in the Civil War.

Speaker 4 I worked with a guy when I was at the newspaper in Arkansas. The guy I shared a desk with, Bob Saleh from Texarkana, Arkansas.

Speaker 4 He said, I knew Confederate veterans. It's in my lifetime.
I knew a man who knew Confederate veterans or Civil War veterans. That's just absolutely crazy.

Speaker 4 But my whole point of that was she's a Republican. She's been Republican, my mammal.
since the Civil War. And like nobody marries the entire family if you're a Democrat.

Speaker 4 You got to go see Mam all, and she'll either approve or disapprove. And she's had pretty good luck at sniffing out the liberals.
The liberals. The Democrats, yeah, the Liberals.

Speaker 4 So you had an ice storm. There was an ice storm on your property.
How does that figure into your head? So I already had a bulldozer. So I got a winch so I could drag these trees out.

Speaker 4 I got a sawmill, cut these into timbers, built a timber frame house. What kind of wood? It's 17 kinds of wood because

Speaker 4 whatever fell down in the ice storm, we've got oak, yellow poplar, hickory, beech. So hardwood.
Hardwood, yep.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 then we wanted to be self-sustaining. Well, how did she know how to timber frame?

Speaker 4 I found a class on eBay for $500 in Tennessee, and I bought it now.

Speaker 4 And I drove to Tennessee and took a one-week class, and we built a little shed slash cabin, and I called my wife from a payphone, and I said, I want to do this.

Speaker 4 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 i 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 so you you built your house full-time like as a job every day 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 um what do you mean the flooring came out of the creek there there are rocks in the creek that are flat, that they look like the stuff you buy at Lowe's that's fake.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, oh, this is what they modeled the fake stuff after.

Speaker 4 It's free. Let's just go pick it up.
Now,

Speaker 4 we probably have, we're paying ourselves about $3 an hour compared to if we had just gone to one of the box stores and bought it in terms of harvesting it.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They are collecting the materials for the house here from the environment.

Speaker 4 That you don't have to rely, you know, neighbors are good though, right? We actually sent them to public school,

Speaker 4 which was, and we let them ride the bus. It was only three miles away, but we figured the bus ride was important too, because when you get to school, they sort of separate you.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 But you've got, can be 15 terrifying minutes on the bus where you interact with everybody, right?

Speaker 4 I remember my son, he was like 10 years old. He had traded some Yu-Gi-Oh cards on the bus and for this like awesome, the best Yu-Gi-Oh card ever.
And he showed it to us and was a little plastic thing.

Speaker 4 And we're like, well, did you want to take it out of plastic? No, no, he told me to leave it in here. And we take it out and it was a fake.

Speaker 4 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 it ran in the family. It ran into the family.

Speaker 4 The same kid who stiffed my son and stiffed me on this dozer. So where, I mean,

Speaker 4 but you learned these, these are life lessons, right? They didn't lead a sheltered life. And so we grew up, you know, they grew up there.

Speaker 4 What percent of the timbers in the timber frame came from your property? All of it.

Speaker 4 In fact, they never left the farm. Really? So you milled it there? Milled it there, chiseled it there.
made the mortise and tenons and the dovetails. It was a lot of work.
Personally. Yes.

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Speaker 4 How did you, you know, cutting a mortise and tenon, cutting a dovetail joint, these are having done it very difficult. How did you learn to do that?

Speaker 4 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 um just dent of will but she'd been like a lit educator electrical engineer software programmer right but not uh nothing that scale yeah not i mean the the only thing i had built before that was a tree house right

Speaker 4 and even that didn't get finished so but i mean, some of that stuff is very complex, like actually complex.

Speaker 4 Timber framing, some, some of the joints are difficult to cut and the design itself is complicated. Yeah, you don't like

Speaker 4 you have to plan it all ahead. You don't like hold the timber up there like you would a two by 40.
It's not renewed a saw. It's not balloon framing.

Speaker 4 Totally right. Or, oh, that 45 needs to be a 42 degree angle.
Let's saw off a little bit more.

Speaker 4 You can't do that while it's, you know, you're up in the middle of the air air on scaffolding trying to get two pieces to fit together. It's actually, it's a fun math problem.

Speaker 4 So I enjoyed it, but there's something honest about it because all the fasteners are wooden too. So it's one medium that you learn.
There's no like bolts. So it's all pegs.
Nails, all pegs.

Speaker 4 And once you realize that and then... So there are no metal fasteners in the frame.
Correct. None.

Speaker 4 I mean, we had to nail the floor to

Speaker 4 the walls on it. Of course, but the frame itself.

Speaker 4 No metal fastener structure. And it's 46 feet feet tall.
It's 46 feet tall. Yes.
From the basement slab, which I timber framed the basement too. I still don't even know how to stick frame.
Like,

Speaker 4 I'm like, well, I'm going to build one house. I'm going to learn one texture.
It's the framing that your house is. Yeah.
If you're watching this, it's stick frame. It's stick frame.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Well, of course, or buy them and just bolt them on. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I, I timber framed that. I'm just like, let's just be pure the whole way.
And there's,

Speaker 4 as an engineer, I thought, well, I want to build a house with timbers. I like how timbers look, but

Speaker 4 you know, we'll just bolt them together. We'll use iron brackets.
That's the best way to do it.

Speaker 4 But in the course of this one-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.

Speaker 4 Like wood shrinks, right?

Speaker 4 It takes like six or eight years 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.

Speaker 4 But if you build your fasteners out of wood, like it can all work. It moves together.

Speaker 4 And there's, you know, if you go to Germany, you know, there's homes that are four or five hundred years old to show that it can work. So

Speaker 4 all the timbers came from the property. What about the stone? There's a lot of stone in the house.
Yep. We got some of it out of the creek.
We dug some of it out of the ground.

Speaker 4 All of the stone is from the property. How did you dig it out of the ground? What does that mean? You started a stone quarry on your own property? In my front yard.
It's now a pond.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I started digging the dirt off of that layer of rock. And I'm like, wow, there are lots of rocks here.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 three tons of them out of here in, you know, a few minutes.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Where were you living at this point? We lived in a mobile home. Like we just pulled in a mobile home.
And I told my wife we'd only live in it for like six months.

Speaker 4 We ended up two years in a 900-square-foot mobile home with four 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 4 It's like being on a boat. Yeah, you try to go to the bathroom.
And if you're gone for more than five minutes, like the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom is so thin.

Speaker 4 You're just enjoying private moment there on the throne,

Speaker 4 trying to read a magazine about timber framing or something, right? And you can hear the kids at the dinner table saying, where'd daddy go? Where'd daddy? Where's daddy?

Speaker 4 And then they start trying to find daddy.

Speaker 4 Anyways, it was a good, comfy experience. And now we actually kept the mobile home and we lease it to deer hunters.

Speaker 4 Really? Yeah. It's a double wide.
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.

Speaker 4 Do you have a lot of deer on your land? We have, yeah, trophy deer all over. What do you charge to rent it, just in case people are interested?

Speaker 4 We're booked up.

Speaker 4 You know, any weird internet people in your plan. Yeah, we are booked up.
Yes. So

Speaker 4 how long did it take you to finish this house? It's not finished. I've been criticized.

Speaker 4 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 kind of weirdo. Great.

Speaker 4 Well, we haven't made that door yet, right? You're making the doors? We have 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 4 So this, that was like your kids. Wait, so what year did you start? How long has this process been? So we started in 2003.
So we're 21 years. 21 years.
And we've been off the grid that long, too.

Speaker 4 Again, when you say off the grid, what do you mean? We're not connected to any public utility. Not electricity, not water, not sewer, not phone.

Speaker 4 The house is totally disconnected from everything. Did you build those systems yourself? Yeah.

Speaker 4 A lot of it's off-the-shelf stuff, but some of it's improvised. Field expedient.

Speaker 4 Like the Tesla battery, the car battery that runs the house. You can't buy that out of a catalog.
You go to a junkyard and say, how much do you want for that wrecked Model S,

Speaker 4 and I'm like, well, I'll sell you the battery for $15,000.

Speaker 4 why not why can't you just buy the battery separately they won't like tesla wouldn't sell me a power wall 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 all right 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

Speaker 4 landscaping trailer. The battery weighs, I think, 1,200 pounds.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So I hurried up and got back to Kentucky with the trailer. I don't have a hazmat light.
So it was a wrecked Tesla Model S, and you pulled the battery out of it. And what'd you do with it?

Speaker 4 Disassembled it. I paid $15,000 cash.
But this is like, you know,

Speaker 4 this is probably like 15 or 20 years. Hopefully it'll last.

Speaker 4 And so I brought it home, took it apart. Actually, I made a YouTube video of this.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And I forgot, like, my two little boys are in there helping me, and they don't have the gloves on.

Speaker 4 They haven't earned a right to have gloves. Don't put stuff on the internet

Speaker 4 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 oh coal c oal 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 from i would think yeah so i'm driving this thing back from dc this was when gas was you know getting close to five dollars a gallon it was over four dollars a gallon and i and i stopped in west virginia to charge charge my Tesla at a supercharging station just to kind of troll people on the internet.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And within 30 seconds, I knew I'd made a mistake because somebody had zoomed in on the picture and my tags were expired.

Speaker 4 And they started tagging the Kentucky State Police, my local sheriff,

Speaker 4 the DMV in Kentucky.

Speaker 4 Like they were trying to get me in trouble.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, there's no way to stop this now and so they were relentless and um but then somebody realized they had been expired for 18 months and i'd actually made it a year without paying taxes and was maybe likely to get out of a year of taxes well it's your win then yeah but um 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 interview well yes and and others with zest to your personal lives than you have learned this the hard way

Speaker 4 You're being very zest. No, it doesn't seem you've got enough minor tax evasion issue here.

Speaker 4 You don't have time to be too weird. 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. It's a car battery.

Speaker 4 It's made to run 400 volts. All of my existing system was made to run off 48 volts, but there were 16 modules, each nominally 25 volts.

Speaker 4 And I realized if you put two of those in series, you could make 50 volts.

Speaker 4 so I put eight sets of two in series and so I put eight parallel I paralleled eight sets of two 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

Speaker 4 well

Speaker 4 I mean it took a few days But it's lasted for six and a half years. I wouldn't advise doing this at home.
Like

Speaker 4 why?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 want to get into everything under my house right now.

Speaker 4 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 D.C.

Speaker 4 And then she has to find the cheese while I'm in D.C.

Speaker 4 But it's she's more like the astronaut, I think, in a rocket. I think that's exactly what she's she's the only.
It's the same trust level required. Correct.
Yes. She trusts me while I'm in D.C.

Speaker 4 and I trust her to fly the house while she's in Kentucky. So what?

Speaker 4 She's also an MIT graduate, so I assume she

Speaker 4 kind of understands some of the stuff. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 By the way, it's good like marriage security, but it's just like

Speaker 4 if we ever, if we ever broke up or if let's say she put something in my coffee and I didn't wake up the next day, she'd have a hard time running the house.

Speaker 4 So so you put these, you put the nodules, which is basically separate batteries, right? Okay, within the

Speaker 4 big big battery.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So I use the battery management system that's native to the Tesla battery modules. If there's a nerd listening to this, this makes complete sense.

Speaker 4 And they'll be like, oh, well, why wouldn't you do that? And everybody else is going to be like, he's just BSing.

Speaker 4 So did you have to add new software to this to run it i had to write software from scratch yeah

Speaker 4 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 um it actually to a raisin and 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 4 i believe 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 induces it. It's not a worm.
It just drinks.

Speaker 4 So how does it work?

Speaker 4 It works great. We can run the air conditioner.
Like for the first 11 years, we had lead-acid batteries and they didn't work that great. You had to add water to them.
Oh, for sure.

Speaker 4 They put off hydrogen gas, which is explosive. Oh, no.
They put off a sulfide gas that can kill you. Like, lead-acids

Speaker 4 are bad, and they're like over 100 years old. But by the way, I love solar panels.

Speaker 4 Like, Republicans are like, they look at me like, like you have solar panels you have an electric car like are you sure you're one of us and i'm like well the solar panels are rocks that make electricity like they are amazing things they they take sunlight and turn it into something we can all use um so you could hate i tell republicans you can hate the subsidies you can hate the bailouts um you can hate the mandates i hate all of those things as well but don't hate solar panels don't hate the technology right because it's actually given me given me and can give other people a license to be independent from

Speaker 4 let's get specific about it. So you have 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.

Speaker 4 I'm assuming all this. Four deep freezers, refrigerator.
Four deep freezers? Full of peaches, beef, and chickens. Running continuously.
Continuously. So

Speaker 4 your power draw is significant on all those appliances, obviously. Yeah.
And the battery handles it fine.

Speaker 4 How much propane or how much diesel or what I assume you have a generator to recharge backup generator that

Speaker 4 occasionally in the winter. But I keep every time I get so your solar panels recharge the battery? Yeah.

Speaker 4 For nine months out of the year, the backup generator doesn't run except for its like test run every Friday. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
When we bust out the machine guns, like who's in the driveway?

Speaker 4 Okay, back down to level one. That's just the backup generator.

Speaker 4 So your electricity is, I mean, as long as you know how to operate the system, which apparently only you do.

Speaker 4 but if you can do that, then you're just living a completely normal life

Speaker 4 with electricity. How do you do heat? How do you heat your house? So in one of the greenest ways possible.
Like, I think the whole carbon thing is a scam. Of course it's a scam.

Speaker 4 But if you do care about carbon neutrality, I wish we had more carbon. We need more CO2.

Speaker 4 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 CO2 levels go up.

Speaker 4 Crop production goes up as CO2 levels go up. But if you did care about CO2,

Speaker 4 I am using wood on my farm, like just trees that fall down. I'm not even going out and cutting a living tree.
There's enough trees falling down. Deadfall.
Deadfall.

Speaker 4 That if I don't get to them, the termites do. That's right.
And they turn them into CO2 and methane.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 4 So wood, can you, because anyone who's made it this far in the interview is probably interested in wood gasification. Can you explain what that is?

Speaker 4 How is it different from a normal wood-fired boiler or a wood stove? Yeah, in a normal wood stove, you put the wood in there. It can be green.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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 thousand degrees.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So some of the stuff that would. How do you get wood to burn that hot?

Speaker 4 You just deprive it of oxygen at first and get it hot, and then you drive all the gases off and you put more oxygen in that secondary chamber, and it looks like it's burning gas.

Speaker 4 Like it'll be a blue flame

Speaker 4 and then it'll turn into a yellow flame.

Speaker 4 It starts out actually. And this is just oak maple beech.
This is just conventional firewood. I burn near wood, nearest wood to the house, right? Near wood? Yeah, I don't remember that.
Near wood.

Speaker 4 Yeah, near wood. Can you burn softwood in it? you can but the bt again if you're doing this yourself oh care about efficiency like if you look at the old timers

Speaker 4 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 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, and it may still say this on there, greenest member of Congress.

Speaker 4 That doesn't mean I just got there and I'm green.

Speaker 4 Nobody, I never got any of the fact checkers to come after me on that. Nobody wants to fact-check me because I probably am the greenest member of Congress.

Speaker 4 Who has self-sustaining food, self-sustaining without externalities, right?

Speaker 4 Self-sustaining power, self-sustaining water.

Speaker 4 So you heat with wood.

Speaker 4 How much wood do you burn? Would you say a season?

Speaker 4 The size of this table, maybe

Speaker 4 four stacks of wood the size of this table.

Speaker 4 So this is about a quart. This is about a quart is four by four by eight.
So it's like roughly that. So four quarts a year.
Yep. That's not much.
That's impressive. How do you get hot water?

Speaker 4 We've got three 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.

Speaker 4 So we have free hot water from like May until September when the air conditioner is running. And then in the winter, when the boiler, the wood boiler is running, that makes hot water.

Speaker 4 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. Amazing.

Speaker 4 But you could pretty easily set up a wood-fired outdoor.

Speaker 4 You could. Yeah.
But in the summer, again, you get it for free from the air conditioning. I actually have a fourth way to make hot water too.

Speaker 4 So So when

Speaker 4 we're not connected to the grid, a lot of people who have solar panels are connected to the grid. And if they have extra power, they sell it back.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I don't want to waste this free electricity.

Speaker 4 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 tries to charge the Tesla that's sitting in the garage.

Speaker 4 So the Tesla's sitting there at half full and a solid state breaker in my breaker box comes on and starts the Tesla charging.

Speaker 4 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 fourth way to make.
hot water. Hot water is almost as good as water.

Speaker 4 I mean, if you've ever gone without water, you know it's bad. Yeah.
But going out without hot water is almost just as bad. Yeah, I have experience with that.
Yes.

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Speaker 4 where do you get your water so i dug a well

Speaker 4 um

Speaker 4 and dug not not drill dug 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 They didn't dig it just straight down.

Speaker 4 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. Yep.

Speaker 4 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 to your well, it doesn't necessarily go right into the reservoir.

Speaker 4 So I did a very similar thing, but I hit uh 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.

Speaker 4 I finally took my friend's jackhammer back and said, okay, that's deep enough. What was the jackhammer like?

Speaker 4 I mean, that's the best argument for public health care that

Speaker 4 exists.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 I don't, I have a new appreciation for somebody that's running a jackhammer. Those are, those would wear your body out quickly.
Like, really quickly. Yeah.
Did you lose a crown?

Speaker 4 I did not lose a crown. So does the well, the dug well work? It works.
One month out of the year, we're kind of short on water. Yeah.
August.

Speaker 4 Yes, August. How'd you know that? Have you ever

Speaker 4 lived in this situation? Yes, I have a dug well, so I'm aware of that. But again, you conserve, right? Of course.

Speaker 4 If you're connected to City Water and it seems

Speaker 4 what's on the other side is opaque to you, you just use as much as you want.

Speaker 4 And what happens is during those peak periods, that's when the utility company has to work extra hard.

Speaker 4 That's when 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.

Speaker 4 When you're making it yourself, it's known.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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 price of power goes up.

Speaker 4 It just costs. You don't know what it costs.
If you're poor and you've got a little screen that says the power just went up, you'll go turn it off, right? 100%.

Speaker 4 You'll say, 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,

Speaker 4 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.
Of course not.

Speaker 4 But you can have these smart systems that make a lot more efficient use of our resources.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You're not living in a. 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

Speaker 4 just so we don't have to hear the backup generator run. That doesn't seem like a crazy sacrifice.

Speaker 4 There's some people that would think the instant they had to turn the thermostat from 72 to 75 was screwed. I'm out of here.

Speaker 4 I'm going back to the grid. But it means that the state kind of has no control over your land.
Correct.

Speaker 4 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 going to be back on my farm and I don't need them. Like,

Speaker 4 it's not that I don't want to do things for people. I help my neighbors and my neighbors help me and I want to do public service.

Speaker 4 But because I have this comfort level that I'm going to go back home to this, I don't need the job.

Speaker 4 We're self-sustaining.

Speaker 4 It gives you an extra dimension of independence, I think, when you're in D.C.

Speaker 4 What about food? Can they starve you out?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 We raise beef and we usually raise a pretty good garden. And I have an orchard,

Speaker 4 peaches. lots of peaches.
My first peach is going to be ripe here in a few weeks, and my last peach will be ripe in September.

Speaker 4 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 4 So, you don't need to leave, actually, your farm. No, are you trying to talk me out of like, I mean, this is a crisis I have some weeks? I bet.

Speaker 4 Oh, man, on Mondays, it's like,

Speaker 4 you know, you know, you're going to get hit with a two by four as soon as you walk in the door in D.C.

Speaker 4 It's like, is it weird? I mean, I guess what I'm struck by, I don't live off-grid, though I do have an off-grid camp,

Speaker 4 but the amount of skills you need to build something like that is really, really striking. Like, you actually have to know how to do things, complex things.

Speaker 4 I mean, timber framing is another level, but electrical, plumbing, masonry, agriculture, heavy equipment operation, like you can do all of that.

Speaker 4 Obviously. So is it weird to be in a room with 434 people

Speaker 4 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 self-loathing.
Is that weird?

Speaker 4 I really don't think about it that much.

Speaker 4 Good.

Speaker 4 I don't think about it. Where'd you pick up plumbing skills? So my rule is buy three books for everything

Speaker 4 because you can go to a hardware store and buy a book on plumbing, but I don't trust one book. So you buy two books.
And then if the two books disagree, what are you going to do?

Speaker 4 Well, you got to have a third book. So I've got three books on plumbing, three books on wiring, three books on septic systems,

Speaker 4 three books on

Speaker 4 roofing. Yep.

Speaker 4 I get three books on everything. And you read them.
And I read them. And then there's the code book, which is like, you know,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So, do you think now we're way in the weeds? I don't know if anyone's watching, but there are like four handymen carpenter general contractors are still in this.

Speaker 4 But do you think that code, which really determines how people live in this country, the code, it's not up to code,

Speaker 4 is it, is it real? I mean, is it

Speaker 4 knowing what you do about all those different trades, does the code protect people, actually?

Speaker 4 It protects the contractors. Well, I know that.
And so they help write it. The unions do.
So for instance,

Speaker 4 the roofers union and the plumbers union, I think, have conspired to put as many holes in your roof with plumbing as possible, right?

Speaker 4 Because all the venting. Yeah, all the vents, right? If you try to build a house to code, you're likely to have four or five perforations in your roof.
I've noticed.

Speaker 4 And and that keeps the roofers busy. Like they're guaranteed to get a call every few years to fix that leak.
And it's also very expensive.

Speaker 4 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 flashing and all the

Speaker 4 every time you have an aperture in a roof. Yes.
Like that's a vulnerability. So

Speaker 4 my roof has no holes in it. Like I looked at this.
I'm like, well, that's a good suggestion, but who benefits if I believe you're not going to be able to do that?

Speaker 4 So you vent your stove at the side of the building, not the... Nope.
No holes in my roof no holes out the side have you seen that opera house in uh I think it's Sydney Australia

Speaker 4 is it Sydney or Melbourne Sydney okay

Speaker 4 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 want to put a bunch of holes in my roof well i couldn't agree more i'm interested in this topic so but nobody else is now the thought of it well but for the the four people who are i've always wondered that why

Speaker 4 with wood stoves where 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

Speaker 4 it's not quite as efficient you know because you've got to turn in the run but you don't have a hole in your roof and in a climate with like lots of snow for example you don't want any holes in your roof right but how do you vent your furnace for example

Speaker 4 So that I just run in a typical flue and it goes up in the chimney with my pizza oven flue, my wood cook stove flue, and my Rumford fireplace flue. So I have four flues through the chimney.

Speaker 4 On the gable end? No, they're in the middle of the house.

Speaker 4 I put the chimney in the middle of the house because it's a big thermal mass and I wanted to smooth out the changes in temperature in the house.

Speaker 4 And so there's where I did accommodate one hole in the roof is the chimney. Because if you put a big stone mass on the side of your house, there's no way to insulate it from the outside.

Speaker 4 So, but by the way, let me say something. Like, I know there are some women watching this wondering, like, I want to live in a house like that.
That sounds like a lot of fun. Talk to my wife first.

Speaker 4 Occasionally, we have like some crisis that I have to solve and become MacGyver.

Speaker 4 So, the first time I got elected to Congress, for instance, the day before I went to go get sworn in, the the well pump failed.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, I can't leave my wife and four kids at home without water. And we have a very unique well pump.

Speaker 4 What do you mean by that? Well, I didn't buy the one at the hardware store, so you couldn't go replace it. So I went down there.
And what did you buy? It's like in a catalog somewhere.

Speaker 4 Like the engineer in me 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And I wired this, you know, it 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 4 I've seen, I've seen that. I've seen drills run winches.
Yes. Well, I forgot it was was there.
Like, I did my Congress thing for.

Speaker 4 You had it on continuously? Yeah. And then the accumulator in the basement that controls the pressure would turn the drill off and on whenever it needed more water pressure.

Speaker 4 And so it ran continuously. I forgot about it.
I just got busy. And like a year later, a freaking water quit working again

Speaker 4 because the Makita died? Right, right. It was actually a Milwaukee hole.
It was it? The hull hog, you know, one of those strikers. No, I totally do with the handle on on the side.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Those are cool drills. So you, last night, I just want to end with this.
Last night we were having dinner, which was really one of the most interesting, amusing dinners I've ever had.

Speaker 4 But you made reference to a story, but

Speaker 4 you didn't get a chance to finish it because I interrupted you. But about putting new plumbing in a county jail, I think.
Will you tell that story? Yeah.

Speaker 4 So quickly, I got into politics because we were living off the grid 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Good call. So I fought that tax and then I actually fought zoning in our county.
They wanted to zone our county. I mean, zoning is to keep the smokestacks out of the cul-de-sacs.

Speaker 4 My county didn't have any smokestacks and didn't have any cul-de-sacs, right?

Speaker 4 Like the neighborhood and E.T., you know, that movie where the kids ride their bikes through the neighborhood. We didn't have neighborhoods like that.

Speaker 4 So we didn't need zoning, but somebody thought if we zoned the county, that we would get prosperity because they saw all the prosperous counties had zoning. It's like, well, it's cargo cult.

Speaker 4 No, totally. It's like saying, we should import some homeless because then we'll have banks.
Right, right.

Speaker 4 M.D. Morgan will move here because in Midtown, they're homeless.
Right. So that was, I was fighting that and writing letters to the editor.

Speaker 4 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 4 So you've never been in politics? Never in my life.

Speaker 4 Also, there was this guy named Rand Paul who was inspiring, who was taking on the establishment. It was his first run for Senate, and it decided to get involved in his race, too.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so I 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.

Speaker 4 We weren't even living in it yet. Sorry, little sidebar.
You traped up from the double wide. Yes, we went to the double wide and we said for $100, you can come to our pizza party.

Speaker 4 I did have the pizza oven working. And

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 the funny thing, too, we didn't have doors on the bathrooms at the time. We had no doors.
So we did run to Lowe's the day before Rand Paul came and put a door on the bathroom. Good call.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So we call it the Rand Paul door door on the bathroom it's the one a room that had a door from the very beginning anyways uh we did by the way also this was in january and rand is cheap as hell he had a two-wheel drive suv

Speaker 4 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 cost to upgrade to the four-wheel drive for rand paul i like my gravel costs way more than that yes anyways i went all in on politics, helped Rand get elected in his primary.

Speaker 4 I was on the ballot the same day in 2010, the primary, May 22nd, 2010.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so I won the election. And it was the most terrifying thing when they handed me the key to the courthouse.
Like it's a small town.

Speaker 4 And if the janitor didn't show up to open the courthouse and start the boiler, which looked like the African queen, right? It was like

Speaker 4 you had to kick it and do all this stuff to get it started.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So anyways, I was like the dog that caught the bus. And I had promised I wouldn't raise taxes.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 His name's Chris. And 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And the county was a million dollars in debt because this did not work out. And I wasn't going to spend another penny, you know, on this throwing good money after bad.

Speaker 4 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. Ooh.

Speaker 4 And so the jailer, Chris, comes to me and says,

Speaker 4 Judge, they call me judge, even though I'm not an attorney. I was the county judge executive.
He said, Judge, I got some bad news. I said, what's that?

Speaker 4 He said, well, the hot water heater quit working on the state inmate side. And I can't mix state inmates with local inmates.

Speaker 4 You know, you get murderers along with non-support, you know, from childhood. Totally in DUI cases.
Yeah. It's like, we can't have them taking showers together.
It's just not going to work.

Speaker 4 And I said, okay, well, 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?

Speaker 4 He said, $12,000. I said,

Speaker 4 I mean, this is a small county. For a hot water heater? For a hot water.
Like all of our property taxes together were like $400,000.

Speaker 4 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 going to do?

Speaker 4 I was like, I'll go buy one 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.

Speaker 4 And it's fairly involved. It's got like inch and a quarter copper lines.
It's not household plumbing. But

Speaker 4 I had three books on plumbing, right?

Speaker 4 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 fifty five hundred dollars and i'm like i can save the county like sixty five hundred dollars so i called an 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

Speaker 4 then i hit the button i bought this hot water heater did they bring it in a tractor trailer. I didn't pay extra for the lift gate because I had inmates.

Speaker 4 The inmates take this thing out of the tractor trailer and we go in and we take the old hot water heater out. And

Speaker 4 there were three 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.

Speaker 4 with the inmates to put the new one in. I'm like,

Speaker 4 I only want one inmate in that closet with me. Fair.
The hot water heater needs plumbed. I don't need plumbed.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 the other two 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.

Speaker 4 Besides, you're in here for stripping copper and other things.

Speaker 4 You're good at that.

Speaker 4 We can do this, Judge.

Speaker 4 We know short iron's bringing this, 10's bringing this, copper will bring this, aluminum. They could quote every price at the salvage.
Seriously? Yeah.

Speaker 4 So they, I leave the two inmates stripping the old hot water heater and it had a computer on it and stuff. And I'm installing the new hot water heater.

Speaker 4 And I noticed, for instance, even like the plumber had left off this water trap that keeps gases from escaping, like the safety device.

Speaker 4 So I made sure to do it completely safe, buy the book or buy the three books that I had. And I come out of the closet.
By the way, there's like 30 inmates.

Speaker 4 I had to walk by the rec room that had a piece of glass and they could could all watch me changing this hot water heater.

Speaker 4 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 execute

Speaker 4 get a callus on his hand or do anything.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I go back out and the inmates said, we got everything of value. There was this hulk of an old hot water heater sitting there.
They had stripped the copper.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 There's nothing on here that'll bring anything down at Livingston's. That was the junkyard place, recycling place.
And I said, no, you left the most valuable thing. I said, come over here.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Remember, I'd refused to hire the only licensed plumber in the county. And they go, Judge, you could go to jail for this.
I said, I'll have a hot shower, won't I?

Speaker 4 You actually did that? I did that. And the only reason I'm telling you this publicly is this was,

Speaker 4 how long was it? Like 15 years ago or something?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 no, 14 years ago, I think the statute of limitations, you know, of practicing it without a license as a plumber on a public building has probably expired.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 it was a good move. Did they take the water heater with them?

Speaker 4 You know, it's on my bucket list. It may still be in there.

Speaker 4 So what are they using it for now? It's,

Speaker 4 I think it's just vacant. Maybe they'll use it for drug rehab or something at some point, which would make more sense.
But did it work? Did your hot

Speaker 4 water? 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.

Speaker 4 Incredible. But

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But I mean, I had four hours of effort in it and I saved the county $6,500.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, no. This is worth my time.

Speaker 4 And it also shows the inmates like, okay, we're buying you $1.50 lunches instead of the $2 lunches now because we fired the crony who was doing the food system. Totally.

Speaker 4 And they were less likely to complain when they saw that the judge himself was actually willing to change the hot water heater.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like, I'm not going to go ask him at the next fiscal court meeting for anything. Why don't you tell the story to APAC and maybe they'll leave you alone? It's like, it's not personal.

Speaker 4 I'm not against you or your country. I just don't want to spend more money.
By the way, I'm probably, there will be some plumbing lobby against me next month

Speaker 4 after they see this. Well, the one thing I know for a fact is that you will bravely stand up to the irate plumbing lobby.
I will. One more story about lobbies.

Speaker 4 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 co-sponsors.

Speaker 4 I put it in the hopper. I got my HR number.
And that day, the milk lobby comes after me.

Speaker 4 Like they said there wouldn't be enough hospital rooms for all the children who were going to die from raw milk if my bill passed. And

Speaker 4 this is kind of weird. You've got a lobby going after its own product,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And she says, OMG, I didn't realize the lactose lobby was this intolerant. Oh, that's brilliant.
You said that? That's pretty

Speaker 4 Thomas Massey, thank you. Hey, thank you, Tucker.
Amazing.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson.com.