Tucker Carlson - Rep. Thomas Massie doesn’t care what you think of him, which is pretty great. (3:19) Where Does US Debt End? (10:32) Why Massie Voted 15 Times Against Funding Israel (14:53) AIPAC (34:04) Mitch McConnell (42:25) Area 51 (50:32) Massie's Relationship with Trump (57:09) Kill
Rep. Thomas Massie’s debt badge flashes $100K/second as he warns the U.S. dollar’s reserve status is eroding under sanctions and proxy wars like Ukraine, which he calls a military-industrial complex cash grab—he’s voted 15 times against Israel funding, clashing with AIPAC, which he accuses of unregistered foreign influence. His off-grid Kentucky farm, powered by Tesla batteries and wood gasification, mirrors his political defiance: he blocked the CARES Act, mocked congressional cliques, and exposed Democrats waving Ukrainian flags during votes, framing aid as partisan theater. From fixing a jail’s hot water heater with inmate labor to dismissing climate scams, Massie’s outsider pragmatism—no lobbyist favors, no fear of backlash—exposes how Washington’s self-serving systems fail even when they’re legally correct. [Automatically generated summary]
So he got stuck at a roast one time when we worked together in New Orleans and had to take a leak, and it was on C-SPAN. And on the tape, which I have seen, he's 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...
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.
It's hard to comprehend 14 digits of debt, but when you see the last five digits are moving so fast you can't perceive them with your eyes, then you kind of understand, whoa, we got a problem here.
I mean, it's $100,000 a second, roughly.
So imagine we had this catapult and we were launching cyber trucks once a second into the ocean.
That's how much debt we're taking on continuously.
Now, there is some good news.
I noticed last month, It went down.
And I'm like, is my debt clock broken?
Why is it going down?
And I realized, oh, it's April 15th.
Everybody's paying their taxes.
So the good news is we balanced it for a month.
The bad news is April 15th is the only reason that happened.
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.
They're red and green if you got that far and can't read.
I say it's like stop and go, but I've seen people press the spend button, then turn around and look at my debt badge and ask, did it just go up?
But I want them to realize there are consequences to what they're doing because they have been, I think, as you said, just ignoring it, putting it off to the side.
Right now, we're able to finance it because we're the world's reserve currency.
And when we print more money, which we're doing all the time, the Fed is doing that, we're actually taxing the world.
Everybody in the world who holds dollars gets like a 3% transaction fee.
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.
And we can do that as long as they use our currency.
But I think it's going to end.
At some point, they're going to quit using our dollars as reserve currency.
I mean, I watched your interview with Putin, and one of the things, whether you hate him or not...
One of the things he said that is true is when we sanctioned him, before we sanctioned Russia, 70% of their transactions were in US dollars.
And after the sanctions, it's less than 20% of their transactions are in US dollars.
So what we're doing with all these sanctions, ironically, we're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we sanction a country and say, you can't use our currency to have a transaction.
We're taking away our ability to charge them 3%.
For that transaction.
Because when we print 3% more dollars, we're just taking that money.
And they'll tolerate like 3% because we're not backed by dollars.
We're backed by aircraft carriers right now.
So they'll sort of tolerate that 3%.
But one of the things we recently did in Congress, we passed something called the REPO Act, where we said we're just going to seize all of Russia's sovereign assets in the United States.
Well, it turns out a lot of that is Treasury debt that they've agreed to buy.
So that they can hold dollars.
And here's the problem with that.
When people see that we've seized their money that they gave us in exchange for these Treasury notes, then other countries won't want to buy our debt.
It's already happening.
And the price of a long-term bond that the Treasury puts out, it's already gone above 4%.
It's like over 4.5%.
They don't want to buy them anymore because we probably wouldn't seize Great Britain's assets.
What's interesting is we were in Afghanistan and I was tracking this.
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 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.
There's a military industrial complex.
They call it the defense industrial base now in the United States.
They say they're hungry and we've got to keep them fed.
And since we don't have any of our own wars and we don't have a reason to deplete our stocks and our bombs and weapons that we have, we engage in these other things to keep them healthy and thriving.
In fact, the Biden administration even made that argument in a letter to Congress for why we should do this supplemental foreign aid to Israel, to Ukraine.
They made the argument that the defense industrial base needs to be strong, and so we need to spend this money.
And they gave a list of all the states in the United States that would benefit from this spending, and that's why they said we should do it.
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.
But I don't see how it's strengthening our country.
Instead, we're referencing a website that's not even hosted in the United States.
And so I went to this website, and it's got a fairly short definition, but it's also got examples of things that would be considered anti-Semitism.
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...
You know, in the Bible, he was not welcome among his own people, okay?
And so that would be anti-Semitism.
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.
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, what if their policies ever became the same?
So, but the members of Congress who go to church on Sunday who just voted to ban the New Testament on campus, make it illegal to quote from the New Testament, the Christian Bible, how did they square that?
Because there's a lot of pressure in Congress to vote for these things.
And our Republican leadership thinks they're so smart.
We're in an election year, and they want to bring up issues.
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 they want to split the Democrats.
They want to show that Republicans are united and then split the Democrats.
That's one of the reasons they do it.
Another reason they do it is there's a foreign interest group called AIPAC that got the ear of this current speaker and demanded 16 votes in April on Israel or the Middle East.
We haven't had 16 votes in April on the United States in Congress.
So what's AIPAC? AIPAC 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.
Ostensibly, it's a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of Israel.
They're for anything Israel.
And they're a very effective lobbying group.
They get in there.
They try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate, for instance, for Congress.
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.
People think it's a grassroots movement in Kentucky.
It's actually a top-down movement from AIPAC, so that people who aren't even Jewish will feel like they've got to support Israel no matter what, even if it's a secular state that funds abortions.
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.
It's a little weird, though, because as you said, you're probably the only Republican in the House who hasn't done homework for them, who isn't on their side.
And 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.
What I find interesting is that it's not just that they disagree with your views, which they do, and I think they have an absolute right to disagree with anybody's views.
We all do.
But they've called you a bigot.
And they call you an anti-Semite and say you're a hater and try to destroy your character.
That seems like a very different level of response to me.
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.
How can they put Paul Manafort in jail, which they did, on a Farrah violation and a bunch of other people in jail on Farrah 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?
So this is, AIPAC is exactly what FARA is meant for.
Now they would say, and we have a First Amendment right.
Okay, well, I agree with you there, but we also have election laws.
And it's disclosure, right?
They're not, FARA doesn't say you can't.
Say Thomas Massey's an ignorant hillbilly.
You're allowed to say that if you want to, but we just want to check where your money's coming from.
Tell us where it's coming from, what you're spending it on, and if you are lobbying on behalf of a foreign country.
So they should be, now to your point, they should be registered with FARA. This is what FARA is, is where there's gray area, where it's an American representing a foreign country.
Let's look and see if you're getting any money from that foreign country.
Are you a dual citizen with that foreign country?
Are you being directed by, for instance, Netanyahu speaking to your group, advising you on your next move?
Are you getting money from the military-industrial complex?
Because to understand AIPAC, I think...
It's easiest to model them as a military-industrial lobby.
Their biggest thing is they want more equipment, more military equipment from the United States going to Israel.
In fact, when they used to be allowed in my office...
The argument they would make is, oh, we're just stimulating the U.S. 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. military contractors.
Now, that didn't make me warm and fuzzy, okay?
But that is their argument.
And if you notice what they advocate for, I think sometimes they advocate for things that even Israelis wouldn't.
I believe that.
They would, I think, be okay with a war with Iran, like an all-out apocalyptic war with Iran, whereas there are people in Israel who say, whoa, hold on a second.
We'd rather not have a war with Iran, but AIPAC does things that lead us in that direction.
Is always talking to you for AIPAC. They're probably a constituent in your district, but they are firmly embedded in AIPAC. Every member has something like this?
I don't know how it works on the Democrat side, 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.
Not only do they not have a Putin guy, they don't have a Britain guy.
They don't have an Australian guy.
They don't have a Germany dude.
It's the only country that does this, that has somebody uniformly.
I guarantee there's some spreadsheet at AIPAC where the AIPAC dude who's matched up with the congressman is there, and then all the congressman's votes on the issue.
Oh, has the congressman been to Israel?
They pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to Israel.
I may be...
I mean, I'm not the only Republican who hasn't taken the AIPAC 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.
Again, this is almost a rhetorical question, but in your 12, 14 years in Congress, 12 years, have you ever seen any indication that Russia is influencing election outcomes or candidates or members?
Russia obviously has Russia Today, RT. Yeah, I think it's been banned, but yeah.
I like, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken, of which I'm a big fan, being from Kentucky, right?
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.
Russia today changed their name to RT, so you don't have to say Russia.
But there's a strong analogy there.
But, I mean, there are efforts.
You'd be a fool to think that they're not trying to influence things here, just like we are there.
What is it?
Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.
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?
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.
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.
So, 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.
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.
And Senator McConnell's favorabilities are lower among Republican primary voters than our Democrat governor's favorabilities.
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.
And there's, of course, the question, as you noted, of donations from Lockheed, etc., the military-industrial complex.
But it almost seems messianic to me.
It seems heartfelt to me.
It seems sincere.
That they think that this is all that matters, winning this war against Russia.
I've heard the argument, I think it's immoral, but I've heard the argument that, oh, this is a great deal.
We just spend money and we're grinding up Russia's capacity to wage war, particularly lots of Russians are dying.
And so we're told that's a good thing.
Since the Cold War began, we've been taught that it would be good for Russia to be diminished.
But they've gone so far as to say...
Russians dying to the tune of 300,000 casualties, they say, is just such a great thing that we need to keep this thing going.
And my answer to that is, why don't you tell us the Ukrainian casualties?
I have been in classified settings with CIA, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, not 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.
And they claimed they didn't know.
I mean, that's just a flat-out lie.
And they said they would get back to me.
And they've never gotten back to me.
Like, not only are Americans being fed propaganda about this war, Congress is being fed propaganda by our State Department and our Secretary of Defense and our intelligence agencies.
And you can just ask a few questions in these classified hearings.
If nothing else, my colleagues should be convicted of a lack of curiosity.
They sit there and they believe everything they're told because these are supposed to be the authorities and they know things we don't.
But you can expose them with two or three questions like, how many Ukrainians have died?
I've been wearing it for a year every day of my life, okay?
But they strip you of every outside reference, okay?
And now your staff is not allowed in that meeting either.
Remember, congressmen, our primary roles are like raising money, being friendly to constituents, putting on a good face, campaigning, and then once a day or maybe twice a day, we roll in there and press the vote buttons based on what staff advises you.
When you go into a SCIF, you don't have your smartphone, so you're not very smart.
They start using acronyms that you don't know.
Remember what the acronym stands for.
You can't just like, okay, what's the IDGFBZ? I don't know, man.
I must be stupid.
But if you were in a regular setting, you just pull your phone out and like, oh, okay, that's what that is.
I know what that is.
And then you also can't ask your staff a question while you're in that setting.
We have legislative staffers who handle certain specific areas.
For my three days of nourishment, I'm sitting in an SUV eating that big tub of pretzels with peanut butter in the middle.
Like waiting, just waiting for them to try to call it in session and sneak this bill past.
And they're like, shit, Massey's going to do it.
So they loaded up congressmen.
You know, the airports were shut down for the most part.
There were some planes coming from California that only had two passengers and they were both congressmen.
So they roll them all back to Congress.
It takes them two days to assemble a quorum.
Because they went to the parliamentarian and they're like, is there any way around this?
And he's like, nope, Massey's right.
The Constitution requires a quorum if one, you know, he didn't call me an asshole, but if one asshole just shows up, objects.
It says there's no quorum here.
So they brought every back.
I go to the floor.
I actually got a...
Everybody was hating me.
I mean, everybody.
Did you know what it's like to be in a room of 434 people and they're all staring at you?
I had maybe 10 friends who were looking at me like, that guy is dead.
We've never seen Harry Carey like this.
They were worried for me, but the rest of them hated me.
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, and she's going to die, and I'm blaming you for this.
And I said- You said that to your face?
Yeah, oh yeah.
No, it wasn't just one.
It was like, when he was done, there was a line of people.
I just stood there, and they're all coming to hate on me.
And I was like, but what about the guy that's going to the grocery store and bagging your groceries and carrying them out to the car?
Does he live with his mother too?
Like, what about the trucker who's out there driving and interacting with people in order to get the goods to where you need to be?
What about the nurse who's going to work every single day taking care of people?
Is she going to kill her parents?
Like, why are you special?
You're supposed to, you know, they carved a hole in the side of a mountain in West Virginia for us in the case of emergency.
Yes.
Well, the sad 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.
But now we've realized they're, like, useless.
We can declare war without them in the event of a nuclear strike.
The Democrats were in the majority, and he had just vaporized Soleimani, and we were worried that he would attack mainland Iran without a vote of Congress.
So the Democrats, actually insincerely, there aren't too many anti-war Democrats left.
But they realized this was a chance to make a statement.
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.
So I had to vote for it, but I was only one of three Republicans to do it.
So he remembered that time, but he didn't remember the fake Obamacare repeal and some of the other things that I was kind of the turd in the punch bowl on.
Just to be clear, for the people who don't know what you're talking about, In new vehicles, as 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.
But I had a funny moment, you know, the 15 or 16 votes we had on Israel in April.
Well, the squad and I, 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 most of the squad voted with me, but I noticed AOC wasn't always there with me, so I went over to the squad on the Democrat side of the aisle.
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.
So 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 this more consistently.
We've formed coalitions on the First Amendment, on the Fourth Amendment, on war sometimes, like to eliminate cluster bombs, delivering cluster bombs.
Even though the Democrats, almost to a person, actually to a person, want to give Ukraine more aid, some of them are like, well, the cluster bombs, maybe we shouldn't do that, okay?
And so you can form coalitions, so I try to do that when I can.
Even though that's a false narrative that's been dispelled long ago, it's still in their same file folder.
So when they see Ukraine is fighting Russia, they use that as a proxy for their hate for Trump.
And so they'll vote for that.
And they did.
They waved.
I don't know if you saw this.
They were waving Ukrainian flags after Mike Johnson put their bill on the floor.
And every Democrat voted for it.
This was premeditated.
Somebody had to go buy 200 Ukrainian flags and hand them out.
And I filmed it, which you're not supposed to do, but you're also not supposed to wave flags of other countries on the floor of the house.
So I'm like, all right, I'm going to expose this.
So I filmed it and I put it on Twitter to show the humiliation.
That Mike Johnson brought upon us by bringing the Democrat bill to the floor.
And it was leverage, too.
Even if you're a Republican and you're okay with sending money to Ukraine, that's a leverage point.
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.
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.
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.
It wasn't just a humiliation of those of us in Congress.
It was a humiliation of our country.
I mean, it's one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and they got everything they wanted for them, and the Democrats are waving the flag, the Ukrainian flag, even though they're in the majority, and we just have to sit there and take that.
And the good news is some Republicans are waking up to it.
Remember, when we started voting on these Ukraine resolutions, even, you know, as soon as the war started.
I was the only no.
There was this open-ended promise in a non-binding resolution that said, well, give them whatever they need.
And there were only two other Republicans that joined me on this.
But now we've got a majority of Republicans in Congress who are saying, wait, they aren't using this money like we thought they were, and we're giving them money to fund pensions.
Of retired politicians in Ukraine who were most certainly corrupt.
Speaker Johnson, just like they had done Kevin McCarthy.
Although I thought inappropriately and at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons, they did that to McCarthy.
But here we had Speaker Johnson who was doing all the things people were afraid McCarthy might do.
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.
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 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.
And that's why we forced a question.
Nancy Pelosi voted for him.
Hakeem Jeffries went on national TV and said, why would we want to get rid of him?
He's given us everything we want.
I mean, The Uniparty has never been so exposed as it was when we called that motion to vacate.
I know some people got mad at us, said we shouldn't have done it, but it's a long game, which we certainly hope that he doesn't become Speaker next January.
And hopefully people will have seen, with Nancy Pelosi rushing to Speaker Johnson's aide, that he's not the Speaker you want when Trump wins the White House and we keep the majority.
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, while we were still in the majority, Paul Ryan sent like a dozen CRs or omnibus bills to President Trump's desk because it didn't have any money for a wall in it.
He had no intention of ever funding a wall.
Paul Ryan did.
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.
Paul Ryan is a sinister person, I happen to know, but also just kind of not a genius and an ideologue at the same time, which is like a bad combination.
Dumb ideologues are the scariest.
But Mike Johnson seemed like kind of a moderately conservative, kind of sincere, decent guy.
You know, maybe he would babysit your kids and do an okay job, unlike Paul Ryan.
And then he immediately just becomes a tool of CIA and Jake Sullivan and the Biden administration.
But he claims he spent time in a SCIF and he learned things.
SCIF, that's a pure compartmentalized information facility or something.
It's where we go.
We have to leave our phones locked up.
No staff in there.
He claims he spent time in SCIF and learned things that changed his mind.
Here's the problem, Tucker.
I was in SCIF with him.
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.
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.
And I was like, this is ridiculous.
You haven't given...
They didn't give us one example of any time ever since FISA was created that getting a warrant would have kept them from solving or preventing an act of terrorism.
They gave hypotheticals, but they had no specific...
To do the program to go against civilians, to spy on civilians.
And actually, that product came out of the Judiciary Committee.
Here's another place where the Speaker betrayed us.
FISA-702 was created by John Conyers and Jim Sensenbrenner.
Conyers was the chairman, and Sensenbrenner was the ranking member.
And what Mike Johnson said this year was, well, even though the Judiciary Committee created this and is responsible for overseeing it, I'm going to let the Intel Committee bring the bill to the floor without warrants in it.
It wasn't even their jurisdiction.
They have jurisdiction over FISA as long as it's for the CIA, but not for the FBI. So that was frustrating.
I couldn't move the center of gravity too far out of Cambridge.
I got it up to 128 on Woburn, and then I commuted 40 miles every day so I could live in a state that lets you have machine guns and old cars and cool stuff.
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.
I like how timbers look, but we'll just bolt them together.
We'll use iron brackets.
That's the best way to do it.
But in the course of this 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.
Wood shrinks.
It takes six or eight years for a big timber to fully dry out.
So how do you deal with metal fasteners and shrinking wood?
Well, the metal fasteners can rip out.
But if you build your fasteners out of wood, it can all work.
And what's kind of funny is I had these big rubber gloves that a friend who had worked on power lines, you know, they were leftovers and he gave to me.
And so like in the YouTube video, I try to make sure like I'm using big rubber gloves and stuff.
And I did like this fast forward, you know, of the disassembly of the battery.
And I forgot like my two little boys are in there helping me and they don't have the gloves on.
It's like a basement room that's not under the house.
I don't want to get into everything under my house right now.
Okay, so my wife says our house is my science project and she's the mouse.
And she doesn't mind that, but I keep rearranging the maze on the weekends when I come back from D.C. And then she has to find the cheese while I'm in D.C. But she's more like the astronaut, I think, in a rocket.
So your electricity is, I mean, as long as you know how to operate the system, which apparently only you do, but if you can do that, then you're just living a completely normal life with electricity.
Yeah, in a normal wood stove, you put the wood in there, it can be green.
You light it on fire, you get it going, and then you control the air that goes to it to keep it from getting too hot.
And a lot of smoke comes out, especially when it's idling, because it's an inefficient combustion process, and it's at a relatively low temperature, under, let's say, a thousand degrees.
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 1,500 degrees.
When our geothermal unit's running in the summertime, doing the air conditioning, it takes the heat out of the living room and puts it in the hot water tank.
So we have free hot water from May until September when the air conditioner's running.
And then in the winter, when the wood boiler is running, that makes hot water.
And then if there's ever not the air conditioner running or the boiler running, we have an on-demand, this is where we cheat, on-demand propane hot water heater that makes up the difference.
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.
So when 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.
My solar panels just turn off and I'm like, run around, turn on some lights, you know, turn on something.
I don't want to waste this free electricity.
So I got extra hot water heater elements that run on DC so that when the sun, when our house is full, the first thing it does is it tries to charge the Tesla that's sitting in the garage.
So the Tesla's sitting there at half full and a solid state breaker in my breaker box comes on.
And starts the Tesla charging.
Then when the Tesla gets full and the house battery is full, I create hot water with the electricity.
So I've got like a fourth way to make hot water.
Hot water is almost as good as water.
I mean, if you've ever gone without water, you know it's bad.
But going out without hot water is almost just as bad.
There are lots of old dug wells on our farm, so I knew it could work.
The way they would do it, they would dig a big pit.
They didn't dig it just straight down.
They dug a big pit.
And then they laid up stones in a circle, the stones you see when you look in an old well.
But then they backfilled the pit with stones.
So that extra area becomes like a reservoir.
And then they put dirt on top of that.
So that when a raccoon poops next to your well, it doesn't necessarily go right into the reservoir.
So I did a very similar thing, but I hit a bedrock and I borrowed a friend's jackhammer and spent a day inside of that hole with a jackhammer trying to get even deeper through the bedrock.
I finally took my friend's jackhammer back and said, okay, that's deep enough.
If you're connected to City Water and it seems what's on the other side is opaque to you, you just use as much as you want.
And what happens is during those peak periods, that's when the utility company has to work extra hard.
That's when the price and the inefficiency goes way up is in those peak periods when people aren't cutting back in response to the supply because the actual cost of producing it isn't known.
When you're making it yourself, it's known.
But I've argued that water and electricity, even when they come from, especially when they come from utilities, should have variable pricing based on the cost at that very instant to produce it.
And then you can have appliances, not mandated, but smart appliances.
If you're rich, you don't care when the price of power goes up.
You don't know what it costs.
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.
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.
So when I go to D.C. 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.
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, but because I have this comfort level that I'm going to go back home to this, I don't need the job.
We're self-sustaining.
It gives you an extra dimension of independence, I think, when you're in D.C. What about food?
I mean, I guess what I'm struck by, I don't live off-grid, though I do have an off-grid camp, but the amount of skills you need to build something like that is really, really striking.
You actually have to know how to do things, complex things.
I mean, timber framing is another level.
Electrical, plumbing, masonry, agriculture, heavy equipment operation.
Like, you can do all of that, obviously.
So, is it weird to be in a room with 434 people who can't do shit, who can't operate a micro— I mean, they're, like, actually incapable, and maybe that's why they're in politics, so they can externalize their self-loathing.
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, but do you think that code, which really determines how people live in this country, the code, it's on up to code, is it?
Is it real?
I mean, knowing what you do about all those different trades, does the code protect people, actually?
So, for instance, the roofer's union and the plumber's union, I think, have conspired to put as many holes in your roof with plumbing as possible, right?
So, quickly, I got into politics because we were living off the grid, and I read this little newspaper, and it said they were going to raise our taxes to fund this cronyism in the county, the conservation district, which was building stuff for themselves.
Not for other farmers.
They wanted to tax other farmers to help their farm, right?
It wasn't really about conserving.
Farmers are the best conservationists there are, so let's don't punish them anymore.
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.
My county didn't have any smokestacks and didn't have any cul-de-sacs, right?
Like the neighborhood in E.T., you know that movie where the kids ride their bikes through the neighborhood?
We didn't have neighborhoods like that.
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.
Because I was like, look, this guy could be a senator someday.
And he might need to go to the bathroom.
And we need something more than a curtain here.
So we call it the Rand Paul door on the bathroom.
It's the one room that had a door from the very beginning.
Anyways, by the way, also, this was in January.
And Rand is cheap as hell.
He had a two-wheel drive SUV. So I had to plow all my driveway so that he could get up there.
And the problem is, it's gravel.
So I had to plow all my gravel off, practically, just to get...
So for what it costs to upgrade to the four-wheel drive for Rand Paul, my gravel costs way more than that.
Anyways, I went all in on politics.
Helped Rand get elected in his primary.
I was on the ballot the same day in 2010, the primary.
May 22nd, 2010. Rand was on the ballot and I was on the ballot.
But I was running for this little county executive seat trying to take a Republican out because he's trying to raise our taxes and bring in more government.
And so I won the election and it was the most terrifying thing when they handed me the key to the courthouse.
Like it's a small town.
And if the janitor didn't show up to open the courthouse and start the boiler, which looked like the African Queen, you had to kick it and do all this stuff to get it started.
The sheriff's office wouldn't be heated, the clerk's office wouldn't be heated, and my office wouldn't be heated if I couldn't get the African Queen to start.
So anyways, it was like the dog that caught the bus.
And I had promised I wouldn't raise taxes.
And I was immediately confronted with all these problems.
That had accumulated over the years in our county government.
And the jailer came to me, who's an elected official in Kentucky.
His name's Chris.
And he 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.
By the way, the state government had sold the county government a bill of goods.
They said, if you'll keep our state inmates, we'll pay you $32 a day and you'll make all kinds of money.
And the county was a million dollars in debt because this did not work out.
And I wasn't going to spend another penny on this throwing good money after bad.
But we had 30 state inmates who go out and pick up trash and mow around the courthouse.
And they get real sweaty.
And the hot water heater had quit working at the jail.
All of our property taxes together were like $400,000.
$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?
I said, I'll go buy one.
Hardware store or something.
So I go look at this hot water heater at the jail.
It is not the kind you buy at the store.
It's like a boiler almost.
And it's fairly involved.
It's got like inch and a quarter copper lines.
It's not household plumbing.
But I had three books on plumbing, right?
I felt fairly confident.
I said, well, if I can find one of these, I'll put it in myself.
So I got on eBay.
And I looked for this model hot water.
There was one, buy it now for $5,500.
And I'm like, I can save the county like $6,500.
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.
Then I hit the button.
I bought this hot water heater.
They bring it in a tractor trailer.
I didn't pay extra for the lift gate because I had inmates.
The inmates take this thing out of the tractor trailer and we go in and we take the old hot water heater out.
And there were three inmates in that closet working on that hot water heater just demolishing everything.
So they dragged that thing out of there and I had to go in the closet with the inmates to put the new one in.
I'm like, I only want one inmate in that closet with me.
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.
That's incredible.
Anyways, that set the tone.
Like you could say, well, you're the executive of the county and you shouldn't be wasting your time on that.
But I mean, I had four hours of effort in it and I saved the county $6,500.
And I'm like, no, this is worth my time.
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.