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Oct. 31, 2023 - This Past Weekend - Theo Von
02:36:37
E468 Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson is a political commentator, host and author known for his years as an anchor on Fox News, CNN and more. He is currently the host of the show “Tucker on X”. Tucker Carlson joins This Past Weekend with Theo Von to chat about life after Fox News, his new show on X, how to find truth in journalism, the struggle for power in America, sobriety stories, the debate around RFK Jr., wild Greyhound bus trips, smoking cigs with teachers, and much more.  Tucker Carlson: https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit  https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ  Babbel: Go to http://babbel.com/theo to get 55% off. Shopify: Go to http://shopify.com/theo to sign up for a $1-per-month free trial. Gametime: Download the Gametime app, create an account, and use code WEEKEND for $20 off your first purchase. Ibotta: Download the Ibotta app now and use code THEO to get 100% cash back on your Thanksgiving dinner starting November 1st. DraftKings: Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use code THEO. New customers can get $200 in bonus bets instantly for betting just $5. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-Gambler or visit w w w dot 1 800 gambler dot net. In New York, call 877-8-HOPE N Y or text HOPE N Y (4 6 7 3 6 9). In Connecticut, Help is available for problem gambling call 888-789-7777 or visit c c p g dot org. Please play responsibly. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). Licensee partner Golden Nugget Lake Charles (LA). 21 + age varies by jurisdiction. Void in ONT. Bonus bets expire one hundred sixty eight hours after issuance. See sportsbook dot draftkings dot com slash basketball terms for eligibility and deposit restrictions, terms, and responsible gaming resources. ------------------------------------------------- Music: "Shine" by Bishop Gunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek&ab_channel=BishopGunn ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: tpwproducer@gmail.com Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers/ Producer: Nick  https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Colin https://instagram.com/colin_reiner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
I have some tour dates to let you know about Athens, Georgia on November 7th and Atlanta, Georgia, November 29th and 30th at the Fox Theater.
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Thank you so much for the support.
Today's guest is a journalist, political commentator, author, and just damn yapper.
He's one of the guys that has made a big transition recently from going to a major network to onto X, which is a major network, but it's a little bit different.
You guys know him probably by name, and if you don't, you're going to get to.
Today's guest is Tucker Carlson.
Shine that light on me I'll sit and tell you my stories Shine on me And I will find a song I'll be singing I'm going to stay I'm going to stay Sure to Zen.
Or you need a spit cup.
Yeah, you better try this product.
It's unbelievable.
Maybe I'll try one towards the end of the episode.
It will wind you up.
Really?
Yes.
Once you try this, you're going to get a lot richer.
Zen?
Is that their advertising campaign?
Zen is not a Zen.
That's the advertising campaign.
Really?
Yeah, but the truth is, Zen is a powerful work enhancer and also a male enhancer.
If you know what I mean.
Really?
Talking erection, huh?
Yep.
There's no election for Zen.
Wow.
I don't know if I want a Zen-supported wiener, you know?
I don't know.
I think you do.
I think you do.
You think so?
Oh, yeah, because you want people to get addicted.
Just close your eyes.
Oh, damn.
It's like that.
That's a neighbor saying, hey, it's real quiet over there.
Just whack it on the nightstand.
Sorry.
Excuse me.
Sorry.
Dude, I would hate to have a real long wiener if you have a cat.
That would be the fuck.
That would be the fuck.
That would be dangerous.
It would be dangerous.
Talk about a cat toy.
Oh, yeah.
But you'd have to put a little bell at the end of it or something.
What?
And a feather.
Yeah.
Nice to meet you, man.
We never met.
Dude, you have such a crazy, you have a crazy laugh, don't you?
It's real.
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
It's very high.
Is this, are we on TV?
Huh?
Is this being recorded?
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, my laugh is very high, and that's how you know that it's real because it's so embarrassing, and I do it anyway.
I like that.
Yeah, and I should have said that.
It's not nice to condemn somebody's laugh or whatever.
Oh, you can't hurt my feelings.
Okay.
Go ahead and share.
Oh, I'll give it a run, man.
Okay, true.
No, I think your laugh.
It kind of reminds me of like a proud kind of grandmother from like maybe the 1850s or something.
Totally sending her boys off to war.
Or like a woman that just got a new cookie recipe in the mail, you know?
It's joyful, but there's a sort of undertone of diabolic.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But in my case, it's totally real.
And again, it's not an appealing laugh.
It's not like, wow, what a manly laugh that is.
It's not a chortle.
It's more a giggle.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it seems like a kid.
Yeah, like a kid's would love it.
It seems like.
But not too much.
Yeah, it reminds me of like Winnie the Pooh, kind of, you know?
You low-key do have a Christopher Robin vibe if he grew up, you know?
Thank you.
I don't think he ever did, though.
I think he exists only in the pages of the books.
Oh, yeah.
Actually, there was a Christopher Robin that was Milne's son, and he grew up to be a super bitter atheist who hated his dad.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, it didn't work.
Really?
It's all fantasy.
Yes.
Wow.
Unless I'm misremembering that.
A.A. Milne, who wrote the book, had kind of a tragic family life.
Oh, that's heartbreaking.
Good to see you today, man.
We never met before.
But one of my children is like your biggest fan.
Really?
Yes.
And are they, like, how children are we talking?
Mid-20s.
Oh, that's fine.
I'm just saying.
I don't want creepy or anything.
I don't need, like, because it's kind of weird that they allow like little kids to watch you.
So seek that, like, sometimes it's weird that there's no barrier to entry in a lot of people.
Porn on Twitter, dude.
So, I mean, in a world that allows that, you're fine.
You think there should be porn on Twitter?
No.
No, there shouldn't be porn on Twitter.
I mean, I'm, you know, no.
Yeah, don't go to Twitter.
I mean, I don't, I mean, I wouldn't, you know, spend a lot of time trying to ban porn on Twitter, but, like, porn on Twitter, come on.
Yeah.
Twitter is for your ugly opinions, not, you know, not your nudity.
Yeah.
What things do you think shouldn't be on Twitter?
I mean, I think everything should be allowed on Twitter.
I mean, I'm on Twitter because everything is allowed.
Right.
And I don't think everything is allowed on Twitter.
I haven't found the boundary yet, but Elon Musk, who owns it, has said he's for free speech.
And if it's a political view that most people don't like, it's still allowed.
And I'm so grateful for that as someone with unpopular views.
Well, didn't they have, well, one thing that I don't like on Twitter, sometimes you see like people beating up teachers and stuff like that.
Do you ever see any of this violence that happens?
Right.
I don't like it.
But the fact that they allow it and kids beating up each other will have like those things where somebody's going to set up, somebody's filming, some other kids are going to come in and beat up the kid.
Right.
But why did they, because then I feel like if they would stop allowing that, then, because other kids just start mimicking what they see.
Well, and it's also bad.
It's bad for you to watch it.
I say as someone who's watched a lot of it, it's like the ISIS videos.
Do you know what I mean?
Or there's a whole bunch of channels of criminals getting shot, coming into a jewelry store or a liquor store, and some Korean guy just blows them away.
And you can't help but love it.
I mean, it is the most alluring kind of porn.
Like you just watch it again and again, this guy getting killed.
And you think, this is not good for me, actually.
I shouldn't watch this.
Yeah, there's probably part of your spirit or whatever.
Totally.
It's not edifying.
It's like actually bad, but it's very hard.
Have you ever seen the criminals getting killed?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I've seen a couple of them.
There's one guy who's so good at it.
He's killed like seven criminals.
Yeah, he's a watchmaker in L.A. Yeah.
No, it's a very famous guy.
Oh, there's the one guy.
I'm like, dude, they got to quit trying to rob this guy.
Well, he finally gave up.
And now I think he lives in Vegas, but this was in the 80s or 90s in LA.
I think he killed five people literally with revolvers, too.
This was before everyone had like a double stack, you know, 19-round magazine.
These were just like with conventional 38 or 357 revolvers.
That's him right there.
Can you have that up for me, Nick?
This is a.
Yeah, watch seller.
He's actually a watch maker.
He's the guy who, you know, fixes expensive watches and makes the new gears.
Mr. Thomas.
The dealer, Lance Thomas, was wounded five times at his shop.
Wow.
Let's see.
He's like the 50. I'm sorry.
Is my memory pretty good or what?
He killed five robbers since 89. That's amazing.
He's like the 50 Cent a watchmaker.
He's like 50 seconds.
That dude's unreal.
They ran me out of business.
Thomas says, there's got to be a truce.
There's got to be a time.
There's got to be a time when you walk away from the war zone.
Wow.
So he just quit because it was too.
But what a BMF.
I mean, he just, yeah, he shot a couple in one day.
He says, this is his best quote.
Mr. Thomas said he felt no remorse for the lives he had taken.
The police ruled each shooting was justified.
I was ice, he said.
A frightening thing about this is that it all becomes easier.
Wow.
It's not good for you to, I mean, you don't want to have to kill five people.
I don't, you know, I don't think it's, I don't think it's good for you.
What's a fair amount of people to kill?
I don't think you want to kill anyone if you can help it.
You know, I mean, well, it's certainly justified in self-defense.
I mean, no one will judge you.
No, no honest person will judge you for killing someone to protect your life or your loved ones, even your property.
But I just don't think you want to have to do that.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, well, unfortunately, there's some people I think that wake up and they're kind of like kind of looking, you know, wouldn't mind getting into a little, you know, killing or whatever.
But I think, yeah, I think you have a lot of people move into places where you can defend yourself, where the laws are more in your favor to defend yourself because it feels like your own safety has become your own responsibility.
Well, if you can't defend yourself, you're a slave.
I mean, by definition, if someone can hurt you, but you can't defend yourself, then you're not a human being.
You're subhuman, obviously.
Yeah.
Like, because that's a human right.
That precedes government, right?
I mean, being a human?
Defending yourself.
You know, you have to be able to defend.
If I walk up and punch you in the face and you can't hit back, I'm the master.
You're the slave, obviously.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
That's why I think it's one reason why you can't take guns away is because people have, at the end of the day, have to be able to defend themselves or groups of people have to.
Well, of course.
And the police, you know, they've got their own thing, their own concerns.
Yeah.
You can't rely on them.
But I was thinking, yeah, what I don't like about those violence, like the violence that they show on Twitter, where it's like the children beating up children.
Yeah.
Is because if you're a kid and you see that and you see it gets a lot of traction, then you just go do it.
So you're just replicating this violence.
It's like you see so many more kids doing it now because they've seen it as like a thing.
So that kind of thing, I don't think they should allow one there.
Well, also, you don't want to see every ugly thing that people do.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
You don't want to see fat people in the shower.
You don't want to see people on the John.
Like there are a lot of things that happen that you don't necessarily want to look at video of.
I don't mind watching a thick person in the shower if there's a real skinny person in there with them and they have to like kind of like jockey for position or something, you know?
Shower them with somebody's heart, I think.
I don't know matter what size they are.
Have you seen a lot of that?
I think I've been in some showers with some, you know, with varying sizes of humans.
And yeah, it's the fattest person you've showered with.
Oh, probably a good...
Hmm.
Hmm.
hmmm I'm trying to remember.
Real fat or just kind of bulky?
I remember I picked this gal up one time trying to fucking go back to how it felt on my back.
I'd probably say upper ones.
Upper ones, but you're not going to get into that.
No, no, no.
Just as yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, you're lying.
I can tell.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are.
Okay.
No.
Is there laws?
Like, do you know if there's any laws?
Like, if there's people who are doing pedophiling, right?
And they are reaching out to children through social media.
Why isn't there a responsibility on the social media companies for allowing that to be an open wall?
I think there is.
I think there is.
And I think some have gotten in trouble for that.
Oh, okay.
Providing a space for that.
Look, I'm not a lawyer.
But it's certainly wrong, certainly immoral.
And you got to think they make some effort to stop that, though.
I think there's a lot of it.
There are a lot of creepy people out there.
And the number of creepy people is increasing.
You think so?
Seems to be.
Yeah, seems to be.
Yeah, I wonder why that is, huh?
Because you can look up other creepy people.
It's kind of like you said you wouldn't allow video of kids fighting on the internet because it inspires other kids to fight.
I think, you know, creepiness inspires creepiness, right?
Yeah.
That's a good point.
Yeah, man, I just want to get to know you a little bit.
Well, I want to get to know you too.
All right.
And not like the whole shower thing.
Oh, no.
Out.
No, no, no, no.
You don't weigh enough, I don't think.
You're close.
For what I'm looking for.
Okay.
Yeah, man.
Nice to meet you.
So you grew up, you grew up in California, right?
I did.
And so were you, I think people, were you in a fraternity?
I think that's the most thing people look at when they see you.
In a fraternity?
Yeah.
No, I wasn't.
I was.
No.
Really?
No.
Okay.
I never joined a fraternity.
All my roommates joined a fraternity.
I actually lived in a fraternity, but I never joined.
I don't like to be told what to do at all.
Really?
No.
Me neither do you.
Like at all.
Like at all.
At all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's my biggest, it's like I have a moral claustrophobia about being told what to do.
I'm happy to do things.
I don't mind serving other people, but it has to be voluntary.
I can't be ordered around.
Yeah, I don't like being told what to do.
Hey, bitch, go get me a cigarette.
You're a pledge.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I don't think so.
I'm not going to do that.
Yeah, and I don't want to be told what to do by some white kid that's in Poly Sci or whatever.
Or any color kid.
Yeah.
No color kid.
Yeah, yeah.
Or adult for that matter.
I just don't want to be bossed around.
And by the way, I don't mind taking advice or wise counsel from people I respect, or I'm often wrong.
I'm not saying that I'm always right.
I'm definitely not.
But being ordered to do things suggests a level of disrespect.
I just can't, I just can't deal with it at all.
And even just about like work and stuff, were you always like that from just like with work?
Like you want to be your own voice?
Of course.
Yeah.
I mean, it's where you end up, right?
Getting fired.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, not that I don't want to fight about it.
I'm not interested in being like, you can't tell me what to do or, you know, give a lot of lectures about it.
But I, I def, especially my business, you have a similar job where, you know, you're paid to say what you think.
Yeah.
Right.
And so you, you want to do your job, which is to say what you think.
Was there even a time when you were working at different news places where you were like, gosh, this still isn't my own voice?
Oh, all the time.
Really?
It was always my own voice, but they're just, you could feel the parameters.
I mean, I started in my 20s, mid-20s.
I'm now in my mid-50s, so it's been a long time.
Well, you look great for 50s, man.
I'm 54. Are you really?
Yes.
Oh, wow.
I know.
Isn't that shocking?
It's shocking.
I don't feel it.
But anyway, but when you're much younger and you've got little kids, I always had a lot of kids just reproduce like a crazy person, which I recommend strongly to you.
You know, you feel vulnerable and like, you know, you're not allowed to say certain things.
And I do think I was never censored, but I self-censored for sure.
You know, the war in Iraq breaks out and you're like, well, maybe it's a good idea.
That's not a good idea.
And you know, it's not a good idea.
You know what I mean?
But you allow yourself to be convinced because you know it's super unpopular to say it's not a good idea, but it clearly wasn't.
War with Iran, not a good idea.
I can say that now.
Why do we go along with that consensus a lot of times?
What is it that makes us afraid to speak out?
Well, people have a deep need to be part of a group.
It's just, it's a human need right up there with sex and food and shelter.
You know, it's like people want to be connected to other people, which I understand and I want that too.
But that can override reason and common sense very often.
So if you're, and a million studies have been done on this, but if you're in a group, I mean, everyone experiences, you know, a group full of people and everyone's like, you know, I hate chocolate ice cream.
And you're like, I kind of like chocolate ice cream, but you don't say anything about it because people like chocolate ice cream suck.
And you're like, yeah, they kind of suck.
You know, it's just, it's a human thing.
And so it's people go along with stuff that their gut tells them isn't the right thing, but you should never ignore your gut, your instincts, which you inherited from your ancestors, which are encoded in your DNA and which are almost never wrong.
If you're with someone and you feel like, God, that person's lying, that person's lying.
You may not know what about, you know, X-ray vision into someone's soul, but you can smell the deception on someone.
I know that you can.
We all can.
Oh, yeah.
Or if you feel danger and you're like, wow, this person poses a threat to me.
You're right.
You don't know the details.
You don't need to know the details.
Get away.
And if something's really stupid, like, let's go to war with Iran.
It's like, what?
Yeah.
And I just feel like it's, you know, maybe because of my age and my job, I have a moral obligation to say, I think that's really unwise.
You don't want to go to war with Iran.
No, because I'm not insane.
That's insane.
Oh, yeah.
Look, I'm not saying it is either.
I don't think that we should be involved in a lot of this shit.
You think?
How's it helping?
Is it helping you a lot?
No, it's just causing more.
All these moral victories you're winning?
It's causing more problems.
I don't even know if I'm winning any moral victories.
It just causes more problems, you know?
It's like hard to navigate between my friends that are different ethnicities or different, or from different places now.
Well, we shouldn't have to because we all live here and we should all be united in that.
Right.
But do you think, and I think when I, when I was a child, it felt like that.
We were all America.
It felt like we were united, that we were all like Americans.
But it doesn't, I feel like that's been pretty heavily compromised, pretty quickly even, which is almost amazing.
And I feel like, and these aren't Debbie Downer feelings.
These are just thoughts.
I should say that.
I think sometimes that, yeah, it's like America just feels like a shell company that people just park their asses.
We're just an LLC for the world.
For a lot of, yeah.
No, I mean, have we always been that?
Of course not.
It was a real country.
It wasn't just an idea or some shell company or LLC.
That's so nice.
I'm stealing that, by the way.
I hope this never airs so I can steal that.
But no, a buddy of mine, one of my best friends, just sent me a video about eight minutes ago.
He's dropping, he's visiting his daughter at Parents' Weekend at a college, a well-known college.
And there's a huge demonstration in the middle of the campus between, you know, two sides in the Middle East.
And one of the sides starts burning the other side's flag.
It's a foreign flag, okay?
Okay.
And this fist fight breaks out.
And I'm like, I mean, I have views on, you know, who's more right or whatever, but I thought to myself, and I said to him, if someone burned an American flag, nobody would fight over it.
You get to burn the American flag.
But burning the flag of another country, which is not our country, to which we do not pay taxes, whose military we don't serve in, that's the most offensive thing.
I'm like, we have lost the thread, man.
We're all Americans.
And if you wind up in a place where our allegiance to other countries or regions or things that are not American take precedence over our common Americanness, I mean, we're screwed.
We're screwed.
I feel like we're at the apex of that sometimes.
Yes.
And if we're not at the apex of that, I don't think in the, I can't tell if we're at that in the, I think we're getting to that in the moral compass of a lot of people.
Yeah.
And it's sad because I think a lot of people, myself included, or for myself, I don't think I ever wanted to get to that place.
No.
I never, but I think a lot of people are just starting to feel like, you know, once your Americanism like dissolves and once your like common thread dissolves, you don't have a connection, you know?
And so then you, it's, your instincts start to take over, like we were kind of talking about, and you have to take care of yourself.
And so once like the ice you're on starts to get melding, like before you're on an ice, you can skate, you're seeing other people, you're fucking do, you know, you're buying a you know, bootleg Gretzky jersey off somebody, whatever.
You guys are all on the ice, right?
You're imitating home alone.
There's a fucking, you know, gays, or there's gay guys always on the ice.
But it's like, what are the gays doing on the ice, too?
Skating, bro.
Yeah.
Stupid.
But they're having fun, right?
I lived, and I'll say that I live with a gay ice skater, and he could jump over a Volkswagen, right?
That's impressive.
Oh, it was unbelievable, bro.
I'd never seen strong ankles.
I mean, just the dude was like, yeah, he brought us out of the living room once and showed us and blew our minds, man.
Beautiful guy.
Not that great.
I mean, pretty beautiful, I guess.
Tall.
Tall.
Which adds a little bit.
But well built, too, obviously.
Oh, yeah, kind of.
I don't know.
I'm going to quit thinking about him.
But anyway, but once that ice starts to melt, the first thing you have to think about is yourself, right?
And so that's what I feel like we're at now.
And a lot of people are having to think about themselves, like literally watching our country or what we viewed as our ideals and morals and what we held dear, like sink in this water.
And there's nothing you can do about it except take care of yourself.
That's where I feel like a lot of people are at.
There's nothing they can do right now but take care of themselves.
And they're displacing a lot of their frustration about our economy, which we never talk about.
It's getting very expensive for people to live here, like too expensive, actually.
Oh, yeah.
I saw some gas the other day.
I was like, Jesus, man.
How do people afford that?
Yeah.
How do you even do a bonfire anymore?
That's totally right.
No, it's completely right.
How do you, if you want to take, you know, gasoline and pour it on the pallets, like it's six bucks.
Right.
But, but they're just placing a lot of that frustration onto regions, countries, conflicts that are thousands of miles away.
It's almost like I'm picking a team and all my rage is going to.
And I do wish people reserve their anger for our leaders who deserve it, in my opinion, on both sides, and for the problems that are like besetting the country.
You drive to America recently, it's like not in good shape at all.
It's kind of poor, actually.
It's shockingly poor.
And people should be really mad about that.
And instead, they're mad about whatever, Israel, Hamas.
I mean, I get it.
I think they're, you know, I understand people are upset on both sides.
However, it's unhealthy to spend all your time in your head enraged about a foreign conflict when your own country is suffering so badly.
Like we need that energy, that constructive energy here.
And I never hear anybody say, 108,000 people died of fentanyl disease last year in my country.
Oh, yeah.
Like young people, a lot of whom weren't doing fentanyl.
They were taking Percocet or benzos and they ingested a pill with fentanyl in it and they died.
They were poisoned to death.
Okay.
That's unbelievable.
That's outrageous.
No one seems mad about that.
They're mad about some foreign war and what a waste, you know, because we can't control that anyway.
Yeah.
What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
Trilingual, maybe?
Or trilingual?
I'm not sure.
What do you call a person who speaks two?
Not me.
That's it.
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Yeah, well, I think it's a lot.
I mean, that opioid epidemic thing, you know, like I remember watching that show.
What was that show that I really liked?
Yeah, Dope Sick.
You see Dope Sick?
No.
Man.
I don't know if I can handle it, but I live in a place with a lot of that, so I see it.
Well, it's about the fan.
It's about Michael Keaton is in it, right?
I think that's him.
He used to be Batman, but now I guess he's selling drugs, right?
Which is a perfect example.
Oh, it's about Purdue Pharma.
It's a perfect example of our country.
Even Batman is fucking selling pills, you know?
Well, the company that got the country, got rural America hooked on opioids, got away with it.
They paid a few people.
Nobody went to jail?
Yeah, the Sackler family, they're still rich and like, really?
They didn't go to jail?
This ruined my, this ruined, this, I think about this every single day.
I hate the Sackler family.
I hate this whole thing that happened.
It's unbelievable.
But they got away with it.
How do you do that?
Well, these people, this country, they let a our FDA let these people down.
But no one was punished.
Not one person was punished.
Yeah, I know.
And you see people go to jail.
I mean, it's not even a political point.
It's true.
And both sides, you know, voters for both parties go to jail for very small things.
Very small things.
And yet you like poison the entire country, you wreck an entire generation of kids, and you're still a billionaire?
Tell me how that works.
I don't know.
If I ever saw that guy on the street, I would fucking saw his face off.
How would you saw his face off?
I'd figure it out.
Do you bring a saw?
Do you have a saw with you?
I'd just turn into a saw.
That's how much I hate that guy.
You know what I mean?
It's just unbelievable how many people I got killed in no care concern.
No.
And then the way that they lobbied our own FDA people, they took them off of the job and paid them more to work for them to help them beat the laws.
Yeah.
Sorry, man.
I didn't mean to bring that up.
No, no, no.
But I mean, next time they tell me I have to take some pharma product, I'm probably going to pass.
I'm just saying.
Yeah.
Probably going to pass.
I don't trust you anymore.
Sorry.
Well, I miss the day you could get some fucking good pills, too.
I mean, there's part of that in this, you know?
When a dude could give you a couple stack or twos, you know, and you'd hold up the wall over there in Hoboken for an hour, you know?
I think those days are over.
You got to go to fentanyl.
I just don't want to do it.
No, I don't think you should.
Well, I'll overdose, man.
I'm sober like 18 months.
I would overdose easy.
You're sober 18 months?
Yep.
One of the reasons I don't do cocaine anymore is because they fucking ruined it.
Why?
With the fentanyl.
It used to be just baby laxative.
Yeah, but I'd rather shit than die.
I agree with that completely.
I'd rather get off the toilet and be like, oh, that was hectic than be like, you know, laying there and just like, God, but I got to go to heaven.
And that, and that, by the way, is a guess.
Okay.
But that's the hope.
So how's it been, 18 months?
It's been good, man.
I love it.
How were the first six weeks?
That's the toughest part.
Oh, I know.
I've been there.
Oh, you have?
Yeah.
What did you have to get off of?
Oh, you name it.
But it's been 21 years.
But yeah.
But you still, you can drink, though?
I can do a little blow.
I can drink.
But other than that, I'm totally sober.
It's a modified separate.
Who is your sponsor, Shepard Smith?
Okay, that's funny, but I'm not going to comment on it beyond that.
That's fine.
No, and no dig to Shepard.
I'm a fan of Shepard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But he's just a legend in a lot of circles from a lot of friends of mine from different colleges.
How do you know all this?
Dude, it's easy to just be alive and you just pay attention.
Well, without commenting on that, I will say- But it was tough the first six weeks.
Like, how would you do?
Yeah, I think what's tough is like having to change, having to quit something, you know?
Having to not have a beer if you need it, having to not like have something to give me a little bit of respite.
Yes.
From my own angst.
Yes.
That's a lot of it.
Did you go off everything?
Yeah.
So I didn't have a problem with anything except for cocaine.
So if I drink, I could have a drink.
I'd be fine.
I hated drinking, but I know if I have a drink, the only reason I'm going to have it is so I can go, I'll have four sips and then I'll go get some cocaine.
And then I'll be.
How did you deal with feeling terrible the next day?
On the cocaine?
Yeah.
Oh, poorly, brother.
Begging people for Gatorade over text message.
Yeah.
It was horrible, dude.
Yeah.
And this was some of this they didn't have that.
It's a high-cost drug.
Yeah.
And not just on the front end, on the back end.
Yeah, the next day was horrible.
The sad, like the things I'd have to apologize for.
Yeah.
What's the freakiest thing you did while on cocaine?
Oh, dude, I'll tell you some of the, well, the weirdest thing is what is I would look for escorts on the internet, right?
Well, yeah.
Classic cocaine move there.
Yeah.
Hunter Biden has plowed this furrow before.
Others have been where you were.
Yeah.
Literally.
Yeah.
I think Hunter even was my plug on some of this.
And so he I would, but then they would come to my residence.
I would be so scared and paranoid.
I would take the money and hand it out the door because I didn't want to not pay for the, you know, they drove over.
Right.
You know, so yeah, I would pay them and then I would just be grateful that they weren't there.
So you, you wouldn't stiff the hooker, but then you wouldn't stiff the hooker.
Yeah.
Well played brother.
I think, look, I well, I just felt bad.
He must have been their favorite account.
Well, then sometimes, dude, I had to talk to a lady who speaks another language.
That's crazy.
Because then you're playing charades.
You're fucking high on cookbook.
You were ordering the human trafficking ones?
I wouldn't say that, dude.
These people were off the interstate.
I would say that.
They were.
Off the interstate.
Yeah.
They weren't like lot lizards.
No, this was out of this was, I mean, they weren't.
I think these were decent ladies who were trying to make a dollar.
I never, yeah.
Anyway, this didn't get in well.
But yeah, that was kind of the toughest part because I was just looking for some kind of connection.
Of course.
And I just.
That's a real thing what you just said.
I get that.
I didn't know how to get it.
Because it's isolating.
Drugs and alcohol are isolating.
You're really about yourself when you're doing them.
And part of you wants to reach out and connect with someone else.
I think that's absolutely right.
Yeah, I like cocaine because I needed to control how I felt immediately.
That's one reason I didn't like alcohol because I was just such a control person that I needed to control how I felt immediately.
So cocaine, I could do it immediately.
The feeling would be there immediately.
And so that's one reason that I liked it.
But you never got into Xanax or alcohol or anything to help you come down.
No, I wish I had.
I didn't know you could do that.
Oh, yeah, you can do that.
Oh, I mean, I don't think it's legal, but you can.
So I was doing it.
Yeah, you're doing it wrong.
I was just doing it.
You had the wrong kind of cocaine addiction.
And most of the shit I was doing, I think it was Sherwin-Williams.
You know, this shit had, you know, I remember doing an eight-ball of matte finish, you know?
So I'm like, this isn't legitimate, you know?
Some semi-gloss.
I'm like, this is for fucking shutters.
This is outdoor.
You know, I've done some very questionable cocaine, you know?
So, what was it like for you getting off of it?
I mean, it was awful.
It was awful.
It was awful.
It was absolutely awful.
But I'm so grateful that I did.
I'm thankful my brother and I both did, actually.
Wow.
So it's in your family?
It's a genetic.
Well, it's in my family.
We're Swedish.
Yeah.
Oh, y'all are.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
The farther north you go on the globe, the higher percentage of people have drinking problems.
I mean, that's, I think, pretty well-established fact.
Look at Santa, dude, works one fucking day a year.
I mean, the Eskimos.
No, I'm serious.
And, you know, a lot of ancestors from Northern Europe.
So, yeah, alcoholism is a big thing.
And I needed to get off it and had all these children and a job on TV.
And it's just not compatible with a productive, happy life at all.
And I quit and the first few months were like shocking.
I didn't realize.
I didn't realize.
Well, I had no help at all.
Really?
Yeah, I didn't.
I did it at home alone.
And you're not willing to try and have help.
Like, were you that kind of person?
Like you're like, were you a like a public job?
I was an anchor on CNN.
And so I just thought, I don't want to get into the whole, like, I'm going to rehab or whatever.
I just didn't want to get involved with that.
And it was fine.
It worked great.
And I've never, you know, gone back and I never would for anything.
However, I didn't realize that I knew very little about it.
I hadn't, this was kind of before I was using the internet.
I just didn't know that much about addiction at all.
And I quit and all of a sudden I had these withdrawal symptoms that were like shocking.
My hands are shaking.
I feel like I'm going to freak out all the time.
Super anxious, super, super anxious.
Sweating, heart palpitations.
I was like, what is this?
And I asked somebody, I didn't tell many people, but I asked them, he's like, oh, you're withdrawing from alcohol.
And if you start to hallucinate, that means you have the DTs, the delirium tremens, and you need to go to the hospital because you could die.
I was like, what?
I never got that.
Thank heaven.
But anyway, yeah, it was awful.
But then, you know, within like, I don't know, six months, I felt great.
I started smoking two cigarettes at once.
I mean, my nicotine, nicotine problem got a little more intense, but I felt wonderful and I felt great ever since.
Wow.
And did you ever go to meetings?
Do you ever get into 12-step or no?
Not one time.
But I love it.
I just had dinner last night with Bobby Kennedy, who's been in a 12-step program.
Russell brand, same thing, another friend of mine.
I almost went to a meeting at Bobby's house on Tuesday.
Okay.
What a wonderful man he is.
Bobby's a neat guy, isn't he?
He is.
He's a very deep person, and he's learned the right things.
And people like that make me very pro-12-step.
Because they're just like, I'm not in control of my life.
And they're not because nobody is.
Everyone lies about it.
Oh, I've got it under control.
No, you don't.
You have no freaking idea what you're doing.
You can't extend your life by a single day.
You're lying to yourself and those around you.
Just admit you have no clue.
You're doing the best you can.
You're a totally screwed up kind of embarrassing person.
You know what I mean?
Okay.
And be liberated.
And I strongly believe in that because it's true.
It is the truth.
I know.
And the rest of it is such a fucking, such a sled we pull.
And it's fake.
And it is.
It's ridiculous.
As I always say to my kids, everybody knows who you really are.
Everybody already knows what your bad qualities are and they love you anyway.
So don't even try and hide them.
I mean, I'm sure you know people who are like alcoholic or bad temper or secretly gay or whatever.
And they're like, oh, no one knows.
No one knows.
It's like everybody knows.
Are you kidding?
And again, they love you anyway.
So you don't need to hide it.
Just be who you are.
And when you are, I mean, you are so liberated.
It's this massive weight coming off you.
It's like, yeah, kind of fucked up, but, you know, more than some, less than others, but trying.
And people are like, that's great.
Yeah.
People are way less judgy than you think they are.
Right.
There's some inverse of it, you know, where it's like we think someone's so, but then if we look at the way we look at people, we might have some jokes about it, stuff, but most of the time you have empathy.
At dinner two nights ago, I'm sitting next to this woman and she said something about, it was a long story, but basically it was about a woman gaining weight.
And I said to her, you know, I've never been in a group of just men on a hunting trip or just men.
Yeah.
Where someone's like, ah, she had a fat ass.
It's like men have the widest strike zone imaginable.
Men like women, heterosexual men like women.
They don't judge their appearance very harshly at all.
They kind of tend to like all sorts of women.
That's true.
And if you knew how non-judgmental men were about women's appearances, you would relax.
But of course, you don't care what men think about your appearance.
You only care what other women think about your appearance and they're very judgy.
But it's the same principle.
It's like we are less judged than we think we are, you know?
Yeah.
It's funny, but we don't, but it's not the nature of us to think that we are.
Did you tell people when you quit using cocaine?
Yeah, I did, I think.
Let me think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I did.
I told them.
Well, I got into meetings.
I didn't, it was been in my family.
You know, my family, a lot of my family, it's in my family.
So the cocaine thing.
The drug, just alcohol, childhood issues, really.
A lot of it is more, a lot of my stuff comes from really intimacy disorders.
Yeah.
Like emote, like connectivity disorders.
You know, so, but then whenever anything triggers one of those connectivity disorders, then a lot of times it would lead me to doing drugs.
So, yeah, I just love it.
What I love about it is now I get to see, man, I saw a dude yesterday who just got a six-month chip, you know, and the guy, man, to see somebody whose life has changed, you get to witness unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
Miracles.
I totally agree.
I had a friend call me this morning, right?
And we've been friends for years and we kind of both know that we have some of the same problems.
And it was like the first time he like opened up to me, man.
And we're both sitting there just kind of crying on the phone it was just because when he opened up it just made me kind of it just made me feel like i was like i don't know i just understood him and it was like i don't know it was just so important well that's what intimacy is yeah i i've always thought that we misread intimacy we think it's when someone tells the truth about other people it's very easy to tell the truth about other people it's only when someone tells the truth about himself it's only when you admit who you really are to someone else that you have intimacy that's the measure of intimacy if
you're willing to tell someone who you really are you are intimate with that person and vice versa and that's totally the key so if you want to know how many truly close relationships do i have that's how you know how many people am i willing to admit what a schmuck i actually am to that's the number and what i love about 12-step i've never actually been to 12-step i've only heard about it actually went i was at russell brands house in the summer and he had a meeting yeah oh that's cool hilarious people was it i didn't stay for it i had to leave
but they were one of the guys was smoking which i love and um just old school and and they were anyway but but i love the 12-step thing because you just like as with christianity which i also like you admit right away that you are powerless yeah exactly you're not in control your life's unmanageable that's a nice word that they use a lot because it's like sometimes people are like man i'm not powerless but i'll be like you know things are unmanageable for me the way that they phrased everything it
was just really articulate but anyway man well congrats on that yeah i think it's interesting and it gives me a better scope to handle my own life you know and it definitely gives me more opportunity to look at other people when i when i'm able to um do you find yourself less judgmental and what what about all the guys you used to do cocaine with do you still talk i did it by myself good that's a fun way to do it shopping outlines at home huh yeah i'd change outfits and come back in and be a different guy doing it yeah
and be like hey don't do it this is for me you know just yelling at the other me you're literally doing it alone oh yeah brother i would do it alone and i'd go hide it somewhere and i'd be like i'm going to bed i'm not doing anymore and then i would get up and go find it you know and i would do more and it does affect your sleep patterns yeah bro i've heard that yeah most of my sleep patterns was me praying dude that somebody would pour
gatorade down my chimney i was just wondering gatorade why gatorade just because it's like has electrolytes in it i would be so dehydrated so you're not much of a planner no no you didn't go to costco ahead of time just get a pallet of it for home no no bro did you have some pretty crazy nights or no i had a few yeah hacky yeah the good news is that uh i mean it was a different i'm 54 so right so it was a different in the world that i started where
i started work in 91 everyone went to lunch every day and i was a writer at a magazine and everyone went to lunch for an hour and a half every day period i mean it was a different economy it was this was before the corporations took over everything and implanted chips on your phone to listen to your conversation track your whereabouts and before we became east germany they didn't really know where you were and it was just a civilized place and you could just have lunch and and if you drank it was totally within bounds to have a couple drinks at lunch you know and smoke at lunch and then that could keep going i'm
not saying it was great for productivity but it was a better country that's just a fact it was yeah it was some fun and um so i would just say the great blessing in my life is it definitely erased my memory of a number of years so i don't have a lot of guilt simply because i don't really remember what i was like but i don't think very appealing yeah not a great drunk yeah yeah okay and when you drink like even if you're not setting out to say use cocaine you can
wind up doing that yeah yeah oh yeah if somebody's got some cocaine you're gonna staying around them until they don't have it anymore until you have it i've heard that yeah that's true oh yeah that's me right there i used it one time i was doing some cocaine at the house and uh people like i was like a big vest guy for about 11 months and um vest with nothing underneath yeah just that's kind of like the chippendales thing some shades yeah dude just chilling in my party you ever dance huh no
i wouldn't dance i'd make a smoothie but um which is kind of like dancing but just but literally nothing underneath it just the vest yeah no no just the vest yeah because i was this was in california too the wet it was you know weather permitted yeah it's totally normal people i mean i remember i grew up in california and i'd often wear a vest you know a silk vest kind of against my nipples i liked it dude remember when silk came out and it was like there were silk shirts oh yeah they were so bad uh i'm not gonna wear remember yeah i never wore
a silk shirt in my whole life you're lying i swear yeah never i never fell for that good for you actually i fell forward i never bought anything from fila oh yeah i never did never had anything that was valure i mean there are whole epochs yeah in fashion history that i just missed i just totally ignored it i've been wearing the same freaking clothes since 1984 and i mean it well i'm gonna do that dude if you just stay exactly the same like someday this will be super cool for a moment and then we'll move on to something else we'll go back to vests when i was in school it
was good man it was good yeah yeah you kind of you seem like you were conceived at like a johnson and murphy and something just rolled right i don't know what that is but i will take that as a compliment it's like the yeah it's a compliment man my best friend kevin likes that show that story what's kevin do he does uh i don't know he's looking for a place right now but um his wife's he got married but that's johnson and murphy they're at the airport he's a producer i buy almost no clothes at the airport but i'm not against it um so
let's get into something important then right um where did you have uh i'm just trying to think of where to take this thing you say trauma no trouble trouble hooks trouble trauma trump those are the fucking okay those are buzzwords buzzwords yep um you make me nervous i'm gonna grab another zen do you want to put one in i'm gonna god i almost want to do One, but I just don't know how I'll do with it.
Why don't we wait until we're about to close?
Because things may happen to you that you're not ready for.
Okay, but it gets wild, huh?
It gets wild in a subtle way, it kind of grows on you.
It's not, it's not like doing cocaine, okay?
It's not like firing up the pipe, and yeah, you know what I mean, blast off or anything like that.
It's a much more subtle, organic.
You just all of a sudden you feel good.
Yeah.
Then you feel the power rising from your central nervous system, then sort of going outward through all the nerve endings down to the tips of your fingers.
And then up here, it just starts crackling the synapses.
And you just make connections that you hadn't before.
I know I'm making it sound like ayahuasca.
It's a lot more subtle than that.
Tuck, if you did like a tucker, a lip tucker, if that was your brand of nicotine, I'd like to do that because I believe in it.
Tuck.
Tuck-a-tuck.
Yeah, tuck-a-tuck.
And you could have a Native American attached to it.
I love that.
I'd definitely get picketed, but I'd do it anyway.
Yeah, but someone would love it.
Native Americans love nicotine, do they?
They certainly do.
God, they love it.
And I, unlike most people, I actually know some.
Do you?
Yes, I do.
Because I live near a population of Native Americans.
In Maine?
In Maine.
And employ two and have for years, and they're really wonderful people.
I spent a lot of time with them.
And the two that I know very well both love tobacco, and they have every right to.
Yeah, look, I think it'd let them love it, you know.
At least leave them with tobacco.
100% that happened in the middle of the day.
Well, they actually gave us tobacco.
They did?
100%.
Wow.
Yeah, it was, I mean, there are a million different Native Americans.
It's one of those terms.
It's like, I'm not sure what Passamaquatis have to do with Hopis.
Like, it's pretty.
There was a lot of beef.
There was a lot of beef between Native Indian tribes.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Some of them were very warlike, I think is the term we use.
But no, they used, a lot of tribes used it in religious rituals.
And they would use it rectally.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Tobacco suppositories.
Yeah.
There's a ramrod.
Get it up there.
Oh, dang, huh?
Yeah.
For real.
Look it up.
Boof and freaking, that's insane.
What?
I can't, did Indian, yeah, let's see.
Tobacco smoke enema.
Let's see.
Oh, there you go.
Oh, yeah.
Look at that.
Okay, so that said it was used by, okay, imported from the New World.
Okay.
And an insufflation of tobacco smoke into the rectum by Enema was a medical treatment employed by the European physicians.
Right.
But also it says tobacco smoke was used by Western medical as a tool against cold and drowsiness.
And drowsiness, bitch, if I'm drowsy and you're blowing smoke in my ass, I got a wrong PPO.
You definitely do.
And by the way, it's not even covered now.
No, no, that and leeches are like completely ignored by the medical establishment.
But yeah, it was common.
The procedure was used to treat gut pain and attempts were often made.
I'm not making this up.
You're fact-checking me in real time.
No, I love this, but applying it by animal was a technique appropriated from the North American indigenous people.
Yes, that's right.
Wow.
See?
How great is that?
It's amazing.
That they even thought it up.
I think, but if you're chilling around that long, you got somebody's going to blow smoke in somebody's ass.
You think so?
Yeah.
Yeah, dude.
You get people around.
So like, how many thousands of years does it take in the evolutionary process for someone to say, okay, we've reached this point in civilization where somebody's got to blow smoke up someone else's ass?
Is that before or after the wheel?
Because they never figured out the wheel.
I think it's.
Four years somebody's blowing smoke.
Really?
It's quick.
It's quick.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
It'd be interesting to see how the first things happen like that.
How were the pyramids built?
I don't know.
People talk about it a lot.
We don't know.
We don't know.
How is that?
And I'm not, by the way, suggesting any theory.
Yeah, no.
Well, look, I think.
But how do we not know that?
And why doesn't that make all of us humble?
Like, if we don't know how they built the pyramids three or four thousand, or actually we don't know when the pyramids were built, to be totally honest.
Yeah.
If we don't know that, then we don't know shit.
Yeah.
Right?
Oh, yeah.
Someone should just say that.
Yeah.
Why don't we just say we don't know shit?
Yes.
Yeah.
All wisdom begins with acknowledging what you don't know.
And anyone who tells you, I know the answer is about to lead you into, say, war with Iran or something equally crazy.
Take the facts.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's a lie.
Yeah.
So never trust anybody who claims to have it all figured out because he's lying to you.
Well, do you think that one of our political, that one of the political parties thinks that they have it all figured out more than the other?
I think they both do.
I mean, I think politicians by their nature are unwilling.
By the way, every once in a while, you get somebody who shows up and starts to tell a portion of the truth and everyone loves him.
And then he's always invariably accused of someone at that time.
Take him out.
They're like, oh, that's anonymous charges.
He rapped me in 1985.
I can't tell you my name, but it happened.
They just did this to Russell Brand.
Yeah, there's always somebody.
Yeah, they'll come out with anybody.
Or nobody in his case.
I don't think they put a name to any of the four people who are accusing him of sexual assault.
I'm not shocked.
Well, now there's bot.
They can even, I mean, there's bots writing articles now.
I read an article the other day about my parents.
I'd never heard of either of the two people in the article.
Are you sure?
Yeah, it was a bot article.
It was a bottom.
Have you done 23 in me?
I mean, are you sure?
You're positive?
Okay.
I'm pretty.
I mean, yeah, you're right.
Because you don't know, dude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
Yeah, maybe I'm angry at the wrong woman.
Exactly.
You know, that's a good point.
You're telling your shrink about the wrong mom.
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Yeah, I think one of the sad things these days is like that we don't know where to get any information anymore.
you know?
Well, I've got one suggestion and that is I'm just trying to think.
No, it's a fair question.
I mean, how do you make sense of the world if you don't believe what people are telling you about the world?
How can you make rational decisions if you can't be certain that the input is accurate?
I can't really answer that.
I know what I do, which is I don't read any.
I don't want that in my head.
You know, the Washington Post or NBC News are there liars.
I know they're liars.
I've written for all three of those.
I know that they lie, so I don't get anywhere near it.
When you say they lie, does that mean like you write an article and you give it to your publisher, your producer, and then they say no and they change it?
Or what do you think?
No, it means they don't assign stories on things they want to ignore.
I see.
And where do they get those orders from?
It's all by instinct.
So their job is to protect the people who are in charge.
I mean, it's to protect the people who have power currently.
The point of journalism is to challenge the people who have power on behalf of the rest of the country.
And they've inverted the formula.
And so if you work for the Washington Post, the idea is just protect George, you know, Jeff Bezos and his friends at all costs.
And that's what they do.
So, but I'll tell you a way that I think is a good start to figuring out what's true is watch what they become hysterical about.
You'll see somebody occasionally say something and people just land on him.
Shut up.
Shut up.
Let's put him in jail.
Whatever that guy is saying is true, or it points in the direction of the truth.
When someone says something that's like legit and saying, no one's mad at the schizophrenic on the bus, you know, who's talking about whatever, the earth is flat or lizard people, which, by the way, may be true.
I don't even know.
Yeah, fucking playing duck, duck, goose on a, yeah.
Nobody cares because he's not a threat to anyone because he's insane.
Insane people are not a threat to the existing order because they're crazy.
They're self-discrediting.
But when they become hysterical about somebody and they're like, he's a conspiracy theorist without even refuting what he told you, then you know he's onto something.
I mean, a hurt dog barks, right?
When you have an infection, someone touches near the infection and it hurts.
What does that tell you?
You have an infection.
Yeah.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Well, do you think that's one of the reasons why Bobby Kennedy was looked at as so crazy?
100%.
Yeah.
And what's so funny, as I said, I saw him, you know, very recently, the other night.
And I said to him, and I saw him, I sort of follow it.
I'm just interested in the reaction to Bobby Kennedy.
And remember, they attacked him as a craze conspiracy nut because of the vaccines.
And he said there may be a connection between the vaccines and autism.
Like, shut up.
And they literally canceled his contract with the New York Times.
He had a contract to write for them.
They canceled it.
Wow.
And they just basically drummed him out of polite society.
They don't talk too much about that anymore.
Right.
But the vaccine stuff, because I think there is this recognition, and by the way, I'm not an expert, but that actually a lot of people were hurt.
A lot of people were hurt, not just with the most recent round of mandatory vacc, but in earlier rounds.
Now, you could argue it was worth it.
You know, we have a flu vaccine.
It academically supposedly prevents the flu.
So maybe we get it.
And some people get hurt.
But they were telling us for years, nobody gets hurt.
Well, that's just a lie.
Yeah, people get hurt all the time.
They get hurt all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of vaccines.
It's like even the polio vaccine.
I recite this a lot, but they tested the polio vaccine in our hometown where I'm from.
They had a primate testing facility there.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
And that's where they tested the polio vaccine.
You grew up in a town with a primate testing facility?
Yeah.
What town?
Tulane National Primate Research Center.
That's got to be the most depressing place in the world.
Is it in New Orleans?
It's up to you.
It's outside of New Orleans.
No, no, no, no.
This is outside of New Orleans.
Yeah, they don't allow that in Audubon Park.
No, no, no.
But in our town, this is where they made it at.
But that vaccine gave cervical cancer to tons of women, and they knew it when they put it out, but they'd already ordered it.
They're like, well, fuck it.
We already paid for it.
So exactly.
So it's bad to lie.
And it's especially bad to lie at scale.
Like if I lie to you about something and, you know, but if I'm lying to 350 million people, that's a crime.
And they've done it.
And the problem is at this point, it's like, I mean, I would go to a surgeon, you know, because that's a pretty straightforward operation.
I've got a knife.
I'm going to take this thing out or sew this up or whatever.
But I don't think I would go to a doctor for, well, we're going to try this drug.
It's like, maybe I would.
I mean, I don't know.
I haven't had to make that choice, thankfully, but I would be hesitant because I don't trust them because they lied.
They got caught lying and they never admitted it.
That's part of it.
There's never any resolution.
There's never any affirmation to your questioning.
And even if you were right, there's never any about-face acknowledgement.
It can't get better.
If you get in a fight with your girl, okay, and one of you behaves horribly, one of you's on, say, cocaine and says something outrageous and you want to continue the relationship, there has to come a point where you're like, you know, I really was an asshole and I'm sorry.
And I love you.
And I'm sorry I did that.
Right.
And only when you do that can it get better.
It cannot be healed before you do that.
It doesn't work.
And that's true with public trust as well.
And that's where we've gotten.
It's gotten to the point.
But I don't understand why they can't admit it.
Like I've been wrong about a ton of things.
I feel so much better when I admit it and stop pretending that I'm omniscient.
I don't know everything.
And that's okay.
Why can't they do that?
Why can't Fauci just be like, wow, you know, I told you this in good faith.
I was wrong and I'm sorry.
He would do more for people's trust in science if he did that.
He's totally incapable of that because he's a freaking sociopath, dangerous human being.
He's a shitty pitcher, too.
You see that?
Quite a shitty pitcher.
And I say that as a shitty pitcher, but even I, he's got little dwarf arms, but still.
Sorry.
No, it's okay, man.
Look at this.
Let's show this shit, bruh.
God, get fucked.
That dude is.
He's got a mask on outside.
Huh?
Dude, that guy's got fucking.
But it's so prima facie retarded.
It's like there's a dwarf on the field with a mask on outside throwing it at the bat boy.
Like, this is not a real country.
If that guy's running it, this is a joke.
First of all, the bat boy's 11, so he's flirting with a child.
So let's call that.
He's flirting with a child.
Let's call it one.
What are you a freak?
Now half of America needs a Tommy John surgery in their heart because of this dude, myocarditis, right there.
And there I am with a fucking slider, boy.
Well, you don't even dick around, do you?
Is that you?
I've done some things, but no, not on this.
Where is that?
That was St. Louis.
But actually, I got to throw one out for the Diamondbacks.
That's why I'm wearing this jersey.
How nervous were you?
I was pretty nervous, I guess.
It suddenly makes you feel like how old you are.
You're like, fuck, I'm getting old.
How old were you?
I'm 40. Oh, I was 41, but I'm 43. But I was like, oh, shit.
43 is pretty old.
Yeah, it feels old sometimes.
Actually, does it feel old?
No, it just feels old when you're running upstairs.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I'm talking about?
I'm 54. Yeah.
I can't believe that.
But I always run upstairs.
I always run upstairs just because.
Yeah.
You're like, I'll show them.
100%.
Yeah.
I've always been up there.
And I'm with my wife who's very fit, like next level fit.
Crazy.
And she doesn't even, she'll just be prattling on, running upstairs, doesn't even.
She does, huh?
She's whimsical.
I don't know if she's whimsical.
She's just got like crazy cardio.
Oh, God.
Because she never stopped doing it.
You know, like when you're a kid, they make you do physical fitness.
And then I took about 40 years off for cigarettes and stuff.
And she didn't.
So, yeah, it pays off, it turns out.
When was your first cigarette?
Do you remember it?
Yeah, I remember it really well.
It was delicious.
And my father smoked and was very, he smoked unfiltered cigarettes called Pell Mels.
We called them Pell Mels.
Oh, yeah.
Palmalls, but they were extra long, flavored with licorice, I think made by the American Tobacco Company.
Great cigarette in a red pack.
And we had many.
So that's, I don't even know if there's a picture of the, he smoked right there, right there.
One down.
One down.
That right there.
That's the cigarette of my childhood.
He picked him up in the Marine Corps when he was 17. I guess they came in his K-ration.
And that was the cigarette of my childhood.
There was always one smoldering in an ashtray in our kitchen and everywhere else.
Anyway, but I was like, when I was little, I was against it.
And my father really loved cigarettes and he wasn't embarrassed of it.
It wasn't like, I smoke, but I feel bad about it.
He was like, no.
And I smoke unfiltered because you feel strip them when you're done.
There's no filter.
You smoke them backwards so the enemy doesn't know it's an American cigarette.
You burn the logo off the, off the paper.
Yeah, he really likes cigarettes and he felt sorry for people who didn't smoke.
So I was like maybe 13. I was in eighth grade when I started and it was it was totally.
Where were you?
Were you out with the boys or you was at the house and you smoked one?
I was at school.
I was at school.
You smoked one at school?
Oh yeah.
It was allowed actually.
It was a pretty freaky with a teacher.
I know it sounds like it was in the 1800s.
It was romantic, I think.
It was romantic.
It was great.
Just to sneak, it sounds like espionage.
No, no, no.
It was totally open.
You could smoke at school.
I could smoke at school through senior year of high school.
Oh, yeah.
Oh.
Oh, yeah.
You could smoke as a child at school.
Oh, yeah.
I had parental permission.
Yeah.
Really?
I shouldn't be saying this.
You know what's so funny?
People would be like, yeah, I did ayahuasca or DMT.
And everyone's like, it's so cool.
It's like, yeah, I smoked a cigarette.
What?
You're a criminal.
But, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say smoking is a great long-term play.
I don't think that it is.
I quit when I was 45 because I felt like I probably should.
It'll probably get me anyway, but I did enjoy it.
I really did.
I never had a bad one.
You know?
Yeah.
There are no bad cigarettes.
You're not like, oh, this is disgusting.
I never felt that way at all.
Oh, wow.
I've had bad Fig Newtons.
Like, you can screw up almost any consumer product, but a cigarette is remarkably consistent and it gives you what it promises you.
The payoff is always there.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
The payoff is always there.
You know, especially that first fucking drag off the bus.
In the morning.
In the morning.
You know what I loved?
Was they had a man in our area, and it was actually my grandmother was married to a man.
And he would light his cigarette and he would let us inhale the lit, the smoke up our nose when we were really young.
Louisiana's the best, isn't it?
God, it was fucking good.
I think it's got the highest smoking rate of any state.
You know what Louisiana does have?
It has the most people that are born there, that die there, that never leave there.
I believe that.
It's a cool place.
It's not like every other place, actually.
No, dude.
It is, yeah.
I always say like New Orleans, it's a good place to get oysters and murdered.
Yeah, you get murdered and oysters.
That's totally right.
The thing about Louisiana, it never gets credit for.
Everyone talks about diversity in the melting pot.
Like Louisiana actually was that long before most places.
You had a bunch of different cultures there and they kind of got along, you know, sort of anyway.
He still got a good mix down there.
Yeah.
We had an area bus called Chafuncta.
That was the river and it was named after the Chafuncta Indians.
Chafuncta?
Yep.
Is that like the Fagawi tribe?
I'm not sure.
That's not a real name.
That cannot be a real name.
That's your real name.
T-C-A-G-F.
Chafuncta?
Yep.
Yeah, Chifuncta.
It does sound like a Derby.
Cheer right there in Louisiana.
Yeah.
It sounds like a play on words.
Yeah, it does.
Well, here's how they got the name.
A long time ago, a Native American threw a big rock into the river, and that's the sound when it went in.
Oh, that's so cool.
Is that true?
Yeah.
True story.
It's pretty fascinating.
But that right there is a perfect example of Louisiana to me is that it's a place for great storytelling.
It's a great place for kind of family.
Yep.
You know, so that's one story I like to tell.
People have dinners with their families there.
People have 90-minute lunch breaks.
People wake up, get to breakfast, and then do two or three things before they go to lunch.
I love that.
Yeah, it was part of it.
That's how life was.
It wasn't all about efficiency.
No, it wasn't.
So if your life is all about efficiency and every moment is being monitored and counts towards something, then you're not really human.
You're a machine at that point, aren't you?
I mean, you're a cog in a larger machine.
And that's what I think a lot of people feel like these days.
Well, and for good reason.
There's some chick on the internet that's a 22-year-old experiencing life in the corporate world for the first time.
And she does this video like, this is terrible.
I don't make any money.
And they treat me like shit and treat me like, you know, I'm not worth anything.
I'm not human.
And everyone's like, shut up and work, honey.
And I watch this and I'm like, no, no.
I hope you win.
I hope you win.
I hope you, the seeds of revolution are sprouting in my heart.
I just so hate that culture.
Oh, yeah.
Who treats people like they're not people?
Like for what?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think for some people, in my own sense, learning to be a boss and leader has been tough just because I never, you know, I just started out wanting to be a comedian.
I wanted to sleep in and masturbate and go be chatty.
No, I didn't get crazy with it.
Okay.
I didn't like, yeah, I was kind of.
Not compulsive or anything.
No.
No, I was an organized, efficient man.
Yeah, just good.
Okay, that's fair.
Yeah, one-off kind of guy.
Yeah.
Kind of like when they play the trumpet in the morning.
You never got greedy, though.
You never went back.
Never went back.
I got greedy.
Yeah.
I was like, that's it.
Yeah.
But so I think learning to do that personally has been a little, it's been a journey for me.
But yeah, I think with companies, it's like, how do we get away from that?
And is it just sometimes I think America was just this Christian experiment that got compromised and has turned out poorly.
You think?
I think you're onto something.
And I hate to say that because a part of me doesn't really want to admit it.
Well, it's obviously true.
It's obviously true.
I mean, you can't have a democracy unless it's a voluntary system.
People have to show a lot of restraint.
They have to be all in.
There has to be some sense of the common good.
You can't just be like, how much can I grab?
It's like Halloween.
It doesn't work if all the kids just empty the basket on the front steps, you know, in the first wave of trick-or-treaters.
No, it's true, though.
No, you're right.
And a democracy is very much the same way because you can take power and then just like steal everybody's money legally.
And so you really have to have some boundaries that you impose on yourself.
And that has to come from within.
You have to have the sense that someone more powerful, like I hate to use the word, but God is watching.
And if you don't have that, then it just descends into greed and selfishness, which is where we are now.
Have we let, because do you think America is still a Christian nation?
No.
No.
What is it?
It's an LLC, as you said.
So brilliantly, actually, again, I think.
We've interprivized communism, it feels like to me.
That's exactly right.
I mean, I don't, no one's for the free market.
Everyone's for using power to hobble their competitors.
You know, everyone's into, the only reason we have regulations is to create monopolies.
The system is completely rigged, and you know that you're asking how do you get reliable information about the news.
The news media want to talk about race.
That's like their main thing that they want to talk about.
Black, white, Hispanic, Asian.
But that's actually not an interesting conversation because you can't change your race and like people are different races and they're sort of different, but they're also very much the same.
It's like not that interesting a topic to me personally.
I'm not interested in talking about race.
What's really interesting is that the United States of America is being looted by a small number of people who are getting away with it.
And they don't want to talk about that.
They never want to talk about economics.
They never want to talk about the tax code.
They never want to talk about any of that stuff ever.
And that's how you know that CNBC and CNN and the New York Times and all these people who are like looking out for you are actually just the Praetorian guards standing in front of the people with the most power and money and keeping the masses from asking uncomfortable questions.
And so whenever anyone asks about like, well, wait a second, you know, why do we tax people at half the rate for investing that we do for working?
Literally, they pay half the tax rate.
So you have a job and you work every day and like, and you pay one rate, but if you just stay home and invest money and live off the interest, you pay half as much.
So are we saying it's twice as virtuous to invest as it is to work?
Is that what we're saying?
So if you're a day trader or just trading stocks or something, you don't have to.
Or if you're a private equity guy and you can claim that your income is actually investment interest on your investments, you pay half the taxes.
So, we have a tax code that discourages work and encourages parasitic behavior.
Now, there are arguments on both sides, and I'm not an economist, but you don't even hear those arguments because it's like, shut up racism.
Trannies or whatever.
It's all a distraction from what the real story is, which is they're looting the country.
Looting.
And at this point, you know, we can't repay the debt that we owe.
So it's going to be like, well, unfortunately, we had to sell Yellowstone.
And no, I mean, it's going to get to the point where we're all.
And we sold it to Asians.
No, no, for real.
Yeah.
Where we're, I mean, what.
And then they're going to say the sale was racist, too.
That's going to be the craziest part.
You're asking questions about it as racist.
Okay.
Yeah.
You're always the race.
Just to be clear.
You're always the racist.
Louisiana man.
It wasn't David Duke from Louisiana.
Shut up, Klansman.
Yeah, I used to live way for David Duke.
In prison?
No.
I can see you guys in the yard.
All the Aryan Nation guys.
He's like on your back because you're doing push-ups.
Bro, I was never in any Aryan nation, dude, you know?
Not even in prison?
No, I never even went to any of their meetings or anything.
I saw pamphlets or whatever, but I never pulled up over there.
But yeah, we shared a back fence, and he used to date this hot girl that worked at a seafood restaurant that I worked at.
So he'd pop in there, and I'd watch him eat shrimp or whatever.
What was the seafood restaurant?
It was called Morton's Seafood in Madisonville, right on the Chipunka River.
Really?
I worked over there, baby.
And I was a bus boy, and they used to have raccoons coming out the wall when they'd cook duck.
The boarding was bad on the wall.
It had rotted out, and they'd let one of us bus boys get there with a broomstick.
We'd have to stand there and beat the raccoons back in.
They're ferocious animals.
Well, they love duck.
Of course they do.
And pizza.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, wow.
We call them trash pandas where I live, and you see them outside in the trash cans.
Oh, yeah.
And they love pizza.
I like pizza.
Oh, yeah.
Unfortunately.
And, oh, yeah.
You have pizza and you, you know, eat the cool?
Yeah, they go crazy.
I'd love to see.
Now, that would be a good Dave Portnoy thing where he gives, he does one bite to a, hit a coon with a bite, you know?
Have you ever seen a raccoon eat?
You never gave him any duck, did you?
Oh, I pulled up on them and they're always like this weed with their hands.
We didn't do it.
The gayest one is the one in the recycling bin.
He's always like, you know, at least the other ones are in the trash.
There's always that one that kind of wanders up from the recycling bin and he's wearing like a negligee, your mom's or something.
You're like, what the fuck has that one been doing?
But yeah, they always are like plead innocent or whatever.
No, they do.
They're so clever.
I love them.
Oh, they're crafty.
Yeah.
I've never shot one.
I've seen them so many times in the woods.
There they are.
Yeah, they love dog food.
Yeah.
That's kind of a mangy one.
I've seen, we have big ones where I live.
Yeah, I grew up running a lot of rabies.
So when women would come down the street, we'd all have to go inside.
Do a lot of people have rabies where you grew up?
Yeah, I would say it was, well, there was a big scare of it.
When was rabies popular?
Can you look that up, please?
When was rabies popular?
Oh, when I was a kid, it was a big thing.
Get out the street, you know?
There's a sick raccoon.
But when they got cars and electricity and stuff, they fixed all that.
I mean, they just, it wasn't as big of a thing.
But yeah, David Duke, man, we would go to the gym sometimes.
And I'll say this.
Nice guy.
Yeah.
I never met him.
Nice guy.
You know, he never, you know, we just did chest and tries or whatever.
There was never any racial things or whatever, you know, but he was a very fit man.
I've never met him, but I will say this, and I'm not saying he's a Fed, though he's obviously a Fed, but every time I would get a new show, I don't know anything about David Duke.
I'm from La Jolla, California.
He wasn't quite as popular there.
Can we find another picture without you?
But every time I get a new show, there would be some news story.
David Duke endorses Tucker Carlton.
Why are you?
I don't know you.
I don't know anything about you.
I'm from La Jolla.
Okay, we don't share a common culture.
Yeah.
I'm from Mitt Romney country, huh?
100%.
Literally, Mitt Romney goes to La Jolla.
That's true.
Comedy store La Jolla is one of my favorite parts.
No way.
It's my favorite comedy club in the whole country.
It's been there a long time.
It's the best thing.
Since I was a child.
Really?
Up in the village, yeah.
Yeah.
In fact, there was a jack-in-the-box next door that I used to ride my bike to.
I remember that jack.
It wasn't, it was maybe disappeared a few years ago if it did.
They closed it down for a while because he got caught selling kangaroo meat in the 70s.
And I don't know if that story was actually true, but that's what everyone in the town thought.
I mean, look, if you can get a fucking couple grams of roux in La Jolla, rue burgers.
That's what we called them.
That's so funny.
I took a close look at the meat.
It was gray and kind of gristly.
And it was not beef.
I mean, and I think the company was owned by Ralston Purina at one point.
Oh, yeah.
And they're out of, I believe they're out of.
Oh, are they?
I think.
Yeah.
I know they're out of the Midwest.
But yeah, I loved it over there.
You would always hear, I love La Jolla.
It's a beautiful area.
But they weren't big on racism there when I was a kid.
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know if they hit, well, it's mostly white there.
Well, that's why they're not big on racism.
Yeah.
And like people were expecting we can't do it.
No, it was like rich white people.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Rich white people.
Oh, yeah.
No, it seemed like rich people.
Yeah, for sure.
It's like, yeah.
You feel rich even when you're driving by.
Or you feel like people want you to leave, I feel like.
It's beautiful there.
Yeah, it's really pretty.
It's very beautiful.
It's sad, though, soulless.
Is it?
Yes.
Yeah.
No soul at all.
No one had a last name.
I mean, it was obviously it's one of the prettiest places in the world.
But yeah, it was, you know, hi, I'm Bob.
I'm a Sagittarius.
Like, nobody had a real connection to anyone else.
Everyone was just kind of passing through.
And the first time I went to New Orleans, which is obviously a disgusting place, but I loved it because it was so, it was just so thick.
It was just so much there.
And all these weird rituals and customs.
I just had a culture.
And I just didn't grow up around that at all.
And even though I didn't understand what they were doing in New Orleans, and obviously I was very threatened by it because half the town is a violent criminal, right?
But I still liked it because I thought this is interesting in a way that nothing I grew up with was interesting at all.
I could totally see that.
Yeah, I think I grew up in a place that was just so, you know, it was just, there was so much lore and stuff in our area that.
And I think that's just a lot of the way that Louisiana was.
Amos Moses.
Is this from Louisiana.
I don't know, but I love that song.
But you just picture, you know, wrestling alligators in the swamp.
And where I grew up, people literally talked about the weather every single day, every day, and the weather never changed.
It wasn't like we lived in Minnesota or something.
It's very Truman show there in Lawrence.
It's unbelievable.
Be like, well, it's going to be 72 and partly cloudy, moving to mostly sunny in the afternoon.
It's going to be 68 overnight.
Tomorrow, and it would just be on an endless repeat.
It was a skipping record.
Did you hate that about yourself?
That, like, was there any self-like loathing?
Because I hated myself because I was poor, right?
But does that happen on the other end of the spectrum?
And I hated my neighborhood.
I just felt embarrassed, right?
Like, does that happen on the other end of the spectrum where people no, not enough.
There should be a lot more self-hatred in rich neighborhoods, I think.
And I hate to say self-hatred.
Sorry.
I was ashamed of myself.
That's a better way to say that.
There should be more shame.
There should be more shame.
Like if you've amassed $100 million from sucking the last remaining lifeblood out of some manufacturing company in the Midwest, calling it private equity, like you should hate yourself a little bit.
You know what I mean?
And there's none of that.
And I think that's part of the problem.
There's not enough guilt among the ruling class.
There's no sense of obligation to people beneath them.
And that's one of the reasons they hate them so much.
And that's one of the reasons that the fentanyl crisis has not even been acknowledged by Washington is because they kind of know they're responsible for it.
And you wind up hating the people you've wronged.
I have noticed.
Like, what do you mean that you might not wind up hating?
If you commit a sin against somebody, if you're cruel to somebody, unfair to somebody, you cheat somebody, you wind up hating that person as a way of justifying what you did.
And the only way to stop that is by admitting what you did and saying it out loud to the person's face and asking for his forgiveness, which again is why the 12-step model works, right?
But if you don't do that, you wind up blaming the person for the crime that you committed against him.
And that's one of the reasons that people who don't get sober are so angry at the world.
They're pissed at their parents.
You meet these people, their parents send them to rehab six times, and they're pissed at their parents.
Why are you mad at your parents?
They did everything they could.
And the reason that Junkie's mad at his parents is because he knows that he's actually the guilty party and he's committed massive crimes against them, but he can't admit it.
So he blames them.
And that is true at a macro level as well.
And if your ruling class, if all the richest people have gotten rich by dicking over the people beneath them, running these fascist companies that spy on their employees' phone calls and like track them as they come in and out of the building and require them to work on Sundays with no overtime and just really inhumane sweatshop type practices, creepy stasi stuff, those people end up having great contempt for their own employees.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, well, I think it's one of the spaces we're getting to right now in the country is people, if you're an owner of something, if you are a well, you know what's interesting is when you say that, I recently met a guy who was a Democrat, right?
He's like a devout Democrat, right?
And he said to me, this was interesting.
I never heard this.
He said, you know, I vote for Democrats because I want there to be programs in place to keep the people that are struggling.
I want to keep them.
I want to satiate them just enough so they don't rebel.
They don't have power.
Right.
And I'd never heard that.
I said that out loud.
Yeah, he said that to me.
And I was like, that's so, I never heard that.
Here's your weed.
Here's your porn.
Just don't make a mess.
Just don't make a mess so that the rest of us who don't, who aren't as unfortunate as you can still operate like we operate.
Okay.
So I just never heard that perspective.
Was this on camera that the person?
No, this was just in a human conversation as two humans eating.
Well, an inhuman conversation, really.
Inhuman beings.
Like, what?
Yeah.
I had a salad.
I don't know what he had.
I'm having a lunch.
The blood of children, probably, I would say.
Sounds that way.
He had an O-negative junior.
Yeah.
I mean, that is so dark, but it's so true.
And by the way, bless him for his honesty because that is exactly what's going on.
And that's not how you treat your own kids or people you love.
You'd never say, I'm going to keep you on just enough assistance that you cannot starve to death, but that you'll be like so harried by the shittiness of your existence that you'll never challenge my power.
Like that is a crime committed against that person.
Well, to me, as an American value, that was like, oh, that's never a way that I ever would thought or think.
No, because you encourage self-sufficiency because that's where self-respect comes from.
I've got my shit in a pile and I'm proud of myself.
That's the goal for an adult man.
And if you're preventing people from getting to that, then you are committing a crime and you should be held accountable for it, in my opinion.
But there's nobody to hold anybody accountable anymore, it feels like.
I know.
Well, I'm very aware of that.
Everyone's in on it.
Well, it's just so interesting.
How do we get out of it then?
By saying the truth out loud.
I think that's the only recourse.
I think that's more powerful than guns.
I mean, I do saying truth.
I mean, that's what they get hysterical about.
There'll be a mass shooting and there'll be three days.
We need to take all our guns away.
They're not going to take your guns away, okay?
Because they can't, but that's not their priority.
But when somebody says something that's true, I mean, they will disappear a person for that.
Like, you'll never hear from them again.
And there's a reason.
And the reason is nothing is a greater threat to the people running things than true words.
And that's where they're confused.
Kanye, you mean?
I'm not talking about, well, Kanye was disappeared.
I mean, and my view of Kanye would be, you know, if you show up on Alex Jones in a hockey mask saying you love Hitler, you're probably not really a threat to anybody.
Yeah, yeah.
Actually, I mean, are there really a lot of people who are going to watch Kanye being like, I love Hitler and be like, wow, I love Hitler too.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Oh, you might be able to walk on with the devil raise, maybe, you know?
No, no, I'm just saying, like, that wasn't if you actually wanted to promote Hitler, and I hope no one would ever want to promote Hitler, but like, if you did, that would not be the way to do it.
Yeah.
Right.
So actually, how is Kanye a threat to anybody?
I don't think he was.
Yeah.
And by the way, he's a recording artist.
He's a musician.
So, like, and a clothing designer, he's not in charge of federal policy.
So, I did think, yeah, I thought that was distressing just because I don't think anybody should be silenced.
If you're not committing violence against somebody, you have the right as a human being, because you are not a slave, you are a human being, you have the right to say what you think.
That is a foundational right.
And if you don't have the right to say what you think, then you're not a human being.
You're a slave.
Like, that's the acid test.
Am I a slave or not?
I don't know.
One simple question.
Can you say what you really think?
And if you can't, then you're a slave.
Super simple.
Well, now it feels like they own, it used to feel like you could write what you think, but now it feels like the paper is owned, right?
Yeah.
So they can, like, even with AI coming out, it's like they could even adjust what you write.
So you don't even fucking have a value to write anything anymore.
It's like, hey, just put in kind of how you feel.
We'll write what you're saying.
Like, it's getting to that point.
You know what I'm saying?
It almost starts to.
I know, you know, it could be two years from that where it's like.
I've been a writer all my life.
And to see now machines doing that and actually doing a fairly, you know, serviceable job.
I mean, writing poetry and screenplays and all that.
Yeah, giving me a fake father.
But upgrade or no?
A little younger than my dad, but I don't know.
That guy seemed a little bit devious.
My father seemed a little happier than him.
Fair.
I'm going to urinate real fast.
You're going to urinate?
Yeah.
Is that all right?
Like a racehorse, my brother.
You ever owned a horse?
I've never owned a horse.
I'm a dog guy.
Really?
You ever bet on a dog?
You ever put one in at the track?
Honestly, yes, I have.
Yeah, in Florida.
And in fact, in Florida in the 80s.
Now we're getting it.
That dog track has now been closed.
And I love dogs, and I've always loved dogs.
And it's the one in Miami that's near the airport.
And it was the most depressing, inhumane, like you just wanted to send money to PETA spending 20 minutes there.
But I did go there.
Yes, I had been drinking and probably other things.
And I did bet on the Greyhounds.
And I feel bad about it.
Yeah.
I do.
Have you ever ridden on Greyhound?
I've always been a sizable man.
And they buck me off every time I try.
Really?
Yeah, wheel around and bite me.
Yeah, they don't.
It's hard to saddle a Greyhound.
No, I mean the bus service.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
I thought you meant the dogs.
Oh, no.
No, I spent a lot of time on Greyhound.
Actually, true story.
Yeah.
I had a girlfriend in high school, but we went to different colleges.
And she went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
And I lived in New England, which is a small colder region.
I got a Will Shepard over there.
Go on.
And I took the bus.
I took a Greyhound bus from Washington, D.C., where my parents lived to Nashville, which is like 12 hours.
And then I took one back.
And so this bus was going on to New York City.
And for some reason, it was 100% Puerto Rican in me.
And I was at the back of the bus and it left at like midnight.
Yeah.
And I was drinking and smoking on the bus.
That's how long ago it was.
This was 1987.
I'll never forget it.
And I fall asleep because I'm so loaded.
I'm taking a leak in the empty cans, you know, just doing what you're doing every day.
I'm not in my life, dude.
And all of a sudden, I feel this wet, grainy thing on my face.
And these people right there in the seat, right across the aisle, were just like full coitus, just like playing couch ball, just full-blown.
A six.
Sound effects, everything.
And the guy was wearing socks and one of the socks hit my face and it was just moist and had a lot of gravel from the ground on it.
And I remember thinking, this is the, I can't wait to get off this bus.
It was dark.
It was nothing erotic about it at all.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
I mean, I don't know.
It depends on what you're thinking, you know, how you are at the time, I think.
Well, I was drunk and in a dead sleep and they're rolling around and she's making these animal noises.
Like they were not at all inhibited, which was kind of impressive in a way, but I felt it was very much an intrusion into my space.
Wow.
Yeah, that's fair.
Like, hey, is there any zoning over here?
Right.
What?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do we have a town?
That's a true story.
Yeah.
Oh, that's good.
Oh, Greyhound's unbelievable, dude.
I remember one time a guy's on there, right, sitting by me.
He goes, hey, yeah, there was a brother on there and he goes, hey, you want to see something?
And I thought it was going to be his wiener, right?
Because I've been on the bus before.
But you said yes.
Well, it was a two-hour ride.
I was like, I'll fucking see it now.
You know, I'm not going to pretend.
You thought he cut a hole in the bottom of the bus.
Yeah, I thought so.
I get it.
I get it.
Some wiener trick.
In there, totally.
Old Greyhound wiener trick.
And I was like, yeah, I'll see it, you know.
And he had a bag of jewelry and a gun, and he just robbed a jewelry store.
Wow.
And he had a bag of jewelry and a gun.
No, I didn't buy any, but he wanted me to sit there and look at it.
And I put on a couple of the necklaces or whatever.
Did you act impressed?
Oh, yeah.
Because I was scared.
And they always give the guy, you know, once you, if you get out of jail, they give you a ticket on the fucking grey.
Imagine you rob a jewelry store and your getaway vehicle is a greyhound bus.
Unbelievable.
You are retarded if you're doing that.
You're like, we got to get out of here in seven hours.
I bought the ticket.
It's pretty cool.
Dude, it was a, yeah, I mean, I loved riding greyhound.
I used to work on a farm up in Mississippi, and so I would take a greyhound bus up there and I would ride it up there, and there was always people on there.
There was a bathroom like on a boat on there.
It was always closed, they said, you know.
I was on one where, yeah, part of it was on fire.
I was on one where a guy stopped to fucking meet his ex or something for like 20 minutes, and we all had a chill and a high hop.
No way.
100%.
Dude, go to Greyhound Bus Twitter feed, Greyhound Bus Help, and look at their replies on there.
Bro, welcome to America, bro.
I love that.
So it's just like every waffle house they stop at.
Oh, it's just like, ah, the bus supposed to leave at 4.30.
It's 970.
Somebody be like, it's 970.
Well, you have a bad watch.
But like, it's 970.
Two people are pregnant.
It's just the list goes on, man.
Chances I'd like the people on those buses 100%.
Everything on me is unbelievable.
But seriously, all drivers allow my bag to be stolen this trip.
Where's customer service?
Yeah, go back one.
They got a video.
Let me see that video on there.
this is what I do at night I go to Greyhound Bus Help Twitter feed and they'll show stuff Yeah little eight balls between the seats or different things.
There's somebody Find a gram down there between the seats.
Did you ever do that?
I never found any drugs on there.
Oh, that might be somebody touching television.
Don't let that video finish.
But I spent a lot of time on this, man.
It's insane.
Greyhound bus hell, it's called?
Greyhound bus help.
But yeah, they could change it.
It would still work.
I'm going to urinate real fast.
All right.
So, sorry, I had to urinate, and that's why.
That's right.
I heard it.
Yeah.
Well, and it's okay.
Strong stream.
I'm a new one.
The strongest part was being little and just not being able to pee in there.
And I grew up around, we had a lot of dudes, and they would hold a lot of brothers back three or four years.
So you'd have a big brother in there, and he'd pee with his dude, Mr. Larry, right?
Mr. Larry?
Yeah, he was like, they'd held him back like seven times, right?
So at that point, you got to respect him, you know?
100%.
And he would urinate over your back and it just right into the urinal, dude.
You'd be standing there peeing, right?
You're like this scared kid.
Remember how scary it was the first time you had to go into the urinals as a kid?
No.
Oh, well, I. I grew up in a less threatening environment.
Oh, you didn't?
Because there's no one doing piss rainbows over my shoulder, bro.
No.
That wasn't hilarious.
He was the fucking Gary Payton of piss on me.
He would fucking shoot from deep.
And so you'd literally be peeing.
Imagine this.
And you can't pee.
You're scared.
And then a fucking pee comes just from above and goes perfectly in.
That's so impressive.
You just feel demoralized, though.
No, but I mean, the pounds per square inch, just the velocity.
You know what I mean?
You'd think you'd almost need CO2 to get that much power.
Yeah, it was impressive, man.
It's crazy what some men can do, you know, or young men or adolescents.
Yeah, there's not a lot of dribbling at that age.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, there wasn't any dribbling.
No dribbling.
It's like.
And then at the end, it's like, bam, off.
It's like the Bellagio Fountain.
It's like, when it's done, it's done.
I do respect that.
So what's your, what is news like around the world?
That's something I don't understand.
It's so different.
It's crazy.
You don't realize that we live in this bizarre biosphere where you have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world.
You have no idea how you're perceived, the United States is perceived.
And you have no idea really your place in the global order because we're cut off from the rest of the world and we have these two extremely lame irrelevant countries bordering us, but that's it.
You know, Mexico and Canada.
No offense.
I like them both, but like nobody cares.
But there are big, important countries around the world and they're very focused on the United States and they have all these views about what we're doing and those views are never expressed here.
So if you're a leader in the United States, you can be like, well, we're doing this for democracy.
This is the arsenal of democracy.
And then you go to the countries that are directly affected by those policies and they're like, you're freaking insane.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
I mean, the mind blower for me this summer, we traveled all over the world, a bunch of different continents, and we're still doing it because I got fired.
So I've been stuck in a studio for all those years.
Now you got to get out and about.
Well, kind of.
I mean, I go on vacation for two weeks a year, but that was it.
You know, when you do, when you do a show regularly, it's you're tied to where you are, period.
You're in a studio.
Yeah.
So all of a sudden, I'm like, wow, I'm kind of emancipated.
Yeah, for a few months.
And it was the summertime.
And anyway, so we went, but the shock for me was, and this is not a partisan point at all, at all.
And what does partisan mean?
It means like carrying water for a party.
Like this is what Republicans think or this is what Democrats think.
So nonpartisan means not.
This is just what I think is true.
And like, it doesn't matter what either party says.
Okay.
What does nonpartisan mean?
It just means not partisan.
It's not, you're not connected to a party.
You're not helping either party.
Okay.
But what I mean is both parties, Republican and Democrat, were saying for a year and a half, Ukraine is winning this war against Russia.
Yeah, I remember hearing that.
Oh, yeah, I mean, and I still think people believe that.
So whatever you think of the war, Russia-Ukraine, I mean, I'm not that interested, honestly, because I'm not Russian or Ukrainian is the truth.
But lots of Americans seem to be interested, and they have their little Ukrainian flags, and they're, you know, learning to pronounce Kiev as Kiev, and they're doing all the steps that you need to do, repeating all the dumb slogans.
Slava Ukraine.
Yeah, they don't, you know, whatever.
Americans have this thing where they have no idea where something is, but they're like, oh, I'm an expert.
You see it now with the Middle East.
I'm an expert.
You know, it's like the Nakba.
What?
Stop.
But anyway, but the article of faith for most Americans was that Ukraine is winning this war.
So, I mean, I don't know.
How do I know?
You know what I mean?
I'm stuck in a studio.
So I go over to the region, two different countries that border Ukraine.
Oh, you popped over there to Ukraine?
No, no, I didn't go to Ukraine.
I don't think I do well in Ukraine.
No, they really?
Well, the government of Ukraine has like attacked me by name a lot.
So I feel like that was unwise.
Who's their master?
Are they their leader?
Well, the president is a guy called Vladimir Zelensky.
Oh, right.
That's right.
He's a fucking comedian.
Yeah, a very unfunny one.
Yeah, do we have any videos of him doing stand-up comedy?
He's got one where he's playing the piano with his dick.
I don't know if you can find that.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
But, yeah.
And actually fairly well.
Was it at a SIG App house?
Where was that?
It was in Ukraine somewhere.
I think that's, yeah, it's a pretty common thing.
There.
Oh, there he is playing piano with his penis.
Yes.
Is he really?
Oh, yes.
Oh, anybody can be president now.
Well, I don't know.
Can you play the piano with your penis?
Huh?
I don't know.
A little bit of Baltoven.
Yep.
Kind of hacky, but it's cute, though.
That was good.
I like that.
I said that just because I knew you might like it.
I love that.
I wish I'd said that.
But anyway, so whatever.
I don't care about these guys in any way, but I go over there and I start talking to very knowledgeable people, like the people who run these countries.
And they're like, what?
No.
Russia has 100 million more people than Ukraine.
100 million.
Wow.
And much deeper industrial capacity.
They have all these weapons factories.
It's the largest country in the world by land mass.
There's no, literally no chance, even theoretically, Ukraine could beat them.
But aren't they an industrial old, aren't they?
Aren't they things made out of stone?
Aren't they like living in the past with a lot of like technology?
Well, it turns out, I mean, they're military advanced.
Well, we always made fun of it, you know, during the Soviet period because it was super inefficient and they were all drunk and they would crash their commercial airliners all the time from drunkenness, all the time.
In fact, a famous, their plane, their carrier, the international carrier, their national carrier is called Aeroflot, the Russian carrier, was the Soviet carrier.
And in a very, very famous crash, the pilot had his son in the cockpit with passengers on the plane.
And the cockpit voice recorder proved this.
And the son just takes the yoke and just pushes it down and flies the plane right into the ground.
So like people made fun correctly of Soviet technology, but it turns out they were actually pretty good at this.
You know, they produced a lot of chess players.
They're not stupid people at all.
And neither of the Ukrainians for that matter.
But anyway, the point is the Russians were never going to lose, period.
And anyone who looked at it objectively would know that, except no one in the United States knew that.
So that kind of freaked me out.
I'm like, we have a big country, smart country, very the most advanced country in the world, supposedly, and nobody even knows a basic fact.
Please really watch.
Like Russia has 100 million more people.
Of course, they're not going to lose to Ukraine.
Like, that's insane.
And yet nobody knew that.
So I thought, wow, what else don't we know?
Yeah.
You know, and like just the amount of lying that you can do in a world where everything is controlled.
All information is controlled with the exception pretty much of Twitter because the guy who owns it has said he's not going to censor.
Yes, it's nice.
I feel like that's one thing that I thought was that, yeah, maybe that's it.
That's what's about censorship is at least you feel like you can say things or that things can be shared on there.
Do you feel, I mean, as someone who writes comedy, who does this every day, do you feel freer on the platform now?
On Twitter?
Yeah.
I feel like at least if YouTube takes me down.
Oh, look at that.
Comedy is legal on this platform.
So Elon like specifically endorsed your right to see.
It was nice of when we had Roseanne Barr on, and she's a- Oh, dude.
She fucking did so much for comedy.
She did so much for women and gays.
Oh, wait, I saw part of that.
And they, Hollywood threw under the fucking bus as soon as they had a chance because they're heartless.
And so anyway, she was on my show and she...
And they took, tell me if I'm misremembering this.
They took a line that she had and they cut out all the context and put it like on TikTok and it made her sound like she was a crazy person or a vicious person, which she's not, either way.
Yeah, she's a Jewish, I mean, she was born Jewish.
I think she's still Jewish, right?
She is.
And so she said, yeah, oh, and the Holocaust never happened, right?
She said sarcastically, right?
I think she had relatives who died in it.
Yes.
Yeah.
Very obvious, right?
Right, of course.
And they, some guy on Twitter, asshole Sam, I don't know what the guy's name was, something Fuckelstein or somebody.
He fucking made a big deal about it.
Oh, from the Minneapolis Fucklsteins.
Yeah, probably.
I know them.
This student, this was two weeks after, right?
Makes a big deal about, or just put that clip in or whatever, no context.
So then YouTube took us down, took that episode down.
But we got to put it on Twitter.
So that was nice, at least because it was an honest place, you know?
But what I worry about is like, didn't some of these companies, didn't Twitter or Facebook, didn't they get in trouble for not letting, like during election times, like not real information being allowed to be shared?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know who would get them in trouble.
They run everything.
And, you know, my concern would be as we're getting to this election, it's very intense.
You know, I think they're, you know, very intense people on both sides.
And if you actually had a platform that was open for everyone to say what he or she thinks, that's a massive threat to the asshole community.
And I think that the because the truth is always a threat to liars.
That's just never changes.
People are killed never for lying, ever.
They're only killed for telling the truth.
You're only punished for telling the truth.
When people get mad, it's because you told the truth.
Everyone should know that.
So, I mean, I don't, I can't imagine the pressure that's going to come to bear on this company, X, now, over the next year.
I mean, it, you know, it's going to be without precedent, I think.
Do you think Elon could be, I mean, there could be like even an assassination attempt on him or something?
I would never speculate about something like that, but I just think there's your guy at a bar.
What are you going to say?
You know?
You know, I think there's going to be, I would have a food taster.
I mean, I think it's, I think, look, the one thing we know, look, if you're doing a great job at something, if you're a great father, great husband, great employer, great comedian, you're not too worried because you know you're doing a good job.
But if you're doing a bad job and the only beneficiary of your work is you and everyone else is getting screwed and they can't even afford to fill up their truck or buy groceries and you're still getting rich, you're very worried.
Dictators are always worried about their own security.
Okay.
So what's the biggest threat to you?
The biggest threat is someone calling you out.
And so you have to shut down any medium where that could possibly happen.
So obviously Facebook is completely controlled.
Google is completely controlled.
TikTok, foreign-known company, God knows what their agenda is.
So really the only big platform that's pretty not controlled with some, apparently some limits.
But in general, it's not controlled.
It's free speech.
It's X. I agree.
So like, there's a lot at stake.
Legitimate leaders don't worry about this.
If I'm a legitimate leader, if I'm a good father and one of my kids is like, I want to smoke weed at the breakfast table, you're like, you can't.
Sorry.
Because I make the rules, no weed at the breakfast table.
I'm not worried about saying that because I think I'm a pretty good father and I think my kids think I'm a pretty good father.
But if I'm a terrible father who's abusing my kids, I can't let them say anything because the authorities might find out.
Like I could get punished for what they know.
And that is the same attitude that every dictator has.
That's why all dictators take the guns and impose censorship.
It's the first thing they do.
They don't want to throw you in prison.
It's expensive.
It's difficult.
They don't want to execute you.
They just want you to shut up and be obedient.
And Elon Musk in buying this platform and opening it up to all Positions, even unpopular ones, is the single greatest threat to their hegemony, to their control.
And, you know, I'm not predicting their response, but I mean, it's going to be intense, super intense.
I can say that.
Would you have security and that sort of thing if you were him?
Would you have like somebody, you know, would you make sure that the Tesla truck, which is supposed to have been out for 17 years, but that it has extra bulletproofness in the glass?
I would definitely include as a standard feature, not an add-on, the oil tanks that drop the oil onto the road behind you so that people pursuing you spin out and go right into a bridge abutment or off the side of the mountain, off Maholland.
You know what I mean?
I would definitely do that.
And I'd have like hidden machine guns under the side view mirrors.
I'd have a death ray possibly.
That would probably be a custom feature, but I would have stuff like that.
Yeah, for sure.
Do you think we get fair news about like even the war like in Israel and Hamas?
Like, do you think we get fair information about that?
Like, Joe Rogan had a lady on recently, and she was saying that, like, the perception of what happens over there isn't the information that we get, you know?
Do you see that?
Think of it this way.
What's at stake?
People's lives, control of governments, control of land, you know, ancient rivalries and hatreds.
I mean, there's so much at stake here.
This is the Celtics and the Lakers from the Bible.
That, of course, yeah, I mean, it's very intense.
And so, of course, there's going to be massive lying on all sides.
And there is.
And that's fine.
And you go into it knowing that.
I've spent a lot of time over there.
And I will freely confess I don't understand a lot of the dynamics because I'm from La Jolla.
I'm not from, you know, Jenin or Jerusalem or Qatar.
It's like, I'm not from the region.
Okay.
I don't speak the languages, but I know enough to know that there's massive lying.
And I think it's good to know that.
The only thing that enrages me is when you hear people say, you know, you must believe me.
I have no obligation to believe anybody.
You have an obligation, if you want me to believe you, to prove what you're saying.
Right.
And I have a right to ask simple, fair questions.
How do you know that?
How can I trust that?
And if you don't give me those answers, then I just don't believe you.
And I don't have to believe you.
And if your recourse is, you're a bad person for not believing me, fuck you.
That's my response.
Fuck you.
And especially in this case where my money and potentially my children's lives, well, that was a cocaine thing you just did.
Yeah, one of these things got blown out of my nose every now and then.
I got to make sure it works.
You got to open it up.
Yeah.
I agree with that.
Respect.
Just widen them out.
There's no show.
God, and it feels good, doesn't it?
God, dude.
If I can feel it dripping down the back of my throat right now.
Anyway, sorry to use profanity on your show, but it.
Somebody put on some cashew, you know?
Let's fucking rock.
Is that what you listen to?
I don't know what happened, dude.
No, be honest.
What were you listening to when you were?
I think it was probably, yeah, some cashews, some Traveling Willberries.
Traveling Wilburys.
Maybe a little bit of...
I got a unique listening now.
Maybe some Morgan Wallet.
Different, you know, eclectic mix, I think.
James Blake.
What about Dust in a Baggie by Billy Strings?
I've never heard that.
I love Billy Strings, but I haven't heard Dust in a Baggie.
Oh, it's a great tune.
And it's about Dust in a Baggy.
I thought it was an Irish guy, Dustin a Baggie.
That's good.
That's good.
Boston.
Dustin, mom's pissed.
Sorry, I'm just a little bit of a bad person.
Have you ever been to Boston?
I've been to Pittsburgh, though.
Dave Chappelle was just in Boston, man.
You saw what they did to him over there?
It was unbelievable.
Yeah.
Do you think that's fair that they should, because, well, it's not fair, but it's like, I don't know, if you go to listen to Dave Chappelle these days, you know he's going to talk more about a lot of stuff.
You know, Dave Chappelle criticizes Israel, spars with crowd at Boston's show.
Oh, he criticized Israel.
So I didn't know that's exactly what he did.
I mean, look, I wasn't there.
I only know what I read.
I wasn't there either.
But I think he made one point, which I think is entirely, I don't know if I agree.
I don't agree with Dave Chappelle on everything, of course, but the one point that I read that I did agree with was the United States is implicated in this, and so we have a right to have an opinion on it.
And that is obviously true.
And anyone who tells you you don't have a right to have an opinion or you must have one specific opinion is wrong.
And I think it's fair to say that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think people should be able to have their opinions, you know?
Yeah, because once you don't have your fucking opinion, then it's like, how do you get to a revolution?
How do we get to a revolution?
Because at what point do people just say, well, if my life doesn't, if you don't want my life to mean anything to me based on how you've set up the environment, at what point do you go from there to, then I am not going to play this game?
Or how does a revolution start?
They're very worried about it.
That's why they're putting people in prison.
I think they should be worried about it.
They are worried.
I'd love to fucking be on a horseback, dude.
Well, but you know how you get to a revolution is by not listening to people and not serving their interests and telling them to shut up again and again, calling them names.
You know, something you've got a legitimate question.
Like, why should I support a war with the run?
Shut up.
You know, calling me, what?
You know, I have four children of draft age.
Like, why is that not a fair question for me?
Shut up.
And you do that enough.
And I have recourse because I have a platform.
But most people don't.
And if you tell them to shut up enough, like, we don't care that you care about gas prices and your stupid pickup truck.
Well, some people like their pickup trucks and they use them for work.
And if it's not affordable to fill it up, that's a big deal for them.
And if you're like, shut up, climate change, pig, you know, your nephew ODs on fentanyl and nobody cares.
Like if you keep that up for long enough, you'll make people radical.
And why wouldn't they be radical, actually?
And I'm so insulated for most of it because I have enough money and I'm not in debt and my kids are grown and paid for.
And like, I'm in a much easier position than most people.
Right.
And I feel radical just watching.
Right.
And so why wouldn't they be on the brink of being unreasonable?
And it doesn't need to be this way.
You don't have to solve all people's problems.
Like some problems are very hard to solve and people know that.
There's no magic button you press that ends inflation or stops fentanyl.
And everyone knows that.
All you need to do is express the fact and do it sincerely that you care, that you acknowledge these are big problems.
But when the speaker of the house, who I know is a nice guy from your state, the new speaker of the house comes in and the first thing he does is issue a statement on behalf of a foreign country.
That's the most important thing.
And I'm not even against the statement, but I'm just saying like, what bigger statement does that make?
That's him, Mikey Johnson?
Yeah.
And he's the speaker?
He is.
Praise God.
I'm damn Mikey.
He's a nice guy and I'm not against him, but I'm just saying like, if you think the welfare of another country is the most important thing for you as one of the leaders of our country, third in line to the presidency, you have lost the thread, son, because it's not.
Nothing is more important for the leaders of our country than our country and how its 350 million people are doing.
So I was enraged by that.
And people are like, oh, are you for Hamas?
Of course I'm not for Hamas at all.
I'm for America, actually.
I shouldn't even have to answer that question.
Are you for Israel or Hamas?
I mean, obviously I'm for Israel over Hamas, but that's irrelevant.
I'm for America.
And no one even asked that.
And I feel deep resentment about that, that the concerns of this country are no concern.
Right, right.
It feels like our concerns don't even fucking matter.
They don't matter.
That's why it makes me wonder, are we just a shell company for Israel?
Are we just a shell company for China?
Like, where are we anymore?
Like, are we just...
We all love it here.
Well, I know you do.
And I'm just saying, like, it doesn't have to be this way.
You know, there are people, there are hundreds of millions of people whose ancestors are buried here and they want to stay here.
They don't have another passport.
And it wouldn't be hard to rally them and just say, like, you're a Democrat, you're a Republican, you're this, you're that, but we're all American.
And let's have a conversation about what's best for our country.
You would get people from all sides being like, that's right.
That's the right conversation.
We may not even agree, but that's the conversation we should be having.
And if you don't do that, I'm just telling you, you play with fire.
People go crazy.
And I'm totally convinced that the mass shootings we're seeing and the massive spike in mental illness that we're seeing, which is leading to the mass shootings, these are manifestations of the frustration and the hopelessness that people feel when they realize their leaders don't care about them.
I believe that.
I can't prove it.
But I believe it because I happen to live in a place with a lot of people who are not kind of succeeding in the modern world.
And they're good people and they have skills and they've been here.
Their families have been here for hundreds of years.
We should care about them.
I agree.
But yeah, I think our country has been compromised by people that don't care and they don't see value in that.
And it feels like it's just about a bottom line or it's about, I don't know, some goal that to me seems so erroneous, I can't even fathom that you wouldn't have feelings.
Like when you're like that Sackler family that's just watching people's children die.
Because you can make money off of a fucking pill.
Who cares?
What do you eat?
What are you going to get?
Another like half bathroom or something?
Like, what are you going to get?
Exactly.
Like, I just, I don't understand the goal sometimes of some of that or why people would think that selling someone out to such a point where they don't have any purpose, where you take away their hope.
You know, we had a guy on here talk about meaning, this guy, John Verveke, and he was real interesting.
This guy is from Canada and he just talks about meaning and when people don't have like, when they don't feel like they're supported by.
I'm going to fuck it up, but if they don't feel like they're part of a group or they don't feel like.
Right.
You go crazy.
Yeah.
And then you get an amazing solitary confinement.
Exactly.
So you've basically taken so much of America by taking away like things that brought us together.
Yes.
And some of those things were smaller towns, like businesses in small towns, things that made people feel of value.
You know, my father went to a, you know, my father, his family was mahogany farmers.
They did wood.
And so I think if your father went into the woods in your town or whatever, part of a company that built tables.
It was literally mahogany farmers?
Yeah.
And you had a table at home.
And then it was your dad's company's table.
You'd be like, we eat it, our families, we build it in our town.
Some physical connection between labor and reward?
Yeah.
Now it's just theoretical and digital and bullshit.
Yeah.
Zoom calls.
Yeah.
Now it's just like, do you want to eat at this fucking Chipotle sit go, you know, where they're selling gas and burritos and, you know, and it just like.
Is that a thing?
But that's a fucking town hall of a lot of, it's just, now everything has just been, it's a dollar general in most towns and that's what it is.
And, you know, it's like, just we've killed off a lot of that, you know?
What's interesting is you drive through, I like to hunt and fish, so I've been in a lot of small towns in America because that's where the hunting and the fish are.
And some of these towns, and especially the county seats in rural towns, have beautiful courthouses.
Beautiful.
Like somebody spent a lot of money and a lot of time to make a beautiful public building.
One of those hasn't been built since the Second World War.
That is true.
Probably since the 30s, since the Depression.
Wow.
Your state especially.
You've got a lot of great public architecture in Louisiana.
None of it has been built since Huey Long was murdered.
Okay.
So why is that?
And it's been replaced by disposable garbage and the dollar store.
I'm sorry to single them out, but they are a symbol of it.
It's so intentionally ugly.
Box stores are so ugly.
You're like, there's got to be a purpose behind, you know, architecture exists for a reason.
You're sending a message when you build a building, when you build anything.
And the message of box stores and dollar stores and of public, the DMV is you mean nothing.
We're not going to spend any time or any energy trying to elevate you or please your senses or build anything beautiful.
It's ugly on purpose to let you know that you mean nothing.
You do not count.
Shut up and obey.
You're an animal, actually.
And I just feel like there's something very profound about that, the message that it sends.
And everyone receives the message, whether they know it or not.
You go into a DMV, what's it telling you?
Wait your turn, wait for your number.
And then some surly low IQ person like hassles you over.
It's like, I'm a citizen of this country.
Why do I even have to have a driver's license?
Give me my fucking papers and let me get out of here.
How dare you speak to me that way?
But you can't because she's in charge.
The whole experience is designed to degrade you and make you less powerful to take your self-respect away.
I'm very upset by it.
Oh, the DMV, it's almost like they have a line.
If you come out of the closet, you get to go to the front of the line.
You know, I'd be willing to do that.
Yeah, but that's the kind of shit I'm saying.
It's like, that's how much they want to compromise who you are or what you are.
But look at that.
Okay.
The drop ceiling, like there's no reason to have lighting like that.
It doesn't cost more maybe to put some lamps or sconces or something.
There's nothing more oppressive than a drop ceiling with fluorescent lighting.
And there's no reason to have that.
And everything is made out of vinyl and metal.
There's not one natural material in there.
Why don't have wooden benches?
What would that cost extra?
Train stations used to have them, but they don't because the message there is all this shit's disposable.
It'll be in a landfill in five years and so will you.
Everything about that is degrading to the citizen and it's not an accident.
We've been doing that since the day we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
That is true.
End of the second world.
I mean, I have a lot of theories about it.
I have no evidence to back up any of my theories.
So I should just say that.
I think that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan convinced the U.S. government and the Western leaders more broadly that they were God.
They had the power to destroy whole cities.
Nuclear power, when weaponized, is the most powerful tool man has ever made.
And it gave people the impression that they were God.
And they lost all humility and all love for their fellow citizens.
They lost love for their fellow citizens.
That's what our architecture, post-war architecture conveys.
I don't love you.
I don't care about you.
The British colonized whole countries, India, for example.
They didn't love the, I mean, they loved the Indians, but they thought the Indians were lesser than them.
They did.
They were racist in our current understanding of that word.
But they built train stations in, say, Calcutta or Bombay that would blow your freaking mind.
There's nothing as beautiful in the United States as the train stations they built in the subcontinent, in India.
Oh, yes.
Stunning places.
Right.
Stunning.
So like, what does that tell you?
And these were colonial train stations built for Indian subjects.
Right.
Look at that.
But they still had a lot of pride in what they built.
They did, but they, they, people, here, do the one in Mumbai.
The Mumbai train station is like the most unbelievable.
I met a Pakistani the other day.
Well, that was part of India up until 1947.
They have their own autonomy now.
They do.
They have nuclear weapons, actually.
Oh, look at that.
Look at that right there.
Wow.
Look at that.
Come on.
That looks like, I mean, that's the train station in Bombay, Mumbai, India.
Oh, yeah.
I've been there and it just, I sat there and it's very poorly maintained.
The Indian government has done nothing to kind of preserve it, unfortunately.
And they've built a lot of garbage architecture they stole from our anti-human architects.
But like, what kind of country would build something like that?
A country that cared about pleasing people.
You look at that, that pleases you.
You want to keep staring at it because it's beautiful.
We've created nothing of beauty in the United States in 80 years.
Like, what the hell?
Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, that's beauty.
No, it's not.
It's garbage.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's bootleg.
You're getting me going, baby.
Am I?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, dude.
I like your attitude.
Well, you know where there's great architecture that blew my mind?
Milwaukee.
The best.
Down by the river?
Dude, Milwaukee is such a beautiful city.
I totally agree with you.
I had no idea.
Have you tried Cleveland?
Yeah.
I mean, Cleveland obviously is famously screwed up.
Mistake by the lake, but it's like, look at that right there.
So the Germans built it.
Milwaukee was a German city, obviously.
It was?
Oh, yeah.
That's why the beer was brewed there.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very German city.
And they recreated Europe, the best of Europe.
Yeah, Cleveland definitely, it was a bit of a different experience, I think, when I was there.
Look at that.
Look at that building.
That's stunning.
Imagine building something like that.
And instead, we built glass boxes that are lead certified.
And it's like we've built nothing of value, nothing of permanence.
Nothing we have built in my lifetime will last.
And rightly so.
There are Roman buildings and arches, Rome, Rome, that are going to last longer.
Rome fell in the fifth century and they're still there.
And that will outlast the construction of a fucking half these pet codes.
It's true.
It's totally true.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, it's crazy, though.
But we just, there's something, something happened.
And I think that's the infection that starts to get into the spirit of us, you know?
And I think that's the fight that's going on inside of a lot of people.
Make something beautiful.
That's what we should be telling kids.
Like your job in life, it's not just working for the man and paying the bills.
It's make one thing that's beautiful that you are proud of, that's an expression of something good inside you.
Make it with your hands or with your mouth.
But make it.
Make something beautiful.
I don't know why that's so.
And by the way, when you say something that you think is, that you think, not others, you think is particularly funny or insightful, you're getting the truth about something.
Aren't you filled with like this, wow?
Doesn't that feel like better than anything?
Yeah, I think it feels like what you're supposed to be doing.
Yes, that's it.
Exactly.
You're doing what you're supposed to be doing, what God made you to do.
That's my feeling.
But that's not advice that we give at all.
It's like how to be an obedient, get some stupid degree at some stupid college to be an obedient employee to some stupid asshole who runs it, who's going to mistreat you.
Yeah.
How do we, what's new in your world?
What are you, what?
Well, I've gone crazy.
What are you doing now that's different with, you know, you got on the Twitter, right?
And so I know that.
And congratulations.
Thank you.
I think it's interesting.
It's brave for people to get out of the system.
A lot of people.
I was expelled from the system.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You got laid off from everywhere.
I have, yeah.
Was it cutbacks or why did you take it?
Cutbacks?
No.
I love it.
I'm going to use that, though.
There's downsizing.
Just downsizing.
I'm being retrained.
I'm learning to code, actually.
They closed the plant.
I totally get it.
I was on third shift and the demand was in decline.
I am going to use that, though, next time.
Why were you fired?
But you got out and you moved to.
I was thrown out.
You were thrown out.
And Elon called me the day that my show was canceled.
And I was grateful that he did.
He called you, huh?
Had you spoken to him before?
yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I had.
And I really liked him.
And I'm not a technology person, to put it mildly, like at all.
Yeah.
Variants.
I've heard technology.
Yep.
Like almost on a crazy sort of Ted Kaczynski way, which is, I'm not defending.
So who handles tech for you then?
Kind of?
The tech people.
They live in Bangalore.
I don't know their names.
Just kidding.
No, we have super smart people.
The Bangalorean team.
The Bangaloreans.
No.
Actually, our most of our staff from Fox came.
And Elon's, we don't work for Elon.
I'm just, I'm a Twitter user like everybody else.
But his, all he said was, I'm going to keep the platform open, you know, and people with differing views, whether I agree with him or not, are welcome on the platform.
And that's, that's the guarantee that I wanted and needed.
And so I've been super grateful.
I mean, that's all I've ever wanted, by the way, is to, I've never been a, I have made some money, but not, I never got crazy rich, but I never wanted to.
That wasn't my goal at all.
I mean, I guess I would like to be richer, I guess.
I don't know what I would do with it exactly.
Well, now it almost looks like a sickness too.
You know, I think there should be a capital.
The money acquisition thing?
Yeah.
There was a name for that, actually.
Historically, it was called greed.
Yeah.
And then somewhere along the line, we like decide you weren't allowed to complain about greed.
And I don't really, and because you're against capitalism.
First of all, there is no capitalism in the United States.
There's no free market.
Okay.
The government controls everything.
You can't have a business without intersecting with government.
And the government is used by businesses to create monopolies.
So there's no free market.
So let's stop lying about that.
Second, I am not against capitalism.
I'm for competition.
I wish capitalism would return to the United States.
But that doesn't mean that you can't say, if I've got a billion dollars and I need 10 more, that that's your sick, actually.
If that's your goal, what would you do with the billion dollars?
I mean, I don't want a billion dollars.
Not that I'm in danger of getting it, but if I was, I'd be like, I don't want that because then you spend your whole life worrying about losing it.
And your existence becomes about preserving money when your existence should be about loving the people around you and creating something beautiful.
Those are your jobs as a person, in my opinion.
Yeah.
Well, could we put a cap on how much money people are allowed to make?
I guess people would find their way around it.
I mean, the way to do it is to say it out loud.
Again, everything changes with words.
Articulate the truth.
It's not an attack on capitalism, which again does not exist in the United States, and I wish it did, to say it is ugly.
In fact, it's a sin to worship money.
It is.
You should not be worshiping money.
Worship God.
Worship people around you.
Worship nature even.
But worshiping money is disgusting and we should not compliment people who do it.
We should instead criticize them and say, that's gross.
Hey, hedge fund manager, that's gross.
I'm sorry.
I think that.
No, I fucking think that too, man.
I remember like maybe two years ago, it was like the first time I'd really made some money in my life.
And I thought, and I remember I was in my garage and I just was fucking heartbroken, man.
I remember calling my brother.
I was crying.
But it didn't make you happy?
I thought, yeah, because I, well, I didn't even know it was money.
I didn't know if it was popularity.
I don't know what had happened, but I'd gotten to a different space in my career.
Yes.
I finally knew I could pay my mortgage for the year.
You know, it just like, and I thought that that somehow in the back of my head, without even realizing it, I thought that that would be the answer to everything.
And when it wasn't, it fucking killed me.
It's, this is so.
But nobody wants to hear that also from somebody who.
But it's the most familiar thing I've ever heard.
It's like, I could tell you so many stories.
It just made me so sad that I've just been fooled, you know, and even fooled by myself.
Well, getting what you want is one of the saddest things that can happen to you.
I mean, when you're happiest when, as a man, I'll speak for men because I am one, you have a clear mission.
For now.
For now, I mean, I could totally change.
Oh, it will change you.
If I get a better spot at the DMV, Tucker, it does change you.
There's something going on in the water, baby.
And that's why if I could take a break to just promote my non-sponsors in, and these are threes, and I normally use sixes, but I appreciate the gesture.
But I do think nicotine does keep your testosterone levels up.
Really?
I do one of those suppositories.
I'm not doing a big one or anything, you know.
I mean, maybe during the holidays, I would.
It's not like an expander.
It's just a regular suppositor.
Okay, I would do something small, you know?
Just pop a bead in or something, you know, if I'm going to be at the ballpark.
You know, I do probably just something, half a gram or whatever, milligrams.
I don't know what it comes in.
Three milligrams?
Yeah, dude.
But getting what you want, succeeding, that's when men fall apart.
Yeah.
But then also, I think that there were more opportunities for success in the past and there was more opportunities to feel value in the past.
Like I remember when I was a kid, we used to get our name in the paper and it made you feel so good, like your local baseball score, right?
And like, even if you lost, they fucking put your last name in an O for four, right?
Cried, even though put cried like in parentheses, and you're like, fuck yeah, dude.
Like at least I'm on the stat sheet.
They caught you crying?
Yeah.
I mean, I had an appendectomy, right?
And the guy who I think was closeted or whatever was our co was like an assistant coach or whatever.
And he was screaming at me to get to third base.
And literally my appendix had burst.
Can you show me on the doll where this happened?
Dude, I remember we had a dude bust.
There's something here.
I can feel it.
Oh, bro.
This guy's screaming at me to get to third base.
My appendix burst.
I'm laying in the fucking dirt, right?
And that's a sign of our fucking country nowadays.
They're like, get to fucking third base.
You're like, I have sepsis.
And nobody fucking cares, man.
But they still put you in the stat sheet, you know, 0 for 4. Yeah, I think, oh, we had a dude who was touching players and they just called him and they're like, look, you can't keep coaching if you're going to touch players.
Touching him like in an affirming way?
I think just extra affirming.
Like too affirming.
Like overhand, you're affirming, but once you turn the hand this way.
I totally agree.
Reach around, not affirm it.
If you're doing that, that's totally, dude.
What do you think about where do we go?
Does Bobby Kennedy Jr. have any chance?
Does a third party have any chance these days?
No.
A third party can affect the outcome for sure, but the system is.
I mean, this could change with time, but the system, it's shown no sign of changing.
I could bore you for hours, but Ross Peru ran in 92 and then 96. I remember that.
You know, when he got Clinton elected in 92. Fear of the years.
That was the campaign thing.
Fear of the years.
I never heard that.
That was good.
Thanks.
But he, and he actually was kind of impressive.
He was a real smart guy, huh?
He was.
He was.
And he said a lot of things that turned out to be true, but of course he was attacked as some kind of crazy person, including by me, I should say.
Damn, really?
Yeah.
I was used as a tool.
Do you even notice you're a tool?
When you're a tool like that for the- Wow.
I was 20. I was in my early 20s and I was writing.
I was covering.
First of all, people in their early 20s should not be covering anything other than like kids with appendectomies in baseball.
That, right?
Shouldn't be covering national politics in your 20s.
Like, what do you know?
You don't know shit.
Yeah.
So you shouldn't be rendering judgment.
Okay.
100%.
100%.
You know, FFA events or whatever, but not politics.
But anyway, I was, and I attacked him as a crazy person and I was used by the person I was working for who's still a public person and truly a dishonest person.
But anyway, whatever.
If it's Chuck Schumer to say it, more dishonest than Chuck Schumer.
Wow.
Yeah.
But anyway, I can't even get into it.
But the point is, he got 23% or whatever.
I think it was 23 that year in 90. Ross Perot did.
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
Oh, dude.
Because he was running basically on sort of a pre-Trump, more restrained, more academic, less Trump.
But the idea was the same.
Manufacturing is dying and it's going to wreck the country.
We need to make things.
Is that Bush, Perot, and Dukakis?
No, who was that?
No, Dukakis was 88. It was Bush, Perot, and Bill Clinton.
Wow.
Who was then the governor of Arkansas in 1992?
It was the first race I covered.
And Perot did really well despite massive hostility from the media.
Because, of course, they were protecting their bosses.
Exactly.
That's exactly.
But I didn't perceive any.
18.9% he got.
What did he get?
18.9%.
I'm sorry, 19%.
I'm embarrassed.
Did he affect the outcome of that race?
Oh, he won it for Clinton.
I mean, Clinton won it, as you can see on the page, at 43, 43%.
Absolutely.
So Perot didn't win.
Do you think that Bush wins that?
Of course, yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
He took from Bush, yeah.
Who is Kennedy taking from?
What do you think?
Trump.
You think?
Of course.
There's no person who's thinking, hmm, I'm going to vote either for Joe Biden or Bobby Kennedy.
I have some friends that are.
No way.
I swear.
Really?
I have some friends that have known Bobby.
I mean, these are people that have known Bobby Kennedy for a long time, but who are Democrats who are like, this is my guy.
The only reason you would vote for Joe Biden is because you believe there's safety in numbers.
You're voting for the party.
You're not, obviously, I'm not attacking Biden, but you're not voting for Biden.
You're voting for the Democratic Party because you think when they have more power, you're safer or richer or whatever.
That's the only reason.
And Bobby Kennedy, man, I mean, I've never seen anybody get right to the core issues affecting the country the way he has.
And I don't agree with him on everything, but I mean, he names names.
I mean, in a big way.
Yeah, that's why I love him.
I think, well, I just think he can fucking, he doesn't know.
I don't feel like he's in anybody's pocket.
Do you feel like low-key, there's some party that's like planted him in there?
People say that, but that's, that's crazy shit, I think.
I mean, I feel like I know Bobby very well, and I, I am totally convinced, just on a human level, that he is an honest person.
And I don't think that he would do that.
And I just have to ask him.
Are there people in his orbit who would do that?
I believe yes is the answer.
But I don't think he knows better has anything to do with it.
I think he's totally sincere.
He's certainly not in anyone's pocket.
I mean, the guy could be, his name is Bobby Kennedy.
He's the son of.
Oh, he could do whatever.
He could do whatever.
He could do whatever.
And he has done.
He's done a ton of great stuff with his life.
He has.
But I'm just saying it's very easy to be loved by everybody and to just, it's very easy to make money when everyone loves you.
Bobby Kennedy could have an infinitely easier life than the one he's chosen.
He's doing this because he sincerely believes it.
Well, look at that, right?
And he's under threat.
I mean, I was with him on the street the other day, this week in Washington, and the security people around him were very nervous.
He was not nervous at all, but they were.
Anyway, the point is, I think Bobby's totally sincere, but he is giving a massive middle finger to the establishment, like almost as aggressively as I've ever seen anybody.
Why can't we get him to a level?
Because what percent does he have to get?
Oh, I guess we don't know because you don't know what he's doing.
He needs to give that plurality.
You know, he'd need to get more than the other two.
And unfortunately, the system is set up where it's hard for a third-party guy to get on all ballots.
I mean, they've rigged the system against a third-party challenge because they don't want that.
Who has rigged the system?
Both of the parties?
Both of the parties.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
They don't.
I mean, once you have power, what's your number one goal?
It's preserving it and preventing people from challenging you.
You know, of course.
When there's a revolution, what city should we meet up in?
Well, if there is a revolution, and I pray there isn't because they never end well, but if there is.
But it'd be fucking fun, huh?
Like the first 20 minutes when you actually storm the Bastille and free the prisoners or whatever, hang your homemade flag from the roof of the Capitol or whatever.
Burn the news networks is the last thing you'd have to do.
So that'd be the fun part of the revolution.
I think that would be definitely be the fun part.
But then it gets, then you have like show trials and famines and you have like all the downside, but whatever.
I'm not in church.
So if that happens, I will be so deep in the woods surrounded by my dogs.
And I'll say it, firearms.
Probably not going to hear from me.
Look, let's just pretend one of your dogs is named Firearms.
I actually have a dog called Firearm.
I have AK and 47. I got a bow.
I got arrow.
I got whatever.
You know, I got all my weapons in the woods with me.
But yeah, and you can even just text me and just let me know where you're going to be.
But I think about that.
You know what's wild?
I think about that sometimes.
But you're going to be in L.A. No, I won't be.
I live in Nashville.
Oh, you don't live in L.A.?
No, I live in a place where if somebody is being weird, you can shoot them.
Okay, because if you're in LA, you just get eaten.
Yeah.
Oh, well, here's the move you would do in L.A. you would get in a boat and go off the shore.
That would be the first move and let the other having grown up on the Pacific, let me just say it's a little bigger than the Chunky Funky River, wherever you're from.
Super big ocean.
Yeah, and also fuck Ben and Jerry's while we're at it.
I'm going to say that.
But go on.
They're Marxist.
Is it called Chunky Monkey?
What's the name of your river?
Chufunkta.
Chufunkta.
I love that, dude.
That's the greatest name ever.
But the Pacific goes on forever, and then you make it to Hawaii like six days later in your Boston whaler.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, if you've been lost at sea for six days, you deserve to show up in Hawaii.
It's easy to miss Hawaii, though, in the middle of the Pacific.
Oh, you could, yeah.
That's a long way to Thailand, too.
Imagine they kick you up.
They're like, you fuck, you were close to Hawaii.
Like, what the fuck?
I let my wife drop.
No, the Pacific is not a good escape plan at all.
No, because south you have, you know, Baja and Sonata.
Right.
Right.
That's going to be a little chaotic.
It always is.
Yeah.
From Los Angeles to what, the Arctic Circle?
I mean, that's just like nothing.
It's like Alaska.
Like there's kind of nowhere to go.
Yeah.
But, you know, you get in the woods.
Deep in there.
Yeah, you got a shot.
You got a shot.
And Radley up in there with a couple of pups.
100%.
You go full boot Radley.
Oh, damn.
Live in the hollow of a tree.
Yeah.
That's it.
I love that.
Me too, man.
It sounds exciting.
But I think people start to think that way.
And that's a sad, it's interesting because it thought this just comes in my head sometimes.
I've thought about asking people I know.
I've thought about asking Joe Rogan, where do we meet up if shit gets weird?
And I never used to think that.
I think Joe's going to leave his house, right?
He might not, but I think everybody's got a little bit of a place.
You know, I think some people are thinking maybe could be, I think you want to do mountainous.
So I think you go Salt Lake or Denver.
You know, Broncos suck, but so I don't know if I'd go there.
Utah at least doesn't have a team.
I don't know, but you start to think about that.
You want to get up to sea level.
You know, you don't want nature beating you.
So you don't want to drown out.
You don't want to be in fucking Johnstown or something or Jones or whatever that place is.
Johnstown or Jonestown.
Or Jonestown.
Both of them are flooded.
Both of them bad.
Bad, bad.
Purple Kool-Aid, overflowing rivers.
You don't want to go anywhere, I think is the truth.
You don't want to go anywhere.
You don't want to.
You don't want to travel.
If things go sideways, I don't think you want to be on the road.
That's a good point.
The two times I've been in places for brief periods where there really was no authority.
What did that feel like?
And where was it?
One was at Katrina right after the storm in New Orleans.
Wow, you were down there, huh, bro?
I was.
And the other was in Baghdad in December of 03 when it kind of like started to get, I felt, out of hand.
And which one was more hectic, you think?
Oh, Baghdad.
But for the United States, I really feel, no one ever says this.
I really feel like Katrina was like, was almost unbelievable how chaotic it was.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, for real?
I mean, yeah, I could bore you.
Oh, I've been at a game when the Saints are fucking losing to the Falcons and it gets fucking hectic enough.
There is no one there to call, period.
And then people start behaving in ways that are ridiculous.
And I saw that with my own eyes and dead people and people getting shot.
Like I saw it, not guessing.
And I was just like, this cannot be America.
Like, I always thought if something bad happened, there would be like, you just like call some special number and like dad comes and restores order.
No, no, at all.
The police were looting.
I saw it.
Yeah.
The police were looting during Katrina.
So, so that's, um, anyway, whatever.
My point is, I don't think you want to travel too much if you can help it.
Yeah.
You know, it's better to be in a place where you're just like, this is my place and I'm defending it with these firearms, but the sec until things calm down, you know, until like electricity is restored after the MP attack or whatever.
Yeah.
Because that's what's going to happen.
There'll be a nuclear attack?
No.
There's going to be, you know, it's pretty easy to take down a society that's digital.
Oh, yeah.
Once you unplug that, and then when there's, but that's a crazy feeling when you're like, okay, because your first thought is, let me call somebody.
Nope.
Your phone isn't going to work.
No calling, no oil through the pipelines, no food delivery.
God's going to have the busiest afternoon.
No airlines, no one on the roads.
Dams fail.
Like it all, you know, if you've, if you've put everything online, which, because the people who run our country are so stupid, they've actually done that.
You are so vulnerable that it's unbelievable.
And you're using Chinese servers and switchers.
And like, at that point, you have no control.
You don't need to drop a nuke on anybody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
First of all, scramble the circuits.
Do not nuke.
You don't need to.
You don't need to.
Let us at least enjoy the mystery of it for a little while, too.
But people are so, that doesn't mean just no DoorDash.
That means no anything.
And people, one thing I've noticed in both the places I've been to.
No Stacey Dash either, huh?
That bitch.
No, no Stacey Dash.
You can't call any of your call girls from the interstate.
Oh my God, dude.
What if they start showing up?
You're like, oh, they will.
They'll be seeking refuge at your place, Repper B. You tip me for no service.
Seeking refuge rainments.
That was a tough play on words.
That's a good one, though.
Thank you, dude.
But I think, yeah, but you wouldn't be able to use money anywhere.
No.
That's going to become no value.
Like, it's just, it's weird we're having this conversation, but even as me listening to you talk, I am, my brain, I think, is recording this because it feels like it could be plausible.
All you need is a couple of cops to be like, you know what?
Fuck these people as well.
I'm not going to fucking quit.
I'm not going to quit blockading or attacking these people who I know are really struggling when I'm going home tonight and being one of them.
100%.
And by the way, my kids are at home.
And there's now, this happened in New Orleans, Drake Katrina.
It's cops and I give them all the benefit of the doubt.
You know, some of them, you do have some criminal cops down there, but you also have good guys too, you know?
And the good guys are like, I'm sorry, I got a wife and kids at home.
Like I'm not, and people are going nuts.
The thing that I noticed was it took like zero time from when authority disappeared for people to get super afraid for the predators to come out and start preying on people and for everything just to fall apart.
Everything.
Yeah.
And if you unplug this country, and by the way, once you decide you're going to go to war with Iran, as we've apparently, the morons who run our country have decided, that is, I mean, a very likely outcome that they're going to do something like that.
Really?
Absolutely.
Everyone's like, oh, they could send an ICBM or whatever.
Why would they bother to throw a missile at the United States across the ocean when they could unplug the country?
And then you have real casualties, mass casualties and mass chaos, like true, true chaos.
People are not prepared for this.
They haven't thought it through.
Our leaders have not prepared them for it at all.
It's like, oh, it's on your iPhone.
You don't have an iPhone and there's no electricity and there's no water and there's no way to get anywhere.
Come on, dude.
And that could happen.
That's not science fiction.
Like that could happen soon.
And we're not ready for it.
And as you said, it's not a cohesive country.
People are not like, oh, I'm going to help my neighbors.
You don't know who your neighbors are.
They may not speak the same language.
Well, you're certainly not going to also help your government.
So that's going to be the weird thing.
When the government's like, people do this, you might, if you're, a lot of people are going to be like, fuck you.
I don't trust you.
Totally.
And people have not seen chaos.
They don't know what chaos looks like.
No, we don't.
Like, when people imagine war, they imagine, you know, two lines against each other, lobbing artillery shells or rifle fire at each other.
There's a certain order to that.
And people can handle it.
You know, it's dangerous, but I can handle it.
It makes sense to me.
It's orderly.
It's geometric.
Chaos is completely different from that.
Chaos is like you have no freaking idea what's happening, who's on your side, who's not, who's a threat, who isn't, where things are going.
People are not designed for that.
People can't handle chaos and they go crazy.
And I've only, as I said, had a taste of this a couple of times, but enough to learn.
Chaos is the one thing you have to avoid because that's when people become animals and really start behaving in ways that are inconceivable to civilized people.
Oh, we're going to turn into middle monkeys real fast or we're going to.
Like in minutes.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, bro.
Dude, I was at a Dave and Buster's one time, right?
I'm not even joking.
Fucking power goes out, dude.
Did you eat anyone?
Bro, it was whack up everyone in that bus, dude.
People were beating the shit.
It was complete darkness.
Right.
And people, yeah, you're fucking feeling around for whatever, you know, birthday cake or whatever.
You're, you know, like, you don't even know what's going on.
Yeah.
But that was crazy.
That's a Dave and Buster.
I know.
You know?
So what is your plans now?
Like, you've already, you're on Twitter.
You're in a free space.
Yeah.
As much as we have in today's society, you're in a free space for free speech.
What else do you...
I mean, some of them, I mean, if I'm being honest, include territorial expansion.
We're going to invade Canada.
Oh, dude.
Just knock.
No, pillow fight.
I'll take that.
No.
I mean, I just want to continue doing what we're doing, which is just, you know, say things that can't be said in other places, bring facts that maybe people haven't heard with a spirit of humility.
You know, if you, I'm having spent my whole life in Washington, most of it, 35 years, I'm very, I know, I kill everybody.
But you know what?
I think a lot of people were glad that somebody was there.
You know, it's nice to see people that get out of a space because then they're, when you're not as compromised, when people don't seem as compromised.
It's totally right.
No, it's totally true.
But I didn't realize just how controlled my brain was by it when I was in it because you don't, right?
But anyway, but I've been around a lot of people who set out like with these grandiose plans.
I'm going to change the world.
Those people invariably, 100% of the time, make the world worse.
So like, you know, approach every task with the knowledge.
I have no real idea what I'm doing.
I don't know the long-term consequences of this.
I probably can't fix every problem.
I'm just going to try my best with humility, you know, to make things slightly better.
That's my goal, make things slightly better.
But anyone who tells you, if we pass this legislation, we're going to fix everything.
We're going to fix healthcare forever, said Barack Obama in 2010.
As soon as he said that, I was like, I don't even know much about healthcare.
I'm hardly an expert.
But I was like, the second you tell me you're going to fix something as complicated as, you know, one-fifth of the entire U.S. economy in one piece of legislation, fuck you.
Yeah.
Because you're lying, actually.
Because that's impossible.
And it turned out they made it worse.
Of course.
So I don't want to do that.
Not that I even have the power to, but I just want to, you know, I just want to tell the truth and do it without being told not to.
And I think that we can.
And Tucker on X is your show.
Yep.
Right.
Yep.
And do you guys have, do you think, would you ever do a show with a partner, you think, or anything like that?
I'm not going to pitch you an idea.
I'm just because that's usually the predecessor question of like is somebody trying to pitch you an idea.
But do you think about that sort of thing?
Like, do you guys have?
Well, I mean, I have a million people I would like to work with.
I mean, you know, I like to interview people actually a lot.
And I really try to be quiet while I interview them because I'm a compulsive talker, obviously.
But I'd like a respite from that where I can just like listen.
So I like to, we will have a lot of people on and we have, and we'll have a lot of recurring guests.
But yeah, we have all, we're making a bunch of documentaries and doing stuff like that.
So like a production company kind of more?
Like, are you expanding in that sense?
Yep.
Like, what is that one?
Ben Shapiro has one.
Outkick is a company.
Is that a company?
Daily Wire?
I don't know what Outkick is.
I have a friend who works there.
Outkick, I think it was football, and then they, uh, Okay.
Does Jason still work there?
I don't think so.
Do you know Jason Whitlock?
Yeah, I do know Jason Whitlock.
I met him one time.
So I love Jason Whitlock.
He's a really neat guy.
He seemed very friendly.
I didn't get to talk to him much.
He's a great guy and very deep.
He's not a shallow person at all.
Really?
He's the kind of person when you're talking to him.
Whitlock's, there he is right there.
Whitlock will say things and you're like, wait, what?
I'm sorry.
I just want to have like a super shallow conversation.
Like, how are you?
I'm great.
How are you?
And he'll, because I'm shallow in some ways and he'll like, he doesn't think like that or talk like that.
It's sort of like super heavy stuff out there.
And it's cool.
That'd be interesting.
Sometimes I want to have deeper conversations with people, but I think I get afraid to get into them or I don't know how to get into them without seeming like I'm being obtrusive or I don't know.
With him, you don't have to worry because he does it.
He's okay with it.
Yeah.
Well, he just goes there, immediately goes there.
I like that about him.
Do you ever get asked, and then we'll wrap up because I know you've been here for a while.
And thanks for your time.
I love it.
Do you ever get asked to bring people over to Twitter?
Like, is there like movement?
Because I know Jon Stewart just had a show with Apple, right?
Was that recently?
Yeah, they just canceled it, too.
Where he canceled.
Yeah, he had a show with Apple.
Jon Stewart.
Jon Stewart.
The guy from The Daily Show?
From The Daily Show.
Jon Stewart's show on Apple is ending.
Mr. Stewart and, sorry, Apple are parting ways because of creative differences over the years.
I didn't even know he had a show on Apple, so it shows you what I know.
People with the knowledge.
But they had a disagreement about the episodes, the type of episodes he wanted to do.
He wanted to do episodes on, can we move it down?
Okay.
According to Hollywood Reporter, ahead of its decision to end, Apple approached Stewart directly and expressed its need for the host and his team to be aligned with the company's views on topics discussed.
Rather than falling in line when Apple threatened to cancel the show, Stewart reportedly decided to walk.
Stewart tended discussions of artificial intelligence and China were a major concern for Apple.
Why would they be concerned with him having episodes like that?
I mean, we're assuming that's true.
I hope it's true.
That's a noble reason to leave.
You know, if you think there's something really important that you want to cover and your boss says no, it's a good reason to quit.
So I hope that that's right.
Was there another time you almost quit before it was?
My sense of the show, I mean, I didn't even know that show existed, so I don't think it was doing well.
I don't think so.
Yeah.
And Stewart, obviously a talented guy.
I knew him, you know.
Yeah, he's kind of below.
25 years ago.
Yeah.
I always thought he was talented.
He definitely did what I think everyone does at some point.
And it's important to come out of it and start to mistake yourself for like a messianic figure and just be like, no, I'm just a guy.
Like it's so important.
And I've done that.
So I've been there.
Oh, yeah.
Your ego is the first thing to grow.
100%.
And it's very scary.
You're like, dang, does God have some special reason for me?
No, you will humiliate yourself.
You will humiliate yourself and you'll destroy yourself.
You will lose the respect of your wife and your friends if you don't pull back from that.
Yeah.
And just remember, I am an asshole.
And if you don't believe that, next time you get out of the shower, walk in front of the mirror and look at yourself and be like, am I really impressive?
Not that.
No, not really.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I saw it this morning.
Did you?
Yeah.
What'd you think?
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
So, like, it's important to do that.
You know what I mean?
That will keep you from thinking you're the Messiah.
I don't think he has any mirrors in this house.
Any other question or anything you wanted to talk about, Takara?
No.
Okay, I know you share everything on your own show.
Well, I just share everything in general.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've enjoyed the hell out of it.
Yeah, man.
It's been a lot of fun.
I've had a great time.
Yeah, I'm with me too.
I appreciate it.
You're the only person I've talked to in the last, well, probably ever, who one of my kids will be impressed by.
They're not impressed at all.
Yeah.
They're impressed by you.
I don't know why.
You've obviously got some sort of weird magic power over younger people.
And I don't know anything about it.
You don't abuse it.
Well, I'm not.
Okay, good.
I just.
You're not going to start a children's crusade or anything.
It came after our industry a couple years ago.
Oh, I didn't mean anything creepy.
Okay, good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I only know adult women.
Oh, the old women like you?
No, I just only know people that are legally adult.
Well, of course.
Okay.
That's all I'm saying, dude.
Because, yeah, immediately, like, you know, I remember the New York Times like hunted down half of our industry, you know, like finally.
I noticed.
Yeah, just that vague stuff where it comes up.
And I think there are a lot of creepy comedians, but not as many as there are in journalism.
Yes, there's some creepers in journalism.
Dude, what happened?
Remember the guy who jerked off in the Zoom meeting and then they brought him back on for the interview?
And he sat there and he's like, oh, you're going to get caught whacking off in a Zoom interview.
I mean, it just shows you his name is Jeff Toobin.
And, you know, not a stupid guy, actually.
I know him.
And I have worked with him, but he's.
Oh, yeah.
But his desire to be on television trumps everything else.
Like if I sent to you, you know, if that happened to you, you'd be like, you know what?
I'm just kind of out.
I'm going to do something.
You know what I mean?
I'll find somebody.
People know I've had issues with it.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, but you said you have them under control.
You're not compulsive.
No, I'm doing great.
Just habitual, but not a problem.
Yeah, just going on a full moon.
But imagine if you're Jeff Toobin to sit there with this female anchor on Fox and talk about that.
It's like there's no shame that you won't bear.
There's no shit you won't eat just to be on television.
And I obviously had no respect for Jeff Toobin anyway because I know him.
But I had even less after that.
I mean, that was.
It's weird how God will give you your gifts.
You don't fucking know what they're going to be wrapped in.
It's like all he wanted to be was on camera.
I know.
And just like, you got to want the right things.
You know what I mean?
I think you got to get real specific with God, bro, because he's busy.
I totally agree.
And last thing I'll say is I think it's so important if you are publicly humiliated, and I have certainly been, and he was, of course, too.
It can be a great thing.
That's a great thing.
And you should treat it that way and be grateful for it.
You know, that this is keeping me from becoming an even worse person than I might otherwise have been.
There's nothing worse than a man who's spent his entire adult life succeeding and never being humiliated.
They become unbearable.
They talk only about themselves.
They can't bear to listen to you.
Every time you talk, they're holding their breath until you stop so they can start up again.
They become true narcissists.
And I just hope for Jeff Toobin, who's really an asshole, actually.
I'm just saying.
I don't know him.
Well, I do.
I just hate to say he's like.
He's an asshole.
Yeah, he is.
But he may be less of one now.
Yeah.
Actually.
And I've certainly been an asshole a lot.
So I'm not judging, you know, but I do it.
So I have high hopes for him.
Yeah.
Caught whacking off.
There's a massive upside potentially.
Oh, yeah, dude.
I mean, definitely.
There's no way.
Yeah, that guy definitely likes jerking.
But yeah, anyway.
Tucker Carlson, thanks so much, dude.
it was interesting, and I really appreciate your time.
I really do.
I did, and thank you for the Zen.
All right, yeah, you bet, brother.
I might do one later.
We'll see.
Now, I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found.
I can feel it in my bones.
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