Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show Braxton McCoy: Iraq, Opioids, and Defending US Land From Foreign Governments & Corporate Giants About this episode Imagine a nation filled with men like Braxton McCoy. That’s what America was. The rest of us are still reaping the benefits.
(0:00) McCoy’s Military Experience
(36:24) McCoy’s Intense Recovery Journey
(1:00:35) The American Drug Epidemic
(1:11:57) The Fake Environmentalists Secretly Trying to Destroy Nature
(1:36:35) Food Security, the Housing Crisis, and Immigration
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Transcript 21,028 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.
0:27 Tucker Carlson? So you basically, single-handedly stopped the sale of federal lands, a huge expanse of federal lands. You're not a politician, you haven't been a public figure.
0:44 Tucker Carlson? I'm not exactly sure how you did that, but I'd love to know. What, just give us the two-minute background. Who are you? Where are you from? How did you wind up involved in this question?
0:56 Speaker 02 Fundamentally, I'm just an idiot horse trainer.
1:00 Speaker 02 In Idaho. I'm not any, anything important or powerful or anything like that. I'm just a regular guy. I've always been a regular guy. I have no desire, despite how many people have tried to push me, I have no desire to go into politics.
1:17 Tucker Carlson? That's probably why they're pushing you.
1:40 Speaker 02 I want to write my books and hang out with my kids and ride horses and go fishing and hunting. I mean, that's who I am. I don't, I've said this many times elsewhere, I don't think it's just me. I think it worked because there were so many people that were upset.
1:59 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:59 Speaker 02 To a degree, I guess I ended up.
2:03 Speaker 02 Kind of spearheading some things. I mean, maybe a way I would look at it is it wouldn't be the first time I've taken point and I'll take point, but it's still a team effort at the end of the day. And it has to be that way. If it be, if something this important becomes about one guy versus another guy, we'll lose. It can't be like that.
2:23 Tucker Carlson? Well, and that's never a reflection of reality. Anyway, there are always huge forces that get embodied in individuals, but it's not so much about the individual. It's about the huge forces behind him and the horses, the forces that you harnessed, I think, just watching fundamentally, we're like the great love of the land by normal people. Like people understand that land is essential. It's connected to identity. It's connected to the definition of America. And so don't treat it lightly. Maybe that's one of the lessons.
2:56 Speaker 02 I think that's totally right. We talked about this at breakfast, but ultimately it's the love of my people and the land is a part of my people. Those two things are inextricably connected. I believe that fundamentally, and I don't want to be like overly pious or anything like that, but I believe fundamentally, we're called to serve our people. So if it took an idiot horse trainer to, you know, in my view, save a bunch of small family ranches throughout the West, then, you know, so be it. It worked.
3:34 Tucker Carlson? Where are you from?
3:35 Speaker 02 I'm originally from Southern Utah. I live in Idaho now, but I grew up down in, well, I guess I probably shouldn't say, but Southern Utah.
3:42 Tucker Carlson? Big town, small town?
3:44 Speaker 02 Very small.
3:45 Tucker Carlson? Not a lot of big towns in Southern Utah.
3:46 Speaker 02 No. I mean, maybe St. George has gotten a lot bigger, but no, I don't even want to say the size, sub, sub 1,000 people by a lot, I guess.
3:56 Tucker Carlson? Wow. Your hometown is fewer than 1,000 people?
3:59 Speaker 02 Yeah. Cows outnumbered us probably 12 to one, you know, and.
4:02 Tucker Carlson? Oh, so legit rural.
4:04 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We grew, I grew up on a little horse place. My old man was a. Horse trainer, but you know, he's an electric electrician. I think he got an electrical engineering degree as well, but that's what he did to kind of make ends meet was the electrical stuff. And then we raced horses and, you know, cowboy, I had a lot of day work and growing up, helping neighbors and family and all that. So you see the struggle from a young age. And right now, what's happening?
4:32 Tucker Carlson? You've allied it over an interesting chapter in your own life. I just asked you to address it really quickly. You clearly don't want to talk about it, but you, you joined the military at some point.
4:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:42 Tucker Carlson? When?
4:43 Speaker 02 I was 17. Um, we, I was skipping school as I was wanting to do at the time when I was at my cousin's and we watched nine 11 happen.
4:58 Speaker 02 On TV live.
4:59 Tucker Carlson? Wow.
5:00 Speaker 02 And you know, back then there was that famous, I forget, it was a pace, some salsa commercial, you know, the New York City.
5:09 Speaker 02 So.
5:09 Tucker Carlson? New York City.
5:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. We didn't have any, there was no love lost between us and New York City, right? I mean, that's kind of the whole point of the commercial. But when that happened, it's like, okay, I don't like them, but that's still my brother. You don't get a punch my brother in the face.
5:24 Tucker Carlson? Amen.
5:25 Speaker 02 So a lot of rural kids felt the same way and we enlisted and I remember my mom, because when you're that age, your parents have to sign for you to, you know, join. And I told her, I said, I mean, you can either sign this now and I'll get a little bit more money. You know, I'll go in, it's like a PV two instead of a PV one or whatever. Or I'm going the day I turn 18. So, I mean, you, you're just delaying the inevitable if you don't sign this. So she signed it. And I went to Benning and then to the war.
5:55 Tucker Carlson? You joined the army?
5:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:57 Tucker Carlson? At 17?
5:57 Speaker 02 Yep. And well, I think by the time I shipped, I had already turned 18, like for boot camp or basic training.
6:03 Tucker Carlson? But you signed up at 17?
6:05 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to go to war. A lot of us did. You're young and stupid and a lot of cultural forces were telling us that this was the right thing. And, and I believed it, you know, and plus. Is wrongfully mis- is as misguided as I was. I wanted to get, you know, take a swing back at the person in our mind, at the people that are taking a swing at us, you know?
6:31 Tucker Carlson? I think everyone, every Amer- most Americans felt that way for sure.
6:35 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah, you get there and about three months in, you get a little disillusioned.
6:41 Tucker Carlson? Well, yes. So you, you join, you go to Benning, then they ship you overseas to Iraq?
6:48 Speaker 02 Yep. Well, yeah, I got back to my unit and they weren't going to deploy. So I, I volunteered for this other deployment because I just wanted to get there. And this artillery battalion needed a PSD team. So they were a personal security detail. So they were, you know, looking for guys and we ended up with this kind of hodgepodge of random MOSs of just guys that wanted to do this job. So we did a, a train up, learn how to do that. And it's funny, like in keynotes, I used to say, we're to try to explain it, you know, if you're talking to bankers, they don't really know what PSD is out, you know, they certainly know what EP is, but I would say we're kind of like the army's idea of secret service, except for better trained or not as well trained, you know?
7:32 Speaker 02 But now, I'm like.
7:38 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, yeah. A lot of us are rethinking questions like that, yes.
7:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. And so we go, we end up in Ramadi.
7:48 Speaker 02 You know, the first thing that happened that really changed, I think was important, but really changed my view of the war altogether. We drove up from Kuwait. A lot of our guys airlifted, but we had all this heavy equipment. Well, of course the PSD team's going to do security for, so we took the drive.
8:11 Tucker Carlson? It's quite a drive, isn't it?
8:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:12 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
8:12 Speaker 02 Oh, man.
8:14 Tucker Carlson? I've done it. It's scary.
8:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. You know, you first you cross that border. And you know, there's oil wells on oil wells on fire and you know, busted up cars and then like, you know, just poverty like you've never seen before.
8:28 Tucker Carlson? Busted up cars from the first Iraq war.
8:30 Speaker 02 Correct.
8:31 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
8:31 Speaker 02 Yep. Yeah. I mean,
8:33 Tucker Carlson? The highway of death. They never, never cleaned it up.
8:36 Speaker 02 No.
8:36 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
8:37 Speaker 02 It's amazing. And then we get to Skania and that night, well, I probably shouldn't tell that story, but we stayed with some Polish SF guys and they were fun. They were like very cool, you know? I just ended at that. And then we go from there, I believe, I don't think we stopped again. We refueled somewhere just south of Baghdad, Skania or something like that. And then there's this, their highway system is like ours for anybody who doesn't know. I mean, it looks like a Western highway.
9:05 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
9:06 Speaker 02 And there's this turn just past Baghdad where you turn toward Flujer Ramadi. And right after that, you know, there's these compounds all over around there. They'll have like these walls around them and all like rich people, poor people, rich. It's almost like Houston.
9:22 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
9:26 Speaker 02 So we, we end up, the lead truck spots an IED. And it's dark. It's like two o'clock in the morning or something. And we had a marine escort because we'd never been there before. So the Marines were taking point and then we were just kind of additional security. Well, this marine comes and knocks on the door of our truck. And he says, Hey, do you want to go help us clear this complex? And of course I'm like 19, like hell, yeah. So that's why I'm here, you know? So I'm like grabbing and what we were told is we're going to try, uh, there was a prayer rug. You know, they found this prayer rug and that prayer rug had suspiciously an ID and some stuff left there.
10:09 Speaker 02 And then there was det cord going back toward this compound. And the plan was to go in there, find whatever was at the end of the det cord and take care of the problem. One version of taking care of the problem was going to be just blowing up the house and moving on. You know, we got shit to do, right?
10:24 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
10:26 Speaker 02 So I'm pretty excited because I'm thinking, oh my, I'm going to get to blow up a building.
10:33 Speaker 02 Like grabbing extra flags and an AT4 and like our frag grenades, you know, and an AT4.
10:39 Speaker 02 And well, we get to this compound, there's like a brick wall around it and we're trying to find an ingress route. You know, you don't want to just go over the wall.
10:48 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
10:49 Speaker 02 Cause who knows what's, so we end up finding a part of the wall that had been busted by a mortar or, you know, one of our guns or something. I don't know. And, and we were able to kind of skirt the side of the building. And I was in my mind for the entire time, I kept thinking, I cannot wait to blow this freaking house up. This is going to be so cool. It's just like every 19 year old kid, right?
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13:19 Speaker 02 Dot com. That changed pretty quick. We get around the front of the house and we can see this deck cord going through into the home. And we're like, let's go all the way around and make sure that it doesn't go through and out, just in case they were trying to set somebody up, you know, some innocent people. And as I was looking inside the building, there was a generator running in inside and it was sitting on a piece of plywood. And I remember thinking that's, that is strange. Why, why would they do that, you know? Well, we get around the front and there's right at this stoop, there's a bunch of sandals lined up and it's like oldest to youngest.
14:02 Speaker 02 So it's like dad, mom, kid, and then all the way down to this like two inch pair of pink like flip flop deals. And I had just left my little sister with my mom, who was roughly the same age. And, uh, man, it, I went from wanting to do that to not wanting to do that really fast.
14:24 Speaker 02 And I think, I think that changed my war for me for the rest of time. I probably could have got sucked into being overly aggressive and uncompassionate. But that really helped right from the jump, solidify that these are actual people.
14:41 Tucker Carlson? Oh, yes.
14:43 Speaker 02 Well, luckily, we go all the way around and the det cord was running throughout into this olive orchard. And one of our guys, without warning, without warning us, hit a pin flare to light up so we could see the olive orchard and my team leader just dove into the ground because he thought we were taking incoming. So he's like diving into this olive orchard. Um, and it ended up, we were able to solve the problem without doing anything to the home. And it had turned out, or at least from what we were told, that what they had done is captured that family and stuffed them into a cellar and then put that board, that plywood over the hole and then put the generator so we couldn't hear them down there yelling.
15:25 Tucker Carlson? Oh.
15:25 Speaker 02 And they were hoping that we would just blow them up, you know? And we didn't. And I think that, as I say, I'm sorry to just keep rambling, but.
15:35 Tucker Carlson? You're not rambling at all. So this was like within days of getting into the country?
15:38 Speaker 02 I think day two, I think. Yeah. Yeah, it really helped understand the war. You know, we were fighting a war in cities, you know? And first of all, I've never even lived in a city. You didn't really have to convince me that cities were bad, but. So.
16:02 Tucker Carlson? So Baghdad was really the first big city you saw?
16:04 Speaker 02 Oh, well, I mean, I had family in the suburbs of Salt Lake and stuff like that. But we would go eat at Lamb's Cafe when I was a kid. Salt Lake used to be a fundamentally different place than it is right now. Uh, thank you, immigration. Um, so I had been to Salt Lake, but you remember Salt Lake in the eighties, nineties. It was totally different. Nothing like it is now.
16:29 Speaker 02 So this was the first city I'd ever lived in was Ramadi when we got there. I mean, to the extent that you're living in it, right? They like.
16:39 Tucker Carlson? Kind of hilarious. The first big city I ever lived in was Ramadi, Iraq.
16:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's true. Yeah, I've only ever lived in two, Salt Lake, when I was going to school for a minute and Ramadi. That's it. And it'd be at this point, I don't even know which one I hated worse.
16:54 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
16:55 Speaker 02 You know?
16:55 Tucker Carlson? Ramadi's probably pretty nice right now.
16:57 Speaker 02 So relatively. Yeah. And then after that is just pretty typical war. We. You know, one story, we were there for about a week or two. And this guy, he's driving a truck, like a big truck. And we were on an OP out in front of FOB Ramadi on Route Mobile. And we were kind of running a blocking position up there. And this guy comes winging in like he's just going to drive by us. Cause he's got a cross hung on his radiator, like lit up cross. And we shot just warning shots into the ground like, hey, you gotta stop. What the heck are you doing? You know? And he jumps out waving his arms, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, you know?
17:40 Speaker 02 And we're like, you're an Iraqi dude. I mean, we're happy that you're a Christian, you know? But you're an Iraqi. And that that's there. I think for the average American, it's really hard to process just how tribal those regions really are.
17:55 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
17:56 Speaker 02 He genuinely believed you guys are Christians. I'm a Christian. We're the same team without any. We need no more justification than that is kind of his worldview. And looking back at that, I wish, you know, he was kind of right.
18:11 Tucker Carlson? I totally agree. He was right.
18:14 Speaker 02 He was right. We should have just trusted him, probably.
18:16 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
18:18 Speaker 02 But so like, we had some things like that. And then. You know, typical war stuff beyond that, some sniper.
18:25 Tucker Carlson? How long were you there?
18:27 Speaker 02 I think about seven months before I got wounded. It's six, seven months, something.
18:31 Tucker Carlson? How'd that happen?
18:32 Speaker 02 I got hit by a suicide bomber at a glass factory on a security mission and.
18:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, we were, we were, we're providing, just to tell briefly, we were providing security for a marine element that was recruiting Iraq, Sunni Iraqis to become IP Iraqi police officers. What we, you know, Bremer and others had decided that we couldn't hire any Baathists. And they also seemed to think that it would be a good idea to have Sunnis police Shia and Shia police Sunnis. And that's just, I mean, talk about ancient tribal conflict. You, you'd have to be, how could you be that dumb?
19:16 Tucker Carlson? I don't know.
19:17 Speaker 02 You're conducting a war. This is basic level stuff. You have to understand the people, you know?
19:25 Tucker Carlson? Or people in general.
19:27 Speaker 02 Yeah. So we're-
19:29 Tucker Carlson? Why make it a humiliation ritual?
19:32 Speaker 02 You know, it does feel like that.
19:35 Tucker Carlson? Of course. It's the oldest, it's, it's, right. It's why the peace settlement after the first world war, you know, the Western nations wound up sending African peacekeepers to Germany to humiliate the Germans. And, you know, how'd that work out? Right? What, how did the Iraq experiment work out? I mean, I don't understand. Right. So, anyway, sorry.
19:59 Speaker 02 No, no, you're right. And that, that's sort of Bremer era. And I try not to criticize people with the benefit of hindsight.
20:11 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
20:12 Speaker 02 But some of this was so dumb. So we had to, we were recruiting Sunnis to, you know, be shipped over to a allied country for training, an allied Muslim country. I just don't know if you're supposed to say, it's not hard to figure out who was helping.
20:31 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
20:32 Speaker 02 And they were training them and then, you know, gonna send them back. And so we were just, the security element is all. And it was day four of what was supposed to be a three day mission, typical Iraq thing. And I was out there, my interpreter-
20:50 Speaker 02 Was with me and we were just kind of asking questions to the people like, why are you here? And stuff like that, because there was a lot of people there and they were there early. And as I've said elsewhere, these are not a punctual people, you know?
21:03 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
21:04 Speaker 02 So we knew something was wrong. And this guy comes up and he's frantically yelling at me. And of course, I barely know any words in Arabic at all. And it ends up being translated to me as I saw a grenade with wires. He was genuinely trying to tell us what he had seen and help us, but we thought tripwire because he was saying grenade. Well, then it ends up a couple of minutes later, we end up in a scramble and this semi truck crashes through this eastern perimeter that we had set up. And that morning, we had been told to look at be on the look for V beds. So he crashes through.
21:43 Tucker Carlson? What's a V bed?
21:44 Speaker 02 Vehicle borne explosive device, improvised explosive device. But so he crashes through and of course, we, everybody lights up the truck, you have to. And then, you know, now there's Iraqi scattered all over the place. Well, in the, I don't know if they changed this after my time, but in those years, you were not allowed to hire any bathers for any reason into any government position. So now we have.
22:11 Tucker Carlson? So what did they do their time?
22:13 Speaker 02 Well.
22:14 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
22:15 Speaker 02 You know, it's so much of that war, even as a young idiot kid, you look back and just think, how strategically just so dumb.
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24:33 Speaker 02 For Americans. But so the result of that was now we have Iraqis running all over the place and we've got to get them back into lines and, you know, get this mission done. And the lines had to be person with no ID, person with a government ID, person with a government ID that says Bathis on it. And we were separating them that way. And then eventually, a really high-speed guy, Lieutenant Colonel McGoughlin, Colonel Mac, we called him, he came out there to help us and some dog handlers. And we were getting these guys in line and the next thing you know, a suicide bomber goes off. And this killed or wounded like 106 people or something like that.
25:16 Speaker 02 Killed two Americans, our friend and dog handler, Sergeant Can, and then Lieutenant Colonel McGoughlin.
25:24 Speaker 02 And I try to say this as often as I can now. He was like thirty, he was like thirty-three years old or something at the time and a lieutenant colonel. And I was a twenty-year-old kid, I turned twenty over there. And he was out genuinely in harm's way. Everyone knew that it was a dangerous situation and certainly Colonel Mac knew. And he put himself out there and died and there, they don't make many officers like that. He was a very, very brave man. He did not need to be there. No, not even at all. He was the highest ranking guy there by, I mean, the other highest ranking guy would be like an E7, you know?
26:07 Speaker 02 So he died and I got wounded, basically everything that didn't. In the same explosion? Yeah. Do you remember it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's, um. I don't know if the concussion knocked me out and then I woke up on the ground, but I was awake on the ground. But do you remember the, it was, the truck went off? No, a suicide bomber with a vest. So what had happened is our dog handler, or one of the dog handlers that was helping us, Sergeant Can, his dog detected the bomb and grabbed this dude by the arm and was trying to pull him to the ground and then it, it went off. And amazingly, Bruno, the dog that had done that, lived through the explosion.
26:52 Speaker 02 Seriously? Yep. He later deployed again to Afghanistan. I mean, just incredible dog. What kind of dog? Malinois, Malinois. Malinois, yeah. Malinois. Really neat dog. It was funny, right before they came out there, he was sleeping on my truck, like the hood of my truck, and Sergeant Can's like, you know, do you want us to come out and help? And in my mind, I'm thinking, yeah, put that thing to work, he's just napping, you know?
27:20 Speaker 02 And he was a cool dog. We all liked him. But he lived and Sergeant Cannon didn't unfortunately. And he was an incredibly brave man, too. He had, I think this was his third tour. I think he'd been to Iraq once and Afghanistan once before this. It might have even been his fourth tour. But he had been out at FOB Hit on the Syrian border and he requested to be, this is my understanding of it. He requested to be moved to Ramadi because they were, he was bored and he wanted to like fight. So he was an incredibly brave guy. He also did not have to be out there and he made that choice and deserves, you know, admiration for his courage. He was profoundly brave.
28:04 Speaker 02 And he died. And then I, me and a couple of other guys got wounded. For me, it was multiple bilateral femur fractures and my tibia was broken, both my hips, all the bones in my right hands. My right hand doesn't work very good. My radius and ulna and my right median nerve was transected at my wrist. So I don't really have much feeling through, through that part of my hand and like this, my fingers fused. My little sister calls me Captain Hook.
28:39 Speaker 02 I had brain injuries and some broken ribs and broken back and I was pretty busted up.
28:45 Tucker Carlson? Do you remember it going off, the noise?
28:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's funny. I remember the flash and the sound and then waking up on the ground. And there were bodies on top of me. I talked about this a little bit on Sean's. I should have done a better job describing it, but I, I could hear my first line leader Johnny yelling, you know, just like every other Mick kid. They just call you Mac, you know? So it's like, Mac, Mac, I can hear him. And I'm like trying to yell back at him and I'd have myself propped up on this elbow. I had like my left hand worked, but my left humerus was busted. And my right humerus worked, but then everything down here didn't work. So I was like kind of in this. And I had myself propped up and there was this pile of guts.
29:34 Speaker 02 Underneath me and when I was looking at that, I was thinking that I'd been blown in half. I mean, who else's guts would they be? And so I was like running an organ through my fingers, trying to see if I could feel it, sitting there thinking I'd been blown in half. I mean, we'd seen people get hurt really badly, but I'd never seen that. So I wasn't sure exactly what that would look like. And I was trying to figure out if it was like a pancreas or something, you know, and, you know, I felt an abdomen. So I'm just like winging it.
30:07 Tucker Carlson? You thought it was your pancreas?
30:09 Speaker 02 I did, yeah. And I also didn't even know if you could feel your organs in that way, you know, so I like, I didn't know if you really had external feeling on them.
30:18 Tucker Carlson? Most people have never had this experience.
30:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I was one of those. And eventually Johnny gets there and like I said, I'm kind of propped up and he, he started, what I didn't know was that there were like three bodies on top of me and that these organs belonged to a different person, Iraqi person. And he started removing the bodies and I could feel like a little bit of weight go off and then a little bit more and then those pulled out and then I could see my hip bones or the top of my hips, not the actual bones, but like my uniform. And then they rolled me over and my, my legs were cooked, as the kids would say, and you could tell
31:02 Speaker 02 because they were not, it was like jello, you know, moving around and your femurs, you know, your glutes and quads are so strong that if your femurs break bad enough, they just contract. So my femur was like as both of them were like, the leg was now like as wide, almost as it was long, like it just retracted like a slinky.
31:24 Tucker Carlson? Oh.
31:26 Speaker 02 Which might've been the only thing that kept me alive because I have, I mean, I can't even remember exactly how many holes it is, but between knee to hip on both quads is like 30 holes, something. So had I not had that, it sort of acted like an internal tourniquet and kept me from bleeding out probably. Cause when, when they got my uniform cut off, you could, every time my heart would beat, you could see the blood kind of ooze out. Um, of the through and throughs, I have some through and throughs and you could just, it was like, I always describe it as like squeezing a water bottle, but with rhythm, you know, and just kind of pour out like that. See this?
32:08 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I had no, my, my blood pressure was so low, they weren't, weren't giving me any, and it was good that they didn't, but they weren't giving me any pain meds or anything, you know, morphine will kill you if you don't have enough. Oh, yeah.
32:24 Speaker 02 So they started working on me and then life led me, or excuse me, medevac me to,
32:30 Speaker 02 uh, Faber Madi. What made the holes? What was the projectile that? Uh, ball bearings. Oh, wow. Yep. And probably came from Iran, you know, probably. I mean, we don't know that. This was a Sunni person, but a lot of the materials for that stuff was coming from. Ball bearings. Do you have any of them? Yeah, I've got, I think I pack around like 12 of them, uh, in my body still. And then I've had like three more cut out since I got home that have kind of like surfaced in different. Ball bearings? Yeah, straight up. Do you have them? With me? No, no, no, no. Did you keep them? Yeah, yeah. Well, not all of them that they cut out with, I didn't get a choice in like Flujah when they were cutting stuff out there, but at home, yeah, I think I have
33:13 Speaker 02 three or four that I've had cut out of like my forearms and my rear end and stuff like that. So I, like a little jar. How big are the ball bearings? Uh, like,
33:27 Speaker 02 like about the size of a pea is what they'd be. Wow. Yeah. I think we counted one time. I don't want to lie. Like mega buckshot. That's what it was. Yeah. It's like getting hit with, exactly. Yeah. It's exactly like that. And then there was one spot on my one quad where my right side, where you could about put your fist in the hole. And there's been confusion since day one about whether that was a gunshot from an AK or just more ball bearings could have really been either. Were there rifles going off too? Yeah, our IPs started just firing. I bet. So, and it's. Iraqi policeman. Yes, I'm sorry.
34:06 Tucker Carlson? So sometimes when people sell products on TV, I love this product, I use this product. There's the question in the mind of the viewer, does this guy really use the product? Does he really love the product? Would he keep the product at home? Ask my dogs. Yes. Now we are in a garage. Uh, I'm not gonna tell you where it is because again, this is prepping, but this is my garage. There's a gun safe and this is a part of my stockpile of ready hour. Completely real. The second I put it here, the second ready hour sent it to me, I felt peace of mind. Because no matter what happens, we're not going hungry in my house. I moved a lot of fishing gear out of the way to keep it in my garage. And ever since it's been here, I have felt the peace of mind that comes from knowing
34:50 Tucker Carlson? my family's not going hungry no matter what. Lastcountrysupply.com. Lastcountrysupply.com. It can be in your garage.
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35:23 Tucker Carlson? The peace of mind that comes with having it.
35:26 Speaker 02 And when that kind of thing happens, it's hard. Are they doing that intentionally or not? Uh, no. You know, but the best IP we had, uh,
35:37 Speaker 02 I don't want to say his name for fear of he died, but his family, um, he died out there with us. He was extremely brave, really good kid. He was like six, four, like 120 pounds. Iraqi? Yeah. He's the weirdest looking Iraqi you've ever seen. It's like, it's like running into Yao Ming, but in, you know, it's like your brain's trying to compute. Wait a second. He was a great, he was a great guy. I really liked him. I remember one time we were, uh, I don't even remember where we were at on an OP or something and we tried to teach each other the languages, you know? And he points to the tire on their technic, on their truck. And he says tire. And I was like, yeah, good job.
36:19 Speaker 02 You know, and he's like, no tire. I was like, wait, is that that's how you say it in Arabic? You know, this is like this bonding moment, you know? Like, yeah, dude.
36:30 Speaker 02 We were just all kids, you know, arm wrestling and screwing off and, you know, and punctuated every once in a while by war stuff, you know? And I think it's.
36:43 Speaker 02 I think that experience really matters. It's so easy to dehumanize people that you're fighting with at that level. And I think I was really blessed to have multiple experiences to remind me that they're all people. How long did it take you to recover from all that?
37:02 Speaker 02 They retired me about a year and a half later. And then it took probably another eight years to get to where I could run. I didn't think I was ever gonna be able to run again. And in, in the hospital. Which it took till you're almost 30? Yeah. Took like a decade to get better? Yeah, it did. I think I was 28 when I ran the first time or seven, maybe. Something like that. Might have been 29, whatever, whatever that year was.
37:34 Speaker 02 2012, maybe? I can't be right, whatever year it was.
37:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I could get around, but I, you know, I couldn't really walk or anything. I mean, I could walk, but not well, certainly not well for a 25 year old, you know?
37:52 Speaker 02 And then I finally got to get up on the mountain again. I packed a cane on my back because I thought, who knows what coming down is gonna be like, you know? And that felt really good to get up to a mountain lake and be like, holy shit, we did it. You know, after all this time, you know? And then I was coaching a little kid's baseball program. It was this girl that I was with. It was her son's team. So I was just helping and I was throwing BP to him and this kid hit a ball batting practice and this kid hit a ball to my glove hand side. And this is like eight years later or however many and I took a couple of steps that just felt different.
38:36 Speaker 02 Like they felt almost athletic, if that makes sense. And I dropped my glove and I just jogged. I was like, I think I can run, you know? And I ran around the bases and then I called some of my buddies from the war and Casey and Johnny and a couple others and Casey's like wears his emotion on his sleeve. So he starts crying, you know? And, uh, you know, I was like, go here feeling like sea biscuit or something, you know?
39:09 Tucker Carlson? Did you, I should have asked, so did you go immediately back to the West when you got out of the hospital?
39:14 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Yeah, they moved me back to my hometown and I got really lucky in that my civilian physical therapist and my civilian doctor were really great. I did that in, uh, in central Utah. The one guy, my civilian doctor, he was an MDDO. So he leaned away from drugs really hard, which was a blessing because I was, you know, leaving Walter Reed. They had me on some ridiculous amount of opioids, like 380 milligrams a day or something.
39:46 Tucker Carlson? How long were you there?
39:48 Speaker 02 Uh, four months.
39:50 Tucker Carlson? So you were on opioids for four months?
39:52 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, longer than that. Well, so in the, in Walter Reed, I take a step back.
39:59 Speaker 02 We, basically everybody who gets wounded over there was contracting this infection and they weren't sure. It was some bug that does not exist here. So they had us in quarantine. So I was in a nice, a quarantined ICU unit for three or four weeks because I couldn't leave ICU until one, I was stable and two, I could be in a wheelchair of some kind. And they couldn't do that without putting rods in my legs because I had external fixators on those big cage deals.
40:31 Speaker 02 And you can't get the rods until you clear the infection, you know? So they were trying to clear this infection and there was some question about whether they were even gonna be able to do that. I mean, who knew? And they finally got that cleared and then I developed gangrene.
40:48 Tucker Carlson? Oh, come on.
40:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, they were, I don't wanna crap on Walter Reed, but they were doing some. Some guys were doing their best and other guys were, were changing through and through wounds with a, like the packing with like a number two pencil and shit like that, you know?
41:06 Tucker Carlson? This in the United States at Walter Reed?
41:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, in DC. But a lot of them were really great people and I don't wanna crap on them. I mean, they helped me, put me back together and they did a pretty good job. Uh, but so then I got that infection, so I couldn't get rods then, you know, I'm just kinda stuck.
41:21 Tucker Carlson? So you got gangrene at Walter Reed?
41:24 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was horrific. And then I finally, they finally get rods in me.
41:31 Tucker Carlson? Picture David Frum's face when you're saying this, you know, just casually axis of evil. We're bringing democracy, no care at all for what it means for men from Southern Utah and like destroying their lives. It just, ah, makes me upset.
41:47 Speaker 02 And I was lucky. I mean, I could have lost my legs really easily, um, really easily.
41:52 Tucker Carlson? Did you get, I mean, how are your spirits? Did you get down?
41:56 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Yeah, I wrote a lot about that. You know, it was like a roller coaster experience at Walter Reed. They, to back up even one more step, just to kinda give an idea of how fragile everything was at the time. They, I first went to Landstuhl and my understanding, and this could be wrong.
42:16 Tucker Carlson? Based in Germany?
42:17 Speaker 02 Yes, they're, they have a big medical hospital there. And my understanding, and this could be wrong, but what was, what they would try to do in Landstuhl is really get somebody very stable and do preliminary surgeries and then send them to Walter Reed. But they did not do that with me. They were like, we you, we gotta get you to Walter Reed. So I was only in lawnmower for I less than a week, I think is what it was. And so I was in tough shape is the only reason I'm saying that. And you know, you're waiting. All I want to do is be able to go take a piss by myself, man. You know, you're a couple of days ago, you'd been a proud, young, former athlete and soldier. And now you're this, you're basically in hospice care, you know?
43:04 Speaker 02 And so, yeah, it starts to weigh on you. And I wanted to get rods in my legs so I could get a wheelchair and have some sense of independence.
43:14 Speaker 02 But I couldn't do that without clearing these infections. And then I finally get the rods in and they moved me up to a neuro ward next to some other guys that had had like the same bug before. And then they put like a label on your door. I think that's all necessary. I'm not, you know, you should say, hey, this guy had this weird bug. We don't want to spread it, you know? But I'm up there next to this other guy and things are now it's better because I can talk to a guy, you know, at least room to room. You know, we're kind of hollering at each other through the wall or, you know, the doorway and stuff. And then I had a pulmonary embolism and it collapsed. I think it was my left lung and then right back into surgery, emergency.
43:59 Speaker 02 You know, they had to decide whether to put one of those IVC filter deals.
44:05 Speaker 02 Inferior and your inferior vena cava, I think is what it is. I guess I'm not good at anatomy, largest vein in your body. And if it, it's like, if you think of like an umbrella without a skirt on it and then some extra wiring to work as a filter, that's what it is. But they would deploy it like this and then it had some kind of legs that would then open up and stick into the vessel to hold it there and it would break up blood clots. What they were trying to figure out is if I had had, because I had deep vein thrombosis already, which is like blood clots in your legs essentially. But they didn't, they weren't sure if I had had a clot originate in my lung or if it had traveled to my lung from my legs. So that's why they had to put that in.
44:51 Speaker 02 And then, you know, that was another, I can't even remember how long before I finally got into a position where.
45:00 Speaker 02 They could even think about walking. Uh, and one day my, I'm pretty sure I wrote about this too. So I'm sorry if I'm retelling stories, but, uh, an uncle of mine came out and he was really close to me and we used to bow hunt, fish together. And then he got drafted by the Royals out of high school. And so he's kind of a neat guy and I always looked up to him, you know? And he came out to visit and he, I told him, I was like, they, they don't think I'm going to be able to walk, you know? And he said, bullshit. And I got a new young surgeon assigned to our team. Cause at that stage you've, you know, you've got like multiple trauma going on.
45:43 Speaker 02 It's like an actual surgical team that's like planning out what to work on next and triaging and well, this guy got assigned, uh, on the ortho side. And he was like 27 and right out of med school and really smart and just kind of a go getter type guy. And he said, I think you can do it, but you're going to have to get on your feet like now. We don't want to risk atrophying your muscles anymore. And you know, you're just going to have to start trying. So my physical therapist at Walter Reed, his name was Solomon. And he was like this giant black guy. He played defensive end or something with Phil Simms on the New York Giants. And then he just did this as a job, I think mostly to be a charitable guy.
46:28 Speaker 02 He was a really neat guy. Uh, so we go down there to PT and he said, you can walk today? And I said, yeah, let's do it, you know? So he helped me up and my bones, I'm like, my right hand is all in this cast thing. And then I've got a, like a soft cast they put on my humerus because they were trying to let me have at least one ambulatory limb. So I just put up my arms on those parallel bars and however long those are 10 feet or whatever, and walked down and then back and I was like shaking, you know? I mean, it hurt like hell.
47:07 Speaker 02 And anyway, I got to the end and then Solomon helped me to, in my wheelchair and he got my arms draped around him like a prom date or something.
47:21 Speaker 02 He sat me down and that was my first time I walked and yeah, and so it's like the peaks and valleys. At that point, you're, you know, you're riding really high feeling like I'm gonna make it kind of thing, you know?
47:34 Tucker Carlson? What's it like to be in a hospital for four months?
47:36 Speaker 02 Oh my gosh, it was the worst. And I was just thinking, I think the blood clot might have been right after that. Anyway, uh, it's terrible. And I'm from a cow town, you know? And so I look outside and it's drab. And that area of DC is like Soviet block.
47:56 Tucker Carlson? Bethesda, Maryland. Yeah, it's the government built it all.
48:00 Speaker 02 Right.
48:01 Tucker Carlson? Right after, during and after the Second World War, and they did a terrible job.
48:05 Speaker 02 It's funny, like even we couldn't learn the lesson of Potomac villages.
48:11 Tucker Carlson? No.
48:12 Speaker 02 We just did it unashamedly.
48:13 Tucker Carlson? We copied it.
48:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:15 Tucker Carlson? Just made Walter Gropius in charge of America's architecture. No, I know. It's, it's in all that war is what did it. And you're not invited to think about what that means, but I'm not fully aware of what it means, but there's something, something about that war totally destroyed the spirit of the country, the good war that is. But anyway, sorry. So, but you're stuck there for four months. That's a, what do you do? Like, what's your day like?
48:42 Speaker 02 PT, occupational therapy, watch Dukes of Hazzard's and King of the Hill.
48:50 Speaker 02 You know, one time, Brian Dennehy came and
48:55 Tucker Carlson? The actor.
48:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, really genuinely great guy. He sat with me for hours. We were talking about the Civil War and he said, uh, have you ever read Shelby Foote's trilogy? And I said, no. And he said, I'll be right back. And he went to a bookstore and brought me the trilogy, which was really neat.
49:12 Tucker Carlson? Brian Dennehy, the actor, shows up at your bedside and then buys you Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy?
49:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was, it was really great. So I had something to read. So that was, you know, helpful.
49:21 Tucker Carlson? But you had to wait for Brian Dennehy to bring it to you?
49:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was great. And I don't want to crap on too many people. Orrin Hatch was very helpful despite our political disagreements. He was a very kind man to me.
49:33 Tucker Carlson? He was a nice man.
49:34 Speaker 02 He was.
49:34 Tucker Carlson? And very connected.
49:36 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was able to get things done and a good guy. Um, yeah. So there, you know, there were people that were coming around, uh, Trying to boost the spirits. Brad Paisley, you know, his, his stepfather came one day and just sat with us for, you know, hours just because it's nice to talk to a normal person.
49:57 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
49:58 Speaker 02 You know, uh, he was a wonderful man. Yeah. So it wasn't all bad, but I did sure as shit did not want to be there. You know, I wanted to go home. Uh, I missed my grandpa, you know? And, uh, I just missed home and I don't, I enjoy, God blessed us with tremendous beauty out there and I try to appreciate it, you know? And I wanted to see it again.
50:24 Tucker Carlson? So what'd you do when you got home? So at this point, you're in your 21 or 22?
50:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. I, uh,
50:33 Tucker Carlson? And the army severs your term. I mean, they discharge you, I guess?
50:38 Speaker 02 Not yet. They, oh, uh, eventually, yeah, they retired me. Before I retired, I was basically just doing outpatient care at the civilian hospital. And I was lucky, our, my PT guy, he used to be the PT guy for like the Olympic wrestling team and I loved wrestling growing up. So it was a good connection. And, and of course he's good at what he's doing and has seen a lot of young guys hurt pretty bad. So that's helpful as well. And, uh, so it's just like that and being depressed as hell every day.
51:08 Tucker Carlson? You're a professional patient at this point. You're still a soldier technically.
51:12 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
51:13 Tucker Carlson? But your job is to go to PT and,
51:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was not good. It was not good. Yeah. And in, in, in retrospect, that program was not a good idea. As much as I wanted to get out of there, it would have been,
51:32 Speaker 02 um, I think this bore out in the data. Like, I don't think it was just me, but I would have been a lot more mentally healthy if they would have just forced me to stay, uh, you know, doing outpatient stuff at Walter Reed because then at least I'm around guys who get it instead of like my family that's, how could they possibly? It's not their fault. I think that would have been better, but, but certainly I was happy to be out of there. So, yeah.
52:02 Tucker Carlson? How long did it take you to get right mentally?
52:10 Speaker 02 A long time. Quit quitting pain meds was the biggest thing.
52:14 Tucker Carlson? What was that like?
52:19 Speaker 02 Uh, realizing how bad it was fucking my, I'm sorry for cursing. Um.
52:24 Tucker Carlson? I think it's warranted in this case. You're allowed.
52:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's a certain family I'm not too thrilled with either. The, um. Realizing that it was a prob, like really messing my mental health up was motivation enough. And then my doctor was really great. He.
52:42 Tucker Carlson? What was it? What was it doing to your mental health? The opioids and the family you're referring to has got to be the Sacklers.
52:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, enough people are mad at me right now that I don't know how many more fights I want to pay, but.
52:55 Tucker Carlson? Well, if you can't criticize America's richest drug merchants, then like what, I mean, at a certain point, you have to be like, I'm, I'm sorry. It's just true. Right?
53:04 Speaker 02 I had two friends die from opioids while we were recovering, you know, they drink some alcohol and die. Cause you know, you're, it represses your ability to breathe.
53:14 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
53:14 Speaker 02 Or suppresses rather, and then drink and pass out and die. So.
53:22 Speaker 02 Um, I was lucky that didn't happen, but so, yeah, I don't, I don't care.
53:27 Tucker Carlson? But what does it do to your spirit? That's the one thing I don't think, we talk about that very often. I, I had, I was on opioids for one day for back surgery. A few years ago and not enough to get dependent, but the first thing I noticed is it completely, it just, it, it transformed me inside. Like it crushes your spirit. That's one day of it and you were on it for how long?
53:53 Speaker 02 Years.
53:56 Speaker 02 You're not, you're definitely not the same person. You know, it's linked. It's. I'm, I have read, I don't allegedly also linked to this suicide epidemic.
54:08 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
54:10 Speaker 02 It, it makes you a different person and I.
54:14 Speaker 02 I try to be very careful about not pretending to be more pious than I am, but I do believe in spiritual war. And I do think that there is really something to ingesting stuff like that. Like, like, I mean, something real, not just some chemical changes in your head.
54:32 Tucker Carlson? I couldn't agree more. Can you flesh that out a little bit?
54:39 Speaker 02 Well,
54:42 Speaker 02 yeah, I think you should be very careful
54:49 Speaker 02 tempering with, like, allowing things into your body. You know, the, the term spirits, that originated because my understanding of this is that that term came from, people thought you were putting spirits into your body.
55:04 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
55:05 Speaker 02 And you probably are.
55:08 Tucker Carlson? Now, you're speaking of liquor, alcohol.
55:10 Speaker 02 Right.
55:10 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, well, there's absolutely no question.
55:13 Speaker 02 So opioids are just that in a different form, is what I would think. And, you know, people get mad at me for this, but I think the same thing about other drugs. Like, if you're communicating with some entity because of something you've taken, I would, I think, I would take that pretty seriously because you, you probably are.
55:32 Tucker Carlson? People hate it when you say that. I've done those drugs. So I feel like I have, as a child, so I feel like I have some authority on it. And I was talking to a friend of mine, someone I really, really, really like, the other day about it. And he was talking about,
55:49 Tucker Carlson? you know, whatever, a trip, taking hallucinogens, for good reasons, by the way, but, um, he said, I was visited by demons. And, and I said, Do you think that they were real? And he goes, Oh, no, they're real.
56:06 Tucker Carlson? You know, I'm not a, I try not to be a judge, judger, um, cause I have no basis for judging other people, period. However, I wanted to say, well, if you think they're real, then you know, maybe don't fuck with them at all. Like, that's not good. That's scary. It's really scary.
56:22 Speaker 02 It's terrifying. Yeah. I mean, even, I went through an atheistic period. Uh, I'm deeply, genuinely deeply ashamed of that period of my life. I think I was mad at God more than not believing.
56:39 Speaker 02 Sarah from Rose writes some stuff about this. Um, I can't remember where, but he says the, it's not that the atheist disbelieves in God, it's that he believes in God and doesn't understand him and is sort of therefore angry.
56:54 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
56:56 Speaker 02 Certainly described me.
56:58 Tucker Carlson? Kind of prefer, I feel like the atheists have a better shot than the, than people who just don't think about it.
57:05 Speaker 02 Sarah from Rose said, not that I want to speak for anybody here, but he says, in a follow-up to that, he says something to the effect of those people are actually more your brother than the people whose Christ is only on their lips.
57:19 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, that, what do I know? But that sounds right to me.
57:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:25 Tucker Carlson? So what was the effect of the opioids on your spirit?
57:29 Speaker 02 Oh, I'm sorry. You keep trying to get me to answer that.
57:30 Tucker Carlson? No, no, not at all. I just think it's interesting and I rarely hear people talk about it. I, there's a lot of talk about the effect of opioids on your respiratory system. You know, just dark can work. I think it's all important and I'm not mocking it. However, the condition of your spirit may be more important than anything, and I never hear that discussed.
57:48 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, I, you're not the same person. And I mean, that's what I mean with like bringing things into yourself. We, we use euphemisms like that. Like, well, I, I wasn't the same guy at that period of my life. Well, think about what that actually means. Like, what do you mean you weren't the same guy? You know, if you believe in body, soul, spirit, or, or body, soul, mind, however you want to think of it, what do you mean when you say you were not the same person? Because like, did your soul leave and go somewhere else? What do you actually mean? And I think what you mean is that you have
58:26 Speaker 02 You have given controls, the control of you over to someone or something else. I mean, that's the way I view it. And that, you know, can be wrong and I'm, it would sound like an idiot or whatever, but that is the way that I view it.
58:41 Tucker Carlson? You don't sound like an idiot at all, and you're clearly not wrong. And that's like a central piece of Christian theology. I mean, Paul says at great length in Romans, this is Paul, this is like the hero of the early church. This is like one of the, after Jesus, the founder of Christianity. And he's like, I do all these terrible things that I don't, I don't want to do. And that's because the sin, what he described as sin is like taking control of me, like something from outside came into me and is making the decisions. He says that. And I, I don't think that's far from the experience of every person who pays attention to his own behavior. Like you do kind of like, what is this exactly?
59:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, you always want to figure out what's animating you.
59:17 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
59:18 Speaker 02 And if you don't think about that, you're probably being driven by something. There's probably a reason you're not taking a step back to think about it, you know? So when you say, what does it do to your spirit? I said, I really believe that it's you've, you've given control over to something else. And so it changes you in every way. You know, you become dishonest, angry, bitter, deeply depressed. And when I say angry, I mean at God. You know, there's a line in there somewhere where he says, even the devil's prey. I think that's kind of like that. It's like, why would, what is the, what are the devils praying to God for?
1:00:02 Speaker 02 Because if we believe in a redemptive God, surely, and again, I don't want to get things wrong and God forgive me if I am, but if we believe in a redemptive God, then they're not praying to ask for forgiveness, for else maybe they would be able to get it. I don't know. So what are they saying in their prayers? Well, probably.
1:00:23 Speaker 02 They're probably bitter, you know, saying, cannot believe you did this to me, or whatever it may be. I don't want to speak for them either. And I want to be careful here. But I think the source of the bitterness, the root of it, is being angry at God. And I think opioids do that. And the minute I got off-
1:00:42 Tucker Carlson? Do opioids make you angry at God?
1:00:44 Speaker 02 I do think that. I do. And drinking too much, I think, does it. And-
1:00:48 Tucker Carlson? Definitely.
1:00:49 Speaker 02 You know, anything that, anything that makes you not you is gonna lead to that eventually. In fact, like all sin, they say, again, I'm not, I don't want to pretend to know things because I don't. But I think that the end result of all sin is ultimately anger at God. And what you're mad about is knowing what you have done, you know?
1:01:17 Speaker 02 So getting off of those-
1:01:18 Tucker Carlson? Let me just add a vehement amen to that. I totally agree.
1:01:22 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:01:22 Tucker Carlson? And I don't understand anything either, that's for sure. And may I be punished for pretending I do because I don't. But what you're saying is, I believe that's true.
1:01:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:32 Tucker Carlson? So you get off opioids, what happens then?
1:01:35 Speaker 02 It was crazy. What about?
1:01:41 Speaker 02 Hmm, I don't want to misremember here. Like, 10 days to two weeks later,
1:01:48 Speaker 02 it was so weird. Genuinely felt like a cloud had been lifted from my vision. Like, like the world felt and looked different to me two weeks later. And I don't know how to describe it beyond, it just, everything felt, to some degree, pretty again. And like, my mind actually worked again, rather than just thought negative things all the time. I could, I could like, think about the things I cared about. And-
1:02:18 Tucker Carlson? How long were you on them, do you think?
1:02:21 Speaker 02 Hmm.
1:02:24 Speaker 02 Boy, probably-
1:02:30 Speaker 02 Probably like five years.
1:02:31 Tucker Carlson? Oh gosh.
1:02:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:02:34 Tucker Carlson? That's the first half of your twenties.
1:02:35 Speaker 02 Yeah. When you're the dumbest person you're ever gonna be on top of that. I had gotten to where I was taking way, way less, but I still like had, you know, I had those hooks.
1:02:48 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:02:49 Speaker 02 And then just getting rid of them all together was totally life changing. And within like two years, all of a sudden I felt like the same person again. And I usually connect that. It's funny. We're having this conversation because I'd never thought about it in these terms. I, I usually connect that to being able to run and hike again and go and bow hunting and, and I wonder if it wasn't actually like the time away from that thing. I'm sure, I'm sure it mattered.
1:03:18 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I, it transforms you into a different person, totally different person.
1:03:22 Tucker Carlson? You said that you lost two friends from OD, accidental, I guess OD. But you must've known a lot of other people who were also on opioids for years.
1:03:34 Tucker Carlson? How, did they recover?
1:03:35 Speaker 02 No.
1:03:36 Tucker Carlson? Oh gosh.
1:03:37 Speaker 02 I know one person. And I don't want to give too much information because I don't want to like hurt his feelings or something, but he looks like a different human being now. I mean, it's, it's been so long. I saw a picture of him recently and I hadn't seen him for a couple of years. And I, I had to look at it for like five minutes because I, it just didn't even look like the same guy, you know? I have a, another
1:04:05 Speaker 02 family member that went through the same experience, looks, it looks like a totally different human being now. The one friend who
1:04:13 Tucker Carlson? Physically?
1:04:13 Speaker 02 Physically, like face, you know, like a different guy.
1:04:17 Tucker Carlson? What are, pardon my ignorance, like what are the changes like for long-term opioid use?
1:04:23 Speaker 02 I don't know. The, the look on them is the like shrunken. You know, their eyes look different, like deeply sad.
1:04:33 Tucker Carlson? So it's not just a weight loss or gain. It's like deeper than that.
1:04:36 Speaker 02 I think so. Like this, like the spark is gone, you know?
1:04:40 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:04:42 Speaker 02 It's, they're horrible drugs. I, I made my daughter, when she was like 13, I made her sign a contract. We notarized it and everything.
1:04:54 Tucker Carlson? So typically, you know, you clean your rifles when the boyfriend comes over. This is the next level beyond that. No rights contract.
1:05:02 Speaker 02 And it's in my gun safe, actually. But I made her sign this contract that said she will not do any drugs, drink any alcohol, or have any premarital sex till 21. And if she's able to do that, then I'll just give her $5,000 in cash. But if she's able to take that same thing till she's, I cannot remember whether I put 23 or 25, then I'll just give her $10,000 cash. You know, to a 13 year old that, I mean, that's a lot of money to me. But to a 13 year old, that's like you're offering them, you know?
1:05:34 Speaker 02 And the reason for that is I've seen how dark that world is and how many people, when it gets your hooks, those hooks in you at a young age, it just ruins kids. I mean, ruins them. Some of them never ever recover and they're, were otherwise going to be, they're good people at root and they were otherwise going to be great, productive members of society. And, and now they're just not, you know?
1:06:01 Tucker Carlson? Just the anguish, the suffering that it causes.
1:06:04 Speaker 02 And you've talked about this before, but the, I mean, you, you can, this stuff is born out in data. You can see the death, deaths of despair across rural America.
1:06:15 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. You know, you drive through rural America, we both live in rural places and you see in people's houses, you know, there are certain houses that are just tidy, squared away. The cordwood is at right angles and like, you can tell these are happy, productive people. And, but there are as many homes with, you know, broken children's toys on the front lawn and that are just a disaster. And, you know, they're, everyone's poor. It's not a matter of, but like those, you know, that's like depression, the disorganization, the chaos. I think that comes from drugs.
1:06:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. Although my yard is a wreck right now. I'm ashamed of it, but I have three young boys and I've been caught up in some other BS for a minute.
1:07:05 Tucker Carlson? Well, but there's a difference between like the happy chaos of small children and the kind of, you know, multi-year, just like, I just don't give a shit at all. Do you know what I mean?
1:07:18 Speaker 02 I know exactly what you mean.
1:07:19 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, the not caring is a sign of drugs. I've always thought.
1:07:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, deep depression for sure.
1:07:25 Tucker Carlson? So what'd you do after? So by this point, I mean, you said it was two years before your head fully cleared.
1:07:32 Speaker 02 No. Oh, yeah.
1:07:33 Tucker Carlson? After you got off dope. So that's, I'm just trying to do the simple math here. So you're 20 when you get wounded, right?
1:07:40 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
1:07:41 Tucker Carlson? That's 27.
1:07:42 Speaker 02 I know. Yeah. And I had a divorce scattered in there and, you know, a string of broken relationships and, and then I finally started feeling really good and
1:07:57 Speaker 02 life was going well. And then I met a new girl and she's wonderful and my entire life changed. I, everything, I mean, it was already on the path or else it wouldn't have worked with her. Uh, cause she's like a well put together person. And then I was like back to living the life of my youth, you know? When I first started dating her, I went down, my old man has back problems. It's like every person that's rode colts their whole life. Uh, he needed help. And I remember when he called me, he had this buckskin horse he needed to rode and he's like, well, you're younger. And I was like, well, my body's in better shape than yours.
1:08:38 Speaker 02 But I wanted to do it. So I go down there and, uh, and this is now I'm doing good in life and at least mentally. And, uh, I get on this colt and we're doing good. And what my old man didn't tell me was that he had a, he would get scared when you'd go to get off. But my old man didn't want me to know that because he wanted me to kind of solve the problem for him. And so I go to swing off and he starts bucking and it twists my knee pretty good. And anyway, that was my first time back on a colt like that. And then we go sit in the bunkhouse and have like a couple beers and you're just feeling really good, you know, like, wow, I'm like back to my real life. And so then I started riding colts again and.
1:09:24 Speaker 02 Back to normal. And that's where I'm at now. And I was guiding hunts for a while and elk and deer and help with some lions in Utah a little bit and occasional bear hunt and just, you know, back being a normal kid from the Mountain West. And it's great. It's like really-
1:09:43 Tucker Carlson? So how did you go? So that's, thank you for taking the time to tell that story. How'd you go from there to like being on Sean Ryan's show and like becoming a figure of, you know, public adulation and, you know, attacks as well? Like you've become this like polarizing figure. How'd that happen?
1:10:05 Speaker 02 I, there's two pieces to it. I got involved in public lands advocacy around 2015 or 16. There was this, there had been this push, the public lands initiative, which was like a different version of the same thing. And like Rob Bishop, who I think is otherwise a good guy. And, you know, some other names were involved in that. And I, I just got involved with some organizations and learn more about it. And the more, the more I've learned, the more my opinions have shifted, you know, more into the direction of conservation, not less. So that's kind of the root of that. And then I spent like the last five years on Twitter arguing with people.
1:10:50 Speaker 02 I mean, they will write, they would write me like horrible emails over the public lands thing. And these are right wing people.
1:11:01 Tucker Carlson? You're pretty liberal, I assume.
1:11:02 Speaker 02 Yeah. It's just incredible. It's like my own side, very angry at me.
1:11:07 Tucker Carlson? Oh, I've been there, yeah.
1:11:09 Speaker 02 And then something flipped this time. Oh, but I should tell you how the Twitter platform, I had been doing keynotes for a long time, a source of income. And I enjoy doing, depending on the group. But it made up about 25% of our annual at the time.
1:11:29 Speaker 02 And I had guided this guy from a big construction company in California, really good guy guided him on a hunt in Southern Utah, got to be friends with them. And then he wanted me to speak as a keynote at this construction conference in Las Vegas is a real big one. So I'd been booked for that. And then this freaking COVID thing starts happening. And it's evolving in the news in real time. And I'm supposed to leave on like Saturday morning to go speak on Monday. And he texts me at like 5pm West Coast time on Friday and says, bro, they canceled the whole thing.
1:12:12 Speaker 02 Like not just speeches, but like the entire conference. And it's hard to blame anybody for doing that at the time, given the way Yeah. the machines were or the mechanisms were turning. So I had been very careful with my right wing opinions publicly for years, because I wanted these people to still hire me to, I mean, you know how the, you know, that, you know, bankers and things like this, they don't, they don't like people with opinions like me. So they don't hire people like me. No. Speak to a lot of tech organizations and you can about imagine how that would go if you're a right wing. In fact, one time, I'm sorry, I'm doing the Trump weave.
1:12:56 Speaker 02 One time, a gal had hired me and she's a really wonderful person. She comes up to me after a speech and says, this is really great. Everybody's really happy. But could you lean less on the like, you have to learn how to pull yourself up message? Because that sounds too much like bootstrapping and that's a right wing thing. I'm serious.
1:13:21 Speaker 02 So that made me paranoid about sharing my actual opinions on anything. So I would never talk publicly and then this COVID thing happens. And I had created a Twitter account while we were night, we were night cabin in the fall on the fall herd. And we, this friend's ranch, they have like a Frito truck that they built into like a cabin. Like they took the lid or the top off and like made a caving cabin out of it. So we're in the Frito truck and I create a Twitter and I get on there and I say something to a left wing politician. And it kind of got some traction. I was like, oh crap, I deleted it, you know, because I'd made it with my real name.
1:14:02 Speaker 02 And I did, I thought I could just like slide in there slowly, but that was in, you know, like September. So I do, I deleted all my tweets and then just didn't even use it anymore because I was scared that I wasn't going to get hired. Well, when this COVID thing happened, that one got canceled and then the next one and the next one. And then, you know, you start getting emails. It's like all seven or eight that we had scheduled for the year got canceled like within a week's time. And so I just got on Twitter. I told my wife, I said, you know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to tell people what I really think about things. And somehow that grew into, it's not a large platform, but a platform. And then you end up on Sean Ryan, you know, like.
1:14:42 Tucker Carlson? Interesting. So this is one of the, I'm, I would just say on the outset, I'm completely a hundred percent on your side. Probably for the same reasons on this question, but it is one of those rare issues where it doesn't break down along left and right at all.
1:14:59 Tucker Carlson? And I probably should have asked you to explain what the issue is.
1:15:03 Tucker Carlson? An hour and a half into this or whatever. I haven't even asked you. What is the public land? What's the, what's the divide on public lands? What are public lands? What does some people seek to do with public lands? And what's your view of that?
1:15:15 Speaker 02 We, so.
1:15:20 Speaker 02 This one organization I was with for a while, I implored them to not let this become a liberals who hunt kind of thing, or else we're gonna lose. It made, we were, they were trying to evangelize the left on public land protection measures, which is just dumb. Because at the time, there was zero aggression coming from the left. It was all from the right. And I said, just let me message this. I understand right wing people. What's, I am one. Like, let me do this. And they wouldn't. So I think a sizable portion of blame belongs on the left for the way they've treated public lands over the years. What they have done is, they, first of all, their central ethos is just, they don't like you.
1:16:04 Tucker Carlson? Oh, 100%. They don't want you on the land.
1:16:07 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:16:08 Tucker Carlson? Or your dogs on the land. They don't, they don't, oh, I have dealt with it.
1:16:11 Speaker 02 Yeah. They want to build like a Truman Show, and you can get on like a electric train and look at it or something.
1:16:20 Tucker Carlson? Right.
1:16:23 Speaker 02 And then the right wants to sell it. And, and so that's kind of the crux.
1:16:30 Tucker Carlson? That's nice. That's so, oh, that's so good. The left wants to turn nature into a Truman Show experience where you get an electric train and view it, and the right just wants to sell it. That is like the most, that's just perfect.
1:16:46 Speaker 02 Well, and we, when I say we, I mean better men from older times figured out the correct compromise to this problem. And it's basically what we have as a status quo right now.
1:16:56 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:16:57 Speaker 02 The multiple use mandate, you know?
1:16:59 Tucker Carlson? And what is that?
1:17:01 Speaker 02 That got established in 76 under FLYPMO, which is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 76. But that had rolled lots of older conservation laws into one, into kind of one thing.
1:17:17 Speaker 02 And establish a very clear multiple use mandate. In fact, I think it's the very first paragraph of the bill. And the multiple use mandate says this, these lands are held in trust for the American people for hunting, recreating, grazing, and extraction of all forms, just whenever it makes sense. I mean, we can't go clear cut the redwoods. I don't, I don't think anyone would even, well, people would advocate, certain people would advocate for that, but I don't think anyone's doing that right now. But there are other places that we should be logging and we can, you know, figure this out.
1:17:52 Tucker Carlson? You can manage the forest.
1:17:54 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:17:55 Tucker Carlson? And by the way, you should, it's a better forest when it's managed sense. I mean, I have a lot of experiences. It's like, it's great.
1:18:01 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:18:02 Tucker Carlson? If it's done wisely, prudently, like it's good.
1:18:05 Speaker 02 Exactly. And maybe the best example of what you're talking about here is the whole spotted owl stuff.
1:18:11 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
1:18:14 Speaker 02 They label, they label the spot. So there's the endangered species act of, I think, 73 Nixon signed it. And we basically put into the, we put into effect some of the most forward thinking in, in this kind of way. I hate, I hate how the left has ruined useful words.
1:18:36 Tucker Carlson? Oh, I know.
1:18:37 Speaker 02 But we instantiated very powerful protections on the, the main goal is we don't let species die here because we as a people think that that would be a sin because God made them. And that's the way I view it. And I think that's what, that's how Nixon thought. Well, the spotted owl comes in and the claim, so they made it threatened and the claim was that this owl needed old growth in order to survive. It couldn't survive in second growth or new growth. And second growth is like something that's been cut down, replanted, and then.
1:19:16 Tucker Carlson? Right. After you whack the forest, this is what comes up. It's very thick and.
1:19:19 Speaker 02 Yep. Yep. And they had said that they can't survive that way on and on. Well, the loggers were saying, we see these things in second growth all the time. What the hell are you talking about? And so then we end up with, I believe it's called the Northwest Forest Plan. And that was in the early eighties, if I'm remembering correctly, or late eighties when that happened, if I'm remembering correctly. And that locked up something like 56 million acres and just killed timber towns all through Washington and Oregon and had an effect on northern Idaho and destroyed.
1:19:50 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, western Montana. Yeah.
1:19:52 Speaker 02 And then it turned out down the road that the loggers were right. That spotted owl was living in the second growth stuff. And it actually was not the harvest that was killing off. It was the some other kind of owl whose name escapes me was out competing it.
1:20:11 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, it was intra owl competition.
1:20:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, and it was an invasive owl.
1:20:16 Tucker Carlson? Of course. Probably a Chinese owl.
1:20:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, right. I know there are some loggers who think they did that on purpose. And knowing the way, seeing the way, I don't want to be too conspiratorial, but it would not shock me if one day we learned that people were doing that on purpose because what they actually hated was loggers.
1:20:37 Tucker Carlson? Oh, I know.
1:20:37 Speaker 02 They don't even love trees. They just hate loggers.
1:20:40 Tucker Carlson? Oh, they don't love trees.
1:20:41 Speaker 02 No.
1:20:42 Tucker Carlson? They'll cut down the trees to put a solar farm in, in a second.
1:20:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:20:46 Tucker Carlson? In places where the sun doesn't shine very much. No, they hate trees because they hate God and they hate God's creation, of course. It's never about saving nature. They're destroying nature. They're spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to manage the weather and poisoning the, you know, it's like, these are the enemies of nature. These are the offshore wind farm people.
1:21:09 Speaker 02 Which, yeah, those wreak havoc.
1:21:10 Tucker Carlson? Oh, my gosh, on the fishery, of course. They don't care. So they're not for nature and don't ever allow a professional environmentalist to tell you he loves nature, you know? I mean, I'm sure there are some who do, but, but in general, the environmental lobby is opposed to the environment, you know?
1:21:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally. Exceptions and rules, right? And the exception doesn't make the rule. Well.
1:21:39 Speaker 02 So that's kind of where we where we're at. But then if you look at what happened here more recently, and this is important for understanding how we got to this new push for sell offs around 2016 or so, a lot was happening right then because P L I and some other things. But around then, uh, some environmental groups really born out of scientists at universities who actually do care, regardless of what people try to tell you, a lot of those people actually do care. I mean, they've recovered all kinds of species because of these people, you know, Gila trout and black footed ferret and the greater sage grouse. You know, these people
1:22:22 Speaker 02 do care that while they come up with a science based management plan for this because the environmental groups were pushing and saying, you can't do any oil and gas, oil and gas extraction in sage grouse country will kill off the sage grouse. Well, these scientists come up with this plan and say, don't list the, don't list these things as threatened. What if you, Mr. Oil and Gas Company, give us, you know, work with us on this plan? We think if you do it this way, it can be done without just killing off the sage grouse. So the oil and gas companies give some concessions and then they do. And what do you know? Like,
1:23:02 Speaker 02 they worked. And yeah, oil and gas is still being extracted and the sage grouse have recovered.
1:23:08 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, there's really good sage grouse, something. Yeah, for sure.
1:23:11 Speaker 02 So we now, we have people who can solve these problems. But if you look at the way the right wing, the tools that they use, or the levers that they use to kind of pry on the right to get them behind sell offs is like, well, you're going to get locked out of it by this thing or that thing. They're going to come spotted out you, you know? Well, we figured out a solution to that. And as long as we keep doing that, there's just absolutely no reason to give up our birthright.
1:23:42 Tucker Carlson? So what is the idea? About selling federal lands, like what, I mean, there was a recent proposal, which I think more than any other person you killed by bringing attention to it, you're really hated by some people for that. But just leaving the people out of it, like, what was the idea? What was the proposal?
1:24:02 Speaker 02 It changed a bunch of times, but the proposal was, the way it was being sold was, hey, we're just trying to get rid of 0.5% of this land. But that's not how it was originally written. Originally, it was like a mandatory sell off of 0.5% of the land and then like 249 million other acres to be evaluated, something like that. Which means that's a floor with no ceiling. Now, why do they want to sell it off?
1:24:36 Speaker 02 My gut tells me minerals, but I don't know.
1:24:40 Tucker Carlson? Sell it off to whom?
1:24:41 Speaker 02 Well, I don't know. They're not telling you. And we do a lot of oil and gas and mineral extraction on public lands right now. But a thing that I think viewers need to understand is when they do it on public land, there's a royalty paid back to both state and federal government. But if you own the mineral rights or the subsurface rights altogether of your property, you're not paying a royalty. I'm sure you're paying taxes, but you're not paying a royalty whatsoever.
1:25:14 Tucker Carlson? How? Well, how does that work?
1:25:17 Speaker 02 Well, it's if you own the rights. I mean, this is like,
1:25:21 Tucker Carlson? Private land you're talking about?
1:25:22 Speaker 02 Private land, I'm sorry. Yes.
1:25:23 Tucker Carlson? Okay, right. Of course, right. If you own the mineral rights, you own the minerals.
1:25:28 Speaker 02 Well, and so if you're, the original thing was, we're trying to balance, I mean, that's how they got it in a budget reconciliation bill, right? Is we're trying to balance this budget, we need a little cash flow here. That's what this is for. Well, why would you sell the mineral rights then? Wouldn't you keep the mineral rights if what you were trying to do is solve the debt problem? Wouldn't you keep that asset on your portfolio?
1:25:50 Tucker Carlson? Well, yeah.
1:25:52 Speaker 02 And they didn't. So I think that, I think there are
1:25:55 Tucker Carlson? They didn't? So they were going to sell the land with the mineral rights? So that means the state and federal governments would never benefit from the extraction past the sale?
1:26:07 Speaker 02 That was what the, that is how the final iteration read to me and I think to everybody else that, you know, plus it's a 900 page bill, so you're feeding it to ChatGPT, you know, and trying to figure out where this stuff is. And I think the, most of the public land stuff was on like page 202 or something.
1:26:25 Tucker Carlson? So what would, wow, that's interesting. So that, I mean, that kind of proves that it's not about solving the debt with sale of public resources.
1:26:37 Speaker 02 No, and that they used a term fair market value in there. Well, on a lot of these, I mean, you've been to Southern Utah. On a lot of these chunks that they were trying to sell off, the fair market value is like 500 an acre. I mean, you're not gonna
1:26:54 Tucker Carlson? 500 an acre?
1:26:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, it's alkali soil with like almost nothing as far as a bunch grasses. It supports an ecosystem. But it, you know, to run, to make it produce, if you're thinking in terms of GDP, which I sometimes I feel like this is all those people are capable of. This is unproductive and
1:27:15 Tucker Carlson? Right, unless you're a lizard farmer.
1:27:17 Speaker 02 Right, yeah, right, yeah.
1:27:22 Speaker 02 So fair market, so that establishes that it's definitely not about the debt. Because you're either pulling money out of the coffers or selling it off for next to nothing. So this is not about the debt. It's about something else. And this is why I think minerals at one level or another.
1:27:36 Tucker Carlson? Was it, was there any restriction on who could buy it?
1:27:42 Speaker 02 They had said, I'm trying, you know, the, there was like seven iterations of that. And I'm trying to remember what the last one said about that. But I don't think so. I don't think there was any kind of guardrail.
1:27:56 Speaker 02 And I think Utah has like 34,000 acres owned by the CCP already. I read that.
1:28:03 Tucker Carlson? Seriously?
1:28:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's true, but I read it on Twitter, so it has to be.
1:28:09 Tucker Carlson? But there is foreign ownership of land in Utah.
1:28:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, in Canada, I think they own, I think they're the largest foreign owner of agricultural land like Tullible in the US. And then Saudi owns a freaking ton of stuff down in Arizona, and they're putting all kinds of guys out of business down there. Like they'll punch a deep well because they've got money, lower the aquifer, and then the rancher guy, he can't afford a thousand foot well. So then they're able to buy up his stuff because now it's dry. So there's all kinds of conflicts spread out across this region. I just can't see why you wouldn't want to limit having more of that problem. But it doesn't-
1:28:56 Tucker Carlson? Why wouldn't Congress pass a lawsuit? We can't have foreign ownership of land in the United States. You can't sell the country to other countries.
1:29:02 Speaker 02 That's, I think, the primary question. I don't understand that at all. So far as I'm aware, I can't buy property in Canada, right? Unless I become a Canadian citizen.
1:29:13 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, a lot of Americans, I own property in Canada. I sold it because I was worried about all this kind of thing. But certainly you can't buy Mexico, right? So, no, I don't understand why. I mean, that just seems like a really easy fix. Foreigners don't get to own our country. So, happy to have you can do whatever. Come on vacation here. You're great. We love you. But you can't own our country, right?
1:29:39 Speaker 02 Right. Yeah. Recreation, the last number I read was 1.2 trillion dollars contributed to our economy through outdoor recreation.
1:29:52 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
1:29:53 Speaker 02 That's extraction by another means. It might not be pulling oil and gas out of the ground, but that's still a form of extraction. You're extracting wealth off of the thing. I mean-
1:30:03 Tucker Carlson? Right.
1:30:04 Speaker 02 And with the multiple use mandate, now you're doing both. It's like best of both worlds. You're maximizing value in that way, you know? So, so why should, I mean-
1:30:16 Tucker Carlson? This has been, as we both acknowledge, kind of a partisan issue. You referred to liberals who hunt. I think there can't be more than eight of those. But there was this effort in the last 15, 20 years to like create these AstroTurf groups. You know, hunters for Kamala, but it's always hilarious. Loading the shotgun through the muzzle kind of groups. But, um, but there are also more serious efforts to do that where these are clearly fake groups. And they're trying to subvert something here. So that's, it's all real, but it's kind of vaximatic.
1:30:57 Tucker Carlson? I think that like hunters, some fishermen, ranchers, people who train horses. Like these are not Kamala Harris voters. These are almost all conservatives. So why, why would you as, you know, product of that world, somebody who shares the values of that world? Why would you be all of a sudden on the side of like not selling public lands? Why is this a, why do you have a conservative position on public lands?
1:31:23 Speaker 02 Fundamentally, I think I've said this before. I'm not sure, so forgive me, but it's, I love my people.
1:31:29 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
1:31:29 Speaker 02 I mean, that's why, I mean, I love the land, but my people don't exist without the land and small ranches.
1:31:37 Tucker Carlson? Wait a second. If the country's an idea, as long as you have that idea, you're a part of it, no?
1:31:47 Speaker 02 I think we probably agree on this one. I've said this elsewhere too, but some people on Twitter will say it's not magic dirt, you know?
1:31:58 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:31:59 Speaker 02 And I understand what they mean when they're saying that, uh, but it, but it is magic.
1:32:03 Tucker Carlson? It's a hundred percent magic dirt. I completely agree.
1:32:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:32:06 Tucker Carlson? I keep some in my travel bag so I can sniff it when I'm out of the country. No, I mean, for real.
1:32:10 Speaker 02 That's cool.
1:32:11 Tucker Carlson? Well, yeah, but why, why do you?
1:32:14 Speaker 02 Oh, I'm sorry.
1:32:14 Tucker Carlson? Why do you so flesh that out if you don't mind?
1:32:18 Speaker 02 I think you have to start at that. I believe America as a people, I believe the ethnogenesis of that happened on our frontiers. Like, if you, at least, you know, history is a thing that's interpreted. So people get mad when I talk about history sometimes and I'm like, okay, well, this is my interpretation of it. Fuck off. You know, like, this is the way I see it. The Revolutionary War was in some ways a very European war. I mean, we, you know, we kind of did some guerrilla stuff. So that was a new invention in terms of European people doing stuff to a degree. But it was kind of a civil war between Anglo peoples.
1:32:57 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:32:59 Speaker 02 But then something happened as we, you know, from Manassas Cutler in the Ohio River Valley to the 49ers where we developed as a people out here. You know, if you stop somebody on the street in New York City and you said, well, maybe not there now because it's like 60% foreign born, pick an actual American city where you're not traveling internationally.
1:33:25 Speaker 02 And stop Americans on the street and ask them what it means to be an American. They're gonna say things like hard work, perseverance, you know, grit, love of country and county and all of that. They're gonna use all of these ideas that actually tie back to knowing what our people went through crossing those plains, you know, fighting Indians and fighting, you know, Mexicans and then the Brits again and, you know, the Spanish and all of this, you know, all of that stuff fed into where we finally, somewhere, I don't know exactly
1:34:08 Speaker 02 when, I don't think I could put a pin in it, but at some point, we became a people that are Americans. We, we never describe ourselves in the same way as it seems like Europeans do to me. And so I think that's a very important piece of this. And I also think it's somewhat ironic that The area where the frontier closed is now like the primary source of the people trying to kill the country off. And then another thing-
1:34:41 Tucker Carlson? Why do you think that is?
1:34:42 Speaker 02 I don't know. Well, resentment, leftism. I think leftism is animated by dark things. I don't think every leftist is a bad person, but I think that that belief system is fundamentally animated by envy. And that's like the earliest story in the book.
1:35:00 Tucker Carlson? And hate.
1:35:00 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I think it's that. I don't think it's too much more complex than that. Think about the Civil War, the reconstruction, the period of reconstruction. Had there not been the pressure relief valve of the frontier, we would have fought it again. Because that boot on the neck of those proud southern people was not going to last forever if they didn't have somewhere to go. And we have towns in Idaho that were established by Confederates.
1:35:31 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
1:35:31 Speaker 02 And they, you know, they had had enough of that shit. And so I think it's, it's an important part of our identity, a very important part of our identity. So I think in many ways, this entire, I'm sorry, I'm doing such a bad job addressing your actual questions. I'm like pontificating over here.
1:35:51 Tucker Carlson? Well, I, I think to describe what you're saying requires what you're saying, which is it's part of like a multi-hundred year story and evolution.
1:36:00 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:36:01 Tucker Carlson? And it's also one of the reasons that the country was able to assimilate people from different parts of Europe. Hadn't always been friends. I mean, the Irish and the English. You know what I mean?
1:36:12 Speaker 02 Totally.
1:36:13 Tucker Carlson? And like the true melting pot was, was Europeans from like non-friendly countries. Didn't have that much in common, actually. I know now they're all just white people, but the English and the Irish didn't feel that way.
1:36:26 Speaker 02 No.
1:36:27 Tucker Carlson? Right. And, but they were able to come together and build this amazing country and, but I think it's through the process that you're describing, like that, that really is America.
1:36:36 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And then now as a modern people, we, there's no, there is absolutely no way-
1:36:48 Speaker 02 Like small ranches, a lot of them are running like 90% of their ground on public allotments and 10% on deeded. And it's been this way for a very long time, like basically since the TG, the Taylor Grazing Act, which was, I think, 36, 1936. Another one of these things that rolled lots of laws into one, but it essentially protects the right for Americans to graze on these public grounds to protect the cattle industry, small family farms. And that on that 10% of deeded acreage, at least where I'm from, much of that is going to be like their alfalfa, their hay production for the winter.
1:37:29 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:37:30 Speaker 02 And then, of course, a pasture to feed on in the winter. So my people from just won't exist anymore without this. And some people will say, oh, well, then F them. This is welfare for rich people. It's like, no, this is welfare for people who are scraping by. If you want to call it welfare, I don't, I don't at all view it that way. But these people are scraping by. The margins on cattle are thin. And if, you know, if you kill grazing, it is over and we are already.
1:38:01 Tucker Carlson? By the way, everyone in the country is on welfare at this point. And people who are paying, you know, half the tax rate that you are through the carried interest loophole, that's not welfare. I think it is. People who are, you know, taking their income as dividend and as interest income and paying half the rate of people who work for a wage. I don't know. I mean, what? All of these things are aimed at the same group, which is legacy Americans. From the short end of everything, I don't think that's an accident.
1:38:30 Speaker 02 No, no, my, my family went out there in like the 30s, you know, the 1830s, not the 1930s, you know?
1:38:40 Tucker Carlson? What, the 1830s?
1:38:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think, I think 36, somewhere around.
1:38:44 Tucker Carlson? 1836?
1:38:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, they were, yeah, they moved out. Well, a lot of them were Mormons and.
1:38:47 Tucker Carlson? So pre DoorDash?
1:38:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. So 47 is when the Mormons got to Utah, but a lot of them started that journey west, you know, back around that time, like from Connecticut, New England area.
1:38:58 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:38:59 Speaker 02 Started, you know?
1:39:00 Tucker Carlson? Upstate New York.
1:39:01 Speaker 02 Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. A lot, like, most of my family's been here since, you know, late 1600s, but they were over here Yankee type people. And then they, you know, moved away. I don't mean that as a pejorative, like, that's where they were at, like, kind of, you know? In New England. And so, yeah, it means a lot to me in that sense. But another thing that the, the people who are not connected to this industry should think about, we have less than 90 million beef cattle in America right now. Our herds, our beef herd is smaller than it was in like 91, like 1991.
1:39:37 Tucker Carlson? How?
1:39:39 Speaker 02 Killing off small.
1:39:40 Tucker Carlson? That like almost 100 million more people, maybe 100 billion. I mean, because there's so much lying about population.
1:39:46 Speaker 02 Right.
1:39:47 Tucker Carlson? Because there's so many illegal aliens here, but we have a much larger population than we had in 91.
1:39:52 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, I mean, what is it like 330 million or something?
1:39:56 Tucker Carlson? I mean, I'd say 360, but like go outside.
1:40:01 Speaker 02 I know.
1:40:01 Tucker Carlson? It's insanely crowded. So there's just, as with GDP and inflation and every other relevant number from which we make decisions about how to run the country, it's a lie. Population is, I think, the biggest of all lies. Now we're saying, I mean, three years ago, we've got 10 million illegal aliens. We've had 10 million illegal aliens for 30 years. And now, since Trump got in, they're like admitting, I think it's more like 60 or 65 million illegal aliens, foreign nationals, living here in violation of our law. So anyway, sorry.
1:40:31 Speaker 02 No, no.
1:40:31 Tucker Carlson? Pardon, pardon the lecture, but like.
1:40:33 Speaker 02 I agree.
1:40:34 Tucker Carlson? We've got more than 330 million people in the United States.
1:40:37 Speaker 02 Yeah. And that ties into this whole idea of a housing shortage. Someone said, well, illegals are not impacting housing.
1:40:49 Tucker Carlson? Who said that?
1:40:50 Speaker 02 I mean, the leftists were saying this, and one of my buddies had such a good way of countering that. He said, I don't know, I assume these motherfuckers live inside.
1:41:03 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:41:04 Speaker 02 So I'm sorry.
1:41:07 Tucker Carlson? That's, um, yeah.
1:41:10 Speaker 02 So food security is a national security risk. I think Hegseth even endorsed this idea recently, that food security is national security to a degree.
1:41:22 Tucker Carlson? Of course, food, water, energy, those are the building blocks of any society slash civilization, food, water, energy. And if those, if you don't have those, I mean, that's why people go to war. That's why populations, that's what, you know, migration is about. I mean, everything is about those three things. And but only in America that's been rich for so long, people be like, no, it's really about self-esteem or, you know, or whatever. No, it's about food, water and energy.
1:41:48 Speaker 02 Right.
1:41:49 Tucker Carlson? And you think, so our beef herd is smaller than it was 35 years ago.
1:41:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:41:55 Tucker Carlson? So why is it, is that Brazil?
1:41:57 Speaker 02 Oh, it's a lot of it is, yeah, import, imported beef and the, the artificial deflation of prices and due to illegal immigrant labor, you know, every time they go to one of these packers, it's like 1600 arrests, you know?
1:42:15 Tucker Carlson? The whole plant is illegal, yeah.
1:42:17 Speaker 02 And you're not going to tell me these people don't know they're doing that. And then I think there's about, I think 30 plants in the US process 80% of the beef in this country. So now you've got, you're also sort of as a byproduct, putting your old local butcher out of business. He can't compete anymore with like $6 hamburger in a tube from Walmart that's got 70 animals packed into it. He can't compete with that either. The local guy can't. Yeah, it's a huge problem. And then if you add on the sell off of public lands and squeeze the last of these guys that are hanging on with their small family ranch, it ain't going to get better.
1:43:01 Tucker Carlson? What role does immigration play in this story?
1:43:06 Speaker 02 I mean, it's fundamental and both legal and illegal. A thing I would say to right wingers, to like really try to think about, these are low population states. They're high landmass, but the density, population density is extremely low. I think Wyoming, I've said this elsewhere, but I think Wyoming has around 300,000 voters, but that was 300,000 people voting for Trump, which means we don't know what the next turnout will be because he is a once in a lifetime figure. There's only one of that guy. So presumably there's going to be less in the next election cycle. Who knows? Well, 50,000 new votes. If you sell us off and fill it up with illegal or legal immigration,
1:43:51 Speaker 02 whether it's H1B, H2B, whatever, I guess those people aren't voting, but you know, aren't voting. And then, you know, illegals or just imports of whatever variety, you flip these, there's not a ton of electoral votes there, but it is.
1:44:07 Tucker Carlson? Wait, so the idea was to take public lands and like build housing for immigrants on them?
1:44:11 Speaker 02 Well, they say not, but there's a crap load of money going into immigrant resettlement in the West. I say this everywhere, but rando land on Twitter, go look at that and you can see these grants for yourself. It's like 4 million, 15 million, you know, 50 million, whatever, going to all these different NGOs and state governments to bring, to put refugees. Like I see burkas in Idaho Falls now.
1:44:39 Tucker Carlson? What? Idaho Falls was in southeastern Idaho. It's always, I think it was the most Mormon town in the United States, surely the most Mormon city in the United States.
1:44:48 Speaker 02 It had to be up there. Yeah. Yeah. Had to be.
1:44:51 Tucker Carlson? Like that in Provo or whatever, old Provo, not new Provo, but you see burkas there?
1:44:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. And this is another thing. I always get called a racist and I don't have to hate someone to not want to be replaced by them or have my children replaced by them. I don't hate.
1:45:07 Tucker Carlson? People are still calling you racist?
1:45:08 Speaker 02 Oh my gosh, yeah.
1:45:09 Tucker Carlson? Still?
1:45:10 Speaker 02 Oh, it's just incredible.
1:45:11 Tucker Carlson? Boy, that's 2000, so 2021.
1:45:14 Speaker 02 I know. Yeah. That word's over.
1:45:15 Tucker Carlson? Oh, shut up.
1:45:16 Speaker 02 I know. But I don't. And also here's an important thing to this. That person in a burka did not choose to live in Idaho Falls where it's 40 below for a week a year. You know, they moved here from whatever desert and now they're living in some of the harshest climate in the US. They didn't choose that. Someone put them there. And then you have to ask yourself why someone would put them there.
1:45:43 Tucker Carlson? I've seen a lot of it. Yeah, let's empty the refugee camps of Somali refugees in Kenya and fly them to Lewiston, Maine, in impoverished, dying mill town full of French Canadians and just see how that works.
1:45:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:45:57 Tucker Carlson? Didn't, didn't work.
1:45:59 Speaker 02 No, of course not. And I love my people and I don't want, I don't want them to be replaced, but from a, just a, a basic in terms of politics, practical level, if you flip these states in the West, you're done. You're not winning another, you're not beating the left with the Electoral College, not without Wyoming, Utah, to some degree Nevada. Like if you lose all of those, if they all go the way Colorado did, it's gonna be over.
1:46:26 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. And Colorado's not just a Democrat, it's like affirmatively evil. We'll take your kids away unless you let them become trannies, kind of thing. It's just like, it's, it's, it's a place that Christians are having trouble living. It's so anti-Christian in Colorado.
1:46:41 Speaker 02 And, and some of the best people on earth live there.
1:46:44 Tucker Carlson? I couldn't agree more.
1:46:46 Tucker Carlson? But I'm just saying it has ramifications. It's not just that like, oh, they get, you know, they had a sort of conservative senator, now they have a sort of liberal senator. It's like, you know, when the revolution comes, they're not joking at all. They're not, it's not like what we're going through now where it's like, do a Fox News hit and you know, we're fighting the liberals. Okay. No, it's like, can't live there anymore if you believe in God, so.
1:47:11 Speaker 02 They, are you familiar with the wolf reintroduction out there in Colorado?
1:47:14 Tucker Carlson? Very familiar.
1:47:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. And you know who's driving that? And it's not working. And look at where they put them. They did it via referendum that won by 1%. So the Front Range voted to dump wolves on ranching communities is what they did because they hate them. I mean, that's why.
1:47:35 Tucker Carlson? Why do they hate them? Cause the ranchers are just so mean or just hate the idea of them?
1:47:40 Speaker 02 Man, I, you know, some, uh, sometimes the left is just hysterical by nature. So it's hard to know if they've just been propagandized into.
1:47:51 Tucker Carlson? Independent minded white Christians are the, are the enemy. It's why they hate Russia, it's why they hate the ranchers. I mean, let's just be honest, let's stop lying.
1:47:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that's probably it. And then they also think the cows are destroying the climate and so beef production is a great evil, despite the fact that beef have largely reoccupied the ecological niche that bison used to, so. You have to replace those with something.
1:48:15 Tucker Carlson? I think you're actually giving them too much credit by trying to be rational. It's like, they don't think that, you know, Jeff Bezos's G4 fleet is wrecking the environment, but they do think that cow flatus is. They, they pick the group they hate and then they backfill the justification for crushing them. So, oh, it's climate. We hate the ranchers because of climate. No, they hate the ranchers because of who they are.
1:48:40 Speaker 02 I agree.
1:48:41 Tucker Carlson? I mean, obviously. Um, so is, so the idea was that this land was going to be used for housing?
1:48:49 Speaker 02 I mean, that's what they told us, but if you.
1:48:51 Tucker Carlson? Why wouldn't you just kick out the 60 million people who care illegally?
1:48:55 Speaker 02 Between that and.
1:48:56 Tucker Carlson? It's too hard.
1:48:57 Speaker 02 Something like 16 to 18% of homes in Utah are owned by investors. It's like, well, the state could pass a law that would solve this problem real fast, you know? Like, I don't, I'm not against anyone making money and I'm not one of these hate people because they're rich. I've got a friend of mine who's a billionaire, the nicest guy in the world. He, he does all kinds of good for people. One of the best people I've ever met. So it's not that, but also, I mean, I'm not gonna fillet the people who are trying to ruin me for greed, greedy reasons, you know, I'm not gonna, they are not my friend, clearly, and they feel the same way right now.
1:49:36 Speaker 02 Um, sorry for being fishy, my back is stiff, but, uh, so it's not about housing. If it were about housing, there are solutions to that. And they're not doing that. They're trying to. You know, I don't want to impugn motives, but it ain't housing. It's not. They're trying to do something else. Oh, and then from a legal perspective, I'm nearly certain of this, please correct me if this is not right, but when you are building affordable housing, like apartments and condos or whatever, that comes with stipulations and I think part of that is the land has to be sold for very cheap to the developer.
1:50:21 Speaker 02 And it's like 50 acres, not, you know, 3 million. I mean, how many acres do you need? What kind of apartment complex are we building over here? You know, 3 million acres?
1:50:34 Speaker 02 It's very clearly not about affordable housing or your kid and his ability to buy a house.
1:50:39 Tucker Carlson? So here's the problem that I have with it and why I'm so grateful that you have done what you've done and why I wanted to talk to you is I'm worried about what the end stage of our debt crisis looks like. So when you're in debt to a lender, that debt is secured with assets. So you take a car loan, your loan is secured by your car. Same with a home mortgage that can take your house. The United States is trillions in debt to a bunch of different countries, investors all over the world, but Japan, China, South Korea, et cetera, Europe. What, and we can't pay it, obviously. And so how do we make good on that debt? Well, what is the United States? The United States is a continental sized land mass that has some of the most valuable resources in the world, which would include
1:51:24 Tucker Carlson? the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, the Great Lakes, which would include some of the biggest oil and gas deposits, energy, and which would include some of those productive farmland in the world. So I'm really concerned that at some point, it sounds stupid now, but at some point, not so far in the future, I'm gonna be like, well, actually the Chinese own Lake Superior. No, I'm, I'm serious.
1:51:46 Speaker 02 I know, me too.
1:51:47 Tucker Carlson? And the oil and gas fields and the nation itself. And so if you set up, I don't think that's crazy at all. Like in the end, the US dollar is a joke and everyone knows that it's backed by nothing. Full faith and credit. So like, what do we have? Well, we have federal lands, actually. Land, minerals, water. And I just don't think you want to set up, set the precedent in motion where you could just sell those if you needed to, because they don't belong to the current occupants of the White House or Congress. They just don't, they belong to the people.
1:52:24 Speaker 02 Correct. And I, another thing they lie about is the actual numerical value of that land.
1:52:32 Tucker Carlson? Oh, yeah.
1:52:33 Speaker 02 There was a number floating around a hundred trillion, they were saying. And I, I kept thinking, how on earth did you get to a hundred trillion? That just does not make sense.
1:52:44 Tucker Carlson? It's just a round number.
1:52:45 Speaker 02 So I started plugging in to the, you know, calculator like, let's see what this would actually work out to. And if you sold at fair market value.
1:52:56 Speaker 02 Every piece of federal land in Idaho, it'd be like 110 billion. That is not going to touch the national debt in any serious way. Not to mention now you're losing all the other revenue streams that come from that.
1:53:11 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
1:53:12 Speaker 02 So I just, it's not, I don't believe it's about debt. I think if you did it all by, if you did it all, let's say you could get to 6.2 trillion. If you did 10,000 an acre or something like that, it's, I'm having a hard time remembering what I came up with, but 6 trillion is a crap boat of money, but we spent 2.2 or whatever it was in the CARES Act a couple of years ago. I mean, that's in the grand scheme of the way we spend, that's not a lot of money. And now the everyday guy is just losing.
1:53:45 Tucker Carlson? What are you doing? I mean, are you going to retreat from public life, having achieved your goal?
1:53:50 Speaker 02 Well, I know, I don't think it's over. In fact, they're already pushing for it again. I started, my friends and I started a thing called the Sage Roche Institute. It's just kind of a small brain trust of people that are much more qualified than me. And we're, we're just going to do the best that we can to message and get these ideas out in front of people. I take no money from it. We don't even have a bank account right now. It's absolutely in no way.
1:54:20 Tucker Carlson? My kind of foundation.
1:54:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, we, in no way is it about money. We, we collected emails and we're just trying to disseminate information because I think we need a lot more than one voice out on this stuff because here, like here's an example. The everyday American hears, well, why don't we just do a new homesteading act? And that sounds good. Like, oh, that'll take care of our kids. No, it won't. All that, first of all, the, the very last iteration of homestead acts, I think the average, more than 50% of the people that claimed land on that left it after two years. Yeah. So you're just doing a sell off with a slight delay if you do that.
1:54:59 Tucker Carlson? I think they did this in Zimbabwe.
1:55:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, how about we homestead act Rhodesia, you know?
1:55:09 Speaker 02 So we're just gonna try to pass information as best as we can and also help. I think we have a golden opportunity right now to do two really important things. One, reshape the narrative and make conservation cool on the right wing again. I think zoomers have been let down by everyone their whole life. It is like constantly getting screwed by someone and we got to win here and we cannot let them down. We like, we want to help them. Keep stacking wins here. Like, we want to be something that doesn't end up screwing them in the end. So the next time they push, you know, we can help zoomers.
1:55:52 Speaker 02 And if we can shift this narrative with zoomers and tell them like, this is yours, man. This belongs to you. Regardless of what people tell you, this is yours right now. You can go to Birch Creek Valley in Idaho right now and go camp and fish and do whatever you want. Get off your ass and go do it. It'll be fun, you know, and it's yours. Experience it. If we can get them to understand that, then that is a huge accomplishment for posterity in the future. Because then they'll want to protect it forever. And that'll give us, at least until they have grandchildren, which would be great.
1:56:30 Speaker 02 And then the second thing I think we have a real opportunity to do is shift the narrative in science back to people who actually want to do real science. I think COVID, for righteous reasons, made a lot of people very skeptical of any expert class. And that, I mean, I am one of those people. But there are scientists out there who genuinely really want to save this stuff. That's the guy that's trying to save the healer trout or whatever. Exactly. So I think we can help them establish some more credibility. Like, no, we actually, we as scientists, not me, but them as scientists don't actually want to pave over
1:57:15 Speaker 02 the Mojave Desert. No.
1:57:18 Speaker 02 So we have an opportunity to shift two narratives that are really important. If we can do that, then I think we've got another couple generations of security, you know, from my children and your children and grandchildren. And that's what I care about. So that's what we want.
1:57:32 Tucker Carlson? It's not an accident that the most articulate voice in this debate is you and you spend the most amount of time outside. And maybe part of it is convincing people that nature is more compelling than porn or video games or anything that's happening on your phone. And I, I mean, the decline in hunting and fishing licenses nationally, as much as I so enjoy being alone, you don't have to compete for a spot because there's nobody there. I do think that's ominous, right?
1:58:04 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, it's terrifying. Yeah.
1:58:07 Tucker Carlson? People don't even know what public lands look like.
1:58:12 Tucker Carlson? Right?
1:58:12 Speaker 02 I mean, it's hugely important. Yeah, that one is, there's a lot of advocacy groups that are trying to get people into bow and like get into bow hunting and stuff like that. I think that's great. And we should try to do more of that. And then just think of like shooting, how many kids are going out shooting on public land? I see this weird narrative every once in a while where guys will be like, they won't even, they won't even let you out there to shoot. A, the leader of a huge gun rights organization tried to tell me this a couple of days ago. And I was like, first of all, why the hell are you trying to fight with an ally? And then secondly, what are you talking about? That's everyone shoots on that stuff all the time. So even things like that matter, like go out and take your AR-15 and go shoot a bunch of rocks, you know, have a good time.
1:58:57 Tucker Carlson? At a distance though, because ricochet is a real thing.
1:58:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, don't shoot one four feet away, but don't, Adam Kinzinger, your buddy.
1:59:06 Tucker Carlson? Whatever happened to him?
1:59:08 Speaker 02 I don't know.
1:59:09 Tucker Carlson? Does he still exist? Adam Kinzinger. Ah, I hope he, I hope he's happy. Sad guy.
1:59:15 Speaker 02 There was a funny, my brain is doing a squirrel thing, but one of the funniest tweets I ever saw, I don't, you know, me and this guy disagree at times, but right after that happened, first thing in the morning, Josh Hawley tweeted, uh, I wonder who Loomis will shoot today.
1:59:33 Speaker 02 Like an hour about that.
1:59:37 Speaker 02 But yeah, we need to get those kids engaged and there are some college programs that do this kind of thing. A friend of mine runs one of these at a university in the West, takes kids out and teaches them how to hunt ducks and, you know, shoot. And so we need to do much, much more of that. And that's important as well. And then I wonder a thing, I guess if I could say, and I apologize, I'm so bad at answering your questions directly.
2:00:01 Tucker Carlson? No, I love it.
2:00:04 Speaker 02 I can understand why someone from Maine would be thinking right now, whoa, I'm never going to see that. Why do I care? There's one answer I think I would give to that, that no one else does is we are a union. And even if you don't want to come out and enjoy the land that is yours, help support us because we support you with various policies that help protect your fisheries and your way of life up here. And we are a union. So, you know, we help you, please help us back, that kind of thing. Same thing with like, I've heard other people say this and it's true with like the farm bill, which is, although it's like 60% snap now, but the farm bill helps, you know, a guy in Iowa or whatever, you know, and that's.
2:00:49 Tucker Carlson? Farm bill is 60% food stamps?
2:00:51 Speaker 02 Oh, I think it might even be more than that. It might even be more.
2:00:56 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, I don't think the real threat is Iran. I'm just saying, I mean, that's, wow, that's sad.
2:01:01 Speaker 02 It's horrible.
2:01:01 Tucker Carlson? So if people want to learn more about you and about these debates, and I think anyone who's made it two hours into this, trusts you, um, I do. Where do they, where can they find, I mean, cause some of this stuff is complex. So like, where's a trusted source for learning more?
2:01:21 Speaker 02 Very. Sagebrushinstitute.org is where we're disseminating everything. And there's an email sign up.
2:01:29 Speaker 02 And that's it. We're just gonna keep pushing. That's it. Eventually, it's possible that we could try to bring in small funds for like leaflets and stuff, but I'm not getting paid. Nobody on the board is getting paid. That's not happening and we'll be straight up. If that ever, like if, if there ever becomes a point where we're asking for money, we will always be straight up about it and you will see that I believe that charity should be for the sake of charity. So no one's paying me to do it. I can promise you that. I agree with that. And we'll live by that as best as we can. And that's where you can go to just sign up and we'll start emailing you and you know, this is what's happening with wolves or whatever. Keep people informed. Thank you. That was amazing. Thank you, sir.
2:02:14 Tucker Carlson? We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit, follow, and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter, telling the truth. Always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.
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