Tucker Carlson and Michael Shellenberger Break Down the California Fires

Michael Shellenberger may be the best reporter in America. Here’s what he’s learned about the fires in Los Angeles — and about UFOs. (00:00) How Many Fires Are There? Where Did They Come From? (03:03) Are Meth Heads Lighting the Fires? (14:56) DEI Fire Departments (38:44) Leftists Blame Climate Change Yet Again (40:47) Gavin Newsom Is Too Busy Hating Trump to Fight the Fires (52:30) The Golden Age of Journalism Paid partnerships with: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://EightSleep.com/Tucker Policygenius: Get your free life insurance quotes today at https://Policygenius.com/Tucker PureTalk: Get 50% off first month at https://PureTalk.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tucker Carlson?

  So I guess the first question is, thank you for doing this. What, uh?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Are we rolling?

• 0:04Tucker Carlson?

  We're rolling.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:05Tucker Carlson?

  Let's roll, shall we?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Good to be with you, Tucker. Nice to see you.

• 0:09Tucker Carlson?

  Great to be with you. Yeah. As I've said to you privately, but I, and I mean it, I think you're maybe the best reporter working. I know you don't even think of yourself as a reporter, but a gatherer of facts and an explainer of what they mean. I think you're the best.

• 0:33Tucker Carlson?

  Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else, and they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode. Um, so where do these fires, first of all, how many fires are there and where do they come from?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I believe there's five active fires right now, and these are ignition-driven fires, meaning that this, these are all, this is all chopper all or, you know, scrubland, you know, brush area. So this isn't, this is different than the Sierra forests.

• 1:09Tucker Carlson?

  Right. These are not forest fires.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are not forest fires, and that doesn't mean that you're doomed to them, but it's the, it's not the same problem that we get in the Sierras. So they're ignition-driven and they're obviously wind-driven, but there's nothing unusual. You know, I just interviewed a climate scientist about this, or rather, an environmental forest science scientist about this. Nothing unusual about this. I mean, it is somewhat unusual to get, you know, you have a dry period and then the Santa Ana winds in January, but it's not like, that never happens. They, I'm working my way there.

• 1:42Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Ignitions. But I mean, the important thing to know is that the National Weather Service put out a fire warning on January 2nd, and a local weatherman actually forecasted on January 1st. They said we're headed towards a super dangerous moment. The next day, the National Weather Service Los Angeles held a briefing to underscore that point. The day after that, the mayor flew to Ghana. I mean, it's crazy. Like you would have-

• 2:10Tucker Carlson?

  These were public press conferences?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, these were, oh, I mean, it's absolutely public and it goes to the politicians first, but it's all said publicly. It's the National Weather Service. So that, so that, so that was like literally on the first or second, the governor should have called out the National Guard. He should have called all of our neighboring states. He should have called Canada and Mexico, asked for all their backup help. They should have started circling C-130s that are, you know, especially retrofitted with, that can dump the fire retardant or, or water. They should have had helicopters circling to see where the fires were. It should have been immediate mobilization.

• 2:44Tucker Carlson?

  Pardon my ignorance, I, I didn't, first of all, I didn't see that news when it happened, but I didn't know that. So it was really clear to the people who run the city and the state that you had this combination of dry conditions and heavy winds, high winds.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and because there's so many ignitions, because of really these two factors, mostly the electrical wires, you know, brushing up against, you know, vegetation and triggering a fire, that's kind of the one, the main ones. The other one is, is homeless people starting fires all over LA. Half of all fires put out by the LA Fire Department are started by homeless people. It's been that way for years.

• 3:23Tucker Carlson?

  Why do homeless people start fires?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it turns out meth heads love to start fires. You know, there's just, every drug has its kind of weird element to it, but meth heads love starting fires. They love destroying things like meth is like the drug of nihilism. So it's like perfect drug for LA and California at the moment.

• 3:43Tucker Carlson?

  So it's not, these are not cooking fires?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  They could be cooking fires.

• 3:48Tucker Carlson?

  But starting fires to destroy things is-

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, for sure. Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 3:52Tucker Carlson?

  But it's not evil or anything?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  No, it totally fine, yeah, what could go wrong?

• 3:56Tucker Carlson?

  But isn't classically starting fires and torturing animals, aren't those like signs of sociopathic-

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Psychopathy, yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, look, meth makes you psych, you know, makes you psychopathic, it makes you psychotic. It's meth-induced psychosis. But I mean, yeah, and all the crazy, I mean, people behave, I mean, things that people do on meth, I mean, it is like, it's like they behave with like superhuman crazy powers, the levels of violence, the- Assaults, the, um, I mean, you just, when you interview people, particularly people in recovery that describe being on meth, I mean, they're just awake for like weeks at a time. Like it's not even clear how they get any sleep at all. So that's just, that madness has continued and you know, and Mayor Bass, who's the-

• 4:40Tucker Carlson?

  So just to isolate what you're saying and just to pause to kind of this really important point. Fires, at least half of fires in LA County are started by homeless people.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:50Tucker Carlson?

  And you believe that's driven by their use of a specific drug, meth?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Not totally. I mean, I think homeless people are going to often start fires for a lot of different reasons. I mean, drugs can start fires, but, but the meth heads are like into fire. Like it's a big part of meth culture. It's just starting things on fire.

• 5:08Tucker Carlson?

  No one sees this in theological terms? It's like this is-

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I know. It's amazing.

• 5:11Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it is amazing.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's satanic. I mean, you kind of go totally satanic.

• 5:15Tucker Carlson?

  Seems about as obvious as it could be.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's awful. Um, so, but you know, you kind of go, I mean, so first of all, that problem should have been dealt with. Obviously years ago, it should never have been allowed. So, but that they knew on January 1st, January 2nd, that the fires were coming. Like it was inevitable that there would be fires. Like there was like zero doubt among anybody that knows anything about fire in Los Angeles. That the fires were coming, the fires were coming. So then like the governor should have been, the mayor should have been there. You should like literally you should, it's all about, and it's all about prevention in part because by the time the fire trucks are having to weave their way up those little hills of-

• 5:55Tucker Carlson?

  That's right.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  The Pacific Palisades, it's over. I mean, so the other thing to keep in mind is that, okay, well, so that's the first thing is that they just have to mobilize in advance.

• 6:03Tucker Carlson?

  So that's a feature for people who aren't aware of the geography of LA.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Oh, it's just incredible. It's why it's so beautiful. Beautiful places are dangerous.

• 6:10Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly right.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  So. So that was, so that, that's like the main event. So the, I mean, cause I knew I did. My first thing I did is I was like, look, they're going to come out and say it was inevitable. And that's just a total lie.

• 6:21Tucker Carlson?

  Because of global warming.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, because of global warming. And I mean, anyway, we can get so, there's so many places to go here. But just on the most practical sense, they knew the fires were coming and they didn't do anything. The mayor leaves the country. She flies to Ghana after having promised not to leave the country. By the way, as mayor, she's traveled six, at least six times out of the country and she promised not to travel. Why is it important the mayor be there? Cause you know, well, aren't there other people in charge? Because it's a command, it's an emergency command situation. She has to be able to issue orders and to, you know, waive regulations and make things happen. The governor has to be doing that. They didn't do that. They should have had, by the way, the, they get, they should get the fire trucks up into the fiery areas right away.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  They can also start, you know, they can start clearing brush. They can start, you know, but literally they could just be in those neighborhoods, just sitting there for days at a time, waiting for the fires to happen. Put them out as soon as they happen. Um, I'm not saying that they would have been able to prevent all the fires from happening. But you remember like the big fire in 19, in 1993, uh, I think it was Laguna Beach or maybe it was Malibu as well. But it was like 700 homes. We're at 10,000, you know, structures at this point, homes and buildings gone. You know, 200,000 people evacuated. I mean, it's like, it's, it's madness. It never needed to get to that level. Okay. So that's the first thing. They just needed to have been there before the fire started.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And they didn't do that because the politicians are just, they're focused on themselves. They're focused on the next political office they want to get. So that was the first thing. The second thing is the water runs out, right? So everybody, so that was the, and then you hear people go, oh, well, there's nothing you can do because like, once the homes are burned down, like the water lines, you can see the pictures, you know, the water like will be spilling out, you know, of the homes. And so that lowered the water pressure. That was a total lie. There is something called the Santa Inez Water Reservoir, which is the potable water, meaning the drinking water that also goes into the fire hydrant system. Cause the fire hydrant, you know, the, the fire hydrant system is the drinking water system. It's the same thing. There's the exact same system.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  That reservoir was empty and it was the second largest of the 10 potable water reservoirs that serve LA County. There, let me make one distinction here because there's actually two kinds of reservoirs. There's the reservoir with the snowmelt water, these really big lakes, basically. And then there's the, and that's, that's the unpurified water. And then those, and then they purify it and then they feed into these reservoirs where they store the water for, for all sorts of reasons for emergencies. So that is an absolute crime, that that Santee Inez reservoir. Why? Because first of all, it was, it's right next to the Pacific Palisades. So for people that didn't know, Pacific Palisades, of course, is like right near, it's on your way to Malibu. It's like the last big neighborhood before you get

• 9:15Tucker Carlson?

  to the And they're Palisades, they're over the water.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  That's right. And so they have a reservoir, you look at the Google Maps and you look at where the Santee Inez reservoir is, it's right next to, like a few thousand feet from Pacific Palisades. And it's above, it's really high up. And so if you had had water coming from that, the firefighters would have had plenty of water. It would not have, they would have had the water pressure, even if you had lost some homes and had those, the water out. So I mean, so two major failures. The first was the failure to aggressively respond days in advance, even though they had very clear warnings. The second was the reservoir was empty. One reporter has reported that the, that the firefighters had not been warned

• 9:58Speaker 01

  by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, that that reservoir was empty. If that's true, that's just additionally scandalous. But one of the, one of the things that we think probably happened is that they had been required to build, have a cover for the clean, for the, for the Santee Inez reservoir, which is the potable water, the cover to prevent the water from being contaminated. In the old days, like the 50s and 60s, you know, birds would poop in those reservoirs and they would just put a bunch of chlorine in them.

• 10:30Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  And then we decided, well, that the water was still, had a lot of, you know, it still was not, was not particularly clean. So we wanted to be cleaner. So you can just put a cover over it, which is a kind of plastic or rubber lining. It appears that there was a tear in that. They had to repair it. They should not have removed that water ever during a fire season. If you need to make that repair, you, you do need to drain right, you know, right before you do the repair. But you would make that drain, the people that I interviewed, Said, "Look, it would take, you know, days if not a couple of weeks to repair it." "It was empty for at least a year." "So it was sitting there for a year." "And the person I interviewed, who works as a senior executive at a different water utility

• 11:13Speaker 01

  in California, said, 'If we had any of our reservoirs empty, we would be like, super nervous the entire time.'" "And you would also then have backup water systems." "So it's like any catastrophe, you know, you just have multiple errors occurring in advance and at the moment." "And then the fires, and then the actual ignitions." "You can't completely prevent ignitions, but you can significantly reduce them." "One would be to not allow people to camp outside all over Los Angeles, Los Angeles County with somewhere around, I think it's 40,000 to 60,000 homeless people in the whole county, madness." "And then the other is the electrical wires that brush up against the vegetation and create fire."

• 11:58Speaker 01

  "With that, you want to clear the vegetation from around the wires, that's obvious." "And then, and then you can also just stop, I mean, this is a not great solution, but you could certainly do it in a pinch if you need to, is you just stop the electricity from going into those homes for some period." "I mean, it's a drag." "I live in the Berkeley Hills, which is also a dangerous fire zone, and when the winds are really strong, they'll just cut off power as a precaution so that if they're, so that to prevent an ignition." "So I think the, the thing that, the reason I wanted to come on your show, even though I'm in the midst of a huge book deadline, is because I'm really concerned about this nihilistic discourse, that there's literally nothing that could be done." "I mean, that is, that is exactly where the politicians want to go."

• 12:43Speaker 01

  "I worry that, you know, ordinary people have that idea." "The problem is, I mean, it's absurd." "I mean, this idea that you couldn't live in Los Angeles, right?" "And it's like, it's like you can say it about anywhere." "You'd be like, 'Oh, it's, there's snowfalls in this place during winter, you know, or hurricanes.'" "I mean, we're in an area that's Hurricane Valley, right, like huge amounts of hurricanes." "That's, that's not how humans roll." "Like, we're capable of living in many different environments, including with extreme weather conditions, and we're really good at it."

• 13:11Tucker Carlson?

  It's like saying, "I can't stop my kids from dying of tetanus."

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:14Tucker Carlson?

  Or starving to death.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:15Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, what?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:16Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  It's so nihilistic.

• 13:18Tucker Carlson?

  There's no agency, no, that's totally right.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  It's so nihilistic. "And you trace it back, I mean, the, the best, the most articulate..." Advocate of that view is a Marxist named Mike Davis, who wrote this book called City of Courts. It's a crazy nihilistic book, but he, he had an essay and also this chapter in that book called Let Malibu Burn. I mean, it's classic, kind of radical left politics. It's classic sort of envy or sour grapes. I mean, sour grapes goes, I can't remember the, the parable, but basically it's like some animal wants to eat these grapes, but they're up too high. And then he says, oh, well, those grapes were sour anyway. It's a, it's a consolation for your own personal weakness and failure. That's just, you know,

• 14:03Speaker 01

  let Malibu burn. I mean, um, you know, you have an ideology of Marxism that is based on resentment and envy. And so then you go, well, yeah, those rich, all those rich houses should go up in flames. It's a fantasy. I mean, it's a left wing. I should know I was on the radical left. Like the fantasy, you hate the rich people because you, because you want their wealth and you, you admire them in some level, but you know, you can't get it. So, I mean, this is how envy works. So you end up constructing this whole political ideology. I mean, this is what Marx has done. And it's infected like the citizenry. I mean, it's infected the politicians. And so there's this, I think that even though you, it's not consciously, the politicians aren't consciously saying, oh, let's let Malibu

• 14:47Speaker 01

  burn. That is the, that is the behaviors they have taken have had that impact. So I think that what you're seeing in real time in these, in these fire, these fires in Los Angeles, these destructive fires, is the manifestation of a nihilistic ideology. It's an emergent quality. It happens through a million small steps. But this heavy focus on left wing ideology, whether it's DEI or ESG or climate apocalypse, or just class resentment manifests itself as in like the most spectacular, beautiful neighborhoods just being turned into ashes and cinders.

• 15:23Tucker Carlson?

  It's also on a more prosaic level of violation of like the most basic agreement there is between citizens and their government, which is I send you more than half of what I own, but you keep my house from burning down and meth heads from scaring my children or whatever. Like you provide public safety, fire protection, you know, water, sewer, electricity, like just the basic stuff seems to be totally ignored.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:49Tucker Carlson?

  So like, why is anyone paying taxes? Why isn't there a revolution? There should be.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Well, because of course they're all trapped by this ideology. I mean, these are the neighborhoods that voted overwhelmingly for Kamala, that voted overwhelmingly for Gavin Newsom, that voted overwhelmingly for Karen Bass. I mean, Tucker, I watched folk, I saw focus groups in 2022 with two Latinos, men and women separated, Latino group and a white group. And the Latinos were great. I mean, they were just like, when they started talking about the mayoral race, they were like, well, what are their positions and like, what are their policies? And what do they want to do and whatever? And they were very rational about it. They're very, as you would hope, they were self-interested.

• 16:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, what do I get out of this?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  What do I get out of these candidates?

• 16:30Tucker Carlson?

  Fair, fair question.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  The white, the whites, I mean, it was amazing. Like they, first of all, they, every focus group, when the moderator would just be like, oh, hey, you know, just how's it going around here? They don't even try to lead the conversation anywhere. And everybody just starts talking about the homeless situation and the crime, you know, which is basically continuous with homelessness. And then they would be like, oh yeah, okay. Well, about the remedies. Oh, there's a mayoral race coming up. I think it was in the, it was like in the summer, you know, that these focus groups were held in 2022. Crusoe versus Bass. And they hadn't really been thinking a ton about it, but there's a moment there where you see it dawns on the white focus group participants, and they were not like recruiting like leftists or Democrats or anything. It was just supposed to be a mixed group of swing voters.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  And they just, as soon as it dawned on them that there was a black woman running, they were like, oh, well, I mean, that's, I mean, got to vote for the black woman. Like it was the most racist, like you would think like in the, in the most racist moments in American history. You know, the stereotypes that we would have, you know, about the South or whatever, but you know, reconstruction or something like people would not be as open and honest about it, but they were just like openly like, well, we have to vote for the black woman. And then in the rest of the focus group, when they, a lot of them knew who Caruso was because he's famous for these really spectacular, you know, housing developments and also their

• 17:54Speaker 01

  that kind of calling them malls is a kind of just a little side description, beautiful like kind of outdoor shopping centers with like lawns and you can get like a fantastic restaurants and you can like have the kids can play freely on these lawns. I mean, it's sort of tragic because of course it's all private. It's not public spaces, but nonetheless you feel safe. You go in there, it's amazing place. So they didn't do that. I wa- these white participants, I was watching them through basically over like the next hour, hour and a half, explaining why Caruso was a bad guy for just running against this black woman. Like it was just outrageous and what is he trying to do? He's trying to make money. I mean, which is just crazy because of course he's just, you know, like, I think he's like a billionaire.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  I mean, he's self-made and extraordinarily successful person and clearly running for mayor is an altruistic act. So it was just appalling. So of course, I mean, I have to say, you know.

• 18:47Tucker Carlson?

  What is that? I mean, I, I've been to every big white country in the last year, Australia, Canada, UK, US, obviously. And that very specific brand of self-hatred nihilism, that brain disease is everywhere. It's not just here, it's, it's throughout the anglosphere.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:07Tucker Carlson?

  What, and it's history changing and it's effects. Like what is that? Why is the white world determined to kill itself? Do you have any idea? It's really noticeable.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's so much in that. I mean, it seems like there's like multiple levels. I mean, at one superficial level, or at least a kind of psychological, sociological level, they're all competing with each other to show who's a better person. The more I, the more hatred I express towards white people, the better I am as a human being.

• 19:35Tucker Carlson?

  Like destroying your own kids is like the measure of virtue.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The nihilism. Obviously, this is a very old story about decadence and of, you know, comfort and you start to kind of believe. I mean, there's something really checked out from reality about the whole thing. I mean, it, first of all, it's, the stories that get told are just, you know, like absurd, like 1619 being the founding of America. That's just obviously wrong. The country was founded, you know, our constitution is 1789, Declaration of Independence is 1776, and all that, but like slavery was never at the heart of the United States. It was always, it was a whole place committed to, it was English Americans, or the American English, as they were referred to, wanting

• 20:21Speaker 01

  to create a country the first time that was just founded on the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and of free expression. I mean, it's so important. They put us the First Amendment, they insist on the Bill of Rights. So you just get this completely twisted, you know, disinformation story about the United States that gets embraced. Yeah, it's nihilism. I mean,

• 20:40Tucker Carlson?

  But embraced by whites, as it's aimed. So it is a, I mean, leaving us in the fact that it's false, but you know, a lot of creation myths are false, but this one is false in a specific way, which is like, you suck and you should die and all the way. It's like, yeah, you're right, I should.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:55Tucker Carlson?

  What, it's,

• 20:55Speaker 01

  I mean, it's end of civilization sort of ideology, isn't it?

• 20:59Tucker Carlson?

  That's it. That's it. It's like, I don't, I've never seen anything like it.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  No, and when you read the,

• 21:03Tucker Carlson?

  And it is the whites, too.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, because the Latinos, I mean, they're,

• 21:07Tucker Carlson?

  They're like, what?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, for sure. They're like working, they're like more working class, they're more Christian, they're more, they love America more, they remember where they came from more. So, yeah, I mean, it's also, yeah, so it's just, in some ways, it's an old story of a civilization just at its end. I mean, including all the transgenderism. I mean, that's, you know, that's the Camille Paglia's famous writing about how that that shows up at the end of civilizations. And so, you know, if you read Twineby, it's like, one of the characteristics is when the elites stop, the creative class of elites, which is, I mean, Los Angeles, they stop identifying with their own working class and they start to identify with, you know, with outsiders,

• 21:52Speaker 01

  basically with, with people from foreigners from outside the country. That's another sign of a civilization at its end.

• 21:59Tucker Carlson?

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• 22:41Tucker Carlson?

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• 23:26Tucker Carlson?

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• 23:45Tucker Carlson?

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• 25:19Speaker 03

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• 25:59Tucker Carlson?

  You alluded a minute ago to its cause being affluence? Just generational affluence?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Seems like it.

• 26:05Tucker Carlson?

  It feels that way to me, too. I'm not an expert.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a cliche, but like a lot of cliches, a lot of truth to it is the, you know, the good times make soft men and soft men make bad times. So, I mean, there's obviously been a huge correction in the United States, which is, you know, welcome, which is a sort of re-embrace of the ideals of the United States.

• 26:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  I mean, let's hope that this has been a wake-up call for the people of Los Angeles. I mean, it's, they are reaping what they sowed and the people of California are reaping what we sowed. And, you know, that is, you know, I mean, it's really quite symbolic. You know, it's like the neighborhoods of the elites in Los Angeles that are really, that it really got the most effective, that are having to flee. And, but again, I mean, part of the reason I wanted to come on, and I've been writing about it every day and trying to surface the stories of the utility, the water utility executives, and I've got a story coming out later today from a firefighter who, you know, like basically just described, I mean, the firefighters, of course, the men and women on the ground doing the hard

• 27:14Speaker 01

  work, they're blameless. But, I mean, the destruction, there's 29 fire departments in Los Angeles, including LA County Fire Department. You know, there's 88 cities. And people don't realize, like, Los Angeles is a city, but then there's a much larger county around it with 88 cities in it. And there's, and not all of them have fire departments. In fact, most of them don't, right? So, the ones that don't have their own fire departments, they depend on LA County Fire Department. But, you know, and it's been this way for a long time. So, it's not like it can't work, but it definitely introduces a level of complexity into it. I mean, the priorities of these fire departments, it's not just like a social media meme. I mean, it really has been DEI. Like, it really has been the priority of

• 27:56Speaker 01

  these fire departments. The first priority of the fire departments should be to put out fires and keep people safe and save lives. But the first priority has been DEI. I mean, that is clearly...

• 28:06Tucker Carlson?

  Is there evidence? Do we have social science that shows that lesbians are better firemen than non-lesbians?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, what are the chances, right? That like all three of these executives are, I mean... You know, it's like, it's also sort of like, I mean, it's funny because the way that the defenders of it sort of talk about it is as though they're imposing equality. Actually, they're demanding that it not be based on merit. I mean, first of all, there was never any evidence that the fire departments were like systematically or structurally excluding qualified people. I mean, it's not to say that never happened, there wasn't some racism. I mean, of course there is, but it's like, they got in a situation where like people are getting promoted who were not as qualified as other people on basis of race. I mean, that is anathema to

• 28:55Speaker 01

  the American system. And by the way, the people of California have now twice rejected racial preferences. One of them in 1996, I believe, and then the other again in 20, was it 2018?

• 29:07Tucker Carlson?

  They also rejected gay marriage, but they're not allowed to get what they want, actually, it turns out. Because whatever you think of gay marriage or racial preferences or whatever, if you believe in democracy and you have a referendum system, you have to abide by the results.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and they haven't. No, they haven't. I mean, the spirit of California, I mean, there's a true spirit of California that I do think is very American, which is really egalitarianism. I mean, the American creed, if you believe Daniel Bell's analysis of it, you know, it's liberty, it's laissez faire, it's individualism, and it's egalitarianism.

• 29:36Tucker Carlson?

  That's the state I grew up in. It was the most American of all states.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  That's right. It's not equity, it's equality of opportunity. That's what egalitarianism.

• 29:44Tucker Carlson?

  It doesn't matter who your family was. We used to say when I was a kid, no one in California used his last name. Now, why would that be? You know, you go back east, as we called it, we'd go in the summertime, it'd be like, hi, I'm Michael Schellenberger in California. It's like, I'm Mike. Well, my father would always say, that's because in California, it's not about the legacy of your family, it's not about caste, it's about you. Can you do it or not?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:06Tucker Carlson?

  That seemed like a great system to me.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It's great. I mean, that's what I love, I mean, it's the part I love about California. It's like, I lived on the East Coast for like a year, it was a traumatic experience. You'd go to parties and someone would be like, oh, what school did you go to?

• 30:17Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, totally.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  And then they'd be kind of looking over your shoulder, and you're like, well, what, like, who cares what school I went to? Like, you know, who am I? And where are my passions?

• 30:25Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  So that was like, I was like, wow, that is crazy. Weird, you know, in California, it's like, what's your jam, dude? You know, it's like, really like, what are you into? You know, it's, that's like the best of it.

• 30:34Tucker Carlson?

  Who are you as a person?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, who are you as a person? It's the human, you know, it's like, obviously, there, you can get culty and whatever. But I mean, it is the, the best of that human.

• 30:42Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you're not held responsible for the sins of people you're related to. Well, I'd say, and, you know, I, I come from a complicated family, so I always loved that idea. You know, whatever.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:53Tucker Carlson?

  You're judged on you.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:55Tucker Carlson?

  Choices that you make and the character that you have.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:57Tucker Carlson?

  Your decency.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Which is actually radical individual responsibility.

• 31:01Tucker Carlson?

  That's what I always thought.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that was always for me, it was like, you know, Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning.

• 31:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  This incredibly Holocaust survivor, the whole thing was, was like, you know, being in a death camp shouldn't control how I think about the world. I mean, that's about as radical of a, of an individual mentality. Point of view, and now, of course, that's viewed as very right wing and very unsympathetic and whatever. But Viktor Frankl was just loved by the existentialist California left in the sixties. I mean, he would sell out these huge auditoriums in Berkeley and they would, you know, they'd go to Esalen. And so, I mean, you go from that to basically nobody taking responsibility. I mean, it's incredible.

• 31:43Tucker Carlson?

  And everyone living under the crushing burden of history, most of it misconstrued in a lie anyway. But still, the idea that the past is determining the present and the future. That's like the least Californian, least American idea ever.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  That's so well spoken. No, no, it's totally brilliantly well spoken. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's like we, in, in, in our next book, we're doing, we were working on this idea of these singularities, meaning like these just awful events in the past, the Holocaust, slavery.

• 32:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Indigenous genocide. And they become like gods for secular people. They become like super present, like, you know, there's, it's just everything that we do is affected by slavery. And, you know, everything that, this is indigenous land. I mean, I was going through the, I was just going through the, all of like the various documents over the years of like water and fire and disaster in Los Angeles. And they, they like all open with land acknowledgements. You know, you're just like, well, yeah, but like literally you think that white people don't belong here. Like, that is literally what you're saying in those land acknowledgements. You're saying, we don't belong here. And you may have seen, there's a very, there's a clip that went viral on social media with the deputy police, the deputy fire chief of Los Angeles, where she's sort of saying,

• 32:54Speaker 01

  "Oh yeah, people ask me, you know, can you carry my husband out of a house, you know, in danger?" And she's like, "Well, you know, your husband got himself in a place that he shouldn't have been." That was her response. It was like-

• 33:06Tucker Carlson?

  Was that, I saw that video, and my first thought was, "That can't be, was that real?"

• 33:10Speaker 01

  I know, it looks like a parody. It's crazy. You're like, "Yeah, that's literally your job is to be able to carry someone..." Can you imagine, like, someone being like, "Oh, yeah, your father, your elderly father, um, you know, we couldn't carry him out of the house, and he shouldn't have been in that house when it was burning down."

• 33:25Tucker Carlson?

  Or your daughter gets raped walking to school. Well, she shouldn't have been wearing a skirt.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Which was all-

• 33:30Tucker Carlson?

  What?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  That's like the left campaign, like, when I was in college, like, that was the whole, "Don't blame the victim." That was the whole thing. Of course, they're all-

• 33:37Tucker Carlson?

  Which I would kind of agree with, by the way. I mean, you should be able to look attractive and not get raped.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 33:42Tucker Carlson?

  You should be allowed to be old and immobile and not die in a fire. Like, what are we even saying?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  That's civilization.

• 33:47Tucker Carlson?

  It's civilization.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:48Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:50Tucker Carlson?

  What's the point of civilization? The point of civilization is to protect the vulnerable-

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:53Tucker Carlson?

  And to make it possible for people to reproduce and continue.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:57Tucker Carlson?

  So make it possible for you to have kids and your kids to have kids. Like, there's no reason to have it other than that.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  At the most basic level.

• 34:03Tucker Carlson?

  Yes. And so, I don't understand, like, how could she say something like that and not get fired or arrested?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I know. She should have been fired as soon as that came out. I mean, and Gavin Newsom should have called for her to be fired. The mayor should have called for her to be fired. She's still in that job. I mean, she's, that, that's dangerous. Like, it's a violation of firefighter ethics. It's, that person is a danger. In other words, she's going around suggesting to all of her people that work for her that they're not responsible for saving, but I think it reflects the mentality, which is a nihilistic mentality, which is that, "We don't belong here. You know, we stole, we stole this land." And so, you, so, and this is this, you know, "Let Malibu burn." I mean, it is- Definitely, definitionally nihilism. I mean, it's anti-civilization nihilism.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  You know, there's sort of two forms of nihilism. One of them is basically anti-civilization, anti-human, anti, you know, modern life. And it stems from this earlier nihilism, which is that life has no meaning. We're just like animals. In the famous Russian novel, Fathers and Sons by Turgerev, you know, the nihilistic character dissects a frog and says, "We're just like this frog." You know, "We're just matter." You know, "We're just dead matter, just this assembly." So it's a very dark nihilistic story that then leads to this just, um, yeah, nihilistic anti-civilization ideology, which became very fashionable. I mean,

• 35:29Speaker 01

  City of Courts, the Mike Davis book, I mean, it was a very fashionable book to read in places like Pacific Palisades and Hollywood and Santa Monica and Venice. So, yeah, I think it's, um, you know, I hope it's a wake-up call. I don't know if it will be, but it is a completely preventable disaster. Fires are definitely not completely preventable, but that level of destruction absolutely is. And anybody who says that it's, that it is not preventable should be as far away from power as possible. Like, anybody who believes that it was inevitable to lose 10,000 homes and buildings in Los Angeles over a week, they should not be in,

• 36:12Speaker 01

  they should be very far away from political power. They should not be in charge of any fire department, because it ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• 36:20Tucker Carlson?

  So I've taken you right to 50,000 feet, the future of the whites and all this stuff, um, which I'm grateful that you addressed. Uh, but just back to the, and I'm sorry for digressing so much. Back to the first question, how did this start? You gave a great explanation. Did climate change play a role? Was this caused by climate change?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  No, it's not caused by climate change. I mean, certainly warmer weather's, all else being equal, makes the wood, you know, drier. But, um, there is no change in precipitation over, since 1877, they've kept very good records of- Rainfall, annual rainfall in the Los Angeles basin and it's unchanged.

• 36:59Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  There are, I know, it's incredible. There's wet years and dry years. You know, you look at it, I just posted on X. It's just people can go look at it. It's from the almanac. No change in precipitation at all in Los Angeles. There have been Santa Ana winds in January, many times in the past, there have been, you know, and by the way, like we, this, we, this is a dry year now, but the last two years were very heavy rains.

• 37:25Tucker Carlson?

  Too heavy.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:26Tucker Carlson?

  Mudslide heavy.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, um, you know, we're, it's extremes. I mean, it's what, you know, that's why California is so beautiful. It's a place of extremes. And so we, you know, we adapt to that. I mean, you know, like.

• 37:38Tucker Carlson?

  But there's been no, in the aggregate, change in rainfall in a hundred and forty years?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. Not, not, yeah. No, it's actually a remarkably stable climate.

• 37:51Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it isn't, I mean, anyone who's lived there can tell you that's, that's its appeal.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:55Tucker Carlson?

  It's, it is a pretty stable climate, actually.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's stable climate with these amazing extremes. So like, you know, you just get these, I mean, the best, I mean, for my favorite weather is like, after like, you know, three days of just intense rains and you're just like trying to make sure that your house isn't flooded and, you know, the mud's everywhere. It's just the dogs are bringing in mud.

• 38:13Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  And then the sun comes out and it's just heaven on earth. I mean, that's why we're in California, right? You're just like, ah. So we love those, we love those extremes. Yeah. I mean, I think that's part of the, I mean, it's so funny because it's like, it, you, the reversion back to these, you know, people are cursing the weather. You know, they're blaming the weather.

• 38:35Tucker Carlson?

  That's why we need human sacrifice.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, yeah, exactly. Well, there's another one was, uh, literally just before I got here, the legislature got to its very important work of passing a bill just now that sets aside fifty million dollars for California to sue Trump. Like literally, and they were in a special session, they, that they kept going. They were in a special session to figure out how to sue Trump while LA is burning. And meanwhile Gavin's going out there all the Be like, oh, well, boy, be really terrible if, you know, if Trump, you know, withheld disaster aid or heaven forbid, you know, required that we, you know, get our shit together. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say on your podcast, get our things together.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  And, and then like literally, he's like, we're gonna sue him for implementing the agenda he was elected on by a majority of the American.

• 39:26Tucker Carlson?

  So it's just an MSNBC agenda. It's just a silly, rich, white liberal agenda. And I will say, I've thought for 20 years that California will only be saved by like Naib Bukele type figure, some authoritarian Latino in a cape is gonna show up and just impose order on the state. And I'm not, I'm not being, I am white. I'm not against whites. I love whites. My children are white. But that, the fact is they can't do it in that state. Gavin Newsom can't do it. The burden of guilt and self hatred is too heavy. And you're gonna get some guy from Oaxaca who's smart is gonna be like, we're not putting up any of this bullshit at all. And no, you can't camp in LA. No, you can't do meth in LA. And yes, we are gonna have like full reservoir. I mean, do you know what I mean?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  It would be amazing. It would be amazing if we had that. We, I mean, there was, there was sort of an idea that Karen Bass, because she was black and because she came from the left, would be able to do things that a white guy wouldn't be able to do. That was part of the, the reasoning for her. She didn't do it. I mean, she's just, I mean, look, she's very, people have to remember, she's very radical. I mean, and I get it. I mean, it was like, I was there, but I left it, but, um, you know, she went to Cuba a bunch of times and, you know, like admired Castro and, um, you kind of thought, well, maybe that was behind her, but it's not, you know, it really isn't. I mean, this, the thing where like, you're like literally get a warning that the whole city's gonna go up in flames. And you're like, oh, I really gotta be in Ghana for the inauguration of the new president. I mean, look at where your head's at. I mean, she, she talks about, she just loves going to Africa all the time. I love going to Africa, but

• 40:49Tucker Carlson?

  I do too.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  You're like, you're like the mayor of like,

• 40:52Tucker Carlson?

  It's just silly and selfish, really.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  It's really narcissistic. It's, it's really vapid. So.

• 40:58Tucker Carlson?

  It's not good to have people kiss your ass your whole life and tell you, I mean, that is just bad. It's if it ever, when it happens to me, it's bad for me.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:04Tucker Carlson?

  It's bad for anybody. And if some people are always being like, you've got black girl magic, like after a while. No, I'm serious, cause it's, there is no black girl magic. There's no white man magic. It's all bullshit, actually. But if if you start to believe it, having people kiss your ass, having had many people kiss my ass, I know corrodes your soul. It makes you into a bad leader. And I really think that's part of we're seeing it, not just in LA, but like the black girl magic thing has been bad for a lot of people. You know what I mean?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:30Tucker Carlson?

  As the white man magic would be too.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, then she gets, I mean, they, so the other thing was she did cut the fire department budget. Okay. Like she just cut it. I mean, she just, it just happened. And then literally.

• 41:43Tucker Carlson?

  They're denying it.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  I know. So she literally goes up at a press conference and it was word salad. I mean, it was quite impressive. I mean, she was just sort of like, like you were like, what did she just say? I mean, she's kind of, she goes, she goes, well, that was, you know, it would kind of be like, well, that was different because we just approved this other money. And she would basically just was a non sequitur. I mean, she's describing a totally different salary negotiation. They cut 72.5 million from the budget. And not only that, but then they had this internal memo that leaked that said that they were looking to cut another 48.8 million, another 49.8 million.

• 42:16Tucker Carlson?

  Fire.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  From the fire, from the fire department, which had already was already decimated. Um, it's a whole story.

• 42:23Tucker Carlson?

  It's like famous for fires.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  No, it's crazy. So, so then like, so they do that. And of course, the LA Times and Politico and I can't remember other people. They all come out and they go, they go, did she cut the budget? You know, it's complicated, you know?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  I mean, it's amazing, you know, it's complicated, which is like, yeah, yeah, she did cut, she did cut the budget. But nobody, the media was not being honest with people about what was really going on until the fire chief, the lesbians, LA County Fire Chief, to her credit.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  She was being, actually, she was being grilled by a local Fox television reporter who was just doing a great job, actually. I mean, just to be handed the local TV, actually, some of the best reporting still.

• 43:06Tucker Carlson?

  Well, in only in LA, LA has always had. Great local television. I don't know why.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  No, I think I agree with you. Yeah. Um, it's fallen off in the Bay area, though they did a little bit better on Oakland when things get really crazy. But she just kept going after her. She just kept asking her over and over again about the, about the budget cuts. And she was kind of having a high five. She was just like, yeah, yeah, she did. She cut that money. And she's like, and did it matter? Yeah, yeah, it mattered. You know, well, she had sent on, she had sent a letter. I mean, there was a letter from, I think it was December 4th that the chief, the fire chief had sent, which said specifically, this is going to reduce our ability to deal with wildfires. She said it twice. Yes, she said it twice in the letter. So it was a little bit like, okay, you were on the record saying it was going to hurt your ability. So, but then she was like, yes, yes, it did hurt our ability.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Um, to deal with it. Then she just was like, I think at that point, the fire chief, she was just like, all right, you know, like, um, the gloves are off. So she goes on CBS and on CNN and reiterates it. And with very strong language, ICE was able to get into this piece that will come out, um, uh, shortly. I was able to get into the weeds a little bit on it, but basically there's a hundred fire trucks that are currently, um, uh, in the maintenance shop that are just need to be fixed. There's a hundred fire trucks missing. The person I interviewed was like, we could go buy, we could have bought for a hundred million dollars. We could have bought, um, you know, uh, like a hundred or 200,

• 44:36Speaker 01

  you know, kind of used fire trucks or whatever, just get fire trucks from wherever, maintain them, and just put them in different points all around the city. You wouldn't necessarily have the staff to deal with them. But you could then, as soon as you get that fire warning, again, on January 1st or January 2nd, you can just fly in firefighters from around the country, from around the world. You would just be like, look, we're just going to bring everybody in. We don't know what's going to happen. And then they can just go, he was, this person was like, you know, we could put like 30 of them at Dodger Stadium. You know, you could just like put these fire trucks that are well maintained, you know. But so she was like, because I didn't quite understand it either, because she was like, we didn't have the money for the mechanics. And you're like, well, why do you like, what do you need the mechanics for? Well, you need the mechanics to maintain the fire engines.

• 45:17Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  So, I mean, this is what, you know, it's like when civilization breaks down, it breaks down in like just a million small ways, you know. So, you know, is there some DEI part of it? Yeah, there was, they were promoting people not based on merit. Is there budget cuts? Absolutely. I mean, they didn't, you know, and what goes wrong when you don't have those budget cuts? Everything, you know, I mean, the other complaint I've heard, you know, is just that, it's just the advanced thinking, it's just getting people that can kind of be thinking in advance, that's where their focus is, that's where the priority is. So, the problem with the DEI is that when you're just orienting an entire organizational culture towards racial and sex quotas, rather than towards, okay, you know, what about the Santa Ana winds and the fire risk and whatever, it's just, we all know that like,

• 46:03Speaker 01

  it's not just time in the day, it's also mind time. It's like, what do you think about when you take a shower? What do you think about when you clean on your shoes? Like, where is your head at? Their head has been in the clouds around, you know, DEI, the larger society, ESG, climate, homelessness, I mean, I mean, the list goes on and on. But the, you know, it was on homelessness, we now know, because the state audit came out, $24 billion on homelessness since Gavin took office in 2019. Tucker, homelessness in California increased by 40% under Gavin. Can you believe, I mean, 40, so, because everyone goes, it's

• 46:41Speaker 01

  such a curious, it's such a curious mystery, as to we spent all this money on homelessness, and yet, it just increased. It's like, well, yeah, because you spent money incentivizing and subsidizing homelessness. You spent all this money to attract people from all over the United States. I mean, I interview people in California that are on the streets, and it's like, nobody's from California. I mean, they come in.

• 47:06Tucker Carlson?

  The only reason I feel like I have any understanding of what homelessness is, is because of the interviews that you did several years ago, which are the most unbelievable, I'd never heard of you before I saw these interviews. And you did, and I would recommend to our listeners to go find them, because they're on YouTube. You did the thing that nobody, I've never seen anybody do it before. Others have followed since you did it, but you just went and you interviewed the homeless. And like, what are you doing here? Tell me your story. And they were remarkably honest.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Oh, they're, they wanna be. They see, the thing is like homeless people, they're always lonely, you know? And so they, they're, um, obviously these are people in a really bad way and they're eager to tell their story. They have a lot to say. They're not, most of them are not dumb.

• 47:41Tucker Carlson?

  Some of them are not dumb at all.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Oh, no. And they do lie like at the beginning. So, I mean, you have to, um, the secret to all great interviews, as you know, more than anybody, is, is you need to have a long time.

• 47:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  People tell the, they lie at first and then the truth comes out. So like you'll interview people and you'll be like, you're like, where are you from, brother? And they'll be like, oh, I was raised here. And then you get like 30 minutes in the interview, they're like, oh, I'm from Arkansas, you know? I'm from Texas or whatever. So, yeah, I mean, um, so, yeah, they're from all over. They, they came here, they come, you know, the most famous one I did with, was with James Church. He had tattoos on his face and he was just incredible. I just love that interview so much. I think it was like, it's not like an hour, hour and a half with him, just holding my iPhone up to him while he's talking. But he was the one who was like, um, you know, if I'm being honest, you know, they pay people to be homeless here. And I was like, I was like, what do you, what do you mean by that? You know, and he's like, well, he's like, I get 650 bucks a month, you know?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  In cash welfare to be homeless here, plus a couple of hundred bucks more in food stamps. It's a great deal. And he was like, I got Netflix on my phone. I watch Amazon, you know, I watch Amazon Prime TV on my phone. You know, I still, I'm electric city from the, from the, the, the light pole right here.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  That video, I will say, is very satisfying. I do think that played a pretty big role in the voters of San Francisco voting to get rid of cash welfare, um, for homeless people.

• 49:05Tucker Carlson?

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• 50:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:50Speaker 04

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• 51:34Tucker Carlson?

  But why did it, I know I've asked you this before, but why did it fall to you to do that?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  It's, well, it's because, well, we know why. I mean, because it's-

• 51:41Tucker Carlson?

  Because you weren't a reporter. You weren't working for a newspaper or a TV station.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  No. I mean, look, it's, for me, this is the golden age of journalism. It is so much fun. Like, I'm, because like, basically, I can go into every story and you discover that people aren't really doing reporting.

• 51:58Tucker Carlson?

  At all.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  I showed up at the guy, I showed up at the house that the guy lived in, the guy that assaulted Nancy Pelosi's husband.

• 52:03Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Just to give you a sense of where journalism is at. And I show up and I'm like, I'm just happy to be there. And there's all these journalists there. There's like a bunch of like local TV news and like the local print, wherever. And I was like, I just kind of like, oh, hey, what's it called?

• 52:15Tucker Carlson?

  He lived out in Berkeley, right?

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was in Berkeley, yeah. Black Lives Matter flag in front, you know. You know, abandoned school bus. They were really, it was a really terrible environment. But, and I was like, oh, I was like, so I was like, have you guys already, I was kind of like worried. I was like, I got here late. And I was like, so you guys already like knocked on all the doors of the neighbors? And they were just like, looked at me and they were like, no, we're like not, we're, I can't remember, one of them says like, oh, we don't want to be like rude or something, or that would be like inappropriate. I was like, I was like, and at that moment, I was like, oh, oh, God, this is gonna be great. And I just like went and knocked on all the doors and like get all the information. Like, oh, yeah, they would run naked out there. And they would be on drugs all the time. And,

• 52:55Speaker 01

  yeah, they were like all left wing. And it was like, you know, I was like, oh, this is amazing. Like, there's no competition. Like, it's, you know, I got on the, I got on the White House briefing just recently, the White House briefing on UAPs, which you and I are both interested in, on the drones. And it was just like, you can kind of go into these stories, you just start talking to people and you just realize journalists aren't really, they're not really journalists. They're more like, kind of the people that would run for like class president or something. They're kind of goody-two-shoes types.

• 53:26Tucker Carlson?

  They're ask kissers, yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're actually very authority. I mean, they're the ones that wanted all the censorship.

• 53:30Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  So they're not that, that old picture of journalists is like this kind of cantankerous and like, you know, crabby and- They got rid of all those people.

• 53:38Tucker Carlson?

  Anti authoritarian.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Anti authoritarian, um, yeah, difficult people.

• 53:43Tucker Carlson?

  I'm the son of one of those.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I grew up around this.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Classic, right? That's like the greatest. I mean, there's like, and you realize it's essential to the functioning of civilization to have a bunch of disagreeable people running around asking impertinent questions.

• 53:55Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  So with this one, it was like, yeah, so I mean, you basically get like, when you just look at the coverage of the fires, I mean, it was like the, the reporters that are going out and doing it. It's like their whole thing is like, oh, we've got to make sure that the right wing doesn't take advantage of this situation to push their, like literally, that's how they think about it. So they're out there running cover for the polit-, I mean, it's amazing, you know? Somebody did like a little meme on it, but it's like that thing where it's like, yeah, it used to be that the reporter would like be holding the microphone up to the politicians and being like, answer my questions. And now they're like, demanding that the people defend themselves for their terrible votes, you know? It's like a complete reversal.

• 54:33Tucker Carlson?

  It's so true. Well, they're the Praetorian Guard for the powerful.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:37Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Sue, but one of the things I learned from your interviews with the homeless, which I just cannot recommend strongly enough as a primary source of information, actual information, is the degree to which the narcotics fuel homelessness. So you can't really disaggregate homelessness from drug addiction.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  No, of course. I mean, it's really.

• 54:55Tucker Carlson?

  You say of course, but like.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  No, I know. Well, no, I know. I wrote San Francisco because it was literally like, cause I knew drugs, like, you know?

• 55:02Tucker Carlson?

  Me too.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  I know drugs. Um, you know, I made three friends from high school that became homeless addicts. Two are dead. It's like, you know, um, I'm, you know, I happily avoided personally all the hard ones, but you saw your friends, like, you know, you'd leave you, wow, you guys are doing meth. You know, it's like meth's bad guys.

• 55:18Tucker Carlson?

  What town did you go to high school in?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Greeley, Colorado.

• 55:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  You know, um, so, um, you know, my parents are psychologists. I remember just being around, my, my aunt had schizophrenia, you know? Um, I've told the story a million times, so I don't want to bore you, but basically it was like, it was just kind of like, so wait, everyone just thinks that this is like a housing problem? Like, that's just crazy. So, you know, you sort of needed to, I needed to go do all those interviews, but I mean, really the first homelessness epidemic, the first time that we're modern homelessness was in the early eighties. And it was just, it was basically, all it was, was a combination of the emptying, the final closure of all the mental hospitals, where they literally, literally dumped people on the streets. Like, I thought that that was, that sounded like an exaggeration, like, for starting. They literally were putting, you know, schizophrenics and stuff on the streets.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  And then the crack epidemic. Like, that's all it was. It was just those two things. And then, of course, then, you know, left-wing mayor of San Francisco and others are like, oh, well, we can't like, we can't like, require that people not camp outside, they're poor. The left, in reaction to Reagan, then took up homelessness as a, as something that they claimed was caused by Reagan. Like, I mean, he'd been in office for, like, whatever, two or three years, and they would just make ridiculous, you know, the Reagan budget, you know, that's why he's on the street. Yeah. So it really gets used, so it becomes viewed by the left, early on, as a political propaganda tool. I also blame the comics, by the way, I mean, and just, I'll name them. Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, they did this whole thing, you may remember, Comic Relief. Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Where they framed the whole thing as a po, as a problem of poverty, which is just, you know, it's just, it's just such a disservice to the people on the street who need an intervention. Right. There's a natural, like, when, for addicts, there's, there's a natural progression where you, you, you know, whether from trauma, or just because you enjoyed getting high, you, your addiction gets in the way of your job, and you stop going to work. And you often, you know, live at home with your parents, or with friends. You lie, steal, and cheat from them, repeatedly. They give you multiple warnings. They finally kick you out. That's often the route to homelessness. You end up on the street. That's the moment where the society, the parent, the family and friends were not able to impose an intervention.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  So, the way it should work is that you end up, you go out and camp on the street, and the cop goes, hey, you can't camp here. It's illegal to camp here. Exactly. And they go, what am I supposed to do? And they're like, well, we're gonna take you to jail, or you can go to rehab. Like, those are your two choices. Yeah. Two choices. And natural intervention is imposed in that situation. What progressives and Democrats did, for 40 years, is they just removed the intervention in the Name of compassion, the most compassion, I think is to oppose the intervention. I mean, the thing that's most common, I'll even find this with like harm reduction workers. I was just with some harm reduction workers in, in Skid Row and, and one of them was telling me the whole usual thing. Oh, you can't make somebody get clean. They have to hit their own bottom, like whatever.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  And I was like, and they were like, I used to run around here, you know, on, on meth. It was a, um, a, an Asian American woman, um, who's doing this. And I was like, I was like, oh, wow. I was like, what did it finally take you for you to get clean? She was like, well, I went to prison.

• 58:31Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, well, right. So.

• 58:33Tucker Carlson?

  I have a really close friend you had, who's lived that same trajectory. I have a couple of friends, but a very, I have a legit close friend. Was totally out of control on drugs and lost kids and all the things that happen when you're addicted. And got sober in prison and rebuilt a life, um, a wonderful life. Yes. But, yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  And they're like the best, by the way, the recovering addicts are like the greatest people.

• 58:54Tucker Carlson?

  My favorite people.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  They're the funniest, most honest.

• 58:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Um, people, they have an equanimity about them.

• 59:01Tucker Carlson?

  I go to AA meetings when I can, not because I'm in danger of partying again. I'm not after 22 years, but because I like the people. Cause they're so honest and they, they're honest about the one thing no one's ever honest about, which is themselves. It's super easy to be honest about you. I don't like your sweater, Mike. That's disgusting. Like, that's not hard. You've gained weight. That's not hard.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:20Tucker Carlson?

  I've gained weight. I'm wearing an ugly sweater. Those are hard.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:23Tucker Carlson?

  And you find among those people, the recovered people, like a true honesty about themselves.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:30Tucker Carlson?

  It's like the greatest church service there is.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Right. Because they're all born again in an important sense.

• 59:35Tucker Carlson?

  A hundred percent.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I, so that's the.

• 59:39Tucker Carlson?

  But to deprive people of that.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:41Tucker Carlson?

  To encourage them to continue to use drugs and alcohol is like, I mean, don't even, I mean, whatever. It's an interview of you, not me, but I just feel like sobriety has to be the goal, not just for the individual, but for the society. I really believe that. So sobriety is the greatest gift. A, B, use of drugs and alcohol causes mental illness, which nobody ever says out loud. I've seen it. To some extent, experienced it. I know you can cause severe mental illness.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:00:10Tucker Carlson?

  By using drugs and alcohol. Like, right? Is that even controversial?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  It shouldn't be. No.

• 1:00:14Tucker Carlson?

  But that's right. I mean, you've done more on this than I have, much more, but.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  It's sort of coming back a little bit. People talk about meth-induced psychosis now.

• 1:00:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  More, but um, yeah, it's uh, it's really.

• 1:00:25Tucker Carlson?

  Weed-induced psychosis.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And the weed now, it's just so potent and dangerous and yeah.

• 1:00:31Tucker Carlson?

  So, but you, as a someone who still lives in California, does anybody, do you ever hear people say that? Like, why are we paying people to use drugs? Like, should it surprise us that things are falling apart?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I do think, I do think that the, the conversation has changed a bit. Um, I'll take some credit for it with San Francisco and the videos in particular. Um, but yeah, it's just still that thing where it's like, they kind of go, but yeah, but there's a black woman running for mayor. And it just, it's like the singularity. It's like, when I always say that, it's like this just, it's just hovering over people.

• 1:01:00Tucker Carlson?

  The race thing.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really, it's really about race in a, in a really important sense. Um, and then the guilt.

• 1:01:08Tucker Carlson?

  The dealers are all immigrants from Central America. We can't do anything about it.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, sanctuary state, sanctuary city. That's part of what they're gonna sue on.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that it's just, um, yeah, it's a big trap. I mean, I think that it's funny because, you know, we're a guilt culture. And so, you know, like, you know, Japan's a shame culture.

• 1:01:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  And guilt is this incredibly important part of the Christian tradition.

• 1:01:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Well, you stop believing in original sin and you stop believing in Christianity, you still, apparently, there's still this deep desire to feel that guilt. And to sort of show it as well. In other words, it is a social part of it. People wanted to see in that focus, they wanted other people to see in that focus group that they, they felt guilty. You know, it's very important to them.

• 1:01:53Tucker Carlson?

  But what's interesting is so in, you know, traditional Christianity. Other religions, you know, the guilty person atone, repents, atones, dons ashes, sackcloth, and covers himself in ashes as a way of saying, you know, I am worthy of the degradation.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:10Tucker Carlson?

  But we've kind of transferred that. It's almost like the homeless are in sackcloth and ashes. Do you know what I mean? Like, I live in the Palisades, I produce music videos, I'm doing pretty well, but I still feel guilt. So but like, seeing somebody like, you know, writhing on the sidewalk, I'm like displacing my atonement on him.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah. He's, well, then they talk about it that way. Even when you talk to the activists that justify it, they're like, well, that's a, you know, those people are suffering because of capitalism.

• 1:02:38Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, slavery and.

• 1:02:40Tucker Carlson?

  But the whole point of Christianity is, no, no, you suffer. You.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:45Tucker Carlson?

  Like, confess your sin. You don't like to put it off on some junkie.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Right. Well, it's the part of it that's just really satanic. I mean, not to be theological about it, but it's just a complete reversal of the traditional Christian process. It's just, yeah, it's exactly, it's making other people.

• 1:03:01Tucker Carlson?

  Atone for your sins.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's crazy.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  It's so bad. And they're sort of on display, you know, it's the, it's the, it's really, if you kind of read it, I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like, they, they want to, they want it to be on display. They want to sort of show it. And that's why they insist that they not be arrested or mandated treatment. It's wild. It is like, you know, like, you go to Skid Row, and it's still like a Hieronymus Bach, is it a Hieronymus Bosch painting? You know, it's just like, you just can't, you still can't believe it. I mean, you still can't believe there's a person lying there, you know, sweating profusely, passed out, you can't tell if they're alive or dead. You don't know, like, do I do an intervention? And it's just, it's really breaking down. These are human beings.

• 1:03:46Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know, that's, and I'm not a particularly compassionate or a kind person. I'm kind of a dick, actually. But even I, like, whenever I see that, I feel such deep sadness for the person. It's like, heartbreaking, like.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:03:57Tucker Carlson?

  Don't allow, if that was my child, would I allow it? Not for one second. I would take that child and chain him to the fucking radiator until he got better. I would not allow that. My child.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  It's a healthy response, by the way. Absolutely, it is. Absolutely is. Those are the people that end up getting off the street. You raise the bottom instead of lowering the bottom.

• 1:04:16Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network. And, no contract holding you back. Plans start at twenty-five dollars a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save ten dollars on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:06:19Tucker Carlson?

  We're so far, Phil, from the...

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so there are, in LA County, seventy-eight? How many fire departments?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Well, there's eighty-eight cities and there's twenty-nine fire departments in counting the county. No, no, that's fine. But yeah, so like, literally, like, once the fire starts... The, I didn't even understand this until I started investigating it. The county fire chief has to call all these cities and be like, hey, can you send a couple of trucks? We're putting together a strike team. You know, can you send some engines or whatever? And they have to call around and they're like, okay, we're all gonna meet. The fire's like blazing away. And they're like, okay, well, we're all gonna meet, you know, wherever, you know, Sepulveda or whatever the streets are in LA. You know, we'll meet in this place and we'll get together and we'll sync the radios and we'll develop a plan. I mean, this is all happening like while the city's burning. I mean, it's madness, right? The other thing is that, I mean, there's like.

• 1:07:09Tucker Carlson?

  So they didn't have any preparation for this?

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  There's nothing, man. I mean, there might've been something that we, but obviously if there was, it wasn't enough. I mean, it's a little bit like when they go, when the people that are like, when the nihilists are defending what happened, they're like, well, there was nothing else we could have done or we did everything we could have. It's like, well, no, obviously you didn't. Like, it doesn't matter what it is. It obviously was, there's only one right answer, which is that you didn't do enough. You know, the fatalism, you know, it's a, it's a way to disavow responsibility on the one hand. Again, I think it expresses that nihilism, but I think it's like, people just have been out of practice, but you have to, this is part of the journalism too.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's that you kind of, it has to be like, no, no, we're not accepting that as an answer. Like, the right attitude for the journalist is to basically be no excuses.

• 1:08:02Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  It makes for like, I mean, maybe the journalists are being too much of a hard ass and too much of a dick about it. And maybe they need to be a little bit, whatever. That's fine. That's their role. It's like, your role is to be the prosecutor against the, on the case of the failure. Your role is to be the investigator.

• 1:08:18Tucker Carlson?

  You're the public defender.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the public, the public defender, the prosecutor, the, you know, but your point is to be like, oh, no, that, that can't be right. So, because when they go, well, we ran out of water. Well, why'd you run out of water? Well, there wasn't enough water. No, well, why wasn't it? Well, because actually it turned out one of the reservoirs didn't have any water in it.

• 1:08:32Tucker Carlson?

  Isn't it your job to make sure there's enough water?

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, and this is what they do when they go after Trump and stuff. Is that like, because Trump will often be like, directionally correct.

• 1:08:41Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  You know, like, oh, but. Trump was referring to the wrong kind of reservoir, you know, the other reservoirs were full. It's like, okay, fine, but the reservoir right next to the Pacific Palisades was empty. So, you know, his basic, the basic intuition, which is, I think, I often talk about the importance of, you know, like if you're defending civilization, it's a physical thing, right? So I'm always thinking to myself as like, like there's a physicalism in my worldview. Which is like, okay, that's a, that's a person, that's a body. You need to, they need to, they're in somewhere they shouldn't be. They need to be somewhere else. So we can have a debate about how to move them somewhere else. That's a totally reasonable debate to have, but they can't be there.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  They can't be there because they're creating fires, they're breaking the law, they're hurting themselves and others. Similarly, there's, there wasn't water there, there needed to be more water. And if you go, okay, well, we actually, let's say that they had all the reservoirs, the potable water reservoirs. Let's say they had all been full and they still ran out of water. Well, then there was some other problem you needed to solve. You maybe needed more reservoirs or maybe you needed, you know, you needed the preparation there. So you just have to have, I mean, you know, the Bukhely type that we, that you'd want to see or somebody. You just have to have somebody that's just like literally, you can, no excuses all the way down the line.

• 1:09:56Tucker Carlson?

  Say there's a, I feel like you're on something super important. If you could flesh it out, you say there's a physicalism to your worldview. Contrast that with the worldview currently in power.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Oh, well, this is, yeah, this is exactly, it's like, um, it's this, first of all, it's like, I mean, it's just so symbolic. It's this city of angels, you know? So it's like, we're up here and you want it like the wealthier you get in LA. And like I said, with some exceptions like Venice Beach, but mostly you're getting up higher. You're moving up, up, up, up, up. You're trying to get away from.

• 1:10:24Tucker Carlson?

  To the cliffs of Malibu.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you end up in the heavens and people talk about, I live in a little tree house. I mean, I get it. I love it. It's like, I live in the Berkeley Hills. I'm not like, you know, but it's like, I'm, you know, I'm above all that. I'm away from all that. Like I'm connected to nature up here, but also, you know, away from all the, you know, the blebes. And so you actually, I think they do, it's that whole thing. We talk about people being in a bubble. You know, I mean, it's like the most bubbly place in the world, except for that it's not. And you're in a massive. Fire zone that must be constantly managed. There's consequences of living in these spectacular places. But you've got people that are, it's there, it's the, the whole industry is a fantasy industry. I mean, it's just exists to construct a fantasy reality.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  And yeah, you would hope that, that people would be able to compartmentalize. Yeah. My day job is constructing fantasies that we charge, you know, $20 to stream. But I know that when I go home that like all the brush has to be cleared around my house. And I have to vote for candidates that are physicalists. I mean, look at

• 1:11:27Tucker Carlson?

  Physicalists?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I don't, I mean, I don't know if that's the right word. There's something there though, right?

• 1:11:32Tucker Carlson?

  You're on to something so important.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  They're fantasyists. I mean, the other people, I mean, I don't want to use the word idealist. Cause there's too many other connotations to it, but there's just, it's just a difference between being your heads, your heads up in the clouds and also, and then as opposed to just being really, you need the firefighter view of the world. You need the cop view of the world. Frankly, you need the homeless guys view. The homeless people like live in a, I mean, they're high a lot. So they're switching in and out, but they have to get their physical needs met. You know, there's just a, yeah. So it's, um,

• 1:12:04Tucker Carlson?

  When we first had kids, I remember my wife being, and I had much lower standards, but insisting on the house being clean and orderly. And I remember saying like, it doesn't, you know, the point of having kids is to instill values in them. She goes, yeah, but one of the values is like order and cleanliness and like,

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:20Tucker Carlson?

  They will feel like things are out of control. If the house isn't clean and orderly, and she's really insistent on that. And we've lived that way our whole lives and I, it, it's a version of what you're saying. It's like, you can tell your kids about honesty and decency and compassion and high achievement or whatever. But like, someone has to make the bed and vacuum the floor. And if there's dog shit in the kitchen, like it has to be cleaned up.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:44Tucker Carlson?

  Like that's, she understood that.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:46Tucker Carlson?

  And has imposed it to great effect, I would say.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  I'm sure. No, I think that's right. And also like parent, we all, I did it too. So I'm not like judging, but like we talk too much to the kids. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And you see like new parents doing, talking to their kid and the kid's like, what? It's like the peanuts is right. Like the whole, what they hear is the wah wah wah wah. As opposed to like, could you, could you set the table? You know? Could you, you know, like the kids like, I mean, we, they kids like to have a job. They wanna have a chore. Chores are super, like, kids love that. You know, and, um, so you, you know, and you're, you're teaching the kids to clean the classroom every morning.

• 1:13:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  I mean, the problem is the specialization and the wealth, they sort of get disconnected from it.

• 1:13:28Tucker Carlson?

  Talk too much to the kids.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean though?

• 1:13:31Tucker Carlson?

  That's why I'm laughing.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  And dogs too, people deal with their dogs. You ever see people with like, they're like, you know, whatever. I live in the Berkeley Hills. It's like, you know, older ladies and their dogs and the, you know, and they're just like saying blah, blah, blah, blah, the dogs. It's like, well, you're not holding the leash tight enough, lady. You know? You rewarded the dog when he did something bad. You should have rewarded it when it came to you. Anyway. So all these things break down, all these norms.

• 1:13:54Tucker Carlson?

  So deep and true. You just said, you're a physicalist. I, I want that to become a, I want intercommon usage. Cause I think it's, that is like, really, really important.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it, cause it's like, people will say things like practical, which is good and pragmatic. But some pragmatic got started to mean things like making shitty political compromises. Do you know what I mean? Or it's an American linguistic tradition or a philosophical tradition. But yeah, a physicalist. It's like, yeah, somebody's gotta clean up all the, you know, if you have all the homeless people, you're gonna have to spend millions of dollars on cleaning up crap.

• 1:14:26Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  All the time. And you know, the, the homeless, one of the things you probably have observed is that, I think it's a, like, probably a compensating mechanism. But they're just, they're obsessed with collecting tons and tons of garbage, basically.

• 1:14:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  So they'll, you know, you'll clean up these homeless encampments and you'll be like, oh, wow.

• 1:14:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, they're not minimalist.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  No, no, they're not living the zen lifestyle.

• 1:14:47Tucker Carlson?

  Bangin' olfs in life. It's like, very much.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  No, no, it's very cluttered, you know? And so they're probably over, but so, yeah, I mean, they need, you need to, we need to reimpose some limits. You know, there's a, I'm also, I just became really obsessed with this scholar I just discovered who wrote a trilogy on nationalism named Leah Greenfeld. Highly recommend her books. Her first book is called nationalism. Second book is called spirit of capitalism. And then third book is called mind, madness and modernity. And these books are just incredible, but basically.

• 1:15:17Tucker Carlson?

  L E A.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  It's actually L I A H and then Greenfeld.

• 1:15:23Tucker Carlson?

  Common spelling.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Tucker Carlson?

  L I A H.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  L I A H. Yeah, she's a Russian. I think she's a Russian Jew who went to Israel, lived in Israel for a long time. And then her and then her and then her mentor was Edward Schills, the sociologist. Um, so she's sociologist, but the nationalism book is beautiful. I mean, it's like the, the, the famous book on nationalism is a guy by, is called Imaginary Communities by Benedict Anderson. And it's, he's a Marxist. And so it's all the whole things like him trying to explain how nationalism, why it's so powerful when Marx thought it should wither away. And but she describes nat- so she defines nationalism, the picture that people have of nationalism is completely wrong.

• 1:16:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  She describes nationalism as a sovereign community of fundamentally equal individuals who have a shared identity. And so she's like nationalism is fundamentally democratic. Now you might have some systems that are nationalist, but they don't have proper democracy. But really the basic idea is that egalitarian idea that we're Americans, we live here, we have the same solidarity. I've also was, um, I've also become, I'll come back to the Greenfeld, but I've also been obsessed with Hannah Arendt, who I had never read until recently. And she.

• 1:16:34Tucker Carlson?

  I don't think you're allowed to read her anymore.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  And well, I know, well, she was canceled. I know. I discovered she was canceled.

• 1:16:39Tucker Carlson?

  Hannah, I love Hannah Arendt, so I, but I didn't realize, just like Freud, who was also a huge figure in my childhood. Everyone talked about Freud, alluded to Freud. Um, and then he just kind of disappeared one day and Hannah Arendt, same thing.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, totally canceled, but it's brilliant. Yeah.

• 1:16:54Tucker Carlson?

  She's too honest.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yeah. She was very, well, it's really in, um, there's, I read her two books. One is the Onto Talatianism book and the other one is Eichmann and Jerusalem. Eichmann and Jerusalem is, it's rough because she describes how the Jewish councils.

• 1:17:08Tucker Carlson?

  It is rough.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Participated with the Nazis. I mean, that was what was really controversial. But what really blew me away from reading Hannah Arendt, because I was coming to the nationalism conversation. I mean, I should, self-confession, because I should have been reading nationalism starting in 2016.

• 1:17:24Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  But, um, but you know, I finally was reading on it and it was like, she was like nationalism is a barrier to totalitarianism, because totalitarianism is attempting to destroy all relationships between people other than the relationship with the state.

• 1:17:37Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  And so, so religion, nationalism, you know, um, you know, the classic de Tocqueville associative ties.

• 1:17:45Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  You know, all of that is a threat to totalitarianism. Yeah. And, um, so that really struck me. And Leah Greenfield, kind of, she has, I just interviewed her, so she has like a difference of opinion with, um, with, um, um, Arendt on this issue. But, but nonetheless, I was just struck by how, I don't know what the right, I must like, like, for me, like nationalism, because I come from the left, you know, from the radical left. And we would, we would code our socialist yearnings as the public interest.

• 1:18:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  You know, Ralph Nader kind of took all of the Chomsky and left-wing views of the early 60s and packaged them for moderate, he kind of made it all seem very reasonable, you know. And the environmentalists did the same thing. So, so the brilliance of the left in general, but the radical left in particular, was of just cross-dressing as mainstream issues.

• 1:18:37Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  So, um, so, so it became, so really what is the socialist movement became a consumer rights.

• 1:18:44Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Public interest, the women's rights movement.

• 1:18:46Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  And you get these really radical ideologies. I mean, I'm just obsessed with this, um, the ways in which like, so Marxism, look back on it, I was like, wow, I can't believe the things I believed in. Marxism has this idea that the capitalists, like what's distinct about them is that they're just super greedy and they're thieves and that they're stealing from their workers. And there's really no difference between the entrepreneur, the capitalist entrepreneur, like Elon Musk or Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, and their workers. They're just meaner and they steal from them. And it's like, it's just an amazingly audacious lie, because whenever you go and actually study an entrepreneur. What's incredible is that it's not just that they are doing, it's not like they're the best at what they're doing.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  They're the best at like 12 different things. Exactly. You may remember when, when Trump and Elon were beginning their bromance, um, Trump goes, he goes, you know, I asked Elon, I was like, I was like, what is that you're really good at? You know, you could see it was like probably a question that Trump is used to asking people that he interviews for a job or something. And he goes, turned out it was a lot of different things, you know? And it's like, well, yeah, like, I mean, cause of course, like with Thomas Edison, people go, oh, we invented the light bulb. He didn't invent the light bulb, um, he improved it. He invented a viable economic model for electricity production. I mean, he invented the electrical grid. He found the customers. I mean, one of the things that impresses me so much with, with Elon is like, I'll see him, you'll see him out there and he'll be selling.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  You know, which is kind of, I mean, selling is sort of the worst part of our jobs in some ways. I mean, you can do it with pleasure and you can do it with verve and stuff, but, but you know, you're kind of like, and I do it. I mean, I'm always like subscribe now, you know? And, and you're like, you have to do it like it's part of the work, but I'm always like, wow, Elon is still, he's the richest man in the world. He's probably, he may be the greatest innovator in American history, certainly top three. And he's still out there having to hawk his products and, but, and he does it great. He's an amazing job of it. He like, he, one of the innovations was, you know, he just become the biggest user of Twitter rather than buying paid ads. But so this gigantic lie from Marx, which is that the, the, first of all, the entrepreneur, the capitalist is, is just a meaner version of the worker.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  As opposed to this gen, you know, this Schumpeterian genius. And Schumpeter comes along and then his, the other thing, the big lie, and then Schumpeter points it out, is that the owner of the company and the workers have the same fundamental interest. In other words, Elon Musk's employees and Elon have the same interest. They want to expand their markets and want to expand their products. So to put them opposed is just so, it's just, it's so dishonest and it's so reminiscent of, of what. You can say feminism or radical feminism, but this idea that the interests of women are opposed by men, that women and men have different interests. And of course, you trace it back, it all goes back to Simone de Beauvoir.

• 1:21:42Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Who's a Marxist, writing in the post-war period, I guess it was like the 40s, her book came out, The Second Sex. But she's just taking this totally idiotic Marxist framework and applying it to women and men.

• 1:21:53Tucker Carlson?

  It's the biggest lie, because it ignores the very obvious symbiosis. It's just, it's like, it's not possible for them to exist apart. And it's not possible to continue the species. It's like so dumb, that they need each other, that actually, power is exerted in very subtle but powerful ways, within a relationship between a man and a woman, that are not at all described or even acknowledged, right?

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  It's the basis of life itself.

• 1:22:17Tucker Carlson?

  Of course!

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  So it is like, really, you trace back, like, the emergence of nihilism, it really is in Marxism, it's in feminism, and then they successfully cross-dress for decades, and they get so good at it, this is the famous long march through institutions, or what they call cultural Marxism. But they basically dress themselves up as, I mean, civil, you know, basically, civil rights, I mean, because once you get equal rights, the work is done. Same thing with gays and lesbians.

• 1:22:44Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  But then the radical left activists then go and grab all those trappings. Because we started the conversation, this may seem like a digression, but it's important, I think, for normies and everybody to understand that, I mean, it took a long time for me to get it, but it was like, oh, right, like, the people that call themselves environmentalists are actually just radical leftists, slightly different from Marx, because they're actually into Malthus, this totally dystopian, anti-human view. But the genius of the left is that they are so successful at masking their real agenda behind something else. You know, we just want equality for people of color, we just want to create equal opportunity for migrants. No, their agenda is the destruction of civilization.

• 1:23:29Tucker Carlson?

  I know. And you see, on the environmental-

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  And it's working in LA.

• 1:23:32Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it is, it is working. And I always thought, on the environmental movement, there was a woman called Julia Butterfly Hill.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:39Tucker Carlson?

  Who spent more than a year in a redwood. And, you know, I always thought, you know, if you were sincere about environmentalism, like, she would be, like, whatever happened to her, nobody knows. And that was to your point about physicalism, like I like redwoods and like if there's a reason to cut them out, okay, but like maybe don't because they're just so beautiful. That's my personal view. I always have felt that way. So like here was someone who was, she saved a tree. That's gotta be the highest level of what they claim they're trying to do, but they totally ignored her. They don't give a shit about her at all. She died in the tree. Probably better for them. What they really wanted to do was disconnect people from nature. It was the opposite.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:20Tucker Carlson?

  So why is it that every single person I know who really spends a lot of time outdoors, who's into, you know, the sporting life or whatever, lives in a rural area, man, their goals are the opposite of those of the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:34Tucker Carlson?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Well, and also, and also I think the physicalist distinction works on that as well. I mean, here you have, I did an interview with a terrific, this scientist I mentioned, and he's just like, you know, when you're like dealing with fires, the main event is what is happening on the ground.

• 1:24:50Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  And they're, and the climate extremists are out there basically saying, no, no, ignore, ignore this whole physical reality. We just need to reorganize the entire global economy.

• 1:25:01Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Like, we can't stop these fires, let Malibu burn, but give us control over the, the, the driver of the economy. I mean, it's such madness.

• 1:25:11Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly. And it's the opposite and they don't care. I mean, what, what's the pollution generated by these fires?

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, oh, it's so much, I mean, it's, I can't, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it's massive. Now, I mean, I will say.

• 1:25:23Tucker Carlson?

  Dangerous, right?

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. I mean, oh my gosh, the air in LA now. I mean, it is, my daughter's in college there. I'm worried about her. I mean, it is absolutely toxic air. I mean, of course it is, you know, and you have a lot of electric cars and you have a lot of batteries going up. We don't know what that stuff is putting out in terms of particulate matter. So no, it's awful. I mean, you know, ostensibly you'll get, you know, tree growth and the carbon will be, you know, reabsorbed and those will be reabsorbed. But yeah, no, I mean.

• 1:25:50Tucker Carlson?

  I'm not talking about carbon. I mean, like.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Tucker Carlson?

  Poison in the air and water.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. I mean, all the, I think of all the, all the, all the houses with all the plastic and electricity burning. It's terrible. No, for sure. I mean, yeah, it's a chance to get re-grounded, I think. A chance to, I mean, you know, it is also an interesting moment, right? Because Hollywood, it's just producing garbage. It is just, it is incredible how bad the cultural production is. Just at a straight, like, you know, if you're someone that just loves pop culture, like, you just love Steven Spielberg. We're not getting that level of quality. I mean, we tried to watch something on Netflix. It's just, it's just awful. And it's because they're all trying to fit it in. Artistry and creativity is transgressive. It's supposed to be, it's supposed to be break.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  I mean, that's actually where you want your, I want my transgression in my art, not in my civilization. I want a really boring civilization and really transgressive art. But it's become the opposite. The art has become boring and conformist and authoritarian. And the civilization has gotten completely transgressive. So people are not where they need to be. The laws are not being enforced. So, I mean, part of you go, God, I do hope it is a wake-up call.

• 1:27:02Tucker Carlson?

  It was five years ago this month that people started to drop dead in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Five years since the beginning of COVID. Tens of millions dead. Societies reordered completely. Economies destroyed. And yet, for some reason, we still don't know answers to the most basic questions. Where did this virus come from? How did it get here? Why did the government tell us to do things they knew wouldn't work? None of those questions have been adequately answered. And one man knows those answers. His name is Dr. Tony Fauci. Until now, nobody has really pressed. And now, a documentary filmmaker called Jenner First is out with a new film explaining exactly what happened. The film is called "Thank You, Dr. Fauci." Jenner First spent years trying to get answers.

• 1:27:46Tucker Carlson?

  And in that time, as he awaited Dr. Fauci's response, he went through tens of thousands of pages of documents and pieced together the story, which is shocking. We are proud to host that documentary here on TCN from December 20th to January 19th. You will see it exclusively here on TCN. Again, it's called "Thank You, Dr. Fauci." And it's worth it.

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

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• 1:29:16Tucker Carlson?

  So what, speaking of the lost not being enforced, tell us what you know about looting.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, that's kind of the standard. That's like the norm in Los Angeles, isn't it? I mean...

• 1:29:31Tucker Carlson?

  Even when there's not a fire burning?

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  No, of course. It's terrible. I mean, obviously they just arrested... I guess they had a couple of guys... They found a couple of guys looting Kamala's house, and then they let them go. Of course, of course. They got the guy... They found the guy that set one of the fires, the homeless guy that set one of the fires, and they let him go. I mean, it is...

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  It's amazing. I mean, the comedians like all their best materials just, you know, in the news already, so...

• 1:29:59Tucker Carlson?

  How could they let... You're stealing from people in the middle of a profound disaster. The city's burning down, and you're stealing... People are dying, and you're stealing. Aren't you... You're like a true villain, I think.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure. And then they let them go, and then that became widely publicized. Well, guess what? You know, this is the thing that people have to... You know criminals, you know, they read the news like criminals are very online. It's not like criminals don't know what's going on and we have these amazing. There's these amazing like, I think it was like phone calls between people in the Oakland jails and their friends and they're like. Basically, um, Auntie Pam, the name of the DA, they're like the Auntie Pam's gonna make sure we, you know, get off. You know, they all know where the the laws are not being enforced.

• 1:30:42Tucker Carlson?

  What's their job?

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah, they're rational actors. You know, the irrational ones are the rest of us, the ones trying to, you know, live there.

• 1:30:51Tucker Carlson?

  So if you're Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass, like you're all in on the climate change explanation. Right. That's, that's all you've got at this.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  I mean, they did. I think they are backing off a little bit from it. I think that they're in a, they're a little trapped, which is great, which is that on the one hand, they, they. They can't accept responsibility because they know that if they accept responsibility, then it's just then, then their, their political futures are doomed. Um, on the other hand, by not accepting responsibility and passing the buck, that also becomes obvious to people. So, you know, they should all go. I mean, remember like, you know, New Orleans, like that mayor was out of there. I mean, like.

• 1:31:30Tucker Carlson?

  Ray Nagin.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Tucker Carlson?

  Was there for that.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that should be what happens.

• 1:31:34Tucker Carlson?

  But New Orleans has, that just accelerated the decline of the city.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, it's, I was there for Katrina. I covered that and I thought at the time 20 year, I guess it was 20 years ago. Incredibly, um, 2005. I thought, well, you know, it's obviously tragic, but Bush is sending over a billion dollars to rebuild it. I'm sure the city will be better and it's been much worse ever since.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  That's depressing.

• 1:31:58Tucker Carlson?

  But LA is not New Orleans. It's our second biggest city. It's the, in a lot of ways, the greatest city we've ever built. And in my opinion, and like, so what happens to it now?

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Well, there's no vision for it at all, you know, and, and we don't have anybody visionary in there. You know, and they did, I mean, I think we had this guy Rick Caruso, as you were mentioning, who ran for mayor. I mean, someone found, you know, there is a video of him calling for increasing the fire department budget. I mean, kind of like that. What else do you need to know at this point? Can that overcome the? I do think that the woke trance was broken. I mean, Trump broke it.

• 1:32:31Tucker Carlson?

  You do?

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  I do, for sure. And look at that. I mean, look at the catastrophe that the news media is in. And the success that people like you and I are having and Joe Rogan being the most influential.

• 1:32:40Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  I mean, he's like the new Walter Cronkite.

• 1:32:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  He's where, sometimes I'm just, I mean, he's where Mark Zuckerberg goes to confess his sins. So it's a different world. I do have some hope for it. I mean, the, the thing about the United States that's so different from Europe is just that literally they, I find, I'm becoming like an old man because I'm talking about how great the founding fathers were, but, but it's like literally they created this incredible system that if you have free speech, if you can, if you, if you can protect your free speech, which we've, I think succeeded in doing, you bake it in, you remind people of its importance, you then are, I think, going to be able to self-correct in ways that places that allow higher levels of censorship are simply not going to be able to do. I mean, just look at this impact

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  that Elon is having right now. It's incredible. I was on some social media chat group and somebody was like, how come we're all talking about the British grooming gangs? It's like, because Elon decided that that was an issue, the AFD in Germany may end up, you know, be, I mean, I think they're, they're going to come in at least second in the elections next month because Elon has mainstreamed

• 1:33:45Tucker Carlson?

  them. Of course.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  So I, that gives me a lot of hope. You've got a platform now that is still just the, I mean, we always knew that the media had that agenda-setting power.

• 1:33:56Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Um, but it, it's amazing to sort of see it so dramatically. You only can really see it when it shifts from the mainstream news media. We were, we were writing last summer about how the sovereign in the United States, meaning like the true power center in the United States was the news media. Um, that is now, in my view, clearly shifted to, to X. It's just, I think you said something recently. I thought, I think I saw a clip of you saying the same thing. I mean, it's just clear, like, that is where.

• 1:34:23Tucker Carlson?

  It dominates everything.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  It's just everything, you know, and like Blue Sky gave it a, they gave it a shot, but nobody can go on there. It's too mad. It's too insane. So I think it can be very, very positive. You know, I always compare X to, you know, it's like when the printing press was, first shows up in the end of the 15th century for like about a hundred years, the Catholic Church was like, the printing press is great, you know, we can print bibles and give them out to all the priests. It's very cheap. The Catholic Church loved the printing press. And then Martin Luther. Got a hold of the printing press and it was just for the next, you know, five centuries was game over. I mean, the best history of the printing press, she goes back, I think it's Oxford history, she goes back and just looks at its impact and she comes back and

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  she's just like, you know, a few years of study or whatever. And she's like, oh, we knew it was a big deal, but it is a much bigger deal than we thought. It's not just the Protestant Reformation. It is that it's also the Scientific Revolution. It's the Industrial Revolution. It's nationalism and it's democracy. I mean, so you get a huge epochal change with this shift of communications technologies and social media. We knew, I mean, we, you know, Martin Gury famously wrote this book, Revolt to the Public, about the game changing aspects of social media, just on the Arab Spring, you know, which is now 14 years ago. But in some senses, it really just didn't get its power until Elon came in, bought it and held strong against people calling him a racist anti Semite for two

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  years. I mean, it was just crazy. The it was like two years of the media just making him out to be the devil incarnate and he held strong and he ended up breaking the news media. I mean, they're just not getting the traffic.

• 1:36:04Tucker Carlson?

  They're done.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  There it's over. Yeah.

• 1:36:06Tucker Carlson?

  It's over. So where does it, I mean, so if I'm

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  And it couldn't have happened to a worse group of people.

• 1:36:11Tucker Carlson?

  They, I spent my whole life among them. I can tell you that's absolutely true and they're, you know, they're terrified. I was, I was watching John Carl, who I on CBS, who I've known, someone sent me a clip this morning, John Carl, I've known him for over 30 years, nice guy, you know, reasonable guy. And, um, and then Trump comes, the business starts to collapse and he realizes, I'm speaking for him, but he realizes, oh shit, you know, I'm a middle aged white guy. I better go along. And he becomes just this cheerleader for every stupid woke idea ever. It was, he feels sorry for him. He's a nice guy, actually, and not a stupid guy. Someone just sent me a clip of John Carl, like basically defending Trump.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:36:49Tucker Carlson?

  And, and it's just like, I mean, again, I'm not a

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  The weather, the, the wind moved.

• 1:36:55Tucker Carlson?

  Then you realize that most people just kind of. You know, they they're easy to easy to control. You just

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Tucker Carlson?

  Tell them what the program is and they go along with it.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's Kent Brockman.

• 1:37:07Tucker Carlson?

  No, you're totally right. I welcome our new alien overlords.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  They're the first. They're the first ones to shift.

• 1:37:14Tucker Carlson?

  No, you're right.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:37:15Tucker Carlson?

  You're right.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz they're covering the news. Like, they know they they're the first ones to know when the winds are coming.

• 1:37:20Tucker Carlson?

  The principle plays no role. Most people just kind of go along with what they think the marching orders are.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  It's amazing. It really reveals, doesn't it, the herd animals? So.

• 1:37:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. And did I say CBS? I think he's at ABC. Whatever. They're all the same and they're all going away.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:32Tucker Carlson?

  But if you're true entrenched power, which does exist, particularly in the intel agencies, I mean, that's where it really resides, as far as I can tell.

• 1:37:41Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know. It's like, pretty threat. You've just law. There's been a massive movement in power from the news media, which you control. That's a fact, I would say, in effect, control, news media is controlled by the intel agencies, fact, to something you can't control. So that's a huge loss of power for you. So like, how can you let this continue?

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, how can they stop it, though? I mean, they.

• 1:38:02Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know. I'm just feeling a little paranoid right now.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  No, no, I am.

• 1:38:04Tucker Carlson?

  This is too much freedom.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  No, I know.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  No, I totally do, too. You're like, where's the like, when's the penny gonna drop?

• 1:38:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, kind of.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. And I also kind of go, are they really gonna disclose all the stuff that they have? I mean, we were going down. We just did a, actually, I don't know if we published it yet, but we were just going down the list of all the all the files that we want.

• 1:38:20Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Because, you know, people are like, oh, can we have a Twitter files for the government? And you're like, yes.

• 1:38:25Tucker Carlson?

  So what?

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  I mean, there's so much in there, right? It's like Russia Gate, you know, the Russia collusion hoax, COVID origins, COVID vaccines, Hunter Biden laptop.

• 1:38:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm assuming there's just a bunch of stuff on Russia, Ukraine, that's there. I mean, remember, cuz they keep leaking, they go, they go, there's no bio labs in Ukraine. They're like, well, there were some, we were doing some help with the bio.

• 1:38:48Tucker Carlson?

  Well, not only are there bio labs in Ukraine, there are a lot of bio labs in Ukraine, which are working on biological weapons. That's what they're not there for.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:55Tucker Carlson?

  Livestock vaccines, sorry. And.

• 1:38:58Tucker Carlson?

  You know, the thing that people don't in this country understand is that the Ukrainian military is selling about half of the arms they get from the United States into international black markets, and they're winding up, in some cases, with the drug cartels in Latin America. That's a fact. Okay, it's a fact. And you can, you can buy them. And I spoke to someone who did buy some, actually, so I know, I know this is a fact. And they're bragging about it. So they're selling conventional weapons, including weapon systems that are very dangerous and very destabilizing, that would make commercial air travel impossible, for example.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:27Tucker Carlson?

  And so what are they gonna be doing with the pathogens in those biolabs? And does the Biden administration have a manifest? Do they know exactly what's in those labs? And will they turn it over to the Trump administration so we can keep track of these things? And the answer is no, actually. The answer is no, I know this.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:39:43Tucker Carlson?

  So that's like the scariest thing that's ever happened. And, and so like, what, you know, like, I think the Ukraine war has the potential to destabilize the world more than anything that's happened in my lifetime, just because of the scale of the weapon systems and biological agents involved in the most corrupt country in the West, which is Ukraine. I'm not attacking Ukraine, I feel sorry for Ukraine, but what the hell?

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Tucker Carlson?

  And so we could use some, we could use, that's why I'm saying this right now, because I hope this is widely disseminated, because I think it's like the scariest thing I've heard in a long, long time.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  That is scary.

• 1:40:20Tucker Carlson?

  But it's all flowered in secrecy. That's the point.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:24Tucker Carlson?

  The only reason this stuff has happened, like this end of the world stuff has happened, is because there's no disclosure at all. Everything is-

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, it's so much pent up stuff.

• 1:40:33Tucker Carlson?

  So much.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  I mean, we're, yeah, we have the JFK files, the UFO files, UAP files, I was supposed to say. Yeah, there's so much there.

• 1:40:41Tucker Carlson?

  So I spoke to someone about the UAP thing. Now we're so far afield, but do you think it's all connected? No, it is all connected, though. It's like, none of this stuff happens, except in secrecy. And this, I said, let's stop playing, like you've been, I've been talking to these people for years now. And the answer was, the public is not ready for this information, because it's, you know, it's just too, it's too much. And what's your view of that? And this is someone who's pushing disclosure, by the way, this is not.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  I know. I don't know. Yeah, I'm worried that it's bad news.

• 1:41:12Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's the point. It's bad news.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  I'm worried it's bad.

• 1:41:14Tucker Carlson?

  Really bad news.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think that's true?

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know.

• 1:41:18Tucker Carlson?

  Notice I'm not even saying it because I don't know if it's true and it is bad. It's super bad.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it seems like the dom- it seems like the dominant two theories are now that it's non-human intelligence or that we or our adversaries have mastered anti-gravity technology.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  The other scenarios of, you know, some kind of new plasma or, you know, it's just kind of, the phenomenon doesn't seem to be showing up in that way.

• 1:41:44Tucker Carlson?

  Well, the core idea seems to be that it's that there is non-human intelligence, whether all these manifestations of it are that or whether they're government programs or Chinese or whatever. It's probably a pastiche of all of them, but the core idea seems to be that there is non-human intelligence, which is plausible, and that it's been in interaction with the US government for quite some time and that it plays a role in.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  What role is it playing? I mean, well, there are all these things that I don't know what is true or what's not true. Do you think any of that is true? I know you've done work on this. Yeah, I mean, you know, and I, it's hard. I mean, um, you know, they, I covered the New Jersey drone situation. I went to Jersey and interviewed a bunch of people. I mean, the weirdest, for me, the weirdest moment is where you have John Kirby, the Defense Department spokesperson at Mallorca's, basically on the same day or the same 48 hours, just when they were asked about it, they just came out affirmatively and they were like, "Well, we're definitely not getting any drones over the military bases or other sensitive sites." And you're like, I was like, "Why would you lie about that? I couldn't, I couldn't." Because of course, you know, all else being equal, I think that they don't, people don't want to lie.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  Politicians don't want to lie because it just creates more work or hassle for them.

• 1:42:54Tucker Carlson?

  Complicates your life, yeah.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Complicates your life. Honesty is the best policy. So why would they lie about that? Especially because the Wall Street Journal had like, they did this huge piece about all of the drone so-called, by the way, unidentified anomalous drone flyovers over the military bases and sensitive sites, which includes nuclear plants. I mean, I, part of my interest in this was always, you know, I was trying to save Diablo Canyon in California. They kept getting drone flyovers. Also Palo Verde, which is our biggest nuclear plant, three beautiful reactors there in Arizona, like a lot of drone flyovers. I'm also from northeast Colorado, which is where, you know, the ICBMs are. A lot of, they're whole, they had this exact same drone situation. I believe it was December, I want to say December 2019.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  And they had this whole inter-agency task force and they were like, they were like, oh, we're gonna put a plane up. And they kind of put a plane up and you're watching, you're like, you're like, well, why are they not scrambling jets? Like, what are we, like, what are we doing here? Like, this is really bizarre.

• 1:43:51Tucker Carlson?

  It doesn't make any sense.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  Doesn't, I can't figure it out because I think the other issue is that they may not know. I mean, okay, well, so to finish that story, so then drone migrants do that. I go out and I'm just like, like, that's the weirdest lie because like, it was just, it's been heavily reported. I mean, the drones, I mean, the drones over sensitive military bases is really well reported. And some of the best reporting was by a publication called The War Zone, which I highly recommend. Very good, serious investigative reporting. They don't believe it's aliens at all. Like, they're just openly like anti-alien. They're like, this is, and I think it's, well, anyway, for whatever reason, they're just like, this is Chinese or Russian or whatever, and they're not taking it seriously. But they do some of the best reporting because they're kind of, because they can't figure out why the military is being so weird about it.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  So then Trump comes out and he goes, they know what it is. I don't know why they're not telling anybody.

• 1:44:44Tucker Carlson?

  And I'm gonna tell everybody on the, on the 20th.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I, first of all, I'm really happy that they're gonna disclose and I wanna raise expectations about what the Trump administration is gonna do. We want the data and I mean, someone was criticizing me because they were like, oh, oh, because I came out, I said, oh, I'm confident the Trump administration is gonna share the data and they're like, that just shows that Schellenberger is, you know, it's like pro-Trump and whatever. And I was like, no, I'm just like, pro-disclosure. I want the expectations to be high because they should be high. There is so much information they're not releasing. So, you know, they were over Bed Minster and he's talked about it twice now, by the way. So, look, we're

• 1:45:19Tucker Carlson?

  He's distressed about it, obviously.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  He's worried about it. So, we're either headed for a pretty epic moment of disclosure. There's another part of me that worries. So, I, okay, so it seems like, yeah, they could do disclosure and we could find out what it is, you know, is it, if it's, there's, it could be aliens. If it's aliens, that's just a whole can of worms and then you have to be like, is there, like, do we talk to them? And if so, who, who's doing that?

• 1:45:43Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think we have?

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  I genuinely don't know. I genuinely don't know. I mean, there's, um, there's this guy named, I can't remember his first name, Stringfield. He wrote this incredible thick book of, um, UAP crashes, crash retrievals, and it's, and he started doing it, I wanna say, 50s or 60s. And I think he went for like multiple decades. And you just sit down with that book and it is like, it's impressive. I mean, if it's a hoax, it's just, um, one of the greatest hoaxes of all times. You know, like other hoaxes, um, you know, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or whatever, they're, they're really bad. Like, they're really, you're just like, this is like

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  the dumbest hoax ever. Like, most hoaxes are not that sophisticated with all these details and all these people interviewed. Of course, Roswell is the big case, but it's only apparently one of them. There's others. So, there is this incredible, you know, gray literature, never published by any academic press, by really a little bit of commercial non-fiction. Um, obviously you have David Grush and Lou Elzondo. I testified in front of Congress on this in, I guess I was in December or November and, um, you know, two people, the two guys from the military, when we, when we were asked, what are they? Two guys said, non-human intelligence. And then me and the NASA guy said, we don't know. Um, because I just don't. I mean, I just,

• 1:47:05Tucker Carlson?

  What do you think the Jones heroin in Jersey were?

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  I mean, look, here's, let me tell, let's just, let's just, let's just, let's just look at the possibility that they're human. They didn't get a single one of them. They didn't down a single one of them. Not a single one of them crashed. And there was a lot of them. And there was a lot of, look, there's a lot of mistaken sightings. You know, it is easy to mistake things. It's totally natural. But, but there was also, I mean, I interviewed mayors, two mayors were like, one of them, it was like, I had an SUV sized drone flying over my house. Another one said he was going to a Fox News interview in New York. The car came from me, walks out his door, and there's one hovering right over him. And he said, you know, felt like it was watching him, like it was there monitoring him. I mean, that's weird stuff.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  So we can't get a single drone down. They're over military bases. They can't seem to get any of them. You know, do I think the Chinese could be behind or the Chinese? I mean, when the Chinese decide to like encroach and you in like, in the South China Sea, when they decide, you know how they like, they'll like warn the United States occasionally, you're flying over our airspace. It's all super calculated and like, you know, like they're making, they're, there, it's like a performance. The Chinese are like, we're messing with you. Like you all kind of know. And they're doing it in ways where they don't want it to escalate, but they want to get a little bit more of that space. It's all super calculated. Now, there was the balloon, you know, are there Chinese balloons? Yeah. But I mean, to be buzzing

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  air, our military bases, it's just so aggressive. Now, I've, I've said it before, I've had other people point out, they go, well, they're aggressive with the cyber attacks. I guess that's true. As a physicalist, I guess I kind of go flying your drones over US military bases and nuclear plants. That is just a level of aggression that just doesn't seem characteristic of the Chinese.

• 1:48:57Tucker Carlson?

  Unless you were, well, of course, I agree with you. An intel person told me that that this person believed that they were in fact Chinese, and that a Chinese satellite went down, was visible to the naked eye. There were news stories about it. It evaporated, burned up, and that this person told me that was taken down by the US government. That was a command and control satellite for these drones. And the belief was, the Chinese government was sending the following message, we're moving on Taiwan and maybe other things. You can't do anything about it. So, you know, I have no idea if that's true or not. Zero.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know, that just doesn't, it just, I just gotta say, it's just, it's so aggressive and, and also, but the other thing is that like, you know,

• 1:49:46Tucker Carlson?

  Reckless, actually.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  Seems really reckless and, I mean, the Chinese have not been seeking confrontations like that for the most part. Um, now Jesse Michaels, who is doing some of the best reporting on this issue of UAPs, um, he's doing YouTube videos. He just did a documentary that was incredible. Like, I think it's like an hour, a couple of hours, highly recommended. That goes through the very long history of unidentified anomalous phenomena over US military bases, including all these cases of, you know, several cases of them shutting down, um, missile systems.

• 1:50:20Tucker Carlson?

  Like a 65-year-long history.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And there was this famous, uh, press conference with like missileers and others from military bases in, in Washington DC. I want to say in the 90s, maybe, maybe 80s. Um, so, you know, like, that predates any of the Chinese stuff by far. It predates all the drones. So that was going on for a really long time. I mean, if you just kind of, if you step back and you look at it, it looks like a very, like, what is it communicating on a very basic level? It's definitely communicating dominance. You know, it's, it's, you can read in a lot of different ways. And that's similar to what the, the Navy pilots said around the Tic Tac, um, interactions off both coasts.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Is that these were, um, phenomena or, you know, or objects, whatever you can call them, or, or craft, that were just demonstrating dominance over our craft. They were able to do things that our craft weren't doing. So, yeah, I mean.

• 1:51:18Tucker Carlson?

  And that was, from their perspective, the point of the behavior was to say, we can do things that you can't?

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so then, then, then, then the question would be, so if it is NHI, then the question is, are they communicating something? And if they are communicating something, why would they only be doing it in that way? Like, You would, you would like, if you're like, if you're trying to demonstrate your strength in an adversary or something, you're trying to send some message, why would you just do that? Because there's nothing that we can do with that information. So then you have to wonder, okay, if it is NHI and it's behaving in that way.

• 1:51:51Tucker Carlson?

  Non-human intelligence.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, non-human intelligence, then is there some, is there actually some other communication going on?

• 1:51:57Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  That we don't know about? And of course, there's just a long history and there's all these crazy stories of, you know, presidents, I mean, going back to Eisenhower.

• 1:52:07Tucker Carlson?

  So just to, just to bottom line, your view after reporting on the lights over New Jersey, in Pennsylvania, New York, mid-Atlantic drone hysteria, do you think they were human-made drones?

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  I genuinely don't know. I mean, I will be, I'll be, I might be more shocked if they were human-made because of their behaviors and they never were able to get one. I did have somebody tell me recently that they had heard, I mean, again, it's always second-hand, it's so untrustworthy, but somebody told me that, that the military got one of the orbs, the famous orbs, and opened it up and it was Chinese. I mean, if that's the case, then somebody has mastered anti-gravity and that's almost harder for me to believe than that it's NHI because, I mean, it's just, I mean, I don't know. I mean, look, we have a, I mean, here's the, I literally go back and forth, you can see me doing it in the same conversation, but we have these huge black budgets in the military, I mean, just gigantic,

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  and they've been there for decades. So is it possible to cover up something like that? I think it might be. I mean, I'm much more, after having covered the Hunter Biden laptop and, I mean, Russiagate 2, but really the Hunter Biden laptop, I was just impressed by how many people were involved in the conspiracy to cover it up. I mean, you had the FBI getting it, covering it up, basically working with, working with Aspen Institute to run a disinformation campaign. By the way, this is Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff run the disinformation campaign aimed at persuading journalists in advance of the release of the Hunter Biden laptop, that it was a Russian information operation.

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  Garrett Graff is the guy that goes and does the big UFO book. So these things all, I mean, this was very weird. So he comes out with a big book on UFOs. I think it was last year's called UFO Garrett Graff. This is somebody that is famously close with the intelligence community. His other books were on Watergate and on nine 11. The book.

• 1:54:11Tucker Carlson?

  Both of which were totally legitimate.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  No, for sure. And I'm sure the official story is everything we need to know. So, you know, you sort of go.

• 1:54:19Tucker Carlson?

  And what was the conclusion on UFO?

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  Well, it was very, it's the, um, the narrative is that they don't know what they are. So he doesn't fully, he's not like a debunker, like these guys who are like, oh, oh, we can explain everything. So he's much more sophisticated than that. But it's basically a debunking. It's basically that. It's basically that it's, it's just all the, you know, typical explanations. Um, and then maybe some US military programs, but he also just says that he just argues that the US military doesn't know what it is. I don't believe Garrett Graff. And the reason I don't believe Garrett Graff is because I saw him participate in a disinformation campaign on Hunter Biden laptop. And I know for a fact that there's something else going on at that Aspen Institute program.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  And Aspen Institute, of course, is a massive US government funded NGO that cosplays as a kind of, you know, bourgeois gab fest. So there, I mean, so I'm like, that was for me, that was all came out in the Twitter files. I discovered that in the Twitter files. And for me, it was like pulling back the curtain and you actually have, as a journalist, like you, we have the emails, you know, like you have the documents. You have the tabletop exercise where they're brainwashing journalists into believing a lie about the Hunter Biden laptop. That was so sophisticated of that, because they, they basically go and brainwash journalists before the story comes out. Because they know they're listening to Giuliani, you know, their FBI tap on Giuliani. They're listening to Giuliani. They had, they know they gotta go brainwash the journalists.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  They go get all the journalists from all the major outlets, plus the social media platforms in these seminars where they program them. I mean, that was like, for me, it was like, wow, there's like a secret government. Like, it was like, there's some, there's like a whole, there's like a whole, it's a very, and it was very just sophisticated. I don't know what else to describe it like it was very, everything seemed very careful. Also, with all the censorship stuff, you see these limited hangouts, right? Where limited hangouts are kind of like the public relations of a covert operation of like a covert propaganda operation. Where like after they get caught, they can be like, oh, no, we were totally honest about what we were doing. We were talking about it, but they do these weird limited hangouts. You'll see these people that clearly look like either directly intelligence community or they're intermediaries.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  Having these conversations they put on YouTube and like, they're like, but it's like, you know, a couple hundred views. Like they're not promoting them in any way. And so you just kind of go, wow, there's like a whole creepy like world of disinformation.

• 1:56:49Tucker Carlson?

  What you realize is that the covert operations are really not covert. Like all the, all the information's out there, actually.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:56Tucker Carlson?

  But it's just discredited or unnoticed or no one collates it. Have you noticed that?

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I know. And then, and you only can understand it. When you see the whole big picture, because there's, there's no smoking guns ever. So there's never something you can, I mean, Hunter Biden laptop got us about as close to a, as a smoking gun as you can get. And it helped because it was, what helped to expose it was that you, it was partisan. And so it was a particular partisan weaponization. My concern with the UAPs, I mean, it's now, I guess the strength and a weakness is that it's become bipartisan in terms of the desire. I mean, it was really, I mean, Tucker, the weirdest experience I've had, I've testified now like 12 times or 13 times in front of Congress in the last few years. The weirdest experience I've had was on UAPs, seeing the Democrats and Republicans basically being aligned in wanting to get to the bottom of the UAP thing.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  I mean, it's beautiful. Like I've never seen, I was like, I, this is, I've never, I've heard of bipartisanship. Never thought I would see it in, you know, in the wild. So that is exciting. On the other hand, I suspect that there is also some bipartisan group that's trying to prevent that information.

• 1:58:01Tucker Carlson?

  No doubt about that.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  So, I mean, look, I mean, it is a.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  I mean, what is gonna happen? I mean, I mean, part of me is, you know, maybe it's my defensive pessimism on it because I like everybody else. I want the information. Part of me is like, there's just no way they're gonna let that information out. It's just something is too. There's something about the UAP thing, like the JFK thing, where there's some secret there that they are really, there is some group of people that really don't want us to know. So, you know.

• 1:58:31Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's, that's a fact.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58:33Tucker Carlson?

  I bumped up against that personally several times on both of those issues, which appear to be related.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58:40Tucker Carlson?

  But I don't know the answer. It's, it's almost like seeing something in photographic negative. All I know for a fact confirmed is that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to keep it secret. And so that's just to tell that it's, there's something profound there. It's not just a bureaucracy covering its own ass. It's more than that.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  I mean, how about the clip where Pompeo is being interviewed about the JFK files? And then he like literally mid-sentence goes, but I mean, I've also seen the UFO files. And it was like, well, why, why did you just switch from like, what made you think of the UFO files on the JFK files? I don't know. I mean, um, so anyway, is there a secret? Has there, have we developed anti-gravity? Have we developed? I mean, we know that in the 50s, there were like, there was a, there's a whole book on it. It's very fascinating. But there was like, there was an anti-gravity program in the US military with our defense contractors. It made the cover of one of the aerospace magazines. It was like, there's like a cover of it.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  And then it just disappeared. And so you can kind of go, I mean, the official, yeah, we tried that and it didn't work. It's like, well, how, that's never stopped you before.

• 1:59:49Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  Like it not working, like, that's like, um, you know, like, like you would keep working on it if you can do anti-gravity. So the other possibility is that it just went dark and they just, they kept doing it.

• 2:00:01Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I, I wonder though about the, like, the possibility that there is a, or has been technology transfer from some other realm to this realm. Cause there are, you know, just in the study of history, there are, it's like, there's really no understanding at a bunch of different points of in human societal evolution, like where did that technology come from? And you see that on a bunch of different technologies. So, but nuclear, anti-gravity, that kind of stuff, like, are you open to the possibility that?

• 2:00:35Tucker Carlson?

  That there's been like a transfer of that technology from some other.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  I mean, that is definitely, there's definitely, that is, that is what a lot of people talk about.

• 2:00:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Speaker 01

  I mean, the problem with this issue is just, it's very frustrating because it's just all secondhand.

• 2:00:48Tucker Carlson?

  Of course it is.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  And so like the Hunter Biden laptop is not secondhand, like it's firsthand and I have the documents. Now, there are a bunch of really fascinating, you know, alleged US, secret US government documents on UFOs, on, on alleged alien spacecraft crashes. They're called the, you know, Majestic Documents or the MJ12 Documents. And so the story is that, um, you know, that, that one or two of these craft crashed in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico. And that sort of begins in, you know, and there's a whole cast of characters that allegedly, you know, including Oppenheimer, were involved in that program. You know, the.

• 2:01:33Tucker Carlson?

  Why would Oppenheimer be involved?

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  Well, why, I mean, because he was the man, you know, like he was, like, he was our greatest scientist. Obviously the father of the atomic bomb and, and, you know, Roswell is where the, um, where we launched the, the flights to bomb Hiroshima, Nagasaki. So it's very symbolic in that sense.

• 2:01:52Tucker Carlson?

  Maybe more than symbolic?

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe more than symbolic. I mean, they keep flying over nuclear, like, as my wife says, she's like, they, your aliens really, they don't like the nuclear, you know, because I love nuclear. So, and I'm kind of like, I'm like, well, yeah. I mean, like, and also the most ridiculous thing is when people are like, oh, yeah, they want us to give, give up our, you know, the people that believe in them, they go, the aliens are here and they want us to give up our nuclear weapons. It's like, doesn't sound like a good idea to me. The foreign space invaders would like you to give up your most powerful weapons. But those documents, I spent a bunch of time on them and I couldn't figure out how to report anything on it because of course, of course FBI was like, these are all debunked, they're all frauds. But there are, first of all, there's a lot more of them. You go to majesticdocuments.com and you can look at them. They're amazing. I mean, if they are.

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  And I've also had the other, and there, by the way, in those, in the Garrett Graff book, there in that book, there's another debunking book called, by Mark Pilkington, I'm blanking on the name right now, but they, they, they all, all the people that are the debunkers deal with these documents and their story is not that they were all hoaxes. Their story is that they were what's called counterintelligence passage material, documents that were created by the US government, but leaked to people to ostensibly be able to smoke out double agents or people like you would see them, I guess who would trace these documents.

• 2:03:11Tucker Carlson?

  Right. Like putting dye in the water to find the leak.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, but the thing is, I mean, it is like, there's like, one of them is a handbook of crash retrieval, like for like, to like that the soldiers would ostensibly read to retrieve these crash. I mean, it's, they, the, if they're hoaxes, they're incredible. I mean, like, they have, like, they have, like, they have, like, the people, like, they have, I forgot what it's called, but like, basically like a manifest where they show who's checked it out and read it and they have all these different names and they've checked those names and those were like real people at those air bases that had these documents. So, and then, you know, there was one document in particular where it was a memo from JFK to the CIA Director Dulles where he says, "I want to see you on this particular day." It was like July 62 or 63, I can't remember

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  which. And now again, everyone's like, oh, that's a forgery. It's part of the MJ12 documents or whatever. It's not real. But then they released the JFK files and then sure enough, we see the Dulles calendar and he had met with JFK twice that day and nobody had known that they had had those meetings until we had that JFK memo and until we had the confirmation of the memo. So that would suggest that at least either that document is real, that JFK memo to Dulles, or whoever forged it knew that he had met with Dulles that day and nobody else had known that. So, you know, you'd be sort of like, I guess, I guess you could still put it in, this is why, this is the problem with this issue is you can still, there's, there's still plausible deniability for a lot, for all these things.

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  You know, you can make up a reason for why these documents are all counterintelligence passage material.

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's why I just have to kind of go, I don't know. I mean, I talked to a lot of people and um yeah, it's just a lot of secondhand information and the documents are secondhand. So you kind of go, there's like my world of like the Hunter Biden laptop, which still a bunch of my progressive and Democrat friends and family don't believe, you know, they still, they still think the Russians were somehow involved. Um, but like I actually have the documents and we can prove what happened there. On the UAP stuff, it's just still just surrounded in.

• 2:05:16Tucker Carlson?

  But the incoming president has said, he just said, I'm gonna tell you what those drones were about.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  He was very relaxed about it, too. I mean, I was struck that when they, when he did, he said it twice. He said it again recently, like last week, right? And but then he said it in December. He goes, I don't know why they're Biden. Like, I don't know why they're not telling people what they are. They know what they are. And I was like, I was like, I mean, it was a really, um, he made it sound like it's no big deal. Like, we should just tell people what it is. But if Trump knew what it is, and if he, if it's NHI, and Trump knows that, he seemed very relaxed about that, because of course, the, I mean, the, the main, the dominant, the conventional wisdom among people that follow this, who think it's NHI, is that um, it's bad news. But it's not a great, that it's not a great story, that if it were good news, and that they were just friendly space brothers, you know, offering us, you know, advanced tech, then, and they'd be like, and there's no strings attached, or whatever, that would be a much easier story to sell.

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  But if there's some bad news in that story, then that might explain why they're so secretive.

• 2:06:19Tucker Carlson?

  Clearly, there's some bad news. My theory is that the reason that permanent Washington or deep state or whatever, people who administer the system hate Trump is not because of any of his policies, which they're probably agnostic on, but because they fear that he will disclose information. I think it's, everything's about disclosure. If you look at the federal government, what's, its defining quality is secrecy, right?

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:06:42Tucker Carlson?

  Billion classified documents. Why is that?

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:45Tucker Carlson?

  It's not good. It's never good. Your kids bathed like that, it's not good.

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:06:48Tucker Carlson?

  They're using drugs or whatever. You know what I mean?

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:50Tucker Carlson?

  They're having sex they shouldn't be having. There's never a good reason for that kind of secrecy. It's not privacy, it's secrecy. So.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Right. Yes.

• 2:06:57Tucker Carlson?

  And there's something about Trump that makes everybody nervous, that he might say. More of what he knows than he should.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  Well, they don't control him.

• 2:07:04Tucker Carlson?

  That's right.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Obviously, so that's, that's very nerve wracking. I mean, how much do you think that they're just worried that he's gonna pull out of NATO? How much of it is that?

• 2:07:13Tucker Carlson?

  That's, I mean, I, of course, that's, that's in my daily prayers that he would do that. I don't think he's in danger of doing that. I hope, certainly hope so, but I think it's even more fundamental. It's like this guy could say the truth.

• 2:07:27Tucker Carlson?

  Because Trump is not much of a liar, actually, by Washington Sanders. He's an exaggerator, of course. But actually, his defining quality is like saying the truth.

• 2:07:36Speaker 01

  Being honest about kind of issues.

• 2:07:38Tucker Carlson?

  The big issues, exactly.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  So what do you, um, so you think he knows? What is this?

• 2:07:43Tucker Carlson?

  The UAP stuff?

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:44Tucker Carlson?

  I do think that, yes.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  And, and you think it's a NHI?

• 2:07:49Tucker Carlson?

  You know, I, he hasn't told me, but yeah, I do think he knows. I'm pretty sure, pretty sure he knows. And I'm pretty sure that everybody I've ever spoken to who I think knows a lot more than I do. I mean, what does it mean to know? Like, do we really know anything? I don't know. I, I'm not sure anybody fully understands this or even partially understands it, but the people who, who I'm confident have a lot more information than I have, to a person are very, very uncomfortable about it.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:17Tucker Carlson?

  Since, not in public and private, which is another tell. That, I'm just not, I mean, you've talked to a lot of people.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, no, I mean, it's, there, it's very, um, yeah. I mean, I say my prayers. I'm still Christian. I mean, um, you know, it's interesting, Joe, when I was on Joe Rogan's podcast last time, I mean, here, you know, Joe was like, I think that there are extraterrestrials, you know, he's openly saying that.

• 2:08:40Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, not, not the case.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  Well, okay, or NHI, I guess, NHI.

• 2:08:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  But I mean, here, you and Joe are like the two big, most influential podcasters in the country, and you both think that it's not just a government secret tech, or that it's not just plasmas. And Joe's very close with Elon. Loves Elon, you know, like me, and I think probably like you, believes that Elon deserves a huge amount of credit for saving free speech in this country. Elon says there's nothing there, never sees anything, and they've got an amazing rocket system that sees a lot of things.

• 2:09:16Tucker Carlson?

  I'm not sure. I've talked to Elon about this a number of times.

• 2:09:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:09:18Tucker Carlson?

  And I'm not sure he says that.

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  Okay, I thought he did say that.

• 2:09:21Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  I thought he said if I see, if there's any aliens.

• 2:09:23Tucker Carlson?

  He jokes about it, which is a tell. Trump does too. And they all, they joke in the same way. I mean, I, of course, I love them both, obviously. And I feel like, you know, I feel like they both have really been great for this country. You know, net, net, as they say. But, um, no, they joke about it in the same way that a lot of people joke about. They're like, no, there are no flying saucers from Mars.

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:48Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, they're not from Mars.

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:49Tucker Carlson?

  They're not from another planet. They're from here. They've always been here. These are spiritual entities. This is my view, and I sincerely believe it. Can't prove it. But since you asked, so he is, I've never heard Elon say that's not true.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  Be dismissive.

• 2:10:02Tucker Carlson?

  That there's nothing there. He just said, look, we monitor space. That's what they do, right? And this is self-evident. If there were, there have been so many sightings in this country and around the world, that if they were from another galaxy far, far away, there would be some satellite evidence of that. They'd be picked up coming into our atmosphere. And of course, that's not, as far as I know, true.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  Well, we do have some photos. I mean, there's that one photo of the one, I can't remember. It's like, it's in the James Fox documentary. So there are some of those, apparently.

• 2:10:34Tucker Carlson?

  Coming through space in here.

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  And certainly, I've been told there's a lot more of those photos and images. But yeah, I mean, there's also.

• 2:10:39Tucker Carlson?

  It would not surprise me, though. I mean, it's clear that these things reside, you know, deep in the earth, under the water, and in the, in the atmosphere. So, um, I mean, that's.

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  And why the elusiveness, then? Why the secrecy?

• 2:10:51Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's the question. That is the question. I mean, why is everybody, who, again, I don't know what anybody really knows. I don't know anything. I just want to start every sentence by admitting, I don't know anything. I don't know what happens when you die. I don't know how the brain works. I don't know anything. I don't know what sleep is for. None of us do.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  That's a really interesting one. That's a surprisingly interesting one, actually.

• 2:11:12Tucker Carlson?

  But it's such a, it's so revealing of the limits of human knowledge. It's like, oh, science has solved this, really? What's sleep for? Tell me how that benefits us sleep, really? But anyway, so I just always want to say and remind myself of the limits of my knowledge, which are profound. So I don't know anything. But once again, every person I've talked to who I believe has deeper knowledge on this question than I have, has seemed burdened by it. Have you noticed this?

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:41Tucker Carlson?

  And these are not people who are making money from it.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:11:44Tucker Carlson?

  These are not people trying to get famous from it. These are people who just seem to have this knowledge and they're bothered by it. So that's.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  And I don't think it's, I don't think it's to cover up a secret weapons program. I mean, in other words, like, I don't think that's how you would do it. It's so like, yeah, I don't believe it.

• 2:11:58Tucker Carlson?

  A secret weapons program?

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:00Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry, it's much deeper. Like weapons programs come and go.

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:12:04Tucker Carlson?

  Weapons that we thought were fearsome when I was a child are a joke now. We're watching weapons technology change so fast in the Ukraine war that people can't even get their brains around it.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  And you wouldn't need this elaborate. And also, like, if you're doing passage material, like, just to go back to those cases, like, why would it be that? And why would there be so much of it? Why would it, why wouldn't it be something? Anyway, it's a very curiously large body of passage material.

• 2:12:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 2:12:28Speaker 01

  On this particular topic.

• 2:12:30Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's right. Well, that's, that's what I was saying. Like, I do think all the puzzle pieces are sort of in plain sight.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  Did you ask Putin about it?

• 2:12:41Tucker Carlson?

  I did not ask Putin about it. I would never have done it on air. Because I did ask him a bunch of questions off, off camera about, you know, he has access to, of course, he controls the Soviet archives, which, and the Soviets were great archivists. And we know that from the, you know, couple of, I'm interested in Soviet leadership and government and all that stuff. There have been a couple amazing books written. The Court of the Red Tsar being, I think, the greatest of them, about Stalin, for example. And one thing you learn from reading the book is they kept records on everything, almost like the Nazis, like crazy level records. And you know, most of them have never been this close. So I had, I did have some questions for Putin about that, about Rudolf Hess specifically. It's one of the great stories

• 2:13:23Tucker Carlson?

  in history that doesn't make any sense at all. The number two guy in Nazi Germany flying into Scotland in a plane by himself and bailing out, you know, right before the US entry into the war and had all these things to say that were wild. And one of the things he apparently said in his debriefs was he believed that Hitler was being influenced by demonic spirits that he had summoned through the occult. Huh? That's not worth knowing more about?

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  There's a lot of stuff on that.

• 2:13:50Tucker Carlson?

  There's a lot. There's a lot. But Hess said that. So I immediately asked Putin about that off camera. I don't want to seem like a wacko, having unauthorized questions, but I did ask him about that. He did not get a satisfactory answer, but I did not ask him about UFOs.

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  Well, I thought also the, you know, you may have seen Marc Andreessen recently said that when he met with White House officials who said that they wanted to take all they, they wanted to take control over all AI, that they said to him something like, we've, we've declassified whole areas of science since the 1950s. And I was like, that just seemed like a reference to this stuff. At least, at least, at least the anti-gravity, if not to some of the UAP stuff.

• 2:14:34Tucker Carlson?

  I think the modern Western mind, the post 1945 Western mind is incapable of understanding some of the stuff because we lack the language of, you know, metaphysics. And I think that's, you know, just been a feature of human thinking from the cave period.

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:51Tucker Carlson?

  Until we dropped the atom bomb, in which case it just like turned off and like, oh, only the material world is real. But no one else has ever thought that because that's not true.

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  Well, like for a hundred years, right? Really from Darwin, you know, 150 years or something.

• 2:15:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, but I don't think, I mean, even before, before the war, before dropping those bombs, which really were, I mean, I do think that's like the pivot point in history more than anything else. But yeah, there have been secular movements, you know, rich people always think they're God. And so they want to eliminate any rivals from the public, from the conversation. But those bombs, man, everything changed, don't think?

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Well, it sure seemed like it. I mean, there's a really positive side of it though, which is that we haven't had these awful wars.

• 2:15:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  Brutal. I mean, when you look at the death toll that was going up from up and up and up from horrors all throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it's awful. So we've, they've spared us that, but it took something apocalyptic.

• 2:15:45Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it's been 80 years. We'll see.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:48Tucker Carlson?

  So last question, sorry, I've got, can you imagine sitting next to me at dinner like you never, I never get anything done? Um, and you're, I think, one of the most knowledgeable people in the country on like all the most interesting topics. So.

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  You're too kind.

• 2:16:02Tucker Carlson?

  No, it's, well, it's just, it's just a fact. In fact, if there's anything this conversation I think is like provoked in people, it's a desire to hear more Michael Schellenberger. So.

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:16:11Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think it's possible that what we're seeing in LA, which does feel like the destruction of our second biggest city?

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:16:19Tucker Carlson?

  From which maybe there's no recovery. I don't know. I hope. But do you think it's an act of war in some sense?

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  You mean from a foreign power or?

• 2:16:30Tucker Carlson?

  I do.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  Oh, like what, what's the evidence for that?

• 2:16:34Tucker Carlson?

  It happened and it happened between Trump's election and his inauguration. And it's crazy.

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Tucker Carlson?

  The second Trump got elected, I had this instinct like, oh, man, I bet a lot there's going to be bad, bad stuff that happens.

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I was more struck by that on the UAP, on the drone.

• 2:16:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Well, exactly. It's of a piece.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53Tucker Carlson?

  Bizarre Tesla explosion in Las Vegas.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Very weird.

• 2:16:57Tucker Carlson?

  Mass shooting, like there's just.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Tucker Carlson?

  If there's a two month period in my whole life, 55 years where more, more weird shit's been packed into two months, I can't think of it.

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:06Tucker Carlson?

  Can you?

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  No, it's freaking me out a little bit.

• 2:17:09Tucker Carlson?

  Me too.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  Honestly, I mean, the, the, I spent a bunch of time on the Lively's Burger. That's the guy that killed himself in the Tesla in Las Vegas. I mean, you definitely have cases of PTSD causing people to do things and people are surprised by suicides. But yeah, it was a weird one, you know, and I was skeptical of his emails because, you know, he sent these emails to Sean Ryan. It's another excellent podcaster. Now I think you've had him on or you've been on there.

• 2:17:34Tucker Carlson?

  I, he's a friend of mine. I, I can, just for the record, I consider him an honest.

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I did too.

• 2:17:40Tucker Carlson?

  Ryan is an honest man.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  No, no, for sure.

• 2:17:42Tucker Carlson?

  CIA operative. Oh, shut up.

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I was like, I, I was like, enjoy it because, because I believe in Sean and, and I didn't, I'm sure he did not fake that. So, you know, and then they, and then the FBI did confirm that those emails were real. On the other hand, you know, that was a weird one too, because also it felt like he was like, oh, the, the Chinese, those were Chinese drones. They've mastered Gravetic. It just felt like he didn't really know what he was talking about either. So there's just a lot of.

• 2:18:08Tucker Carlson?

  Have you ever heard the word "gravetic" before?

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I thought it was anti-gravity is what I've heard.

• 2:18:14Tucker Carlson?

  But I'd never, well, you're a writer, you're a word person. I'd never heard that word or seen that word.

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  No, I felt like he was using it wrong. That was my instinct.

• 2:18:21Tucker Carlson?

  That was my thought too. I looked it up.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, I guess I look at it, I just think Nietzsche really nailed it, which is that when people, you know, when people stop believing in traditional religions, they become, they unconsciously, you know, develop, you know, they develop new sense of guilt, a new vision of the apocalypse, they invent a new soul. I mean, people think that there's this thing called gender, which is separate from your body. It's kind of like a soul. My friend Abigail Schreier pointed that out. And so we just end up recreating Christianity, but in a deformed and deranged way. And the emergent quality of it is this destructive fire.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  Like, you don't, it's actually more powerful because nobody got out there and said, you know, let's let, I mean, somebody did say, "Let's let Malibu burn," but that was never like the explicit policy of the government of LA. It's just something that emerges after years of budget cuts, after years of self-hating ideologies like DEI, like climate apocalypse, like the homeless apocalypse. It's just emerges kind of deep from deep within us, from some, from some self-destructive part of us. So for me, if there's a foreign invasion, it came through the human psyche, not from outside of it.

• 2:19:40Tucker Carlson?

  Michael Schellenberger, how can people find you?

• 2:19:45Speaker 01

  Public.news and @schellenberger on X.

• 2:19:51Tucker Carlson?

  The best.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Tucker. I really appreciate you.

• 2:19:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

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