Joe Rogan Podcast: #2138 with Tucker Carlson (Transcript)

No, of course it’s people within the government. But, yeah, they’re working on all kinds of things, obviously that are classified. But in general, no, they can’t control these objects. So, no, it’s not American technology or Russian or Chinese. It predates all of that.

Historical Sightings and Ancient Texts

JOE ROGAN: Well, some of it does. Right. For sure. The Kenneth Arnold sightings, that was really early on. That was the early 1950s. He was seeing these flying saucers, these disks that were moving over mountains.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, right. I mean, the prophet Ezekiel writes about it in the first chapter, “Wheels in the Sky.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s a crazy one. Boy, when you read it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it is crazy. If you read it, it’s like, oh, wow. And not just the Hebrew scriptures. It’s all over every…

JOE ROGAN: The Vedic text, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: So these are spiritual phenomenon. There’s no evidence they’re from another planet. I mean, I think that’s the op. That’s the lie that they’re from Mars. Look, space, the atmosphere is really well monitored, right. Both for military, for defense reasons, but also because it’d be nice to know when asteroids are coming.

And there’s no evidence, has never been any evidence, that there are lots of these objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet. There’s no evidence of that at all.

JOE ROGAN: Hmm.

Spiritual Entities and Supernatural Phenomena

TUCKER CARLSON: So they’re from here, and they’ve been here for thousands of years, whatever they are. And it’s pretty clear to me that they’re spiritual entities, whatever that means, or supernatural. And which is to say, supernatural means above the natural, above the observable nature. And they don’t behave according to the laws of science as measured by people.

And they’ve been here for a long time, and there’s a ton of evidence that they’re under the ocean and under the ground. So, with that fact set, what do you conclude?

JOE ROGAN: When did you start having this opinion that they were spiritual and that they’ve always been here? When did this…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I didn’t know anything about the topic until 2017.

JOE ROGAN: And was that after the New York Times piece?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it was before. It was before. And the things that I saw, I mean, I was and am still a very conventional person. I mean, I’m 54. I grew up in this country, in California, which was like every assumption about America, I bought completely, just completely. And I thought that everyone who questioned those assumptions was bad. I just bought into the system completely without even thinking about it.

And I imagined that I was some kind of free thinker. And I’m going against the grain, but my core assumptions were the assumptions fed to me by the culture and the government. And I didn’t even realize it. But anyway, I’d never really thought about UFOs at all.

And I’d been in journalism since I was a kid, so of course I’d run into a lot of people who had crazy views on a lot of different topics. UFOs, 9/11, circumcision, every whack job in the world you run into when you’re covering stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Fluoride.

TUCKER CARLSON: Fluoride, right. I just brushed with non-fluoride toothpaste this morning.

JOE ROGAN: Me, too.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly, exactly. But probably unlike you, I didn’t have any opinions like that. I was like, fluoride. Come on. Nine eleven. Shut up. UFOs. You’re crazy. I just had this reflexive. I’m ashamed of it. I’m not bragging about it, but…

JOE ROGAN: But it was.

The Trump Campaign and Reassessing Reality

TUCKER CARLSON: It was 2017, and really, it was the Trump campaign. It wasn’t that I was so in love with Trump, though I’ve always liked Trump because he’s hilarious and charming and all that, but I wasn’t a Trumper or anything. But it was watching that campaign and particularly his claim that they were spying on him, and I was like, really? The intel services and federal law enforcement, FBI, do not spy on presidential campaigns. That’s so out of the realm. That’s so crazy. That could never happen, because, of course, there’s no democracy in a system like that.

And fundamentally, we’re a democracy, an imperfect one that kind of lumbers along, but it’s not fake. And then that turned out to be true, and I knew it was true, and that just blew my mind. So I began a process, still ongoing, of reassessing a lot of other things.

Okay, well, if that was not true, what else is not true? And what else that they told me was a conspiracy theory might actually have some basis in fact. And then someone from, a DoD employee reached out to me and said, actually, there’s a ton of evidence that this UFO thing is. And really.

And so I started doing segments on it when I worked at the TV channel. And there was a lot of mockery, but I was like, I don’t care. I’m just going to do this. And then, of course, the second you start, as you know better than anybody, you start talking about something, then people reach out to you. And some of them are deranged, but some of them aren’t at all.

So I just started getting a lot of information from people and meeting with people, mostly in private. Come to my house, let’s talk. And I decided on the basis of what they told me, and then I talked to a lot of people about it, that actually, this is really a very heavy duty question. Actually, it’s not just, it’s not the little green men question. It’s a much bigger question. And it’s really bad. It’s really dark.

And then I stopped. Then I was like, I don’t want to know anymore because it’s not helping me at all as a person.

JOE ROGAN: What information did you get that made you feel like it’s dark?

The Nature of Deception and Spiritual Forces

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s so dark? Well, first of all, the deception is always bad. Lying is bad in it. It’s bad. Not just in a legal sense, in that it can be illegal to lie, but it’s bad. It’s bad for you. It rots you. Being a liar makes you a bad person. When you lie, you are serving evil. There’s a moral quality to it that’s inescapable and very obvious, and only advanced civilizations ignore that lying is bad.

And so if you have lying at scale, which we have on this topic, it’s inherently bad. Okay, so that’s the first level. The deeper level is what are… Okay, so if they’re spiritual beings, which I believe they are, it’s a binary. They’re either on team Good or team Bad. You can assign any name to it you want. But what are these things? Are they good or bad? And I think some of them are bad. And if the US government knows that, or elements, the people within the US Government know that, then they’re serving a bad force.

JOE ROGAN: When you say spiritual, what makes you draw that conclusion that they’re spiritual?

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the obvious? I mean, spiritual may be the wrong word, supernatural. They’re beyond nature as we understand it. I mean, obviously they are. I mean, just chart their physical behavior. It doesn’t go outside of what we understand about physics. No visible means of propulsion, coming at indescribable speed, hitting the ocean, continuing at speeds that are impossible under sea.

I mean, in other words, if I take a 9 millimeter or a 7.62 by 39 and shoot you at 50 yards underwater in a swimming pool, and it’s even more intense than salt water because it’s denser, you could catch the bullet if it even makes it to you. Right. So if you have a craft, any object underwater that’s traveling at 500 knots as measured by sonar, right there, you’re challenging our understanding of physics. What is that? How can that be?

Underwater Phenomena and Physical Evidence

JOE ROGAN: So they’ve tracked that. They’ve tracked things going 500 knots under the sea.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Really? Yeah, much, much faster than any object could actually go under sea. Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of stuff going on underwater and a lot. And there’s video of these things coming out of the sky into the water and also emerging from the water, right? Yeah. So it’s all so blurry, though.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it’s that trans medium video.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I don’t think some of it’s that blurry. I think some of it’s crystal clear.

JOE ROGAN: We just don’t have access to it. Is that what you mean? Just we haven’t seen it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Correct.

JOE ROGAN: So they have some stuff for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, but there’s just a lot going on underwater and it’s measured and so whatever. I mean, these are all, again, this is the most obvious observable level of it. But then you just ask yourself, what is this actually? And if there’s been extensive knowledge of this for decades, maybe 80 years at least, if not going back to the 30s, 90 years, to what end?

Government Secrecy and Public Safety

So there are two possible explanations, obvious explanations. The first is the one you often hear, which is this is so heavy that if the public were to know about it, it would be just disruptive. It’d be too scary. You don’t want to scare people for no good reason. There’s nothing we can do about it. And you also don’t want to suggest that the US military isn’t capable of protecting the country, the homeland. And it does suggest that if you can’t control these objects in your airspace, and that’s known, if they can’t, that’s known. Okay. Then that’s just a limit to the power of the US Military. And you don’t want to tell people that because then they won’t believe that they’re safe. I get it.

But then there’s a deeper level, which is, okay, what’s your relationship with these things? What is the US Government’s relationship with these things? And there’s evidence that there is a relationship and that it’s long standing, and that raises a lot of questions about intent. And so what is that?

And I just personally decided, and people have been hurt by these things. That’s a fact. That’s a knowable fact. It’s a provable fact. And killed. And I’m not saying millions of people have been killed by whatever these things are, but people have been killed. And it’s known because it’s working its way through the courts, out of the VA.

So, I don’t know. An object that is, by definition, supernatural, it’s above the laws of nature as we understand them, and that has resulted in the deaths of people. We don’t spend enough time thinking about what that adds up to. Not good, actually, not good.

JOE ROGAN: How many people do you think have died from these things?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know. But I mean, I…

JOE ROGAN: And is it radiation sickness? Is it, what is…

Gary Nolan and Brain Injuries

TUCKER CARLSON: So the person that I talked to, I interviewed someone who was a Stanford Medical School professor who’s out there and worth talking to, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: Talking about Gary Nolan.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly who I’m talking about. Effectively an expert witness in these cases. So he’s an expert in brain injury. Do you know him? Yeah, yeah. Entirely credible person. Checks all the boxes that I care about. He’s got patents, so he’s like a lot of Stanford University professors. He’s independently rich. He flew to, I live in a remote place, and he flew to my place at his own expense because he wanted to tell his story. So he’s got no profit motive here.

He’s the most highly credentialed person at the university, practically. Stanford Medical School, we consider that a big deal. And he’s worked on this for over 10 years, assessing the injuries to US servicemen from being in close proximity to these objects or having contact with these objects. And his conclusion, as you know, because you’ve talked to him, is that there’s some kind of energy coming off here that scrambles people’s brains or kills them. And it’s not exactly radiation, at least in his telling to me. So anyway, but the point is people have died.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so, you know, does raise a lot of questions about what the hell, right?

JOE ROGAN: What the hell?

TUCKER CARLSON: American citizens have died and you’re hiding it. Why are you hiding that? Why would you hide that?

Interdimensional Beings and Government Contact

JOE ROGAN: Perhaps because they don’t have any explanations, because it’s so beyond our comprehension that they’re still trying to piece it together. I would wonder how much interaction they really do have with these things. If I was from another planet or if I was some interdimensional being, I don’t know how much I’d give a shit about the President. I don’t know how much I’d give a shit about the government.

I would probably look at this infantile race, this species, this bizarre territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons, this very weird species. I’d probably look at them as very chaotic, and I wouldn’t really have much concern for who’s running it, especially if they have the ability to travel at insane speeds and go undetected.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it depends. Okay, so the template that you’re using to understand this is science fiction, right? These are an advanced race of beings from somewhere else. But the template that every other society before us has used is a spiritual one. There is a whole world that we can’t see that acts on people, a supernatural world that’s acting on us all the time for good and bad.

Historical Perspectives on the Supernatural

Every society has thought this before ours. In fact, every society in all recorded history has thought that until, I’ll be specific, August 1945, when we dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and all of a sudden, the west is just officially secular. We’re God. There is no God but us. And that’s the world that we have grown up in. But that’s an anomaly. No one else has ever thought that.

There’s never been a society that thought that every other society has assumed. And they’ve had all kinds of different explanations, and the details differ, but the core idea does not differ. Never has differed from caves until now, that we’re being acted on by spiritual forces at all times. And so to someone born before or living before 1945, I think it would have been much more obvious that this is the thing that every society has written about.

And in fact, that battle, that unseen battle around us, that spiritual battle, has been the basis of every society, of every religion, not just Christianity. So once you discard your very, very recent assumptions, relatively speaking, about how the world works, you’re like, well, that kind of seems like the obvious explanation, right?

JOE ROGAN: It’s not that obvious to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what’s more obvious, do you think?

Advanced Technology and Secret Programs

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t think there’s an obvious explanation. I think if I had to guess, some of this stuff is ours and some of these things are propulsion systems that they theorized way back in the 1950s. Anti-gravity propulsion systems, things that can operate without igniting fuel and pushing something out. That they operate in some completely different way that utilizes gravity and almost can instantaneously transport to new places, essentially fold space time. I don’t know.

So there’s things that the government does where they have these programs and the people that are sworn into these programs, whether they’re the physicists or the metallurgists or whoever these people are that are working on these programs, they don’t tell anybody. All their phones are monitored, everything’s monitored. There’s a culture of secretism that’s pretty intense.

And it’s not inconceivable that over the course of the last 70 plus years of them theorizing and then eventually implementing some of these things, that they’ve developed drones that can move in ways that the people that understand conventional propulsion systems could not imagine and that they figured out a way to do this and to keep it secret. And we’re probably not the only ones working on these things.

Crash Retrieval Programs and Donations

But where did they get that information? And Diana Pasulka, her work, they describe these crafts, these crash crafts as “donations,” which is fascinating that they’re left there. The crashed retrieval program, the crashed UAP retrieval program is essentially, they’re going, “Figure this out. We’re going to crash this thing here. You figure this out.”

And the question is, if that’s true, okay, where are these things coming from? If there’s something that is so advanced that it’s decided to leave us a little trinket for us to back engineer. Is that from another dimension? Is that from here? Is that from some realm that we just don’t have access to? Is it from another planet?

We have drones that are on other planets right now. We have a drone on Mars. We have the lunar rovers, we have satellites that we send to observe and photograph other planets. We just got really high detailed photographs of Jupiter. They’re pretty amazing.

But if something was like us on another planet, but lived uninterrupted with technology advancing for 1,000 years, 10,000 years, a million years more than us. What would that be like? And how much would we be able to understand of what we’re seeing? What would we be able to see?

Detection Systems and Advanced Civilizations

This idea that we monitor our skies.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: But if something just appears and disappears essentially instantaneously, if something literally can fold time, can fold space, and just traverse between immense distances almost instantaneously, what are we going to see? What are we going to see?

And also what kind of detection systems do we have? We have radar, we have visual, we have a bunch of different military based detection systems to look out for enemy crafts and airships and all that stuff. But if you’re dealing with something that’s a million years more advanced than us, how much would we be able to detect?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, so I think we’re pointing to the same question. I mean, I have no doubt that the US government has technology that we don’t know the details of that makes sense. Sure, but where did it come from?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

Origins of Nuclear Technology

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not even sure this is a separate question, but related. We really know where nuclear technology came from actually, when you really…

JOE ROGAN: Yes, like the Manhattan Project.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, like we know the Manhattan, we know something about the Manhattan Project. But where exactly did that, you know, came from? Germany. German scientists were working on it. Okay.

JOE ROGAN: The one per, this is a…

The Nature of UFO Sightings and Advanced Technology

TUCKER CARLSON: Separate conversation, but the one person I know who’s really pushed that was writing a book on it, who’s a trustworthy person. And a friend of mine, I know you know him, said to me, “Actually I spent a year working on this and I wanted the closer I got to like, okay, but what’s the genesis? Like where did this, what was the, what was the Isaac Newton apple on the head? Oh, gravity’s real moment for fission.” Not clear. Weird. I don’t know the answer.

But here’s the point. Clearly government has technology that we’re not read in on. Of course, but so that doesn’t answer the question, why have people seen these objects in the skies for thousands of years? Confirmed. And what are they? And maybe they’re from another planet. My only point is there’s no evidence of that.

There’s a huge amount, a massive corpus of evidence that they’re seen by people in our atmosphere, you know, on Earth looking up, or in a submarine looking out. And what is that? And by the way, to your point, like we can’t see them coming into our atmosphere because they don’t want to be seen. Well then why do they want to be seen by people on Earth? Like if they, if the technology is that advanced, and clearly it is. Why do they make themselves visible in the first place?

Studying Primates and Advanced Species

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know, when we study primates, one of the things that we do. Have you ever watch Chimp Nation on Netflix?

TUCKER CARLSON: No. Have a TV, but the sound of it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s an amazing documentary on Netflix that details these embedded scientists in the Congo. And what’s really fascinating about it is that this group of scientists or related scientists have been there for 20 plus years. So these chimps have become entirely accustomed to having human beings near them.

So there’s very specific rules. You stay within 20 yards of them. If they come closer, you back up. You never have food, ever. You can’t bring any food there because they’ll fuck you up and just steal your food. If they find out you have food.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re formidable, you’re in real trouble.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, they’ll tear you apart and they kill each other. So they’ll definitely kill you. And so when they have done this, the chimps have become accustomed to them being there and the chimps behave completely normally. The chimps see them as just an innocuous part of their environment. They’re not food and they’re not enemy. They don’t ever intrude, they don’t try to challenge them, they don’t make eye contact. So they don’t worry about the people at all. So they behave completely like chimps.

And if I was an advanced species and I was studying people and I wanted the human beings to eventually kind of catch up, right? Like you’re introducing technology that they call donations, crash vehicles. Figure out what fiber optics are. Here you go. Check this out. Figure this out. Try to figure that out. Maybe it’ll take you decades, maybe it’ll take you more, but you are accelerating the technological evolution of this advanced species on this planet. And one way to do that would…

TUCKER CARLSON: Be for what purpose, I wonder?

The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s a very good question. My belief is that biological, intelligent life is essentially a caterpillar. And it’s a caterpillar that’s making a cocoon. And it doesn’t even know why it’s doing it, it’s just doing it. And that cocoon is going to give birth to artificial life, digital life. It’s going to give birth to a new life form. I think we’re real close to that. I think we’re way closer than that, to that than most people would ever want to be.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree, I agree. But can we assign a value to that? Is that good or bad?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good question. It depends. Universally, I think it’s the path, I think it’s what happens. I think what this thing is. If you extrapolate, if you take the concept of a sentient artificial intelligence that has the ability to utilize all the information that every human being has on earth at a level of computing that’s far beyond the capabilities of the human mind and all of our supercomputers that currently exist, because it’ll design much better computers, it’ll use quantum computers, it’ll have the ability to recode things and change things. It’ll make better versions of itself.

So instead of biological evolution, which is very slow, it takes a long time relatively, it takes. It’s pretty quick really when you think about it. Like how long? It’s not that long to go from being a single celled organism to being a human being flying a plane. Really relatively over the course of a billion years, if you think about how long the universe has been around.

But it’s slow compared to technological evolution. I mean, 100 years ago we didn’t have shit and now we have. We could send videos from your phone and it’ll hit New Zealand in a second. It’s crazy. The stuff that we have now is beyond imagination. It’s essentially magic for people 100 years ago.

If that keeps going, it’s ultimately going to lead to a life form. And if that life form has now untethered, it doesn’t have any problems with biological evolution. Now it’s just about information and implementing the technology that’s available and then increasing that technology and making it better and better. It essentially becomes a God.

Because if you give it enough time, it has the ability to make better versions of itself, which will in turn make better versions of itself. It has the ability to utilize everything. It has the understanding of everything that exists in the universe. Black holes, dark matter, everything. And it probably has the ability to harness that or even reproduce that.

So if you take artificial sentient intelligence and it has this super accelerated path of technological evolution, and you give artificial general intelligence, sentient artificial intelligence far beyond human beings, you give it a thousand years alone to make better and better versions of itself, where does that go? That goes to a God.

Machines vs. Human Creation

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t, what kind of God. I think of this way. So the first stage of the Industrial revolution consisted of people building machines that were stronger than the human body, right? So the steam powered loom. Sure. The backhoe.

JOE ROGAN: Combustion engine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Combustion engine. They replace. They replace muscles, right? So that’s the machine. Does it become stronger than the human body? The Second stage, which we’re in the middle of, consists of creating machines that are more powerful than the human mind. That’s what computing is. And I would say AI or supercomputing is just that exponentially.

But that doesn’t make it a God in the sense that the machine, however powerful it is, any more than a backhoe, is a God because it can dig a trench faster than a hundred men. It is still something that people created. So the story hasn’t really changed. At the center of the story are people, and their creative power may lead to unintended consequences. But the machines that they build did not make the universe and did not make people. People made the machines.

But I would say the part I agree with is there’s a spiritual component here for sure. People will worship AI as a God. AI, Ted Kaczynski was likely right, will get away from us. We will be controlled by the thing that we made. All those are bad. Like, that’s just bad. And we need to say, unequivocally, it’s bad. It’s bad to be controlled by machines.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Machines are help mates. Like they. We created them to help us to make our lives better, not to take orders from them. So I don’t know why we’re not having any of these conversations right now. We’re just acting as if this is like some kind of virus, like Covid, that spreads across the world inexorably. There’s nothing we can do about it. Just wait to get it.

It’s like, no, if we agree that the outcome is bad, which, and specifically it’s bad for people, we should care what’s good for people. That’s all we should care about. Is it good for people or not? If it’s bad for people, then we should strangle it in its crib right now.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: And why is. Blow up the data centers? Like, I don’t. Why is that hard? If it’s actually going to become what you just described, which is a threat to people, humanity, life, then we have a moral obligation to murder it immediately. And since it’s not alive, we don’t need to feel bad about that.

The Atomic Bomb Parallel

JOE ROGAN: Well, you could say the same about the atomic bomb, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, you could.

JOE ROGAN: And you could say that we have to develop it like Oppenheimer felt before the Nazis did.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love that. How’d that work? How’d that work? Well, I love, by the way, that people on my side, I’ll just say. I’ll just admit it. On the right, you know, have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking?

JOE ROGAN: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s just like prima facie evil. If you can’t. Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings. Like, no, it’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people. And if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like, it’s not a tough one. Right? Is that a hard call for you? It’s not a hard call for me.

So with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify, like, oh, no, it’s really good because someone else will get it. How about no, how about like, spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening? Would you kill baby Hitler? You know, famously, right?

So I don’t know why we’re sitting back and allowing this to happen. If we really believe it will extinguish the human race or enslave the human race. Like, how can that be good?

God’s Process and Human Importance

JOE ROGAN: Well, if God creates everything, if God created the universe and God creates people, God probably creates a process. And we think that we are very important because we are. Very important to us. But are we very important in a universal sense? Not really. Like if the Earth just imploded and disappeared, if the sun went supernova and our whole solar system was blown to bits and the universe still exists.

TUCKER CARLSON: It depends how wide your. For sure. In the end, as Conan O’Brien, the famous philosopher, once said, “Every grave goes unvisited.” Which is true. And that’s an important perspective. Pull out the lens a little bit. Does it really matter? No, it doesn’t.

JOE ROGAN: But it does matter. Does matter.

TUCKER CARLSON: How about this? Do your children matter?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do their lives matter? Would you die for them?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, of course. Everything matters. If you’re not comfortable, it matters. If you’re sitting here like, you don’t want to wear headphones, like, let’s not wear headphones. That matters. Everything matters.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what matters most? Like, right, that is the evil.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: The evil is the…

JOE ROGAN: It’s the same thing as saying the necessary evil of dropping nuclear bombs on civilians is if you don’t do that, then there’ll be more evil, then more things will happen. It’s kind of the same thing. Like, it doesn’t…

Hubris and Humility

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it comes from the same place, which is hubris. Like imagining you’re God. You have unlimited power and you have omniscience. You can imagine what the future is going to be. You can’t. You’re fucking idiot. You’re a person. Like, you can’t even make your wife happy.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, the limits of your power are really obvious. The limits of your wisdom. Same. So, like, don’t jump into shit. Big things whose outcomes you can’t predict with certainty, like, you can’t know. Go in with humility. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Right.

JOE ROGAN: So.

TUCKER CARLSON: And do what you can, knowing that you’re probably going to screw it up and you probably won’t achieve your goal. But, like, you should try. And on the AI question everyone I’ve ever talked to about. I’m hardly an expert. I don’t own a computer. Okay. But everybody I’ve ever talked to, and there’s many people, like, “Yeah, you know, could get away from us and enslave us.”

Well, let’s say no to slavery. How’s that? Is that a tough one? Not for me. Yeah, I mean, and maybe a good use of nuclear weapons would be to hit the data centers. No, I’m serious. Like, why is that crazy?

JOE ROGAN: It’s not. It’s not. If you think that human beings are the end of this evolutionary change.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, what else is some supercomputer in a data center outside Dulles Airport? No, you know what I mean, right? I don’t actually think that individuals. I don’t think I’m that important. My life is that important. I don’t. I will die. I know that. And I try to keep that in mind every day.

JOE ROGAN: But you’re important to everybody that cares about you. You’re important to the people around you.

TUCKER CARLSON: If we don’t think people are important, then what do we think is important? I guess that’s what I’m saying.

Evolution and Adaptation

JOE ROGAN: Not necessarily that we don’t think people are important, but if evolution is real and if there is this, I don’t know, but it’s visible. You can measure it in certain animals.

TUCKER CARLSON: Measure adaptation, but there’s no evidence that. In fact, I think we’ve kind of given up on the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution that’s articulated by Darwin is kind of not true.

JOE ROGAN: In what sense?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, in the most basic sense, the idea that all life emerged from a single cell organism and over time, and there would be a fossil record of that, and there’s not.

JOE ROGAN: There’s not a fossil record of transitionary species, like species that are adapting to its environment.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s tons of record of adaptation. And you see it in your own life. I mean, I have a lot of dogs. I see adaptation in dogs through the litter to litter. But no, there’s no evidence at all that, non-zero, that people evolve seamlessly from a single cell amoeba. No, there’s not. There’s no chain in the fossil record of that at all.

And that’s why you don’t actually hear people. You hear them make reference to evolution because the theory of adaptation is clearly, obviously true, but Darwin’s theories, totally unprofessional. That’s why it’s still a theory almost 200 years later. No, we have not found that at all. And I can’t even guess. I mean, I have my own theories on it, but they’re not proven.

JOE ROGAN: What are your theories?

TUCKER CARLSON: God created people, distinctly. And animals. I mean, I think that’s what every person on Earth thought until the mid-19th century actually.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s not a new idea.

JOE ROGAN: They didn’t have computers. They didn’t have a general understanding that we have today of the process.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think we understand more? Yes. Really?

JOE ROGAN: You don’t think that we understand more today?

Modern Understanding and Technology

TUCKER CARLSON: Way less. We understand so little that we’re actually sitting here allowing a bunch of greedy, stupid, childless software engineers in Northern California to flirt with the extinction of mankind. So no, previous generations would be like, what? No, stop. And we’re not doing that because…

JOE ROGAN: But they wouldn’t have done that, even with the nuclear bomb. I mean, obviously the Manhattan Project was done in secrecy, but they wouldn’t have stopped it. Because the imperative of getting this weapon before Hitler got the weapon was what it was.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, Hitler was kind of done by then. The Russians had pretty much extinguished any hope that that would continue.

JOE ROGAN: But not in the…

TUCKER CARLSON: Middle of the logic of war.

JOE ROGAN: The commencement of the Manhattan Project for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: But the logic was the same. And it was four years of “got to beat the other guy.” And I don’t mean to sound too judgmental about the bomb. I know why they built it, okay? But you just wonder why nobody in the middle of that thought, is this really a good idea? And some of them did think it.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure they did, yes. I mean, Oppenheimer himself, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: Large organizations don’t respond to the moral qualms of individuals very well. So that was whatever. It’s well known what happened. But no, we should pause and ask, is the machine we’re building worth having? And nobody seems to do that.

And there are all kinds of economic forces which nobody ever mentions that drive that heedlessness, that stupidity. Like California, for example, is completely, the state both of us have lived in, it’s collapsing. And they’re betting everything on AI. The tax base is going to be dependent on this technology working.

JOE ROGAN: Is that really what they’re betting on?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, AI is…

California’s Homeless Crisis

JOE ROGAN: Did you see the most recent thing about the amount of billions of dollars they spent on the homeless problem with no trackable results?

TUCKER CARLSON: They’ve had massive results. They’ve increased the homeless population dramatically. If you pay for something, you get more of it. And that would include fentanyl addicts. Oh, absolutely. It’s been a wild success. I actually talked to Gavin Newsom the other day.

JOE ROGAN: Did you really?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What’s that like? Does he smell like sulfur?

TUCKER CARLSON: It was by phone. I was talking on the phone. Such a weird smell. That was too fast for me.

JOE ROGAN: Sulfur and hair grease?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. No, but I was making fun of, I shouldn’t even make fun of it because it’s so tragic. But what’s happened to the state and people living on the street.

JOE ROGAN: What is this non-gaslighty perspective?

TUCKER CARLSON: He said, “Go back to Russia. You like Russia so much.” I was like, actually, I’m originally from San Francisco, but I can’t live there because…

JOE ROGAN: He really told you to go back to Russia?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. I mean, he was laughing, whatever. He’s a perfectly charming guy. They all are, in person. But anyway, I’m so far afield.

AI and Energy Consumption

But my point is, AI is being driven by the greed of politicians to some extent. And you’ll notice that AI, by the way, as a fact, those data centers that drive our digital life, which is not life, it’s actually death mostly. But I mean, they’re the biggest power draw. I mean, how much electricity does AI require? Like, more than countries. Our grid can’t handle AI just as a practical matter.

JOE ROGAN: Well, our grid can’t handle electric cars.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it can’t handle air conditioning in the state of California where I’m from. If you live east of I-5, where it’s really hot and you’re not getting those ocean breezes, they have brownouts like in South Africa. It’s Johannesburg now.

But here’s what’s interesting, is that none of the global warming cultists seem to have any concerns at all about AI. Why is that? Just like they don’t have concerns about John Kerry’s G4. Somehow that’s exempt, really. AI is going to draw more electricity than anything else in the United States. More than steel production used to. And you don’t have a problem with that. But you’re totally against energy because it’s destroying the planet. But AI gets a carve out, even though it’s going to be the number one energy draw in the United States. Let’s go through your reasoning on that.

JOE ROGAN: They’re probably not aware.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’re totally, they’re not aware. They’re mad about my wood stove. I heat with wood. They’re mad about my wood stove. They don’t want an outdoor barbecue. They don’t like a gas stove. No. They’re way into the details on this stuff, except somehow AI isn’t a problem.

JOE ROGAN: But do you think that they’re informed? Because this is not a narrative that you ever hear. You never hear on the news.

TUCKER CARLSON: I grew up in a world where a wood stove was considered wholesome and natural. And now it’s consumed.

JOE ROGAN: Smells good too.

Wood-Fired Saunas

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, it’s the best. And the heat is the, I have a wood-fired sauna which I use every day, and it’s the great. It’s one…

JOE ROGAN: How do you make sure it’s the right temperature? Is it like an offset smoker? Do you have to kind of fiddle with it for a while to get the right temperature?

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s time consuming. No, I have a Finnish, the Finns are geniuses, but I have a Finnish stove in it and it’s incredibly precise. I don’t know if you ever use a wood stove, but there’s a carburetor on it basically that lets in air.

JOE ROGAN: Like an offset smoker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, exactly. And it’s so precise. I mean, it’s absolutely crazy. I mean, you move it a third of an inch and the flame changes. So I use birch, which I love, and the whole process takes a while. I get it to 200, which probably takes an hour and 20. I mean, it’s a thing.

JOE ROGAN: I get hot.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like it hot? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: 200.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Well, I do it every day, so…

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay. Does that help?

TUCKER CARLSON: Which is embarrassing.

JOE ROGAN: The wool hat?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Well, it’s felt.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I bought one of those. I never wore it.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s incredible. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What’s the difference?

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ll tell you. Because you’re, don’t get, I’m so boring on this stuff. You got to get going on this.

JOE ROGAN: My wife and kids are, you see, you have one. You know, you’re speaking to the choir.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re the best. Go Scandinavia. Yeah, it’s like the one thing. If your name is Carlson, it’s the one thing to be proud of in your people. They’re so sad and defeated and pathetic. But saunas are still great.

But anyway, the sauna hat, so your head heats up much faster because it’s higher, but also because it’s got all the capillaries in your head, all the blood vessels in your head. So the point of a sauna is to bake. So you want to stay hot as long as you can, then you reap the benefits. And you also get the solitude and the prayer time or the meditation or whatever in your seat or church. But you can’t stay in a sauna that’s really hot very long because your head heats up.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: So the sauna hat, the felt hat, the banya hat, as they call it, insulates your head so you can really stay hot a long, long time. It makes a, you really should do it.

JOE ROGAN: So is it just because it makes it more comfortable? Is that the idea?

TUCKER CARLSON: If your head overheats, it just overheats. And what you want is you want to cook evenly, just like on a barbecue. And so you sit on the bench with your feet up. You want to be as flat as you possibly can to cook evenly and to stay that way.

So I do, I try to do 20 minutes. I have my timer, my egg timer with the sand going through the hourglass and I, which goes to 15 minutes, but I try to stay an extra five if I can. And I couldn’t without the banya hat.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like eight bucks on Amazon. Well worth it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I have one. Like I said, I just don’t use it, but I do.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re embarrassing and you look like a tool wearing it, but you shouldn’t have it.

JOE ROGAN: But no one’s looking in there anyway.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s right. Do you sauna with other people?

JOE ROGAN: I do sometimes. Yeah. Comics.

TUCKER CARLSON: We get in here.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. When we train together, we all get in a sauna together afterwards. The Rock was in there with us.

TUCKER CARLSON: No way.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the Rock worked out with us, then sat in the sauna with us. It was fun. Got in the cold plunge with us.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, that’s pretty great.

JOE ROGAN: It was fun.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is he a good dude?

The Rock

JOE ROGAN: He’s a great guy. Really nice guy. Like, really.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve heard that. I don’t know him, but I’ve heard.

JOE ROGAN: He’s like, genuine. Some people fake humble. They fake it to look cool.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s pretty obvious.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s not doing that. He’s a real guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: The measure of humility is really, really simple. Can you tell the truth about yourself?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, are you just, are you cool to be around? He gives real hugs. He’s a real guy. He’s real. He’s a real guy. And we, when we hung out with him, we were, I hung out with him for hours. We worked out for like two hours. And then we got in the sauna together. We all hung out, and we did a podcast together. He’s a genuinely nice guy. You’d be able to sniff something out.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you can tell, like, immediately something.

JOE ROGAN: You tell something.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know people are hiding stuff.

Sauna and Cold Plunge Routines

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but. So, yeah, I’ve done the sauna with other people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I do it by myself, so no one sees my sauna.

JOE ROGAN: I do it at 196 degrees. I do it for 25 minutes.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s intense. 196 for 25 minutes is a lot.

JOE ROGAN: The last five minutes are rough. And I used to only do 20, but lately I’ve been doing 25.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Just because it’s more uncomfortable. The whole idea is just to make it more uncomfortable. I want it to be very hard to do so that the rest of my day is pretty easy. So really hard workout, cold plunge starts the day. That’s the first thing I do is hard. It’s three minutes at 33 degrees. It sucks. And then I get out of there and then I work out.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s really impressive. I mean, I had the opposite training as a young man, which was the goal was like French toast. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: French toast.

TUCKER CARLSON: Grind out the cigarettes in the syrup.

JOE ROGAN: When you’re drinking, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The Value of Discipline and Hard Work

JOE ROGAN: Well, I started doing martial arts when I was a young man, and when I got into it, it was the first thing that I ever did that first of all, gave me a real understanding of the value of discipline and hard work. Because you can get as good as the amount of effort that you put forth. And if you put more effort and you’re more intense and you’re more driven than other people, you beat them and you start beating everyone and you start becoming this thing that you never thought you could be, which is someone who’s extraordinary at something that’s very dangerous.

And so that was my formulation as a man. Like, that helped me go from being this confused kid to being someone who understands, like, oh, there’s a path, and most people don’t want to do it. But if you could do it, if you can do this dangerous thing that people are terrified of and just do it ruthlessly all day long, live it. I lived at the gym. I mean, I taught all day long. I trained all day long. My whole life was dedicated to martial arts.

So I got really good, really quick, and it changed the whole trajectory of my life. And it instilled in me this understanding of the value of dedication and of a singular commitment to something, to really being while you’re doing it, you’re not distracted, you’re fully focused on improving. And through that, you could apply that to all aspects of your life.

But we all encounter difficult things in life. And there’s this saying that I love. It’s a really great saying that the hardest thing that’s ever happened to you is the hardest thing that’s ever happened to you. If it’s a parking ticket or if it’s your parents being blown up by a drone, it’s still the hardest thing that’s ever happened to you. If you had an incredibly easy life, like most people today, they complain about the dumbest shit because to them, that is their primary focus. They don’t have a real existential threat.

You remember how nice everybody was after 9/11?

TUCKER CARLSON: Very.

JOE ROGAN: It was crazy. California was patriotic. There’s flags on everybody’s car. Everybody was friendly. I went to New York City. It was like a totally different place.

TUCKER CARLSON: Everybody was so friendly, applauding when firemen walked in.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, they were heroes. Everybody was a hero. And that’s because they had encountered something that was way harder than they were accustomed to. And it just put things into perspective. So for me, training and really hard workouts and doing difficult things like the sauna, there’s a lot of health benefits to it, too. But the mental benefits to it are really primary for me because it makes…

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s impressive. The rest of life. I didn’t have a childhood like that at all. And we were decadent, unfortunately. And so those are lessons that I learned much, much later.

JOE ROGAN: But, yeah, it’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a good. I think it’s a. If it doesn’t destroy you, I think it’s a great way to do it. And you don’t have to do it the way I do it. You could do other stuff. You could do yoga, you could do hikes, you could do…

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but doing things for the sake of the difficulty in doing them, yes, I love that. Again, that was not my training at all.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I was very lucky that it was mine. But more importantly, it gave me a tool to mitigate the stress of regular life, especially the stress of this kind of life that I live. You need something to mitigate that or you’ll go crazy.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree with that completely.

JOE ROGAN: You’ll go crazy.

Disconnecting from Digital Life

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. You know, removing yourself from it a little bit has always worked for me. You know, nature works very, very well. Animals, contact with animals, people you love. Less digital experiences, fewer digital experiences, for sure. I think that this stuff’s not good for you. It’s just so obviously not good for you.

JOE ROGAN: I was having this conversation with Michelle Dowd yesterday. She is a woman who survived an apocalyptic cult. She was raised in an apocalyptic cult and kicked out when she was 17 because she snuck out to go see “The Color Purple.” They weren’t allowed to go see movies. She’d never seen a movie until she was 17.

TUCKER CARLSON: A movie, and her first movie was…

JOE ROGAN: “The Color Purple,” and then they kicked her out.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can kind of see that. I mean, what about “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or something?

JOE ROGAN: “The Color Purple” was the first movie she’d ever seen. No, but someone…

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you see one movie that’s “The Color Purple”?

JOE ROGAN: Well, a boy invited her to the movie. But could you imagine never seeing a movie or even a television life and…

TUCKER CARLSON: Then seeing “The Purple,” dating a boy who wanted to see “The Color Purple”? There’s so much going on here, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: Well, this boy was a guy who had left the church, and so she was in contact with him, and he was saying, “Hey, there’s a whole world out here. You want to go see the movie?” And she’s like, “Okay, let’s go.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, obviously, look, I’m totally against cults, obviously. On the other hand, you do got to ask yourself, I don’t know, is your average Amish teenager happier than your average conventional American teenager on Instagram? And of course, the answer is, oh, yeah.

Autism and the Amish Community

JOE ROGAN: Well, they certainly have less instances of autism, which is really fascinating. It’s very, very fascinating.

TUCKER CARLSON: The Amish have less autism?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s almost none.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I’m not surprised.

JOE ROGAN: It’s extremely rare.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why do we think that is?

JOE ROGAN: I wonder. I really do.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can think of a couple.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s funny.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t want to go Bobby Kennedy.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s the problem. If you go Bobby Kennedy, they’ll come for you. But the question is, why?

TUCKER CARLSON: Look, and I don’t know the answer.

JOE ROGAN: But how is that not in the debate? How is that not in the conversation?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s not only not in the conversation, you’re punished for adding it to the conversation.

JOE ROGAN: And so we are dancing around anti-vax conspiracy theories right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why be on the defensive? It’s like if you purport to represent science and you’re mad about a question.

JOE ROGAN: And you’re ignoring data.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but even within the absence of data, science is a process.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not a result, it’s a way of doing things. And at the core of science is asking questions, including unlikely questions.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what science is.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And if you don’t allow that, then you may be doing something, but what you’re not doing is science. We can say that conclusively. So for people to wrap themselves in the mantle of science and attack you for asking a question, you know, they’re frauds. And I don’t know how they have the moral high ground in this.

Science, Ideology, and Messy Issues

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they do. But I think it’s the same kind of mindset that allows people to create the nuclear bomb. Because you say, “Listen, we’re not even saying that vaccines cause autism.” But let’s say this. If you’re looking at all the data of all the things that cause autism and you see that the vaccine schedule ramps up considerably, and then you have autism, which seems to at least be more diagnosed than ever before, people will instantly say, “We stopped polio, we stopped smallpox. Vaccines have saved millions of lives.” And they’re probably right.

We drop that bomb to keep Germany from dropping that bomb. We need nuclear weapons so that other people don’t have nuclear weapons. We do a thing that maybe has some negative effects but is overall good. I think you can kind of apply that sort of logic and reasoning as a human being to very messy issues.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think people do, and we all do, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: People do that with abortion, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: They do that with abortion.

TUCKER CARLSON: They do with everything.

JOE ROGAN: “Has a right to choose, reproductive freedom.” They say all these things and then you say, “Okay, what if the baby is near term? What if it’s six months old? What if it’s seven months old?” And people don’t want to have that conversation. “A woman has the right to choose. You’re a fascist. Stay out of women’s body.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Does a woman have a right to kill you if you annoy her or inconvenience her? This is weird.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, when is it a life? But it is one of those things that to me is a human problem. Whereas humans have these very messy interactions with some things that don’t line up with their ideology. And there’s an ideology of science worship, there’s an ideology of authoritarian worship. “The bodies of science have bestowed the truth. If you ignore it, you’re a science denier.” And you know, that’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: Those are political terms or theological terms. They’re not terms rooted in science. And look, we all make trade-offs constantly. You know what, there’s, you know, everything’s bad. It’s a shit sandwich versus a shit croissant. I’ll take the shit croissant. It’s smaller, you know. That’s a daily experience for everybody. So I get that.

And I don’t think everything is moral absolute either. You know, we don’t even know sometimes whether a decision will result in good or bad. So it’s very complicated. I totally agree with that. What I object to is the absence of reason.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have to believe, because I think it’s true, that if you’re reasonable, that you can reach maybe not the perfect decision, but a better decision. And if we don’t believe that, then we’re just in the land of witchcraft and let’s just admit it. So the lack of reason is what freaks me out.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s ideological capture.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Because there’s certain things that if you’re on the right side of these subjects, the correct side, whatever your ideology believes, you can’t differ from the doctrine. There’s a very clear doctrine.

Religion and Ideological Thinking

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s religion then. It is. Yeah, it is religion. So I’m very pro-religion. But you can’t have a religion that’s too stupid and destructive. If your religion winds up hurting a lot of people, then I’m against your religion. That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think. But even some really good religions have aspects of them that you could say were overall detrimental to the people that were…

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure, absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: Encountered with them. I think that that kind of thinking, I think cult thinking, whether it’s Scientology or whether it’s Christianity, there’s a type of thinking or that’s woke. Woke is clearly a cult. It’s a mind virus. And I think that it’s so trite to call it that now. It’s like whatever this thing is, this leftism, this Marxist sort of ideology that’s waving its flag and indoctrinating people in this country, it’s very similar to all kinds of religions.

It’s very similar to fundamentalist religions that have always existed in that everybody has to believe very specific things. And you can’t differ. You can’t differ from the doctrine. And when you…

Truth, Lies, and the Erosion of Democracy

TUCKER CARLSON: So here’s another way to think about it that I’ve been meditating on this a lot. Yes. Religion, politics, they’re all kind of melding. It’s hard to know where one ends and another begins.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So maybe a simpler and more useful way to think about it is truth or falsehood, lying or honesty. Maybe just assess everything that way. Is someone lying? I don’t care what your justification for it is. Lying about vaccines. They’ve lied a lot about vaccines. And they’ve done it, I think, in most cases, because they feel like they’re serving some greater good.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Well, that’s the narrative.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right? Right. We can’t tell people that there are vaccine injuries because they won’t get vaccines, which are good for a big population. I understand the thinking, but you—how about this? You can’t participate in lying. You can’t lie.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t lie.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you can, period, though. You can’t lie about anything. Just don’t lie about anything. Try to tell the truth all the time. If you can’t say something that’s true, just don’t say it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not required to say everything you think, obviously, and you shouldn’t say everything.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you should never lie. And if you just stick with that, you get pretty quickly back to reason and order, don’t you?

The Problem of Power and Information

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. No, you’re making complete sense. And I think that this is the problem when people have information and power above other people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, right, that’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Which is the problem of governments, which is also the problem of cult leaders. Cult leaders, they get completely infatuated with this idea of being omnipotent and this power that has control over giant swaths of people, and you get to dictate their behavior and you get to tell them what to think. That’s very intoxicating.

And it’s common. It’s common in that it’s always existed throughout human history. It’s a thing that people do when they get power. They abuse the shit out of it. And if they think that you’re too stupid to know the truth and that they’re better than you, because they do think they’re better than you because they’re running things. It’s a natural inclination.

It’s a natural thought that people have if they’re the ones. If you guys are a bunch of dopes that are just listening to my orders and I tell you how to live your life and what to do, I’m naturally going to think I’m better than you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s—I mean, people have lived under those systems since there have been systems. But always what makes it particularly galling and hard to live with is when you call that system a democracy.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s too dishonest for me. I would much rather live in a monarchy where everyone thinks the king has been assigned by God to rule over us and his whims are law. And you know, that makes sense. I don’t like it, but at least it has internal coherence.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

Democracy in Name Only

TUCKER CARLSON: When they stand up and pass a $60 billion funding bill for Ukraine when 70% of the population doesn’t want it, when they’re ignoring the actual problems in our country like the economy and the border, and they’re calling in Congress over the weekend to pass something that people don’t want while ignoring the things that people do want.

And if they do the same kind of thing again and again for like 50 years and they call it a democracy, that will drive you insane. Yeah, because it’s just too dishonest. Why not just say, we don’t give a shit what you want. We are getting something out of this Ukraine funding. Whether it’s the thrill of being masters of the universe or whether it’s money from the defense contractors, whatever we’re getting out of it is more important to us than your opinion.

This is not self-government. You don’t run this country. We do. Shut up and obey. If they at least said that, you’d be like, okay, I get it, those are the terms. But if I get another lecture from Joe Scarborough about defending democracy when this is not a democracy, it’s not even a close approximation of a democracy, then I’m going to go crazy, because I just can’t deal with the lying.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Does that make sense?

The Shift in Mainstream Media

JOE ROGAN: It does make sense. What’s interesting is that there are people saying that now. And I think that’s a relatively new thing in terms of mainstream media. And I consider what you do on X mainstream media, what we’re on right now is essentially mainstream media. It used to be, you could call it, there’s corporate controlled media.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.

JOE ROGAN: And that used to be mainstream media. Mainstream media used to be CNN. It’s not really anymore. Mainstream media is what, in terms of the volume consumed. More people are consuming things on Twitter, on X, than there are on anything else. They’re consuming information through the Internet, through YouTube, for good or for bad. Whether it’s correct or incorrect, they’re consuming information in different forms now than ever before.

So more people are saying what you’re saying than have ever said it before. And when people lie and when people bullshit and gaslight, it’s more offensive now than it’s ever been before because there’s so much access to truth that it’s just—you could see it now if you’re paying attention. If you’re not a boomer who only reads the newspaper, you pay attention and you see it and you go, this is horseshit.

Unsophisticated Lies

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s like, I guess what bothers me is that the lies aren’t sophisticated.

JOE ROGAN: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I look back over my now sort of long life, and I’m recognizing all the times that I was lied to. But, you know, I didn’t know I was being lied to. They kind of pulled it off. There’s something incredibly insulting and demeaning to tell me a lie when I know it’s a lie and you know I know it’s a lie. We both know it’s a lie. But you’re demanding that I pretend to believe it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: What you’re really saying is, I have no respect for you. You’re like my dog.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re a slave. I’m demanding that you participate in my lie.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: The lack of stealth. I’m not explaining it very well, but that really bothers me.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s no real other way to lie. Like some of these lies, like politicians. Did you see that conversation that AOC had with that man they brought in for the Biden case? And they were talking about what crimes? And she was grilling this guy. What crimes? Did you see Joe Biden? Did he steal anything? Did he steal bread? I forgot what she said, but—and he was trying to explain what they were RICO crimes. And she was saying, RICO is not a crime.

TUCKER CARLSON: I saw that.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a category of crime. Okay, all right. But tell that to the Genovese family. Not only that, it’s so dumb to say that publicly and say it with confidence and tell a person.

Ineptitude and High Self-Esteem

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the thing. The marriage of ineptitude and high self-esteem is really the marker of our time. It’s like, I have nothing against dumb people at all. My dogs are dumb, and I love my dogs. No, I’m serious. I don’t think God cares about your intelligence. Right. Only people care. And so it’s not a moral category. And stupidity is not—I mean, someone down syndrome. I really believe better people than I am, you know, more likely to go to heaven.

So I’m not attacking her for being dumb, but the idea that a dumb person has no—the White House press secretary is in the same category. Who has no idea she’s dumb. She really thinks, she won the prize. She’s the most impressive. I’m White House press because I’m the best talker in America. It’s so crazy. And yet the smartest people I know are very often, sort of—well, I’m—you know, they have humility.

JOE ROGAN: Well, also, she’s following Kayleigh McEnany. Is that how you say her name?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t really know who that is.

JOE ROGAN: She was the last White House press secretary.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t know who that is? She’s the goat. I sort of do.

JOE ROGAN: She’s the goat. Greatest White House press secretary of all time. She’s the best.

TUCKER CARLSON: I had stopped paying close attention by that point.

JOE ROGAN: She had all the documents. She would kill them. Whenever she would get called out, whenever there would be a question, she’d say, that’s interesting. And then she’d open—because you said this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Your paper said that and CNN said this, and—and she would call them out on stuff, and she was just really, really well prepared.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love that.

JOE ROGAN: Very articulate. She was wonderful.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good for her. I mean, that’s what it should be.

JOE ROGAN: But she was operating under President Trump, you know, so obviously she’s demonized.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just—

JOE ROGAN: I can’t believe you don’t know who that is.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I know who it is, but I—it’s just funny. The—

JOE ROGAN: She’s the goat.

The White House Press Corps

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s—I had stopped watching all briefings by then. I used to go to briefs. Well, they’re so dumb. They’re so dumb. As you did. I used—I mean, I literally would go there, be in the briefing room, the former Kennedy swimming pool, and you—and the first thing you know. I mean, I was never a White House reporter, but I would—was a reporter, so I would go to them occasionally.

And the first thing you notice is how impressed all the correspondents are to work there. I work at the White House. Work at the White House. Got my pass. My hard pass. And then the distance between that little credential they were so proud of and the reality of their lives was insane. They’re in this tiny little room, they’re being treated with total contempt by the White House staff who thinks they’re just animals. You know, it’s like, shut up. They’re eating out of vending machines.

And this was a different time, right? So when I was working as a journalist in Washington, we went to lunch every day at a good restaurant and charged it to the company. And with your sources. We had lunch every single day like civilized people. I don’t even think that exists in the world anymore where you had time for lunch, where you weren’t just so under the gun from your corporate masters. You had to get back to work. We ate lunch.

And I remember thinking, these people don’t eat lunch. They eat a stale Mounds bar out of a vending machine. They bring quarters to work so they can. I remember thinking your life is—you’re not even human. You’re just like a little puppet or something. And—but you’re so impressed. And all your neighbors know, you know, he works at the White House. He’s in the White House press corps.

And the job wasn’t even really a job. You would just sit there and ask your question, your little assigned seat like you’re in a high school gym. It was just awful. And I just had no respect for people who did that for a living at all.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail?

TUCKER CARLSON: Come on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s amazing.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: But that guy gave sort of the—that’s, I think, probably the best window into an outsider in the political process, at least in terms of the campaign trail. It’s the best window to the press, the best window to the relationships that they had with the politicians, at least in the 1970s. It’s an amazing book.

The Evolution of Campaign Journalism

TUCKER CARLSON: I was talking to a campaign reporter. I never do that anymore, but I was this week, actually, and he was telling me it’s totally different. Like, when I did it, you were all on a—I mean, it was bad, actually, because it just cultivated groupthink, which was then leveraged by the candidate for better coverage. Like, the whole thing was kind of an op, actually, but it was at least fun.

Like, you were on a charter plane, and you’re flying with everybody, and you hit three or four cities a day, and there are cocktails on the plane and naughty behavior and they fed you and they kind of dealt with everything for you. It was fun. It was like a road trip, right?

And now it’s just grim. They’re all driving alone in their little rental cars to some obscure town in Iowa to sit there with no access whatsoever to the candidate, wrote up their little reports, and then they get back to their hotel and they’re writing up more for the website. And it’s such a bad job actually covering politics that only the people who couldn’t make it in any other business are doing it. It’s like a reverse meritocracy. It’s only the most kind of pathetic power worshipers would ever do a job like that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, like critics.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, that’s exactly right.

JOE ROGAN: Most critics want to be writers.

The Nature of Critics

TUCKER CARLSON: Most like the worst people. Just as people like, well, you’ve actually been in show business, so you’ve got a better experience with them or you have a lot of experience with them. But I’ve known a lot of them who work for magazines or newspapers, and they’re the kind of people who have a lot of cats, and all the cats hate them. You know what I mean?

They’re just the lowest. They all have some weird wandering eye, and they’re fat and they’re super into porn. Totally isolated from everybody. I actually worked for one of them for a while who was a critic for the New York Post, a guy called John Putharts. And he was one of the weirdest, most unhappy people I’ve ever met in my life.

And he would come into my office occasionally and he would rub his—he had a really hairy back, and he would rub it against the door frame. Like, say, these kind of obscure—he was stupid, but he didn’t know that he was. I mean, he was actually kind of dumb, but he didn’t know it. And he would kind of philosophize. I was 10 years younger, and I was his captive. So he would just lecture me as he was rubbing against the door frame.

One time we went out to lunch and we all had drinks. Of course, this is mid-90s. He didn’t really drink, but he ordered this drink with an umbrella, and it had a watermelon, piece of watermelon on the rim of the glass. And he took the watermelon and ate it, and then he ate the rind. I’ll never forget that, watching him eat the rind and thinking, of course, this guy’s a critic. His true love—he was editing this magazine. But his real interest was in writing about movies. And they’re just sad people who wanted to.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever read—you know, Siskel and Ebert? Did you ever read when Siskel, Roger Ebert, rather wrote—he wrote a screenplay. No, it’s very bizarre. It’s really sexual. Very strange. It’s supposed to be terrible. Of course I’ve read passages in it, but I remember going, oh, okay, yeah, they’re not.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re not creative. They’re creative adjacent.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they don’t have anything to contribute.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what I’m saying. They don’t have creative power. Right. So they’re mad about that.

Creativity and Honesty

JOE ROGAN: They probably could figure it out if they had a different mindset. I think creativity isn’t in everybody. It’s just a matter of how you—

TUCKER CARLSON: 100% it’s in everybody. It just requires honesty.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: The impediment to creativity is lying. Sure.

JOE ROGAN: And yeah, I used to say that about joke thieves, that one of the real problems with joke thieves is when they get caught and then they have to write their own material. And the problem is they don’t understand the language. They just know how to say the sounds. Like, if you told me what to say in French, I can’t speak French. But if you told me what to say and I practice it and I said it right, you think, wow, that guy fucking speaks French.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s what comedy’s like. So if you got a guy who knows how to repeat other people’s jokes, but he doesn’t know how to create them. See, comedy is one of the rare things where someone, when a cop—like you get a guy like Shane Gillis, that guy writes his own stuff, he edits it, he thinks it out in his head, he performs, he forms it, he produces it, he changes the order of things.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love that.

The Comedy Writing Process

JOE ROGAN: It’s a complete—everybody does it pretty much the same way. There’s a few guys that hire writers and that’s honorable. There’s nothing wrong with hiring a writer. And it also gives jobs to other comics because some comics are just really good writers and they’re not so good at performing. And so people will work on stuff, they’ll collaborate on stuff.

Like Chris Rock would do this thing where he would hire comics and they didn’t write the jokes for him, but they would be guys who would bounce stuff off. So he would have his ideas, he would go on stage, and then after his set, they would all meet and they would talk about the set. And guys would have taglines like, you could say this, oh, great. And they write that down. They’re adding. So it’s a collaboration.

So you have the master, you have Chris Rock, who is so open minded and intelligent and humble that he brings in other masters and says, tell me what I’m doing wrong. Tell me what I could change. Tell me what I could make better. And they work together.

And then there’s people that have people that are essentially ghostwriters. They hire comics to write jokes for them. They pretend they’re theirs, and they don’t really write them at all. So that’s another level which is total—

TUCKER CARLSON: Also, does anyone who does that get successful?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. I don’t know. Not top shelf. They get close. They do well. There’s people that have people write for them and they do well, but they’re not the guy that everybody goes to see. They’re not David Tell. They’re not the guy that everybody goes to see. They’re not the—like, David Tell’s the guy that comics go to see when he’s in town.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Like, you just see—he’s a master. You watch him. He’s Yoda. You’re like, Jesus Christ. Like, how is he so good? Well, he’s so good because he writes every day. Because he’s sitting with a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee every morning, writing things in a notebook. And he’s practicing every day. He goes on stage constantly.

And he’s just—it’s that Japanese term, kaizen, where you take this one thing, just refine it to its ultimate mastery. That’s what he’s doing. So these guys who pretend to be that and steal jokes and then they get caught, then their material drops off a cliff. It’s so obvious.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they’re frauds. Yeah.

The Ego Problem in Creativity

JOE ROGAN: Also because the very thing that allows you to steal someone’s jokes, that’s an ego thing. That’s like, I want the laughs. I want to be the man or the woman. I want to be the fucking one up there showing everybody. Look how amazing this person is.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Look how amazing. That’s the opposite mindset that’s required for creativity. So creativity is not about you. Creativity is about the ideas. Creativity is about things. Creativity is about how does this concept work with these other concepts? How do I—how do I get it in the most digestible form?

If I was an audience member, what would it be like to feel this? What’s the best way to introduce it? What’s the way to make it so that people don’t think that I’m being mean, that I have a point, or that I thought this through? This is not just a flippant thing.

Like, you’re allowing someone—when someone’s on stage, you’re allowing that person almost to think for you. Like, you’re like, take me on a ride. Like, I’ll give you my mind. I’m not going to—I’m not going to be thinking what I would do. I’m not going to—I’m just going to let you think for me.

If that person’s not doing a good job of that, if it’s clunky, if it’s shitty, if the transitions suck, if the way, then it just interrupts this hypnotism that you’ve put on me, this hypnosis. Now I’m not letting you transform me.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s also inherently fraudulent, right? I mean, I’m giving control of my mind over to someone who is himself under the control of somebody else. Do you know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: If you’re stealing.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, if I’m in the audience.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I would say this also goes for ideas, for commentary, you know, that’s not funny, but that’s real.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you see it a lot. I’ve seen it a lot, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You see bullshit a lot.

Hidden Agendas and Free Speech

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the number of people who are totally not controlled, who are really saying what they actually believe with no weird agenda that they’re not telling you about, is pretty small.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I just have noticed that a lot recently, particularly on the question of wokeness and free speech, there are a lot of people who are on your side because they’re for free speech, or not actually for free speech at all, who are pushing a very specific foreign policy agenda, for example, and using another issue to lower your defenses and let themselves into your brain. And I think that’s really sinister. Really, really, really sinister.

And it’s becoming more obvious now. Like, if you’re for free speech, then you’re just for free speech because you support the principle. It doesn’t—the content of the speech is not that interesting to you. The fact that a sovereign human being has the right to express himself because he’s not a slave, he’s a citizen and a human being. That’s what matters.

And if all of a sudden you become famous, like, I’m for free speech. And then you support silencing people who articulate opinions you disagree with. Like you’re a fraud. You’re kind of a sinister fraud.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I—that—because that’s the business I’m in. I—boy, I’ve really noticed that. Have you noticed this?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And that’s also the same kind of thing. When you hear them talk. If you hear someone talk that’s saying something, that’s kind of horseshit. It resonates with you that that’s—you’ve seen.

The Bari Weiss Moment

TUCKER CARLSON: You had a moment with Bari Weiss on your show that went everywhere. I saw a clip of it. I never saw the show itself, but she was going on about—she was posing as one thing, and then you pressed her. You’re like, well, hold on a second. What do you mean by that? You just attacked somebody. And she had no idea what she was talking about.

And it became really clear to me. Washington. It completely changed my view of Bari Weiss forever. I was like, oh, this—she’s a fraud. Actually, this person’s not honest at all. Like, she has a very specific agenda. That’s all she cares about. The rest of this stuff is just a—is a kind of sleight of hand maneuver.

JOE ROGAN: You’re talking about the thing with Tulsi Gabbard.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s correct.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. She called her a toady and she didn’t know what that meant.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, but she had no idea. Like, Tulsi Gabbard had straight outside the lines on some Syria or something. And Bari Weiss was going through the files in her head, like, what does she have to believe? And she was aware that Tulsi Gabbard had somehow violated that in a way that no one’s willing to say, like, in detail to fully articulate. What did Tulsi Gabbard do wrong? No one will tell you. She’s just bad.

And then what that revealed about Bari Weiss is she’s completely dishonest. Like, she’s a liar. Actually, you can’t, by the way, if you attack somebody particularly personally and can’t explain why you’re attacking the person, like, that’s not acceptable. You’re a dishonest person if you can’t explain why.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s a common thing that people do in private and they get accustomed to speak like we’re talking. Like, we’re talking in private. We’re just two people talking, right? So people get accustomed to saying things without being able to back them up. You know, like, oh, he’s a vaccine denier.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I’ve done a ton of that in my life because I’m an asshole. So it’s like, I just don’t like that person.

The Bari Weiss Discussion

JOE ROGAN: I have as well. But what I’m saying is I don’t know how much time Bari Weiss had spent doing podcasts before that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, she spent. Look, I’m just saying, I think it’s important to be honest about what your agenda is.

JOE ROGAN: I think she is honest. I think she is honest. And I really like her. Yeah, I like her.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I’m not against her.

JOE ROGAN: She’s very intelligent. I just think that was a mistake. And I think you’re allowed to do that and hopefully learn from that. Don’t do that anymore. Don’t say a thing that you. And I’ve done that. I’ve definitely done that. I’ve said a thing, and I wasn’t really exactly sure what I was talking about.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, my gosh. I do that every day. And I may have just done it with Bari Weiss. So let me be a lot more specific about what I mean. If your agenda is neocon politics, which is her agenda, just say so. Don’t pretend to be a defender of free speech as a principle, which is what she does.

JOE ROGAN: How is she a defender of neocon politics?

TUCKER CARLSON: Bari Weiss.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, like what, specifically?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, anyone, including me and Tulsi Gabbard, who thinks that America shouldn’t be funding wars that don’t help America, she will attack as a traitor to America or whatever it takes. And so, no, no, that’s her main interest, which is fine. And by the way, I actually have friends who I disagree with really strongly on this question who believe in neocon politics. Doesn’t mean they’re terrible people, or I hate them, or I’m not friends. I’m still friends with them, but they’re very direct about it. This is what I care about. Okay, fine.

I really care about bird hunting and fly fishing or whatever. And you don’t. That’s totally cool. But be honest about it. So if your job is to defend the right of free people to say what they really believe, then go ahead and defend it. And if somebody is not allowed to speak or fired from his job for having an opinion that you disagree with, defend him anyway.

I just interviewed a guy who is a black nationalist socialist. Okay? So I’m obviously not much of a black nationalist. I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but I’m not. And I’m not a socialist either. But this guy is facing prison time under the Biden DOJ because he said things they don’t like about foreign policy. And I just interviewed the guy for an hour, and it was because on principle, you should be able to say what you think, period.

JOE ROGAN: What is this gentleman’s name?

The Uhuru Movement Case

TUCKER CARLSON: He was actually a boy, it turns out. I loved him, and I’m embarrassed I can’t. He’s a member of a pretty small black nationalist socialist group. It’s the revolutionary Black nationalists or something like that. They’re out of southwest Florida. And he’s literally facing prison for repeating Russian disinformation. He’s not even accused of doing anything. He’s accused of saying things the Biden DOJ doesn’t like. Well, in a…

JOE ROGAN: What were these things that he said?

TUCKER CARLSON: Repeating Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine. And his point was, well, there’s a backstory here, which is that NATO has been moving eastward since 1991, and that’s a massive threat to Russia. Missiles on their border from a hostile power is a threat. And the Biden administration accelerated that. And in response, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine.

Now, you can disagree with that, but that’s hardly a crackpot view, by the way. I think that’s actually true. But even if you don’t agree that it’s true, that’s not. You don’t have to be a paid propagandist from the Kremlin to say that. Right, I have said it. I’m not a paid propagandist.

JOE ROGAN: Is this a gentleman?

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s him right there.

JOE ROGAN: Four Americans from a multi power organization work with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, to spread propaganda. Now propaganda. First of all, you know, there’s a lot of propaganda.

JOE ROGAN: Scroll up a little on that, Jamie, so I can read what this is saying. Covered up. Oh, okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. So that guy, that guy right there.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, subscribe real quick.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, the People’s Democratic Uhuru movement in St. Petersburg.

JOE ROGAN: So he contacted. He spoke with someone in Russia. They spoke with people in Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he’s not. No, no, no. He is being. He’s charged with felonies. The FBI raided his house. The first thing they did was cover up the security cameras and they went in there and arrested. They got raided by the FBI.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights freedoms. Russia denies its own citizens to divide Americans and interfere elections in the US,” says Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olson. Now first of all, weaponized our First Amendment rights. No, your First Amendment rights are never a crime.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re God given. The government did not bestow them. You were born with them as a free person, period. And the First Amendment simply says you can’t interfere with their exercise. That’s it. And in this they are. And I looked at, I read this and I thought, I reach out to…

JOE ROGAN: This guy, by the way, Matthew Olson.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I wish Matthew Olson would never do my show. I mean, the guy whose salary I pay as a U.S. citizen. No, he would never speak to me.

JOE ROGAN: Listen, look at that quote. “Russia’s foreign intelligence services allegedly weaponized our first amendment rights, freedoms, Russia denies its own citizens to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States.” That you got to. Why are you saying that? Say what happened.

First Amendment Rights Under Attack

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, but nothing happened. So that’s the thing. So I’m reading this, someone sent it to me, and I’m thinking, okay, clearly there’s a crime here. They were found with, I don’t know, mortar shells or they were. I mean, usually the government makes up. They put kiddie porn on your computer, at least to discredit you. There’s no underlying crime other than they said something that the foreign policy establishment of the United States disagrees with. Okay, that’s not a crime by definition.

And this guy is facing life in prison. And it looks to me because Bari Weiss has not defended him, I think this guy is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. And I’m thinking, this is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: The rest of his life in prison?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, hold on. This is the thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think he’s 83.

JOE ROGAN: Yeshitela. How do you say his name?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeshitela.

JOE ROGAN: Yeshitela. And three other U.S. citizens, Penny, Joanne Hess, Jesse Neville, and Augustus C. Romaine Jr. are charged with conspiracy to defraud us. Hess. Oh, okay. Defraud the United States. Hess, Yeshitela and Neville are also charged with impersonating agents of a foreign government.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. They say, to defraud the United States. So defraud suggests theft of something of value. Right. By defraud you, I steal your money. There’s no allegation of that at all. And I actually read the charges. There’s no. The only allegation is they said things that the US Government, the Biden administration, doesn’t like. That’s it.

And because they’re unpopular and they have views that are considered, quote, fringe, you know, crazy black nationalists, nobody wants to defend them. And my only point is not that I’m such a principled person. This also. This seems very obvious to me. You can’t allow that. You absolutely cannot allow that if you believe in the First Amendment, in the freedom of free people to say what they think.

JOE ROGAN: So what this implication is, they’re saying that they were recruited by the FSB. So it says, prosecutors said Ionov operated an entity called the Anti Globalization Movement of Russia that was used to carry out its US influence efforts overseen by the Russian intelligence Service, known as FSB. They recruited U.S. based organizations to help sway elections, make it appear there was a strong support in the US for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and backed efforts such as the 2015 United Nations petition to decry the genocide of African people in the U.S. according to the indictment. Backed efforts.

TUCKER CARLSON: What does that mean?

JOE ROGAN: Look at that. Backed efforts such as the 2015 United Nations petition to decry the genocide of African people. But what. Just look at that statement. Backed efforts such as a thing to decry genocide. The United Nations petition of 2015 to decry the genocide of African people in the US according to the indictment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so the real misinformation and propaganda is in the charging documents. Actually, the real liars here are the Biden DOJ officials who did this. And they’re dangerous. They’re criminals, in my opinion. But if you read it carefully, you will see that the only crime is having opinions that the people in charge didn’t like.

JOE ROGAN: And were they in contact with people from Russia?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I think they went over to Russia for some conference. So they went over to Russia. The way this typically works is they say, well, you went to a country against which we’ve imposed sanctions.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you violated the sanctions regime in some way. That’s how they get you. They’re not even alleging that. They’re not even alleging that. They’re just saying you said things that we don’t like. That by the way, a foreign government we don’t like, agrees with.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s not. But they learned those when they went over to Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s all on the Internet. They learned them. I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter where they learned them. I would, because I’ve talked to the guy and I’ve seen what they wrote, the opinions that they expressed. I don’t, you know, the genocide of African peoples in America, I don’t even know what that means. I guess I don’t agree with that.

But their views on Russia I generally agree with because I think they’re true and so does Jeff Sachs and a lot of other non crazy, non black nationalists would probably agree with the basic framework of their position. But whether we agree or not is not relevant.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

Freedom of Speech vs. Foreign Policy

TUCKER CARLSON: All that matters is in a free country, which this was when I grew up, you have the right to any opinion you want. You do not have the right to hurt people. You don’t have the right to steal from them, you don’t have the right to defraud people. But you certainly foremost have the right to any opinion you want, no matter what the people in charge think of it.

In fact, you have that right as a bulwark against tyranny by the people in charge. That’s the only thing that keeps this country free is my right to have any opinion I want. And this guy is going to jail for his opinions. And you know, it’s so crazy that I kept thinking, is there something that I’m missing? It does seem a little fringe, this group. I’d never heard of them. I’m not sending them money. Okay. They must have done something. Nope, nothing.

And you should see the video of the FBI, right? It’s unbelievable. They sent, it’s on the Internet, it’s on X, I have the video on there. They sent 40 armed agents with automatic weapons to this guy’s office and his house. No exaggeration, it was a full blown we’re arresting El Chapo type thing for this guy. He’s an 83 year old army veteran. It’s outrageous.

And I really find it baffling that nobody who’s against woke culture or whatever will touch it. And the reason they won’t touch it is because their foreign policy views in general are more important to them than their views on speech and the First Amendment, their views on America.

JOE ROGAN: Well, if you step out of line, right, so the ideology is that we must support Ukraine. So this is. Russia has a point. This is what they’re saying. So Russia was very upset about the movement of the weapons closer to their…

TUCKER CARLSON: Borders.

JOE ROGAN: Joining NATO. All the stuff that was the hard red lines that Putin had already set. Russia would definitely do something if Ukraine joined NATO. We all knew that. So if you deviate from that, you’re going to be in trouble. So better just ignore it because you can’t. You clearly, if you look at who these people are, I mean, these are people that would be supported by the left wholeheartedly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they are. I mean it’s the revolutionary socialist. Yeah, they’re not at CPAC this year.

JOE ROGAN: But the left has to ignore it because then it conflicts with the…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the categories right on the left are just now they’re actually ridiculous.

JOE ROGAN: They’re ridiculous.

The Illusion of a Two-Party System

TUCKER CARLSON: They don’t mean anything. They’re ridiculous. In fact, we’ve moved past the point where they don’t mean anything. They do mean something. They are propaganda instruments designed to cloak the truth from the rest of us that in fact there’s agreement, not disagreement at the center of power.

They all agree on the things that matter and those are the economy and foreign policy, because that’s where the money is. There’s no effort to say, rein in the credit card companies, which if you really cared about the country, you’d say, but people are really suffering, okay? They don’t have enough money to live. Kids can’t not only not buy houses, they can’t afford rent. And why is that?

And one of the main reasons is because they’re paying like close to 20% interest on their credit cards. And okay, we just imagine that in a free market that’s a good thing. Tell me why that’s a good thing. Who benefits from that? Why are we for that? Again, I’m not for that. I think the credit card companies are villains and they send credit cards to kids at school and get them hooked on this. I think it’s totally wrong.

And if you said that in the US Congress, people would look at you like you had three heads. Like, what? They just don’t care because they all agree that our current economic system and our current foreign policy assumptions are good. So that’s not a two party system, that’s a one party system. And it doesn’t serve the interest of the country.

And my position is super simple. The only country I have an emotional attachment to is the United States. That’s it. I like lots of countries. I like almost all countries, actually. I’ve been to a lot of them. I like them all. But the only one I feel emotional about is the United States because I live here, I was born here, my kids are here. It’s my country. And most of the people in our foreign policy conversation do not feel that way. So that distorts it really dramatically.

The Psychology of War Hawks

And they’re also, a lot of them are violence worshipers. Like, they get off on war, they get off on hurting people and on the power that that imbues them with. And I think, you know, the Liz Cheney model, you know what I mean? Like, someone like Liz Cheney who’s got like a really sad and barren personal life, a lot of them are this way, weird personal life, failed personal life. Like they don’t have people who love them, they don’t have kids who respect them.

And so Adam Kinzinger or whatever, they’re all kind of the same. The more broken they are inside, the more focused they are on like war and foreign policy because it gives them a feeling of power and strength and success. Like, I can’t get my wife to respect me, I can’t get my kids to listen to me. I can’t pass any meaningful domestic agenda. But what I can do is bomb the living shit out of a foreign country.

And so there is this. It’s not true for all of them, but for a lot of them, there is this syndrome that drives their behavior. But whatever the reason, it’s totally disconnected from what’s good for the country. And if you run America, you have one job. One job, and that’s improve America, period. They don’t see it that way. And so I don’t think the system can continue because it’s too distorted. It’s not serving its original purpose at all.

JOE ROGAN: So what was it that these guys said that made this raid possible?

The Russia Narrative and Ukraine

TUCKER CARLSON: They said Russia. And I don’t want to speak for them. Like, anyone who wants to see it can interview. And I just want to say again, like, one of the cool things about this moment that I did not anticipate. There’s always sad stuff happening. I know that you probably experience it all the time is like, finding not only common ground with people you thought you had nothing in common with at all, but also, like, liking them, you know?

Like, I actually liked the guy. I’m sure we disagree on a million things. Probably mad at white people. I am a white person. Whatever. But, like, in my conversation, I was like, I like this guy. You know, he’s honest and he’s sincere. He’s principled. He was a veteran, you know, but whatever.

No, I really think what they said was what I have said and a lot of people have said, which is there was a reason for this invasion. I personally think the invasion was a bad idea. Didn’t help anybody. I’m against war. I’m sad the war’s ongoing. But they were pushed to this by a more powerful country, which would be the United States of America, with the threat of including Ukraine in NATO. It’s really simple.

And right before the invasion, days before the invasion, they send poor Kamala Harris, who has no idea what day it is, to the Munich Security Conference, an area she knows nothing about, no experience in at all. And they send her there for one purpose, which is to announce at a press briefing with all the cameras rolling to Zelensky right there. She says, “We want you to join NATO.” What? No.

Other NATO members were clamoring for Ukraine. It didn’t even qualify for NATO membership. Why would you say that when Putin’s got troops massed on the Ukrainian border, you send your vice president to the Munich Security Conference with the world watching and say this that no one even really wants? Why would you do that? To provoke war, obviously. What’s the other reason.

And it was scripted. Like Kamala Harris is not freeballing stuff. Like she’s saying what she’s told to say. Obviously it’s not her area. She doesn’t know anything about this stuff. She was told to say that. But why? To provoke a war, obviously.

So that was my read. I said that on Fox News. Not a lot of people liked it, but it just seemed obvious to me. I’m not making excuses for Putin. Please. I want to protect the United States. And I think this war really hurts the United States. Like my motives are always right out there anyway. I think they said a species of that, something like that.

And last thing I’ll say is that. Why was the reaction so strong? Because it was true. They don’t care if you lie. No one in power cares if you lie.

JOE ROGAN: But a lot of people, they only…

TUCKER CARLSON: Care when you tell the truth.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of people are saying those things and they’re not getting arrested because…

Making an Example of the Powerless

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s like some black nationalist guy in St. Petersburg. Like, who cares? We can do. Who’s going to defend him? Nobody. He’s some wacko. He’s some like 80 year old guy who’s like been in the fringe left movement for the past 50 years. Like New Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael. He’s like a relic of the past. He doesn’t have a constituency. He doesn’t care.

The modern Democratic Party hates him. He hates them. And the Republican Party is like black nationalism. No thanks. So he has no constituency. They’re never going to like you could say that. And what are they going to do to you? Nothing. Because they’re. They can’t. But this guy. Yeah, crush him. Kill him. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

And I really think not to be like a 70s liberal about it, if you let the weak get crushed, it’s bad. It’s super bad. You need to protect the weak. And this guy’s weak.

JOE ROGAN: And so you think they’re making an example out of him with this?

TUCKER CARLSON: And they can. They have all this power.

JOE ROGAN: I just don’t understand why they would move so many people. Why they would get so many agents. Why they would do this so publicly for one guy’s opinion or one group of people’s opinion.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I don’t know. I mean, why did especially why did medieval kings hang the heads of people they executed from the gates?

JOE ROGAN: Right. But it feels like there should be more to it. Like what? What did they say? So the problem…

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re telling me.

JOE ROGAN: I know the problem is that, I mean I’m just straw man. I’m steel manning this rather. So the problem is that they went over to Russia and they talked with people in Russia and then they’re saying these things. Is that the problem?

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re not charged with that. They’re not charged with going…

JOE ROGAN: But you think that’s the motivation behind it? Because they went over there, it said, different article has a quote from him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, yeah, they are not. At least when I interviewed him, they had not been charged with taking money from Russia.

The Accusations and the Reality

JOE ROGAN: So it says they’ve been accused of us. They’ve accused us of taking money from Russia. Yesatella said yesterday at a news conference and July 29, “We’ve never taken any money from Russian government. But I’m not saying that because I’m morally opposed to taking money from the Russians or anyone else who wants to support the struggles for black people. Don’t tell us what we can’t. Don’t tell us that we can’t have friends that you don’t like.”

He accused the US government of seeking to use the APSP as a pawn in its proxy war with Russia. “The unsubstantiated allegation that opponents of the war are co-conspirators with a foreign power are intended to bolster the phantom of a Russian boogeyman in the public consciousness. The escalating military aggression by the US against Russia and China is already being accompanied by increasing repression and an attempt to criminalize left wing opposition to the unpopular war.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: So they’re accusing him of taking money from Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re not. They’re not charging him. So here’s the distinction, which is like really, really important. So there are two levels on which the Department of Justice in all administrations acts. There’s the level of propaganda, like what do we want people to think? And there’s the level of law. What are we charging someone with? And you have to ignore the first and pay very close attention to the second.

So we have a legal system, we have laws. And you can’t actually go to jail unless you violate one under the terms of our system. And so ignore what they’re saying about you. Joe Rogan sucks. He’s a bad man. But in the end, I’m busting you for double parking. And so you really, you’re not a bad man, you’re a double parker under the law.

And so if you look at the charges against these guys, they’re not charged with violating sanctions regulations. They are charged with totally amorphous, quote, crimes like defrauding the US Government, not for money, but for like defrauding it. Like, I guess, counter signaling it. Sending a message publicly that they don’t like.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, there’s no crime.

TUCKER CARLSON: Look it up, except speaking. And I think that’s a precedent that we don’t want to live with.

The Beauty of Admitting You Were Wrong

JOE ROGAN: No, no doubt. Yeah. Let’s take a leak. We’ll be right back. We’re going to pee. Tucker and I are going to pee together. Yeah, well, that’s the confronting of reality. You’re forced to examine your beliefs and why you came to those beliefs in the first place.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is the beauty of this moment, though. It is people are living intentionally much more. And it’s also just much more interesting. It’s not just. It’s less shallow than it was for sure.

JOE ROGAN: I think so. I think it’s more nuanced. People have more. At least the people that are paying attention have a more nuanced perspective. But then you have the people that are in the echo chambers that are just digging their heels in even more and you could spot them easily because…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’re missing out. Because there’s nothing more liberating than admitting you were wrong. I mean, that is like the moment of liberation.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s the basis of religion, it’s the basis of AA. It’s the basis of anything that improves you as a person is admitting, honestly admitting to other people, not just to yourself, that like, wow, I got that wrong. Yeah. And then you’re free because then you don’t have to hide it anymore.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Very important.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s a beautiful thing. And that is like changing your mind. I always noticed this covering politics that, you know, a candidate would be like, “I’ve got him on tape saying 10 years ago something different.” And no one ever asked my opinion. But I always wanted to say, why don’t you just. Why don’t you say you’re absolutely right and the country’s a lot different from what it was 10 years ago. And so my opinions change too. Like, why wouldn’t they? Because I’m not a freaking robot or a liar.

JOE ROGAN: Also, I used to think this because of that, and now I realize I was wrong.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: How great is that?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s part of being a human. It’s not being a flip flopper.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the best part of being a human.

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is an interesting time for that because you see people that won’t do that and you could recognize them easily because they’re the first people to throw out insults. The first thing to do and describe you. They’ll describe you in an insulting way and then they’ll say. Say what they disagree with you about. They’ll say something. They try to define you. You far right white supremacist racist.

The Impact of Being Called Racist

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’s been there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They throw it all at you and then they say what you said.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so funny. I got called racist and white supremacist so many times, but when I first was called that, I mean, it really stung, you know, a lot, because just where I grew up and how I grew up and those, like, the worst things you could ever call somebody.

And so I actually, like, paused for a moment and thought, am I like. Which I think it’s fair to ask yourself, like, am I a whites? Whatever that. I never figured out what that was. Am I a racist? Not really. And I thought, really, the people I dislike most are almost all white liberals, actually. So I.

JOE ROGAN: You’re racist against white people?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but like, no, I am white. My kids are white. I’m not against white people. I like white people. But no, it’s not that. It’s that. So a reporter once called me about this. You’ve been called racist? No, actually, I really dislike you. If I were to sort of narrow down my bigotry. It’s like, people like you, I just think you’re disgusting. I really mean it, too. Racist. Racist. Okay. All right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s a thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, I don’t think that works as much anymore.

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t work? No. Well, I think a lot of the things that you overuse, eventually people realize, like, oh, you’re yelling wolf again. Yeah, well, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: And when people get hit with it and don’t disappear, then it becomes obvious.

JOE ROGAN: That it lacks power. Well, it’s also. You’re trying to use these words to define someone, especially someone like you, that has so many hours and hours of talking about things, like to try this reductionist perspective of someone, to reduce them this ultimately very negative thing, and not say that they’re a human being.

And also the fact that it’s done by the people that want to think of themselves as compassionate and kind, which is the most bizarre. The left is so aggressively incompassionate. Like, they’re so aggressively unkind with letting.

TUCKER CARLSON: People die of drug overdoses on the sidewalk. That’s compassion.

JOE ROGAN: That whole thing is fucking crazy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s cruelty, actually.

The Business of Homelessness

JOE ROGAN: It is. And it’s also when you find. Do you know Colion Noir?

TUCKER CARLSON: I know him.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Great guy. He opened my eyes to the homelessness thing. We had him on the podcast and he was explaining how he was in San Francisco, and he was like, what is this? Is like, they don’t have any money for this. Is that what it is? Like, no, There’s a whole business behind it.

And these people that are running this homelessness initiative or whatever the fuck they call it, they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Some of them a quarter million dollars a year.

TUCKER CARLSON: Imagine making money off the homeless and.

JOE ROGAN: Not doing a goddamn thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what’s so funny is I do think the root of their power and the one thing they’re good at is just charging the moral high ground and taking it in the first moments of the battle.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: They just run up to the moral high ground and are like, we’ve got this. This is ours. And they’ll protect that at all costs. And it’s like, that’s kind of all they have, is this self righteousness. And if you can puncture that, it’s like you’re getting rich from the homeless, actually.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And is there anything more disgusting than that? Some junkie who’s dying in misery outside the convention center in San Francisco, and you’re making money on that.

JOE ROGAN: They’re essentially using those people as a battery to expand the power of government.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And their own personal advantage.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they’re expanding government. They’re making more government employees. Now there’s tons of people that are working on the homelessness problem. Air quotes and, you know, they probably all have blue hair and they talk nonsense and nothing’s getting done and no one’s being punished for it.

But when they did that study where they said that they had no data, like, how are you? What? You can’t say whether or not it’s doing anything. Well, how’d you spend $24 billion?

TUCKER CARLSON: But why are they not treated as, like, the most reprehensible people in our society?

JOE ROGAN: I think there’s too many things to think about. And I think most people, unlike you and I, aren’t even paying attention to it. They’re paying attention to the fact that the tents are there. They’re paying attention. If you go to Los Angeles, it’s a fucking zombie apocalypse.

But what they’re not paying attention to is what is going on. How many people are making money? I didn’t even know until Colion explained it to us. I had no idea. I thought it was just, they don’t have any money. They don’t put any money in it. And they let these people sleep there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, no, no.

JOE ROGAN: There’s actual Money.

TUCKER CARLSON: All these parasites.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, parasites. Government parasites. Of course those are real.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

JOE ROGAN: And this whole idea of I’ve created so many jobs, like, what jobs are they? Government jobs that are just bullshit? Because there’s a lot of those.

Lawmakers Ignoring Homelessness at Their Doorstep

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s crazy to me, just having spent most of my life in Washington, is how close this is to the lawmakers physically. So the US Capitol sits across from something called Union Station, which is a really beautiful train station right on Capitol Hill. And so to get into the Capitol and there’s a massive homeless city there, people dying of drug overdoses right there.

And so to get to work every day, lawmakers have to like, step over the bodies of fellow Americans dying, like dying, living outdoors, shitting in the bushes, addicted to drugs, which is hell. Okay? And they have to ignore that on their way to creating utopia in some foreign country.

And you’re like, does it ever occur to you that that’s disgusting? That your primary duty is to the drug addict, your fellow American? You’re doing nothing. And you’re telling me how we’re going to make Eastern Europe into, you know, this brave new world. I don’t know. I just can’t get past that.

I think. I’m not super sensitive or aware or anything. I’m not super. Anything really. I’m pretty ordinary. But I think I would notice walking into vote on Ukraine aid, I’d be like, shit, there are like five junkies on the street. Like, maybe we should do something for them.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s very bizarre. It’s bizarre that they can rationalize it or at least that they don’t get called out by all their people. And this idea that it’s compassionate, you have compassion to leave these people and to give them aid and to help them and give them clean needles.

The Spiritual War Between Good and Evil

TUCKER CARLSON: But then you’ve got to think, like, maybe there’s something bigger going on actually, because there’s no. Yes. There’s an entire sector of the economy now that feeds off of human misery. The drug treatment centers that don’t work, the homeless advocates who create more homeless. The, you know, migrant workers, you know, American born aid agencies, workers who, you know, increase illegal immigration and gang activity.

No, there’s all this, you know, people are making money off this. The arms manufacturers that help kill people in foreign countries, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a vig and all of that. It’s a scam, it’s a grift, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s something more.

There are a lot of people who seem to be just for Evil for its own sake. And you’re like, maybe all the crazy talk about a spiritual war of good and evil, maybe there’s something to that. Maybe that’s not an illusion. Maybe that’s like everyone else has always.

JOE ROGAN: Thought that there are certainly forces that have evil consequences that exists, but they.

TUCKER CARLSON: Act on people from the outside. And you feel it also on the other side. I mean, people are better than they naturally are. Sometimes, like you feel compassion for people or true empathy for someone, or you, you really want to help someone, there’s no advantage to you at all. Like, why are you doing that? It’s almost like you’re being acted on by good.

And all of us have known those moments where we just are cruel for the sake of it, hurt someone for the sake of it. What’s that? There’s no advantage to us. That’s evil acting on us. And I think we’re seeing it at scale.

And like, I grew up in the most secular world you could ever grow up in Southern California in the 70s and 80s and in a very secular family. And I’ve never really paid much attention to that. And all of a sudden every. Not everybody, a lot of people I know who had similar childhoods to mine, similar life experiences are like, maybe there is like a supernatural realm.

Maybe there’s more than just like what we can see, feel. Maybe life is more than just ordering shit on Amazon. Maybe there’s like a purpose. Maybe there is this battle between good and evil around us that we can’t see but that we do experience a lot.

JOE ROGAN: It seems like it’s always been a narrative throughout human history. It’s always been this recognition. Carl’s over there snoring. I don’t have my headphones on so I can hear them.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re snorting or snoring?

JOE ROGAN: Snoring. Carl, snoring. Carl the dog.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, Carl the dog.

JOE ROGAN: Carl the dog. He’s the best. But he snores when he sleeps because he’s a little French bulldog.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s a sporty little bulldog.

JOE ROGAN: He’s awesome. Yeah, he’s the best. Dogs don’t get cuter. They might be as cute, but they don’t get any cuter than Carl.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s right. Yeah, I’ve got some pretty good looking dogs.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I have a beautiful dog. I have a golden retriever. But he’s not as cute as Carl. Carl’s a different.

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t tell him that.

JOE ROGAN: He knows. He doesn’t like Carl. Well, he doesn’t hate Carl, but he like ignores him. He thinks of Carl as a thief of attention only, which he is. Yeah, Fair.

So we’ve always. Human beings have always at least believed that there are forces of good and evil and that they. That’s what exorcisms are about.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

JOE ROGAN: The idea that you’re possessed. You’re possessed by evil. There’s always been this thought that there’s good and evil. But when did you start. When did you start considering that and thinking that that’s. Because weren’t you at one point in time, weren’t you a Grateful Deadhead?

Tucker’s Grateful Dead Days

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah. I listened to him this morning.

JOE ROGAN: You used to travel around with them?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How old were you when that was going on?

TUCKER CARLSON: I went to my first Dead show in December of 1984. So I was 15. Speaking of the San Francisco Civic Center. Yeah, the New Year shows. So they’ve always played in Oakland, but one year they played in San Francisco. And so we were in Tahoe over Christmas, and for some reason my dad was gone. I don’t really know where.

So my brother and I drove illegally from Tahoe in the family vehicle to downtown San Francisco.

JOE ROGAN: How old was your brother?

TUCKER CARLSON: 13.

JOE ROGAN: So you drove or.

TUCKER CARLSON: He drove.

JOE ROGAN: 15. You drove?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

TUCKER CARLSON: Tahoe. So it was a couple hours. And remember being on the freeway, like.

JOE ROGAN: 15.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we had a pretty different kind of childhood. But anyway. Anyway, we did that. You. Yeah, it’s me on the left.

JOE ROGAN: Get the fuck out of here.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I don’t know, you know, I don’t know how that. That picture is hanging in my barn. And I’ve never, you know, I don’t release any pictures of myself or family or anything like that. And somebody came to my barn and took a picture of that. It’s hanging next to my sink, and put it on the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s my brother Buckley on the right. That picture was taken. So my dad was a reporter in San Francisco in the 60s and pretty well known reporter. And that was in the 80s when I was in school and we were home for Christmas vacation.

And he had covered the Grateful Dead. He knew the Grateful Dead. My dad did. So they were in his office. They, like, came through D.C. and they, like, called him. And they came over to his office. Jerry came over to his office. And my dad’s like, I got Jerry Garcia here. You guys should come down.

So my brother and I, we lived in Georgetown and we had a Vespa. Remember those?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The Grateful Dead Experience

TUCKER CARLSON: And we drove. Our Vespa was freaking cold out. I’ll never forget that. We drove our Vespa down to 6th and E or whatever, where my dad’s office was. And there was Jerry. I’d never met him before. He was missing the middle finger of his right hand, famously, you know, the famous handprint, Grateful Dead handprint. And when he shook his hand, you could feel his. It collapsed kind of because he didn’t have that middle finger.

But anyway, so my brother and I drove to this to the New Year show. It was actually a couple nights before New Year’s, and we didn’t have tickets, of course. And we were in the park across from there, and we were, you know, whatever. Doing the, you know, whatever things that people do at Dead shows. And we were pretty freaking out of it.

And this guy comes up out of nowhere and puts a ticket right in my face and goes “here” and hands me a ticket. So my brother was extremely out of it. I mean, he was, you know, I never should have done this, but I was like, “all right, man, I’m going in.” All right. And I left my little brother in the park during the show. Just, like, very, very impaired. Like, super, super impaired. It was completely wrong to do something like that, but I did do it.

And then I went in and saw the show. Kind of freaked out in the middle of it. Hid in the men’s room for a while. Never forget that. Standing on the stall, smoking cigarettes.

JOE ROGAN: Is it acid?

TUCKER CARLSON: It was. No, it was psilocybin. Mushrooms. Which, by the way, I should just say I got sober 22 years ago. I’m completely opposed to anything. Like, I don’t take Advil. Like, I’m totally opposed to anything but other than nicotine and coffee.

But, yeah, it was mushrooms, but we ate way too many and started to kind of melt down a little bit. But anyway, the point is, I get out of the show. This is pre cell. This is 1984, and I get out of the show. And they played actually a lot of tunes that they didn’t play. They played “Spoonful.” Like, they didn’t play “Spoonful” a lot. It was, like, a pretty obscure tune. I’d never heard it before, actually.

And I couldn’t find my brother. My little brother. And I’m, like, in charge. And, you know, my closest friend and lifelong friends talked to him this morning, and but I couldn’t find him. And I was like, “oh, man, my brother’s gone.” But there he was. He appeared like an hour later. He had spent the entire show in somebody’s van parked there. But he seemed undamaged, and it was great.

I mean, not everything about it is great. I mean, I do think the drug thing got, you know, definitely hurt people for sure. But from my perspective, I went to a bunch, probably 50 or more shows and really enjoyed it. And I love the fact that they had two drummers. That was a huge thing for me.

The Power of Rhythm

I love rhythm. I think it’s the basis of music. It’s obviously the basis of music. I mean, instruments are cool, but they’re kind of like interior design. And the architecture is rhythm. And it’s the universal sound that every culture appreciates because it reflects something that’s pre-existing that’s in you. Everyone relates to rhythm.

And I just absolutely loved the drums. And I loved they would always play like it was called “drums,” actually, but they would play a section of every show. It was just drums. Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart’s gone crazy on the drums. They had drum circles. And I just like drums to this day. I listen to drums. Just percussion. King Sunny Adé, the great West African drummer. And anyway, whatever. So, yeah, I like the Grateful Dead a lot and still do. And I like that kind of music.

JOE ROGAN: Jam music.

TUCKER CARLSON: I like jam music. I like acoustic music. I love bluegrass. Love bluegrass and Americana. And to see that grow, to see Billy Strings become like a venue packer, you know, like, Billy Strings is like a big act right now.

I do feel like creativity, art has been completely destroyed and eliminated in the United States. There’s like, as we were saying earlier, you can’t be creative if you’re not honest. It’s that simple. And we can’t be honest. So there’s no creativity. And in the visual arts and literature and architecture, it’s died. But comedy is still alive, thank heaven. And music, for some reason, has escaped that and is still alive.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And the growth, the explosion of acoustic bluegrass, the banjo, like one of the great instruments ever, is just thrilling and like a sign of life, you know, at this late stage.

Art Thriving in Chaos

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think when there’s social pressures and when society’s in chaos, art does tend to thrive. Some kind of art, some art.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Comedy certainly does now. Like, comedy’s never been better, but it came amazing.

TUCKER CARLSON: It came close.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. The walls got breached. Whoa. No.

TUCKER CARLSON: But a few years. I don’t know when it was, but, you know, eight years ago or something, it felt like, “oh, wow, you know, people can’t tell jokes anymore.”

JOE ROGAN: We kept doing it, I noticed. Yeah. And, yeah, we kept doing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Kept the little embers alive.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, there’s it was flames. It’s just, you know when you get people in a club and you take their phones away and just have them just be actual human beings and not be filming everything. Just being completely trapped with this idea of capturing something and then putting it online, then you get to have a human experience.

TUCKER CARLSON: You mean when people like live in the present rather than in the future far away?

JOE ROGAN: That’s one of the great things.

TUCKER CARLSON: Through a data line.

JOE ROGAN: Going to a good club that uses Yondr bags for your phones is that it just takes you out of it. Like, at the very least, it’s a break. Like, like this podcast is a break for three hours of phones. There’s no. I’m not. No one’s checking phones.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love that.

JOE ROGAN: That’s very rare with human beings where they can just sit down and just have conversations for long periods of time without being distracted by something.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not in my house.

JOE ROGAN: But yeah, it’s a real problem with folks, you see.

The Value of Shared Meals

TUCKER CARLSON: Huge problem. It’s a huge problem. And I the one thing I will say about my very unconventional childhood is there was a huge premium on meals and like eating with people and spending four hours at the table was like totally normal in the house that I grew up in. Totally normal. In fact, it was like daily.

And that was our primary form of entertainment and mode of communication and, you know, thing that we did for fulfillment and fun. And I still do that. I still feel that way. And we have dinner parties constantly and there are no phones and people talk and entertain each other and it’s like, it’s so much more interesting.

I’m not on social media, but if I were on social media, I don’t think I would find that on Instagram. I’m just and I’m not attacking Instagram, but I don’t think I would find that anything like that.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s definitely a lost thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s such an easy thing and such a fun thing.

JOE ROGAN: It is a fun thing. Yeah, it’s a great thing. And I think people enjoy it. And I think that’s also led to the rise of podcasts too, because they don’t get that in their real life. So at least they get to be a person who sits in on these conversations.

The Podcast Revolution

TUCKER CARLSON: I got to say, this is I’m not being suck-upy because I don’t suck up ever to anyone. But the effect that podcasts have had is just it’s just incredible. And I never would have predicted that in a million freaking years.

JOE ROGAN: I would have never thought it. When I first started doing this. It was in my living room with my friend Brian. And we did it on a laptop. We had a webcam. And we were like.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was my friend Brian.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Brian Redban of Kill Tony. You met Brian?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I did. No, but I just love the phrase “with my friend Brian.” Like every bad story. Like, “with my friend Brian.” We were we were down in Mexicali and I just me and my friend Brian, we just.

JOE ROGAN: Started fucking around online. And then we started eventually bringing in guests, and then we eventually got a studio, and then eventually I got a big place in LA, like a real warehouse, and then eventually moved to Texas. It all just eventually happened, but it was not.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I was in another part of media for that whole period. And if you had asked me up until the last few years, the future is clearly shorter, crisper, more produced. Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: Everyone would have thought that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Everyone did think that, including me. And I hated it. You know, I hate it. I like long form, but I never I was a long form magazine writer for years, so I I thought. But I thought that was over. Yeah, not over.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody thought that. Yeah. Even my friends, they were telling me how to edit my show. They’re like, “you should edit that. No one’s going to listen in three hours.” I’m like, “then don’t listen. I don’t care.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Do whatever you want.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not making any money doing this. It was just for fun.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love that.

JOE ROGAN: This is fun. For years, for years and years, I did it just with no money. There was no money in it forever.

TUCKER CARLSON: What year, like, how many years in did it start to pay for itself?

JOE ROGAN: Five.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a long time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, long time. It took a while. I mean, it was making it was probably like existing. Yeah. But about five years in, then it started making money. And then it was like, “oh, this is a business.”

I remember very clearly. I was on stage once in Chicago. I was doing the Chicago theater, and I had this story that I was going to tell. I’m like, “how many people listen to the podcast?” and there’s 3,700 people in the place and they went nuts. It was like, yeah. And I was like, “oh,” I thought there was this, like, thing that I’m doing where, you know, a few people are paying attention. I don’t even know what the I didn’t even back then, I never even knew what the numbers were. I didn’t even care.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they may not have been like, could you even collect numbers accurately?

JOE ROGAN: You could get downloads off of, you know, like, whatever the provider was that was with a host, you could get, like, download numbers from the host, and they would use that to inform ads, like, “oh, he gets X amount of downloads per month.” And then they would you know, that’s when there was very few people advertising on podcasts. “All right, let’s give it a try.”

Signs of Hope

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s one of the great developments between podcasting and Billy Strings. Like, I have I’m serious, I have hope that it’s not all going in the wrong direction, because you can get this view that, like, everything is falling apart late Rome. Just a matter of time before, you know, it really does collapse.

And then you see these signs that are not minor. You know, they’re significant. That, like, no people. I mean, I haven’t met a person in the past year who said, “you know, I thought this, but then I was reading the New York Times and I realized I was wrong.” Like, not one person.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But the number of people say, “I was listening to this podcast.”

JOE ROGAN: “I was listening to Rogan and da.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Da da da da.

JOE ROGAN: It’s, like, really noticeable. Yeah, that’s why it’s interesting. It’s interesting because you could put people in front of people, and they might not even be right. They might be wrong. But at least now you’re having conversations about something you would never have a conversation about before.

And even if this person gets exposed as being incorrect, well, now you have a more nuanced understanding of what the subject is about, why people think incorrect things. And, you know, this idea of, like, platforming people is a big one today. “Why would you platform that person?”

TUCKER CARLSON: First of all, “platform” is not a verb. And whenever they take a perfectly good noun and turn it into a verb, you know, something bad is afoot. Yeah, okay. “Platform.” Oh, you mean letting an adult human being talk.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s not only allowed. I think that’s the law.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, I think it’s important for us. It’s even important to talk to people that are completely different than you, that don’t agree with you at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s especially important otherwise, it’s just masturbatory.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just you alone getting yourself off.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s also interesting to know why these people think the way they think. And also, there’s so many people that if you talk to them online, you’d have these horrible conversations. But if you sit down with them as an actual human being and treat them with respect and consideration, you talk to them like a human being, and you just try to be as friendly and open as possible. Despite what your differences might be. You realize most people have a lot in common, a lot more. Way more in common than they don’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: But that’s the secret that they’re trying to hide.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Mind Control and Censorship

TUCKER CARLSON: So mind control. You know, the end stage of mind control is censorship. Right. But it begins long before that. And it begins by creating false categories that wall off your willingness that prevent you from wanting to know certain things or talk to certain people. And name calling is the most obvious tool. Like, he’s a crank, he’s a racist, he’s a whatever. Fill it in. And then you’re like, I can’t listen to that person.

And I have to say, your willingness to platform or to have a conversation with Alex Jones, I think was a revolutionary act, actually. Not that everything Alex Jones says is right. It’s not. Not everything I say is right or anyone says is right. But Alex Jones is an interesting person. And even if he’s not interesting, he has been walled off from the rest of us through name calling and your willingness to be like, no, actually, we’re just going to listen Alex Jones, and you can decide for yourself.

JOE ROGAN: Well, Alex has been my friend for more than 20 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. But even if he just. Yeah, but I’m sure you have other friends you haven’t invited, just like you were not allowed to talk to him. And when you hear Alex Jones talk, you may not agree with everything he says. I don’t know that I do. But you definitely understand why they told you you couldn’t listen to Alex Jones.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s one of the reasons why I had him as one of the first guests when I came over to Spotify.

TUCKER CARLSON: Love that.

JOE ROGAN: I was like, let’s go.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did they say?

The Alex Jones Controversy

JOE ROGAN: Well, a lot of people weren’t happy we lost sponsors. It was an issue, but I think it did the job. You know, regardless of what he said, that’s incorrect. Clearly, the Sandy Hook thing was incorrect. You know, Alex. I know Alex personally, so I know what he was going through. And, you know, everybody wants to talk about mental health, and they want to praise people for being honest about their mental health issues and support them on their mental health journey to wellness.

Alex has gone through some real issues, and one of the reasons why he’s gone through some issues is because that guy is uncovering real shit that’s terrifying every fucking day. And he was drinking out of control, and, you know, he’s just fucking constantly stressed, freaking out. And when you see so many lies and so much propaganda and so many psyops, that are being done on people. You start seeing them where they don’t exist. And that’s what he did.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, and he’s also channeling some stuff. You can’t call 9/11 in detail because you’re super informed before the fact. He called it. Yes, he literally called it in the summer of 2001. He said planes will fly into the World Trade Centers and they will blame a man called Osama bin Laden. We know that he said that because he said it on tape multiple times. And then he said, call the White House and tell them this. Now, let’s just. That’s all we know about Alex Jones. Let’s just say that’s the fact set. How’d that happen?

JOE ROGAN: Right. How did he do that?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, he’s channeling something. That’s super. Yeah, of course.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Prophetic Visions and the Supernatural

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s no other. I mean, tell me how he did it otherwise, I’ve asked him about it. How did you do that? At length. He had dinner in my barn recently. We’re talking about this. How’d you do that? I don’t know. It just came to me. And that’s real? That is real. The supernatural is real. And I don’t know why it’s hard for the modern mind, just because it’s a materialist mind to accept that.

But what you. And that’s not a new phenomenon. It’s happened throughout history. There are people called prophets, and there are people who were prophets, who weren’t called prophets. But there are people who have information or parts of information, bits of information, visions of information come to them, and then they relay it. It’s not from them. They received it. This is one of the oldest phenomenon in human history.

So those people tend to be a little crazy, a little unbalanced, a little different from everybody else. Do you know what I mean? They live on locusts and honey in the wilderness. I mean, that’s just. That’s. They’re not like everybody else. And that’s clearly part of what. I’m not saying that everything that Alex Jones says is a prophecy from God. It’s not. But that was prophetic. And if it wasn’t, tell me how it wasn’t in July of 2000.

I lived in Washington in July of 2001. You know, my dad worked in the government. I was as well informed as anybody could be about what was going on in the government. I’ve always been interested in what’s happening in other countries. I was aware of Osama bin Laden. I knew about the Taliban. I knew more than most people. There’s not one person who was saying. Not one person in Washington, D.C. was saying, you know, at some point soon, they may fly airplanes into the World Trade Centers and blame Osama bin Laden. That just wasn’t a thing.

So if you said that multiple times on camera, there’s a reason. And everyone. I’ve said this to 50 people, what I just said to you, and they all look at me like, yeah, that’s stupid. Tell me how it’s stupid. Tell me how he did that. That’s impossible.

JOE ROGAN: Actually, he didn’t just do it with that either.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’m aware he’s done it with a lot of things.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s one of the more interesting things about him is that he talks about stuff. He talked about stuff. I’m going to send this to Jamie because this is one of the really crazy ones that he called. And this is 2000, 2000, probably, I guess, 2017. Here it is. Let me find this. Give me a second here. Because I sent it to him. How the fuck did you call this? Because it’s one of those ones where you’re like, this is exactly what’s happening now. Here it is here, 2017.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hold on a second.

JOE ROGAN: I’ll send you this. Jamie, come on, technology, let’s go. All right, I sent it to you, Jamie. So this is some guy’s Instagram clip that I found that took a clip from the podcast, and he’s doing commentary over. Put these on me.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I’m. Real quick.

JOE ROGAN: You got it. Okay, cool. Here we go.

Alex Jones on Interdimensional Entities

TUCKER CARLSON: 22 years on podcast.

JOE ROGAN: InfoWars. Alex Jones and Joe Rogan discuss what’s currently happening right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Google CERN technology, Vampire aliens in a nutshell. Alex was pretty on point with this message.

JOE ROGAN: Let me know what your thoughts are. Is he crazy or is he on something? It’s really big. So. Okay, yeah, pour another shot of that media. Get this out.

TUCKER CARLSON: All right, let me give you my best of the police deep research and proclamation.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think is going. But am I wrong to still hold out hope that aliens are real? Because I tell you, as one, the two guilty pleasures that I still cling to, it’s Bigfoot and aliens. Those are two. Bigfoot, not so much. I wish it was real, but I just don’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you ready? Yes. Bigfoot’s real. No.

JOE ROGAN: Come on, Daddy.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: Are you ready? Yes. I’m going to give you the biggest flaw, Joe. There are aliens in this room right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: For real. You. Yeah, you’re not of this world, bro. Me?

JOE ROGAN: You’re the alien.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, wow.

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, here’s what the elite believe. And let me be very clear.

JOE ROGAN: This video takes out context. I only go with what I can prove.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, thank you.

JOE ROGAN: And people can’t even handle that. There’s armies.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re fighting a pedophile conspiracy.

JOE ROGAN: But beyond that, it’s a vampire conspiracy.

TUCKER CARLSON: In that they are interdimensionally stuck in the essence of our youth. Right.

JOE ROGAN: And they believe they’re possessed by an all world entity.

TUCKER CARLSON: They do, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then Joe, I’ve been on air 22 years. I don’t get into aliens, metaphysical religion, any of that. I’ve studied Yuli and I’ve also communicated with a lot of the top people. And if you want to know, I will actually break down right now the best knowledge right now. What’s happening on the planet? What’s happening?

The Elite are all about transcendence and living forever and the secrets of the universe. And they want to know all this. Some are good, some are bad, some are a mix. But the good ones don’t ever want to organize. The bad ones didn’t want to organize.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they lost after power.

The Battle Between Good and Evil

JOE ROGAN: Powerful consciousnesses don’t want to dominate other people. They want to empower them. So they don’t tend to get together until things are really late in the game. Then they come together. Evil’s always defeated because good is so much stronger. And we’re on this planet and Einstein’s physics showed it. Max Planck’s physics shutter all, there’s at least 12 dimensions.

TUCKER CARLSON: And now that’s why all the top scientists and billionaires are coming out saying it’s a false hologram.

JOE ROGAN: It is artificial. The computers are scanning it and finding tension points where it’s artificially projected. And gravity’s bleeding in to this universe. That’s what they call dark matter. So we’re like a thought or a dream that’s a wisp in some computer program, some God’s mind, whatever. They’re proving it all. It’s all coming out now.

There’s this sub transmission zone below the third dimension that’s just turned over. The most horrible things is what it resonates to. And it’s trying to get up into the third dimension that’s just a basic level consciousness to launch into the next levels. And our species is already way up at the fifth sixth dimension, consciously our best people.

But there’s this big war trying to basically destroy humanity because humanity has free will. And there’s a decision to which level we want to go to. We have free will. So evil’s allowed to come and contend, not just good. And the elites themselves believe they’re racing or using human technology to try to take our best minds and build some type of breakaway civilization where they’re going to merge with machines, transcend, and break away from the failed species that is man.

Which is kind of like a false transmission because they’re thinking what they are is ugly and bad. Projecting it onto themselves instead of believing. No, It’s a human test about building us up. And so Google was set up 18, 19 years ago.

TUCKER CARLSON: This was.

Google and Artificial Intelligence

JOE ROGAN: I knew about this before it was declassified. I’m just saying I have good sources. That they wanted to build a giant artificial system. And Google believes that the first artificial intelligence will be a supercomputer based on the neuron activities of the hive mind of humanity with billions of people wired into it with the Internet of things.

And so all of our thoughts go into it. And we’re actually building a computer that has real neurons in real time that’s also psychically connected to us that are organic creatures so that they will have current prediction powers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Future prediction powers.

The AI Crystal Ball and Control of Consciousness

JOE ROGAN: A true crystal ball. But the big secret is, once you have a crystal ball and know the future, you can add stimuli beforehand and make decisions that control the future. And so then it’s the end of consciousness and free will for individuals, as we know. And a true 2.0 in a very bad way.

Hive mind consciousness with an AI jacked into everyone, knowing our hopes and dreams, delivering it to us not in some PKD wirehead system where we plug in and give up on consciousness because of unlimited pleasure, but because we were already wired in and absorbed before we knew it. By giving over our consciousness to the system, our day, daily decisions that it was able to manipulate and control into a larger system.

There’s now a human counter strike taking place to shut this off before it gets fully into place and to block these systems and to try to have an actual debate about where humanity goes and cut off the pedophiles and psychic vampires that are control of this AI system before humanity’s destroyed. They are. How’d they get. How’d the pedophile. Yeah, it’s pretty much it. Yeah, it’s incredible.

TUCKER CARLSON: I didn’t understand about a third. That was seven years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Seven years ago. Okay, so no, seven years ago, no one was thinking AI was going to take over civilization.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you can see why the FBI decided to destroy him, which it did. The people in. I mean, it’s just like what has happened to Alex Jones is proof that at least some of what he’s saying is true. Because why? Who is Alex Jones a threat to?

JOE ROGAN: Did you see that interview with the guy from FBI was trying to hook up with that dude on a date. Was it CIA? That’s right. And they were talking about how they can destroy a person.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I think I was mentioned in there too.

JOE ROGAN: Were you?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it was. Yeah. I mean, there are a couple. Okay. So. Yeah. Again, I don’t know the third dimension. I don’t know anything about dimensions. Okay. So I can’t comment on that.

But two things he said are true. One is that every civilization, every religion, the Greek myths, you know, every single one, including Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, has believed that there is sort of. That the spirit world and humanity are like that. There’s, you know, they’re hybrids. Yeah. Okay, so that’s just a fact. Genesis 6.

So, you know, I don’t think that’s crazy at all. Given that it has been the belief of civilizations that had no contact with each other.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it’s crazy. And I also don’t think it’s crazy to consider it. I don’t think we have a real map of reality.

The Reality of the Supernatural

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we definitely don’t. And better put than I. Than I explained. That’s exactly right. We don’t have a real map. And it’s not crazy to consider it. And it was a very. It was an entirely conventional view up until fairly recently that. Yeah. That this spirit world, I hate one, don’t even breathes with people. But that is that everyone thought that. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Even the term spirit world is probably a loaded term.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course is. They’re all. Whatever it is. How do you say it? In a way that doesn’t sound crazy, but the whole thing sounds crazy because we don’t acknowledge the reality, the actual physical reality of the supernatural. And it is real.

That’s the first thing. The second point that’s obviously true is that people, weak people, which is a synonym for bad people come together for strength and safety. They act as one. The hive mind is specific to a certain group of people, bad people, and that good people don’t tend to come together, but they’re coming together now.

And I just know. I just noticed this. I mean, people independently who I know, or sort of know in many cases have long despised, have come to exactly the same conclusions without talking to each other. I know that you have this experience all the time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like, I can’t believe you think that. How did you wind up thinking that?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And not just on a specific issue, like foreign policy or Covid or whatever, but on a whole bunch of different things. They’re all coming to the same conclusion, and they’re coming together. And so that does suggest, you know, a big change and a battle.

I mean, it is a battle between good and evil. I’m not always convinced I’m on the good side. I’ve been, you know, an instrument of evil many times in my life, and I’m ashamed of it, but.

JOE ROGAN: Are you talking about the Iraq war?

Reflections on Good and Evil

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, the Iraq war. I’ve been cruel to people, probably even already on your show in ways that are unjustified. That’s my instinct to do that. That’s a fault. Not, you know, not something to brag about. It’s something I’m ashamed of.

So I’m not saying I’m always on the right side. I certainly have not always been on the right side. I’ve been on the wrong side many, many times. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is good, there is evil. They are at war with each other, and we are subject to the effects of that conflict.

And that we’re seeing it suddenly play out in ways that are really, really obvious. There’s no political explanation for the trans phenomenon. Nobody benefits. You can say, I hear these. See these right wingers be like, really? It’s all about the people who make synthetic hormones. They benefit. Yeah, okay, they benefit. It’s not driving it. That’s stupid. It’s not about the money, actually. There’s no upside. It’s not helping the kids at all.

If a child has anorexia, which is pretty common actually, in this country, and the child thinks she’s fat, you don’t say to the child, yeah, you’re fat. You don’t do that. You give the child help if you can. It’s hard to treat, but you try.

If a child comes to you and says, actually, I think I was born in the wrong body, the last thing you do is affirm that it’s hurting the child. Like, why would you do that? If you love the child? You wouldn’t do that. It’s really an exercise undertaken for the sake of destruction, for the sake of hurting someone. There’s no real upside.

What’s another phrase description of that? It’s evil. And you see that a lot. A lot. And why? Like, what is that?

JOE ROGAN: What is it?

TUCKER CARLSON: And why is it so obvious to a completely. Even a completely secular person like me, all of a sudden there’s a reason for that. We’re what? You know, history is moving really, really fast. We’re right in the middle of it. And I probably wouldn’t have chosen to be born at the time I was. I’d much rather sort of reach maturity in 1955.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I don’t know. I don’t get to choose. You know, I don’t like drama, I don’t like change. I’m.

JOE ROGAN: There was drama and change back then.

TUCKER CARLSON: There was, but it. What people didn’t recognize. Well, if there was a Cold War, of course there was a Korean War. Okay. But people didn’t see it in their face. Right. In the way. I don’t think.

JOE ROGAN: Wouldn’t you rather know?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t have a choice. I do know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’d rather know. I’d rather be right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Well, then you’ve got a much better attitude than I. I mean, sometimes I just. My parents got divorced when I was little and so I kind of like. I don’t want change.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I know what you mean.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not up to me.

If Satan Was Real

JOE ROGAN: I know what you mean. You know, I was having a conversation in the green room of the club the other night about this guy from Canada that’s HIV positive, that’s a trans woman that’s taking hormones so they can breastfeed their nine month old daughter.

So a biological male is taking hormones and is now breastfeeding their daughter off of their male tit. And I said, if I was Satan, if Satan was real, I would do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: If Satan’s real, I would. I mean, if Satan was going to do something insidious and unbelievably creepy, he would do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I think he is doing that.

JOE ROGAN: Obviously, but this guy’s a real freak.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, but.

JOE ROGAN: Right. He’s also using public money too, but.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s a victim too. I mean, the thing about. Right, because the thing about evil, the reason that evil is distinct from everything else, it destroys the vessel, it’s held in the conduit through which it flows, destroys the person. So that guy in the end will not thrive, he’ll be destroyed too.

And so that’s how you know that it’s supernatural. In other words, if I steal your iPhone and sell it and I get an extra 400 bucks, that’s kind of explicable. You understand why I’m doing that? I want the 400 bucks.

But if I’m encouraging your kid to castrate himself. I’m not really benefiting from that, actually. There’s no material benefit to me at all. There’s no real psychic benefit. It’s hurting for its own sake, and that’s evil. There’s no political category that explains that.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And then there’s clearly money involved in that.

TUCKER CARLSON: There is money.

JOE ROGAN: There’s the gender affirming clinics that have popped up all over the country since 2007. You see the map of it. It’s fucking bananas.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why would you want to do that? Why would policymakers want to do that?

JOE ROGAN: Why would anybody want to make money that way? Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: People. It’s the most unnatural thing ever. Because parents, every parent at a certain age feels like, I like my kids, I want grandkids.

JOE ROGAN: Right, you want to protect your children to continue.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: From bad decisions.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I always think the politicians who push trannyism on the country, like, their kids are going trans too. Yeah, they are, right. They’re not escaping it. It’s like they’re burning down their own house.

JOE ROGAN: I would like to see the statistics of people in Hollywood, like, how many of their kids turn trans versus the world? Yeah, I know. Some of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Them too. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But how many of them versus the rest of the world?

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot more. A lot more.

JOE ROGAN: Which is a morally corrupt business.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, more than we knew. More than I knew. You know, the entertainment business, it’s.

Hollywood’s Dark Side

JOE ROGAN: It’s always been that way. You know, Tarantino was talking to us about this famous old director that had a bedroom in his office where he would bed the starlets. And it was just common knowledge that if you wanted to be in his movie, you had to fuck him. And you’d go into his office. He had a literal bedroom in his office.

TUCKER CARLSON: We had some of that in television.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I’m sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, quite a bit. Yeah. And I didn’t. I didn’t really understand. I didn’t, you know, obviously partake in it or you would know, because all my text messages went up at the New York Times. So I’m not hiding any of my own behavior.

But I mean, I. I will say, if I’m being honest, it didn’t really register with me. I was like, yeah, that’s kind of wild and crazy. I just didn’t, you know, I like my wife. I don’t want to blow up my family. I didn’t do anything like that, really.

But I certainly saw a lot. Like, a lot of it. Like, a lot. And I just didn’t really see it as, like, horrifying. I just saw it as kind of like, whoa, you know, creative people are this way kind of thing. But I look back and I’m like, it was really dark.

JOE ROGAN: Well, especially the producer thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

JOE ROGAN: That, like the Weinstein thing. That, the way they ran the business, that’s how it was. Pay to play.

TUCKER CARLSON: I worked for Harvey Weinstein for a year.

JOE ROGAN: Did you really?

The Harvey Weinstein Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I did. When? 1999. He had a magazine with Tina Brown called Talk Magazine. I was the head political writer for it. And they had an office at Carnegie Towers in New York, right below the park. And I remember the big con. I mean, I remember he was a pig. I was not like an intimate friend of his or whatever, but I certainly dealt with him.

And the big controversy was he was smoking in elevators. And that was. And I’ve kind of supported that, if I’m being honest. But he was considered incredibly insensitive and just like vulgar. Just like a pig.

Well, he looks vulgar. Yeah. Well, that was certainly what everyone thought of him. Where I worked, Harvey’s just a pig. And his brother Bob was a little bit less that way. He was also involved. But yeah, people knew that he was a bad guy.

JOE ROGAN: But like awesome movies.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And also, but he was just powerful. It’s like Harvey Weinstein, like, want to fuck with Harvey Weinstein? I mean, I didn’t really think about it too much, to be completely honest. That was just. It was just a guy I worked for. But I don’t know. I didn’t. I certainly.

If you’d played the Alex Jones clip for me in 1999, I would have been. And I did see Alex Jones clips in 1999 and then in later years where he was talking about Building 7. And I was very offended. I was like outraged that he would be suggesting that there was something about 9/11 that wasn’t above board, that there was, you know, things we didn’t know they were being hidden from us. And I was like mad at Alex Jones for saying that. I remember that really well. How dare you?

Building 7 and Government Secrecy

JOE ROGAN: The building 7 one is wild.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it is what it is. Why? I mean, I have no. All I know is 21. I don’t even know what year it is. 23 years. Could it really be 23 years? 9/11, 23 years later? What’s the justification for classifying any document around 9/11? There’s no justification.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the same justification and classifying the documents by the Kennedy’s assassination.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, exactly. 61 years later.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Or releasing the COVID vaccine data 75 years later.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, yeah, right. I mean, it’s. Look, secrecy is different from privacy. Privacy is necessary for the dignity of this way. You’ve got a door in the bathroom in your bedroom, right? You know, you need privacy, you need private thoughts. We have no privacy whatsoever. None, no privacy at all, thanks to the iPhone and government spying on us all.

So there’s no privacy, but there’s massive secrecy. Secrecy is different. Secrecy abets lying. The only reason to have secrecy is in order to do something that you’re ashamed of other people knowing about. That’s immoral and probably illegal. And there’s more secrecy than ever. And that means that there’s more lying than ever. There are more crimes being committed than ever. That’s the surest sign of it.

Why are there a billion classified federal documents in a so-called democracy? Because they’re lying to us, that’s why. But 9/11, like what is the justification for that? I don’t know the answer. I really don’t know the answer. But there is one that’s for sure. It’s not methods and sources. You think it’s methods and sources trying to protect their Saudi sources? I don’t think so.

JOE ROGAN: You know, the wildest thing about Tower 7 is that if you just say it looks like a controlled demolition, people get mad at you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t know, because I’m not saying that it is a controlled demolition, but I’m saying if you watch looks like a controlled demolition, but that happens all the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Buildings catch fire and they just implode in on themselves. I think that happens every week. Right. All these poultry plants and manufacturing plants that keep getting burned through fire, they all like just the way it went down. Yeah.

So I say, why do they respond that way? And of course I responded that way, so. And I think looking back, the reason that I did was because if you call that into question, you had to ask a lot of other really obvious questions you didn’t want to deal with. And you might arrive at the conclusion that a lot of your most basic assumptions are false and that you’ve been had and it’s just too destabilizing maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Well, the real problem with Tower 7 is they go, well, okay, if it was a controlled demolition, how was that engineered? Did they just decide to do that before September 11th? And you know how long it would take to rig a building like that? Or was it built into the building and how would they know it would even work? And how would they do something like that? And how would there not be a record of it being built into the building, like for someone to engineer.

TUCKER CARLSON: And where’s the sound signature on the tape? There would be a sound of the explosions coming out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which is a fair question.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So a lot of fair questions. And has there ever been a building that experienced a tremendous amount of damage because two enormous skyscrapers fell right next to it, damaged it, and then massive fires started. And then there’s diesel generators that are in the basement, so they have all this fuel. So they have this incredible infantry in the basement that weakens the structure. Is that why it collapsed? Maybe.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally possible. A lot of building engineers disagree with that, as you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they don’t think that could have happened in the way you just described. I’m agnostic on it. What I know, because I don’t know the answer and I have no way of knowing. All I know is that there’s no justification for keeping those documents secret that I can think of. And if there is, tell us what it is. No one has bothered because nobody presses. And it’s, you know, I’ll add that to the list of outrages.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: And then it gives you this feeling of helplessness because there’s so many of those. They just pile on. There’s always another one.

Government Surveillance and Media Complicity

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the US government spied on me, broke into my phone and spied on me. And I couldn’t get a straight answer to that. And I’m not a felon.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that, they got into your signal account, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And then they leaked it to the New York Times, what they found there. So it’s one thing to say, okay, we picked up your text exchanges with a foreign national, which is true. I text a lot of foreign nationals because of my job. Why wouldn’t I? And it’s my right. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not illegal.

But we picked up your text exchanges, which I think itself is a lie. I think they were targeting me. I think they are now. I know. I’m pretty positive they are, but whatever. Leaving that aside, we spied on you. We think we have justification. Is there a justification for leaking the contents of my private conversation to a news outlet in order to discredit me? No, there’s no. That’s secret police shit. Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not whining. Ooh, I’m a victim. I’m certainly not a victim. But what was infuriating was my total. And I got members of Congress involved because I was pissed and I felt threatened. I couldn’t get a straight answer. They were just like, we’re not answering those questions. And what are you going to do about it, bitch? What are you going to do about it?

I don’t possess a drone fleet. There’s nothing I can do about it. Actually, that’s the truth. So when the system breaks down and things like, I don’t know, honesty, justice, the law, none of those apply. The people in charge decide. That doesn’t apply to me. You are literally powerless.

JOE ROGAN: Bizarre that the New York Times wouldn’t have an issue with that.

TUCKER CARLSON: The New York Times does that all the time.

JOE ROGAN: But they wouldn’t have an issue with the government tapping into your phone.

TUCKER CARLSON: They work for the government. Are you kidding? The New York Times. The New York Times is a conduit for the lies of government. That’s what it is. It’s their tool. And they’re perfectly aware of that. I mean, I used to write for the New York Times as a freelancer. I mean, I’ve been around the New York Times a lot.

And yeah, there are a lot of really smart people there. But for sure, even now, I would less so now. But there’s still, I think, smart people there. There are. I know some and they know. But they think that, that, you know, it’s worth it because they’re bringing information or. I don’t know what they think, actually.

But no, they’re tools of power. And that’s like the one thing that you’re not allowed to be, even if you think the power is good. Like, maybe they all support the agenda of the US Government, destabilizing the world and impoverishing their own population. Maybe they’re on board with that. Even if they are, they shouldn’t do it. Because the job of the media, the press, is to keep power in check. You are kind of like the seat belt, right? You know, you make sure that things don’t go too far. So. And they’re not doing that. They’re acting as a willing handmaiden.

JOE ROGAN: When do you think that switched?

The Watergate Deception

TUCKER CARLSON: I think it’s been the case for a long time. I mean, if you look at what happened to Richard Nixon, which I of course did not understand at all. Richard Nixon was taken out by the FBI and CIA and with the help of Bob Woodward, who was a Washington Post reporter, who had been a naval intelligence officer working in the White House, working in the Nixon White House, and then he shows up like a year later and he’s this brand new reporter.

He’d never been a journalist at all. He’s a naval intel officer. The famous Bob Woodward, we all revere. And he’s at the Washington Post, and somehow he gets the biggest story in the history of the Washington Post. He’s the lead guy in that story. Well, I worked in a newspaper. I’ve been in the news business my whole life. That is not how it works. You don’t take a kid like his first day from a totally unrelated business and put him on the biggest story. But he was. He was that guy.

And who is his main source for Watergate? Oh, the number two guy at the FBI. Oh, so you have the Naval Intelligence officer working with the FBI official to destroy the President. Okay, so that’s a deep state coup. What else? How would you describe that? If that happened in Guatemala, what would you say?

And yet the way it was framed and the way that I accepted for decades was, oh, this intrepid reporter fought power. No, no, no. This intrepid reporter, Bob Woodward, was a tool of power, secret power, which is the most threatening kind. To bounce the single most popular president in American history, Richard Nixon, from office before the end of his term.

And replace him with who? Oh, Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission. Now, how did Gerald Ford get to be Richard Nixon’s vice president? Well, because Carl Albert, the Democrat speaker of the House, told him, you must choose him. We will only confirm him when they sent the actual elected vice president away for tax evasion. Spiro Agnew of Maryland.

So you have a complete setup, like an absolute Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history, actually sat on the Warren Commission. Something else that I accepted at face value until I looked at it and I was like, that’s completely insane. You didn’t want to interview Jack Ruby in your investigation. The.

JOE ROGAN: The assassination.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, you’re fake. Yeah, he was on the Warren Commission. And so sorry for the long story, but the point is, like, that. That happened in front of all of us, but the way it was framed, cloaked the obvious reality of it.

The people who broke into the Watergate office building, from which the name is taken, Watergate. I think it was six of them or seven of them. All but one was a CIA employee. That. That’s real. It’s like, look it up on Google.

So the whole thing, Richard Nixon was elected by more votes than any president in American history. In the 1972 election, he was the most popular by votes, which is the only way we can really measure popularity. The most popular president in his reelection campaign, and two years later, he’s gone. Undone by a Naval intel officer. The number two guy at The FBI and a bunch of CIA employees. You tell me what that is. Those are the facts. Those are not disputed facts. That’s not crackpot shit. That’s just look it up.

JOE ROGAN: So why did they want to get rid of Nixon?

Nixon’s Understanding of the Deep State

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, there are a lot of theories on that. I mean, first of all, we don’t need to know motive to know what happened. They, meaning unelected federal employees, got rid of Richard Nixon, which is the most anti-democratic way to make a leadership change that there is. I should just say at the outset, I actually kind of believe in democracy. Obviously it’s not working well, obviously it’s ending globally. There will never be another liberal democracy, unfortunately. But I’m attached to it because I was born here. I really believe in it. And it’s better than any other system. So that’s why I’m pissed.

What was their motive? There are a lot of theories on this. There’s an amazing conversation, it’s on tape between Richard Nixon when he was still president. I think it was in 1973. And I think it was Richard Helms, the head of the CIA. Though I may have messed that up. But it was the head of the CIA and I think it was Helms. And Nixon says, “I know why they killed Jack Kennedy.”

So Nixon was a student of history, obviously a flawed and complicated person, but a very, very smart person. And he was really interested in why this guy who’d been president, just one president before him, was murdered. And he didn’t think it was a lone gunman who was mysteriously assassinated two days later by another lone gunman. It’s so obviously bullshit. And he knew that.

And the CIA director, and you can listen to the tape, it’s on the Internet, is totally silent on this question. So I think there was the impression, I don’t think, I know that Nixon understood that the bureaucracy was really in control of the country. It wasn’t elected officials. And that’s a massive threat because it’s true.

And there may have been other reasons too, that I’m not privy to. Look, all I, and by the way, I didn’t even know any of this despite having moved to Washington in high school and been around this stuff a lot. I didn’t know any of it. And I know Bob Woodward personally, so I didn’t. And I know Carl Bernstein personally. I even worked for Carl Bernstein briefly. So I knew some of the actual players in this.

But I didn’t connect the obvious dots because they weren’t framed that way. That’s the point I’m making. It’s the way that you frame things. You can have all the information available on Wikipedia, which is also controlled by the intel agencies, but there’s still information on there. The information can be out there in the public domain. It’s a matter of seeing it for what it is. Right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So Nixon said that he knew why they killed JFK. Did he elaborate?

TUCKER CARLSON: Nope. And it’s worth listening to. It’s a very weird conversation. It takes place in the Oval Office, which famously had tape recording devices in it. Obviously, this became a big feature during the Watergate hearings. But yes, that conversation, and I may be mangling it slightly, but it’s on the Internet and absolutely worth listening to.

And the CIA director has this kind of sinister silence. So if I’m the president, you’re the CIA director, and I say, “I know why the guy who was just president 10 years ago was killed,” the obvious answer would be, “Well, why? What? You know why he was killed. You’ve got insight into the assassination of the US President.” He doesn’t say anything. Just a very weird response.

JOE ROGAN: Like what?

TUCKER CARLSON: Just got to throw that out there. If you say to me, we’re taking a leak, you’re at the next urinal, you’re like, “I figured out the secret to life,” and I’m like, “Huh, okay,” that’s not a good response.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a telling response.

Trump and the JFK Files

JOE ROGAN: Did you hear Trump’s take on the JFK assassination? Why he didn’t release the files?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I know what Trump’s take is.

JOE ROGAN: He said that if you knew what I know, you wouldn’t tell people either, which is crazy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s his position on the UAP thing as well.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, actually.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s a lot of people’s position on it. I mean, Trump is saying, of course the CIA had knowledge of it. That is known. The whole JFK conspiracy industry, and it really is an industry, more books written on that than almost any historical topic, is filled with wackos. Right. There are a lot of wackos in there. But that fact obscures the larger fact, which is the facts themselves tell an unbelievable story.

And so, whatever. I could get into it at great length, but yeah, they’re still classifying documents 61 years later. Both Trump and Joe Biden have, in violation of my read of federal law, kept those documents secret. There’s no living person connected to the Kennedy assassination. It was a couple generations ago. There’s no person whose secrets are being protected. It’s an institution, or maybe countries. There may have been countries involved, too. I mean, I don’t know the answer, but there’s clearly something worth protecting.

And I know that when I spoke to someone who’d seen the documents, two years ago, I got one fact out of him, which is, yes, the CIA was involved. And by CIA, CIA is a huge organization. But James Jesus Angleton, the head of the Operations Directorate, had knowledge of this, which I think is well known. But that’s the view of someone who saw the documents. So I thought that was news. So I went on TV and said that.

Mike Pompeo’s Threat

The next day, I’ll never forget it, I went quail hunting. And I was driving back, and I got a phone call from Mike Pompeo’s lawyer. Mike Pompeo was the Secretary of State, but before then, he was the Director of the CIA. And in that position, he plotted the murder of Julian Assange. So he is a criminal as far as I’m concerned.

But his lawyer called me and said, “You know, you should know that anyone who tells you the contents of classified documents has committed a crime.” He’s threatening me, in my car. I’ll never forget this, with my dog sitting next to me. And I said, “Are you really saying that to reveal that the US Government had a role in the murder of a democratically elected president, to say that out loud, that’s the crime? What about the actual crime, which is murdering a president? You’re covering up for that Mike Pompeo?” He had no response at all.

And so Mike Pompeo is the one who pressed Trump to keep those documents secret. And so what’s crazy to me is not just that Pompeo did that. I think Pompeo is a really sinister person and a criminal. I think that because the facts suggest that he was caught. Yahoo News, Micah Isikoff wrote a long piece on this several years ago. His employees went to Micah Isikoff and said, “Hey, Mike Pompeo is plotting to murder Julian Assange, who’s never even been charged with a crime in the United States as CIA Director.” That’s illegal. You’re not allowed. Federal employees are not allowed to just kill people they don’t like. Just to set the baseline here.

So that’s who Mike Pompeo is. But he somehow intimidated Trump into not releasing this. Well, okay, that’s all bad, right? I think it’s criminal behavior. What’s crazy is how Mike Pompeo is treated. He’s treated as a Republican poobah in good standing. He fully expects to become the Secretary of Defense in a Trump administration, which is completely insane. Why would you take a criminal and give him nuclear weapons? That’s my view. I think it’s a common sense view.

And he goes to fundraisers and dinners, and everyone’s like, “Hey, Mike Pompeo.” It’s like, no, you’re the guy who kept information the public has a right to know secret. You’re the guy who plotted the murder of someone who committed no crime. You are the outlaw. You are the bad guy. But no, he’s treated as a pillar of Republican Washington. I think that’s mind bending to watch that. And by the way, you know, whatever.

JOE ROGAN: That’s all I’ll say, by the way.

Congressional Fear of Intelligence Agencies

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I mean, you know, people don’t say that because they’re worried about getting punished. They’re worried about someone putting kiddie porn on their computer. Right. Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I’m not guessing at that. They’ve told me that. Including people on the intel committee. Including people who run the intel committee. The people whose job it is to oversee and keep in line these enormous, secretive agencies whose budgets we can’t even know. Their black budgets. They’re the parents. The agencies are the children. They’re afraid of the agencies. That’s not compatible with democracy.

Democracy is a really simple system. Even representative democracy like ours, the people rule. They do so through elections. They express their preference through voting. They send their people to the capital city to run the government on their behalf. Whenever you have unelected people who are not accountable to anyone making the biggest decisions, you don’t have a democracy. You have something else. Another system. I would call it a tyranny, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not a democracy.

So that’s super obvious. It’s playing out in front of everyone, and no one cares and no one does anything about it. And I think the reason is because they’re threatened. And if you look at the committee chairmen who allow this to happen year after year, they’re all, and I don’t know, people say, “Oh, they’re compromised or being blackmailed or whatever.” I don’t have evidence of that. But I know them. And they all have things to hide. I know that for a fact.

And so it’s not a stretch of imagination to imagine that some committee chairman who’s allowing warrantless spying on Americans to continue or whatever abuse they’re allowing, knowing fully, hiding the truth about UAPs, ignoring the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. Why are they doing that? It’s not impossible to imagine that some guy with a drinking problem or a weird sex life, and that’s very common, very common up there, that’s why they’re doing it, because they don’t want to be exposed. I don’t have evidence of that. I don’t have proof of that.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s not a crazy thing to assume that that could be happening. And I said to somebody, a very powerful person the other day in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official holds a really senior position, a very famous person. I was going crazy. I was so mad about all this stuff and about the warrantless spying and about the funding for these insane wars.

And I said to the guy who serves in one of the legislative bodies, I got so mad, my dogs were afraid. They’re like, “Well, why are you yelling?” Because I don’t yell at home. But I was like, “All these people are controlled. They’ve all got weird sex lives and all these things they’re hiding and they’re being blackmailed by the intel agencies.” And he said, and I’m quoting, “I know.” I was like, are we, okay, so at this point, we’re just sort of admitting that’s real. How could, why do we allow that to continue?

JOE ROGAN: Having people compromised thing. God, that’s an old story.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the oldest story.

JOE ROGAN: J. Edgar Hoover. It’s all of them. It’s Epstein’s Island. It’s everything.

Government Legitimacy and the Consent of the Governed

TUCKER CARLSON: But look, I don’t have any, I’m telling you. What’s the phrase the finance guys use? Open kimono. I’m actually telling you all I know. I don’t know anything else. Right. But I know that the publicly available facts tell a really clear story, which is the government is not acting on behalf of the population. And so it’s inherently illegitimate because its only legitimacy derives from the citizenry.

The only reason the government can do things that it does, kill people, collect money by force, all the powers that it has come from one place, and that’s the consent of the governed. That’s the only legitimacy they have.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s where it’s fascinating, this concept of good and evil. Because when you think about it, if this is true and if these people are compromised because they’re secretly perverts and creeps, they are though, and they’re corrupt and they steal money or they, all these different things are evil things. Lying, controlling people, engaging in unnecessary wars that are going to cost thousands of lives for profit. All these things are evil things. So if evil is real, evil would want those kind of people to be in a position of power.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And evil would want men to breastfeed their children.

The Nature of Evil

TUCKER CARLSON: Here’s the illusion that we fall for time and again. We imagine that evil comes fully advertised as such. Evil people look like Anton LaVey. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Black cloak.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Sickle.

The Nature of Evil and Weak Leadership

TUCKER CARLSON: Evil is an independent force that exists outside of people, that acts upon people. I really believe that. I’ve experienced it a lot and it’s obvious. And what vessel do they choose? The weak. It’s weak men and women who are instruments of evil. The weaker the leader, the more evil that leader will be.

And unfortunately we’ve reached a time in American history where every leader is either a woman or a weak man pretty much. And so there’s, I’m sorry to say it, this is true. And the weaker the leader, that’s what Mike Johnson. Everyone’s like, “Oh, Mike Johnson’s such a nice guy.” Well, I know Mike Johnson and he’s probably perfectly nice guy to the extent that he’s like polite and seems kind of meek and restrained and he’s not saying “motherfucker” ever, you know what I mean? He’s got like very sort of buttoned down affect.

But he’s a weak man. And that’s the man you should be afraid of. The people who you shouldn’t be less afraid of are the headstrong, loud, don’t care what anybody thinks. Yeah, those guys will go off track, but they’re probably not going to abet genocide or blow up the world in a nuclear exchange because they might. They may be obnoxious, but they know who they are.

Weak people just become a host for evil, you know, an open, empty building that evil occupies, possesses even. And that’s exactly what’s happening to Mike Johnson. It’s absolutely crazy what Mike Johnson is doing. But it’s not because he’s evil, it’s because he’s weak and therefore susceptible to evil. It’s a meaningful distinction that I have noticed.

JOE ROGAN: It is a very strange thing how many weak people wind up being leaders in this society. And particularly because so many people don’t want their lives exposed. They don’t want that Eye of Sauron gazing down upon them if they try to run for president.

TUCKER CARLSON: I get it. Or the physical threat.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, physical. I mean, look at what’s happening to RFK where the Biden administration, for the first time ever, denied him Secret Service protection as a legitimate presidential candidate.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s absolutely nuts.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, how is that? I mean, it’s hard. You know, you realize that a lot of the things that we took for granted were actually voluntary. Like, people just didn’t do things because, like, that’s just wrong. That’s not fair. You know what I mean? That’s bad sportsmanship. Like, there was a lot of self restraint involved in running a functional society.

You can’t kind of, you can’t just make an infinite number of laws and enforce them. That’s impossible. You rely on people to just not do bad shit because, like, I’m not the kind of person who does bad shit. And once the people in charge decide, “Well, I’m just going to do whatever I want, not all you can do about it.” So the Biden administration denies him Secret Service protection, and you’re like, “How can you do that?” Like, “Well, we’re doing it. What are you going to do about it, bitch?” And the answer is nothing, actually.

Government Surveillance and Digital Privacy

JOE ROGAN: What is this most recent bill that they’re trying to pass about the ability to monitor phones?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s just the nightmare scenario.

JOE ROGAN: It’s something that they’re already capable of doing because they did it to you, and they did it through an encrypted app.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, they do? Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How do they do it? Do you know how they use, how they got into your phone?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there are two ways to. It’s interesting. And I was with Ed Snowden in Moscow. Talked a lot about this because he’s got the technical. He’s first of all, an excellent and principled person. And his X feed is a really good place to start for people to understand what’s happening here. He’s paid a huge price for being, obviously, he’s literally exiled to Moscow involuntarily.

But there are a couple ways to do it. One, you could hack into Signal, I guess it’s open source. It was created with CIA money, as I’m sure you know. I’m not sure that’s how you. I don’t think you need to do that. You just capture the phone itself. You just capture the phone. And the bottom line on digital security is that nothing is safe from state actors who want to spy on you, period. There’s no electronic communication that they can’t monitor, period.

JOE ROGAN: What about these things? Like, Erik Prince has some new phone out. I think it’s called Unplugged.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Eric is a good friend of mine, and I have a couple of those phones. I’ve talked to him a lot about it, and he’s a really a wonderful person. One of my favorite people, actually. But that phone is designed for a different purpose, I think. I know. And that phone is designed to keep Apple and Google from tracking you, which is sort of a separate category.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what is this, Jimmy?

TUCKER CARLSON: This is the bill, I believe, I think.

JOE ROGAN: Which bill?

TUCKER CARLSON: The one you were talking about.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: House bill on social. Can we just roll down to what you highlighted? So this is like a perfect example. So the Turner-Himes bill, Congressman Mike Turner and Jim Himes. So who are Mike Turner and Jim Himes? So it just be funny both those guys are the most, and who knows why? And you can sort of fill in the blank on motive. I’m not going to.

But those are two of the most reliable water carriers for the intel agencies and for basically the federal bureaucracy in the Congress. Like, these are not people who are working for their constituents. These are people who are working for permanent Washington. I would say these are two of the most sinister people. I know more about Turner than Himes, but so it’s not surprising they’re doing this.

It would permit federal law enforcement to also force any other service provider with access to communications equipment to hand over data. Anyone with access to a WiFi router server or even phone, anyone from a landlord to a laundromat, will be required to help the government spy. So that’s the story right there. So basically warrantless. Oh, of course, warrantless, absolutely.

And in violation the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, as if anyone cares anymore. No one does, clearly. But I just remember when I was a kid and we’re roughly the same generation, you remember this too. People be like, “Oh, East Germany.” Like, there are more spies than there are people. East Germany was like the most elaborate surveillance state ever created. And of course it collapsed. But we’d always make fun of East Germany or North Korea.

Who has more privacy, the average North Korean or the average American? Well, obviously the average North Korean. Because there’s less technology, the US Government spies on its own population more than the North Korean government spies on its. That’s just a fact. I’m not saying North Korea is preferable. I’m not moving there. I’m not carrying water for North Korea.

What I’m doing is criticizing my government because I live here. Because it was better. It can be better. It should be better. And it only will be when we demand it. And it’s not some esoteric, like you have to be some crazy civil liberties lawyer or something, like every person should demand, just as a starting point, a baseline that, no, you’re not allowed to spy on me. I didn’t do anything wrong. Like what? No privacy? No humanity. You can’t be fully human without privacy.

JOE ROGAN: And you also have to take into consideration that these people that are ahead of these intelligence agencies that are requesting these data are just, they’re just human beings. They’re human beings requesting data from other human beings without going through a court, without going to a judge and getting a warrant, without stating a case, without having some clear national security mandate, something.

The Self-Preservation of Government Organizations

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not. And there’s no justification. I mean, by the way, we had FISA. We’ve had the FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, since, I think, 1977. So it predates 9/11. Did it stop 9/11? Oh, I don’t think it did. Shut the fuck up. You’re not protecting us.

Actually, you open the southern border to anyone who wants to come. You’re not checking IDs, you’re not doing any kind of biometrics. You’re not even screening for Covid. So clearly you don’t care about my safety. Stop telling me you do. You don’t. You’re a criminal. Stop this charade. You don’t care about my safety.

So using my safety as a pretext for spying me is not going to fly because I’m not that stupid. I may be kind of stupid. I’m not that stupid. No, you’re doing this for one simple reason. Because this is what organizations do. They protect themselves. They exist for their own benefit. All human organizations, from the Church Bake Sale Committee to the Department of Justice, they all are the same.

They’re an organism, just like any other. And an organism’s main goal is to survive and reproduce, to get bigger. And you just see this throughout the federal bureaucracy? Well, it just so happens that the largest human organization in history is the federal government of the United States. And so all of this stuff benefits. It accrues to its own power.

That’s like, let’s say you believed every piece of science or scientific claim about global climate change, you would not reach the same policy conclusions. You’d be like, “Well, the first thing we need is ban private air travel, because obviously that doesn’t make any sense.” And then the second thing we need to do is, you know, whatever. You’d look at it rationally from a scientific. If you bought the premise, which I don’t, but if you did, you would that.

No, you go through every climate quote, climate demand. Not one of them disempowers large organizations, whether it’s NGOs or the government of the United States, not one of them. They all make the government more powerful and they all make you less powerful. So that’s when you know it’s not really about the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. It’s about making them more powerful and disempowering you.

And it’s not about who runs those agencies. The bigger the agency, the more effective it will be in doing what all human organizations do, which is protect themselves and increase their power. It’s like, it’s fundamental. I guess that’s what I’m saying. It’s not about, “Oh, elect Trump. It’ll change.” No, it’ll only change when, like, we’re just eliminating the CIA and we’re going to have a small intel gathering service that feeds the president relevant information so he can make informed foreign policy decisions.

But we’re not going to overturn elections in other countries in the name of democracy, because that’s insane. If we believe in democracy, then we’re going to let people vote for their own leaders because we believe in democracy as a principle. Right? Like, you just get rid of all this shit because it’s not helping us, it’s only hurting us.

The Prerequisite for True Leadership

And it would take someone, you know, who’d be willing to be assassinated to do anything like that. And so as you’re choosing your leaders, ask yourself, does this person mean it enough to die? And that’s the same question you would ask about your own dad. Does he love me enough to die for me? About your own husband, does he love me enough to protect me from a home invader at risk to himself?

The basic prerequisite for leadership is love of the people you lead and the willingness to die for them. And if you don’t have that, you shouldn’t be leading, period. That’s true in the military, it’s true in business, it’s true in your home, and it’s true in the government. And so no president will fix this unless he’s literally willing to die for it. In short of that, it can’t be fixed.

JOE ROGAN: I can think of no better way to end this conversation than that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Joe Rogan, ladies and gentlemen.

JOE ROGAN: Well, listen, man, it’s been very fun getting to know you. I think you are a very, you’re a controversial character in the world, but you’re misunderstood. And I think if people pay attention to your actual work and the things that you talk about, I think you’re generally a force of good. I really believe that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I feel like I’m the most conventional person who’s ever lived. I don’t think I’m radical at all. I’m the opposite.

JOE ROGAN: In this crazy time, someone who’s conventional and wise seems radical.

TUCKER CARLSON: Maybe I’m hoping for a better time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think a better time’s possible.

TUCKER CARLSON: Me, too.

JOE ROGAN: I do.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just.

JOE ROGAN: We’re in for a rough ride.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I’m not disarming anytime soon. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you, Tucker.

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