#2138 - Tucker Carlson

Did you see the US government just released, apparently by accident, the Project Aqua stuff? Did you see this?

They just released, I think by accident.

I haven't done email in many years. Really?

Okay, so. This is so amazing. This is in there. They're talking about this. This was just released.

We're talking about setting up this program, Kono Blue.

Do you ever wonder if stuff like this is just disinformation?

S. government who's... Look, let me just start by saying, you know, I don't know anything.

I sent a document saying I would never talk about KonoBlue and similar efforts. I can't believe the AARO would have released it.

You know, I mean, here's what we do know is that there's enough going on in the skies, but not just the skies, underwater that the U.

S. military has been forced to respond to it. So like move aircraft from one place to another because there are too many of these objects in the sky. That's actually happened. Chris Mellon just wrote a long piece about it.

So it's real. The government is not controlling it. In fact, it's forcing the government DOD to respond.

And we know that there is a real effort and has been underway for a long time to keep the public from knowing about it. But that's all known. That's established. I don't think any rational person would deny that. The question is, like, what is it, actually?

I mean, now is sort of the point you have to ask, like, what is this?

So who are effectively government employees but don't have civil service protection, for example. So that's 12 million people in a country of 340 million working for the federal government. So it's kind of hard to overstate how big the federal government is and how well funded. And so to say, the government this, the government that, 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.

Look, space, the atmosphere is really well monitored, right? Both for military, for defense reasons, but also because, like, 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. Hmm.

So they're from here and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are. And, um, it's pretty clear to me that they're spiritual entities, whatever that means are supernatural. And which is to say, supernaturals means above the natural, above the observable, uh, nature. And, um, they don't behave according to the laws of science as, as measured by people, you know, and, um, and they've been here for a long time. And there's a ton of evidence that are under the ocean and under the ground.

So, like with that fact set, what do you conclude?

I just bought into the system completely without even thinking about it. And I imagined that I was like some kind of free thinker. and, you know, I'm going against the grain, but like the core, my core assumptions were the, you know, 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, you know, like every whack job in the world, you run into when you're covering stuff.

Exactly.

I'm ashamed of it. I'm not bragging about it, but, but it was, it was 2017.. And really it was the Trump campaign. It wasn't that I was like so in love with Trump, though I've always liked Trump because he was hilarious and charming and all that. But I wasn't like 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. Like that's so out of the realm.

That's so crazy. Like 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. It kind of lumbers along, you know, but like 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. Like, 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, you know, a DOD employee, reached out to me and said, actually there's a ton of evidence that this UFO thing is real. And really? And so I started doing segments on it when I worked at the TV channel. And there was like 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, you know, 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 a little green men question.

It's like 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.

Like it rots you. Like 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, like 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, okay, so if they're spiritual beings, which I believe they are,

like it's a binary. They're either, you know, you're on team good or team bad. You can assign any name to it you want. But like, what are these things? Are they good or bad?

And I think some of them are bad. And if the U.S. government knows that, or elements, the people within the U.S. government know that, then, you know, then they're serving a bad force.

No visible means of propulsion, you know, coming at indescribable speed, hitting the ocean, continuing at speeds that are impossible undersea. I mean, in other words, if I take a, you know, nine millimeter router, 762 by 39, and shoot you at 50 yards underwater in a swimming pool, and it's even more intense in saltwater 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 understanding physics. Like, what is that?

How can that be? So...

There's a lot of stuff going on underwater and, um, 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.

Correct. But they have some stuff for sure. So,

And, you know, if there's been extensive knowledge of this for decades, like maybe 80 years, at least, if not going back to the thirties, 90 years, um, you know, to what, to what end? 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. Like 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, you know, the U S military isn't capable of protecting the country, the homeland. Um, and it does suggest that. If you can't control these objects in your airspace and that's known, they can't, that's known. Okay.

Then that's just a limit to the power of the U S military. And you don't want to tell people that because then they like, won't believe that they're safe. I get it.

But then there's a deeper level, which is like, okay, what's your relationship with these things? What is the U? S government's relationship with these things? And there's evidence that there is a relationship and that it's a longstanding. And that raises, like, a lot of questions about intent.

And, um, and so like, what is that? And I just personally decided, um, you know, and, and people have been hurt by these things. You know, that's a fact. That's a fact. It's a noble fact.

It's a provable fact, and kilt. 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, uh, out of the VA. So, um, I don't know. If we have 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 like. what that adds up to, like not good, actually not good.

Yeah. Entirely credible person, um, checks all the boxes that I care about. He's, he's got patents. So he's like a lot of Stanford university professors. He's like independently rich.

He flew to, I live in a remote place and he flew to my place at his own expense. Cause he wanted to tell the 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.

Uh, and he's worked on this for over 10 years, um, assessing the injuries to us servicemen from being in close proximity to these subjects or having contact with these subjects. And his conclusion is, you know, cause 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, um, at least in his telling to me. So anyway, but the point is, people have died.

Why would you hide that?

I 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.

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 and 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've grown up in, but that's an anomaly.

Like 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 like been the basis of every society.

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?

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 conventional, the people that understand conventional propulsion systems could not imagine. And that they've figured out a way to do this and to keep it secret. And we're probably not the only ones working on these things. But where did they get that information?

And you know Diana Pasulka? You know her work? They describe these crafts, these crash crafts, as donations. Which is fascinating. They're left there.

The crashed retrieval program, the crashed UAP retrieval program, is essentially. they're going like, 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 a thousand years, ten thousand 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? And this idea that we monitor our skies, sure. 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?

This is a separate conversation, but the one person I know who's really pushed it, who's writing a book on it, who's a trustworthy person or a friend of mine, I know, you know him,

said to me, actually, Spenny, you're working on this. And the closer I got to, okay, but what's the genesis? Where did this, what was the Isaac Newton,

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.

in the atmosphere, on Earth, looking up or in a submarine looking out. And what is that? And, by the way, to your point, 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? If the technology is that advanced, and clearly it is, why do they make themselves visible in the first place?

on Netflix, I don't have a TV, but I like the sound of it. 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.

If you're 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,

as if 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,

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 be to...

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 to that than most people would ever want to admit.

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.

that currently exists, 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's pretty quick, really, when you think about it. It's not that long to go from being a single-celled organism to being a human being.

in a billion years, if you think about how long the universe has been around. But it's slow compared to technological evolution. I mean, a hundred 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 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 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.

allow it to utilize everything. It has the understanding of everything that exists in the universe. It's 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.

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.

they replaced muscles. So that's what the machine does, and it becomes 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,

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.

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. That's just bad. And we need to say unequivocally it's bad.

It's bad to be controlled by machines. Machines are helpmates. 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.

something 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, 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.

The way that people on my side, I'll just say, I'll just admit it, on the right, have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Are you joking? That's just like prima facie evil. Well, if we hadn't done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings. 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 civilians, so, with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons? It's 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 spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening? Would you kill baby Hitler, famously?

So I don't know why we're sitting back and allowing this to happen.

and how can that be good?

No, it doesn't.

The limits of your power are really obvious. The limits of your wisdom, same. Don't jump into shit, big things whose outcomes you can't predict with certainty. You can't know. Go in with humility.

I guess that's what I'm saying.

And do what you can, knowing that you're probably going to screw it up and you probably won't achieve your goal, but you should try. On the AI question,

everybody I've ever talked to and there's many people, was like, yeah, it could get away from us and enslave us. Let's say no to slavery. How's that? Is that a tough one? Not for me.

Maybe a good use of nuclear weapons would be to hit the data centers. Why is that crazy?

I will die. I know that. And I try to keep that in mind every day.

. Is it real? I don't know. But it's visible. You can measure it in certain animals.

I see it litter to litter, but no, there's no evidence at all that none, 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... That's why it's still a theory.

that we don't know. 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.

And we're not doing that because we know.

and the imperative of getting this weapon before Hitler got the weapon was what it was on everyone's mind.

like, is this really.

. And some of them did think it.

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

and that would include fentanyl addicts. Oh, absolutely. It's been a wild success. I actually talked to Kevin Newsom the other day.

Anyway, I'm so far afield. But my point is,

by the way, as a fact, those data centers that drive our digital life, which is not life, it's actually death mostly.

They're the biggest power draw.

How much electricity does AI require? More than countries. Our grid can't handle AI just as a practical matter.

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.

They don't like a gas stove.

That isn't a problem.

The whole process takes a while. I get it to 200, which probably takes an hour and 20..

Like it hot, yeah, yeah.

I'm so boring on this subject. Please! My wife and kids are like,

it's the one thing to be proud of in your people. Like. 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.

Right. 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.

You can't stay in a sauna that's really hot, very long, because your head heats up. 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.

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, you know, 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, um, and I couldn't without the banya hat.

It's fun. The Rock was in there with us.

Really nice guy.

We got in the sauna together. We're all hung out. Then we did a podcast together. He's a genuinely nice guy. You'd be able to sniff something out.

I've done the sauna with other people.

. Really? 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 a really hard workout. Cold plunge, starts the day. 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.

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 like 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.

Like 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've had an incredibly easy life. like most people today. They complain about the dumbest fucking 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?? It was crazy. California was patriotic.

There's fucking flags on everybody's car. Everybody was friendly. I went to New York City. It was like a totally different place. Everybody was so friendly.

It was a lot 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 the rest of the life easier.

If it doesn't destroy you, I think it's a great way to go.

It's just so obviously not good for you.

You know, they're frauds. And I don't know how they have the moral high ground in 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 dropped 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.

And I think you can kind of apply that sort of logic and reasoning as a human being to very messy issues.

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 bodies.

Stay out of their little 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.

Everything's bad. It's a shit sandwich versus a shit croissant. I'll take the shit croissant. It's smaller. That's a daily experience for everybody.

So I get that. And I don't think everything is moral absolute either. 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. 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 we'll just admit it. So the lack of reason is what freaks me out.

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.

Yes, religion, politics, they're all kind of melding. It's hard to know where one ends and another begins. So maybe a simpler and more useful way to think about it. is truth or falsehood, lying or honesty. Maybe you should 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.

You're not required to say everything. you think, obviously, and you shouldn't say everything you think. But you should never lie. And if you just stick with that, you get pretty quickly back to reason and order, don't you?

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. 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 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.

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.

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 fucking 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 lining.

What we're on right now is essentially mainstream media. It used to be, you could call it, there's corporate controlled media. I agree. And that used to be mainstream media. Mainstream media used to be CNN.

It's not really anymore. Mainstream media, 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 can see it now. If you're paying attention, you're not a boomer who only reads the newspaper. You pay attention and you see it and you go, this is horseshit.

You're like my dog. You're a slave. I'm demanding that you participate in my lie. The lack of stealth,

I'm not explaining it very well, but that really bothers me.

Did he steal anything? Did he steal bread? I forget what she said. And he was trying to explain what they were, Rico crimes, and she was saying Rico is not a crime. I saw this.

It's a category of crime. Okay.

Tell that to the Genovese family. Not only that, she's so dumb to say that publicly, and say it with confidence, and to tell a person.

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 a crime. I mean, someone with Down syndrome, I really believe are better people than I am. More likely to go to heaven.

So I'm not attacking her for being dumb. But the idea that a dumb person has no idea, the White House press secretary is in the same category, who has no idea? she's dumb. She really thinks like she won the prize, and she's the most impressive. I'm White House press secretary because I'm the best talker in America.

And she would call them out on stuff. And she was just really, really well prepared.

Obviously, she's demonized. I can't believe. you don't know who that is.

It's just funny.

Got my hard pass. And then the distance between that, that little credential they were so proud of, and the reality of their lives was like insane. Like, they're in this tiny little room. They're being treated with total contempt by the White House staff, who thinks they're just fucking animals. You know, it's like, shut up.

They're eating out of vending machines. And this was a different time, right? So, like, when I was working as a journalist in Washington, like, we went out to lunch every day. At like a good restaurant, and charge it to the company. And look, 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 that you had to, like, get back to work. We ate lunch. And I remember thinking, these people don't eat lunch. They eat like a stale Mounds bar out of a vending machine.

Like, they bring quarters to work so they can eat. I remember thinking, your life, like, you're not even human. You're just like a little puppet or something. But you're so impressed. And, like, all your neighbors know you.

He works at the White House. He's in the White House press corps. And the job, like, wasn't even really a job. You would just like, sit there and ask your question. In 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.

The best window to the relationships that they had with the politicians, at least in the 1970s. It's an amazing book.

I mean, it was bad, actually. It was 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, like, you're flying with everybody.

And you'd hit three or four cities a day. And, like, there are cocktails on the plane. And, you know, naughty behavior. And, like, you know, 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, like, 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. Write up their little reports.

And then they get back to their hotel. And they're, like, writing up more for the website. And, like, it's just an op. 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.

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 doorframe.

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, like, ten years younger, and I was his captive, so he would just, like, lecture me as he was rubbing against the doorframe. One time we went out to lunch, and we all had drinks. Of course, this was, like, mid-90s.

He didn't really drink, but he ordered this drink with, like, an umbrella, and it had a piece of watermelon on the rim of the glass. And he took the watermelon, 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. It was his true love. He was editing this magazine, but, like, his real interest was in writing about movies.

And it was, they're just sad people who wind up doing that.