Knowledge Fight - KFC #1: The Lies of Math (w/ Molly Conger)

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

In the first level of Knowledge Fight Country, Dan and his guest adventurer Molly Conger set out to understand the context around Tucker Carlson's interview with a welder who is mad about algebra.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw.

And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. All Zone Media This is going down like Donkey Kong In the fight. Knowledge.

Country. Country. I don't think that that is going to be a consistent opening for this show. But I panicked when I saw the record button had been hit. And so I had to come up with something. My name is Dan. I am someone who has done a podcast about Alex Jones for 10 years. And now I'm branching out into the wider,

world of shitheads and silly dumb-dums who put out right-wing media and maybe even some non-right-right-weight media along the way should something come up. The premise here, the exercise that I am engaged in, is generally, it's a situation where all of these folks, these assholes who put out this media, get criticism for the things that they put out and they always say, I'm being taken out of context. People just see a clip of me and they think the worst, they don't know the context. And so what I have set myself out to do is explore the context, the open world, the jungle japes, the other Donkey Kong levels, you wander around, see what's under a rock, see what's

in a barrel, take their full context and let's really see if they're telling the truth about being taken out of context. Spoiler alert, they're always lying, but we'll find out what the context is. And joining me on this first exploration of something shitty is someone who I've wanted to have on and talk to for a very long time, a host of our own podcast, weird little guys. Mali Conger, thank you for joining me. I'm so excited to finally be on with you, Dan. I've been listening to your show for close to a decade. That's unhealthy. So I was just telling you before we started recording, I spent so much time listening to you. And I just realized I've never talked to you.

You've interacted online, but we've not verbally talked to each other. It's so strange. Because I talk to you all the time, but you are not talking back to me. It's just the podcast. Yeah. You've probably yelled, oh, you dumb. You missed this little detail or something. I do that with some podcasts as well.

I feel like I end up talking to them like, oh, good point. or I correct them. So this is a dream come true. Now finally the podcast will talk back to me. Yes, yes. It's interactive now. You've immersed. So you do podcast weird little guys.

And I also love that podcast. I think it's wonderful exploration of weird little fellas. And I think that we're going to have a lot of overlap in terms of our interests. Totally kind of opposite. right? Like the actual sort of emotional tenor of the audio content, very different, but spiritually identical. Yeah, I think we have a lot of the same thoughts about these guys. You have a more dissecting and talking about them in a narrative sense. You can weave out a story that is comforting to listen to. And sometimes, you know, they have musical backing that soothes you as you talk about,

racists. And my tone is largely, I hate these people, fuck them. This is stupid. The thing that they're saying. But the same sort of addiction to contextualizing, to really show you the horror. Because a lot of times people will use context. Like you're saying, these guys, why I'm being taken out of context? As if the context would be exonerative. And I think for both of us, the thesis is the context is damning. And I have all of it. Yeah. You are so thrilled. You get to say you're being taken out of context. And you're so lucky that a lot of people are actually taking you out of context. Because the context makes it worse, brother. Yeah, we'd all have to address the bigger picture of what these folks represent and the problem that they are.

If we'd all took it in context, we'd be like, oh, oh, crisis, crisis, emergency, people are bad. So I was listening to your show, and I believe, if I recall correctly, you're sort of beginning with being interested in these kinds of people has to do with the unite the right rally. And so your interest grew out of that. Is that fair by memory of that? Yeah, I was, I was just a regular person. I was, you know, woefully ignorant of the ways in which these monsters occupied the world with us, right, until they came to where I live. And then I thought, oh, my God. Oh, my God, these people are real and they're very dangerous. And now they're in my neighborhood and they've killed someone. How did this happen? Who are these people? What is going on here?

And I'm still trying to figure that out, but it has been almost a decade. That makes a lot of sense in terms of like the freak circus came to where you live. And like, oh, I have seen this face now. I'm interested in how like, how did it become weird little guys? Like you see this. The United Right Rally comes. There's a terrible Nazi protest. Someone dies.

and then you assess it and you're like, ah, the problem is these weird little guys. So the name of the show, I think our producer Sophie came up with the name because it's something I say all the time. I didn't realize, you know, when you have your own verbal idiosyncrasy said back to you, it's a little humbling. But in my study of these men, you know, they're these great monsters, these mass shooters, these mass shooters, these terrorists, these leaders of these organizations, they make themselves out to be these larger-than-life things. But they're all just like some fucking guy. You see him up close and it's just some weird guy who sucks. And they all are. No matter what they've done,

no matter how scary and dangerous they actually truly are sometimes, it's just some fucking guy. And that, I don't know, it's comforting. That is. I only say weird little guys back to you repeatedly because I think it is a perfect encapsulation. You say it's an idiosyncratic thing of like your your language, but I think it's a perfect distillation of a lot of these. Yeah. And I think that I felt like very similarly, you know, when I was in the deposition room, seeing Alex Jones face to face for the first time.

That's right. Close enough to smell him. He smelled fine. No, I just mean like that's you're close to this subject. You've spent so much time examining. And now suddenly you're in the room like the anthropology. There's a physicalization of him in the same way that these Nazis come to your town. You know, like that you see like, ah, this is just, this is a person.

There's blood here. There's a skin. It's just a weird guy. There's this flawed human being who has very personal, sometimes very banal motivations. Yeah. It smelled fine. But here's the thing. I've been working on a theory that there's a real close connection between Cologne and Booze in terms of sense.

And I think that that's strategic on a lot of alcoholics parts. They often do have an alcohol base, yeah. The history of alcoholic men needing to cover up their alcohol, I think plausibility works into it. Like, oh, no, it's not gin. It's my cologne. Anyway, that's my theory. So, Molly, today I have prepared an episode for us to discuss. I'm so excited.

I've been racking my brain. What am I going to get? What horrors do we have? So for the time that we have together and the episodes that we're going to do, I thought I would find some guys, maybe some weird guys. Oh. We could discuss them and see their shows, but I didn't want to start too hard. I didn't want to jump to too obscure territory. I didn't want to be too safe and just talk about Alex Jones.

So I decided there's a middle ground. and that is Tucker Carlson. We are going to cover an interview that Tucker Carlson did recently. Oh, he knows how to pick a guest, too. Oh, he's so good. It's going to be somebody so normal, yeah. You know what the thing I respect about Tucker is the bookers. You know, like, they don't let the riffraff get in.

They have like solid standards. Yeah, this is a bad one. So how much familiarity would you say you have with Tucker Carlson as a figure? I don't have the fortitude that you do to watch this stuff. So like when I have to cut clips of something like this, like when I was writing about, you know, the people who are trying to bring back apartheid in South Africa, you know, Tucker Carlson had interviewed some of these people. And I was like trying to cut clips of these interviews. I don't want to watch it. I don't want to watch Tucker Carlson.

This is my damage. This is how I'm broken is that like I have taken a bit of. of time, like, away from it, and I miss it. I'll spend a whole week reading old Stormfront Post. I'm not going to sit through Tucker Carlson. I realize that in a lot of ways that this is maybe like my tragic mutant power or something that I don't mind listening to his dumb ass. And I don't know.

In the same way that, you know, you might talk back to a podcast, I find myself just being like, ah, you asshole, when Tucker says something. that alleviate some of the difficulty of it. But he does suck. There's no doubt about that. He just, he always looks like, what's that great post? He looks like a dog that just saw a magic trick. What?

He's, yeah. Or something, he's, he's experiencing like a new smell. You know, like he has this like, huh? I didn't know that this could happen from a, like, experiential. He does that a bit in this episode, so we'll get some fun. So to start off, I thought I would play a little bit of an out-of-context drop for you to enjoy. Nobody was good at motorboat and titty's their first time. But you stuck with it.

Yeah, exactly. And you got better. Yeah. What does it mean to be good at that? That's exactly the question I had. Like, what's the learning curve on that? I don't know. I would never say somebody has motorboated some titty hasn't been like expert work.

This was fantastic. A virtuoso. Yeah, I myself am a man, and so I don't, I've not had my tithes motorboated. I don't have a lot of experience with being on the business end of that. But I do know a fair amount of women. And I don't think anyone has ever been like, you know what was great. This guy really knew how to motorboat my titties. It's not something I think is for the pleasure of the woman.

No, I think it's celebratory. I think that's. I think this is something that happens in the stands at NASCAR races. Yeah. And maybe like in the background of a girl's gone wild video. Like, I don't know that this is happening a lot. lot in real life. I went to a Girls Gone Wild event once when I was like 22. It was one of the worst nights of my life. I don't want to get into it. It sucked. Because you were bad at motorboating

your first time, but you stuck with it. I was bad at watching all of that stuff happen and being at peace with it. Do you peel back the curtain of those kinds of things? Terrifying. It's not good. So do you recognize the voice? Do you know this guy? I was so distracted by the motorboating of it all that I don't think I do. Okay. Well, you shouldn't know him. Okay. He's a zero.

So as I was getting ready to launch this show, I was planning to take a little peek over at Tucker Carlson's show to see what he's been up to and how he's situating himself in the new media landscape. The man who pretended that he'd been attacked by a demon in the middle of the night and yelled at a crowd about how Trump was their daddy and he was coming home to spank them, he had to create a new position for himself now that everyone hates Trump. Tucker has always been an incredibly insincere person, so I had no doubt that he could find a new way to bullshit people, but I wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do. It seemed pretty clear that when I left off, he was trying to court the anti-Semites and the right-wing audience and was trying to ingratiate himself to some elements of the left by pretending that he actually cares about Gaza. I watched a few episodes of Tucker's show, and I was planning to cover an episode that he did with one of Alex Jones' old fourth-hour guests, Jay Dyer. He's this guy who's like really into demons and stuff and he reads a lot. He's cool. I don't think the demon pivot's going to work for Tucker, but the anti-Semitism thing could be the next big hustle.

Yeah, if you keep the demon stuff light, you can have like an early Joe Rogan kind of vibe maybe. You know, like some of the wacky stuff. But if you go all in on I was scratched by demon talons in my sleep, like people are going to turn that off. Yeah, especially when you can't answer follow-up questions about your dogs and stuff like. that. It's ridiculous. But I did end up buying Jay Dyer's book where he explains the esotericness of Hollywood. Guys who write a lot about esoterica don't always have the firmest grasp on the words. Not really, no. I was sold on it. I decided because he did an interview with Tucker and he promoted his esoteric Hollywood book, I went and I looked at the table of contents and there was a

whole big chapter about David Lynch. And I was like, yeah, all right, fine. Let's see. What do you got on this, weirdo? Keep his name out of your mouth. He does a whole thing about Twin Peaks. It's basically just describing Twin Peaks. Really like this show. You've not gotten any deeper than just like, hey, there's a shadow self.

Great. Cool, man. Whatever. Anyway, I decided that wasn't, I'm not going to do an episode about Jay Dyer. Mostly because Tucker released an episode that was so dangerous and so insightful that it demanded everyone's attention. On September 7th, Tucker released an interview with a guy named Jess Ellifson, who's apparently a ceramics artist from rural South Dakota. There's no problem with that.

And honestly, the parts of the episode that are just about pottery and how to use a kiln are pretty interesting. That's cute. Yeah, it is. I love it. He's talking about the heat you need to get up to and how an arch helps. It's important for men to have healthy hobbies. Yes. And I think that creative expression is super good for people.

So like making a bowl, making a mug. I love it. Unfortunately, the episode doesn't stay on that topic and things get real messed up. So just off the bat, I should say that I looked into some of Ellifson's work, and I assume he's an okay artist. I have no opinion on that, and it seems like he does good work, and I would use one of his bowls. That said, I worry about this guy, and I think that he has terrible vibes. He and Tucker don't have great chemistry, and Elefson's sands. and himself comes off a bit depressed.

But leaving that aside, there are a number of big problems with the reasoning that's displayed in this interview. I feel like that makes it worth discussing. Also, you know, people were posting clips about it all online. And I think some of them missed some of the point of it. I think missed the context, let's say. So I'm not much of a sculptor or I don't have a lot of artistic hobbies. But I do respect it.

I think it's fine. I think that's great. Like I said, I think it's great for men to have a healthy and productive hobby. Too many of them don't. So that's wonderful. I'm glad he's making his bowls. I hope he's not using a lead-based glaze. There's no comment on that.

He does talk about different things you add to clay, different. I forget the word that they use, the clay people use. There's a fun fucking word that is about like the makeup of clay. I forgot it. Anyway, here's the point I'm trying to get at. Do you think it makes sense for Tucker Carlson to interview? you a guy who makes pots. But like I said, I haven't watched a lot of Tucker.

So maybe he's sort of branching out. So maybe there's like an old arts and culture segment. Like maybe he's got a weather guy. Like maybe it's sort of an hour long news program now where there's an arts section. Right? So there's no demons. That would be perfect if that were this. This is the feature interview.

So he didn't bring this guy on to talk about pottery. Maybe a little bit. But not like as a human interest segment. Okay. How do we, how do we get from Tucker Carlson to pottery? and it's not demons. Well, he interviewed Putin. Putin is in Russia.

Russia is where the Faberger eggs are. Eggs are basically pots or yolk. Is this guy into some sort of fringe religious movement? I mean, he's an anti-Semite. That's what we're going to get to. But like, he posts shit on TikTok that's really offensive. That's basically why Tucker found him, I'm sure. I was going to say this is sort of rock bottom.

for Tucker because this is just some random anti-Semite from TikTok who makes vases in his spare time. It's worse than Rock Bottom in that sense because I really think that the interview is really embarrassing and bad. And I don't think he should have put it out. And that's the thesis that I'll get to at the end. Because he used to at least be getting like, I don't know, like some Hungarian guy who works for the Heritage Foundation or like, you know, that apartheid guy who at least ran a whites only community, you know. racist of some prestige. Yeah, or Putin. Or actually Vladimir Putin. Yeah.

And I, you know what? Hey, I'm not super into gatekeeping. So the idea that he would open the door to this potter on the basis of his racism, I don't want to be like the elitist snob who's like, you can't come in. But I think it was a bad idea. He's trying to promote from the outside. Smart. Yeah.

So is his show, is it just on YouTube now? Or is it streaming on X.com? Like, how do you even? even watch this. The everything app. It's on there. He has his own network, too. But I think I didn't follow it too closely, but I remember recently, like the

subscriber numbers came out and they were pretty like abysmal. So I don't know. I think I find him on rumble. I think he's on rumble where I find him. Yeah. But he's probably on YouTube. Everybody posts the clips all over the place and they're like, isn't this stupid.

So you ready to jump in? All right, hit me with the potter. I'm ready. All right, here we go. Here is Tucker introducing Jess and sort of seemingly apologizing for doing the interview in the first seconds of it. Jess, thank you for doing this. Thank you, Tucker. One of my many theories, but the one I believe in most fervently is that the meritocracy as practiced in the United States is not a meritocracy.

The promise is, you know, the system is going to locate the smartest people in the 50 states, funnel them through a certain, number of approved schools and then into a certain number of approved businesses or government, and we're going to get good governance and a good country as a result. And in fact, the opposite has happened. The system is designed to exclude rather than include, exclude Christians, people with an independent cast of mind, creativity, an awakened spirit, all of them, genius. All of them are excluded in favor of hyper-aggressive, selfish, small-minded, cruel, compliant people. And that's how you wind up with a system where Ben Shapiro gets into Harvard. Like, how could Ben Shapiro, I'm just like on IQ points, it's not possible.

Sorry for the long preamble, but there's a reason, and I want viewers to understand why I was so anxious to do this interview. Very anxious. You live on a farm in South Dakota. You are a potter and a welder, and I think you're one of the best artists I've met personally. I think you have a kind of genius to what you do in an aesthetic sense that's last. lacking in our leadership. And I don't think a government populated by people who cared about beauty would blow up girls schools or allow its population to die of drug odies.

So I think it really, really matters. The love of beauty really matters. And you have it. That's fascism. Anyway, that's why I'm doing this interview. And there's a bigger reason. It's a big reason. That love of beauty shit.

That's a dog whistle right there. It is. It is. But I think it's a dog whistle. It doesn't have to be. But the way he. He says it set something off for me. Oh, no, I'm, I 100% agree with you.

I just think it's a dog whistle that's easy to get away with. I think that a lot of people will hear that and be like, yeah, I love beauty. I love things that are beautiful. Yeah, it's delightful. It makes, I, I, we're talking about eliminating that, which is not beautiful. Right. And the definition of beautiful is pretty convenient. A certain kind of, yeah, this preservation of Western culture.

This, that's garbage. It's genius. Now I got to see these bowls, actually. Do we have some pictures of these bowls? If he's the best... You can look him up. He's Jess Ellifson. It's spelled E-L-O-F-S-O-N.

You can find some of his bowls. Probably sold out by now because of the Tucker appearance. But you know what? Honestly, I said that his stuff looked okay, and I stand by that. But he's the best artist Tucker seen a little much. Okay. I'm looking at an old Facebook page. Jess Ellison Fine Art. He hasn't updated it in a few years. So maybe he's better now. And it's like, yeah, it's good. It's good. But there are several people at my local farmer's market who sell identical pots cups and bowls. And they're fine. And I think up until fairly recently, he probably was one of them. You know, like that was what he was doing. Like this is just farmers market level pottery. It's nice. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe not the best artist of all time. Or something that indicts the government. But whatever.

And I'm not trying to gatekeep art, but I just don't know that like mugs, I don't know. If we're talking about the best art I've ever seen, no matter how good the mug is, the mug is never going to be the best art I've ever seen. Yeah. And Tucker grew up rich. Tucker is an heir to a fortune. He's been to a museum. Right.

He has. And he's not dumb in the way that he needs to be for this episode to make any sense. But for me, look, I'm a little different. I'm a little weird. If I'm getting a mug, I want it to be the lowest possible art. Like I had one that said still crazy after all these beers and I was like, this is my favorite mug of all time. That's art. Yeah, I think the mugs in my cabinet are all just showed up here.

Yeah, it's a thing you accumulate over time. They just materialize. Yeah. So Tucker starts off this episode, I think a bit defensively, as if he needs to answer the question, why the fuck are you doing this interview? This kind of makes sense because Jess Ellifson is not necessarily a household name. and even if he were the world's most famous potter and welder, it's still kind of weird for him to be popping up on Tucker's show

because Tucker interviewed Putin. But Tucker says something important in that clip, which is that there's a bigger reason why he's doing this interview. If we're watching this and we're supposed to take him at his word, then there's something about Jess that makes him a relevant guest for Tucker to present to his audience, so we need to keep our ears open and see if we can figure out what that thing is. These people with these awakened minds and spirits are being shut out of this false meritocracy that rewards people specifically like Ben Shapiro. So we're getting the anti-Semitism pivot early here.

Yeah, I mean, there's cues. And he's sneaking it in gently because a lot of people are like, yeah, I hate Ben Shapiro too. I hate him for a lot of reasons. Not the ones you do, though, Tucker. Maybe. It's subtle. It's very subtle. It's smooth.

Yeah. So we have a vague insinuation of nefarious groups opposing Chris. and getting people like Ben Shapiro and Ivy League schools. So these are early clues, but we'll see where else this goes. So Jess talks a little bit here about his love of art. And I think if we just stayed around this, it wouldn't be too bad. My name is Jess Ellifson. I'm a three-dimensional artist.

I do not. While I'm primarily working ceramics, all three-dimensional art. I can work with any medium and create beauty with it. And that really is the goal of what I try to do to make beautiful things out of materials that no one would ever think of. It's why I love ceramics. I can create beautiful, long-lasting, enduring pieces of functional art that people can appreciate from just nothing more than raw elements off the periodic table. and it requires absolutely zero input or assistance from any other human on this planet. It is truly my own skills, my own mind, and my own abilities put down for eternity.

I mean, he's wrong, and I think that his perspective is off about how no one else is contributing to anything, even in his own art. But leaving that aside, it's kind of like, all right, all right, dude. You like to make art? Zero Riz on this guy, too. Like, this is not a good interview so far. I agree. I agree. Like, they're both approaching this very low energy.

Tucker's like, I think you're brilliant. And this guy's like, yeah, I am brilliant. Like, I'm not in. Here's the issue. Tucker seems embarrassed. There's a Tucker vibe that he does when he's like trying to be really serious or seem really serious and it's forced. It's this low energy kind of thing we're seeing here.

And then I don't know anything about Jess. So I don't want to insinuate or speculate. But like, there's a mood issue here. I don't think he's, he doesn't pop off the screen. If you're just listening to it, especially. If you're not looking at him, I'm worried about him. I hear him and I'm like, I think. He says he's a 3D artist, but he has a very flat affect.

Yes. Yeah. To the point where I think, like, I worry about heroin withdrawal or something. I don't know what's going on, but he seems, he seems flat. Maybe he's so nervous to meet his hero that he had to take a beta blocker. It could be. You know, he took two or three propranol, and he's just... If you're watched the video, he has shades on through the whole interview.

No. And he's smoking cigarettes and doors at Tucker's desk. So like... Just blasting Sigs with sunglasses on? Come on. Tucker has to very overtly put in a packet of... his couch tobacco, I think as a defense against this guy smoking cigarettes at his table. It's a little antisocial.

Oh, I wonder if you can hear the Zinn in his cheek. I feel like I wouldn't be able to enunciate well. He probably spit it out as soon as the camera was away from him. But I don't have any problem necessarily with Tucker interviewing someone about art. And if this guy just wants to talk about his own skills, great. But it's never just that simple, is it? Oh, I did find a picture of him sitting at the desk in his little sunglasses with this very bad haircut. What's going on here?

See, yeah. I'm not somebody who has the best aesthetic senses. So, like, I didn't want to, I didn't want to point that out. But it is a weird kind of bowlish haircut. But it's like uneven. Like, it looks like he did it with kitchen scissors and no mirror. Like, he gave himself a bowl cut with scissors that were not sharp enough. There's a part of me that kind of like is like, yeah, whatever.

He lives on a farm in South Dakota. Like, he's an artist. He's an artist. I don't think he needs to necessarily be camera ready, except he's on camera. And so, yeah, there's a little bit like, I get it. You don't really try all that hard, but like, you're, come on. I mean, I had a moment of panic when I logged in today. I was like, this show's not video, right?

They would have told me if this was video because I would have brushed my hair. No. First of all, you look fine. And second, no, we're not on video. I don't need the world to see all my weird tics. and how much I faped. I'm a podcaster because I don't get dressed every day. Yeah.

So we shift off the conversation of Just Art to how much Jess doesn't like bullshit art. Okay. It's a lot of bullshit out there. Since high school art classes, I got in trouble for calling bullshit. He's an outsider. Modern art. They were like, this is in the Guggenheim. I was like, why?

Because that's fucking horrendous. He tells it like I wouldn't put that in my toilet. Like you think that this dude is skilled? Like people who just drape plastic over shit or duct tape a banana to a wall? Like there's no possible way if you're being intellectually honest with me that you have any appreciation for this shit. And so before I want to understand what the purpose of it is. I mean, clearly this didn't arise organically. the movement, which began with Dada 100 years ago

and then flowered into all kinds of different movements, but basically modern and postmodern art? I've heard it was a CIA op. Like literally, like with Jackson Pollock, who just slapped paint on a canvas, and it was just trash, and there's no thought or interesting things beyond it. I've heard that the CIA started just paying retarded amounts of money

for his painting. just to fuck with Russia. Because they were like, we'll do this and we'll make this the art. And like, when you look at Russian art and Russian classical architecture, which is like how our architecture used to be, right? Yes. Like beauty, symmetry, skill. Like, they wanted to confuse them.

And for what reason? I mean, that's their admitted goal. Who's they? And then you wonder, like, is that even their admitted goal? Were they just trying to destroy our society? because that was the actual end effect, right? It was the end effect. I love Tucker as like, yes, yes.

By the age, do you mean like Judeo-Bolshevism? Is that way, like, what are we doing? What are we doing, brother? Also, that banana thing he's talking about. He didn't say that to his high school art teacher, because that's from 2019. Oh. Are you 24?

Are you 24? I think he's probably thinking about some of the, like, soup cans and Andy Warholish guy. He said specifically the banana tape to the wall, as this example of this like really stupid piece of art. That's from 2019. That is a specific piece of art. Yeah, but he's still mad about it. And he was mad about the same thing back when he was a kid.

It's giving some guy on Rogan who's had like a few puffs of a joint. And he's like, yeah, man, he's got this half remembered fact. And he's just vibing it out. And they don't even have Jamie to look it up. Yeah. It is giving older brother's friend. The CIA invented modern art, man. Like, all right.

Yeah. that's great. I mean, he's right in some ways. There's a kernel of truth to some of the government funding of that particular art movement in response as part of the cultural war with during the Cold War. But I'm not sure he totally understands what he's talking about. No, it was that they wanted to create the image that communists and the Soviet Union were incapable of creativity and they didn't have a vibrant culture. And so the CIA helped fund and promote American artistic movements as part of the Cold War anti-communist hysteria. Like, that's not untrue.

But then the idea that they were just trying to confuse Russia and decay society or something like that, that's not established. But that's the place that Tucker and Jess want to take this to. He's talking about high school art class. So he's not actually taken an art class, like an art history class, an art appreciation class. No, that's not fair. He has a degree.

In what? Welding? Art. Does he? We're going to get into his college career a little bit later. So hold your horses on that. Because guys you were talking about how they were too edgy in high school grow up. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that he has a high school art's perspective, kind of, that he's definitely embodying. But he does have some education. And we'll get into a lot of specifics about that in a little bit. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello! My gosh.

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Open the free IHRRA radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. I'm Melissa Jeltson, and in my new podcast what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck.

Because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that.

And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing the disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go. get your podcasts.

Blockers. In Washington, it became the worst thing you could be. And I found six of them. People who devoted their lives to public service, who believed their work mattered, until they were told they no longer belonged. I'm Michael Lewis in my new audiobook, Blockers, Rebels in the Deep State, tells the story of these blockers. People who kept our most sensitive data secure, helped prevent wildfires, made huge scientific. scientific discoveries, but got in the way of the Trump administration's agenda. What fascinated me wasn't politics. It was what happens when a society decides it no longer values the people doing the work it depends on.

Get Blockers Now, only at blockers.fm. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good france.

I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to Examined the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not desert of happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay.

For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life. threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated. Someone's not going to make it out of this alive. It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie.

He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. First, we have to get to this idea that they're trying to confuse us and demoralize us and decay society. Who's they? I think you nailed it, Judeo-Bolshevists or communist. That's like the explanation for communists, whatever. I don't know. They don't say.

They hint. They never say. And by they, I mean guys like Tucker. Yeah. I think that Tucker likes other people to say, and then he makes a shocked face. Right. Like he's inching closer. He's inching closer to saying it, but he doesn't like to.

No, it's gauche. It's de class A to say those kinds of things. Also, I think felt spar is the word I was looking for when it's talking about the makeup of clay. Oh, that's a kind of rock, isn't it? I think so. Like a mineral from the soil? I don't know. I feel like Feldspar.

was the word. And if it's not, I'm going to say it was. I believe you. So this next clip we have is about Obama's presidential library and how it's ugly art that's destroying America. Very important stuff. Yeah. This is important to society. And this is the presidential library of Barack Obama, which I think I have read cost approaching a billion dollars to construct. It's in Chicago. Here it is. We're putting it on the screen now. So what do you make of that? Is that beautiful? the eye of mordor no it is it is the absolute contrary opposition to aesthetics and beauty there's no symmetry to that symmetry is the basis of beauty yes that's that's what your eye immediately is drawn to you don't have to be told what's beautiful that's right you don't have to be told when a woman is

beautiful like and they teach you that in earth art school, but then somehow it gets lost in the upper levels, you know, draw a line down the middle, perspective, symmetry, balance, aesthetic. So symmetry is balance, right? Yeah. So the human body is... Draw a line, yeah. And you can feel it through, you know, just by touch, you're from your palate to your

navel, to your toes, you are symmetrical. You two sides have joined, even sides have joined, mirror images have joined. And there's a... And that is true in nature. It's true in plants. that's true in other animals. And so this is an organic fact. Symmetry is beauty.

The Fibonacci spiral. Yeah. The golden ratio. The golden means. Why not bring up? Sacred geometry. The whole way everything was built and created before, you know, what, the industrial revolution and the degradation of our own culture.

Probably. Yes. And so if something is asymmetrical, by definition, it cannot be beautiful. Or it's an assault on the senses. Yeah. Right. So you look at that building and you have to ask, what's the purpose of it?

And when you spend $800 million to build something, it's not a haphazard project. There's a design to it, right? Literally a design, but also a conceptual design. Like, what are you trying to do with this building? I mean, that amount of money, it's got to be money laundering, right? Well, there's that. It didn't cost $2 million to build. There's no way.

Like, you were just slapping together shit. You didn't cut shit. You didn't measure anything. you were just like, hey, look at that piece of metal I found in the scrap pile. Well, that one to this one, you know, is there even windows in the thing? Right. Like, there's no way it could be billions of dollars. It's just not possible.

And yet the number of credentialed members of our ruling class will gaze upon that building and, you know, give lectures about how it's beauty. And it challenges us to, excuse me, understand this or that. They'll justify it as art when every person looking at it knows that it's grotesque. It's offensive. So what's the purpose of that? It's to hurt us, isn't it? To hurt us.

To degrade our society, to destroy our families. Yes. It's destroying our families. It's destroying our family. The Obama Library's design is to destroy your family. I mean, it's like a little bit brutalist, I guess. Like, I don't, it's not for me, it's not my prefer. style, but I don't think it's destroying my family.

What? How can your family exist? Speaking of family is my parents are going to come to town this weekend and one of the things they wanted to do. Yeah, they wanted to go to the Obama Museum or the library. Be careful. It's going to destroy your family. We've been making a lot of progress lately, healing a lot of old wounds and I'm very worried that the design of this building. Yep. I'm going to look at that asymmetry in the building and be like, Dad! Okay, first of all, I do think they did measure it because the lines are pretty straight.

The lines are, I think there probably was measuring and cutting. I have to say. And it does have windows. I mean, some of that shit talk, you know, like some of the, they obviously there's like, no one thinks that they made this by accident or like that the building was just like, oh, they just slapped some things together. But like, come on. So I looked at it up, but they did cost $800 million.

So that was the number Tucker used. But this guy went from a. billion to billions as the conversation progressed. He was like billions of dollars. It's fast and loose. You know, details aren't so important. But it's fine. It's fine.

It's a valid point to say that a lot of this stuff ends up with inflated budgets and that there is some corruption. That's fine. If you want to talk about that, but like, the wall is ruining my family. What the fuck is wrong with you? I'm sure some contractors got paid more than they needed to be paid. I have no doubt that that occurs. in many projects of this size.

But it's not, it's not, they didn't design this with the explicit intention of destroying your family. No, no. If that was the goal, I think they would have tried harder. I think it would be way weirder. Yeah, I think that they have preferred artistic styles that they're into. And like, if I see a building that is... Not everything can have white columns, okay? I'm sick of it.

But if I see a building with white columns and everything's symmetrical, I'm not like, oh, no, this is trying to attack my weirdness. or my lack of a family. It's destroying my family. Yeah, exactly. I don't feel indicted by symmetry or asymmetry. I don't think I've ever looked at a building and thought I was destroying my family. No, no. I'm trying to think.

Well, maybe. I think the building and the zone of interest is pretty upsetting. You know who can look at a building and say this is destroying my family? Guys who have a lot of opinions about family court. Yeah, those buildings destroy. They've destroyed a lot of weird little guys family. So we're drawn to beauty. I think we all can agree on that.

Sure. Everybody likes things that are beautiful, but that's a very vague thing to say. It's true. And in this next clip, I get worried that maybe Jess has an inability to recognize beauty. We are all drawn to beauty.

Look at the classical art and the Greek sculptures of the ideal human form. We should be worshipping those things. not having dicks on chicks. Right. Which itself is an assault on not just the natural order, but aesthetics. What in this society today isn't an assault on humanity?

Wow. That must be stressful for us. It's become so blatant and obvious that they hate us and they want to destroy our lives and make us miserable and beat us down and shove horrible. ugly disgusting music and architecture. There is nothing mainstream in this world that has any beauty in it. It is disgusting. Even the thoughts and policies of this government are disgusting, the music that they put out, which is also purposely to degrade our society. There has been nothing created mainstream in this world since I was born.

that should be taken in by human senses. It is, I'm disgusted by it all. I've been disgusted by it all. This is the most relaxed hyperbole. Everything sits up and board sucks. I love a hater. Don't get me wrong. Like, I do enjoy someone who's just needlessly contrarian.

But, like, this guy sounds like a bummer. He just sounds very. It sounds very depressed. This isn't even proper hating because he's not giving us specific examples and what he doesn't like about it. He's just saying everything's very bad and it's, and they made it bad to hurt me. Like, you're just depressed, man. Yeah. And I don't, I don't believe that, like, there aren't songs and movies that he likes.

I don't believe that for a second. Put on some Ted Nugent for him. That'll cheer him up. That's not mainstream, right? That's how he would get around. Yeah, it is? Well, not. now. It was mainstream when like cat scratch fever came out for like a week.

But surely there is one thing he's ever seen that he's enjoyed. Absolutely. Yeah. And I will say that he better not make any pop culture references throughout the rest of this episode. Otherwise, uh-oh. Is that foreshadowing? No. Yeah, he just seems like a bummer. I think also there's something really funny about the way he's speaking. He's like the ideas, the government, the music they put out. Like, it's the government. Mid putting out music. Like Trump's not hasn't dropped an album. Like say one concrete thing.

Tell me one thing that has any substance to it. I think he probably didn't like, you know, anything whap. He didn't like that. He didn't like that song. Yeah, he hated that. That was an attack on his family. I mean, it might have been. Does he have a family?

Does this man have a wife? He does. He has a wife. He has at least some kids. I don't know. I didn't look too deeply into that because I think like, whatever's going on there. That's his business. but yeah, he's got a family.

Who booked this? I don't know. Some really very talented organizer who knew how to do numbers. I think that, like, he lives on a farm in South Dakota, and he says that he built his house out of, like, shipping containers that he welded together. That's kind of cool. And his family has owned this land for, like, six generations. And so, like, that's his sort of domestic situation is just, like,

The family's got a plot of land and his parents still live there and his kids live there. And it's all just kind of a homestead kind of thing. That's on brand for Tucker. That makes sense. Yeah. So obviously, we're confused by how much he hates all art that has ever existed since he's been born. Right. Most artists would at least have some art that they would tell you that they like.

He does get to like some classical stuff like the nudes from Rome. Greek news. He likes a Greek news. He likes a Greek nude. Yeah, but Tucker doesn't have to go that far back to get to something he likes. He wants to talk about how Jess's art is beautiful, not like the Obama building. Best he's ever seen. Yeah.

I almost feel bad putting that up there. I mean, because as you said, ugliness, intentional ugliness, asymmetrical design, assaults on us are everywhere. I mean, from the packaging and the products we buy at the supermarket to the design of fast food restaurants and big box stores. You know, it's all around as omnipresent. But this is just a obvious example. I want to contrast that with a video that I saw. I want to play 15 or 20 seconds of it of art that you were creating, which we have been trained to dismiss as not art, as utilitarian, as welding.

This is video. This was my first experience of your work. And the first time I heard your name is someone to send me this video. I love this video. He says that it's one of the first. videos he's ever shown his wife because he was so excited about it. One of the first videos he's ever shown his wife. I find that to be utter bullshit.

I've shown my husband like 70 videos today. Yeah. And I think that Tucker is somebody who sees a lot of dumb shit online that he might be like, hey, honey, look at this. People are making fun of me because I said I got attacked by a demon while you were in bed with me. But Tucker puts on the screen, it's a shot of a wood burning stove that Jess has created out of like a piece of, you know, the arm, the scoop arm of like construction equipment, inside the scoop

of that, like that bucket, he's made a woodburning stove in that. Okay. That's kind of cool. Yeah. It looks cool. I like it. That's cool. I don't know if there's anything deeper. Is that safe in terms of like material safety, like to burn a fire inside of that? Is that like rated for that kind of temperature? I think it is probably safe based on what he explains. But there's also like a, the scoop teeth are coming out of the bottom of it. So like, I don't know when you would ever implement this as a piece of decor. It wouldn't go in anybody's house. Like, I don't know what the purpose of it is, but it does look cool.

So fine. Is it symmetrical? That's the most important question. No. No, it's not. It can't be because it hasn't opened, like a door that opens to the side. It doesn't have like. So it's not beautiful.

I think definitionally we've learned it's not. But I think it kind of is. Well, I was just trying to look for some more of his art, and I found a very cool sculpture of a skull smoking a cigarette. Hell yeah. That rules. So this guy knows beauty. Yes. I have no problem with a skull smoking a cigarette.

That's great. That's fine. That's fine. But you can't tell me it's better than any other art currently existing on the planet. It's better than literally everything that they want you to like. I mean, it's not destroying my family. I'll give it that. Yeah. So South Dakota is where this guy lives. And Tucker wants to know about like, hey, what's it like over there?

So give us some background on you. Where do you see you live in Soho in New York over your gallery? Tell us where you're from. I live on my family farm in South Dakota about 20 miles east of Sioux Falls, not far enough from civilization. And there's a thriving conceptual art community there? No, South Dakota does not like me. Why? Because they are mainstream. Yeah. It is 10 years behind the rest of the world.

They're insecure, like a lot of rural places, and they seek mainstream acceptance, and so they fall for the dumbest lies. Sioux Falls wants to be all of the other biggest shitty cities. Rani is, like, addicted to bringing in the shittiest ideas from every other shitty city. Why don't we have African homeless here? Where's our drug problem? We need that.

Yeah. They are super concerned about it. They feel left out. There's not enough stabbings and shootings and drug addictions. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm very, as someone who lives in a rural area, I'm very familiar with the mindset. Tell me about the farm.

It's a family farm. So, like, that's a strange transition to tell me about the farm. But obviously, it's just like there's too many non-white people around. I would prefer that. Great. Yeah. They hate me. They hate me there. They're too mainstream. Sue Falls.

A bunch of people. They're chasing all the trends, Sioux Falls. That's, I mean, that's, I think one thing everyone knows about Sioux Falls, South Dakota is their trendies. Yeah, they adopted the like snap bracelets in the 90s way ahead of everybody else. They were so thirsty and desperate to get on pogs. No, he's saying they're like a few years behind. Like they're chasing these trends, but they're just not fast enough. Yeah, so maybe they have pogs now.

They're all still using tomogachis. I think that anybody who's like, this city hates me is either like so full of shit or deserves it. Like if a town does hate you. What are you doing? Yeah, you're an asshole probably, right? I mean, I think. Like, are you showing up to town meetings and being really weird? I think you'd have to be.

I don't think Chicago has any opinion on me. I'll say that. I think a lot of people like you. Not the city. The city has, the city is unaware of me. There was a period of time in my life where I was very annoying to the mayor on a personal level. And I think that's cool, actually. But the city did not hate me.

No. And if that's what he was saying, if he's, he's like, I'm a rabble rouser and a gadfly on the local government. No, I think he's talking about just like the people, the people of Sioux Falls don't appreciate his genius. Yeah. Because they're so pedestrian. They don't like that he's a dick. They don't understand his cool art of cups. And skulls that smoke?

That was from like 15 years ago. I don't think he's making cool art like that anymore. But I think if you make something like that, you can kind of retire. If you make a skull that smoking... That's your David. Yeah, yeah. That's something that's going to stand the test of time. Future civilizations are going to find it and they're going to learn so much about us from it.

And the cigarette, the cigarette wasn't sculpted. It was a real lit cigarette in the skull's mouth. You know what? Pretty cool. Pretty cool. That rocks. So he said that he lives on a farm. And so Tucker asks, what kind of farm? What kind of farm is this? Does he farm? Is he growing anything? We'll see. What kind of farm is it? Primarily agriculture. It's crossed many different things over the century and a half. I'm trying to bring it back to incorporate grass-fed, livestock. I want to take it back to self-sufficient. If I'm you got, uh, agriculture, we've got a business you got. Primarily agriculture.

I got a company business. I got a business company. Okay, cool, man. So if it's, if it's primarily agriculture, what other kind of farm is it? I don't know all the types of farms there are. But I think that if someone were engaged in farming, that's not the answer they would give. They would say soybean or cattle. This season we're growing corn. Yeah, no, that's a sign of bullshit. I think he has a garden. Like, just because you have a lot of land,

does it mean you have a farm? Like, not all, it might be zoned agricultural, but it doesn't mean you're doing agriculture. Yeah, that's the sense that I get from him. He probably grows some things, but like, it's not a farm. Legally, it's a farm. For tax purposes, it is a farm. But he's not farming.

It's not like, it's not something like where you have, these plots that are dedicated to and like turning over the so. Like in the way that we imagine farmer. He doesn't have a tractor. If he does, it's maybe an art installation. Well, apparently he does some custom auto work. So maybe he knows how to make a tractor. I don't know.

Later in this episode, he's going to say that he makes the best cars that anyone has ever made. And it comes off very believable. How can he be both so depressed and so confident? See, that's where I think like there might be a heroin. situation. I think that I don't know. I don't know. He's a confusing guy. He popped a Xanax because he was nervous about the interview, maybe. We can go out of our way all we want to come up with explanations, but what we're seeing is what we're seeing. We just have what we have. So you asked about

Jess's family that is under attack by buildings. That's why he has to live on a farm, so they don't see these buildings that will destroy his family. And there's nothing more symmetrical than welded together shipping containers. So it works perfect. I forgot he made his house out of trash. I think he did. I don't remember exactly what I think he said that. But in this next clip, he discusses parenting. I bet he's a great dad. I bet he's fun. I built cars from the ground up. The best cars ever built, the old Ford 60s, 70s. There again, no car has been built since 1979. That's worth the money you pay for it. Yeah. What's in your studio?

A wood stove. I bet. Yeah. Yeah. What else? I write all the greatest things I've ever learned on the walls around me. Pieces of history. Some native pottery artifacts that I've collected from around the world.

I love history. I think without history, you, you can't understand where you need to go. You can't understand where we've been. But moreover, you can see the mistakes of the past. Everyone has something to teach us, and the most important lesson is what not to do. And if you learn only what not to do,

I said that to my daughter the other day. I was like, you know, I don't, my daughter was born when I was 23 years old, me and my wife, they was not planned, you know, but it bonded us together. And all as I knew was what not to do from how I grew up. What did you know not to do? Not ignore your kids that even five minutes of not paying attention can cost lives. True. No one is guaranteed another day on this earth. That's right. And we can all leave at any moment. So live your life to the fullest, use every moment. He does not know where he is from moment to moment. It's not hard to love your child

and just be supportive. All you have to think is, how would I want to be talked to in this moment? Like, what would I need? What would I have liked to have heard? The question was, what's in your studio. And there's no guidance in this world anymore. It'd be awesome if if if there was anybody out there like any preachers or churches or figures that were like here's how you properly raise a family and it's that doesn't exist. It's it's only like how to destroy a family. Cool. Buildings. Yeah. You were so right like this is the he doesn't know where he is like what is going on here. The question was what is in your studio? And he said a wood stove and I write all my. best ideas on the walls.

And things that he learned from other places like a native pottery. But he's just like scrolling on the walls? Probably. That sounds like it looks crazy. Yeah, I would, I would assume so. Yeah, but also kind of cool. He didn't say like a kiln, a potter's wheel, some art that I enjoy. He's like, I write on the walls and I love my daughter and I learned not to not pay attention

because that costs lives. Like at this point. I think they have already talked a little bit about his self. He built his own kiln, like this big woodburning stove. And so I think that's what that's addressed by that. Yeah, but you're right. This is, this does sound a little bit. It was a weird answer to the question.

Yeah. I would love to see what, because I'm picturing like in some kind of thriller movie where someone is like slowly losing their mind trying to solve a mystery and they start writing the clues on the walls. That's what I'm picturing. Yeah. I'm picturing. So when I was in high school in a psychology class, they showed us some documentary. I have no idea what it was. I've never been able to find it. But it involved somebody who was living with schizophrenia who was on the streets. And I will never forget, they had written their name on the wall. And it was in who. And they told the camera person, I have signed my name in Fetius. And I have never forgotten. that and the delivery of it was so like elevated and so like sincere.

Kind of what we're getting. Exactly. That's kind of what I feel from him. I have signed my name, Infecious. Infecious. Yeah. So this is completely unfocused. Tucker asked Jess about what's in his studio and that launched him off on a rambling take about how you got to know history and all you need to raise children is no what not to do. But he also wishes the churches would give you parenting manuals. churches that do and they're bad. They're real bad. Maybe not for him. There are some churches that are telling you what to do with your children and you should not use those books. I think my experience is that every church has a element of that. To whatever degree, they're forceful with it. Like, it varies.

But every single church is going to have some pamphlet about like what to do in a parenting situation. Like he imagines there's just this like chill like oh we don't know anything church please I was thinking to to train up a child that's that child abuse manual that a lot of evangelicals really like that's like the militant uh kind of it does exist it's a bad idea even in my like sort of evangelical e baptisty kind of upbringing there was stuff that was totally benign that was like light versions of that like it's everywhere it's all over this guy what he was what he wants is there. He could walk into any church within a 50-mile radius of his home and find what he's

looking for. Yeah. Tucker probably knows some guys. Oh, Tucker, I absolutely knows some guys who would it help you in your child abuse journey. This whole thing is just insane. And I'm not convinced that the rambling that we just listened to ended there because I cut this clip where Tucker's video went to commercial. That stuff about how no one's promised any time, it feels weird because I only know what Tucker's video has told me about Jess.

This tone suggests that he's talking about a child who passed early, but they haven't addressed that in any way or indicated that in the episode. So I don't know what to feel about this vibe shift. Like it really feels heavy. Right. When he was saying, like, you know, what have you learned, you know, what have you learned, I guess from your own past? You know, if you look away for five minutes, that cost lives.

Like, did he have a sibling who drowned? That was my first thought was like, did your brother drown? I attached it to the kid because he was talking about his. kid too. Right. Like so it just the... I was thinking like, did you learn something from from your own childhood that you're applying to your parenting strategy?

I don't know. Yeah. It's fucking insane. And the vibe is like if a child is dead here, you should tell me that. Yes. Yes. I will respond to this slightly differently if you're talking about that experience. But as it is...

If you're having trouble approaching that, like let me know and I'll be more gentle. Yeah. But as it stands, that's not on the table. And I, I just think that it's so weird. Tucker's checked out and it comes out in how little control he's exerting as a host on this show. Jess seems like he's going through mood swings and because Tucker can't or won't captain the ship, this episode is forced to go along with him. One minute he's bragging like, I build the best cars.

And then in an instant it feels like he's eulogizing a kid and none of it tracks. It just feels crazy. And I reminded suddenly that if you're watching it, he's wearing sunglasses and blasting SIGs. Yeah. Yeah. And it has some nice sleeve tattoos, like sort of arm tattoos showing, has a very unsymmetrical posture, let's say. So not beautiful. I think that someone in one of these churches that tells you how to raise a kid would tell you to sit up straight. So, you know, Dan, obviously you're an experienced host, right? But you for the most part have hosted with a consistent co-host.

But when you're relying on an unpredictable rotating cast of guests that maybe you haven't worked with before, you don't know, not everything's a hit. And if something is really super bad, if you have a guest on the show and it's just like every second is excruciating for both of you, you don't have to put that one out. No, you don't. You don't have to put that one out. Sometimes you scrap it. I think that this is a thought that we're going to definitely.

I definitely loop back around to towards the end of this episode that I very much think that there's obligation has to be the only reason that this came out. He just didn't have anything else to air this week. And he probably had some ads that he sold or something like that that he needed to put something out. And so like, who gives a shit? Put out this interview with this weird welder. But he has some ideas. I bet. Yeah.

And we're going to get to some of them like this. I don't understand how any historian or anybody in the modern culture can look at the Roman Empire who had running water, toilets, and showers. Where did those things go? If this is just a slowly progression, then what was the Middle Ages? Why were people shitting in ditches? No, things fall apart very quickly, repeatedly, and often, right? I think we've lost the technology of flushing toilets like three times in the last 2,000 years.

That's kind of a central technology. Yeah. Bruckers are signing off with that. That's fun. And like I said, this is just, it's Joe Rogan, but they don't even have Jamie. They can't even get Jamie to look it up. And I think that Joe Woody, like, I think generally, I don't know, I'm giving too much credit. I'm stopping myself mid-sentence.

I've never actually watched any Joe. Rogan, to be so honest with you. I was going to be so polite and nice and say his guests wouldn't be the kind of people who would say, like, yeah, we forgot how to make flush toilets, but they probably would. I love it when a guy is like, because I do not know this information, this information is simply not knowable. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

No one knows how this happened. Rome fell and we fucking forgot how to make water run in toilets. Everybody did. Or the system that they had. was complicated with aqueducts and all that stuff and it's not easy to reproduce. And look, I'm not a big Roman history guy. They didn't have flush toilets. Well, they didn't have flush toilets in the way that we understand, but they did have.

They had the aqueduct system of water, but they did not have like, it sounds like he's talking about a like a porcelain toilet that you flush, like a modern flush toilet. No. They did not. No, but they would have, they had like public places where you could like defecate or pee. And they'd have run in the water. constantly through it. So like you would be.

That's not a flush toilet. It is considered the same kind of technology. So like we consider that to be like, you know, part of the history of flushing toilets. It's a big achievement. Don't shit on the Romans for this here. Oh, yeah. No, I'm saying that's, that's phenomenal. But actually they, hold on, hold on, hold on.

I need to correct myself. The Romans didn't develop this. It long predates the Romans. So like, but I get what he's saying. But again, it's this like he has this one kernel of truth. like the CIA funding certain art movements in the mid-20th century. Sure, there is an element of truth to that, but you have stripped it of all context and supporting documentation

and you're just saying this half-remembered fact and then building this sort of vague thesis on top of it about how everything's shit now because of them. Like we have running water and pipes all over the place. We have that system that works. Let's say that America Falls and all of our infrastructure sure an organization goes into disrepair. We have not forgotten how to make, like, flushing toilets and running water.

We just lack the organization and centralized entity to do it. So, like, he's conflating those things in a very weird way that I think is stupid. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about, all in one place. And it's free. I heart radio whatever you want to hear

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Always free Download the free IHard Radio app today I'm Melissa Jeltson And in my new podcast what happened to her I'm bringing you new stories and conversations Every week Stories about women

whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In Washington, it became the worst thing you could be. And I found six of them. People who devoted their lives to public service, who believed their work mattered, until they were told they no longer belonged. I'm Michael Lewis in my new audiobook, Blockers, rebels in the deep state, tells the story of these blockers.

People who kept our most sensitive data secure, helped prevent wildfires, made huge scientific discoveries, but got in the way of the world. the Trump administration's agenda. What fascinated me wasn't politics. It was what happens when a society decides it no longer values the people

doing the work it depends on. Get Blockers Now, only at blockers.fm. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this.

The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good france. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to examined the backfire effect on the on the online.

Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, for wherever you get your podcasts. Shortly before 6 o'clock a.m. on November 13th, 1991, Annette's mother and her two young sons found her unresponsive inside their apartment. Investigators ruled the case a homicide. Over the years, detectives continued searching for answers, but the case eventually went cold. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a True Crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told and to the questions that still remain. As the years passed, detectives continued working the case. But more than three decades after Annette's death,

no one has been held accountable. Annette's mother, Frida Scott, spent years hoping to see her daughter's case solved. She never saw that day come. Annette Jones's case remains unsolved. Listen to Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. But here's the thing. Hucker isn't this dumb. Need to understand some of these basic things, but he has to pretend not to so he can

present this guy as something other than an idiot. It has to suck. But like he said at the beginning of the interview, there's a bigger reason that he's doing this. Because of them. Because of them. Whoever that is. So flushing toilets, that's not the only thing that we keep forgetting over time.

We've lost a lot of other stuff too. Like how to make symmetrical buildings. Yeah, and how to make buildings that don't kill your family. You forget how to build a flush toilet three times in the last 2,000 years. Or the other two times. Clean water. Like, look at how clean water was forgotten about what? Up until like the late 1800s.

with the final ending of the typhus outbreak in in New York when they figured out like, oh, dude, no, people are shitting in this well. Like, that's why you're all sick. And it's like, wow. Thank you, Captain obvious. But yeah, people are that fucking stupid. Yeah, man. So stupid.

So Tucker's having a little bit of fun. This is stoned older brother talk. I think that they're doing some riffing and shit, but like Tucker has to know that this is bullshit. There's no way that he cannot be embarrassed to be going along with this. So, Jass is mixing up two different things here. The 1847 typhus outbreak that he's talking about wasn't caused by people shitting in a well. That was mostly believed to be the result of overcrowding and unhygienic conditions on boats, transporting migrants to the United States and Canada from Ireland. He's mixing that up with some stories from around the time of other outbreaks that were

believed to have been caused by things contaminating public water supplies. But the issue is that even in the late 1800s, people didn't think you could just drink water that was from a well you also shit in. It's not like there was an outbreak that was traced to shit in a well and that taught everyone don't shit in the wells. Like water filtration is a field. It was like unsanitary living conditions. Yeah.

And like places where people shit and like disposed of things unknowingly getting into the water supplies. I mean, these are problems of exploitation and capitalism. Like the reason the cyclospora outbreak we just had was because of exploited farm laborers having no sanitary places to relieve themselves while working their 17-hour shifts, right? Like, we have the science. We do know how to prevent this, but it is occurring because of unsanitary conditions forced upon people by capitalism and exploitation. Yeah, but the other explanation is people just thought you could shit in a water bottle and yeah we just forgot yeah i think that Tucker knows that that explanation that you're providing is kind of the obvious thing and that's the conversation he never wants to have yeah so

let's humor this idiot instead because it allows us to avoid the actual point rome fell and we sort of just shitting in our own cups yeah makes sense i buy it what else you got for us pottery guy What haven't they lied to us about Tucker? No, that's right. It's everything is a lie. The more you research, the more you learn, the more you read, the more you find out that everything around us in this matrix is a absolute lie. From top to bottom, start to finish, how you should live your life, what you should value.

They're all lies. It's why people are miserable. Yeah. The matrix was made after he was born. So I think he shouldn't know that as a reference. Wait, how old is he? You know what? Here's the thing.

Because he's so depressed, I have no fucking idea. But I think he has to be at least 50. I think he would be 50. Like you see a picture. You've seen the picture of him. Yeah, yeah. He's like, it is 40s, 50s probably. Yeah.

So yeah, he shouldn't have seen the Matrix. He shouldn't know about the Matrix. If he's younger than me, look the fuck out. But if he's under late 40s, I think that there's a real problem. Yeah. But I watched that documentary about Peter North. Do you know Peter North the porn star? No.

He's a famous male porn star who's been in the industry for like, I don't know, 40 years or something. And they did a documentary about him recently and he's like 70 and he looks 40. He looks like he's in his 40s. He looks fantastic. So this guy could be like 70. He could be a good 70 or a rough 50. Either way, he shouldn't know the Matrix. Wait, he got his bachelor's degree in 2005.

So if he graduated at a traditional age, he's in his early 40s. I can't imagine that he got his degree at a traditional age then. Like, I dropped out of high school, but I would have graduated in 2001. So that would have been like, he and I would be the same age that. Do you think there's more than one guy named Jesse Ellifson in South Dakota? There might be because I did see one. There was a new story about a guy named Jess Ellifson or Jesse Ellifson who got to arrested for weed, I don't know if it's the same person. I wasn't certain. It's the right age.

It's the right age. No, I think that that person who got arrested for the weed has got to be too young. That person was like in their 30s. I can't believe this guy's in his 40s. 10 years ago, though. Yeah. That story was interesting. I wanted to try and see if it was the same guy or if I could determine that it was because that was a situation where like someone took brownies and overdosed on weed. So they called the police. And then they found a bunch of pot plants and guns and stuff. I think it's always funny when someone gets too high and calls the police on themselves.

Okay. There are only 11,000 people in Brandon, South Dakota. And there's only one with the last name, Ellison, Jesse Ellifson. I think he just took the E off of his name. I think it's the same guy. I thought that was possible, but I also think it might, it could be his kid or something. I don't know. I'm staying out of it.

So look, the Matrix is lying. That's the important thing. The Matrix is lying to us. Yeah. Sorry. I also, there's such an anger about like, they tell you what to value and that kind of stuff. I don't understand.

Who's they? Right. And why do you care if someone's telling you to value something you don't value? Like, that seems very adolescent. That seems like something I would be mad about in high school, the materialism, all the, ah, these, these people. If you have a strong. sense of self, you can just value what you value.

Yeah. Yeah. Matrix isn't going to stop you from that. I can't. No. He's in his own studio with his handmade kill making his cool cups. You know, just do your own thing, Jess. Yeah.

Do what you're doing. They obviously can't stop you from making cups. Yeah. So he expounds a little bit more about parenting. And it's just, this feels so weird. That's the basis to raising. great men and women. Don't give them nothing

except knowledge and teach them the things that you wish you had known long before you had to learn them and especially the hard lessons. Like what? The value of life and how fragile it is and how easy it can be taken from you

and how one simple mistake can destroy your entire future and take your whole life from you. He's got to be talking about something, specific. That's not something people appreciate. No. Wow.

Yeah, it does feel like he's talking about something specific. Also, the life is very fragile. Fantastic. I have a tattoo that says that. And I agree with him. Yeah, it feels like he's talking about a kid that he lost. And it feels like he's about to go on to talk about how, you know, like his life changed in an instant, possibly involving a bad decision.

Because like, that, that's the vibe. That's the tone that is being built. But he doesn't do that. This is what he says next. On the way here, dude, I saw a motorcycle tipped over, a lot of blood on the road. And it's something I've discussed with my son. My 16-year-old son wanted a motorcycle.

And I was like, dirt bike, fine, motorcycle street bike, no. Oh, you know, but I'm good. I can ride. And it's like, that's not what you have to worry about. it's you have to worry about every other idiot out there on the road that you can't compensate for. And like, I'm guessing that dude that might not be alive right now, probably didn't do anything wrong. Yeah.

Probably obeying all the rules of the road. But somehow, did they even give drivers tests anymore? I don't think they do. No, I'm pretty sure they don't. No, the standards are gone for everything. Yeah. Oh, so God. So Jess saw the aftermath of a motorcycle accident, which may have involved a bunch of blood. From that, he's come up with a story that the guy riding the motorcycle probably did nothing wrong and was hit by some driver who wasn't obeying the rules.

Are there even rules anymore? You're not enforcing anything. There's no driving tests. They stopped enforcing the rules. So I'm a 42-year-old dude, and I just got my driver's license this past year. Ah, congratulations. Thank you. And I did take a driving test. They still exist.

Maybe Jess and Tucker would prefer that we live in a nanny state where you have to get a new driving test every six months. But for me, and I don't know if I speak for you, Molly, but I choose liberty. I think liberty is important. I mean, what's next, a license to operate your own damn toaster? Oh, that's what they want. You know? They want. So given the only the information that Tucker has made available to me, I kind of have to assume that this guy saw someone who had a motorcycle accident and he's a

emotionally experiencing it as if it was his son because his son recently asked about getting one. Unless there's another explanation that Tucker isn't offering, this guy seems unstable and kind of a dumb interview guest, but he's probably a fine welder and, you know, makes good mugs. This is fucked up. This just feels very weird. He's struggling with something that he's not articulating. That is very clear. And I think that it's easy to like assume that what he's wrestling with is his, underlying bigotries that he can't really give voice to, but I think it's something else.

I think it's a mood problem. On my way here, I saw a man die. Like, should we have rescheduled? Like, I'm sorry, Dan, if I just, if I on my way to my office today watched a man die, I might have asked you if we could do this next week. He didn't watch someone die. He just saw the aftermath of an accident and he's assumed that someone died. But he's obviously having a hard time with it.

Right. But we are also assuming. that happened and it wasn't just something he's making up. So I don't know. I don't know. The specter of child death is clearly very present with him. It feels that way. There's something about a fear of losing someone. And I wish that I understood what that was so I could be more sensitive to it. But in the interview, there is absolutely nothing that is indicated at all. I think that he has something going on. I wouldn't have done

this interview if I were Tucker, I don't think that the payoff is worth it. I wouldn't have aired it. Yeah. And I think that you sound really, really dumb when your guest is suggesting that they don't even give driver's tests anymore. And you're being like- And just agreeing. Yeah.

Yeah, they don't. You're just going to yes and it. Tucker has a son who's in his 20s. Like he has a relatively recent memory of taking a child to get a driver's license. Like he knows that's not true. Yeah. Yeah. it's offensive for him to be like humoring this.

Like Jess should be like suspicious of like, why is this guy lying to me? Why is he going along with the bullshit that I believe? He knows, Tucker knows better. What is, I mean, I guess at some point that the answer to this question is the purpose is to create content. The purpose of creating content is to create content to sell ads. But like, if you have an interview show, I would assume that you're booking guests and you're interviewing about something that you think your audience would like to hear and benefit from hearing. So like, where is that?

Where is that part of the conversation? I have a theory and we'll get to it as this evolves. Because I feel like even a diehard Tucker fan is like, why are we here? Yeah, I think so. I try to put myself in the headspace of someone who's like, I like this show generally. It is good. And I think I would even be like, I don't know why this is happening. I don't understand this.

But I think towards the end, it starts to come together a little bit more in terms of like why Tucker wanted to try this. But the conversation about how there's no driver's tests and no standards, obviously great launch off point to complain about women firefighters. A thing I'm always thinking about. Yeah, it's destroying the family. It's just a free for all at every level. Yeah. And it's like, the more incompetent you are, the more qualified you are for any job. Exactly right.

As long as you don't ask questions, we got a job for you. Right. Obese female firemen are the goal. Right. Oh, you can't rescue people from fires. You're too stupid to operate a hose. Well, they shouldn't have been in the fire in the first place to hunger. That's exactly right.

Well, because it's not about the victims of the fire. It's about the self-esteem of the obese, mentally retarded female firemen who can't fight fires. Right. No, I'm highly aware of this. So if you take three steps back, it's, you know, it's never about what they say it is. They tell you it's about empowerment and making the lady feel better about herself, which, by the way, I'm not against at all. I'm for everyone feeling good about himself or herself. But it's always about destroying your civilization by its determined enemies, who are many. So telling your children, teaching your children is that. the key to keeping your civilization going. It has to be. That clip, I think, provides a clear example of what Tucker seems to be doing throughout this episode. He's saying that civilization is under attack by these unnamed many enemies, and he's hoping that Jess will jump in and say, not only that, let me tell you what else the Jews are up to. He's trying to prompt Jess so Jess can say the awful shit, and Tucker

can more or less keep his hands clean and feigns some kind of ignorance when the inevitable backlash comes. But the guest is too spaced out. Yes, he doesn't know where he is. He's too suited to do it. Yeah. So Tucker says like, oh, the enemies of humanity are many. And then there's just a pause. And Tucker's like, wait, that's your cute, dipshit.

Come on. The obese female firefighters. I mean, that's a constant problem. People are constantly dying in fires because of this problem. Right. I think studies have been done. You know, I think we all, we all know the plague that it is. It's a woman dominated a field.

Mm-hmm. It's such a weird niche way to express what your problem is. You know, like, it's just anger for the sake of being angry. And just making up a woman to get mad at. Yeah, yeah, which is what these dudes like to do. But then he's like, this thing I made up is destroying society. I'm not against it, but it is destroying society. Right.

Then why aren't you against it? Well, because I want this guy to say it. I'm the good guy. I'm just telling you like it is. I'm trying to double. talk here. This guy is supposed to push things further for me so I can have plausible deniability. Come on. That speaks to why I think Tucker seems frustrated and why his energy is bad and why like he just doesn't seem to care that much because the guy isn't doing his part.

And you can't just pick random guys. Like that's why he usually picks from within the content creator ecosystem. But Jess does do like TikToks and yeah, like he does some like anti-smell medic asia content that tucker didn't bring his A game today yeah yeah and i think it's probably because he's depressed and a real mess which just talks about in this next clip did you ever have any moment we're like you know i'm smart like maybe i should go into the insurance business and make millions of dollars no i've i've been broken my entire life this this world broke me early on you seem pretty whole actually I don't feel it.

Bro, are you good? I don't feel it. That's probably why I'm always striving to create something. Mugs. To bring some beauty and happiness to other people's lives. I think that's one of the things that really drives me the most. You feel it. I can feel it.

Yeah, I don't know why Tucker would say that. That's a mess. I'm pretty broken. The world broke me. early. I think that that's a fine thing to say. And artistically, you know, like, hey, but my art is a way that I deal with feeling like I'm broken. Oh, that's great. Sure. The way that this tone comes off from him is that like I'm broken in a way that I haven't worked on. You know, like it's I have given up to whatever the brokenness is as opposed to recognizing that like

shit's hard and I have to move through it. I have a responsibility to move through it. That does not sound like he's ready to take responsibility for whatever's going on here. And I don't know that Tucker's the person I would open up to about it. No, but it's interesting the way that it is, it feels like an attempt to open up. Now I want to look at his TikTok. Is he like a men's mental health guy on TikTok at all? I don't know.

I didn't watch. I only saw one that someone else had reposted on something else that was complaining about. You didn't investigate the talks. No, I generally don't do that. I don't know when people are being serious or not on those kinds of short form videos. So I'm not a good judge for a different medium. Yeah. But I think that Tucker shut him down, basically.

He was trying to express something of himself and like this. I'm broken. I'm a mess. Bubba. Tucker's like, you're fine, buddy. Come on. Just say something offensive. Come on.

Tucker's like, we're not doing this. You're fine. I don't like. I don't care. Everybody who's looking at this knows that you have some problem. You're dealing with something and you're unwell. I don't care. That's Tucker's vibe.

So Jess complains about some other stuff of this next clip that I think is dumb. Fucking wind turbines. I hate the wind turbines. What's the point of wind turbines? To destroy the land. It's like X-Men in those giant robots, you know, that had the rest. red eyes. Yeah. Right? Like I can see them and they come closer from me from Minnesota and I can now see them on the horizon line at night from the second floor of my house. And it's like when they showed up,

I was like, oh my God, that's the fucking system in the Matrix coming to kill me. No, it's not. That's how that feels. The wind turbines encroaching from Minnesota. Yeah. On first glance, this just sounds insane. But on the other hand, he also shouldn't be making an X-Men reference. That's part of the pop culture matrix that's just meant to destroy civilization. How does he even know about that? Well, look, I know that the X-Men was created before he was born. So maybe like, you know, maybe it predates when everything got ugly. But he's definitely talking about the 90s cartoon with the Sentinels.

So there's no excuse for this. He sounds nuts. Okay, he lives seven miles from the border to Minnesota. I was going to say he probably can't see Minnesota. He probably can see Minnesota from his house because it's seven months. miles away. Yeah, from the second floor. Yeah, that seems like, uh, it's not like a Sarah Palin, I can see Russia, the backyard thing. No, on a clear day, maybe he can see a turbine. Yeah. That's really funny. But no, they're coming to kill his family, like robots. Like the

Sentinels who hunt X-Men. They're going to, they're going to walk to his house and kill his family. They're going to swing their big turbine arms and decapitate his beautiful family. He's worried about there being like a master mold, kind of like giant wind turbine. that's creating little mini wind turbines that sends out. Oh, it's terrifying stuff. Trump is very afraid of wind turbines too, isn't he? Yeah. I think he thinks they kill everything or something.

Yeah. Just like their existence is very fatal. Yeah. Because life is very fragile. I don't know if I buy into that, but also like, I think it's fine to have some criticisms of wind turbines. But I don't think he's talking about migratory birds. No.

And I think that in the same way that like a lot of data center kind of stuff, something that's missed in the conversation is like they make a lot of noise. And if you live nearby something that makes a lot of noise, it can drive you nuts. It's detrimental to your health. Yeah. And I think that maybe there are some complaints like that that are around wind turbines. I'd be willing to hear those.

I'd be willing to hear him out if he didn't also think that a building being asymmetrical would kill your family. Yeah, that makes him seem a little dramatic. Definitely. So you were asking about like his inspirations and like how does an artist, he's got to look at art if he wants to. And so he talks about that here a little bit. I guess like even in my in my own art, I like do you think you're going to take inspiration from any of these modern creations like your coffee cup there? Like that's not inspiring. No. No. Like I look through history books. I mean, I love Greek. and Roman pottery, it's beauty, it's accentuation of the female shape. I love, I love women. Yeah, why wouldn't you know? I love beauty and to create.

Every normal person male and female loves the female form. Yes. Not necessarily in a sexual way, though that, of course, that too. But in an aesthetic way, the female form is, in my opinion, the purest expression of beauty and every normal person knows that. Every normal person knows that. And the destruction of it is really upsetting. He's upset.

There's a feeling that Tucker's jumping in to reassure him that it's okay to be attracted to women. I don't know how else to read that. Every normal person loves the female form, Dan. Right. Like this artist is saying that he's inspired by female form. And Tucker almost... He's like, yeah, don't.

worry, brother. Yeah, me too. Yeah, that's cool. That's normal. What? But the more he insists that it's normal, the less normal it feels. Yes, definitely. But also, who's trying to destroy your ability to appreciate the female form? Everybody just wants you to be sexually aroused by the Obama Library. They're trying to destroy the female form by telling you that that's what a beautiful woman looks like, like this weird building in Chicago. Oh, my God. And that's phenomenal. He's like, where am I supposed to get inspiration to make my mom? Mugs. Other mugs?

Also, let's not forget that Tucker is selling the mug that he's shitting on. He's talking about this mug not being... Oh, that's incredible. That's Tucker's merch that he's drinking out of. It's a black rifle coffee mug that Tucker sells. But it's not beautiful because you know what? It's not symmetrical. How come the mugs don't have a handle on each side so that they're perfectly symmetrical?

Like a sippy cup. I think you're on to something here. If we want to create beautiful things, we must look to... The sippy cup. I'm all right with that. He should put big old breasts on the mugs, you know, if that's... Big old motorboating titties on the mug. When do we get to the motorboating? When does that come in? I don't remember exactly where that was, but...

Is it part of their deep appreciation of the female form? I think it was probably a conversation about respecting women. It's a respectful thing to do because women like it. Yeah. You need to be good at it. The mythical female orgasm is said to arise only from the perfect motorboat. Right, right. I've heard of this. In Greek legend.

It's in his history books. He would know. Herodotus wrote about this in American Pie 6, I believe. Pliny the Elder documented this extensively. Yeah, yeah. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello.

My gosh. Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish, right inside the free I-Hare radio app. Get the blood going up. Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like the Tom Green Farmcast and park the bus. Now with full video. We're building a ramp for Tony Hawk. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry with all the hilarious moments you've been missing right on your screen. Cheers.

Open the free IHRRadio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. I'm Melissa Jeltson and in my new podcast what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place. with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year.

You never know who that devil is because he's wearing the disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Blockers. In Washington, it became the worst thing you could be. And I found six of them. People who devoted their lives to public service, who believe their work mattered, until they were told they no longer belonged. I'm Michael Lewis in my new audiobook, Blockers, Rebels in the Deep State, tells the story of these blockers. People who kept our most sensitive data secure, helped prevent wildfires, made huge scientific discoveries, but got in the way of the Trump administration's agenda. What fascinated me wasn't politics. It was what happens when a society decides

it no longer values the people doing the work it depends on. Get Blockers now, only at blockers.fm. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over.

We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good france. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to Examined the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. You do not desert of happiness.

I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of betrayal, we meet Carl Bryant. Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. You will have hell to pay. For nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life. threatening to ruin him. Cyberstalking, swatting, extortion, impersonation. And then the text threats escalated.

Someone's not gonna make it out of this alive. It's playing out in real life, not just on the phone. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man. But every piece of evidence was a lie. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Jess, like, I think that there's this interesting thing of like, okay, you're probably a fine welder and artist. You seem like an idiot.

I don't know why you complain so much. Like, he spends a lot of time complaining about arguments that he has with AI. And so... Oh, no. Yeah, so he has a little AI-based fantasy here. If they created an absolute honest AI, I could take down the entire government in an afternoon. How? Well, an honest AI would have to have access to public financial records, and you could just simply say,

Hello, AI, good morning. Why don't you look at every single elected official across the United States, look through their financial records, find any improprieties, and then I'd like you to to write a lawsuit pointing out which laws they've broken. And then why don't you go ahead and file that for me? Who would be left? And that's the short, you can't create the list of like,

who's gonna get caught up in that? No, you'd have to be like, who's not gonna be caught up in that? Yeah, we got two city clerks maybe somewhere in Kansas. I don't know, I doubt even that. So have you tried to get AI to do this for you? Oh yeah. Why? Why did you? What have you done to try to get AI to do this for you? This is stupid.

Oh, buddy. Oh, buddy. Yeah. This sounds like something like you'd overhear at a bar. This is just like it doesn't make sense for Tucker to be doing this on his show. This is just two guys who don't know what they're talking about encouraging each other as they get a little bit drunker and a little bit sadder until they call their wives to come pick them up. I think it's a little bit more manipulative than that because I think Jess, probably is that and Tucker is trying to make Jess worse. He's trying to provoke him into crisis. Yeah, he's trying to get him to call his wife and scream at her about something. Like at some point, you just, you don't air this. You don't air this because it's not, this isn't anything.

Yeah, like Jess, I don't think knows anything about civics. But like, Tucker has been sued a bunch. I think he understands that AI doesn't have standing to file these lawsuits, among other issues that would come up in a court. Like, let alone AI not having the standing. Like, even if you put your own name on it, point out the laws they broke and then file that as a lawsuit. That's not really how a lawsuit works. Oh, it would get thrown out in almost every case.

That would not work. And also, like, they don't believe that the legal system works. So why if an AI filed this suit would they believe that it would actually progress through the court? Like, this is stupid. And Tucker knows it's stupid. but he's pretending not to in order to try and be like, come on, buddy, come on, say something fucked up. If you're so convinced there's this level of financial impropriety going on, which to some

degree that's true, that is. But like a lot of these financial records you're saying that they can't get to, you're just talking about like FEC records. Like you could brute force your way through. You could use investigative journalism tactics. Like, sure, you could find some financial improprieties that you could bring to light. But you're just asking AI to do. it because you don't, you don't really want to do it.

Salt of what he's saying is entirely achievable. He's just saying it's too hard. I want a robot to do it. AI won't even do it for me. We don't have a good enough on it. We don't have an honest enough AI. It's not that this is not achievable. It's that the AI is lying to me.

Yeah. Because they programmed it to do that. I think, you know, like I live in godless metropolitan Chicago, but I've never once spoken to an AI. I've never done it at all, but even taking this up further, I've also. never been like, why won't this A go along with me? I think it's pathetic if an artist who lives in the middle of South Dakota is like, yeah, I hate civilization. I don't want to be a part of it.

Also, I'm frustrated by my interactions with a robot. Fuck you, man. You're more addicted to this shit than people in the middle of the city. Right. He's saying, you know, Sue Falls, the bustling metropolitan of Sue Falls being 20 miles away is too much civilization for him. But he's just in his office all day yelling at Grock. Yes. Yes.

That's sad. That's sad. We need to readjust some stuff here, I think. And I think maybe it starts with education. And that is a nice little transition to some thoughts that Jess and Tucker have about learning and what we should be learned. All the nursery rhymes need to be brought back and told to everybody, Hansel and Gretel or Rumpel's Stiltskin. How is Rumpel Stiltskin not like the perfect allegory for everything we are dealing with right now? Creating wealth from nothing and only wanting to eat your children in return?

And then when you call it out for what it is, they stomp their feet and scream and call you names. Does it say that? Yeah, you're familiar with Rumpel's skin, right? Yeah, but not. It's been 50 years at least. Once you acknowledge this reality for what it is and name him, pounds his feet, throws a fit, and then disappears back into the shadows from whence he has crawled.

Wow. That's definitely banned. Yeah. But I mean, like, look at that lost information, right? That lost lesson. It's like flush toilets. Yeah. This isn't suck.

We've forgotten rubble's jostkin. This is not very subtle at all, but a couple quick points for you here about Rumpel Stiltskin. One, it's not banned. Two, Rumple Stiltskin could create gold out of straw. Like it wasn't a trick. He actually could do it. And three, it's a stupid story. The girl is only forced to spin straw into gold because her dad lied to the king to impress him saying that she could.

If he hadn't bullshitted the king, she wouldn't be in a position where she had to spend straw into gold. or be killed in the morning. That might have been a harsh arrangement for the king to make, but based on the story, it's the dad's fault. Then Rumpel Stiltskin comes along and says he can make the straw into gold for her and asks what she'd give him. She offers her necklace, then this process repeats the next night and she give him her ring.

On the third night, the king says that she's going to become queen if she spins a whole bunch of straw into gold, but she has nothing to offer Rumpel Stiltskin. He says he'll do it for her, but if she becomes queen, he gets their first child. She has no real choice, and she doesn't know if she's going to become the queen anyway, and she doesn't want to die. So she's like, cool, whatever.

She didn't have to accept that deal. She could have made a counteroffer. This dude accepted a necklace and a ring the first two nights. So it seems like he might be starting off negotiations at a high point with your firstborn child. It's a crazy escalation, and you've got to think he would agree to something else. So you're saying it's a skill issue for the princess. You could have made a better deal with Rumble Stilson. She shouldn't have been in that position to begin with.

That's her dad's fault. But I do think that we're skimming over some things here. And that's why they need to teach this in school, Stan, to teach children to negotiate. If evil little men. Right. So then she agrees to the deal. She didn't have to, but she did. And then she forgets for a year, at which point she has a kid and Rumpel Stiltskin shows back up and he wants the kid.

He wants that child. This is just contract law. Yeah. He's a fucking. weirdo, but he's not done anything wrong. And I guess she owes him the kid for no reason. Do we know that he eats it? No, we don't. We don't know that. I don't think he eats it. No, that's a little anti-Semitic, a little fun thing that he's throwing in. But like for no reason, because Rumpel Stiltskin feels bad, he adds a new wrinkle to the deal where she can get off the hook

if she comes up with his name and he gives her three days worth of guesses. And she only learns his name because she spied on him while he was singing it to himself. Oh, I wouldn't have done that if I were him. No. Operation Security, buddy. Come on. Don't sing your own name. You've got three days where you just got to shut up.

Come on. It's a stupid story. And the only explanation you can come up with from the text is that Rumpelstiltskin didn't really want that kid that badly. Because that's a big out. Yeah. He's like creating a situation where he's like, all right, let's just fucking call it off. Just come up with my name.

I don't know. The villain of the story is the dad. And then what's the other one that was banned? Hansel and Grettle also not banned. No, no, none of this is banned and or lost information. But they are dumb old stories that are based on a lot of like racist and anti-Semitic shit. So it makes sense why Jess would want this to be educational material and to be taught literally or whatever. At what level, at the level at which this would be appropriate curriculum, we're talking three and four-year-olds, which is not a mandated level of education in the United States.

It's not even available everywhere. So what are you talking about? Yeah, I can't imagine like even in like first grade. Yeah. By their own parents. Like you were free to read your three-year-old rumble still skin. Yeah. And I think a lot of people do.

I think that my parents, like there was a ton of shit that we ended up learning and reading and stuff that was never examined really. Like my parents are pretty progressive and definitely anti-racism and so there's a lot of like I read a lot of tint comics when I was a kid. And like that stuff is very racist. And it was just like, well, I didn't realize. I didn't realize. You read Rumpel Stiltskin. You don't realize.

Hey, there's an anti-Semitic message that some people take away from this. It's not banned. But he wants to talk to children. And adults, apparently. Well, I was going to say, actually, I did learn Hansel and Gretel in school. When I was in college, I took like

an anthropology of folklore class or something. Like, yeah, I did. I did read Hansel and and Gretel in college. From a different lens than like, hey, this is. It is being taught. It is being taught. You can learn it in school. Yeah, absolutely.

Folklore classes, any literature, you're going to touch on some brothers grim. It's influential stuff. Oh, yeah. So if you thought that this was a strange kind of educational take, we get into something a little bit worse here. Were you on debt? I have none. None. Yeah.

Yeah, in college, I could not pass college algebra because I could not understand why we were putting letters into numbers in math that didn't make any logical sense to me. And I could not get anybody to explain to me how that was ever going to be useful to me. So I continually got into arguments with algebra teachers who thought they were smart, who I found to be very lacking in intelligence. So I ended up in a class called finite math that they had hidden from us. us that like it was just I got drunk with the lady who signs you up for classes like early on in college right at a party and we became friends and so I never had an advisor and I would just whatever classes I wanted to take I'd walk into her office I was like hey sign me up for these class she was like no problem yeah so like when I came time to graduate and like I finally had to

sit down with like whatever admissions person they were like how the fuck they were like you've taken none of these freshman classes i was like yeah they suck and they're stupid i was like algebra's dumb i don't need to know algebra i'm an art major like i want to build cool shit i mean he sounds like someone who's still there you know like is still in college he sounds 21 i think that there's something very strange about an adult being like yeah i got drunk at a party with this with this gal who worked at the admissions office. He doesn't know the word registrar. Right.

But also, like, I worked at college offices at the time that I was in college. Like, I couldn't have gotten somebody into a class that they didn't qualify for. I didn't have the ability to do that. And I don't think that he's, like, going to house parties with staff, like, professors or somebody. You know, like, this is just all very strange to me. This sounds like a guy bragging and he should be past this by now. And also, okay, it's been a minute since I was in college, but if you're taking collegiate algebra, like basic, like introductory to algebra, like this is the first time you're finding out that there are numbers in math, you're in a remedial math class. Yeah, already.

This is high school stuff. I took algebra in the seventh grade. Like, this is remedial math at the collegiate. level. And then so they put him in a different class that they were hiding from him. So they put you in like remedial remedial math. Like the reason you didn't know about that class before is because it's for people who need help. Yeah. And there's no shame in that. And like people learn differently. No, but it sounds like he's bragging about finding out about this secret math that's better. It's like no, babe, that was that was a class for kids who need help.

It's a technicality class. It's like the school has those so people can hit their prerequisites. Like it's not hidden. It's not. Yeah, it's, it really worries me the way that he's thinking about this as, as somebody who's navigated an educational system before. Like, I think that he just probably wasn't good at math and didn't get that. He seems to be okay with like geometry.

Like he knows shapes and stuff. Like he clearly has to in order to do ceramics and 3D art. And that's fine. he just doesn't get algebra and it's not deeper than that. Yeah, so he went to the University of South Dakota. Finite math is math 104 focuses on practical mathematics for use in business and everyday problem solving, which is great. It sounds like he needed that and I hope that he learned some good math, but this isn't you beating the system because letters don't belong in math and these math professors were lacking in intelligence because they couldn't best you in a battle of words. Outer point, I think that finite math was a secret forbidden class that he accidentally found.

But then I had to take a math class. So this woman was like, you ever thought about finite math? Like here, it's on the list. And it's got the same credits and it counts. I was like, let's do it. Holy shit. You know why they don't want you taking finite math? Because it explains to you how much you will pay on any loan for interest and how fast you could pay off a loan if you just pay $50 more.

That's all it was. I think I made it through a week of the class before I cut up all my credit cards and was like, oh, I am never doing that. Ever, ever, ever, ever, under no circumstances. Will I ever take out a loan and pay twice the value of anything? It just made absolutely no sense to me.

So, yeah. What sounds like he needed the class? Why does algebra put letters into numbers? I don't just to fuck with you. So you deal with math. in your job every day, you've already, I think, demonstrated your grasp of math is high.

I mean, functional math. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, if you can build a wood-fired kiln, you understand math. So, but what, you didn't add letters to numbers in the process of doing that.

That's the weirdest thing. Nowhere did I find any letters in my math to calculate the size and structural integrity of a key. Cantonary Arch. Isn't that weird? Oh, that was weird. Because everybody, every math teacher was always like, you need to know some algebra.

I've yet to encounter a single person in my life that uses algebra. Actually. Have you? I think this guy is a spectacular poster child for why going to college doesn't always help someone learn. I think he's kind of just an angry idiot. Like, finite math isn't a secret math class that the man doesn't want you to take. it's the remedial option that schools offer to make sure everyone who is willing to pay tuition can take care of their prerequisites.

Like when I was in college, Missouri had a physics requirement, but I didn't want to take a class like that. So I took astronomy for poets. Jess just took the math version of that where they teach you high school level math stuff and say, good enough, move along. And it sounds like it's good they had that class because he didn't understand how interest works and he learned it. And that's very important. So that's good. Yeah, but I also think that using principles that he could have learned at high school, it's just that like this class applied those things in a way that he was able to connect with,

which is great. Like I'm glad remedial math was available for him because it sounds like he needed it and he learned something. And that's wonderful. But the lesson he came away with was I'm smarter than college. Right. And the Jews are trying to stop me from knowing these things with confusing me with letters. Right. Jews are trying to hide interest from me because they're doing usury to the Gentiles.

Right. That's the subtext. I find his claims about no one using algebra interesting because he uses a ton of algebraic principles all the time. He just doesn't realize it. For instance, every time he measures something in feet, the unit of measurement is a letter that he's introducing into the number. Three feet is just another way of expressing three units of 12 inches, but it's way easier

to deal with those numbers when you use symbols. It's not a complicated thing, really. And the fact that Jess seems to be kind of mad about this, like someone's trying to trick him with algebra, it speaks to how unwilling he must be to listen to anyone who might try to explain something that he refuses to understand. He just seems like an angry idiot who probably makes decent ceramic bowls, but really, this is just humiliating for Tucker to be doing.

He went to elite schools, so he knows damn well what variables and constants are in basic algebra. Tucker sounds so sincere. He's like, why do you think they put letters in math? Oh. You know the answer. The only excuse for him to ask a question like that is if he's trolling Jess. And that's clearly not the case.

What Tucker is doing as an extension of his clear intention through this whole interview to bait Jess into saying some inflammatory shit, preferably about Jewish people. He's pretending to be as dumb as Jess, acting like he doesn't know why there are letters in algebra, as a way of trying to get Jess to lower his guard. We're all friends here. Come on, what's up with these fucking numbers? Hey, buddy, bah. That's what Tucker is doing.

And guess what? Does it work? It works. I've just realized what this reminds me of. The plot towards the end of the run of Veep, where when Jonah's running for president, he gets everyone mad about math. He says math is an Islamic conspiracy to destroy America

because they're Arabic numerals. Yeah. It's stupid. That's what this is. The plot of Veep. And Tucker is playing into it for the sake of that eliciting some sense of, like, kinship between him and this guy, so he will do the dirty work for him, which, like I said, it pays off.

I've yet to encounter a single person in my life that uses algebra. Actually. I don't know. So, like, you, but you would know. Yeah, but I mean, I live in a fake world. That's why you use fake math with letters. Congratulations. Everybody out there in the Matrix?

Good job. Your good little boy slaves. That's amazing. There it is. Yeah, Tucker got that was the goal the whole time was to do that. And it took forever for him to get to that because this guy. It's like not a good payoff for the amount of time we spent complaining about algebra. Or any of the other shit.

Not a good payoff. Like I, Tucker so badly wants someone else to bring up the JQ because he doesn't want to be a JQ guy. but like, oh, was that worth it, Tucker? He was brinning. He was very excited and was like, ah, you can almost sense a relief on Tucker's part when he finally drops that, that goy bomb. And it's so crass.

Like, I mean, obviously, I'm not saying any version of anti-Semitism introduced into the show would be good or cool, but like, this is crass. That is so, like, low-rent anti-Semitism that I think. I think it was a miscalculation. I think what Tucker was. is going for is a little more highbrow. I think he would like to be.

But I think this is all just a mistake. I think he thought that it would play out differently. Because Tucker wants the plausible deniability of this sort of pseudo-intellectual anti-Semitism, this sort of, I don't know. This is so crass that I don't think that's the kind of anti-Semitism Tucker wants to be peddling. Because it doesn't have the plausible deniability. I think that his assessment of the possibility of this guest was based on like, short clips that are curated on TikTok, and maybe like he didn't realize, oh, this guy isn't

going to be a good conversation. Even if I do bait him into saying stuff that I can plausibly deny having said myself, I think that he thought that it would go better. And maybe that's funny. This guy did not bring his A game. I think he did. I think this is his A game. I think that he's just not good.

So Tucker, after he has gotten this reaction that he wants, you can see that he wants to go further. He wants to take this a step further. So he asks, what's the matrix? What's the matrix? Finally. This world that is constructed around us. Mortgages, loans for cars that aren't worth $30,000 that somehow costs 150, insurance, The scam of life.

Why is insurance the scam? How can it not be? I don't have it, so I agree with you, but I just like to hear you explain it. What was that? United Healthcare, right? That's the dude that got whacked, right? The vice guy. Yeah.

Like, did they not just post like quarterly profits in the, in like, the multiple billions of dollars? I mean, that doesn't give it away for anyone. buddy that is an amazing clip Tucker has finally gotten Jess to open up and say some anti-Semitic shit so he tries to follow up by asking what the matrix is obviously expecting him to take it in that direction that's where Jess is that seems like he's going instead jess kind of thinks that the underpinnings of capitalism or the matrix and he has a particular distaste for insurance in response Tucker agrees with Jess saying that insurance is a scam and lies strength to his face that he doesn't have any insurance.

He cares no insurance of any kind. Tucker is a multi-millionaire with multiple children. He has all kinds of insurance on various things he owns and his life and his wife and all. He's probably wearing a watch that he has an insurance policy on. Yes. This is one of the most transparent lies a person like Tucker could tell. And Jess really should be asking himself why Tucker is so comfortable lying to his face like this. like what benefit is served by Tucker's suckering jazz in like this?

He has to know that he's being used, right? I mean, like, if he don't think he does know. He can't possibly know, right? If he knew where he was, like, as you put it, then he would know that this is like, this super rich guy is telling me he doesn't have insurance. Uh, fuck you, man. That's because he's so awake to the problems of the Matrix. Right, right.

Yeah. Okay, sure. I think he'd be justified at. throwing a swing at Tucker at that point. Like, obviously, you are a threat to me. You are a danger to me. You're lying to be this blatantly and transparently. And it's like, if he truly believes that these, you know,

these moneyed interests are the underpinnings of the Matrix, who do you think you're talking to? Who do you think you're talking to? Salt of the Earth kind of guy who made his own bucks from nothing. Tucker is the heir to a massive fortune, is he not? Ah, no, no, no insurance. No insurance on that. He doesn't carry any insurance because he's not a slave to the Matrix.

Right. It's the scam. So it's really obvious that Tucker is lying about not having insurance, but he also might be committing a crime here because this was one of the commercials that he ran on this same episode. Most people don't like thinking about life insurance. It's one of those topics you tend to kind of put off. But if you're married, you've got kids, you've got people who depend on you, you probably should think about what would happen if you weren't around. And that's why we've partnered with ethos.

They've made getting life insurance. super easy. You can do the whole thing online. You don't have to sit down with an agent or go through a medical exam. You get a quote in seconds, apply in just a few minutes, and in some cases, you get coverage the same day. Just answer a couple of simple health questions. You get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies can be yours for as little as $30 a month, so it's a good deal. If you've been putting off life insurance because you thought it would be a very complicated, expensive process, you should probably check out Ethos. Take a couple of minutes, get your free quote online at ethos.com

slash Tucker. Ethos is ethos.com slash Tucker. Application times obviously vary as do rates, but we think it's pretty good. So again, here is this just from what Tucker said. Why is insurance this scam?

How can it not be? I don't have it, so I agree with you, but I just like to hear you So if the FTC does anything anymore, this should be a consumer protection issue. Like honestly, this is, This should be illegal. So he's admitting he's trying to sell me a scam. Literally based on what he's saying, he's scamming you with this partnership that he's done with this advertising company.

That's so embarrassing. And like, I mean, I guess he works for himself. But, you know, as I heart radio employees, I know I signed a non-disparagement clause for our advertisers. He certainly just disparaged. Yeah. Oh, well. I think that like obviously this episode got a lot of like traction on social media. with people being like, you don't believe algebra is real?

What the fuck are you talking about? But I think that that's a bigger issue. Like that Tucker is undercutting his own premise. And like, that's so embarrassing. The clearness of how much he's lying to this guy. Like, I think that that's much more interesting than. It would be like Alex telling a guest that you shouldn't buy gold. Yeah.

Like, it's a scam. I think that like Jess not believing in algebra is unfortunate. and it reveals like an unwillingness to listen or learn anything. But I also don't think that like that's that big a deal. That's his life. Whatever. No, but it's emblematic of his approach to the world, right? This sort of intransigence, this refusal to engage with the possibility that there are things that you just don't know.

Yeah. He's like, no, I already know everything I need to know. Everything I already know is correct and final. And I don't need to engage with any additional information. And anyone asking me to is a. assaulting me and my way of life and my family. Yeah, I think that sucks, and I think it's unfortunate. And I think that there being more people who have that mentality, it causes problems.

But I don't think that Jess existing is a problem. No, because Tucker is doing it intentionally and at scale. Yeah, and Tucker, the way that he's clearly lying to this dude in order to facilitate that guy taking the fall for saying crazy shit and anti-Semitic shit. That is a much bigger problem, I think, because it facilitates and creates more. And so I think that's the focus. And Tucker knows better. This guy genuinely thinks algebra is fake. Tucker knows better.

Yeah. And I'd love to explain to him why like variables and constants work the way they do. If a math professor couldn't do it. He already understands it. He just doesn't know that he understands it. It's he needs probably go talk to somebody. Anyway, the issue is Tucker. That's all.

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the free IR Radio app today. I'm Melissa Jeltson, and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing the disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Blockers. In Washington, it became the worst thing you could be. And I found six of them. People who devoted their lives to public service, who believe their work mattered, until they were told they no longer belonged. I'm Michael Lewis in my new audiobook, Blockers, Rebels in the Deep State, tells the story.

these blockers. People who kept our most sensitive data secure, helped prevent wildfires, made huge scientific discoveries, but got in the way of the Trump administration's agenda. What fascinated me wasn't politics. It was what happens when a society decides it no longer values the people doing the work it depends on. Get blockers now, only at blockers.fm. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard a count after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming

up over and over. We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good trance. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to Examine the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Shortly before 6 o'clock a.m. on November 13, 1991, Annette's mother and her two young sons found her unresponsive inside their apartment. Investigators ruled the case a homicide. Over the years, detectives continued searching for answers, but the case eventually went cold.

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So obviously, the subject of Trump comes up. Oh, how is, how is Tucker doing on that these days? So one of the big projects that I have coming back into this podcast is trying to figure out, like, where are all these people? What are they doing now? Right, because they've all had to cope with the change in different ways. Yeah, and I think that if you want to like nail down Tucker, he thinks that it was all a trick. Like Trump fooled them. That's embarrassing.

Were you fooled by Trump? I did support him. And I go back and forth on whether or not I was fooled. I don't think I was fooled. Something happened to him. He turned his back on us. He became something else. I mean, unless he's not, he just can't be that good of an actor.

He doesn't seem to be. Otherwise, he could sell the lies now a hell of a lot better than he's selling him. No, that's a great point. Right? Like, so, no, he was being honest in the beginning. He was saying the true things, you know, deport all these people, save our country, all the things that were obviously wrong. he was pointing them out and then

just like a light switch he was like, no, no, I never said any of that. Yeah, actually, actually, Lindsay Graham's a great guy. Yeah, he's totally straight. Loves peace. What? These people all hated him.

These were everything we voted against. He surrounded himself and just is rolling around in it with everybody that hated him and tried to destroy him. and then somehow convinced him to destroy himself. That's exactly right and nicely put. They convinced him to destroy himself and us.

So deep. So deep. I think that that is a fascinating glimpse into a pained mind. Like Tucker asks the question, were you fooled by Trump, which presupposes that Trump was out there fooling people? You either saw through him or you were fooled. And that's a comfortable dichotomy for someone like Tucker.

either of those possibilities is defensible. One is probably seen by Maga folks as cynical early on, and the other now looks a bit too optimistic and naive, but they're both positions you could come to sincerely. Tucker needs these to be the only two options, because he's a third thing. He never was fooled by Trump, but made a shit load of money helping Trump fool people, and he would still be doing that if that was in his best interest. If he just spoke honestly about how he knew Trump's audience were a bunch of idiots who thought basic math was a white genocide conspiracy and he knew that he could fleece them, a lot of them wouldn't be so keen to keep watching his dumb show. So for the time being, it's still preferable to pretend that Trump fooled him, even though that's kind of humiliating in its own way.

That's kind of a clever approach to it. Yeah. As for Jess's answer, he's just grasping at whatever straws he can and to not have to accept that Trump never cared about. him and none of this shit meant anything. And his whole worldview relies on the idea that he could never have been wrong. So Trump must have changed. Yeah. And it's personal.

Like there's a personal feeling that is wrapped up in it that like I can't imagine that he didn't like me. And all those things that he said that made me think he liked me, those were real. He changed. The Jews got to him or something. Right. Somebody got to him. Yeah. It's unfortunate because the truth is that he should just realize that it was all bullshit and he got scammed.

And the guy he's talking to was one of the main PR people for the scam. And it's obvious Tucker knows his audience is dumb as rocks based on the way he's treating them by airing this content in the first place. Either that or he knows that his content is meant to serve a bigger purpose. As he put at the beginning of the show, he knows that it's stupid. maybe the people who are watching aren't stupid. They just want to advance more bigoted kind of conversations into a broader mainstream place. And having this kind of a guy on is a way to do that. But it's still dumb.

All of it's dumb. Tucker sucks. So I don't know, Molly, how much you've like seen the reaction that people have had to this interview. No, this is all new to me. Oh, wow. It's caused a bit of a stir in bigot social media spaces. And people like Nick- People really worked up about algebra. Yeah. People are real defensive about letters and in numbers and stuff. But like Nick Fuentes in particular, like he's responded by suggesting that Tucker Carlson's getting paid to make anti-Semites look stupid. He interviews a guy who thinks algebra is a Jewish conspiracy. So all other people who complain about Jewish people, they're going to look silly.

by being grouped with that guy. This is one of my favorite recurring arguments in the neo-Nazi space, because this has been going on for decades, for decades. Whenever one guy gets too explicit about it, all the other neo-Nazis are like, obviously this is the feds trying to make us look stupid. This guy who's saying the stuff that we all believe, this is obviously an op to make us look bad.

Right. And he articulated his ideas in a way that are particularly stupid, and he's not camera ready. are stupid. That's true, but some people could make them sound less stupid if they tried a little. But it's just like it's like a recurring cycle. Every time one guy gets too explicit or like really embarrasses the movement, this is obviously not. This is obviously no true Nazi. Exactly. Yeah. They do that all the time. No real Nazi would be so embarrassing. Like I have terrible news for you, brother. You're all embarrassing. Yep. Yep. But here's the twist. I do think that the interview was a setup.

But my sense is that Nick has it backwards. He was setting up the guest. Yeah. It's true that the only reason Tucker interviewed this guy is because he'd seen his social media posts and he had reason to believe he would say some anti-Semitic shit. Tucker was clearly trying to bait Jess into saying more explicit things and he seemed disappointed that it didn't go that way. But I don't think that Tucker knew Jess was this stupid.

I suspect that he thought Jess was an angry Potter, but he seemed genuinely surprised when just said the algebra shit. Tucker had to scramble and pretend that he never took math classes in order to yes and that stuff without having to break character and acknowledge that the person he was interviewing is a fucking idiot. Because I don't, I don't, there's no way I believe that was Tucker's Plan A is what I'm saying. Why didn't they cut the algebra part? It's edited, right? Well, I have a theory about that. So it feels to me like Tucker's setup was basically the same as a lot of his content. He interviews some guests with extreme views that he wants to promote.

It gets them to say horrible shit while he acts surprised and like he's being exposed to all sorts of new information that he's never heard before. So he has plausible deniability when people call him out. He disseminates and whitewash his Nazi shit to his audience and gets to pretend to be shocked and offended if anyone accuses him of doing that. Tucker does this all the time. And I'm sure he thought this would be just like any other episode, except that the thing that he had to pretend he'd never considered was elementary math.

It's kind of embarrassing and no one could possibly believe his fake wonder in that moment and it hurt his game. So Jess, I think is too dumb for prime time. And I imagine that if Tucker didn't have advertisers and obligations like that, the episode wouldn't have come out. But to your question of like, why wouldn't you just edit that stuff out? I think it's Tucker hanging him out to dry. Like, I think he realized, I'm not going to get what I want out of this.

But people are going to go crazy for memes about, like, algebra and stuff. This is so much free publicity I'm going to get. So I think he just... That makes sense. Yeah. I think he just left Jess out there to hang. And I guess he kind of does that to a lot of his guess. Like, even when he does get what he wants, right?

Like, if a guest says something really outrageous, he gets, like, you know, the bad press of having had this terrible guest on. That's good press for him because that's what he wants. And then he can say, well, look how bad it was. obviously I don't believe that. Look, look how stupid this guy is. Obviously, I don't agree with that. Right.

But you continue to have these people on. But a lot of times, too, those people are able to express themselves in ways that you can kind of defend. Like, I think that even if you have an interview, like his interview with Nick Fuentes, I don't believe it. But I believe that he could sell that like he had some interesting ideas. And we were talking about stuff and like, oh, yeah, he said this shit. I didn't say it. Look, I don't defend this. But like, this guy is talking about how we should teach Rumpel Stiltskin and algebra isn't real.

Like, Tucker can't do that. He can't play that same game with this. It is all just exploitation. He's just exploiting this guy. I mean, this just, this sounds like a guy that Alex Jones would hang up on. Yeah. Yeah. Or talk to for a long time privately.

Be best friends with. Tend is a lieutenant colonel who told him secret information. Yeah. about Rumpel Stilskine. Listen, you got to see through the predictive programming in Brothers Grimm stories. They're telling you the future. I just felt sad because ultimately, like, I think in the second clip that we listened to, you were feeling like this guy isn't here.

He's somewhere, he doesn't know where he is. And I feel like that's kind of true. And like, I don't think he deserves to be treated like this. I think. It just seems like it's cruel to him to expose us to his thoughts. It's not fair to him. And I don't think he's a child or like he doesn't have some responsibility to make his own decisions. And like he chose to go on the show and all that.

So like that's his fault. But like what Tucker's doing to him is also malicious. I mean, it's like when I used to go to a lot of like local county and city meetings, there was an old woman that would sometimes show up to these really obscure. board and commission meetings. Like she'd show up with the library commission, which like nobody shows up to, right? And she would have these handouts

about fluoridated water or about how the Wi-Fi signal is making the homeless people deranged and violent. And it's like, she's obviously not well and not super with it. And the facts that she has are deranged. But she's not really hurting anybody because she's in this room

with no one in it saying these things. Putting her on TV would be cruel. And I think that that's the two prongs of the problem. is like, yeah, his ideas are bad and they hurt people and this anti-Semitic shit is boring and way off base. And then the second prong is like Tucker is abusing this person by pretending to take this seriously. So stop. It all needs to stop. But Tucker's the much bigger problem.

And just in the clumsiest, more bad faith way, like pretending he doesn't have insurance or he's never heard of algebra. Yeah, yeah. Like that's disrespectful. Like I said, he should hit him. I don't know disrespected. I would hit him. Like, he is asking for it. Those are fighting words.

If Tucker Carlson tells me he doesn't have insurance, I know that he's setting me up. That is- You're mocking me, aren't you? Yes. You're daring me to accept this. Like, you're, yeah. Throw a swing at him. Tell me more about the Matrix.

Like, he's baiting you. Yeah. Yep. So you have one last clip here. It's how the interview ends. with what I would describe as an anti-plug. So you don't need the promotion, and you probably don't even want the work,

but I just can't resist by ending on the question of the art that you make. So how do people get it if they want it? Find me. Yeah, I'm going to make you work for it. Comes with an IQ test. I'm not that difficult to find. No, you're not. No.

my phone number's on the internet. Okay, man. I think that there's something that seems fun about that. I'm going to make you work for it. I'm not going to plug in my plug. But then when he says like my phone numbers on the internet, it's like how much are you actually making people work? You're not making people work at all.

You're just being kind of an angsty teen or something. Google it. Like I did. I did Google it. It's an IQ test. You can Google something. What? Like I said, there's not a lot of Jess Ellifson's out there.

So as long as you're getting the spelling from the caption of the video, it's not hard. I understand if he is like showing up in a mask and not letting Tucker say his name. If he's like, I'm going to make you work for it or something. Maybe. Maybe I'll allow it then. But yeah, it's a pretty uncommon name. Very easy to find. Just fucking plug something, you asshole.

I'm looking at the pottery, Dan. I'm looking at the pottery on the website where he sells his pottery. and it's sold out. So he doesn't need the plug. It's sold out. But one of the items that is sold out on this website, I don't know if you saw this. I assume you did see it.

Special order for Dan? No comment. Does you order $390 of this guy's mugs? No comment. I did not, but I did also see that. And I'm glad that you were able to find that in real time. This is why I knew that we would get along famously. That I knew that you'd, as soon as you said that you had Googled him,

I'm like, I bet that she's going to find that there was a special order for Dan. Special order for you wanted the, you did your due diligence. You have a whole shelf full of these mugs now. Yeah. I wish that was me. It's not. I don't have any of his mugs. I don't think I would pay that much.

300's high. I mean, $3.90. Too much. I think there's a sense that you get from that kind of an anti-plug that it just feels like adolescent. And I think a lot of this feels very. and like stuck. It's stuck somewhere that isn't very mature.

And I think that's unfortunate. And I don't think Tucker is doing anyone a favor by engaging with this and like acting like it's normal or good. Like I said, you know, my understanding of Tucker's arc right now is this sort of mainstream, mainstreaming of this hard anti-Semitism. Like I think, you know, the right wing is sort of fracturing in its approach right now. they're dealing with the fallout of, you know, you can't just be a MAGA guy anymore. And I think he is going to be sort of on the forefront of this hard pivot to extreme anti-Semitism.

And that's why he's trying to sneak it in in all of these ways. This kind of fell flat. This didn't work out. I agree. I think it was a dud. I think he should have left it on the shelf. Not that I want him to be more successful in that mission, but this was just weird. No, but just from, like, I think we both have a little bit of an editor's mind.

And, you know, you're thinking like. Right. from a content production point of view. This I wouldn't have aired. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you there. And I think one of the things that we're going to find over the course of the episodes that we're doing is like there's almost a battle, I think, for who's going to be the mantle of the hard anti-Semitic right. It's easy to imagine that like, yeah, Tucker is going to take that.

But other people don't want him to take that title. Like Nick doesn't want him to take that. there's other people who would rather be them. The guys that have been doing it. Like, Nick, I think are going to be less successful at entering the mainstream doing it. I think you can't be a Trojan horse if you're riding on top of the horse and you always have been. Right, right. That makes it very difficult.

You can't do like a false flag if you are using the same flag you have been. It has to be a different one. I mean, I guess, you know, if all of society pivots in that way, you don't need a Trojan horse. And so that would be very dark. But I think what Tucker is trying to do is, you know, fall back on his history as, you know, a mainstream right-wing commentator and Trojan horse in this hard pivot. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a lot of his scam.

I hope that he is unsuccessful. Yep. Well, that's what you get when there's no standards, you know, like when you just let anyone in the open-door policies for Nazi propaganda is no good. I guess it's this. He's experiencing the same difficulty that a lot of people. people who had legacy media jobs are, you know, people who think that they can take their their magazine job and just pivot to Substack, I think they don't realize how much they relied on having an editor.

Oh, that's, yeah, that's probably true. Yeah. And so he's realizing, like, if I'm my own booker and my own editor, this doesn't go as well. The institutional backing that they took for granted is maybe a little bit lost. You were not the lone genius of the operation and without the institution around you, the content looks like this. Yeah. I would say the only thing I disagree with there is that there is a particular genius in Tucker's ability to go, what? Like that face.

Like no one else can make that face. Like a dog's seen a magic trick. Yeah. No amount of bookers or editors could replicate that. That's natural skill. You can't teach it unlike algebra. But you can't teach that either because it's not real. Apparently not.

So I was going to close by asking you what you think about this episode, but I think we're pretty clear. Like it's just unaffective, not good. Just like depressing. This man needs to see a professional. I'm concerned for his well-being, to be honest, for his mental state. Yeah. I think as soon as you click this on and you see that he kept his sunglasses on the whole time, that's a bad sign. That's like Kanye showing up with a bag over his head.

Like, this is a man who's in a mental state. But I, yes and no. But I think at least Kanye, you could kind of say like he's an artist. You're right. This is just a guy who maybe has a really bad hangover. I'm not saying that this jazz guy isn't an artist because obviously he is. He's a potter and a welder, but not in the same way.

He's not a performance artist. Yeah. Yeah. I think he just had a hangover. Yeah, probably. Or withdrawal from something heavier. I don't know. I'm sorry to start things off on this kind of a vibe, but I was too fascinated and I'm glad that I got to break you in on the like algebra, the real shit.

I'm glad that you didn't see that beforehand because your face was quite delighted. No, I don't really seek this, this particular thing out. So I'll always be surprised if you want to have me back. Absolutely. And we will talk again soon. But first, before we get out of here, where can people find Jamali? Oh, it comes to an IQ test. You just got to find me.

You can listen to weird little guys wherever you get your podcasts. It comes out every Thursday. Right now I'm in the middle of an exploration of race science and eugenics. We're having a great time over there. Always fun. Oh, yeah. I had a small bone to pick with you about the weird little guys. And it was just that I was jealous that I didn't get to join you for the review of Uwey Bowles,

citizen vigilante because I didn't have a podcast running at that time and I got drunk and watched it. You wanted to do it. Yeah, I had a lot of thoughts. I think next time I do a movie, you'll have to come on. Please. I love art. You're a discerning critic of right wing art. Yeah. Yeah, people can just check that out. And yeah, I don't have an outro yet. I don't know what I say at the end of episodes. It takes a while to get into the swing of things. I was listening to some old episodes in my show. And I think it didn't hit it sort of tonal stride in the first six months. So try some things on. Okay, here, I'm going to do this.

We'll see. This probably isn't going to work out, but we'll see. Banana. That's another Donkey Kong thing. Beautiful. I'm going to stop. Knowledge Fight Country is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Coolzone Media, visit our website,

coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcast. Podcasts. Clips, links, and sources, reference, and episodes are listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that? Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw.

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