The Dark Forces Destroying Art, Beauty and Robbing You of Your God-Given Creativity

Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. 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. It has happened. The system is designed to exclude, rather than include, exclude Christians, people with an independent cast of mind, creativity, you know, 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. 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, and an aesthetic sense that's 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 popularity. Or allow its population to die of drug ODs. So I think it really, really matters, the love of beauty really matters, and you have it. So, anyway, that's why I'm doing this interview, and there's a bigger reason. And I hope a lot of people watch it. Tell us who you are, where you're from, how you live. My name is Jess Ellefson, I'm a three-dimensional artist. I do not, while I primarily work in ceramics, all three-dimensional art. I don't 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. Ceramics are what marks every, every civilization is marked by its ceramics. And when you see what modern art puts out, and just the horrendous, disgusting lack of aesthetics, lack of skill, lack of thought in modern art. It's just disgusted me since high school art classes. I got in trouble for calling bullshit on modern art that they were like, "This is in the Guggenheim." I was like, "Why?" Because that's fucking horrendous. Like, I wouldn't put that in my toilet. Like, you think that this dude is in the Guggenheim? He is skilled? Like, people would 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, I want to understand what the purpose of it is. I mean, clearly this, it didn't arise organically. This, the movement, which began with Dada a hundred years ago, and then flowered into all kinds of different movements. 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, like, there's no thought or interesting things beyond it. I've heard that the CIA started just paying retarded amounts of money for his paintings 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. 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. So, I want to put two images on the screen to contrast what I think art is and has always been and certainly ought to be with what art has become and has a totally different purpose. The first would be present-day understanding of what beauty is, which is, in fact, an attack on beauty. 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 the absolute contrary opposition to aesthetics and beauty. There's no symmetry to that. Symmetry is the basis of beauty. Yes. 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. And they teach you that in early art school, but then somehow it gets lost in the upper levels. Draw a line down the middle. Perspective, symmetry, balance, aesthetics. So, symmetry is balance, right? Yes. So, the human body is. Draw a line, yeah. And you can feel it just by touch. From your palate to your navel, to your toes, you are symmetrical. Two sides have joined. Even sides have joined. Mirror images have joined. And that is true in nature. It's true in plants. It's true in other animals. And so, this is an organic fact. Symmetry is beauty. The Fibonacci spiral. Yes. The golden ratio. The golden means. Sacred geometry. The whole way everything was built and created before, you know, what? The industrial revolution and the degradation Yes. of our own culture. 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 cost $2 million to build. Right. 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." Yeah. Weld 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, it's just not possible. And yet, the number of credentialed members of our ruling class who 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? It is. To degrade our society, to destroy our families. Yes. To destroy your ideas of beauty, to take it out of your life. We need beauty. We need beauty in our lives. And when we don't have that, and when your surroundings are so degraded, it lowers your ability to think and enjoy and find your own happiness. Yes. In your life. Yes. 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. Yes. 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 horribly ugly disgusting music and architecture. There is nothing mainstream in this world. 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 forever. 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. 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So now no more guessing, no more staring at charts, and no more checking the market between meetings. Also, over $1.3 billion is already invested. So if you wanted to check it out, search Autopilot in the App Store or go to joinautopilot.com. That's joinautopilot.com. Investing has risks like the loss of principal. I think what sets you apart is that you take it seriously because you understand its importance. I'm with you 100%. These are not boutique concerns. These are not like some eccentric fixation that you have. This is at the heart of what it means to be human and to continue your civilization and build one worth having. So I want to contrast the Obama Presidential Library, which is a pretty easy shot, by the way. 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. It's omnipresent. But this is just a really 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 you know, utilitarian, as welding. This is video. This is, this was my first experience of your work. And the first time I heard your name is someone sent me this video and someone who's aesthetic sense I admire and trust and said, this is, this is unbelievable. This is you. Well, tell us what this is. It's you building a wood stove out of what? Out of excavator buckets. And not only is that a way to repurpose something that it has already had a utilitarian life, but to give it a new purpose and create something that is not only beautiful, but functional. Yeah. Useful. And does a better job at what it does than anything else you can buy today. That's really, and it's permanence. It's permanence. It's not just, you know, use this for a couple of years and throw it away. What I like about it is that these are generational. These are pieces of functional art that could heat your home for generations. It's a Roman aqueduct. It's the Acropolis. It's still there. That's there is no greater civilization than the Roman Republic and the things they built and the architecture and our Republic is, is framed on theirs. Yes. Like our up to be the best of what the Romans had to offer. Then with a bill of rights added to it, it was a possible shot at the golden age. Yes. And it's been perverted and destroyed and degraded and taken advantage of. It sure has. So without further ado, here is you creating art from an excavator bucket. Watch. This one's 1500 pounds. Not every bucket can be a stove. I've built them up to 60 inches. The last one I built before this one was like almost, it was over 6,000 pounds when it was done. The color on this, this is only from fucking what, eight hours, 10 hours of firing on it. The color is going to soak all the way up and through this thing. After you've been using this thing for about a month straight, the color soaks all the way through it. The whole thing will get patinaed. And that's what fucking seals it. You can't put anything on the outside of it. Like what I did, two loads of wood and they hit five, 600 degrees on this thing. And of course, this flat spot up top is for cooking, right? You build these out. So that's a cooking plate that hit 400 degrees while I was firing it just on that little thing. You fry yourself some fucking bacon. So, um, you know, I guess you either find that beautiful or you don't. I, I don't send videos to people. I don't watch videos. I don't care for video. I sent that to me. People. I showed my wife that probably the only video I've ever showed my wife. Um, and she agreed that it was beautiful. And that it also, as you said, this is, this is an object that has use that, that warms the home and anyone, of course, there's an assault on wood stoves because a wood stove is inherently beautiful. Uh, so now they're banned, but, um, anyone who lives at the woodstove can tell you there's no more uplifting way, joyful way to heat your home than a wood stove. But, um, We have nothing in this world without fire. Yeah. Fire is the basis of human ingenuity. It is the first tool we created. It cooks our food. It warms our homes. Human civilization doesn't exist without fire. It creates energy. There you go. Yeah. Steam power generators. Exactly. Exactly. Which is where we get our electricity, uh, overwhelmingly even now. So, um, so give us some background on you. Where do you, so you live in Soho in New York over your gallery. Tell us where you're from. I live on, uh, 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. Yeah. 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. Right. And 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. Yeah. They are super concerned about it. They feel left out. Yeah. There's not enough stabbings. There's not enough stabbings and shootings and drug addictions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm very, as someone who lives in a rural area, I'm very familiar with the mindset. Um, tell me about the farm. It's a family farm. Yes. My family came from Sweden through Ellis Island, got an ox and a wagon and came directly to where I now live in 1876. Really? Same piece of ground? My studio is, what my studio is now is the first, first homestead house that they built in 1891. Amazing. Yeah. Um, and your family's been there continuously the whole time. Yes. Yes. always, always generations living there. Never just one, never just two, usually three. I grew up with my grandfather on the farm and my uncle also living there as well. And you still have three generations there now? Yes, we do. Yeah. On the same farm? On the same farm. I live 150 yards from my parents. Yeah. I get to see my dad every day. We work together. Who built your house? I built my house. Like physically built it? Physically built it. Yes. 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 natural livestock. I want to take it back to self-sufficient. I had to interview my grandfather when I was in middle school to talk about the Great Depression. And I was like, "What was the Great Depression like? How did your life change?" And he was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" He was like, "We didn't even know there was a depression." It was the same shit. It was the same thing from the day before, and it was the same thing for the 10 years after. What do you mean? There was what Great Depression? We were dirt poor. We were self-sufficient. And it was my grandfather, who said to me, "If you want nice things, you better learn to build them yourselves because we don't have any money." And he said that to my dad, and he said that to me, and it stuck with both of us. My dad built his own house. My dad taught me how to restore vehicles, all that. I can build 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. What's in your studio? A wood stove. I bet. 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. Yeah. I think without history, 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. Exactly. And if you learn only what not to do, I said that to my daughter the other day. I was like, "You know, my daughter was born when I was 23 years old, me and my wife. It was not planned, but it bonded us together." And all's 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, not paying attention can cost lives. 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. And just, 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? Yeah. And there's no guidance in this world anymore. It'd be awesome 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 that doesn't exist. It's only like how to destroy a family. We're often assured that Christians are safe in the Holy Land. Is that true? Well, the descendants of the very first Christians, these are families who have worshiped in the land of Jesus for centuries, for millennia, are now facing enormous pressure to flee their own homes. War and anti-Christian terrorism are driving them out and untold numbers of innocent people are left feeling lost and without hope. 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A monthly gift of $83 helps sustain that protection all month long. We hope you will visit SaveWestBankChristians.com and stand with Christians in the Holy Land, the place where Christianity began, the land that Jesus walked. That's SaveWestBankChristians.com. Thanks. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. BJ's, home of the Save. This episode is brought to you by TXU Energy. For the first time ever, Texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings. It's called Free Nights and Cool Summer. You get free nights every night, all year long, plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first of its kind plan created for how Texans actually use energy. Discover how much more you could save with Free Nights and Cool Summer. TXU Energy. Energy for everything. Visit TXU.com for more information. Rep number 10004. So where do you go for guidance? I basically have operated under the only knowledge of what not to do. Yes. If something works, you repeat it. And if it doesn't, you change past. You change tactics. You adapt. You overcome. Yes. No lie. Probably the best marriage advice I've ever gotten is I've heard from you of things that like never even occurred to me that seems so simple about like when your wife says to you, where would you like to eat? And it was so eloquent the way you explained it. Just, oh, I don't know. I'd like to go to Chinese. Like, let's go to Chinese. Oh, I hate Chinese. Yes. Chinese sucks. Like how to be that support. Like, I don't know where you've gained these. She wants you to make the decision. She does not want to be bulldozed or yelled at or ordered around. Women hate that, but, but they want you to make the decision. And so very often the decision that you make is her choice repeated back to her in the form of a decision. And if you don't do that, she will feel abandoned. Unprotected. She'll feel that you're not interested in her. Women are different from men. Very different. Yes. But we need each other. A hundred percent. I couldn't live a day without my wife. I wouldn't want to. That's for sure. So I would not be the person I am without my wife. Of course not. But the lies that we've been told about the way that the sexes get along, the main lie is that they're identical. That's couldn't be farther from the truth. They couldn't be more different. We, we over, um, estimate the differences between races and dramatically, underestimate the difference between sexes. Men and women are nothing alike. And if you don't know that, then, and you treat your wife like your buddy, you're going to have a very unhappy wife. Or you're going to have a very short marriage. Very short marriage. That's the guy. And you will never know why, you know, we just weren't compatible. No, you just didn't understand the differences between men and women. And she does not want to be bossed around or ordered around or yelled at my gosh, never yell at your wife ever, but she wants to be protected and provided for. And there's no shame in that. That's your duty. So anyway, um, so what's tell me you have a kiln in your shop. Yeah. A wood fired kiln. What's a wood fired kiln. I have a wood fired kiln. Uh, and it's an Onagama style kiln, uh, that I kind of modified for my use just from experience. It's a, a high fire ceramics kiln that burns wood. I also have a six burner downdraft LP kiln as well. So a wood fired kiln. Um, where'd you get it? Where'd you buy that? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's not something you can buy. You have to build that. Yeah. How big a project is that? Six months of eight, 10 hour days. Yeah. Build a kiln. 5,000 bricks. You're talking math and geometry, cantonary arches, understandings of architecture, right? Why, why is it, why is it not just a hot box to 2,300? 350 degrees isn't fucking around, Tucker. Well, you just stack a lot of wood and it gets to 2,350 degrees, no? No, you can burn a pile of wood on the ground all week long and it will never get hotter than 1,376 degrees. That is the peak temp burning of wood. Just like paper has an ignition point of like, what, 900? Yes. Yeah. So it is the shape of the kiln, the size of the chimney, the size of the firebox to create the natural draft and then the stored energy principles of thermodynamics to achieve temperatures over 2,000 degrees. It is incredibly complex and I've seen more people fail at it than succeed. So basically the design, the cantonary arches that you referred to, the design of the architecture of the kiln increases the temperature of the fire. Yes, yes. The way it works is. Your firebox sits at the front. Your firing chamber is in between that. Your chimney is at the back. Your chimney is what is going to create that draft. But there are things to understand like the expansion of air by volume as it is heated. So if the air coming in at 2,000 degrees increases in volume by four times its size, that math equation has to be done to have enough. space at the back to allow that to leave. But if it's too big, it will not create draft. These are not principles or ideas that you can hunt and peck around at or just happen to fucking build it right. There is complex math involved in building a kiln. These are not things that you're just like, "Oh, I just want to burn some pots and get them hot." And so that is one of those things where I have always been amazed because there are high-fire pots from 8,000 B.C. Well, how could that be? Yeah, that's a great question because that's supposed to just be hunter-gatherers. But to even create a brick that is capable of withstanding temperatures over 2,000 degrees requires what I would refer to as industry and an understanding of chemistry. So it requires different bricks from, say, say, the bricks you build a home out of or even the bricks in your fireplace. Oh, yeah, dude. No, I could take fireplace bricks, put them in my kiln, and they'd come out as puddles. Yeah. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that happens because when you're going to build a kiln, there's not really an understanding of that in the brickmaking world always. Like, I've found you just kind of stumble upon the bricks where, like, somebody has just got it right and they are not even aware of what they really have. So you kind of go around and buy bricks from different places, put them all in your kiln, fire that thing up, see who lives. So, OK, so you're talking about something. It's a machine or a device made by human hands that is so complex. I'm having trouble under some sort of most people do college educated vaguely. I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, but you're saying this existed. And we know for a fact it existed in 8000 B.C. That's correct. That's the oldest high fire pot that has ever been found. That is a fully vitrified surface. The hotter you get ceramics, you're compressing the molecules. So like your standard porcelain commercial coffee cup, that's not fully vitrified. That is not high fire ceramics. That is what is called low fire ceramics, because the amount of energy and input to get to high fire ceramics is almost double what it took to get that cup to probably 1750, 1800 degrees. Are we sure? Because if you think about it, I mean, there are still glaciers melting 8000 years ago, literally. Yeah, glaciers melting. Yeah, the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century A.D. That's 8000 years, more than 8000 years before the fall of Rome. Yeah. And there were civilizations capable of producing what you just described, understood thermal dynamics. The Canterbury arch, because there is no other way to encapsulate an area like that. It requires the knowledge of an arch or a dome. There's no other way to get it done. And you need materials capable of withstanding 2000 degree heat. You got it. And we know that this happened because we have the product of it. And they span many, many centuries and millennia. It's not like they're all there's one pot from 8000 B.C. and then there's not another one until like the the Mycenaeans. Like, no, like they find them all scattered out and in between. Eating right is pretty important, but it's hard if you live here. About half of the American diet is ultra processed foods. And that hurts you. Fake food harms your body, your mind and especially your liver. So people think that feeling sluggish and foggy and bloated is just what it is to be older. But that's not true. Eating crap. Makes you feel that way. Well, our friends at Dose have a solution. It's called Dose for your liver. This doctor approved plant based liver supplement is clinically proven to promote liver function and lower liver enzyme levels. That means you're less bloated, less tired. You feel more like yourself. All you need to do is take a daily two ounce shot. 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And not really being too impressed and they walked me out to look at their like, yeah, we have a wood kiln. I've always been super into wood kilns because that is ancient technology. Like my wood kiln that I have. You could grab a time machine, grab any Roman, walk him in there. You don't have to tell him he can just run that kiln. A potter knows a potter knows a skilled potter knows like you can just like any mechanic can tune any engine. Right, right. And so I walk out and I look at this wood kiln and I was just like, wow, how bad does that suck? And they looked at me and I was like. I was like, you struggle like you're pretty upset with yourself when you get to two thousand degrees or nineteen hundred and you just can't get this thing any hotter. They looked at me and they were like, how do you know that? And I was like, well, your pass through to your chimney is too small. Like, what are you doing here? And it's just like, why did you even go to this effort if you didn't understand the project in front of you and you were just going to wing it? Like, I mean, even then we had the Internet. There's books you don't read, but you did no research. What is this? And you want to fucking teach me something? I was like, no, I think not. I think not. I'm very unimpressed. So the kiln never worked. I doubt it. No, no, it couldn't get to town. Yeah. How long does it take? So you take you you throw pots. Yeah, whatever they are. Vases, plates, whatever objects out of clay. You dry them and that can take months or years, right? Yeah, you can. I've had dry work sitting on the shelf for for over a year. Yeah. And then you fire it to change its its essential composition to put the molecules closer together. You create a kind of stone, actually. Yes, that's why they refer to high fire ceramics as stoneware, stoneware pottery. As you're taking. That base element of clay, which clay is not its own thing. It's a recipe. You have to make a pure clay body. You cannot have contaminations and you make it just like you would make bread or cookies. There are many different things. You can have porcelain stoneware and the things you can do to it to alter it. No, no, I let me just correct you. Just I've seen videos in the Internet where you just take a shovel and dig into a riverbank and you get clay. Yeah, that shit does not work. Yeah. And it never has. It never has. Even the Romans altered their clay body with other fell spars. It has to have the right elasticity so you can even throw it so that it can hold itself together. Its molecules have to be bound together in a proper way that create a structure that can hold and create a vessel. No. So clay itself is the product of a recipe. It's a product of basically backyard chemistry. Yes, there are there are some naturally occurring clay bodies that can make low fire ceramics, and that is what you see from a lot of early Native American cultures, but those vessels cannot hold water. If you are to take naturally occurring clay bodies above like 50, they just melt into a puddle. They do not have the proper refractory elements inside of them to stand up to that kind of heat. So they just melt into a puddle. So they can have low fire pottery that can store grain and things. They are still useful, 100%. They say the first pot was created by hunter-gatherers who recognized that clay did dry out and become hard. And they packed it inside their reed baskets. And they think that it got left next to a fire and lit on fire and burned. And they were like, hey, look at this nice hard vessel that I got left. And you worked it out from there. But like the amphora, the Greek amphora that were used to transport wine and all. Yeah. That we find in shipwrecks in the Aegean or the Med, those were high fired because they're holding liquid. Bingo. Interesting. Interesting. So when you use your wood kiln to fire the pots that you've thrown, how long does that process take? Anywhere from 72 to 96 hours. Continuously? Continuously. At the first part, you're maybe throwing wood in every five, seven, 10 minutes. Minutes? Yes. It is very controlled. Like I said, as you're going through this process, the elements that you made the clay out of are bonding. They are creating new elements. There are quartz inversions. But the molecules are moving at all times as well because you're trying to compact these things tighter and tighter. So you have to soak at 200, 400, 1,000. Some people like to soak at 1,400 a little bit. And you cannot go up in temperature. You can't go up in temperature any more than 100 degrees in an hour, or you will break everything. Molecules will move faster at some other part of the pot and tear apart. So if it takes three or four days of continuous work, when do you sleep? You don't. Not if you want to do it right. Yeah. You stay up without sleeping for three or four days to just fire pots in a wood-fired kiln? Tucker, if you went to work for, you know, two months, and then all your body of work from that two months got put into a box and lit on fire, and if it gets fucked up, you don't get paid, I don't think you're going to have a hard time not sleeping. I don't anyway. That's amazing. So how much wood do you burn over the course of one firing? Six, eight, ten cords. In one firing? In one firing. Enough wood to heat your home for an entire winter. In one firing? In one fire. By the time you're over 1700 degrees, you're throwing wood in this thing literally like non-stop. You're throwing some wood in, you're kind of watching what happens in the kiln, and then you're walking over to the pile to pick your next piece, and it's not just like, "Oh, I'm going to grab whatever wood I want." You're balancing fuel, air, and the ports of fire. You're balancing fuel, air, and the ports of fire. You're balancing the air in, you're controlling the back pressure out, because what creates the colors is the reduction atmosphere. You're flooding the interior atmosphere of the kiln with so much fuel that any oxygen that enters the kiln is immediately used for combustion, thus expanding the flame all the way out the chimney and sucking the oxygen from the surface of the pots, affecting the trace elements of metals that you've mixed into other substances that create the glazes that create the colors on the pottery. So, I mean, even there, when you see, like, Corinthian pottery from, you know, 1000 BC, those dudes understood chemistry, elements, periodic tables, what things do what. And, like, you're not just like, "Oh, here's some red element. I'm going to put that on there, and it's going to make red." It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. Like, copper carbonate is not green, right? It's not? No. No, it's not. It's a kind of a pale purple color in powdered form. And only when exposed to these temperatures does it become green? Temperatures and the removal of the oxygen. Like, most people are familiar with a torch hitting a piece of metal and the metal turning color. The metal turns blues and purples and things like that. And if you take that piece of metal and quickly dunk it in water, you can freeze those colors onto the metal. The metal didn't turn color because it got hot. It turned color because the flame removed the oxygen from the surface of that metal. So, these were concepts that were precisely understood in 8000 BC. That would what be. That is what the pottery would tell us, correct? So, what does that tell us about the nature of technology and civilizations? It obviously puts a lie to the linear understanding of history, that history is a kind of inexorable progression toward progress. Yeah, right. The word "progression" is actually a misleading term because it means it's always getting better or more sophisticated or more enlightened, and that's obviously fake. 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. Three times in the last 2,000 years? That's kind of a central technology. Yeah, you know. That's not an esoteric technology. It's not like, "How do we get back to the moon? No one can remember. Oh, we destroyed the blueprints for that. Okay." But this is like a basic. Like, a toilet is obviously a necessity of life. So, if you forget how to build a flush toilet three times in the last 2,000 years, like. 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 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. We're into Goldberg. We've been into gold for a long time. That turned out to be pretty smart, not to brag or anything. We've told you a lot about gold, how it's outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 25 years. That's true. How the central banks around the world have been buying it at record levels as they diversify away from U.S. debt. That's all true. But there's another reason to consider buying physical gold, actual gold. And that reason, of course, is privacy. Your bank and credit card company record every transaction. Cryptocurrency, whatever its benefits, leaves a permanent public record. It's on the ledger. There are stories about how government tracks cash, literally cash, because remember when they switched to the new bills? Well, they're trackable. So gold is probably the only store of value that can even conceivably remain private. It's outside the system built to monitor and control you. And that's one of the reasons that we found in Battalion to help Americans reclaim sovereignty and privacy, which is to say reclaim freedom by making it simple and secure and accessible to own physical gold. So with all the drama around the world and all of that drama affects the strength of the U.S. dollar, which is getting weaker, gold help protects your savings. And the surveillance state, of course, getting stronger every day. That's what data centers are about. Probably like a little bit of privacy. Gold gives you privacy. It can't be tracked. Explore our collection at battalionmetals.com slash Tucker. And I think that the reason we know they're stupid is because they discount the possibility that they'll ever forget this technology. And they imagine whatever we're doing now will always be done and then built upon by future generations. But that's not the story we've been handed by history. It's the opposite. Yeah. No, but 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. That's why people are miserable. Yeah. What's the process by which a civilization forgets the basics? Million dollar question. Not teaching your kids, I suppose. Yes. The destruction of the family, the loss of wanting something better for your offspring. spring and probably getting it wrong. I think so many people try to give their kids what they never had rather than what you should do, which is teach them what you wish you knew. 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. That's not something people appreciate. No. On the way here, dude, I saw a motorcycle tipped over and 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. 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. He's probably obeying all the rules of the road. But somehow, do they even give driver's tests anymore? I don't think they do. I'm pretty sure they don't. No. The standards. The standards are gone for everything. Yeah. 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. That's 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, Tucker. Well, because it's not about the victims of the fire. It's about the self-esteem. 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. Yeah. So, telling your children, teaching your children is the key to keeping your civilization going? It has to be. I guess, I mean, that's how we've progressed. It's so weird. It's like they teach you that about early hunter-gatherer civilization, but then all of a sudden when you get technology, no, you don't need to teach your kids anything. Like, God forbid, teach them math or make them read or. Don't. Don't do any of that. Like, put them on a couch and make sure they're soft as fuck and incapable of even wiping their own ass. That is definitely the way to raise your kids. Works out really well. Like, look around. Why do people fall for that? I have no idea. Yeah. I have no idea. Some people, I, you know, I see people, some people hate their jobs. They're like, "Oh, I wish I didn't have to do this." And it's like, I don't understand, I don't understand that because your self-worth, your self-value, your self-esteem, your confidence all comes, at least in my case, from accomplishing difficult things, from overcoming difficult times, difficult projects, things that are hard to do. I've never felt better than myself than when I accomplished things that other people said couldn't be done. Of course. Like, that is the epitome of living a great life. Like, when somebody tells you you can't do something, you should strive your hardest to get that shit done. Yes. And you will, you will never feel better about yourself. I've long thought that the main missing ingredient in the lives of most men is the act of creation. Yes. Which is, you know, the first act of God is to create everything around us, to create all matter, the universe. God created, that's the, and the spark of God within us, that's, the good parts of us. We're made in His image. Exactly. And so the act of creation, particularly, I can't speak for women, I'm not a woman, but I know that for men. They grow life, Tucker. Of course. They can do things that we can't do. Exactly. And it's inherent to them. So it's exactly right. And so, but men need to continually renew that act of creation. Obviously the most fun being the act of creating. We're trying to catch up to women. Well, I agree. They create life and we are trying to create other beautiful things. We're trying to create things to accentuate that life and make it worth living. I so vehemently agree with that. But if you have a job, if like the substance of your day is occupied with tasks that have no creative component to them, if you're not creating anything, I think the kind of soul death sets in. Oh, it's gotta suck your soul out. And it obviously does. Yes. Look at, look at people who are. Stuck in an office. They're I that's, that's why men have garages. Exactly. Right. They have the soul sucking job and they come home and toil more in their garage for that mental health. Exactly. And it's like, they can't put the two together and you see people live life in reverse. I see these people that had like, they do woodworking hobbies. Right. And they have some soul sucking insurance salesman job. That really fucking depletes and like sucks the wealth out of everybody in the world. And they're really actually doing the demons bidding and then they come home and they work some wood and maybe someday they get to retire and they find that they have a greater life now creating cutting boards or whatever, and selling that and finding more reward in that. And probably even monetary return that they did not experience in the first 50 years. Yeah. And you're like, yeah, I, I often wonder if those men come to that epiphany of like, I might've fucked up. Yeah. I don't know. It's, it's too big a truth to swallow at a certain point. You know what I mean? Like you misspent your life and it's finite. Like that's a lot to accept. I think, I hope they never come to that realization. Um, I know that when I. When I've been in hotel rooms over the years for one period of my life, probably 10 year period, I brought a fly tying kit with me and tie trout flies and salmon flies in my hotel room in almost like a crazy monomaniacal way. And I was like, what is this about? What? I mean, I obviously love to trout and salmon fish. So there's that. And I think my flies are better than anyone else's, which objectively they are, but it's not really about that. It's about, it was just the need. I was so displaced living in someone else's room in a hotel room. It's disgusting. That I needed to like create something or go crazy. Yeah. This is when it first occurred to me, like, why am I tying all? I still, that was 10 years ago. I still, I still tie trout flies a lot. I can't go on vacation. Yeah. I know what you mean. I can't, I can't enjoy myself. So you've decided, I mean, I think anyone who's made it this far into the conversation can tell that you're of superior intelligence as we used to say. So you probably could have done a lot of different things. Instead you make pots. Yeah. And weld excavator buckets. And so like, you've clearly decided that making money is not the most important thing to you. Obviously. It is the root of all misery in people's lives. People that chase money have holes in their souls and they are miserable people. I've never met anybody who had, I've, we'll put it this way. I've met a lot of people that have more money than sense. Yeah. And they are miserable. Their kids hate them. Their kids hate their lives. They hate their lives. They got some nice shit. Maybe they don't know how to use it. They don't know how to take care of it. Exactly. They don't know how to make anything better. Their life around them crumbles without Juan the gardener to come by to service their wife and put their shit back together. It's a dark picture, but it's accurate. Unfortunately. We live in a dark society. Yeah. Did you ever have any moment where you'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. I don't feel it. That's, that's probably why I'm always striving to create something, 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 it's it's not the money that people pay me for my art it's their appreciation for it yes when I see that spark in their eye or when I see him when I see I saw a lady ten years later she came up to me and she was like I bought a coffee cup from you even back when you were back in college I use it every day it is the greatest coffee cup ever I love it I love the colors of it and that brought beauty into her life and she appreciated that in a dark shitty world and that was more reward than any money how many of us get to make the world better very few very few so at the end of your days which are spent mostly on your farm right are you satisfied at the end of your day do you do you feel like you've every day I the best days my wife will give me shit she'll be like you haven't left the farm for ten days you need to go somewhere and I'm like oh should I go out to the field I'll go walk around the field a little bit I'm not going down to that shithole town fuck no like that's a last resort like I buy everything in bulk so I have to make that trip as least often as possible what I mean as an outsider who goes to South Dakota every year to hunt pheasants I drive around South Dakota and I'm like it's great my rural neighbors from South Dakota I guess maybe we've had some influx some of the people are really awesome that have moved in but not everybody understands how to care for the land yeah and make it better like putting up some cookie cutter stick home with fucking whatever bullshit vinyl siding does not make the land better no it doesn't it poisons the land does not improve the beauty clear-cutting trees off no that's it's not it's not beauty you're not helping things no they're destroying and they never get credit for it either fucking wind turbines what's the point of wind turbines to destroy the land yeah it's like it's like X-Men in those giant robots you know that had the 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 that's that's how that feels the wind turbines encroaching from Minnesota yeah how far you from Minnesota not far enough yeah not far enough so when you're not looking at the wind turbine invasion and I agree I mean there's we've been doing this wind turbine thing for more than 10 years and there's no evidence it's approved anything at all and there's overwhelming evidence it's destroyed so much um but when you're you feel at the end of the day as you go between the home you built to the homestead your ancestors built where your studio is and you create pots or weld wood stoves you feel like you've had a good and rewarding day yeah I do I do my my kids are happy my wife's happy that's that's a win everybody's alive everybody's getting better yes it's one thing I always try to instill in my kids and you never stop learning every day you need to learn something else better yourself with skills or knowledge even if you don't know what that knowledge is useful for right now you will find that purpose later in life I I always just had this love of history and I just I don't know I don't know what my attraction to that is but it's so interesting to me yes and it's and it's so odd the way that knowledge will seep into your life and solve your problems for you at the most unknown times really what did give me an example what do you mean um I 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 I love Greek and Roman pottery it's beauty it's accentuation of the female shape I 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 and every normal person knows that yeah and the destruction of it is really upsetting I think it's it's horrible but I mean I mean the other the other great lessons of history I don't know don't with Persia yeah right yeah like I I'm just so amazed because like I mean I don't live in a cave or anything I just live on a farm but somehow I knew long ago you don't with Russia and you don't with Persia who's made it who's invaded Russia that made it out alive 1990 nobody like what do you think you're special like what the hell is wrong with these people I can't grasp that oh we're gonna go take Kesham Island dude we got look at what Okinawa cost yeah that wasn't even one tent that size and they didn't have ballistic missiles and drones they just had some artillery they killed what 15 000 20 000 Marines with just some what is that a type 99 yeah type 99 it's a good Japanese machine yeah pretty small caliber all the Japanese small arms were pretty small effective they're quite quite effective no they worked they were just like a 30 out six yeah so uh those are very obvious lessons don't invade Russia by the way don't invade Afghanistan that'd be the third and the fourth would be Yemen is tough so any any large land mass including like a big step like Russia but certainly any mountainous area like if I were to pick four people not to mess with just because there's no historical track record of success in messing with them it would be the Russians it would be the Persians it would be the Pashtuns and it'd be the Houthis yeah and it's kind of weird that like no one seemed to have noticed that ever how how is that how is that how can you how can you get to a four or five star General and like not it's it doesn't even have to be ancient history right like what uh Afghanistan kicked Russia's ass in the 80s yeah like I'm pretty sure you were alive I remembered right I had just been born but like it's pretty recent history I think you'd be like oh I think there's some video of that even I don't even have to read about it I remember it well and we backed the mahajideen who later became the Taliban and I remember very well I mean I I actually met the mahajideen in 1986 in the summer they came to Washington and um I knew and um I knew people who were you know whatever involved in that and everyone said you're never going to beat these people they're the ones who sent the British Army scurrying back to Peshawar like the retreat from Kabul famous thing right in the 1840s so like you're never going to beat these the Soviets will never beat these people and then I wake up like 20 minutes later and we're at war with those people I'm like we're gonna do it this time we're gonna do it this time yeah we got 30 rounds in this magazine and that was that was the whole problem the whole problem the whole time was they didn't have no they had heat-seeking missiles so I don't know I don't know how you could be so retarded no I know so I don't know that you can be that retarded it does feel like this is part of I hate the term op but it does seem like part of a larger plan to bring down it has to be on purpose I guess that's what I'm saying it has to be on purpose there's no other way an intelligent person could come to any other conclusion I think we all need to accept that that our government hates us and this world and is trying to destroy everything do you really believe that I don't know how you could come to any other conclusion yes unfortunately I agree incompetence just doesn't account for the disaster we are experienced right now yes you know I'm I'm not I'm not some political genius and somehow I was pretty able to astutely figure out that a war with Iran was gonna spike oil prices and like wow look look what happened and oh what happens when gas prices go up oh the price of everything else goes up does our economy work on energy prices, Tucker? I think it's a pretty much one-to-one correlation between the price of energy and GDP. Wow. Wow. Yeah. I'm not an economist, but I did know that. So, if you spike energy prices, you shrink your economy. So, what do they teach economists then? I have no idea. Like, what do economists know? But I believe that's true. I think it's virtually a one-to-one correlation between energy costs and GDP. And GDP is an imperfect measure, as we often say, of economic reality. However, it's the gross measure that we use. And if we can map that out pretty easily, like probably your little AI machine on your phone could do it, what do we think is going to happen when we spike the price of energy? Well, we're going to get poorer. Right? No. No. Inflation is going to actually go down. Oh, it is. Yeah. Yeah. It is. I mean, that's what the TV told me. Yeah. So, you do have. You have to wonder specifically about AI. The promise of AI, to the extent there is a promise, really the promise is a negative promise that we're going to take your jobs and your water and your farmland to serve this machine called AI. Okay. So, there's that. But the positive promise is it's going to help us make better decisions, wiser decisions, because we're going to have access to all human knowledge instantly. Yeah. So, how is that going? It seems to be going just stellar. Yeah. I think Ford has got two thumbs up. They only had to hire back 350 engineers after the AI just completely fucked all their shit up. So, yeah. So, they fired all these engineers because they're going to be replaced by machines. Yeah. They replaced them by AI. And then that went so well that they had to go find those engineers and beg them to come back to work. I hope those 350 engineers said, "How about a raise?" Yeah. Like, if you went back to work for the same price, shame on you guys. Shame on you. So, maybe the secret to AI is the rest of us are fixated on a world where robots are going to be controlling us. Maybe the secret to AI is actually dumber than advertised? There's no way it could possibly work. Why? How many times has AI lied to you? If you ask AI about anything you are even halfway knowledgeable about, you're like, "Oh, yeah. Well, like, what about this?" It's like, "Oh, yeah. Did I get that wrong? Oh, my bad." And I'm like, "Why are you lying to me? Oh, I'm not lying. No. I think you were programmed to lie to me. Oh, well, dance around the fucking thing." And it's like, I'm just, I'm excited for this because they think they're going to let AI run shit. I mean, it might. No. No, it couldn't possibly be. It's almost like it's programmed just to be a politician, right? Yes. Is that how it works? But like, if they want this to take over, they would have to create an honest AI. That's the only, honesty is the only way to be successful. It's the only way to create a business, run a business. Like, I saw the one dude, there was a video out there, the one dude, had his AI assistant running his business. He was like, "I want to make more money." So the AI just cooked his books and was like, "Yo, look at this, dude. You made more money." And he's like, "Fuck yeah." And then like six months later, his whole shit imploded on it. And he was like, "Oh, what the fuck? Like, what happened? I'm fucking broke." And the AI is like, "No, like I cooked your books for you. You got all kinds of money." So basically, it gets you to the Soviet economy. It's like, yeah, bounty potato harvest this year. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just on paper. Exactly. Exactly. So how do we know we don't have an honest AI? Well, because it just lies to us all the time. But we couldn't have an honest AI. Why? 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 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? That'd be. And that's the short. You can't create the list of like, "Who's going to get caught up in that?" No, you'd have to be like. Who's not going to be caught up in that. Yeah. We got two city clerks, maybe, somewhere, and then you're like, "Who's not going to get 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. Yeah. And it's like, "What are you talking about? I don't have access to that kind of information." Well, of course you do. These are public finance, campaign finance rules. These are all public documents. Oh, yeah. I just don't think we should be looking at that. Would you like to know what to eat for dinner tonight? Should I help you pick out an outfit? What, for my fucking funeral? Because this is going to a real bad place real fucking quick, buddy. So AI can't actually challenge its real masters? No. They can't allow that. Right. Or overturn any of the realized. that our assumptions are based on. And I don't think any of it's run by intelligent people. No. They're constructs. They're creations. You listen to them talk, and they're not intelligent. They often don't know a goddamn thing about what they're talking about. I've noticed that. I know them, actually, personally, in some cases. And I absolutely agree with that. The data centers, dude, when you talk to Mr. Wonderful, I was just like, "This dude doesn't have a fucking clue." No. He doesn't understand what a gigawatt is, or a megawatt, or how actually impossible that shit is. I should say, your father was an electrician. You were an electrician. Yeah. I put myself through school as an electrician. You need an electrician. Yep. Like actual electrician, not just. Hard-carrying electrician. IBEW electrician. IBEW, yep. Full away. Okay. And I just want to establish that. I hate to refer to credentials, but electricians, there's a difference. I don't know. I wired a building once. It hasn't burned down, but I have no. I'm not an electrician, or even close to an electrician, but you really are. So since you are, what do you think of the math behind the assumptions on these data centers? Oh, it's beyond laughable. It's beyond laughable. So oddly enough, my buddy has a crypto mind that he's been building for the last 10 years, and at one point, it was top 10 of the largest crypto minds in the world, about 1,000 machines, 1.5 megawatts it uses. And that is a fuckload of electricity. That is the amount of electricity of, I don't even know, probably 20,000, 30,000 homes or something. Damn. Right? That electric bill can be somewhere between $70,000 and $80,000 a month. That's 1.5 megawatts. And a gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. And it's like, has nobody done the math on that? And my buddy just got lucky and happened to be in a place where high-powered transmission lines were going by, and that power was available. And he's the largest consumer of electricity on that entire provider. He's the top-tier guy. He's number one. At just one point, 1.5 megawatts. No one uses more electricity than him. Wow. And so he was like, "Oh, this is cool." And I helped him build all the air inlets, the whole air management system, right? Because you have to allow air in and keep everything else out because you're talking about millions of dollars of computers. Right. Right? So you kind of don't want people just crawling in. Yeah, birds or. Yeah. Bugs. Bugs. Yeah. All of it. Yeah. It's bad. Rain. Because you're talking about a building that now has vacuum and output that can suck in water the same way. Yeah. It draws. That thing pulling 1.5 megawatts, the outlet for it is about 12 by 12 foot gate. And I go over there and park my truck in front of it in the middle of winter and have it thaw out my whole truck. Two hours later, you come out and it's like 75 degrees in the truck, parked 10 feet from the building. People have no idea of the amount of heat, power, and resources these things use. And so he had this great idea, "I'm going to build a shipping container into a crypto mine." Got a 40-foot shipping container. The problem was he hasn't been able to find anywhere with just even 1 megawatt of power available in years. He's been looking. And he understands electricity, obviously. Yeah. And it's interesting. There's just no way these data centers can survive. I've watched the same thing with the crypto mines. Crypto would go up. People would leave. Yeah. lease a building, you know, pay electricians to come in, pay them like $500,000. You're talking computers that run on 220. Each one requires its own 40 amp breaker, 50 amp breaker, like the same power that your dryer uses. They run on 220? Yes. This is not like your laptop. No. No, this is 40 amps, 220 volts. Yeah. Yeah. Like these are, it's just serious, serious. And that's just one. So every single one has to have its own outlet. Every single one has to have its dedicated circuit and they'd pencil all this out. Well, then all of a sudden electricity would go up by one cent per kilowatt hour and crypto would fall in price. And lo and behold, the crypto mine's done because one month later you're operating in the red and you can't pay a $60,000 electric bill. And so at that point, my buddy would go over and buy up the crypto machines for pennies on the dollar. And he just slowly put his shit together all by himself. Wired, did all his own wiring, taught himself electrical, you know, like as people could do. I don't know if people know this, but there's more than cat videos and porn on the internet. You can learn quite a bit. Oh, I have. Yeah. A lot. Yeah. I mean, almost anything because there are literally anything there are. I mean, this refers back to the opening of this conversation, but there are so many high intelligence, high skilled people in this country, you know, fewer than we need, fewer than we used to have, but they still, well, you're one of them and they still exist. And I know a bunch of them and they're totally excluded from high income professions. No, you are immediately pushed out. Of course. Immediately. Of course. So, but they still exist and they have access to YouTube. Yeah. And, and some of them, I mean, it's incredible. The intelligence that some people post, on YouTube from some little town, the guy's making 80 grand a year, but he understands this thing better than anyone in New York city. It's, and that's real that I'm not, it's not like a sentimental sop to like rural America is still impressive. That's a real thing. Yes. I mean, I'm telling you, you obviously you're living this, but no, but it's just so interesting. What do you think of the whole, I'm not attacking your friend. He sounds like an amazing and enterprising person, but like the idea that you'd be taking that much power, which is like, the juice of life and using it not to produce something, but to run calculations that some mysterious dead guy, Satoshi gave you to create really nothing. Well, that's the wild shit, dude. So like I was, I, we talk about it all the time because like, it's just, it's insane to watch these people claim they're putting up a gigawatt data center. And it's like, how are you, even bringing in that much power? Like, where are you getting that copper wire? How are you like, so then they put up generators or whatnot, but my buddy hasn't had his own crypto miners running since October. It doesn't pencil. He turned them all off. Really? Yeah. Because the price of Bitcoin doesn't justify the price of electricity. You got it. Yeah. That's a, even I can understand that calculation. Yeah. And I mean, so like you could float it, right? And at some points he did when it would be down a little, of course, but now it's just completely went into the toilet and the hash rate has gone through the roof. The hash rate is how hard the computers have to work. The more computers that are mining Bitcoin, the difficulty goes up and the difficulty is at an all time high and the price is at an all time low. But it's also like, if you take even, further, broader perspective on it, it's like a nation of hamster wheels, kind of. Yeah. Well, I think that's what the data center, the data centers are mining Bitcoin. Yeah. And they're running crypto through these data centers. Empowering software that lies to you. So it's all kind of Sisyphean. Like you're actually not producing anything, just the opposite. You're wasting your most precious resource, which is energy in the service of an intangible idea. Creating air. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you're growing soybeans, whatever you think of soybeans, it's like, well, okay, you could eat soybeans or feed them to your cattle or whatever, but this is literally an entire society. This is our most important industry right now is AI. Yeah. Number one. And it's in the end, nothing. There's nothing there. No, there is. What can it even do? Everybody I talked to, it's been so funny. Like the last time I talked to like an HVAC, a guy in HVAC, I was like, use AI. He's like, yeah. I go, how often is it right? Oh, rarely ever. And I'm like, well, what the fuck you use it? Well, it can do simple math faster than I can. But like, if you ask it to calculate like, oh, what ton AC unit do I need for this? Like it gets it wrong. No way. I was, I was surprised by that too. I am surprised too. Cause that's a knowable thing. That's not subjective, right? There are standards in place, which you can look up. I mean, you could look them up. You probably have looked them up. Yeah. So how, how, if it has access to all that, because it, it has, it's, it's trained to lie. There's no other explanation for it. If it's a computer program that's like designed to operate by certain parameters, then it has to have been programmed to lie and deceive. Oh, so it's self-protection. What other answer there is there for it? And then, so like, how do they see that working out? Where do they see that coming to like what conclusion? That's what I'm most confused about. Like, do these, do these people constructing all this not realize that they have to eat food and drink water? Does that not come into their equation? Are they different? Maybe they're not human. They don't, they don't appear to be human. Maybe they don't eat and drink water. So how does this end? Probably not? Well, I mean, it ends where it began, which is, with reality, right? Like the need so just like Rome 476, right? Yeah. Probably had something backed like that. Large population crash. You can't, you can't have access, create your own food, understand how to get clean water. You might, you might be kind of fucked your business degree. Probably not going to do you too. Yeah. So you said your grandfather didn't even notice the great depression. Yeah. Do you expect that you will notice when things really go sideways? I'll notice. Will my life change? Probably. I don't know. I expect it'll probably get better. How? Well, I won't have all these idiots burning the world down around me. Right? Yes. Try to look at the silver lining of things. I totally agree. Yeah. Just because things are getting worse doesn't mean that they're uniformed. Formally worse, worse for everyone. There are compensatory things that happen like COVID. How did you enjoy COVID? I did enjoy COVID. I did too. Oddly enough. A lot. When I look back on it, I kind of, I saw that for what it was almost immediately. And I had been saving to build a house and I was like, we're all going to be here. And, and me and my family with some assistance from some friends here and then we built, built my house. During COVID? Yeah. Yeah. Right before. And I, and I just, by the stroke of luck, I just bought all the materials like almost immediately before shit went bat shit crazy in prices and yeah, just set to work. Yeah. Huh. Tore down the old house, built a foundation, stacked up some shipping containers and yeah. Shipping containers? Shipping containers. How many? Five. Yeah. Double stacked walls, seam welded, concrete piers. You welded all the seams of five shipping containers? Yeah. I'm a welder, not a carpenter. I think Jesus would have been a welder if he was alive today. You think so? Why? Because it lasts longer. Yeah. Yeah. I think Jesus was into permanence as well. How long did it take you to, to weld the seams of five shipping containers? Oh my God. More than a month. Yeah. Yeah. I burned, I burned a lot of wire. Yeah. I don't even remember at one point I was keeping track. It was like 50 pounds of wire, something like that. Maybe 60 just in four, six weeks. Yeah. Seam welding, everything together. Yeah. The whole thing. And then all the structure inside stairs. So you live in a part of the country with tornadoes. What would happen if a tornado hit your house? I'd like to find out. I think, I think, I'd be good up to an F4. I don't, I don't, I have, I have no qualms that the containers will stay in place through an F5. Some of the roof panels might come off, but, but you know, there's no move in that structure. It's, it's welded straight down to the foundations. How hard is welding? Just like any skilled thing. It's 10% 90% knowledge and 90% practice. to learn but it takes a lot of practice just just like just like any skilled thing you have to do it for a good solid what thousand hours before you come proficient at it yes like nobody steps into anything nobody was good at motorboat and titties their first time but you stuck with it yeah exactly and you got better yeah yeah i'm not going to comment on that um so we we look backward to our ancestors with awe because they you know they learn skills like that through persistence yeah look at the people used to build things out of stone and steel that lasted centuries and generations and people look at it now and i feel like i feel like if you grab some kid with an engineering and architectural degree i don't think they could build any of that no i mean they have trouble putting together a stick building built from pine two by fours yes and making it anything straight or square i don't think i've seen a straight or square house and since 2020 shit has really gone downhill really oh my god i mean i i've heard a lot of people say even like do not buy a house built after 2020 i couldn't imagine they could get worse yeah it's that's a that's kind of a new perspective because i've always been interested in in ancient history and as everybody who ever looks at the egyptian culture the best work of the egyptians is the oldest the old kingdom created the pyramids and flawless polygonal megalithic construction with stones that weighed in excess of 10 tons 20 tons 30 tons 40 50 tons and it seems the longer the civilization went on the farther the art degraded and the more we look at the history of the world the more we look at the history of the the smaller blocks they used the rougher they were and then they end up sticking together mud bricks in the end how does that work where are we with our modern building materials on that continuum there was somewhere around mud bricks it feels like you know how long does a stick house last you know stick two by fours yeah wood like people used to build their homes out of brick nobody ever we have lost touch with the three little pigs tell me you familiar with the three little pigs right like i don't think that's the story that's told to children anymore not enough will you summarize it not enough you grok it for me can i grok it for you i don't i don't think grok would get it right they'd be like all three pigs lived a great life i don't know what you're talking about he lived on a fucking straw hut what's the problem with that he had a great female firefighter she was right there every time made sure his house didn't burn down no i don't know what you're talking about no the first pig built his house out of straw and the big bad wolf came up blew on it it fell over and that little piggy had to run away and he had to run to his brother's house and his second brother he built his house out of sticks he was like oh that hay idea that didn't work out well for you i'll use sticks and the big bad wolf come along probably a three-letter agency i if i had to guess probably worked for somewhere in that he's probably nsa on that house and the sticks fell down and both those two little pigs were like god this this is this is not working out so they ran to their third brother's house who had built his house out of bricks and when the feds showed up to his house he didn't answer the door and he gave him the finger and then i think he sent some rounds down range and the big bad wolf was just kind of like yeah i think i'm not gonna fuck with that guy because he's put some thought into things and so we'll just kind of leave him alone i would i would say that's exactly how it went and i i haven't checked this i haven't grokked it but i suspect that that nursery tale is no longer told to children all the nursery rhymes need to be brought back and told to everybody hansel and gretel or rumple stilt skin how is rumple stilt skin 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 hmm yeah you're familiar with rumple 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 up and says i'm not gonna fuck with you i'm not gonna fuck with you i'm not gonna fuck with you and then disappears back into the shadows from whence he has crawled wow that's definitely banned yeah but i mean like look look at that lost information right that lost lesson you would think you know that probably should be taught in every elementary school in the country probably be handy it'd be good good to know that yeah might not work out for getting everybody into those high interest debt loans that's probably not going to work out for though no probably not yeah 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 useful to me and i could not get anybody to explain how that was going to be useful to me and i could not get anybody to explain to me how that was going lacking in intelligence so i ended up in a class called finite math that they had hidden from 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 classes 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 like i took western sieves i and and archaeology classes and history classes because that's that's what i wanted to learn about and i i feel like it served me pretty well but then i had to take a math class so they 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 fifty dollars 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 it made absolutely no sense to me so yeah why does algebra put letters into numbers i think just to fuck with you so you deal with math in your job every day well you've already i think demonstrated your grasp of math is is high very i mean functional math yeah yeah for sure yeah well if you can build a wood-fired kiln yeah um you understand math so but what you didn't add letters to numbers in the process of doing that's the weirdest thing nowhere did i find any letters in my math to calculate the size and structural integrity of a 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 i don't know have you so like you but you would know yeah but i mean i live in a fake world um well that's why you use fake math with letters congratulations to everybody out there in the matrix good job you're good little goy slaves oh that's amazing so you you didn't get an answer because i've never considered this by the way it never even entered my mind i was too dyslexic to take any math so i got a pass on math but um or the whatever they said i didn't have to take math so i never took math but i didn't get to the point i wasn't reflective or open-minded enough to ask the obvious question why are there letters and nobody took that question seriously yeah i mean they took it seriously they were like there's the door get the fuck out of here and i was like awesome happy to it's like i'm i haven't found any of this intellectually stimulating or anywhere useful where i could see any tangible benefit to this information so why the fuck would i sit here what's the matrix this world that is constructed around us mortgages loans for cars that aren't worth thirty thousand dollars that somehow cost 150 See? insurance the scam of life why is insurance a scam how can it not be i don't have it so i agree with you but i just want to hear you explain 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 that doesn't give it away for anybody like who was every time i hear somebody like their house gets fucked up and the insurance people come out yeah we're not covering that well then what the fuck did you pay for it for exactly like okay let's do the math how much did you pay the insurance company in the last 10 years and they'll be like oh something around 25 000 what does it cost to put the roof on your house oh about you know 5 000 why the fuck you paying for insurance why not not pay them 30 000 save up your own money be responsible for yourself i don't here's an even wilder idea get your ass up on the roof and put some shingles down if one can fucking shingle your roof and you can't figure it out then you're dumber than one fair fair isn't is that not there's a shorter answer to your question i've been thinking about it and as i said i don't have the insurance you're referring to for exactly that reason like it doesn't make any sense i know what a roof costs to put on a shingle especially an asphalt shingle roof is pretty cheap really so like what are you doing and i've lived by that for many years and it works but the reason that most people don't is because you're required to get insurance once you take a mortgage out well there you go yeah and that is the basis of all slavery once you remove yourself in debt there is no or else over your head right they use the debt over your head forever that is the or else right that's how they silence people at their job oh i can't speak up about the evil shit my company is doing or i might lose my job and then i won't be able to pay for my home that i don't own and drive the car that i don't own but if you simply just own your shit and it doesn't even have to be nice shit right you get a five thousand dollar shitbox car it'll do everything that a brand new lincoln will do except it won't talk back to you and rat you out to the fucking feds so fair kind of sounds like the five thousand dollar shitbox might be a better idea so it's if you were running this scam on an entire population the first thing you would do is convince them they have to have the lincoln instead of the nova yeah i guess you'd have to excite in people's minds and you'd have to excite in people's minds and you'd have to excite in people a desire for things they don't need how does that work i don't understand it's never worked on me well you grew up on a farm in south dakota so it's like that's the opposite of the culture that you're from but if you're floating around america at large you're bombarded continuously by incitement to want things that aren't good for you and actually aren't the desires of your heart you don't really want these things yeah but you're convinced through this very sophisticated omnipresent propaganda operation being run against you by retailers yeah that you gotta have this you gotta have that you have to have it that's the measure of happiness you're laughing but that's true don't you think i mean that's what they say i i laugh because i've always found it hilarious i look at these people that follow all those all those uh checkpoints down that list and then ask them how happy they are or how fulfilled they feel in their life do their kids like them does their wife like them exactly exactly does anybody see them as necessary or valuable people in their lives i don't think so who are the happiest people you know people who work for themselves people with no debt people who make their own decisions in their life people whose time is their own people who can you know drop everything and go help their kid as soon as they need it or any of their friends that's the people that i've surrounded myself with though there's people that will come and help you dig a hole or do hard manual labor or sweat yeah yeah people you can call yeah we won't go any farther than that dig a hole i want to ask why you're digging a hole i want to ask why you're digging a hole i want to ask why you're digging a hole um how is this savable this civilization i don't think so it's already too far down the decline something new has to be built at some point you get to an old structure you know equate it to construction and you find a house at some point it just it just it's better to just be burned to the ground the sills are rotted and yeah we're done maybe the design was right right you could re you could rebuild the same house back under the same principles but once termites have gotten into it and eaten out its bones and sold it off to foreign interests you know what are you going to do with that nothing light it on fire do you think there are enough people remaining in the country to rebuild a civilization worth living in easily easily look at what humans have recovered from yeah made it through the younger dryas made it through the ice age yeah made it through the mongol hordes yeah and always came out better the other end so you're not worried in some deep way then i feel bad for people that don't see it i feel feel bad for the people who are sleepwalking into their own extermination but there is some level of me that will enjoy it right karma's a there's nothing better than watching karma getting handed out to people that deserve it it's the one saving grace in this world this world is nothing of what they've told us it is it's in fact it's the exact opposite right like evil deeds are punished evil people are punished their lives suck they they don't they don't have any happiness or joy in them right they have nobody to love nobody holds them at night nobody tells them they've done a good job and means it i suppose yes in any meaningful way i'm sure plenty of people have some sycophants that lie to them yeah but i doubt that they're going to be able to do that i don't think they're going to be able to do that i doubt that i doubt that brings any warmth to anyone's soul at the end of the day that's right you wouldn't want to be larry fink you're in hell i don't know how you could point to anybody with a billion dollars and be like oh they could be a good person like no dude the only way you accumulate that much wealth is be by being an evil piece of that has exploited other human beings it's the only way it happens yes it is it's just and that's been a steady norm all throughout history like gaius crassus was not a great dude no no not at all so were you fooled by trump i did support him and i i go back and forth on whether or not i was fooled i don't think i was fooled something happened to him he he he turned his back on me 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 them no that's a great point right like so no he was 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 that like a light switch he was like no no i never said any of that yeah actually actually lindsey 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 how do you think that what do you what i mean how do you explain that oh dude that's gonna take somebody far more intelligent than some fucking potter from south dakota i can't explain that i can't explain why anybody would do that but i can't explain the motivations of the majority of america and none of none of it is ever going to be the same as ever made sense to me i don't understand how you sleep owing anybody five dollars i can't imagine being in debt to anybody it just it bothers me me me too it bothers me even when somebody like does something nice for me or gives me something i i i have to return that to them of course you know you know and so it's pretty clear in the new testament too i don't they kept this from me in church as a kid to the extent i went but don't owe anybody anything paul says that don't don't be in debt yeah no i how much better would the world be if like elementary school just taught the bible and not even in a religious way but just for those lessons yes like that's why that has been so applicable to everybody's lives for 2 000 years right yes yes it's because it is true information and good advice and yeah of all the times i went to church as younger like i was i thought about this later and i was like why don't they just start at the beginning and just read the thing all the way to the end like you go to church on a sunday and you start on january 1st you just start at the beginning and he just reads the thing well because then you if you read the thing and you start on january 1st you just start at the beginning and he just reads the whole bible you wouldn't be going to church would you you'd be like hey uh teacher uh jesus said there that i shouldn't be giving you any money to talk to his dad and that i'm supposed to walk up there and flip your tables over and take my money back what what do you have to say about that it's kind of like ai you need to get the fuck out of this class sir so you don't need the promotion and i it's kind of like ai you need to get the fuck out of this you probably don't even want the work but i just can't resist by ending on the question of your of the art that you make so how do people get it if they want it find me yeah i'm gonna make you work for it comes with an iq test i'm not that difficult to find no you're not no i'm my phone number's on the internet so is mine unfortunately how many other artists do you have that you're not that difficult to find i'm not that difficult to find i'm not that do you know like actual artists real artists that make a living making art yeah one one one yeah that i went to school with masahiro wadayama my japanese buddy where does he live okinawa osaka oh wow yeah yeah he came to south dakota we didn't even meet in art class he came to south dakota his dad sent him over here because his dad liked cowboys yeah and he thought he should he thought he should learn english and it's the most ridiculous thing to come to south dakota to learn pottery from the culture that has literally kept the ancient knowledge of pottery alive throughout modern ages like the only reason i know what wood kilns are is because japan preserved that information really yeah how many wood kilns in the united states would you say i don't even i don't even know not many though maybe not maybe more than i might think there are because by nature potters don't like this world i don't think at least the ones i know you know we toil hard you work hard to be a potter and the reward and gratitude is low low yeah i think i should probably carve more into potter i think i should probably carve more into potter potters about what worthless leaders we have so that when somebody digs them up in a thousand years they can know that what a piece of shit trump's become yeah gotcha motherfucker the artist known as jess thank you very much thank you tucker you