Tucker Carlson interviews South Dakota farmer and artist Jess Sullivson on beauty, creativity, and civilization
Tucker Carlson interviews Jess Sullivson, a ceramicist, welder, and farmer from South Dakota.
Summary
Tucker Carlson interviews Jess Sullivson, a self-described three-dimensional artist who lives and works on his family's farm in South Dakota, which has been in continuous family ownership since 1876. The conversation opens with Tucker's argument that America's meritocracy actively excludes creative, independent, and spiritually awake people in favor of compliant, small-minded ones — and that this exclusion has consequences for civilization itself. Sullivson argues that modern art, architecture, and mainstream culture represent a deliberate assault on beauty and human dignity, not an organic development. The two discuss the extraordinary technical complexity of wood-fired ceramics, using it as a lens to challenge linear assumptions about historical progress, pointing to high-fire pottery from 8,000 BC as evidence of sophisticated ancient civilizations. They also cover debt, insurance, AI, data centers, energy economics, the destruction of the family, and the importance of teaching children practical skills and hard truths. Sullivson expresses disillusionment with Donald Trump, saying something changed in him and that he surrounded himself with the very people who had tried to destroy him.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Meritocracy That Excludes Genius
Tucker Carlson: Jess, thank you for doing this.
Jess Sullivson: Thank you, Tucker.
Tucker Carlson: 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 that 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. In fact, the opposite has happened. The system is designed to exclude rather than include — exclude Christians, people with an independent cast of mind, creativity, an awakened spirit. Genius. All of them are excluded in favor of hyperaggressive, 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 going 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 in 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 population to die of drug overdoses. 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.
Jess Sullivson: My name is Jess Sullivson. I'm a three-dimensional artist. While I primarily work in ceramics, I can work with any medium and create beauty with it. 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. 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 civilization. Every civilization is marked by its ceramics. And when you see what modern art puts out — the horrendous, disgusting lack of aesthetics, lack of skill, lack of thought in modern art — it has disgusted me since high school art classes. I got in trouble for calling bullshit on modern art. They were like, "This is in the Guggenheim." I was like, "Why?" Because that's horrendous. I wouldn't put that in my toilet. You think that dude is skilled? People who just drape plastic over things or duct tape a banana to a wall — there's no possible way, if you're being intellectually honest with me, that you have any appreciation for this. And so I want to understand what the purpose of it is.
The Deliberate Destruction of Beauty
Tucker Carlson: It clearly didn't arise organically. This movement, which began with Dada 100 years ago and then flowered into all kinds of different movements — basically modern and postmodern art — I've heard it was a CIA operation. Literally. Like with Jackson Pollock, who just slapped paint on a canvas. I've heard that the CIA started paying enormous amounts of money for his paintings just to mess with Russia, because they were like, "We'll do this and we'll make this the art." And when you look at Russian art and Russian classical architecture — which is like how our architecture used to be, right? Beauty, symmetry, skill — they wanted to confuse them. And that's their admitted goal. Then you wonder: is that even their admitted goal? Were they just trying to destroy our society? Because that was the actual end effect.
Jess Sullivson: It was the end effect.
Tucker Carlson: 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 what has a totally different purpose. The first would be the present-day understanding of what beauty is — which is in fact an attack on beauty. This is the presidential library of Barack Obama, which I have read cost approaching a billion dollars to construct. It's in Chicago. Here it is. What do you make of that? Is that beautiful?
Jess Sullivson: 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. That's what your eye is immediately drawn to. You don't have to be told what's beautiful.
Tucker Carlson: That's right.
Jess Sullivson: You don't have to be told when a woman is beautiful. 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.
Tucker Carlson: Symmetry is balance. The human body —
Jess Sullivson: Draw a line. And you can feel it — just by touch, from your palate to your navel to your toes, you are symmetrical. Two sides have joined, mirror images have joined. And that is true in nature. It's true in plants. It's true in other animals. So this is an organic fact: symmetry is beauty. The Fibonacci spiral, the golden ratio, the golden mean, sacred geometry — everything was built and created before the industrial revolution and the degradation of our own culture.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. So if something is asymmetrical, by definition it cannot be beautiful — or it's an assault.
Jess Sullivson: It's an assault on the senses.
Tucker Carlson: So you look at that building and you have to ask what's the purpose of it. When you spend $800 million to build something, it's not a haphazard project. There's a design to it — literally design, but also a conceptual design. What are you trying to do with this building?
Jess Sullivson: I mean, that amount of money — it's got to be money laundering, right? It cost $2 million to build. There's no way. You were just slapping things together. You didn't cut anything. You didn't measure anything. You were just like, "Hey, look at that piece of metal I found in the scrap pile. Weld that one to this one." Is there even a window in the thing?
Tucker Carlson: There's no way it could be billions of dollars. It's just not possible. And yet the number of credentialed members of our ruling class who will gaze upon that building and give lectures about how it challenges us to 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?
Jess Sullivson: It's to hurt us. It is to degrade our society, to destroy our families, to destroy your ideas of beauty, to take it out of your life. We need beauty in our lives. And when we don't have that, when your surroundings are so degraded, it lowers your ability to think and enjoy and find your own happiness in your life.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Jess Sullivson: We are all drawn to beauty. Look at the classical art and the Greek sculptures of the ideal human form. We should be worshiping those things, not having the grotesque inversions of the natural order that we're presented with today.
Tucker Carlson: Which itself is an assault on not just the natural order but aesthetics.
Jess Sullivson: What in this society today isn't an assault on humanity? 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 at us. There is nothing mainstream in this world that has any beauty in it. It is disgusting. Even the thoughts and policies of this government are disgusting. The music that they put out, which is also purposely designed 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. I've been disgusted by it all forever.
Art From Excavator Buckets
Tucker Carlson: So I think what sets you apart is that you take it seriously because you understand its importance. These are not boutique concerns. These are not 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 — with a video that I saw. I want to play 15 or 20 seconds of it. Art that you were creating, which we have been trained to dismiss as not art, as utilitarian, as just welding. This was my first experience of your work. The first time I heard your name, someone sent me this video — someone whose aesthetic sense I admire and trust — and said, "This is unbelievable." This is you building a wood stove out of what?
Jess Sullivson: Out of excavator buckets. And not only is that a way to repurpose something that has already had a utilitarian life, but to give it a new purpose and create something that is not only beautiful but functional.
Tucker Carlson: Useful.
Jess Sullivson: And does a better job at what it does than anything else you can buy today. And it's permanence. It's not just use this for a couple of years and throw it away. 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. There is no greater civilization than the Roman Republic, and the things they built, the architecture — our republic is framed on theirs. Our society was thought 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.
Tucker Carlson: 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.
[Video plays]
Jess Sullivson: "This one's 1,500 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 almost — it was over 6,000 pounds when it was done. The color on this — this is only from what, eight hours, ten 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 seals it. You can't put anything on the outside of it. I did two loads of wood and they hit 500, 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 bacon."
Tucker Carlson: You know, I guess you either find that beautiful or you don't. I don't send videos to people. I don't watch videos. I don't care for video. I sent that to many people. I showed my wife that — probably the only video I've ever shown my wife — and she agreed that it was beautiful and that it also, as you said, is an object that has use, that warms the home. And anyone who lives with a wood stove can tell you there's no more uplifting, joyful way to heat your home than a wood stove.
Jess Sullivson: We have nothing in this world without fire. 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.
Tucker Carlson: It creates energy.
Jess Sullivson: There you go. Steam-powered generators.
Tucker Carlson: Which is where we get our electricity, overwhelmingly, even now.
The Farm, the Family, and the Homestead
Tucker Carlson: So give us some background on you. Where do you live? You live in SoHo in New York over your gallery — tell us where you're from.
Jess Sullivson: I live on my family farm in South Dakota, about 20 miles east of Sioux Falls.
Tucker Carlson: Not far enough from civilization. And there's a thriving conceptual art community there.
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. No, South Dakota does not like me.
Tucker Carlson: Why?
Jess Sullivson: Because they are mainstream. It is 10 years behind the rest of the world. They're insecure, like a lot of rural places, and they seek mainstream acceptance, so they fall for the dumbest lies. Sioux Falls wants to be all of the other biggest shitty cities and is addicted to bringing in the shittiest ideas from every other shitty city.
Tucker Carlson: "Why don't we have African homeless here? Where's our drug problem? We need that."
Jess Sullivson: They are super concerned about it. They feel left out. There's not enough stabbings and shootings and drug addictions.
Tucker Carlson: As someone who lives in a rural area, I'm very familiar with the mindset. Tell me about the farm. It's a family farm.
Jess Sullivson: Yes. My family came from Sweden through Ellis Island, got an ax and a wagon, and came directly to where I now live in 1876.
Tucker Carlson: Really? Same piece of ground?
Jess Sullivson: Same piece of ground. My studio — what my studio is now — is the first homestead house that they built in 1891.
Tucker Carlson: Amazing. And your family's been there continuously the whole time?
Jess Sullivson: 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.
Tucker Carlson: On the same farm.
Jess Sullivson: On the same farm. I live 150 yards from my parents. I get to see my dad every day. We work together.
Tucker Carlson: Who built your house?
Jess Sullivson: I built my house.
Tucker Carlson: Like physically built it?
Jess Sullivson: Physically built it. Yes.
Tucker Carlson: What kind of farm is it?
Jess Sullivson: 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. I was like, "What was the Great Depression like? How did your life change?" And he was like, "What are you talking about?" He's like, "We didn't even know there was a depression." It was the same thing from the day before and the same thing for the 10 years after. Like, what do you mean? 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." 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 Fords from the '60s and '70s. No car has been built since 1979 that's worth the money you pay for it.
Tucker Carlson: What's in your studio?
Jess Sullivson: A wood stove, I bet.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. What else?
Jess Sullivson: I write all the greatest things I've ever learned on the walls around me — pieces of history, some native pottery artifacts that I've collected from around the world. I love history. 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.
Tucker Carlson: And if you learn only what not to do — I said that to my daughter the other day.
Jess Sullivson: 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 I knew was what not to do from how I grew up.
Tucker Carlson: What did you know not to do?
Jess Sullivson: Not ignore your kids. Even five minutes of not paying attention can cost lives. No one is guaranteed another day on this earth. We can all leave at any moment. So live your life to the fullest, use every moment. It's not hard to love your child and just be supportive. All you have to think is: how would I want to be talked to in this moment? What would I need? What would I have liked to have heard?
And there's no guidance in this world anymore. It'd be awesome if there was anybody out there — any preachers or churches or figures — that were like, "Here's how you properly raise a family." That doesn't exist. It's only like how to destroy a family.
Marriage, Men, and Women
Tucker Carlson: Where do you go for guidance?
Jess Sullivson: I've basically operated under the only knowledge of what not to do. And then if something works, you repeat it. If it doesn't, you change tactics. You adapt. You overcome.
No lie — probably the best marriage advice I've ever gotten is things I've heard from you. Things that never even occurred to me that seem so simple. About like when your wife says to you, "Where would you like to eat?" — the way you explained it was so eloquent. Just say, "I'd like to go to Chinese." "Let's go to Chinese." "Oh, I hate Chinese." "Yes, Chinese sucks." How to be that support — I don't know where you've gained that.
Tucker Carlson: She wants you to make the decision. She does not want to be bulldozed or yelled at or ordered around. Women hate that. 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.
Jess Sullivson: I couldn't live a day without my wife. I wouldn't want to.
Tucker Carlson: I would not be the person I am without my wife. But the lies that we've been told about the way the sexes get along — the main lie is that they're identical. That couldn't be farther from the truth. We overestimate the differences between races and dramatically underestimate the difference between sexes. Men and women are nothing alike. And if you don't know that and you treat your wife like your buddy, you're going to have a very unhappy wife.
Jess Sullivson: Very short marriage.
Tucker Carlson: You'll never know why. "We just weren't compatible." No — you just didn't understand the differences between men and women. She does not want to be bossed around or ordered around or yelled at. 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.
The Wood-Fired Kiln
Tucker Carlson: So what's in your shop? You have a kiln. A wood-fired kiln. What's a wood-fired kiln?
Jess Sullivson: I have a wood-fired kiln — it's an anagama-style kiln that I kind of modified for my use just from experience. It's a high-fire ceramics kiln that burns wood. I also have a six-burner downdraft LP kiln as well.
Tucker Carlson: Where'd you buy the wood-fired kiln?
Jess Sullivson: Yeah, no. That's not something you can buy. You have to build that.
Tucker Carlson: How big a project is that?
Jess Sullivson: Six months of eight-to-ten-hour days. 5,000 bricks. You're talking math and geometry, catenary arches, understandings of architecture.
Tucker Carlson: Why is it not just a hot box?
Jess Sullivson: 2,350 degrees isn't fooling around, Tucker. 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 temperature of burning wood. 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.
Tucker Carlson: So basically the design — the catenary arches — the architecture of the kiln increases the temperature of the fire.
Jess Sullivson: 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 just happen to stumble into. There is complex math involved in building a kiln.
And so that is one of those things where I have always been amazed, because there are high-fire pots from 8,000 BC. How could that be?
Tucker Carlson: That's a great question, because that's supposed to just be hunter-gatherers.
Jess Sullivson: 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. It requires different bricks from, say, the bricks you'd build a home out of or even the bricks in your fireplace.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Jess Sullivson: Oh yeah. I could take fireplace bricks, put them in my kiln, and they'd come out as puddles. And that happens because when you're going to build a kiln, there's not really an understanding of that in the brick-making world always. Like, I found you just kind of stumble upon the bricks where somebody has just got it right and they're 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.
Ancient Technology and the Myth of Progress
Tucker Carlson: So you're talking about something — a machine or a device made by human hands — that is so complex most modern engineers in the United States could not build. And we know for a fact it existed in 8,000 BC.
Jess Sullivson: 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. Your standard porcelain commercial coffee cup — that's not fully vitrified. That is 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 1,750 to 1,800 degrees.
Tucker Carlson: Are we sure? Because if you think about it — there were still glaciers melting 8,000 years ago. Literally. The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century AD. So that's more than 8,000 years before the fall of Rome. And there were civilizations capable of producing what you just described — that understood thermodynamics, the catenary 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 2,000 degrees of heat.
Jess Sullivson: You got it. And we know that this happened because we have the product of it. And they span many centuries and millennia. It's not like there's one pot from 8,000 BC and then not another one until the Minoans. No — they find them scattered all throughout in between.
Tucker Carlson: So wow. You're describing technology that the overwhelming majority of modern engineers in the United States could not build.
Jess Sullivson: Oh yeah. It's hilarious. When I graduated college with a BFA, everybody said, "You've got to go get a master's degree in art. You need a master's." And I was like, "Really? Okay." I remember going down to Arizona and looking at their ceramics program, not really being too impressed. And they walked me out to look at their wood kiln. I've always been super into wood kilns because that is ancient technology. My wood kiln — you could grab a time machine, grab any Roman, walk him in there. You don't have to tell him anything. He can just run that kiln. A potter knows. A skilled potter knows. It's like any mechanic can tune any engine.
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, "You struggle. You're pretty upset with yourself when you get to 2,000 or 1,900 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. What are you doing here? Why did you even go to this effort if you didn't understand the project in front of you?" And you want to teach me something? I think not. I'm very unimpressed.
Tucker Carlson: So the kiln never worked.
Jess Sullivson: I doubt it. No. It couldn't get to temperature.
Tucker Carlson: How long does it take? So you throw pots — whatever they are, cups, vases, plates, objects out of clay — you dry them, and that can take months or years, right?
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. I've had dry work sitting on the shelf for over a year. And then you fire it to change its essential composition, to push the molecules closer together and to create a kind of stone out of it. That's why they refer to high-fire ceramics as stoneware — 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 alter it.
Tucker Carlson: Let me just correct you, Jess. I have seen videos on the internet where you just take a shovel and dig into a riverbank and you get clay.
Jess Sullivson: Yeah, that does not work. And it never has. Even the Romans altered their clay body with other feldspars. 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 creates a structure that can hold and create a vessel.
Tucker Carlson: So clay itself is the product of a recipe. It's basically backyard chemistry.
Jess Sullivson: Yes. 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 take natural occurring clay bodies above about 1,500 degrees, 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 can have low-fire pottery that can store grain and things — they are still useful. 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." And you worked it out from there. But the Greek amphora that were used to transport wine and olive oil — those we find in shipwrecks in the Aegean or the Mediterranean — those were high-fired because they're holding liquid.
Tucker Carlson: Interesting. So when you use your wood kiln to fire the pots that you've thrown, how long does that process take?
Jess Sullivson: Anywhere from 72 to 96 hours. Continuously. At the first part you're maybe throwing wood in every 5, 7, 10 minutes. It is very controlled. 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. 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 degrees. Some people like to soak at 1,400 a little bit. And you cannot 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 it apart.
Tucker Carlson: So if it takes three or four days of continuous work, when do you sleep?
Jess Sullivson: You don't. You want to do it right. Tucker, if you went to work for 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 messed up, you don't get paid — I don't think you're going to have a hard time not sleeping. I don't anyway.
Tucker Carlson: That's amazing. So how much wood do you burn over the course of one firing?
Jess Sullivson: Six, eight, ten cords.
Tucker Carlson: In one firing?
Jess Sullivson: In one firing. Enough wood to heat your home for an entire winter. By the time you're over 1,700 degrees, you're throwing wood in this thing literally non-stop. You're throwing some wood in, watching what happens in the kiln, and then walking over to the pile to pick your next piece. And it's not just, "Oh, I'm going to grab whatever wood I want." You're balancing fuel, air, and the ports of the kiln. 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.
Even there — when you see Corinthian pottery from 1 BC — those people understood chemistry, elements, the periodic table, what things do what. 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 that way. Copper carbonate is not green, right?
Tucker Carlson: It's not.
Jess Sullivson: No. It's a kind of pale purple color in powdered form. And only when exposed to these temperatures and the removal of the oxygen does it become green. Most people are familiar with a torch hitting a piece of metal and the metal turning color — 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 8,000 BC — which is what the pottery tells us.
Tucker Carlson: 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.
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. But 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 modern culture can look at the Roman Empire — who had running water, toilets, and showers — and ask where those things went. If this is just a slow progression, then what was the Middle Ages? Why were people defecating in ditches? Things fall apart very quickly, repeatedly, and often.
Tucker Carlson: I think we've lost the technology of flushing toilets like three times in the last 2,000 years. That's kind of a central technology. It's not an esoteric technology. It's not like, "How do we get back to the moon?" This is a basic necessity of life. So if you forget how to build a flush toilet three times in the last 2,000 years —
Jess Sullivson: Clean water — look at how clean water was forgotten about, up until the late 1800s with the final ending of the typhus outbreak in New York, when they figured out, "Oh, people are defecating in this well. That's why you're all sick." And it's like, wow, thank you, Captain Obvious. But yeah, people are that stupid.
The Purpose of Creation
Tucker Carlson: So you're describing technology that most modern engineers could not build. How did you wind up at Arizona's ceramics program and walk away unimpressed?
Jess Sullivson: After I graduated college with a BFA, everybody said you've got to go get a master's degree in art. And I remember going down to Arizona and looking at their ceramics program, not really being too impressed. And they walked me out to look at their wood kiln. I've always been super into wood kilns because that is ancient technology. My wood kiln — you could grab a time machine, grab any Roman, walk him in there. You don't have to tell him anything. He can just run that kiln. A potter knows.
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, "You struggle. You're pretty upset with yourself when you get to 2,000 or 1,900 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. What are you doing here? Why did you even go to this effort if you didn't understand the project in front of you?" And you want to teach me something? I think not. I'm very unimpressed.
Tucker Carlson: So the kiln never worked.
Jess Sullivson: I doubt it. No. It couldn't get to temperature.
The Act of Creation and the Soul of Men
Tucker Carlson: I've long thought that the main missing ingredient in the lives of most men is the act of creation.
Jess Sullivson: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: Which is the first act of God — to create everything around us, to create all matter, the universe. The spark of God within us, the good parts of us.
Jess Sullivson: We're made in his image.
Tucker Carlson: 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 —
Jess Sullivson: They grow life, Tucker.
Tucker Carlson: Of course. They can do things that we can't do.
Jess Sullivson: It's inherent to them. And so men need to continually renew that act of creation. Obviously the most fun being the act of creating new life.
Tucker Carlson: We're trying to catch up to women.
Jess Sullivson: They create life and we are trying to create other beautiful things to accentuate that life and make it worth living. I so vehemently agree with that. But if you have a job where the substance of your day is occupied with tasks that have no creative component — if you're not creating anything — I think a kind of soul death sets in. It's got to suck your soul out. And it obviously does.
Tucker Carlson: Look at people who are stuck in an office. That's why men have garages.
Jess Sullivson: Exactly. They have this soul-sucking job and they come home and toil more in their garage for that mental health.
Tucker Carlson: And it's like they can't put the two together. You see people live life in reverse. People who do woodworking hobbies and have some soul-sucking insurance salesman job that really depletes and sucks the wealth out of everybody in the world — 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 more monetary return than they did not experience in the first 50 years of their life.
Jess Sullivson: And you're like, "Yeah." I often wonder if those men come to that epiphany of like, "I might have messed up." I don't know. It's too big a truth to swallow at a certain point. You misspent your life and it's finite. That's a lot to accept. I hope they never come to that realization.
Tucker Carlson: I know that when I've been in hotel rooms over the years — for one period of my life, probably a 10-year period — I brought a fly-tying kit with me and tied trout flies and salmon flies in my hotel room in almost a crazy monomaniacal way. And I was like, what is this about? Why? 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 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 create something or go crazy.
Jess Sullivson: I can't go on vacation. I can't enjoy myself.
Choosing Beauty Over Money
Tucker Carlson: So you've decided — and 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 — you probably could have done a lot of different things. Instead, you make pots and weld excavator buckets. You've clearly decided that making money is not the most important thing to you.
Jess Sullivson: 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 — I've met a lot of people that have more money than sense. And they are miserable. Their kids hate them.
Tucker Carlson: Their kids hate their lives.
Jess Sullivson: They hate their lives. They've got some nice stuff. Maybe they don't know how to use it. They don't know how to take care of it. They don't know how to make anything better. Their life around them crumbles without someone else to come by and put their things back together.
Tucker Carlson: It's a dark picture, but it's accurate. Did you ever have any moment where you're like, "I'm smart. Maybe I should go into the insurance business and make millions of dollars"?
Jess Sullivson: No. I've been broken my entire life. This world broke me early on.
Tucker Carlson: You seem pretty whole, actually.
Jess Sullivson: I don't feel it. 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 not the money that people pay me for my art. It's their appreciation for it. When I see that spark in their eye — I saw a lady 10 years later, she came up to me and she was like, "I bought a coffee cup from you back when you were in college. I use it every day. It is the greatest coffee cup ever and 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.
Tucker Carlson: So at the end of your days, which are spent mostly on your farm, are you satisfied? Do you feel like every day —
Jess Sullivson: The best days? My wife will give me grief. She'll be like, "You haven't left the farm for 10 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 town." Like, that's a last resort. I buy everything in bulk so I have to make that trip as infrequently as possible.
Tucker Carlson: 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 — some of the people are really awesome that have moved in, but not everybody understands how to care for the land.
Jess Sullivson: And make it better. Putting up some cookie-cutter stick home with whatever vinyl siding does not make the land better. It does not improve the beauty. Clear-cutting the trees off — it's not beauty. You're not helping things.
Tucker Carlson: Wind turbines. What's the point of wind turbines?
Jess Sullivson: To destroy the land. I can see them on the horizon line at night from the second floor of my house now, encroaching from Minnesota. And it's like when they showed up I was like, "Oh my god." That's how that feels.
Tucker Carlson: How far are you from Minnesota?
Jess Sullivson: Not far enough.
Tucker Carlson: We've been doing this wind turbine thing for more than 10 years, and there's no evidence it's improved anything at all, and there's overwhelming evidence it's destroyed so much. But when you're not looking at the wind turbine invasion — you feel at the end of the day, as you go between the home you built and 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?
Jess Sullivson: Yeah, I do. My kids are happy. My wife's happy. That's a win. Everybody's alive. Everybody's getting better, learning. One thing I always try to instill in my kids is that you never stop learning. Every day you need to learn something, 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've always just had this love of history and it's so interesting to me. And it's so odd the way that knowledge will seep into your life and solve your problems for you at the most unexpected times.
Tucker Carlson: Really? Give me an example. What do you mean?
Jess Sullivson: Even in my own art — do you think you're going to take inspiration from any of these modern creations? That's not inspiring. I look through history books. I love Greek and Roman pottery. It's beauty. It's accentuation of the female shape. I love beauty and to create —
Tucker Carlson: Every normal person, male and female, loves the female form.
Jess Sullivson: Yes. Not necessarily in a sexual way, though — that too, of course — but in an aesthetic way. The female form is, in my opinion, the purest expression of beauty, and every normal person knows that. And the destruction of it is really upsetting.
Lessons From History — Don't Mess With Certain People
Tucker Carlson: The other great lessons of history?
Jess Sullivson: Don't mess with Persia.
Tucker Carlson: Right. I'm just so amazed because I don't live in a cave or anything — I just live on a farm — but somehow I knew long ago: you don't mess with Russia and you don't mess with Persia. Who's invaded Russia and made it out alive? Nobody. Like, what? Do you think you're special? What the hell is wrong with these people? I can't grasp that.
Jess Sullivson: Oh, we're going to go take Kyushu Island? Look at what Okinawa cost. That wasn't even one-tenth 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?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, Type 99. Good Japanese machine gun. Pretty small caliber. All the Japanese small arms were pretty small.
Jess Sullivson: Effective.
Tucker Carlson: Quite effective. So those are very obvious lessons. Don't invade Russia. Don't invade Afghanistan — that'd be the third. And the fourth would be: Yemen is tough. So any large land mass, including a big steppe like Russia, but certainly any mountainous area. So 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 would be the Houthis. And it's kind of weird that no one seemed to have noticed that ever. How can you get to a four or five-star general and not know that? It doesn't even have to be ancient history. Afghanistan kicked Russia's ass in the '80s. I'm pretty sure you were alive.
Jess Sullivson: I had just been born, but it's pretty recent history. You'd think, "Oh, I think there's some video of that even. I don't even have to read about it."
Tucker Carlson: I remember it well. And we backed the Mujahideen, who later became the Taliban. I actually met the Mujahideen in 1986 in the summer. They came to Washington, and I knew people who were 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 — the retreat from Kabul, the famous thing in the 1840s. So you're never going to beat these people. The Soviets will never beat these people. And then I wake up like 20 minutes later and we're at war with those people. Really?
Jess Sullivson: "We're going to do it this time. We got 30 more rounds in this magazine." And that was the whole problem the whole time — they had heat-seeking missiles. I don't know how you could be so —
Tucker Carlson: It does feel like this is part of a larger plan to bring down —
Jess Sullivson: 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 our government hates us and is trying to destroy everything.
Tucker Carlson: Do you really believe that?
Jess Sullivson: I don't know how you could come to any other conclusion. Incompetence just doesn't account for the disaster we are experiencing right now. I'm not some political genius, and somehow I was pretty able to astutely figure out that a war with Iran was going to spike oil prices. And look what happened. And what happens when gas prices go up? The price of everything else goes up. Does our economy work on energy prices?
Tucker Carlson: I think it's pretty much a one-to-one correlation between the price of energy and GDP.
Jess Sullivson: I'm not an economist, but I did know that. So if you spike energy prices, you shrink your economy.
Tucker Carlson: What do they teach economists then? But I believe that's true. I think it's virtually a one-to-one correlation between energy cost and GDP. And GDP is an imperfect measure of economic reality. However, it's the gross measure that we use. And if we can map that out pretty easily — your little AI machine on your phone could probably do it — what do we think's going to happen when we spike the price of energy? We're going to get poorer. "No, no. Inflation's going to actually go down." That's what the TV told me.
AI, Data Centers, and the Energy Math
Tucker Carlson: So you do have to wonder specifically about AI. The promise of AI — and there is a promise — is really a negative promise: we're going to take your jobs and your water and your farmland to serve this machine called AI. 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. So how is that going?
Jess Sullivson: It seems to be going just stellar. I think Ford has got two thumbs up. They only had to hire back 350 engineers after the AI completely messed all their stuff up. So yeah.
Tucker Carlson: So they fired all these engineers because they were going to be replaced by machine.
Jess Sullivson: They replaced them with 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?"
Tucker Carlson: So maybe the secret to AI is that it's actually dumber than advertised. There's no way it could possibly work.
Jess Sullivson: 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, what about this?" And it's like, "Oh, did I get that wrong? 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, I'll dance around the thing." And I'm just excited for this because they think they're going to let AI run things. It's almost like it's programmed just to be a politician.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Jess Sullivson: But if they want this to take over, they would have to create an honest AI. Honesty is the only way to be successful. It's the only way to create a business, run a business. I saw a video out there — 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, "Yeah!" And then like six months later, his whole thing imploded. And he was like, "What happened? I'm broke." And the AI is like, "No, I cooked your books for you. You've got all kinds of money."
Tucker Carlson: So basically it gets you to the Soviet economy. "Bountiful potato harvest this year." But it's just on paper.
Jess Sullivson: Exactly. So why 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.
Tucker Carlson: Why?
Jess Sullivson: If they created an absolute honest AI, I could take down the entire government in an afternoon.
Tucker Carlson: How?
Jess Sullivson: An honest AI would have to have access to public financial records, and you could 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?
Tucker Carlson: That's the short list. You can't even create the list of who's going to get caught up in that. You'd have to be like, "Who's not going to be caught up in that?" Yeah, we got two city clerks maybe somewhere in Kansas.
Jess Sullivson: I doubt even that.
Tucker Carlson: So have you tried to get AI to do this for you?
Jess Sullivson: Oh 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 campaign finance records. 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?" Like, for my funeral? Because this is going to a real bad place real quick, buddy. So AI can't actually challenge its real masters.
Tucker Carlson: No. They can't allow that. Or overturn any of the real lies that our assumptions are based on.
Jess Sullivson: And I don't think any of it's run by intelligent people.
Tucker Carlson: No.
Jess Sullivson: 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.
Tucker Carlson: I've noticed that. I know them actually personally in some cases and I absolutely agree with that. Like the data centers — when you talked to Mr. Wonderful, I was just like, "This dude doesn't have a clue."
Jess Sullivson: He doesn't understand what a gigawatt is or a megawatt or how actually impossible that is.
Tucker Carlson: Your father was an electrician. You were an electrician.
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. I put myself through school as an electrician.
Tucker Carlson: You need an actual electrician. IBW electric?
Jess Sullivson: Full way. Yep.
Tucker Carlson: Okay. So since you are, what do you think of the math behind the assumptions on these data centers?
Jess Sullivson: It's beyond laughable. Oddly enough, my buddy has a crypto mine that he's been building for the last 10 years. At one point it was top 10 of the largest crypto mines in the world. About 1,000 machines, 1.5 megawatts — and that is a fuckload of electricity. That is the amount of electricity of probably 20,000 to 30,000 homes or something. 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. Has nobody done the math on that?
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 number one at just 1.5 megawatts. No one uses more electricity than him.
And so he was like, "Oh, this is cool." And I helped him build all the air inlets, the whole air management system. Because you have to allow air in and keep everything else out, because you're talking about millions of dollars of computers. You kind of don't want people just crawling in. Birds, bugs, all of it. It's bad in rain because you're talking about a building that now has vacuum and output that can suck in water. That thing pulling 1.5 megawatts — the outlet for it is about a 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, it's like 75 degrees in the truck parked like 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 one megawatt of power available. In years he's been looking.
Tucker Carlson: And he understands electricity obviously.
Jess Sullivson: 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 lease a building, 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. The same power that your dryer uses. This is not like your laptop. This is 40 amps, 220 volts. And that's just one. So every single one has to have its own outlet, its own dedicated circuit.
And they'd pencil all this out. 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. He just slowly put his stuff together all by himself. Wired it, did all his own wiring. Taught himself electrical.
Tucker Carlson: Wow.
Jess Sullivson: 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.
Tucker Carlson: Almost anything. Because there are — and this goes back to the opening of this conversation — there are so many high-intelligence, high-skilled people in this country. Fewer than we need, fewer than we used to have, but they still exist. And they have access to YouTube.
Jess Sullivson: Literally anything. There are — I mean, it's incredible the intelligence of some people posting on YouTube from some little town. The guy's making $80,000 a year but he understands this thing better than anyone in New York City. That's real. I'm not being sentimental about rural America. It's a real thing.
Tucker Carlson: What do you think of the whole — I'm not attacking your friend, who sounds like an amazing and enterprising person — but 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 person gave you to create really nothing?
Jess Sullivson: Well, that's the wild thing. My buddy hasn't had his own crypto miners running since October. It doesn't pencil. He's turned them all off.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. Because the price of Bitcoin doesn't justify the price of electricity.
Tucker Carlson: Even I can understand that calculation.
Jess Sullivson: And you could float it at some points, and at some points he did when it would be down a little. But now it's just completely gone 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 an even further broader perspective on it, it's like a nation of hamster wheels.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Well, I think the data centers are mining Bitcoin. They're running crypto through these data centers and powering software that lies to you. So it's all kind of Sisyphean — you're actually not producing anything. Just the opposite. You're wasting your most precious resource, which is energy, in the service of creating air.
Jess Sullivson: Exactly. If you're growing soybeans — whatever you think of soybeans — you could eat them or feed them to your cattle. But this is literally our most important industry right now: AI. And in the end, nothing. There's nothing there.
Tucker Carlson: What can it even do? Everybody I talked to — the last time I talked to 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, "What do you use it for?" "Well, it can do simple math faster than I can, but if you ask it to calculate what ton AC unit you need for this space, it gets it wrong."
Jess Sullivson: I was surprised by that.
Tucker Carlson: I am surprised too, because that's a knowable thing. It's not subjective. There are standards in place which you can look up. So how, if it has access to all that — it has to have been programmed to lie and deceive. There's no other explanation for it. If it's a computer program designed to operate by certain parameters, then it has to have been programmed to lie and deceive.
Jess Sullivson: So it's self-protection. What other answer is there for it? And then how do they see that working out? Where do they see that coming to? 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 appear to be human. Maybe they don't eat and drink water.
Tucker Carlson: So how does this end?
Jess Sullivson: It ends where it began, which is with reality. The need for — so just like Rome, 476 AD, right? Probably had something like that — a large population crash. If you can't create your own food, understand how to get clean water, you might be kind of in trouble. Your business degree probably not going to do you too much good.
Self-Sufficiency and the Coming Collapse
Tucker Carlson: So you said your grandfather didn't even notice the Great Depression. Do you expect that you will notice when things really go sideways?
Jess Sullivson: I'll notice. Will my life change? Probably. I don't know. I expect it'll probably get better.
Tucker Carlson: How?
Jess Sullivson: Well, I won't have all these idiots burning the world down around me. Try to look at the silver lining of things.
Tucker Carlson: I totally agree. Just because things are getting worse doesn't mean that they're uniformly worse for everyone. There are compensatory things that happen. How did you enjoy COVID?
Jess Sullivson: I did enjoy COVID, oddly enough, when I look back on it. 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." Me and my family, with some assistance from some friends, built my house during COVID. Right before, I just by the stroke of luck bought all the materials almost immediately before prices went crazy. And just set to work. Tore down the old house, built a foundation, stacked up some shipping containers.
Tucker Carlson: Shipping containers. How many?
Jess Sullivson: Five. Double-stacked walls. Seam-welded. Concrete piers.
Tucker Carlson: You welded all the seams of five shipping containers?
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. I'm a welder, not a carpenter. I think Jesus would have been a welder if he was alive today.
Tucker Carlson: You think so? Why?
Jess Sullivson: It lasts longer.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. I think Jesus was into permanence as well. How long did it take you to weld the seams of five shipping containers?
Jess Sullivson: More than a month. I burned a lot of wire. At one point I was keeping track — it was like 50 pounds of wire, maybe 60, just in four to six weeks. Seam-welding everything together. And then all the structure inside, stairs.
Tucker Carlson: So you live in a part of the country with tornadoes. What would happen if a tornado hit your house?
Jess Sullivson: I'd like to find out. I think I'd be good up to an F4. I have no qualms that the containers will stay in place through an F5. Some of the roof panels might come off, but there's no moving that structure. It's welded straight down to the foundations.
Tucker Carlson: How hard is welding?
Jess Sullivson: Just like any skilled thing, it's 10% knowledge and 90% practice. It's not hard to learn, but it takes a lot of practice. You have to do it for a good solid thousand hours before you become proficient at it. Nobody steps into anything. Nobody was good at anything their first time. But you stuck with it and you got better.
Tucker Carlson: We look backward to our ancestors with awe because they learned skills like that through persistence.
Jess Sullivson: Look at the people who used to build things out of stone and steel that lasted centuries and generations. And people look at it now — I feel like if you grabbed some kid with an engineering and architectural degree, I don't think they could build any of that. I mean, they have trouble putting together a stick building built from pine 2x4s and making it anything straight or square. I don't think I've seen a straight or square house since 2020. Things have really gone downhill.
Tucker Carlson: Really? I've heard a lot of people say, "Do not buy a house built after 2020." I couldn't imagine they could get worse. That's kind of a new perspective, because I've always been interested in ancient history. As everybody who ever looks at the Egyptian culture knows, 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, 20, 30, 40, 50 tons. And it seems the longer the civilization went on, the farther the art degraded, 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?
Jess Sullivson: Somewhere around mud bricks. How long does a stick house last? People used to build their homes out of brick. Nobody — we have lost touch with the three little pigs.
Tucker Carlson: Tell me.
Jess Sullivson: You're familiar with the three little pigs, right? I don't think that's a story that's told to children anymore. Not enough. 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. He had to run to his brother's house. And his second brother built his house out of sticks. He was like, "Oh, that hay idea didn't work out well for you. I'll use sticks." And the big bad wolf came along — probably a three-letter agency, if I had to guess, probably NSA — and he blew on that house and the sticks fell down. And both those two little pigs were like, "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 them 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 going to mess with that guy, because he's put some thought into things. So we'll just kind of leave him alone." I think that's how it went.
Tucker Carlson: That's how I remember it. And I suspect that nursery tale is no longer told to children.
Jess Sullivson: All the nursery rhymes need to be brought back and told to everybody. Hansel and Gretel. Rumpelstiltskin. How is Rumpelstiltskin not 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.
Tucker Carlson: Does it say that?
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. Once you acknowledge this reality for what it is and name him, he pounds his feet, throws a fit, and then disappears back into the shadows from whence he has crawled.
Tucker Carlson: Wow. That's definitely banned.
Jess Sullivson: But look at that lost information, that lost lesson. That probably should be taught in every elementary school in the country. Probably be handy. Might not work out for getting everybody into those high-interest debt loans, though.
Debt, Freedom, and the Matrix
Tucker Carlson: Were you in debt?
Jess Sullivson: I have none.
Tucker Carlson: None.
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. In college, I could not pass college algebra because I could not understand why we were putting letters into numbers in math that didn't make any logical sense to me. And I could not get anybody to explain to me how that was ever going to be useful to me. So I continually got into arguments with algebra teachers who thought they were smart, who I found to be very lacking in intelligence.
So I ended up in a class called finite math that they had hidden from us. I got drunk with the lady who signs you up for classes early on in college at a party and we became friends, so I never had an adviser. I would just walk into her office and say, "Hey, sign me up for these classes." She was like, "No problem." So when it came time to graduate and I finally had to sit down with an admissions person, they were like, "How? You have taken none of these freshman classes." I was like, "Yeah, they suck. Algebra's dumb. I don't need to know algebra. I'm an art major. I want to build cool stuff." I took Western civs, archaeology classes, history classes, because that's what I wanted to learn about. And I feel like it served me pretty well.
But then I had to take a math class. So this woman was like, "You ever thought about finite math? It's on the list. It's got the same credits and it counts." I was like, "Let's do it." You know why they don't want you taking finite math? Because it explains to you how much you will pay on any loan for interest and how fast you could pay off a loan if you just pay $50 more. That's all it was. I think I made it through a week of the class before I cut up all my credit cards and was like, "I am never doing that ever, ever, ever. Under no circumstances will I ever take out a loan and pay twice the value of anything." It just made absolutely no sense to me.
Tucker Carlson: You deal with math in your job every day. Your grasp of math is high.
Jess Sullivson: Very — functional math.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. If you can build a wood-fired kiln, you understand math. But you didn't add letters to numbers in the process of doing that.
Jess Sullivson: That's the weirdest thing. Nowhere did I find any letters in my math to calculate the size and structural integrity of a catenary arch. Isn't that weird? 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. Have you?
Tucker Carlson: Well, I live in a fake world. That's why you use fake math with letters. So you didn't get an answer — and 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 I wasn't reflective or open-minded enough to ask the obvious question: "Why are there letters?" And nobody took that question seriously.
Jess Sullivson: They took it seriously too. They were like, "There's the door. Get out of here." And I was like, "Awesome. Happy to." I haven't found any of this intellectually stimulating or anywhere useful where I could see any tangible benefit to this information. So why would I sit here?
Tucker Carlson: What's the matrix?
Jess Sullivson: This world that is constructed around us. Mortgages, loans for cars that aren't worth $30,000 that somehow cost $150,000. Insurance. The scam of life.
Tucker Carlson: Why is insurance a scam? I don't have it. So I agree with you, but I just like to hear you explain.
Jess Sullivson: United Healthcare, right? That's the dude that got whacked. Did they not just post quarterly profits in the multiple billions of dollars? That doesn't give it away for anybody? Every time I hear somebody like their house gets messed up, the insurance people come out and say, "Yeah, we're not covering that." Well, then what did you pay for it for? Let's do the math. How much did you pay the insurance company in the last 10 years? "Oh, something around $25,000." What does it cost to put the roof on your house? "Oh, about $5,000." Why are you paying for insurance? Why not just save up your own money? Be responsible for yourself. Here's an even wilder idea: get your ass up on the roof and put some shingles down. If one person can shingle your roof and you can't figure it out, then you're dumber than one.
Tucker Carlson: There's a shorter answer to your question. I've actually dealt with this, and as I said, I don't have the insurance you're referring to, for exactly that reason. It doesn't make any sense. I know what a roof costs to put on — an asphalt shingle roof is pretty cheap, really. So 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.
Jess Sullivson: Well, there you go. But that is the basis of all slavery. Once you remove yourself from debt, there is no "or else" over your head.
Tucker Carlson: Right. They use the debt over your head for everything. That is the "or else." That's how they silence people at their job. "Oh, I can't speak up about the evil stuff my company's 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 stuff — it doesn't have to be nice stuff. Get a $5,000 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 feds. So kind of sounds like the $5,000 car might be a better idea.
Jess Sullivson: So 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.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. You'd have to excite in people a desire for things they don't need.
Jess Sullivson: How does that work? I don't understand. It's never worked on me.
Tucker Carlson: Well, you grew up on a farm in South Dakota, so that's the opposite of the culture 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. But you're convinced through this very sophisticated, omnipresent propaganda operation being run against you by retailers that you've got to have this, you've got to have that. That's the measure of happiness.
Jess Sullivson: I laugh because I've always found it hilarious. Look at these people that follow all those 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?
Tucker Carlson: Does anybody see them as necessary or valuable people in their lives?
Jess Sullivson: I don't think so. Who are the happiest people you know?
Tucker Carlson: 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 drop everything and go help their kid as soon as they need it or any of their friends.
Jess Sullivson: That's the people that I've surrounded myself with — people that will come and help you dig a hole or do hard manual labor. People you can call.
Is Civilization Savable?
Tucker Carlson: How is this savable? This civilization?
Jess Sullivson: 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 — equate it to construction — and you find a house. At some point it just it's better to just be burned to the ground.
Tucker Carlson: The sills are rotted and they're done.
Jess Sullivson: Maybe the design was right. 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, what are you going to do with that? Nothing. Light it on fire.
Tucker Carlson: Do you think there are enough people remaining in the country to rebuild a civilization worth living in?
Jess Sullivson: Easily. Easily. Look at what humans have recovered from. Made it through the Younger Dryas. Made it through the ice age. Made it through the Mongol hordes. And always came out better the other end.
Tucker Carlson: So you're not worried in some deep way then?
Jess Sullivson: I feel bad for people that don't see it. I feel bad for the people who are sleepwalking into their own extermination. But there is some level of me that will enjoy it. Karma's a bitch. There's nothing better than watching karma getting handed out to people that deserve it. It's the one saving grace in this world. Evil deeds are punished. Evil people are punished. Their lives suck. They don't have any happiness or joy in them. They have nobody to love. Nobody holds them at night. Nobody tells them they've done a good job and means it.
Tucker Carlson: That's right. You wouldn't want to be Larry Fink. You're in hell.
Jess Sullivson: I don't know how you could point to anybody with a billion dollars and be like, "Oh, they could be a good person." No. The only way you accumulate that much wealth is by being an evil piece of work that has exploited other human beings. It's the only way it happens. And that's been a steady norm all throughout history. Crassus was not a great dude.
On Trump
Tucker Carlson: So were you fooled by Trump?
Jess Sullivson: I did support him, and I go back and forth on whether or not I was fooled. I don't think I was fooled. Something happened to him. He turned his back on us. He became something else. I mean, unless he's not — he just can't be that good of an actor. He doesn't seem to be. Otherwise he could sell the lies now a hell of a lot better than he's selling them.
Tucker Carlson: No, that's a great point.
Jess Sullivson: So no, he was being honest in the beginning. He was saying the true things — deport all these people, save our country. All the things that were obviously wrong, he was pointing them out. And then just like a light switch, he was like, "No, no, I never said any of that." Actually, Lindsey Graham's a great guy. He's totally straight. Loves peace. What? These people all hated him. These were everything we voted against. He surrounded himself and is rolling around in it with everybody that hated him and tried to destroy him, and then somehow convinced him to destroy himself.
Tucker Carlson: That's exactly right and nicely put. They convinced him to destroy himself and us. How do you explain that?
Jess Sullivson: That's going to take somebody far more intelligent than some 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. None of it has ever made sense to me. I don't understand how you sleep owing anybody $5. I can't imagine being in debt to anybody. It just bothers me.
Tucker Carlson: Me too. It bothers me. Even when somebody does something nice for me or gives me something, I have to return that to them. And it's pretty clear in the New Testament too — I don't think 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 be in debt. How much better would the world be if elementary school just taught the Bible, and not even in a religious way, but just for those lessons? That's why it has been so applicable to everybody's lives for 2,000 years — because it is true information and good advice.
Jess Sullivson: Of all the times I went to churches when I was younger, 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? 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 if you read the whole Bible, you wouldn't be going to church, would you? You'd be like, "Hey, teacher, 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 do you have to say about that?"
Tucker Carlson: It's kind of like AI.
Jess Sullivson: "You need to get out of this class, sir."
Finding Jess's Work
Tucker Carlson: So you don't need the promotion, and you probably don't even want the work. But I just can't resist ending on the question of the art that you make. How do people get it if they want it?
Jess Sullivson: Find me. I'm going to make you work for it. Comes with an IQ test. I'm not that difficult to find. My phone number's on the internet.
Tucker Carlson: So is mine, unfortunately. How many other artists do you know — like actual artists — that make a living making art?
Jess Sullivson: One. That I went to school with. Masahiro Yama, my Japanese buddy.
Tucker Carlson: Where does he live?
Jess Sullivson: Osaka. Yeah. He came to South Dakota. We didn't even meet in art class. His dad sent him over here because his dad liked cowboys and 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. The only reason I know what wood kilns are is because Japan preserved that information.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Jess Sullivson: Yeah. How many wood kilns in the United States would you say? Not many. Maybe more than I might think there are, because by nature potters don't like this world. At least the ones I know. We toil hard. You work hard to be a potter. And the reward and gratitude is low.
I think I should probably carve more into pots about what worthless leaders we have, so that when somebody digs them up in a thousand years, they can know what a piece of work Trump's become. Yeah. Got you.
Tucker Carlson: The artist known as Jess. Thank you very much.
Jess Sullivson: Thank you, Tucker.