Tucker Carlson’s Podcast Rockets To No. 1 In America

Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson has reached another career milestone more than a year after being unexpectedly let go by his former employer despite hosting the network's top-rated program.

Carlson's podcast has now climbed to the No. 1 spot on Spotify, surpassing "The Joe Rogan Experience," which held the top position for years. In 2020, Rogan signed a $200 million, three-and-a-half-year exclusivity deal with Spotify.

Earlier this week, Carlson made some serious allegations against the Biden administration during a podcast, which he believes should concern all Americans.

During an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast in late February, Carlson revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring his phone calls and electronic messages ahead of his trip to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. He added that he was warned the administration might have him arrested if he conducted a "softball interview" with Putin.

The intelligence agencies operate under the president's direction — in this case, Joe Biden.

Here’s a partial transcript of the interview:

TUCKER CARLSON: The only reason I’m telling you [about my meeting with Snowden] is, and I didn’t tell anybody, and I didn’t text it to anybody, OK, except him.

"Semafor" runs this piece saying, report "reporting" information they got from the US intel agencies leaking against me, using my money in my name in a supposedly free country. They run this piece saying I’d met with Snowden like it was a crime or something.

So again, my interest is in the United States, in preserving freedoms here, the ones that I grew up with. And if you have a media establishment that acts as an auxiliary of, or acts as employees of, the national security state, you don’t have a free country and that’s where we are. And I’m not guessing because I spent my entire life in that world, 33 years. I worked in big news companies, so I know how it works. I know the people involved in it. I could name them. Ben Smith of Semafor, among many others. And I find that really objectionable, not just on principle either — in effect, in practice. You don’t want to live in that kind of country.

People externalize all of their anxiety about this, I have noticed. So it’s like, "Russia is not free!" Yeah, I know. You know, neither is, you know, Burkina Faso. Like, most countries aren’t free, actually. But we are, we are the United States, we’re different. That’s my concern. Preserving that is my concern.

So they get so exercised about what’s happening in other parts of the world, places they’ve never been and know nothing about. It’s almost a way of ignoring what’s happening in their own country right around them. I find it so strange and sad and weird.

LEX FRIDMAN: So, the NSA was tracking you, do you think CIA was? Do you think people still tracking you?

TUCKER CARLSON: Look, one of the things I did before I went, just because of the business I’m in, all of us are in, and just because we live here, you know, we all have theories about secure communications channels, like Signal is secure, Telegram isn’t, or WhatsApp is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, you can’t trust it. I said, OK, so I thought, you know, before I go over here, I was getting all this, we’re having all these conversations, my producers and I about this, and I decided, you know, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna actually find out like what’s really going on.

So I talked to two people who would know, trust me. And that’s all I can say. And I, I hate to be like, “Oh, I talk to people who know.” But I mean, they would know, and both of them said exactly the same thing, which is, “Are you joking? Nothing is secure. Everything is monitored all the time.” If state actors are involved. I mean, you can keep the Malaysian mafia from reading your texts probably, you can not keep the big intel services from reading your texts. It’s not possible, any of them. Or listening to your calls.

So, and that was the firm conclusion of people who’ve been involved in it for a long time, decades, in both cases. So I just thought, you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care.

LEX FRIDMAN: You say it lightly, but it’s really troublesome that, as a journalist, you would be tracked.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they leaked it to Semafor and they leaked it to the New York Times.

LEX FRIDMAN: So you had no fear. You know, your lawyer said, be careful which questions you asked, you said, I don’t have–

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the lawyer said very specifically, depending on the questions you ask Putin, you know, you could be arrested or not.

And I said, “Listen to what you’re saying. You’re saying the U.S. government has like control over my questions, and they’ll arrest me if I ask the wrong question? Like, how are we better than Putin if that’s true?”

And by the way, that’s just what a lawyer said, but I can’t overstate — one of the biggest law firms in the United States, smart lawyers we’ve used for years. So I was really shocked by it.