#1170 - Tulsi Gabbard

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Five, four, three, two, one. Boom, and we're live. Hawaii in the house.

Tulsi Gabbard (0:08)

Aloha.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Good to see you.

Thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me. What a great place to be a congressperson.

Tulsi Gabbard (0:13)

The best.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

You're in paradise.

Tulsi Gabbard (0:15)

Yeah, it's hard to leave to go to Washington, I tell you what.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

That's one place, if it wasn't for the storms and the fact that it's really a volcano.

Tulsi Gabbard (0:23)

Yeah. As we've seen all too evident just recently.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Yeah, I have a friend who goes to the big island every year for Thanksgiving, and he convinced me to go two years in a row. It was awesome. I loved it. But then this year, I'm like, yeah, I don't know, bro.

It seems like it's shooting rocks into the sky and half of it's on fire.

Tulsi Gabbard (0:41)

Yeah, that's been, so that's my district. My district in Hawaii covers basically the whole state except for the densely populated urban corridor of Honolulu.

Joe Rogan (0:52)

Oh, so you're lucky.

Yeah. You cover everything except the problem spot.

Tulsi Gabbard (0:55)

The city, the city.

So, no, it's been tough. It's been a tough year because of those folks in the district of Punah with the volcano. Yeah. We have gone through a few near misses with hurricanes, some big flooding on Kauai, and now we've got another one that's knocking on our door.

Joe Rogan (1:13)

Yeah, you guys just, what was it, a level four just passed?

Tulsi Gabbard (1:17)

It was five. They were expecting it to be kind of the same intensity that Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands saw.

So we were really like encouraging everyone to get prepared, getting prepared ourselves, like boarding up all the doors and windows, and then thank God it turned into a tropical storm at the end, and we had a lot of rain. We still had some flooding, but compared to what it could have been, we were fortunate.

Joe Rogan (1:39)

And then on top of that, you guys had a alarm where a text went out to everybody in the island saying that a nuclear missile was headed your way, and this was not a drill. What the hell happened there?

Tulsi Gabbard (1:56)

I was in Washington when that happened. It was a Saturday afternoon-ish in DC time, early morning in Hawaii, and somebody from Hawaii sent me a screen capture of that alert that went out to over a million cell phones across our state saying, ballistic missile headed towards Hawaii. Seek cover. This is not a drill.

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:23)

What does that feel like? I mean, until you find out that it's not, how long did it take before you found out that it wasn't real?

Tulsi Gabbard (2:29)

So I immediately started thinking, so many things running through my head. I'm thinking about my parents, my husband, my family, everybody's in Hawaii. Start thinking about what's going on in the state. Is this real? Is it not real? So that was kind of the first thing. Like I kicked into gear, like, okay, let's make sure this is legitimate.

The actual threat from North Korea is a very real one, so it could very well be. It was not obvious that this was just a mistake that people should blow off. And that was what I think most of the people in the state understood as they started thinking through, what do we do with the last minutes of our lives?

So I called, the first person I called was our state adjutant general, who's also the head of our Civil Defense and the National Guard, and called his cell phone. Thank God he answered the phone. And I said, I got this message, what's going on? And he said, it's a alarm. It was sent out as a mistake.

I said, okay, I'm gonna blast that out. So I got on Twitter and I put that out, just saying, hey, this is not accurate. I forget exactly what I said, but basically this is a alarm. And then just started getting on the phone, making as many calls as I possibly could. But as I was doing that, I was getting text messages and emails and things from people who were freaking out.

Joe Rogan (3:47)

How far is Korea from Hawaii?

Tulsi Gabbard (3:52)

It's over 4,000 miles.

Joe Rogan (3:55)

But that's not very far for a nuclear missile.

Tulsi Gabbard (3:57)

It's for an intercontinental ballistic missile. And knowing progressively, just over the six years that I've been in Congress, and this was a major issue that I've been bringing up since I've been there, in just raising the alarm bells that North Korea is increasing their capacity and their ballistic missile capabilities that put Hawaii closer and closer than reach, Hawaii and Alaska, particularly. And that's why, you know, and after people started getting the word that this was a alarm, I started hearing from folks who just shared their stories of what they went through. And, you know, on the news, they showed the guy who was lowering his daughter down a manhole on the side of the street, his little girl.