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May 29, 2021 - The Dan Bongino Show
10:55
The Bongino Brief - May 29, 2021

The one question I get asked more than any other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dan Bongino.
Welcome to the Bongino Brief.
I'm Dan Bongino.
If I had one question, more than anything, the first one's usually about Geraldo.
Oh, every time.
Is Edward Geraldo real?
But question two, after they get past Geraldo.
I'm not kidding.
They always say, Dan, we're losing the country.
What do I do?
What do I do?
And I said to the caller yesterday on the radio program, and I'll say to you this morning because it matters, I'm going to be candid in a moment of self-deprecating but hard reality.
For the last 10 years, I haven't had a very good answer to that question.
The answer I gave was pretty standard.
I think what any other conservative would tell people.
I mean, I meant it.
I wasn't lying to people, but that doesn't mean the answer was good.
I'd say to people, Hoorah, baby.
Gotta go vote.
Gotta vote.
Donate.
To candidates that matter.
Candidates that are good.
Volunteer.
Be an activist.
Go join your local Republican club.
I mean, it was, I believe the answer, I just, again, being candid with you, because I owe you that, that's not a good answer.
Because a lot of you who email me every day with terrific feedback on my show say something that's perfectly appropriate and correct.
They say, yeah, Dan, great.
We did all that.
Look where we are now.
The verdict is in.
You're right.
So I thought to myself, there's got to be a better answer than this.
And I found that answer one day.
I was reading Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules for Life, and there's a section in there, and I'm not sure, he's not really a political guy, he's more of a... I don't want to categorize him.
He's just a very good thinker.
More of a philosopher, more than anything.
It's probably a more precise, appropriate term.
But he has a line in the book, and the line in the book is about making your own bed first.
And the gist of it is, you know, it's great to go out and want to change the world, but maybe you should focus on making your bed in the morning first.
In other words, fix what you can fix around and in your immediate locus of control first, before you worry about changing everything else.
And I thought, that's it.
That's it.
He's right.
And I never answered that question when someone comes up to me and says, well, what can I do to fix this?
I never answered that question the same way again after that.
Folks, I'm not in any way trying to diminish the importance of voting, activism, donating, joining Republican clubs.
That stuff's important, and anyone who tells you it's not important is lying.
However, I don't think that's the most important thing, because if it was, we would have already changed things, we did all those things, and we're still losing.
The most important thing, ladies and gentlemen, is to make your own bed first.
You know, the great Andrew Breitbart, God rest his soul, had a saying that's apropos and perfectly applicable to today's times, and it was that politics is all downstream of the culture.
He's right.
If we don't change the culture, forget the politics.
It's irrelevant.
It doesn't mean anything.
You will never win the political fights, whether for Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, conservatism, libertarianism, whatever it is, if you don't get the culture on your side first.
Politics is downstream of culture.
That is a tautological statement.
That should seem evident to people, but it's not.
How do I know that?
Because the caller to the program, and I'm sorry for this extended intro, but it matters.
The caller to the program spurred me on to remember a story just recently.
I go to eat in this breakfast location every Sunday, Guy likes it too, in this breakfast spot after church on Sunday with my family.
It's a nice kind of downtime for me.
Everybody knows me there, so it's great.
You know, we enjoy it.
Nice local kind of place.
And I said to a woman, She asked me the question, of course, what can I do?
And I said, well, you have to talk to your grandkids and your kids first.
What are they learning in school?
What are they doing?
Do you talk to them about taxes, healthcare, government, the importance of limited government?
Do you talk to them about firearms, the second amendment, the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly?
Do you talk about that stuff?
And I'm not kidding.
She looked at me and said, nah, I don't want to really start any fights with them or anything like that.
Um, so I, I don't, I try not to do that with the family.
And I thought to myself, you're asking me, what can you do, how to change the world?
And no offense, I know, cause I've gotten this answer from probably a hundred different people.
Uh, I don't want to start any fights.
And I'm like, really?
You wanted to ask me how to change the world, but you're not even willing to take the fight to your own household.
I get it.
I'm not suggesting the woman was being rude or obnoxious.
I'm just saying, you're asking me a question, but you don't like the answer.
Folks, we have to make our own beds first.
We have to focus on changing things locally first.
Changing the culture locally first.
And then we can graduate to the county level.
And then the state level.
And then the federal level.
That's not to say we should ignore any of those levels at any given time.
It's a 30-front war.
We have to fight them all at the same time.
But ladies and gentlemen, the easiest fights are the ones in front of your face before you take on the army down the road.
We have to make our own beds and our own house first.
And it starts with our kids, our spouses, our grandparents, our mother-in-laws, our father-in-laws.
Those fights we should be willing to have.
Because they matter.
If we can't teach our kids and grandkids the value of freedom and liberty without being embarrassed, if we can't do that, then all's for naught.
Forget it.
It's over.
You expect to convince a government leader about the value of liberty, freedom, Personal dignity and love of country when we can't even take that fight to our own kids?
So the question, ladies and gentlemen, is how do we make our own beds locally, and then graduate to the county, and then the state, and then federal level, change the culture first locally, which would therefore change the politics downstream federally later on?
How do we do that?
Well, I want to give you some examples of people who are doing it now because I don't want this show to be macabre.
I want this show to be uplifting.
And whenever people ask me for advice on things, we're going to talk now and again, how do we do it?
I don't want to complain about it.
The answer is how do we fix it?
Any idiot can complain.
We're losing.
What do you do?
So whenever people ask me for advice about what to do, I give them that answer.
But tactically, I also answer the how.
And the best advice I ever saw was in a book.
Joe, get ready.
Joe's heard this book a thousand times.
Used to drive him crazy.
Now I think he's just resolved himself to pure madness because he's heard it so often.
There's a book out there by Nassim Taleb called The Black Swan.
I mentioned a lot of books on the show.
It's a terrific book.
The gist of the book, it's a very complicated book, but it's not complicated to read.
It addresses a lot of things.
It's a wonderful book.
It was a bestseller for eons.
And Taleb goes over in the book, one of the things that analysis of all these people who were successful.
And they basically ask in the book a couple of times, like, is there one thing all these successful people had in common?
Is it they were good looking?
Were they smart?
Were they athletic?
What was it like?
What was it?
They were the hard workers.
And the reality is there isn't one thing.
There isn't.
You have people who've accumulated a lot of wealth and success who were poor, who were rich, who were not that good looking, who were really good looking, people who were super smart, people who were of average intelligence.
Why is it?
What is it that got them there?
And he came to this conclusion on this.
They collected opportunity.
They collected opportunities.
They made their own luck.
If there was an extra class to take in college, they took it.
They collected an opportunity.
If there was a Republican club meeting late at night, they were tired to go and they went, they went and they collected opportunities.
There was a school board election and nobody else wanted to vote in.
It was inconvenient to stop on the way home.
They voted.
They collected opportunities.
If there was some symposium on a college campus after hours and no one else wanted to go, but it may have been valuable.
They collected opportunities.
They were invited to a cocktail party.
They thought, ah, cocktail parties, eh, for the snobby crowd.
But they went anyway.
And maybe they met someone special there.
They collected opportunity.
So when people follow up and say, what can I do?
And I tell them, make your own bed.
I always tell them how.
And the how is to go out and collect every single opportunity you can.
Because out of the thousand cocktail parties, Republican club meetings, interactions you could have had but didn't, but chose to have at some point, hopefully, out of those thousand, 999 may be a total waste.
But one of them is going to change your life.
And if you didn't collect the opportunity, it was never there in the first place.
And you'll be relegated to the purgatory of lost opportunity.
But there's a second part to collect opportunities.
I took it from the book, but it's not... Talib and the guy who writes this were trying to make a different point, but it meant something different to me.
He says, if you're going to collect opportunities, don't chase trains.
The train leaves at 8 o'clock and you say you're going to be somewhere, then be there at 7.55.
Because if the train leaves at 8 and you're chasing it, that's your fault.
You screwed up.
That's on you.
It's a big boy world, we're conservatives, we believe in personal responsibility.
The train leaves at 8, it's your job to be there at 7.55.
If you're chasing the train, that's your fault.
If you commit to an opportunity, I'm gonna go to that CPAC, I'm gonna go to that Republican Club meeting, I'm gonna vote in that school board election, then you damn well better go.
And if you're chasing the train because you were late, that's on you.
Collect opportunities.
Make your own bed.
Don't chase trains.
The Dan Bongino Show.
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