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Jan. 3, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:43:15
Fortitude: American Resilience | Dan Crenshaw | EP 214
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Well, you let these diverse people be free so that they can think up ideas that might be appropriate for the next problem, and then you let them talk, which is why free speech is so important.
It's like, without that, we do not have a problem-solving mechanism.
We can't capitalize.
This is biological diversity.
This is the manner in which organisms themselves have adapted to the entire structure of reality.
You don't mess with that.
You certainly don't do it politically, and you need free speech.
You know, and part of that is also opponent processing.
You know, if I want to move my hand as smoothly as possible this way, I put this hand up to stop it and push, and then I can do it.
And a lot of the processes that occur biologically are like that.
Opponent processes, they make for precision and control.
And a lot of our political structures in the West, because we allow for free discussion, are opponent processes.
They're opponent processes.
And so we have a problem.
We get a diverse range of opinions.
God only knows which is right.
And then we can talk them through.
Then maybe we don't implement something, you know, catastrophically stupid.
And so...
And I think the other point to extract from what you said is it's diversity.
It's also the decentralization principle.
Yeah, right, exactly.
This is a key element of conservatism is this...
First of all, a sense of humility.
Conservatism is about a sense of humility.
A sense of humility about what you can really know and what you can control.
And in my experience dealing with my colleagues, Democrats, they have no such humility.
They do believe that they can solve every problem.
And sometimes I think that's well-intentioned and sometimes it's not.
I think it's just important to kind of extract what they want, but then let us figure out how to get there.
Thank you.
Hello everybody.
I'm very pleased today to have with me Congressman Dan Crenshaw.
Dan and I have talked before, but here we are talking again.
Originally from the Houston area, Dan Crenshaw is a proud sixth-generation Texan.
From an early age, he knew that he wanted to serve his country with the most elite fighting force in history, the U.S. Navy SEALs.
His father's career in the Texas oil and gas industry moved his family all over the world, including Ecuador and Colombia, where he attended high school.
As a result, Dan is fluent in Spanish.
In 06, Dan graduated from Tufts University, where he earned his Naval Officer Commission through Navy ROTC. Following graduation, he immediately reported to SEAL training.
That's something very difficult to do, by the way, in Coronado, California, where he met his future wife, Tara.
After graduating SEAL training, he deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, to join SEAL Team 3, his first of five deployments overseas.
On his third deployment in 2012, after six months of combat operations, he was hit by an improvised explosive device blast during a mission to Helmland.
In Helmand Province, Afghanistan, he was evacuated and awoke from a medically induced coma, learning that his right eye had been destroyed in the blast and that his left eye was badly damaged.
He was medically retired in September of 16 as a lieutenant commander, lieutenant commander in the U.S. After serving 10 years in the SEAL teams, he left with two bronze stars, one with valor, the Purple Heart, and the Navy Commendation Medal with valor, among others.
Soon after, he completed his Master's in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
In November of 18, Dan was elected to serve the people of Texas' 2nd Congressional District in Congress.
He serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has the broadest jurisdiction of any legislative committee in Congress.
He also serves on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, among others.
Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.
Well, thank you for having me.
It's an honor, as I've noted to you many times, one of our intellectual heroes, so I appreciate you.
Yeah, well, that's really something to hear from someone like you, I can tell you that.
We just had an election in Canada and one of the things that wasn't discussed was what happened in Afghanistan because Canadians served there as well and I've been putting together this idea that I'd like to put four or five people who served there together on a podcast and get a grounds-eye view of the situation and but I've got you right now and so what in the world were we doing there and what happened and was it any use and What's your opinion about that?
Because I just don't know, you know, so anything you can tell me would be real helpful.
Yeah, it's a complicated one.
But at the same time, it's not that complicated.
You know, let's start with some of the first questions.
I mean, why do we go in there in the first place?
We went there in the first place because of 9-11 and the United States invoked Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which is how Canada gets involved, because you're our friends.
And if we get attacked, we ask you to come help, you say, sure.
Americans have a long history of working with Canadians in special operations.
And actually, where I was stationed in Kandahar, at least for a while, that was a purely Canadian base.
That's why there was a hockey rink, for instance.
And so, you know, longtime partners.
But why were we there?
Well, because of 9-11.
And we decided that, and I think rightfully decided, That there needed to be a response to the attacks on 9-11 because they originated from Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda was being harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And so we decided that the Taliban no longer should be in control of Afghanistan.
That was day one, and basically everybody agreed with what we should do on day one.
Now, day two, and I'm speaking in kind of general terms, but let's call it day two.
The question becomes, now that we kick some butt, do we leave?
And this was always a difficult question, and this kind of gets to the rest of the questions as far as what we're doing there.
Why?
And there's a question people have been wrestling with for 20 years, and there's been disputes about it.
And it's not exactly a simple question or a simple answer because your alternatives are basically come away with the win, call it a win.
I don't know if it's a win, but it's certainly retribution.
Call it revenge.
But the next question is, okay, do we have an interest in prevention?
Do we have an interest in future prevention of future attacks?
And the answer to that question became, yes, we do, which is why the global war on terror became the buzzword for 20 years.
And the difficult question was always, do we let Afghanistan just fall back into the hands of the Taliban, or do we stay and try to at least create some semblance of a government that will be our partner That we can align with and that we can conduct counter-terror operations with and prevent another 9-11.
And that became the choice for 20 years, and that's what we chose to do.
And people like to sort of take easy swipes at that and say, well, look, they were never really prepared.
It seemed like an endless war.
We're just sort of institutionalized the war.
We're just doing the same things over and over again.
But they forget what the alternative is, and life is always about assessing what the alternatives are.
It's easy to be disenchanted with the present or the current choice.
It's a little bit harder to actually think about it and assess what the alternative is.
And it turns out there isn't really good alternatives in a situation like this.
So you can stay at war, or you can say that you ended it and refuse to acknowledge that there's actually an entire ideology out there that has no interest in ending that war with you.
You know, and what I tell people is, and you can kind of get what side of the debate I'm on, you know, call it an NS war, call it what you want.
The fact is, is you send guys like me over there as an insurance policy so that there's no more 9-11s.
And, you know, what did we get for 20 years of war in Afghanistan?
Well, we got no more 9-11s.
And that's certainly not nothing.
It's actually pretty significant.
And do you think that's a reasonable causal link?
I mean, you did get Osama Bin Laden, or we did, I suppose, is another way of looking at it.
Not that I'm taking any credit for that.
So that did happen.
And as you said, there hasn't been another major attack.
And the incidence of terrorism worldwide or that sort of terrorism does seem to have declined.
It's always a trick to attribute the cause of that correctly.
It's hard.
But Al-Qaeda is an organization that exists primarily to externalize their operations.
They exist to attack the homeland, whether that's Europe or the US or Canada.
ISIS, for instance, is an organization that exists to build an Islamic caliphate.
Now, they're all kind of under the same umbrella.
I mean, the Taliban, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, to the extent that they fight with each other, it's mostly about power structures as opposed to ideological differences.
They're all on the same team there.
They just might have different strategies.
And so we decimated Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda tried to move to Iraq, tried to move to Yemen, and we just go after them.
And what that does, is it an endless war?
Yes, because these people are in an endless war with us.
You know, we weren't at war on September 10th, 2001.
We weren't at war in the year 2000 when the USS Cole was hit.
We weren't at war when our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were hit in 1997.
And we weren't at war in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed.
But somebody was at war with us, and this is what I have to remind people.
And we can say we ended a war a couple months ago, but we didn't end any war.
And the intel suggests that al-Qaeda is rapidly reforming and now they have the space and the time because somebody like me is not going after them anymore.
And that's the key ingredient there.
Are they on the run, or are they kicked back and planning the next big operation, the next really, really glamorous operation, the really dramatic attack that they like to do?
You know, that's better than just an underwear bomber going on an airplane.
And so do you think they have that space now in Afghanistan?
And so I got to tell you a brief story.
There was a Canadian federal election just not too long ago and maybe a month before that or so.
One of the cabinet members of our Prime Minister's government, he was re-elected with the minority government, Justin Trudeau.
She referred to the Taliban, the new government in Afghanistan under the Taliban as our brothers.
You know, that wasn't so different in some sense from some of the missives that have been coming from the U.S. State Department, but many people weren't too thrilled with that description.
And, you know, the feeling of more hard-headed people, and maybe they're wrong, is that, you know, it's the same old characters now that have obtained power, and we better watch the hell out.
And so, is that over-suspicious?
Should they be offered an olive branch?
It's like, what's your sense about the right way forward with that new government?
Well, I don't think it's overly suspicious at all.
These are certainly the same people that took my eye.
These are the same people.
Now, granted, I get to wear a cool eye patch as a result of it, so I'm not complaining too much.
Yeah, you do look cool.
You do look cool.
There's no doubt about that.
I read a comedian's comment about you.
I think he apologized for it.
It was something like, it looked like, what was it, a private eye in a porno flick or something like that, which is a good joke.
Hitman in a porto.
That part was the good joke.
That part was the good joke.
It actually was pretty funny.
That kind of sparks the history of the birth of my political career, I guess.
We can talk about that.
It's a funny moment.
Well, let's finish off with the Taliban and then let's finish off with the Taliban.
Yeah, Taliban are terrible.
And they haven't changed one bit.
If anything, they're emboldened and ruthless.
Look, the Haqqani Network, again, a ruthless, ruthless terrorist organization and drug running operation.
The head of that, I think, is the second in command for Taliban right now.
The people in charge, you know, there's groups that we have intel, there are groups in charge of security around the Kabul airport.
The Taliban groups were suicide bombing experts.
I mean, these people all come, they're all cut from the same cloth.
Nothing has changed.
We're seeing plenty of videos of them hanging people, murdering people, executing people, rounding up women, selling them off.
Women are under attack in Afghanistan in a very serious way.
And yet the State Department is calling on them to be diverse, inclusive, and equitable.
I tweeted something nasty about that.
I think you did.
I think I remember.
I'm not opposed to working with questionable characters around the world.
I come from the special operations community.
I also come from the intelligence community.
This is what you have to do sometimes.
But this isn't necessarily one of those cases.
This was a time to put your foot down and refuse to let this happen.
Now, when you let it happen, and the question is, what do you do after the fact?
Because we're not going to go back in and invade.
So you do have to work with them to an extent, and it was this sort of deal with the devil.
And I do understand that.
But you don't have to speak so favorably about them either.
I mean, come on.
I mean, there's at least some dignity that we might preserve, I would hope.
But our State Department...
Well, you also maybe might not...
You might also not say things that would lead to overtly mock you, like diversity, inclusivity, and equity missives.
That's a bit on the, let's call it, naive side, to say the absolute least.
Yeah, it's how wokeism has infected serious people.
I mean, to say the least, it's infuriating and it's caused quite a bit of angst in the United States.
People on both sides of the debate and both sides of the aisle are deeply unhappy about it and we feel deeply embarrassed and as we should.
Especially because it was so preventable.
One of the key takeaways from the hearings this week where General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense were testifying before the Senate and the House in front of the Armed Services Committees.
I'm not on those committees.
I didn't get to ask them questions.
But one thing that really came out and that I hoped would come out was our Defense Department told them very clearly, you need to leave at least a few thousand troops there.
There's a very, it's almost guaranteed that if we go down to zero, because, you know, slogans, right?
This is where I get very upset with the debate about all this, because I feel like the push to remove troops is effectively based on a slogan, an emotional slogan.
Maybe two slogans.
Do you know what slogan means?
The derivation of that word?
It's very interesting.
It's from sluag garum.
It's Welsh.
Sluag garum.
It means battle cry of the dead.
Well, that's interesting.
And it fits perfectly with how I'm using the word slogan now, because I think these emotional slogans were effectively political battle cries that caused death.
And when you say, you know, this emotional cries to bring the troops home, as if I need your help, right?
As if I'm not a smart individual that volunteered to go and And defend America as if I need somebody's sympathy.
I don't.
And the other slogan, no more endless wars.
It just reduces a very complex and important topic into a A very foolish debate.
And I think that's how we ended up in this place, where the number had to be zero.
It couldn't be 2,500, couldn't be 5,000.
Couldn't be something reasonable, right?
Because I'm not saying we have 100,000 troops there.
Like, when I was deployed in Afghanistan, it might have been 120,000 troops there.
And, you know, maybe as a surge, it's debatable whether that's necessary or not, but it's certainly not sustainable forever.
And I think what people became unable to do is distinguish between this enormous resources being expended on nation building, let's call it.
I think that, again, I think that's an overly simplistic term.
But they don't like hundreds of thousands of troops there indefinitely.
Fair enough.
I mean, why would you?
I totally get that.
I don't think we should do it either.
And I also don't think that we should be trying to export democracy.
But that's been a bit of a straw man argument or a red herring, really.
Obviously, related terms, but it's, you know, this whole idea that we're trying to export democracy, that was never the point.
You know, and it's an unfair criticism of the Bush administration.
Their goal was not to export democracy.
Now, you might make a different argument on Iraq.
I think they got over their skis on that one, but let's set that debate aside.
Well, Afghanistan, it was never the point.
It was just that on day two, like I said, you have a question.
Do you try to build some semblance of a government that you can work with?
Or do you just let the Taliban take it over and then you're right back to where you were right before September 11, 2001?
And what have you gained?
So what do you think would have happened if you would have left five or 10,000 troops there?
We'd be in a very good situation right now.
The Afghan government would still be up and running.
And there'd be little skirmishes, little combat operations for a while.
There just would.
Why do you think that that small number of troops...
Sorry, we have a bit of a lag, so I'm being a bit rude here.
But why are you convinced that a number, 5,000, 10,000, something like that, why are you convinced that that would have been sufficient?
Well, because it's sufficient enough to hold certain airfields, commit certain air power to our Afghan partners, and honestly give them the morale boost that they need to go fight it on their own.
It also provides logistical support to them.
I mean, a truly modern army is 5% combat, 95% logistics.
That's what makes the American military so unbelievable, is that we can deploy anywhere in the world and our logistics are second to none.
And that's something that's not quite realized.
It's not obvious.
I watched an extensive series on World War II that concentrated and it was narrated by Eisenhower.
It concentrated a lot on logistics, which I found absolutely fascinating.
And it stunned me as well.
Just the sheer difficulty of supplying tanks and men with gasoline once the English Channel was crossed.
That was an amazing operation.
They built these huge spools out of With as much steel in them as battleships and unrolled pipelines across the English Channel.
And that was like one of them.
It's amazing.
Absolutely beyond comprehension.
And that it was possible and that it worked.
So the logistics, the supply of the army, all of that, that is really something.
And people don't know how complex that is.
So you figure 5,000 to 10,000.
And that was killed by slogans.
It was killed by slogans.
It was killed by emotional slogans.
Because, I mean, like you say, you can't overstate the importance of logistics.
And people say, well, we've been there for 20 years.
I mean, why can't they handle it?
I mean, you handle it, being a new country after 20 years, that's not exactly a long-standing, a long time, you know?
It's difficult.
You know, give these guys some slack.
I mean, they've been trying to build a plane while it's falling through the air for years, and it's not easy.
And you've got an insurgency that's ruthless and doesn't play by the same rules.
You know, they've got IEDs set up everywhere.
You know, this stuff is hard, and it takes time.
You've got to remind people, we are in South Korea.
Since the 50s, they didn't have an election until the 80s.
You know, it takes a while.
And would anybody say at this point that it wasn't worth it?
That we should have just left and let that fall to communist China control the way North Korea is?
I don't think so.
I mean, South Korea seems like a pretty good partner.
South Korea is quite a place, man.
Yeah, absolutely.
Look at it thrive away, man.
Hooray.
And that would have never happened without our presence there.
Just never.
And it's not like they ever stopped the war either.
They're technically still at war.
So I just think the argument...
Now, look, are we losing Americans there?
No.
But we also haven't lost an American in Afghanistan for a year and a half until these Marines were killed just a few weeks ago.
So, you know, and before that, and people are like, well, that's because of the treaty with the Taliban.
It possibly, possibly got, you know, they have time on their hands.
They're strategic thinkers.
But before that, when we didn't have a treaty, we had an average of six to seven deaths in Afghanistan every year.
I'll tell you what, the U.S. military loses a hell of a lot more than that.
Suicide and random accidents.
I wouldn't call this a war in the traditional sense.
It was not like what I was dealing with.
Even what I was dealing with in 2012 was certainly not like 2010.
War is relative.
I don't see what was going on since about 2014 as a full-blown war by any stretch.
Okay, so let me summarize what you said and see if I got it right.
So you think that 20 years of involvement kept terrorism at bay pretty effectively, and now that's done with, and whatever was there before is mounting again, and has been emboldened, that was your word.
And emboldened by what exactly?
Well, by the fact that they took over the government of Afghanistan instantly and are back in control?
And then I have some...
Parallel questions along with that, if I got that right.
What is this endless war that we're in, apparently, about?
And who's underneath it?
Because I have been watching American foreign policy for a long time, and I keep wondering about Pakistan, and I keep wondering about Saudi Arabia, which has all this immense wealth and has the proclivity to fund rather radical ideas all around the world, continually.
And so...
I know those are terrible things to ask you about, or even to talk about.
I'm not an expert on this, but I know enough.
What we're dealing with is Islamic extremism that really originated from Saudi Arabia, the madrasas of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi Islam, which is a very extreme form of Islam, and that materialized over time.
And I think what's interesting is, and I'm going to get the year wrong and the exact attack wrong, but there was a major Islamic extremist attack in Saudi Arabia decades ago.
And ever since that moment, the Saudi Arabian government sort of had this deal with the devil with them.
Leave us the hell alone and we'll at least...
Harbor you, right?
So that's why people kind of look to Saudi Arabia as this culprit, even though at a governmental level, they're an ally.
And again, it's deals with the devil.
Yeah, so it's very strange.
And it's, you know, why are we allies with Saudi Arabia?
Well, because they're the only geostrategic deterrence to Iran, and they're worse.
This is life.
You know, this is realism, as opposed to who we wish people were.
But that's sort of where it came from.
And this has been around for a while, and they hate us because they hate us.
You know, and Westerners are always looking for this sort of this logical reasoning.
Why do they not like us?
It must have been something we've done.
Must be our foreign policy.
And so I asked, okay, well, let's take our biggest example.
Let's take Osama bin Laden.
What exactly did we do to this guy?
I mean, was it us aligning with him and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 80s?
We helped him.
Or was it when we defended his homeland of Saudi Arabia from invasion from Iraq, from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War?
We stopped Saddam Hussein from invading Saudi Arabia.
And that was actually, he claimed that our mere presence there was enough to radicalize him and start al-Qaeda.
That doesn't make any logical sense, right?
Because we're always looking for this sort of transactional relationship to help us understand as Westerners, but they're not Westerners.
They don't operate off the same logic.
They think we're infidels and they hate us because of who we are.
And you need to accept that.
And that's why it's an endless war.
They will always be at war with us.
And we'll never snuff it out.
It's a reality that we have to live in.
And do you think about it as a religious struggle or as a criminal enterprise that's essentially organized against the West, U.S. in particular?
I mean, it certainly seems to me like a religious struggle.
At least that's how they paint it.
And...
I can only go off of how they operate.
That's an interesting question.
I don't know that I distinguish too much.
In a sense, it operates like an organized crime enterprise, for sure.
That's how we track them.
We track them through financing.
We track them in all the traditional ways that you might hunt down an organized crime unit.
In practical purposes, we see it the same.
The religious side gets into it because it goes back to the old adage, winning hearts and minds.
It turns out that that ain't that easy.
We're never going to win over Muslims in this sense.
It's just not going to happen when we're over there.
I mean, the alliances that we get when we're in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, they're based on practicality.
And look, the vast majority of Muslims there are just not that extreme, so they don't They're fine aligning with us.
They don't necessarily subscribe to this idea that you can't even speak to a Christian.
So it's complicated.
Life is complicated.
So tell me about life as a congressman.
You've been a congressman now for three years and I spent some time in Washington and I was surprised by many things and overwhelmed by many things and impressed by many things.
But what's your day-to-day life like?
So I guess maybe what we first should do is describe the difference between a congressman and a senator for everybody that's listening.
And then I'd like to know what you do day-to-day and what your fellow congressmen do.
Mostly senators are just much older.
Look, the American system, and I guess I'm just, you know, and I'm speaking to the whole audience, because, you know, there's probably not a lot of Americans that quite understand the origins of our system, but it's not a parliament, you know, and the reason being, our founders...
In creating a republic, they wanted it to move slowly.
They didn't like this idea, this notion that the decisions over an entire country could be made very easily.
So they created sort of these national structures and federal structures.
And the House is a national structure, the Senate's a federal structure.
And we've kind of changed that over time, and we've sort of destroyed that by changing the Constitution.
But it was originally intended wherein the House really represents the people.
It's the people's house.
Your election is every two years.
It's very emotional.
The majority rules, absolutely.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi only has four votes majority, and she just kicks our butt.
We can't do, we have no power in the House.
Because it's majoritarian, and it's emotional, and it's the people.
It really is the people.
The Senate was supposed to be this sort of, it's like the House of Lords, sort of, in Great Britain, the UK. And it's supposed to be this sort of slower or methodical decision-making process.
And the Constitution was actually written where there is no popular vote to elect your senators, where your state legislatures actually choose your senators, because the entire point of the senator, You get two per state.
And this is important, too, when I say federal and national, right?
Because national implies that you're representing the people.
So you represent just based on numbers of people.
But the Senate isn't like that.
There's two senators per state.
And the reason it's like that is to It's to, well, give more power to states that are less populated so they don't just get run over by everybody else because the foundation of our country, the United States of America, the foundation of our country is this idea that we can all kind of live together peacefully if we leave each other the hell alone for the most part and let states do what states do.
I kind of like that idea.
I think it would get us out of a lot of our problems.
But the idea was then that states have representation, and then they choose that.
Now, that got changed in the early 1900s in an amendment, so now it's a popular vote.
So the Senate got a little bit more populist.
It got a little bit more nationalized, but still a federal entity, still two votes per state.
That matters.
The other big difference in the Senate, a senator has more power, individual senator has more power to block legislation than, say, I do in the House.
And with that power comes more responsibility.
So you hope that senators believe in that responsibility.
One of the worries I have is that We're getting a little bit more of a kind of a Wild West type of senator getting elected to Congress and a little bit more radicalized, the kind of people you see in the House, because it's easy to be it's easy to be a purist.
It's easy to be a little crazy when you just have no responsibility and it's easy to kind of The diffusion of responsibility is quite significant in the House.
There's 435 members, but in the Senate, there's only 100.
So your status actually matters there a little bit more, and you need to act like an adult.
And for the most part, that's how it's operated.
And that's a four-year term?
Six years.
Six-year term in the Senate.
Oh, sorry.
A lot of people don't know this.
It just allows you to kind of escape the political ramifications, you know, the emotions of the people for a while and just kind of make adult decisions.
And maybe that's a good thing.
I think the House should probably be a little bit more.
If I were to change something, I'd say the House should be three years, because we're running for election constantly, it seems like.
That's something I really did want to ask you about.
When I went to Washington and met a number of congressmen, both Democrat and Republican, the first thing I thought was, there is no way I would want to have this job.
And part of it was, well, when are you not running for office?
And that's really hard, and it's really expensive, and it's really demanding, but you're also supposed to be working.
But then also, you have to fundraise constantly.
And that was really shocking to me.
My sense of it was that congressmen were spending like 25 hours in an office that wasn't their primary office, on the phone, Raising funds for their party.
And so that's like 20 hours a week.
And then you have to campaign for like, who knows, 10.
And then you have to fly because, you know, you don't live in Washington necessarily.
And well, then there's your job.
So that's got to take up a few hours as well.
So I have no idea how you do it.
And can people do it?
It's definitely not glamorous.
And people ask if I enjoy it.
And I say, well, what do you mean by that?
Because I don't enjoy it the way I enjoyed the SEAL teams.
I mean, I got blown up in the SEAL teams and I still rather enjoyed it quite a bit.
This is not enjoyable in the same way.
Now, I personally, people who follow me, they know I do a lot of fun things associated with my campaign that make it enjoyable.
Like, we throw big parties.
We have a big 4th of July celebration.
We do a youth summit, which, of course, you were guesting at.
I do fun things to make it enjoyable.
And the reason I say it's not quite as bad as people realize, you are correct that a lot of folks would say it's about 20 hours a week you might spend on the phone fundraising.
Now, for me, it's not correct.
I don't do that at all.
I might spend an hour.
How do you get away with that?
And why do other people do it?
If you can get away with not doing it, why does anyone do it?
Because I put so much effort into just trying...
I try to be somebody that somebody just wants to donate to.
Does that make sense?
So I put a lot more effort...
It makes sense if it works.
It works for me.
I was under the understanding that congressmen were under tremendous pressure from their party brass to do that sort of work.
And you can understand why, because it's so expensive to run it.
Maybe it doesn't have to be.
You know, that is a question.
And that gets into a whole other set of questions.
To answer your question, it does work.
It works for me.
It's hard to replicate it, to be perfectly honest.
It works for me because, hell, I don't know.
I know how to use social media pretty well.
I do things like this, right?
I have my own podcast.
I know.
I wanted to ask you about that, too, because you wrote a book.
And just a couple of years ago, while you were doing all this, and then you have this podcast as well.
And so you are using this new media to speak directly to people.
And so that begs one question, which is how in the world do you have the time to do all that as well?
But I would like to ask you about your experiences with social media.
It's like, how is that working for you politically?
And what do you think it signifies, let's say, for the future of politics?
Because who needs the legacy media and 30-second soundbites?
It doesn't look to me like anyone does.
Yeah.
And look, the entire point of being a representative is to, well, there's a couple points to it.
Craft legislation, vote on that legislation.
So I'm in the minority, which means I'm not really crafting any legislation.
I mean, I have legislation I'd like to craft, but I have no power.
So my duty is effectively just to vote on it.
That doesn't take up a whole lot of time.
And I think a lot of members are going to mislead the public a little bit when they say, I don't have any time to read anything.
Look, there's ways that we digest these massive bills.
We're following their development over time.
Staff is combing through it.
You know, the reason they're so long, too, they're filled with legal jargon, you know, and then you have to break apart the substantive part of it.
But there's ways to There's ways to absorb it.
So I never use that as an excuse for why I'm voting against something, because you basically know what's in it.
Anyway, that's sort of a side point.
But anyway...
Well, it's a relief, though.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't like using that as an excuse.
It could be an excuse.
I just don't like using it.
But another big part of your job is simply to communicate with people.
Because you're representing them.
So you need to communicate both up and down.
You need to communicate their voices, what you said you would run on.
So obviously, you don't perfectly represent everybody.
There's lots of Democrats in my district who don't feel that I represent them.
That's fine.
But I represent a majority of the people in my district.
And I represent them based on what I ran on, a set of values, a set of conservative limiting principle values.
And my job is to explain things better than they can themselves, which is sort of why they elect you.
They're like, they kind of want you to be like them, but just explain it better.
And I knew that's what I wanted, because I was never political.
The first moment I got involved in politics was the moment I declared running for office.
And I always knew, so I was a normal guy is my point.
Like, I think being involved in politics and being an activist can kind of change the way you think about politics, and I think gets you detached from regular people who just aren't thinking about it all the time.
But I was just one of these regular people not really thinking about it all the time.
I was very interested in policy, which is slightly related but different than politics.
And so So the point is, I was kind of a regular guy.
And I knew what I wanted.
And I just wanted people to explain why the hell they were doing what they were doing.
And don't talk to me in talking points.
And to do that, you do need long-form discussion.
And then you've got to communicate with people where they're at.
So why do a podcast?
Well, so I can dive deep into issues.
And be willing.
Know things well enough so that you can have a long-form conversation.
A lot of people will struggle with that.
And so that's number one.
But not everybody listens to podcasts and not everybody wants to listen to anything for an hour.
And so you also have to be able to communicate your points on Twitter.
You know, and that's not great, but it is something.
And that's what some people follow you on.
So communicate something there.
Instagram is probably one of my favorites because I can kind of do everything on Instagram.
And I have the biggest following there.
And, you know, you put out videos.
I put out explainer videos.
And I'm not giving you a 20-minute, you know, Informational episode on issue X, but I'm trying to do it in a couple of minutes and go a little deeper than just Democrats are bad, you know, and they want to kill jobs.
Well, why do they want to kill jobs?
Let's just explain it a few layers deep, just a few more layers.
And that's what people are looking for.
And it's been very successful.
And so I can spend my time doing that, which is also my job, because my job is to communicate.
I can spend my time doing that and being creative with that and being good at that.
And that takes away all those hours of fundraising that I have to do.
It's not like I don't do any.
And I'm like one of the number one fundraisers in the house.
Ah, so that's part of the reason you can get away with it, because what you're doing is very effective.
Right, right, yeah.
So tell me about this Youth Summit, more about the Youth Summit, and how that got started, and why you do it, and what you saw there.
I know I did this Q&A, but my staff give me things and I do it, and I don't know the context as much as I would like to, especially with something like that.
I wish you could have been there.
Me too.
Love to get you there next time.
We'll do it every year.
And it's a very cool thing.
If you're a conservative, you know that one of the biggest electoral problems you have is young people.
And this isn't all that surprising.
I think the promises of the utopian left are very endearing to a young person, and to a certain extent, you'll never escape that.
But my goal is to give them the tools of conservatism.
There's a lot of youth groups out there you're probably familiar with.
You've spoken at a Turning Point event.
Maybe you've dealt with YAF too, so Young America Foundation.
Both good organizations, but this isn't what I'm doing.
I'm not doing either one of those things.
I'm trying to do a mix of both because what YAF does is very intellectual.
Ben Shapiro is pretty much their main headliner.
Of course, you know Ben well.
And so it's a bit more intellectual.
There's not a lot of fanfare to it.
It's just somebody on a stage and let's give a speech and let's answer some questions.
And then you got something like Turning Point, which is a very high production.
It's like a kind of a concert, like very much a rally.
And what I try to do is a mix of both.
So I want to give you that experience.
And I'm also 100% only focused on high school and college kids.
And you have to have an age limit.
So mine was 24.
And I want to give them both intellectual tools that they can come away with.
Uh, which is why I invite somebody like you to speak.
Uh, and, and I want to also give them a good time because I know I need to grab their attention.
I need them to have fun.
I need to, I need them to come away with an experience that they're not going to forget.
And so we just had, I mean, it's, it's a high production fun event.
And, uh, there's like a, there's a, there's even a concert in the middle of it.
Um, Yeah, I don't know what's going on with you conservative types, because you've got comedians now, and you've got entertainment, and you're talking to young people.
It's like, this is very strange.
So hey, I've got a question about this issue of young people, because I've been talking to lots of conservative folks in Canada, because we have a conservative party, and they're about as popular as our government, but not quite.
And I've mentioned that I believe that their fundamental problem is that they can't figure out what they have to offer to young people, but it seems to me that what they have to offer is this notion, it's something like paternal encouragement.
It's like, we really think you could be something if you behave properly in some essential sense, and we really believe in you as an individual, In alignment with your traditions, more than we believe, let's say, in the utopian promises of government, per se, as a problem-solving enterprise.
And I think one of the things I've really noticed, and I get a lot of letters from people, is that, and this just about killed me when I was on my tour, because I'm offering people words of encouragement as individuals, and I had no idea how much starvation there was for that.
And that was particularly true of young men, but not only true of them.
And that is something conservatives can say.
It's like, look, you know, we really believe in you.
And we are skeptical of the claims that big organizations per se, especially government, can do what they promise.
Whereas you, as an individual, especially if you get your act together, man, you're really something deadly.
So, in the best possible sense.
And that's a...
That's a really attractive message, especially to young people now, because they don't really hear that.
They hear that they're just spoilers of the environment.
Some guy wrote me.
I just opened his letter today.
He'd been in prison.
He'd been suicidal.
He wasn't a good guy, and he sorted his life out when he was 30, about.
He said he...
Encountered my lectures and he stopped regarding himself as intrinsically, like an intrinsically bad despoiler of the planet, something like that.
I'm not exaggerating and he had no idea that maybe there was something to the idea that he had intrinsic value and he quit all his idiocy, stopped drinking and stopped taking drugs and he got married, he had a kid and he's got a job and you know, it's...
Conservatives have something to offer young people, and they just don't know how to get it across.
There's something about what you're doing that does that.
It's partly why I'm so interested in talking to you.
And why do you think the Turning Point thing is working?
Exactly.
It's different than what I do.
What Turning Point does, what Charlie does, is they just were the first ones to give conservative kids a place to go hang out with each other.
Frankly, which is pretty meaningful.
People are just looking for, especially in a university setting, people are desperate to find like-minded individuals who feel the way they do.
They give them that.
And the Republican clubs were just kind of outdated.
Young people don't go joining these clubs anymore.
So we sort of just look for different ways to do it.
And I think that's what it gives them.
I don't think it's much more complicated than that.
But to jump off of what you were saying about what conservatives deliver, when somebody asked a question like that, it kind of depends on my audience on how I want to answer it.
But jumping off of what you said, You know, because you said, you used the phrase paternalistic encouragement, which is different, of course, than paternalism, which is, I think, a leftist attribute.
But what we do, and what I want to jump off of there, is what I often say, and actually it was a speech I gave to that youth summit, Because I'm always trying to explain to kids, like, how can...
I'm giving you a tool.
I'm giving you a way of explaining something simply so that when you're confronted by your classmate, you can have this tool.
Now you've got a tool in your toolkit that you can use.
So I'm like, here's a way to think about the difference between conservatives and liberals.
And like, it goes something like this.
The conservative ideology is like, it's about love, okay?
And it's about the kind of love that your parents give you.
And that's a little different than, say, the kind of love that your, like, crazy aunt gives you.
She loves you, but she kind of wants to just spoil you, right?
She just wants you to love her.
It's really important to her.
She doesn't really have a lot of responsibility over you either.
So your parents create rules around you, and they tell you that your actions matter.
They tell you that you're accountable.
They tell you that you better work hard if you want to succeed.
And they're not always that nice about it.
You know, it doesn't feel like love.
But it is in a very profound way.
That's love.
And then your crazy aunt's like, you're perfect the way you are.
You don't have to change.
You're fine.
And it's not your fault that you got a bad grade.
And I want to do things for you.
Like, let me take you to the shopping mall.
It doesn't mean she's a bad person.
It just means that that's not...
There's nothing worse that you can tell young people, especially around 16 or 17, that they're fine the way they are.
It's like, they might as well just die right there and then then, because they've hit perfection.
It's like, no, you've got lots more to learn.
There's way more to you than you've explored, and it's really necessary that you find that out and develop it.
And that's way more encouraging than you're okay the way you are.
But, you know, I get it in some sense, because...
It's associated with the idea that people have intrinsic value.
And if you have children, in some way, they are just perfect the way they are.
But in some way, they're not, because they're not everything they could yet be.
So it's easy to get the message mixed.
Yeah, and it's like there's a difference between not being perfect and being bad.
And we shouldn't tell kids that they're just bad.
But you also have to give them some room to grow and something to aspire to.
Yeah, well, that's the thing right there, that issue of something to aspire to.
And part of the woke, what would you call it, pathology that we're all engrossed in at the moment is the idea that there's something wrong with judgment per se.
And that's such a preposterous idea because to do it, and I could speak about that psychologically, because to do something like look at a room, you have to make judgments about what you're looking at and why.
You can't do anything without judgment.
There's a hierarchy of values.
It's tied to our perception.
And there has to be something at the top in some sense that unites us.
And we should strive for that.
And that is the sort of thing that conservatives can do.
Along with warnings about the overreach of government, because people who are conservative tend to be more concerned about that.
And so I think the two things that I like to say are foundations of conservatism, one we just hit on, which is effectively personal responsibility, a sense of accountability.
I think that's an important bedrock for any civilization.
I would also say that it's the precursor to freedom.
I don't think you can be a free society if you don't at least have this sort of sense of personal responsibility ingrained in it.
I don't see how it's possible, right?
Because for the simple reason that Freedom requires a sense of responsibility.
Otherwise, you're just asking other people to be taking care of you.
And if you're asking other people to be taking care of you, by definition, you're infringing on their freedoms.
Or you're asking a politician to infringe on their freedoms.
So these are necessary foundations.
And this is what conservatives have to offer, is freedom.
You're also depriving yourself of the adventure of your life.
Because one of the things that's been so successful for me, in some sense, is to draw a connection between responsibility and meaning.
It's like you want some meaning to set against the suffering.
Well, where are you going to find that?
Well, reliably, one place to find it is in responsibility.
Because that means you're shouldering something worth shouldering.
And it's a burden that's actually somewhat significant.
And you can, you know, you can...
Comfort yourself with some sense of your own utility in the face of all your sins and stupidity.
How can you live without that?
It's not possible.
Yeah, one of the struggles I have is how that's not more persuasive.
Because there's just a lot of people who just, I think, fundamentally disagree with what we're saying right now.
They would disagree that freedom as a virtue in and of itself is even a virtue in and of itself.
They would also define freedom very differently.
They would say, well, it can't be free unless you have housing, unless you have free healthcare, unless you have at least some living wage, then you can't go be free.
So we're defining the word freedom completely differently, right?
Because I would define...
It's troublesome on the edges, too, because, you know, you can certainly see that there are levels of absolute privation that are so severe that your freedom is restricted in many ways, not in all ways, and maybe not in the most important ethical ways.
I mean, I read a lot of literature written by concentration camp survivors who were in a pretty damn rough situation and still insisted on their own, what would you say, ethical responsibility.
Certainly Solzhenitsyn's conclusion, and In some sense, he thought that was all you really had when everything was stripped away from you.
And Viktor Frankl, who I wouldn't regard particularly as a conservative, he pretty much came to the same conclusion.
And those are pretty powerful books.
It's hard to read through them without being, you know, somewhat convinced.
And I think one of our challenges is convincing people that freedom is actually a good thing.
And maybe not just, not libertine freedom, I mean like ordered liberty freedom, you know, freedom within a moral framework, which is what makes me a conservative and not a libertarian.
And it's more difficult than you might think to convince people.
Well, I don't know.
I think you understand it.
I think it's a conversation you have pretty often.
But it's convincing people that freedom is indeed, even though it's risky, and even though it's messy, and even though it can allow you to fall on your face sometimes, and even in suffering that you might think is unjust, it still, in the aggregate, improves things.
It improves everything.
And it's harder to see that at the moment.
And so what people are swept up by is the sort of false promises of immediate action.
Immediate action to save something, to fix something, and to take that paternalistic government view, that status view of something.
But the thing is, if we actually took a step back and saw the forest for the trees and looked at the long span of history, It is always true that more freedom leads to more prosperity over time, and less of it leads to less, if not complete and utter decay, in fact.
Well, I think the diversity argument is actually a weird, what would you call it?
It's a weird warped version of that in some sense, because speaking as a scientist, I hope, part of the reason that freedom works is that we don't actually know what problems are going to come up next.
Because things actually change, and they change in an unpredictable way.
And so we have our traditions to guide us, and thank God for that, because we'd be making endless decisions all the time otherwise, and we would be in complete disunion.
But we still, that's not a perfect structure for moving ahead into unknown territory.
Okay, and so you don't know what the problems are, and you don't know what the damn solutions are, because you're not that smart.
So what do you do about that?
Well, biologically, what has happened is that human beings are possessed of very diverse individual temperaments, and that's the diversity argument.
That's why diversity is necessary, but it's temperamental.
So there are creative and non-creative people.
There are extroverted and non-extroverted people.
There are compassionate people, and there are tough-minded people.
There are conscientious people, and there are people who aren't burdened down by duty, and sometimes that frees them up to be artists, let's say.
Who's right?
Well, the answer is, it depends on when.
And so, okay, so how do you cope with that structurally?
Well, you let these diverse people be free so that they can think up ideas that might be appropriate for the next problem, and then you let them talk, which is why free speech is so important.
It's like, without that, we do not have a problem-solving mechanism.
We can't capitalize.
This is biological diversity.
This is the manner in which organisms themselves have adapted to the entire structure of reality.
You don't mess with that.
You certainly don't do it politically.
And you need free speech.
You know, and part of that is also opponent processing.
You know, if I want to move my hand as smoothly as possible this way...
I put this hand up to stop it and push, and then I can do it.
And a lot of the processes that occur biologically are like that.
Opponent processes.
They make for precision and control.
And a lot of our political structures in the West, because we allow for free discussion, are opponent processes.
They're opponent processes.
And so we have a problem.
We get a diverse range of opinions.
God only knows which is right.
And then we can talk them through.
Then maybe we don't implement something, you know, catastrophically stupid.
And so...
And I think the other point to extract from what you said is it's diversity.
It's also the decentralization principle.
Yeah, right, exactly.
This is a key element of conservatism is this...
First of all, a sense of humility.
Conservatism is about a sense of humility, a sense of humility about what you can really know and what you can control.
And in my experience dealing with my colleagues, Democrats, they have no such humility.
They do believe that they can solve every problem.
And sometimes I think that's well-intentioned and sometimes it's not.
I think it's just important to kind of extract what they want, but then let us figure out how to get there.
Yeah, well, actually, that works out temperamentally.
That's exactly how things should work, because liberal people, all, you know, insofar as psychologists have been able to determine this, and it's not exactly accurate, because psychology as a field is prejudiced against conservatives.
So some of the scientific measures are biased.
Yeah, it's terrible, especially in social psychology.
But none, well, so...
The people who tend towards those more liberal, utopian and grand scheme views, they tend to be high in openness, and that's creativity, divergent thinking, and low in conscientiousness.
They're not very detail-oriented.
Whereas the conservatives are the opposite types.
And so what you see happening in businesses is the open liberal types tend to be entrepreneurial, at least in their vision, and the conservative types implement.
And if you don't get that right in your business, then it doesn't work.
Because the open people, they're everywhere.
They can't settle down.
They can't even catalyze an identity easily because they're interested in everything.
And they're full of wild schemes and great because, hey, some ideas.
But if you want implementation.
And then the other problem with the grand scheme thing is, and conservatives always say this, and it's really hard to teach young people about this, but it's really important.
And that's the law of unintended consequences.
It's like, why are you so sure that your stupid idea will only do what you think it will do And not a hundred weird things that you don't predict at all that are worse than the original problem.
And this could lead us into a discussion of climate change politics, for example.
I've been watching the spot price of oil and natural gas as well and what's happening in China, which has just cut power to millions of people because coal prices have gone through the roof and they're trying to meet their carbon targets.
So it's like, yeah, well, that's a solution, is it?
Well, let's talk about that a bit, maybe, if you don't mind.
Because I see you're on that committee.
You just talked to Bjorn Lomberg.
Yeah, we just have a podcast.
It's a subject I primarily deal with.
Most people probably think I'm on Armed Services Committee and primarily deal with national security issues, but my two issues are healthcare and environment.
Mostly, I don't know, I've always tended to gravitate towards weaknesses, and I feel like those are the two subjects that conservatives are weakest on in our messaging, even if I think we're correct about our assessments of them.
You know, can I say one more thing about the decentralization part of conservatism and then let's move into climate change.
We got a lot to say about climate change.
But one of the reasons I think this is so important, this sense of humility, it also helps people understand.
I'm always trying to help people understand what the philosophical underpinnings are, why you're a conservative, because I think there's a really rich tradition there.
And I don't think there is one on the left, right?
I think the left is about what you want right now, and I don't see it guided by any kind of principle, or especially, and there's no governing principles in there either, no limiting principles.
And so the decentralization argument is important, and it gets to the diversity argument, because it's really why we end up supporting the free market.
It's why we think that is important, because while it will never be perfect, and while you can always imagine a utopia where the centralized thinking just makes things better, it never works, and there's a good reason it never works.
And the entire point of that diversity, and then the free market that underpins it, It's the ability to do something and then test out whether it's creating value or not.
Because, yeah, you can be that whimsical artist if you want, but if nobody cares about it, then it's a good indication that you're not creating any real value.
But, of course, some people do, and they find a way to do that.
And I just think that's so important.
And that's the thing that makes it so tough, is that we produce these decentralized processes, and they're actually cognitive computational devices.
The environment's unbelievably complex.
It's impossible to keep up with it.
So you distribute decision-making, and that is a fundamental conservative principle, in the most diverse possible manner, right?
Right down to the level of the individual.
Because you're too damn stupid to know what's coming.
And so you need to build a computational machine, and that's really perhaps how conservatives should talk about it, because that link is very seldomly made.
How do you keep up with an infinitely complex environment?
With an infinitely complex mobile economy that's so diverse that you can't predict what it's going to do, you certainly can't control it, and you shouldn't, and maybe someone somewhere will keep up a bit, and then you can copy them.
That's a deal, man.
And I think it's a good one.
And it's actually a good segue into the climate change debate.
Because what the left will say is, okay, well, there's market failures.
Free market seems nice, but there's market failures.
You have to admit that.
And I would say, yeah, I can admit that.
It can happen.
And that's where environmentalism comes from, right?
There's externalized costs.
And that's effectively the argument about climate change.
But then you got to put your conservative hat back on and say, okay, Again, a primary tenet of conservatism is assessing trade-offs, because I would say conservatism is a governing philosophy.
It's a process-oriented philosophy that seeks to solve problems within a set of limiting principles.
Limiting principles means we ask questions like, what are the second and third order consequences?
What's the cost-benefit?
And that's really what The climate change debate should be about.
Unfortunately, it's not about that.
It's about you're a denier and a killer, or you want to save the planet like a good person.
Which one do you want to be?
They moralize over us on it.
But it really is fundamentally about About trade-offs.
And so, you know, the Republican mainstream position on this isn't denying climate change, right?
It's just assessing the facts and saying, okay, there's certainly some warming going on.
There's certainly some loop warming, I would say.
I'm just going to use the same data that everybody else is using.
Let's use the UN data.
Let's use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And let's see what they're saying are the costs are going to be.
And so their cost, the simplest way to put this is, yeah, there's a cost.
And how do we quantify that cost?
Well, we can look at it this way.
According to the UN, again, the scientific consensus, we're going to increase global GDP by 450% in 100 years.
Well, by 2100.
With climate change costs, it's going to look more like an increase of only 434%.
So it's a cost, but it ain't that much, okay?
And so, again, we're not denying it, but we are saying, look, whatever actions we take need to be somewhat proportional to that cost.
And that would be a good place to start.
Well, that's why I liked Lomberg so much.
He was the only...
I'm really interested in environmental issues.
I studied them for a long time and tried to figure out, you know, what bothered me about most of the environmentalist discussion was there was no rank ordering of priorities.
And that's a real problem if you want to implement some solutions.
And I came across Lomberg and I thought, hey, look, this guy, he's got a...
He's got a sensible way of actually generating policy out of this, right?
He put his teams of economists to work and does cost-benefit analysis and tries to build something approximating what would be a policy-generating machine.
He takes projections of precisely the sort that you just made into account.
And that market failure idea, we could talk about that a little bit.
It's like, well, of course the market fails because even a decentralized cognitive machine made up of all these millions or billions of human brains isn't going to be perfect.
But that's not the issue.
The issue is, what makes you think that you can jump into that gap with your theory and fix it?
If the bloody market can't do it, why in the world do you think you can't?
Well, because I have an ideology.
It's like, well, yeah, you and everyone else.
And dealing with market failures is essentially what politicians are supposed to do.
It's why we create a government.
To deal with market, so deal with poverty.
I mean, you could argue that poverty, excessive poverty might be a market failure.
It's just not getting fixed.
Now, if you really think about it, there's always going to be somebody at the bottom, but you don't want them to be too far at the bottom.
And so this is where you have a value-based judgment and you have a political argument about it.
You kind of figure out what to do.
But, you know, the problem with what the left does is say, this is an indication that the entire system is bad and we need to throw out the foundations.
A conservative says, it's an indication we might need to take some action and we should be very careful about how we take that action and we should do so within a set of limiting principles.
And that's a difficult sell because And it gets back to the climate change debate, because it's a difficult sell, because the liberal will say, what do we want?
Action.
When do we want it?
Now.
What does the conservative say?
What do we want?
Incremental change.
When do we want it?
In due time.
Yes, exactly.
It's just not that exciting, especially to young people.
So, you know, there's that principle in science, Occam's razor, right?
Do not multiply explanatory hypotheses beyond necessity, which is the simplest solution, is by default the most appropriate.
Now, the same thing might apply with regards to problems, and that's another conservative advantage in some sense.
It's like, no, no, the smallest possible change that will produce the end result.
Because you don't know what the change is going to do.
And that uncertainty, that's part of that humility of conservatism that you described, that is something that's communicable to young people.
It's not like we don't think there are problems.
But we're also quite skeptical of grandiose solutions and even more skeptical of the people who put them forward.
And that's not foolish at all.
I'm much more afraid of the people dealing with climate change than I am of climate change.
As you should be.
So this week we're debating this reconciliation bill.
And reconciliation just means that you can pass it to the Senate with only 51 votes instead of the 60-vote threshold required to overcome the filibuster.
And that means it has to be related to budget items.
Not that anybody cares about that, but that's what we're debating.
And within that big $3.5 trillion, which is actually closer to $4.5 trillion, Depending on how you estimate it.
There's a lot of, you know, let's call it Green New Deal provisions.
And what a Green New Deal basically is, is massive subsidies for solar and wind, massive incentive structures for only solar and wind and renewables.
But renewables, they really just define as solar and wind, okay?
They don't like hydro, they don't like nuclear.
And we'll get to that.
So it's that and also a full-on attack against the oil and gas industry, which should also trouble Canadians.
Hey, we're plenty troubled by it.
That's for sure.
I mean, when even Trudeau is like, hey, why did you guys cancel the Keystone Pipeline?
Yeah, but he's secretly happy about it.
Yeah, that's true.
So this simultaneous attack is unbelievably dangerous for the well-being of people across the globe.
So right away, you're going to see increases in energy prices.
How much?
What are we going to see in two years?
What do you think?
300 bucks a barrel?
Oh, oil?
Geez.
No, no, I don't.
The data I see doesn't see that, but you could get up to 90.
I just read a Wall Street Journal article today that some estimates are at 90 by the end of the year, which is pretty damn high.
I don't know about 300.
I mean, but I don't know if they pass this bill.
And implemented their natural gas tax, which would put a lot of our medium-sized producers out of business.
Yeah, just exactly that.
And also take away the one thing that has decreased carbon emissions back to the U.S. back to 1990 levels.
That's fracking.
Fracking.
Now, which Democrat would have predicted that?
Zero.
Nobody.
No one predicted that, man.
Nobody.
Nobody.
That's right.
Because it just kind of happened.
It's a free market.
It just kind of happened.
And it happened because of a government action.
But the government action was just liberalizing it.
It was just removing a barrier to it.
And the export ban that even Obama signed, when we removed the oil export ban out of the United States, what did you just create?
Well, you created a powerhouse of energy in the United States.
And why is that a good thing?
Does that make climate change worse or better?
Well, the question isn't...
That's the wrong question, really, because the question is, what is demand for energy around the world?
And so it turns out demand for energy in the next 20 years is going to go up almost 30%.
That's a guarantee.
So who's going to provide that energy?
It's not going to be solar and wind.
All estimates show it's going to have about its same proportion of the energy mix.
And so it's either going to be the United States and Canada that actually care about environmental regulations and put all these restrictions on a per unit basis.
And this is a scientific estimate.
It's not the EPA that did it.
It was one of our national labs that did this estimate.
A unit of natural gas is 42% less emissions than a Russian unit of natural gas.
So we're cleaner.
We're objectively cleaner when we're giving you oil and gas.
And yet this administration, counterintuitively, in an effort to reduce gas prices, wants OPEC to increase production.
So we're attacking U.S. oil and gas.
And trying to get OPEC to increase their production, this is, if you're trying to solve the problem of reduction of emissions, this is the opposite of...
They're not exactly our friends always.
No, and they want to put Texas oil and gas out of business.
We see this play out in Canada madly.
Yeah.
And so it's just- Same thing's happening in Canada with regards- Sorry, sorry.
Well, I'm just saying if we're trying to solve a problem of reducing emissions, then fine, let's solve the problem.
And the other thing as Republicans were always wondering is, wait a second, if you really think this is an existential threat and we're done and we're cooks in 12 years, the world is on fire, as they always say.
Well then, why not just, instead of the trillions of dollars towards a bunch of nonsense, why not just build a bunch of nuclear plants?
Really, why not just build a bunch of nuclear plants?
Why don't you have just government-funded nuclear plants?
So what's the answer to that?
Yeah, why not?
Like, France did it.
Their answer is, well, there's the truthful answer, there's the public answer, and there's the real answer that I think is true.
So their public answer is, well, it's expensive, there's safety issues.
I'm like, yeah, but on a per unit basis, it's still a better deal.
Again, if you think, I thought no cost was too high because we're in an existential crisis.
And so I would assume that you think it's priority to have reliable energy.
And you don't get reliable energy from solar and wind, and you never will.
It's impossible.
And I don't care how far along the battery technology comes, it'll never meet where we need it to meet.
It just won't.
It's physically not going to happen.
And so you need nuclear and you need gas, but they're against it.
They're shutting down gas, nuclear plants in California and New York.
And it's just, it's just, it's really mind blowing.
So it leads me to believe that they don't actually, one, they don't actually think it's a crisis.
And two, that they're mostly driven by special interests in the solar and wind industries that have really captured them.
And again, I'm not against solar and wind.
I just think they should fit in where they fit in.
I don't think they should be oversubsidized at this point.
I think there should be technology neutral subsidies for carbon reduction that involve nuclear and it also involve carbon capture for oil and gas.
I mean, if the entire point is...
Reducing carbon emissions and let's make that the technology goal as opposed to just renewables because it makes us feel nice.
And it really is about feelings.
I mean, I don't think there's any other reasoning behind it.
There is another reason, I think, is that the ideological morass out of which such ideas emerge is extraordinarily confused, and it's, you know, 30% anti-capitalism and 20%, what would you say, resentment about the nature of humanity itself, and then 40% Concern about the environment and our depredations.
And so you have that mix.
You can't think clearly.
It's like, well, are we saving the environment?
Yeah, but what about capitalism?
Because it's actually the problem to begin with.
And so then you get these sorts of solutions emerging.
And a lot of them are tainted with this terrible, destructive anti-capitalism, which seems to be often a more important crisis than the environmental crisis itself.
Yeah, I mean, you look at the Green New Deal and what AOC wrote up in this sort of like children's science project.
It was very little about the environment and much more so about the substantive change in healthcare and the economy.
And it was kind of saying the quiet part out loud, which we all suspected that this was mostly about the sort of great reset that people talk about.
It's kind of more about that than it is climate change.
But for you to get you to agree to these really substantive reforms, to the sort of revolution in thinking, you need to scare the hell out of you.
Which is why they use terminology like, the world is on fire.
And it's why they point to every hurricane and wildfire, like, this is what climate change looks like.
I mean, you hear that all the time.
But it's really as if we've never had hurricanes, as if we've never had wildfires, and as if there's not actually a much better explanation for California wildfires, which is poor forest management, which every study shows, right?
It's like, let me get this straight.
If we all drive electric vehicles today, if the United States stops producing carbon today, Are you telling me there's no more wildfires?
Are you telling me all of our weather starts to look like San Diego?
Are you telling me Houston's not going to have hurricanes anymore?
That's nonsense.
I mean, that's complete nonsense.
And it's not data-driven.
It's not fact-driven.
And truthfully, again, go back to UN, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data, If the Western world, I believe all developed countries, if they stopped emitting carbon right now for good, you might get a reduction in temperature of, I think it's like 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.
Right, right.
And that's actually within the error bounds.
So one of the problems with these climate projections is that if you go out 50 years...
You can't even tell if what you did 50 years ago had worked because the air bars are so big at that point.
And that's actually a huge problem because what it means is there's no way of testing whether your damn solution, your large-scale solution, had any effect whatsoever.
So how in the world are we supposed to solve a problem like that?
You can't.
But I mean, you can't.
Like, it's like we don't want to do anything, right?
I mean, I listed some things that Republicans are in favor of, and primarily nuclear energy and gas.
I think that's a healthy, that puts us on a healthy glide path towards reduction in emissions and And look, the other truth is, the more a country develops, the more you industrialize it, the more concerned they become about the environment.
That's another truth.
So maybe focus on...
Yes, definitely.
Well, also, you know, with the lefty types, you think, well, they're concerned with poverty reduction.
Okay, well, how to do that?
Well, how about you make energy real cheap?
How about that?
Because energy is what does work, and so if you give that to poor people for as close to nothing as possible, then they can do almost everything free.
How would that be?
So are you so sure you're concerned about those poverty-stricken people?
If you look historically, can you really imagine anything that has done more for them than cheap energy?
And how would that even be possible, even metaphysically?
Energy runs everything.
So cheap energy means wealth.
Directly.
Virtually no intermediation.
So now you're going to make energy all more expensive to produce these trivial changes in climate that you won't even be able to measure.
What's up with you exactly?
It's true.
It's such a frustrating conversation.
I do think We're winning the debate on this because it's not a winning argument to say there's no such thing as climate change.
The environment doesn't need our help.
That's just people don't want to hear that.
But but they would just want to hear something.
And so and that's I think that's what we've we're offering at this point.
And so I think we're on a healthy track as Republicans.
I am still very worried about this bill that has the potential of passing.
But Hey, let me ask you about that infrastructure bill, okay?
Because, I mean, I've thought, and talked to many people about this, that, you know, if the Democrats need something to do, because they need something to do, and they're in power, well, maybe infrastructure isn't such a bad preoccupation.
There's something real about it, hopefully, at least maybe 30% of it, which might not be bad, given, you know, large projects waste a lot, always.
And so...
Pros and cons of the infrastructure project as far as you're concerned.
Yeah, so there's two things for people's understanding.
There's this reconciliation package.
You hear the number $3.5 trillion associated with that.
So that's one thing.
Then there's the infrastructure, the bipartisan infrastructure deal, which is like $1.23 trillion.
Still a lot of money.
The bipartisan infrastructure deal substantively is not bad.
It has a lot of good things, right?
Like what?
Like what?
What do you see that's good?
It's just your typical boring infrastructure stuff, like highway funding, port funding, sewage treatment, this kind of stuff.
It's boring when it works.
It's legitimately decent infrastructure.
Our opposition to it, again, it's not everybody's opposed to it, but my personal opposition to it is it's about three to four times too much money.
Yeah, that's about what you'd expect, though.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's just, if it was cut in half, at least you could get me scratching my head, like, maybe.
But it is important for people to know the substance of it is not bad.
The price tag is just too much, considering we've spent $6 trillion.
On getting our economy back on track after COVID, which, frankly, was mostly money well spent.
It's probably some of the best work government has done in crisis, to be honest, especially with the small business loan program that we instituted here in the US. But in any case, it's not the time to just be throwing money out the door.
With hyperinflation coming about, you just need to be more careful.
Uh, is, is really our only opposition to the infrastructure bill.
So that's, and what about the three?
So now you separated out the 1.2 trillion, which you're speaking reasonably positively about for, you know, a suspicious conservative type.
And then there's the 3.5 trillion.
So let's talk about that.
And, and, you know, because the fear was that everything would be put into that basket, right?
Of course, that's going to happen.
So tell, detail out that.
Yeah, so the reconciliation package is a series of tax hikes, about over $2 trillion in tax increases, three quarters of which will indeed, despite what the Democrats say, they're lying about this because we have liberal think tanks that have done assessments, and it will increase taxes on at least three quarters of lower to middle income people.
It will increase your taxes because there's so many different types of tax increases.
And it's going to hit you somehow.
And if it doesn't hit you there, it's probably going to reduce your wages.
So we've already seen...
How much are people looking at being hit by?
About 1%.
It's not a ton, but it's something.
But I think what's worse about the way Democrats do economic policy, it's not like it's going to make your wages noticeably decrease immediately.
But I'll tell you what, they're not going to increase.
And I have proof of this.
If we look at the last 15 years of data, so let's look at two major recessions, one COVID and one's 2008 financial crisis, and two different types of economies, two different types of governing philosophies.
And the first time was...
Under Obama, we need more tax.
We need to tax the rich.
We need to spend money on infrastructure.
They had this nearly trillion dollar infrastructure package back then.
Turned out, everybody agrees now, that turned out to be a waste and did not contribute to the economy the way we'd hoped it would.
The shovel-ready myth.
That's widespread agreement on that in hindsight.
At the time, I can understand why you might think that stimulus is important, but in hindsight, it didn't work out.
But you're also increasing taxes.
You're a threat to businesses because you like to regulate them.
And they tend to see businesses as more of a bad actor than a good actor that creates investment in jobs.
And so what did that create?
Well, it created plenty of wealth for the top.
Everybody's mad about inequality.
Under that system, the top still get richer because they could figure it out.
But the bottom quintile of earners was stagnant.
So that's not a myth.
That was true.
Now, after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, this is Trump's major accomplishment, obviously.
Anyway, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
So what do we do?
We cut corporate tax rates, cut everybody's taxes everywhere, right?
Tax cuts for everybody.
And what happened to wages?
Well, if you look at wage growth, the bottom quintile of earners skyrocketed.
Now, it doesn't mean that it drastically reduced inequality, okay?
But as far as the proportion goes, the percentage goes, the bottom people were growing much, much faster than the top.
No, in absolute terms, obviously not.
And that's what everybody looks at, right?
They want to take the data that they care about, and it makes their argument stronger.
So they'll say, yeah, but they made $100 million more.
Well, okay, well, they had $50 billion.
So percentage-wise, they didn't make that much more.
But the lowest quintile You know, doing this particular job, which, you know, I don't know what universe you could imagine where that particular job is making that much more, but they were growing.
Why?
Because, well, pro-growth economic policies create a tight labor market, right, where businesses have to compete to hire people.
I mean, we're in a very tight labor market now.
Wages are, you know, thanks to Biden, but mostly because of the pandemic and a few other things, but wages are pretty high.
I mean, it is still hard to hire people.
You know, this bill could reverse that.
Because, look, the reality is that Biden economics has not really hit the United States because they haven't done anything.
They haven't passed anything.
They've created this sort of...
Their general view on business that it's bad and the increase in regulations has, I think, decreased investment, but that's hard to measure.
I think it's intuitive and obvious.
But other than that, there hasn't been a major shock to the system.
A lot of the shocks are maybe too much spending and also supply chains problems.
Which are more related to the pandemic.
It may be a refusal of this administration to do anything about it and loosen certain restrictions.
Anyway, the point is pro-growth works and it actually helps increase wages for the lowest quintile of burgers.
That's a data-driven fact that we can look at over the past decade or so.
Getting back to this reconciliation package, it's just doing the opposite.
It's just doing the opposite.
You're going to reduce wages, more importantly reduce their potential growth because You're also creating an environment because you're raising corporate tax rates, so businesses are just going to hire less.
It's never the CEO that gets hurt because of a corporate tax hike.
This is an absurd notion that you're just taking it to these mean corporations.
You know what, these corporations that employ hundreds of thousands of people?
It doesn't mean they should just do whatever they want.
No, it is the inequality in some sense that bothers people, but one of the things I have trouble with with regards to leftist policies is that they actually underestimate the severity of the problem of inequality, and they assume that restructuring capitalism would remove inequality, and there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that that has ever worked in any way other than the opposite.
Because inequality is not a consequence of capitalism.
It looks like it's almost like a physical property of reality itself.
There are physicists who model the unequal distribution of money using the same equations they use to describe the dispersion of gas into a new environment.
Like, it's really something fundamental.
It can't be overstated.
And it's a real problem, right?
Because who the hell wants terribly poor people?
Like, that's such a catastrophe.
But it's not like...
It's a consequence of capitalism.
It's like, come on, guys.
The other thing about inequality, it's just...
Look, let's look at the following math problem.
If you and I are the...
The sole citizens of country X, you make $50,000 a year and I make $100,000 a year.
Well, there's a delta between us of $50,000.
Now let's both double our income.
So now you make $100,000 and I make $200,000.
Well, holy crap, inequality just doubled because now there's the $100,000 delta.
So it's just not always what people think.
I mean, the question isn't necessarily about inequality.
I don't care that there's a lot of people who are way, way wealthier than me.
It doesn't necessarily bother me.
What would bother me is if I have no chance of ever being them.
If I was the most talented, smartest person on the planet, it would bother me if I had no chance of ever being that person.
And I'm sorry, but that's just not the world we live in.
You know, if we look at what keeps you out of poverty, and I think this is from the Brookings Institute, there's like three things.
It's like finish high school, have a job, any job, and don't have kids before you're married, and you've got like a 97% chance of not being in poverty.
So it turns out we do live in a society where choices matter, and the value that you provide matters.
And that's the society we want to live in.
Is it perfect?
No.
Is it the best we can do?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is.
And should we have a safety net for those who just can't make it?
Yeah.
Yeah, there should be a safety net.
But, you know, we should argue about how much of a safety net and the fundamental...
And about the negative consequences of that potentially as well.
Right.
Because, you know, a safety net doesn't make things worse.
It makes you dependent and makes you unable or wanting to find more work and be productive, right?
That would be the fundamental question of a safety net.
And I think their Democrat policies just generally don't care about that.
So can I dig into the weeds?
I still don't understand the differentiation between the $1.2 trillion and the $3.5 trillion.
Oh yeah, I got a long way to go on the list here.
So let me do it more generally instead of getting too much into the weeds on the taxation stuff.
Okay, so a lot of increase in taxes, a lot of increase in spending.
A lot of that increase in spending is on things like expanding Medicaid, right?
Expanding Medicare, like making Medicare benefits more generous, even though like 96% of the Medicare population already gets dental and vision and whatever.
So it's just, it's a lot of, to me, it's a lot of bribery, okay?
It's like, we're giving you stuff.
We're gonna fund, like, the pre-K. We're gonna fund all of these things through the government.
We're just gonna do so many things.
Any wishlist they've ever had, they're sticking in this bill.
Again, subsidies.
Subsidies for solar and wind.
A new climate bank, whatever the hell that means.
I mean, with tens of billions of dollars in it.
It's stuff like that that is, you know, some of it is extremely threatening, I think, because of a policy perspective.
Some of it's just incredibly wasteful.
So that's where you see the over-inclusiveness of the infrastructure development project.
That's where everything is being shoveled into.
Yeah, yeah.
So again, it is separate from the infrastructure bill, what we call the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package.
If people remember when the Democrats were talking about human infrastructure, like everything is infrastructure.
Right, right.
They put all the human infrastructure into the reconciliation package and we kept the real infrastructure in the infrastructure package.
So again, substantively speaking, I think the infrastructure package is good.
I just think it's too expensive.
And substantively speaking, I think the reconciliation package is complete insanity.
Okay, well, let's close that off there because we're going to run out of time here.
There's some other things, if you don't mind, I wanted to ask you about.
We'll pop out of the political domain to some degree to begin with.
You have a book.
You wrote a book not too long ago.
And so maybe you could, well, tell everybody what the book is and then talk about that a bit if you'd like to.
Sure, I appreciate it.
Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage.
I came out with this book in April of 2020.
Interesting time to come out with a book, as you can imagine, because that was the start of the pandemic.
I've never really done a book tour, but it's done pretty well.
And I think it's done pretty well because it's sort of, you know, I'll be honest, I kind of describe it as like a Jordan Peterson 12 Rules for Life, but like the JV version, okay?
It's like if you're the post-grad level, like I'm trying to give people a bit more of a high school level.
Of the similar thing.
And specifically, trying to guide people through how to build more fortitude, more mental fortitude.
And I use a combination.
So every chapter is a different lesson, sort of a different concept that I'm trying to ingrain.
And those lessons and concepts are imparted to the reader through a series of stories from the SEAL teams.
There's some philosophy, there's some Bible verses, and there's some pop culture.
It's a mix of everything.
I think it's multidisciplinary.
And I think it's interesting.
I think it's unique, and I think that's why it's sold pretty well.
So where did you learn to be resilient?
I mean, after you were terribly injured, you went back and continued in your military operations.
I mean, that seems to be, I mean, some resilience, you know, it's, you're healthy and you're tough and that's part of what's built into you.
It's a gift in some sense.
But then there's the role that attitude plays and education and all of that.
And I was fortunate enough to meet a number of Navy SEALs in California and got to know some of them quite well.
And, you know, they're very respectable characters and they go through hell to become Navy SEALs.
That's quite interesting.
They told me some pretty hair-raising stories and Where did you learn to be resilient to the degree that you learned it?
Was that mostly military?
Was that mostly a military consequence?
Of course, like any development, I think it's a consequence of a lot of experiences.
But what I write about in the book, my first experience, and this experience is laid out in a chapter called Perspectives from Darkness.
And I made it into that chapter because one of the first...
Foundations of fortitude being, you know, if we define fortitude as resilience to it, the ability to overcome adversity.
And perspective is a pretty good place to start because if you think everything is worse than it is, you're going to have a hard time mentally coping with it.
Uh, if you have a sense of perspective, you're able to, you know what, this isn't that bad.
Like one of the, one of the things, one of the things instructors and buds, this is SEAL training, repeat to students constantly is, look, there's 10,000 men who have done this before you, so stop your complaining.
You can do this.
And that's a, that's like a quick gut check.
Like, God, I don't want to be one of those who just quit.
I mean, there's 10,000 that have done it before.
It's probably more than that, to be perfectly honest.
But But what I write about is my mother, because I think that was my first real interaction with some kind of fortitude.
She lost her when you were 10.
Yeah, right.
And I also watched her deal with breast cancer for five years, and I had trouble recalling real suffering on her part, mostly because she hid it from me.
And I have trouble recalling her complain.
I have trouble recalling her have a bad attitude.
I have lots of other recollections of her being funny, of her being nice, of her being a good mother.
Wow.
And it sort of begs the question, like, how on earth can someone do that?
It's extremely difficult and not show that kind of resentment and bitterness and just raise your kids.
And so that's sort of my first hero.
You know, first hero to look up to.
I also have a whole chapter on heroism.
And frankly, I got some of that philosophy from you on how to build hero archetypes and the proper way to look up to people as a way to develop yourself in a better way.
Right?
And I say, like, don't take an individual.
Like, you don't want to just be like Jordan Peterson.
You want to see what makes him successful.
See how he's done well in his life and maybe copy some things from him.
How does he talk to people?
How does he think through things?
What's the thought process that he uses?
And how does that apply to the hierarchy you want to be better at?
Because it might be different.
You might be an academic.
You might be in media.
You might be in sports.
It's different.
You've got to look up to people within your own Genre, really.
And the SEAL teams is no different, because what am I trying to be?
A better SEAL, a better leader.
What makes somebody something that I want to follow?
So that's chapter two, for instance.
One of my favorite chapters, because I think it's a good way to start.
Because you got to know what you want to be.
If you want to be somebody who lives with fortitude, you got to know what that looks like first.
You got to know what you're aspiring to.
It's a really important Well, and you can look at what you admire spontaneously.
Like, obviously you admired your mother spontaneously, and so that's an instinct.
That's not rational exactly, although it might be hyper-rational.
You know, and we all have that instinct to admire, and that does point us in the direction of what is better.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's just, in a practical way, in kind of a materialistic way, it's like, well, just what works?
What are the outcomes that actually work for people and what don't?
And one of the problems with postmodernism is trying to make the things that don't work, make them work.
Socialism hasn't been tried.
It's like that kind of thing, right?
Because it feels good.
And so then my second real interaction, I suppose, with Fortitude, yeah, would be the military.
I mean, BUDS is a trial by fire.
You come out a different person than you went in.
How were you different?
How were you to begin with?
That's the first question.
And then how were you different?
I think maybe I'll take that back a little bit.
I guess I'll say, because one thing we say in the SEAL teams is, you were a SEAL before you got here.
We just made you prove it.
And then we trained you.
But that mental capacity, it had to be there because you wouldn't make it through Hell Week otherwise.
So you had it, but you hadn't proven it to anybody, and you hadn't proven it to yourself.
And once you prove it to yourself, that's something.
I mean, you become something a little different.
It's not too different, but it's a little different.
Some people can become cocky, right?
You don't want to be too cocky.
You want to be confident.
So you definitely become more confident.
I don't think you've met many CEOs who aren't very confident in themselves.
But that's a good thing.
Yeah, but they weren't cocky.
Most of them were unbelievably funny.
They're unbelievably humorous.
I think I'm very funny.
And I'm not being overly confident.
I think I'm very funny.
Humility is not an attribute that we have very much of.
Yeah, it changes you.
There's a culture.
I can identify a teen guy.
Really easily.
First of all, there's definitely a look, right?
But there's something in their eyes.
I can just tell.
I can just tell.
And I don't know how to describe it, to be honest with you.
Because we all kind of come from the same place where we wanted to do this particular job.
We wanted to go through the hardest training we could find.
And be in this elite team.
And so that, I don't know, it just makes you similar in some way, even though there's, I think, a decent amount of diversity in the teams, as far as backgrounds go, as far as backgrounds and wealth come from.
I mean, it's very, very difficult to It's also very difficult to see who's going to make it through it.
This gets to another chapter, which I call No Plan B. And you can't get through BUDS unless you decided that you would die before you quit.
You have to have given yourself no choice in the matter.
That's the only way you make it through.
If you're like, you know what?
I'm going to do my best.
That's like marriage.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
That's a funny story.
Because one of the sayings in the SEAL teams is the only easy day was yesterday.
And that motto is plastered on the buds grinder.
And so what me and my wife did, understanding that there's so many good parallels between seal trading and marriage, we went and took some of our wedding photos right in front of that sign.
The only easy day was yesterday.
And it's sort of this no-quit attitude and this understanding that, look, things get harder.
So what?
Deal with it.
Embrace it.
Embrace the suck.
I'm just kind of using slogans from the SEAL teams at this point, but they have quite a bit of meaning associated with them.
Embrace the suck.
And what does that mean, fundamentally?
Well, they have meaning because people are actually acting them out.
They're not empty slogans.
They might be comical, oversimplified representations, but there's something actually happening.
And I like that particular one, Embrace the Suck, because it actually gets to another chapter in the book, which is simply called Do Something Hard.
And the whole point of this discussion is embrace suffering.
I'm not saying embrace like swimming with sharks, because you can suffer swimming with sharks and getting bitten, like that would suck.
But...
I've been self-imposed suffering, right?
And so like buds and how weak and everything we do, it all is self-imposed.
Like you do have it in the back of your mind.
It's like, I'm not going to die.
I'm not actually going to die.
It feels like I'm going to die.
It feels like they're trying to kill me.
But I know that they're going to save me if I start drowning and people do drown.
But we save them, okay?
It's funny, but it's horrible, but it's funny.
But there's a real value to seeking out challenge and suffering.
This is why people do Spartan races.
This is why people come together.
They love group suffering, too.
This is why people go organize themselves at CrossFit gyms and do these crazy things.
Why don't you go climb a mountain, right?
Like, is it for the view?
Did you climb the mountain for the view?
No, no, no.
You did it.
The means were the entire point, like the path that you took was the entire point, because it's hard.
And I think that's pretty normal and intuitive.
And I think that's been a really fundamental tenant of Americanism for a very long time.
And I think we're losing it, which is why I felt I had to write about it more and just kind of remind people of why these things are important.
I don't think there's anything novel in my book at all.
Well, you are a conservative.
Yeah.
Right.
I just think what I did was take all the best ideas from history and try to lay them out for people because, you know, if you're trying to come up with something novel these days, there's a good chance that you're probably just wrong about it because it hasn't stood the test of time.
I think it's very rare that there's going to be really new insights in today's world.
And I think the new insights are really just the old ones, like personal responsibility and doing hard things and challenging yourself and feeling good about a challenge, even if it sucks, even if it's an injustice.
I dive into that quite a bit in that because that's people's next question.
It's like, well...
How can you say all suffering is good?
Even injustice, even things that happen to you, what if you lose your eye and go blind?
Well, then just look at the silver lining.
I'm oversimplifying it quite a bit.
There's a much, I think, deeper discussion in the book.
But it really does just simplify to look at the silver lining.
Just because there's an injustice done against you doesn't mean you have to tell yourself that story.
It doesn't mean you have to tell yourself a story of being a victim.
You can be a victor, even if it's false, like even if you really are a victim.
Now I think people over victimize themselves these days to an extraordinary degree.
I think they They either lie about their victimhood or they associate victimhood with bad luck.
And then there's a difference, right?
And in either case, though, it doesn't actually change how you should react to it.
And you can react like a person with fortitude and tell yourself a story of being better for it and being a victim, or you can tell yourself a story of being a victim and see where that leads you.
And I promise you won't lead you anywhere good.
I think that's a perfect place to stop.
There's a bunch more things I would like to talk to you about, but, you know, we traversed a lot of ground.
You can have me back anytime, you know.
Good, good.
You thanked me for coming on, but I'm pretty sure I was like, can I come on to your podcast, Jordan?
That's actually what happened.
So I appreciate it.
I'm really pleased to have you on it.
I really appreciate it talking to you.
And there are other things I'd like to talk to you about in the future.
I didn't talk to you about, you know, potential political ambitions and many other things.
But this was good.
And that ended well.
So, look, thanks a lot, eh?
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, and thanks for your service.
You know?
Well, thank you.
Yeah, really.
I know as academics, we're protected by a ring of people who put themselves on the line to make sure we have the freedom to complain.
Well, you know, I never really saw the SEAL teams of service because it was this adventure for us.
If you look at, if you know Matt Best, he was actually the part of Black Rifle Coffee.
I'm familiar with them.
He wrote a book called Thank You for My Service.
And I think that actually gets really to how a lot of veterans feel about their service.
They're like, I got to go jump out of airplanes and go, you know, blow things up with my best friends.
I don't understand how this is service.
This is great.
And yeah, sometimes you lose an eye, but you signed up for it.
I will say politics feels a lot more like service.
I will say that.
There's zero glory in it.
But it's important.
And you know, that's, that's, it's fulfilling.
That's why I do it.
Hey, man, thanks a lot.
And for the invitation to the youth summit.
Yeah, hey, we're going to keep when we get dates for next year, we're going to keep bugging you about it.
So love to love to see you there.
Hopefully, how's your health?
Are you feeling better?
Yeah.
I'm still like running about 70%, but that's better than two.
It's a hell of a lot better than two.
Yeah, it is.
Yes.
So thanks for asking.
70 for you is a lot more than most people.
Well, we need you.
The world needs you.
Please take care of yourself.
Good luck with your political duties, and hopefully we'll talk soon.
All right.
Yeah, I need it.
Thanks, Jordan.
Thank you.
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