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July 19, 2023 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
42:27
Episode 114 LIVE: Lost And Broken (feat. Rep. Adam Smith) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
You can battle congressman Matt dates Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem for the Democratic Party.
He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing the laws.
So we're going to keep running those stories to get hurt again.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
You are in the right place!
This is the movement for you!
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
Welcome back to Firebrand.
We are live broadcasting out of the Rayburn House Office Building Room 2021. The Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. I'm told we're on a new platform now.
Kick!
So if you're a kicker...
Follow us on KICK. We're there.
Thanks for tuning in.
We've got folks from Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan, Arizona, Hawaii, Arkansas, Florida, and Washington State.
If you're the Washington State viewers, you're going to want to stick around because at the end of this episode, I've got a terrific interview with a Democrat member of Congress I have sparred with frequently, but it's an interview that I think will give you great insights into the pressures of this job and but it's an interview that I think will give you great insights into the pressures of this job and governing and, frankly, just existing in this Congressman Adam Smith will be joining us.
He's got a new book out called Lost and Broken, and it seems that a great deal is lost and broken these days.
Also going to give you an inside look at the debate we just had on Syria on the floor, a hearing with our military personnel subcommittee.
It was one of the most uncomfortable moments for a general in front of the Armed Services Committee in a long time.
We're going to have that clip, but first, the big news on Capitol Hill today, the IRS whistleblowers, Whistleblower X, we now know as Joseph Ziegler.
They are laying out the case that in similar circumstances, anyone other than Hunter Biden would have seen a felony charge and that people were directly involved in suppressing the investigatory work with very large sums of money, tax monies owed, not paid, Hunter Biden getting special treatment. tax monies owed, not paid, Hunter Biden getting special treatment.
And you remember what they did to the FBI whistleblowers, right?
Garrett O'Boyle, Steve Friend, Marcus Allen?
They made them all out to be white supremacists, dangerous conservatives.
You know, those people that President Obama complained about clinging to guns and Bibles.
Well, you're not going to be able to make that case against the IRS whistleblowers.
You're not going to be able to smear them just because, I don't know, they're unvaccinated or conservative or they're evangelical Christians.
You're dealing with people who might otherwise be regularly counted, Among the Biden supporters, but they saw the injustice and they stepped forward.
Let's go right to Joseph Ziegler in the House Oversight Committee giving whistleblower testimony.
Take a listen.
I've recently discovered that people are saying that I must be more credible because I'm a Democrat who happens to be married to a man.
I'm no more credible than this man sitting next to me Due to my sexual orientation or my political beliefs.
The truth is, my credibility comes today from my job experience with the IRS and my intimate knowledge of the agency's standards and procedures.
In early August of 2022, federal prosecutors from the Department of Justice Tax Division drafted a 99-page memorandum In so, they were recommending for approval felony and misdemeanor charges for the 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax years.
That did not happen here, and I am not sure why.
I think we're all pretty sure why.
It's because there's a protection racket that exists for the benefit of the Bidens at the expense of the rest of us.
And really, when you're talking about Hunter Biden's tax evasion, it's the least of the Biden family's worries because increasingly, the money laundering is coming forward.
The connections to the Chinese, some shady businessmen in Eastern Europe, Was plowing cash in exchange for favors from the Bidens.
And it's all coming out.
Unfortunately, we have a Department of Justice far more interested in going after conservatives, targeting them, sending the FBI to big tech companies to censor our speech than to actually follow up on these true crimes.
I want to also give you an important update regarding work that occurred in the House Armed Services Committee today.
As I've said many times, the greatest perk of being a member of Congress above all else The opportunity to nominate our young patriots for military academies.
West Point, the Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, Merchant Marines.
You typically get to see the best of the best and on days when even you're a little down about the country or the state of affairs, when you see these brave young patriots step up to express their love of country through service in our military academies, it is revitalizing.
Well, increasingly, we have learned that at these military academies, there's been an invasion of wokeness.
And it's the radical race ideology.
It's the radical gender ideology.
You'll recall some of the slides that were being presented to students.
Ask them not to say boyfriend or girlfriend.
You had to say partner.
Not mom or dad.
You had to say parent.
You have to say y'all instead of you guys.
I guess I don't much mind y'all coming from where I come from.
But nonetheless, the lack of oversight, the lack of institutional respect for the norms and values of the country seemed to have gone away and we should investigate why.
So we had all of the service academy superintendents of their various areas before the Congress and we were asking them questions.
Now, you're about to see me question General Clark.
General Clark is the leader of the Air Force Academy.
And at the Air Force Academy, it seems as though some of this stuff has gone most sideways.
And so I'm asking him about a scholarship program that they allow to advertise and solicit on their base, and he can't even define the basic terms of eligibility drawn from radical gender ideology.
Take a listen.
A diverse and inclusive force is a warfighting imperative.
This is on a slide at the Air Force Academy.
General Clark, do you agree with that statement?
I do agree with that statement, sir.
So, I mean, were the Mongols diverse?
Well, sir, I'm not really as versed on Mongol warfighting as I am on US warfighting.
How about the Vikings?
Were the Vikings diverse?
Again, sir, I'm looking at our country, the most diverse country in the world.
Sure, but this is about a warfighting imperative.
How about the force in Ukraine?
Are the Ukrainians fighting the Russians a diverse force?
Sir, once again, my concern is the people that I'm charged to build into leaders.
Right, but you would acknowledge that throughout history, including present history, that statement hasn't borne true in every example, right?
Sir, what I would say is that those countries have to rely on the full force of their population to build a war fighting force to win our wars, and that's why it's important for us to be diverse, because our nation...
Sure, so let's look at the population that actually makes up the fighting force frequently.
Now, we have more men than women, right?
70-30-ish?
That's correct.
And of the men we have, most of them are not transgender men, most of them are cisgender men, right?
Yes, sir.
But yet, at our academies, we push something called the Brooke Owens Fellowship.
Are you familiar with that?
I am, yes, sir.
And in that fellowship, it specifically says, if you are a cisgender man, this program isn't for you.
So, you just said that your answer on why we do such this full hug of these diversity concepts is because it's all about the fighting force that we draw from But you're literally pushing a program in the academies that says, if you're a cisgender woman, a transgender woman, a non-binary, agender, bigender, two-spirit, demigender, what's demigender?
Sir, that's a term of the people that are eligible for that particular scholarship that is available.
What's a demigender person?
It's a person who looks at their gender in a different way than I do, sir.
Well, sure.
That's all of these people.
You're a cisgender man.
You don't even get to apply.
Do you know what demigender really means?
I'm not really sure, sir.
Right.
So, do you know what agender means?
All one word, not a space gender, but agender.
Sir, I don't.
Right, so here we are pushing a fellowship, calling for people that you don't even know what the words mean, and the number one group of people, the cisgender men, are excluded.
Now, in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, should we be pushing programs that we can't define, That exclude the largest group of service members.
Well, sir, first, that program is not an Air Force Academy program.
It's a program open to our entire country.
Right, but you guys advocate for it within the Academy.
We allow our cadets to apply for it.
Why are you allowing your cadets to apply for a program when you cannot define the basic terms of eligibility?
Because it's an opportunity for us to develop them as warfighters, and we look for every opportunity that we can.
But you don't even know what the words mean.
How can you use this as a way to develop the warfighters if you don't know what it means?
Well, some of those terms may not be applicable to us at the Air Force Academy, but some are.
Well, if you don't know what they mean, it's hard to tell if they're applicable or not.
I think one of the reasons why some of this stuff has gotten into the academies is because we don't have the same oversight from the Board of Visitors.
And, Mr. Chairman, I seek unanimous consent to enter into the record an article from the Washington Examiner entitled, To Push Wokey Ideology, Biden Illegally Gutted Military Academy Oversight Boards.
And so, in this piece, it goes through a timeline where on September 8th, 2021, all of President Trump's appointees were fired.
On September 17th, Secretary Austin created Board of Visitors subcommittees, and then he populated those subcommittees with people who weren't on the Board of Visitors.
Have you ever seen that happen before?
Sir, our Board of Visitors is populated and supports us in great fashion.
Right.
What about the subcommittee?
Are there people on the Board of Visitors subcommittees who are not on the Board of Visitors?
I can't answer that, sir.
Seems like something we ought to know.
Yes, sir.
I'm not sure.
Right, but that would be odd, right?
I mean, here, let me ask the question this way.
You don't have any basis to disagree with the reporting here in the Washington Examiner that literally we have people who are not on the Board of Visitors who are serving on these subcommittees.
You have no basis to disagree with that, do you?
Sir, I'm not exactly sure the question you're asking.
I'll have to take that for record so I can understand exactly what you're asking.
Representative Escobar.
We are back live.
Selena on YouTube says it's crazy that I even have to ask these questions.
And I'll be straight with you.
I still don't know what demigender means.
And I don't know what agender means.
And I'm not entirely sure we need to know these things to grow warfighters.
The point I was making in that hearing that I continue to make is that our military should be focused on lethality, capability, survivability, and having to worry about whether or not we've got the right number of Demi-gender people in a scholarship-fellowship program is a distraction from that mission, and oftentimes it's divisive and harmful to the very sense of unity that we're trying to create in the military.
So I know I play you a lot of these clips of me asking tough questions of these generals, and it is weird, Selena, that I have to keep doing it, but we have to shine a light on this, and that's a point that many of you have made as well.
But it's not just here in our country where our military is engaged in far-flung misadventures.
I've consistently made the argument that the United States should not be entangled in major power competition in Syria.
But one of the statutory things that allows the Syrian conflict to go on with continued U.S. entanglement is the power we have vested in the executive to declare a national emergency.
So in 2004, Nearly 20 years ago, we declared a national emergency in Syria.
And the Congress is supposed to vote on those national emergencies, their propriety, And every six months.
But we don't do that.
It allows for massive slush funds, endless wars, and a real risk of accident or escalation.
So I filed legislation to end the national emergency in Syria, believing sincerely that the United States of America is more likely to be the cause of a national emergency in Syria than the solution.
Only, I think it was like 25 or 26 people out of the 435 in Congress voted with me.
Over 300 voted the other way.
So I got killed in this vote.
But I think we won the debate and I want you to see it.
Take a listen.
I brought a war powers resolution to the floor of this Congress to get U.S. troops out of Syria, arguing that the United States being excessively entangled in great power competition in Syria wasn't making life better for Syrians, it wasn't playing out to our benefit in the sphere of great power competition, and that it left U.S. service members and contractors as sitting ducks.
And following that vote, which I lost overwhelmingly on a bipartisan fashion, sadly, there were casualties.
There was the death of an American, because we have now become the neighborhood crime watch of certain areas in Syria where there are oil rigs.
And that's what it's all about.
So I now come to the floor with this resolution to repeal a 2004 Emergency vis-à-vis Syria.
2004. Now, it's supposed to be voted on by Congress every six months thereafter, but we have been derelict in our duty in doing so.
And so I'm glad that today we're bringing forward a number of these emergency resolutions that have just been dormant slush funds, spending untold sums of money, with no transparency as to how much is going into the Syrian emergency.
But how about this rule for how about the House thinks about emergencies?
Nothing's allowed to be an emergency for 20 years.
Because if it were really an emergency, there probably would have been some cataclysmic event of biblical proportion before the 20 years.
And if it's still an emergency 20 years later, it's a chronic condition and the United States cannot be the world's policeman and we cannot be the world's piggy bank.
Now, if the principal argument against my resolution is that my resolution is soft on Assad, well, the logic that undergirds that is that somehow the 2004 resolution was this great anti-Assad tool that we must have, that we must maintain to beat Assad.
Well, look around.
Mr. Speaker, Assad's never been stronger.
So if this 2004 resolution was Assad kryptonite, it's been the worst Assad kryptonite you could ever imagine.
It's malfunctioned.
So I think we ought to repeal this emergency.
We have sought transparency to see how much money has been going pursuant to it.
We don't know the answer to that question.
And to the extent that there are sanctions that we still want to maintain, whether there are the other National emergencies that exist targeted at terrorism generally, at Russia, at Iran, the Magnitsky Act.
There are all kinds of other authorities for the President, the Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of the Department of Commerce, even the DOD weighs in, state, regarding sanctions regimes.
So this is not a vote to lift sanctions and then just hope for the best with some pretty gnarly Syrians.
In fact, it's us standing up, To do our job, and that's what we should do in repealing this 2004 resolution.
I reserve.
I can't think of a more effective way to insult the President of Israel when he stands on that podium and addresses us tomorrow.
Well, I would observe, Mr. Speaker, to the gentleman, that if he is looking for a more effective way to insult the President of Israel, he need look no further than the remarks of some of his own colleagues in the recent days, which I would deem far more insulting than this policy debate about how to have an effective sanctions regime.
No one here is arguing for sanctions relief vis-à-vis these individuals.
What we're saying is that the National Emergencies Act is a very ineffective Inefficient way to administer a sanctions regime.
We do have specific authorities with the Magnitsky Act, with the national emergencies vis-à-vis counterterrorism.
Treasury has these authorities.
State has these authorities.
And most importantly, Congress has the authority to impose sanctions.
If you believe that there are people who should be the subject of sanctions by the United States government, we are the board of directors of the most powerful country on the planet Earth.
We can introduce those bills, we can vote for them, and we can fulfill our constitutional authority.
What I'm asking the Congress to do is to repeal a 2004 emergency vis-a-vis Syria when Syria doesn't look anything like it even did in 2004. And to my Republican colleagues, if you vote to allow This national emergency to continue.
What you're doing is you're gaslighting unaccountable spending by the Biden administration because they never have to make requisite report regarding the outlays on these matters.
And the money just moves around.
We never quite see the efficacy of it.
And we are all strong supporters of Israel on this side of the aisle.
Certainly, and I would observe that U.S. policy in Syria has not particularly helped Israel.
Matter of fact, when you had terrorist groups setting up camps in Syria directed at Israel, you know what the Israelis did?
They took them out.
They blew them up.
That sent a message to Iran?
The balance of power was restored and it did not involve the United States of America becoming the bloc captain of Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East.
And if we want to do that, it should be through a war powers resolution with Congress affirmatively voting to do it, not just having rolling national emergencies.
When the law contemplates a requisite obligation for us to vote to reauthorize these things, we never do it.
We don't do our job.
Then the money goes out the door and we don't see a safer Israel, a safer Middle East, or a safer Syria.
All we see is an empowered Assad.
So if this is the great tool we had against Assad, we better be thinking of some different ones because it hasn't exactly worked out as the proponents of this national emergency would seemingly indicate.
I yield back.
If I don't mind saying so myself, I think we won that debate overwhelmingly.
Burl on Facebook agrees, says he wants to see a vote every six months, or this should be void.
Marla says that it is super bad that I only got 25, 26 of my colleagues to vote with me.
I would agree, but we have to smoke them out.
We have to show who's voting with the people of this country and who is voting to be the Syria block captain.
And we also have Alan observe that The GOP is a little top-heavy with rhinos.
Quite the observation, Alan.
Moving now from the GOP to an interview I'm very excited about.
Congressman Adam Smith wrote a book called Lost and Broken.
This may be one of the least political policy interviews that we've done on Firebrand, We have human beings who serve in this Congress, who are policy makers, who have the frailties and foibles and follies of regular folks, and when those are confronted in the crucible of this place, it oftentimes can lead to lessons that maybe our Firebrand viewers would enjoy and could use to help others.
So please enjoy my extended interview with Democrat Congressman Adam Smith.
Get ready for a very different kind of interview.
Firebrand viewers will be familiar with Congressman Adam Smith.
He hails from the state of Washington, a beautiful part of our country.
He's the former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and he is currently the lead Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.
Now, we've had many spirited debates about military policy and our beloved service members, and we usually play those debates right here on Firebrand and discuss them, and you can clearly see that Representative Adam Smith is very sharp, very quick rhetorically, and if I don't mind saying so, A very worthy debating adversary when we disagree.
And I think it's a good thing for the country to see lawmakers disagree on substance while actually addressing the substance and not just trying to cancel one another.
There have certainly been times in my seven years here when Congressman Smith has convinced me to change my view on matters.
Specifically, he's often effectively pointed out when we're making expensive military systems that are not useful to the warfighter.
The littoral combat ships come to mind.
I don't know if I've ever convinced Congressman Smith to hold my point of view on something, and I certainly won't force him to make an admission of that here today.
But here's some advice to every viewer of this program.
At least a few times a year, read a book from an author that you might fervently disagree with on something.
I do this quite frequently.
It's how I came to read the essential text of critical race theory, which we highlighted on this show years ago.
So, Congressman Smith has recently written a book that I highly recommend fitting within this portfolio of observing and understanding and flushing the issues out on.
And that's true even if you don't agree with Adam on a variety of other things.
It's not particularly a book about Congress or policy or politics, though there are juicy insights on all of those things.
The book.
Lost and Broken is about pain, anxiety, and the overall state of the human condition.
Representative Smith has endured an incredible personal journey, and I've been reading books by members of Congress for more than a decade, and I can honestly tell you I have never seen a book where a member of Congress, currently elected, was more personally vulnerable and honest about crippling challenges with Focus and strength and a number of matters that we're going to discuss.
So we hope lost and broken no more.
My colleague Adam Smith joins us now.
And Adam, maybe start with just letting people know the journey you've been on.
Sure.
And first of all, thank you for having me on.
I completely agree with everything you just said.
And you have at least convinced me on the medical marijuana issue and on the need for allowing service members to test whether or not drugs can help them with their PTSD issues.
So there are issues.
And I agree with you.
We should have those debates.
Now the issue is I had a severe anxiety and chronic pain problem.
And my book actually starts in 2016 after my third hip surgery, which I was not getting better from.
And the anxiety really hit me in 2013. Chronic pain hit me in 2014. By 2016, I thought I was never going to solve the problem, bottom line.
I had tried all kinds of doctors and psychiatrists and all kinds of different things and I was in worse shape than ever.
So then I sort of figured it out.
I eventually did find people who could help me.
So what the book does is it talks about how I got there because pain and anxiety rarely just sort of pop up.
I really had to go back into my full history as a person.
And then most importantly, how I got out, and if I have one big message on this, you can get better.
There are treatments for both mental health and chronic pain, and I hope I can help people find that path.
As you've been talking about it, you know, we say anxiety and chronic pain almost as one continuum, but talk about how those two conditions inform on one another.
Yeah, no, it's really interesting, and we don't fully understand, to tell you the truth, but it is absolutely true that Mental health conditions like anxiety or depression can trigger pain in your body.
Now, in my case, I had two separate sets of problems.
The pain certainly contributed to the anxiety and vice versa, but I had a knee surgery when I was a kid.
I never properly rehabbed from it.
My body, after 30 years, eventually broke down.
And mental health-wise, I had a problematic childhood.
Hard to explain.
I was adopted.
There was all kinds of issues involved there that I never truly dealt with, which really triggered the anxiety.
But they can definitely feed off of each other.
And the anxiety was first for you.
What do you think that people get wrong most about the challenge of confronting anxiety and working through it?
Wow.
A lot of answers occur to me, but I'll go with two.
Number one, I think, certainly for me, one of my challenges when the anxiety hit me was, there's no way to fix this.
Okay, I mean, what is a doctor going to say to me?
I mean, I understand, okay, if my knee hurts, okay, maybe I need surgery, maybe I need physical therapy.
I think all the time.
How am I going to change the way I think to stop having anxiety come?
And that's a fundamental misunderstanding.
You can, in fact, change the way that you think.
You can teach your brain to better deal with the stresses and strains that you face in life.
Second thing I really didn't understand was this concept that's going to sound a little loopy, but the basic idea, you have to have a sense of your own self-worth.
And if you don't, You are going to have a lot of problems, and it's a lot harder to have than you think it is.
That basic...
Well, the Buddhists would refer to it as the concept that we are all worthy of love.
If you don't understand that about yourself, you're in a bad place.
And it took me a long time to grasp that.
It doesn't seem like a...
An easy place to arrive if that is a challenge that presents.
We're joined by Congressman Adam Smith.
The book is lost and broken.
He's describing it and it couldn't have been an easy decision to write this book because in politics we always want to present the toughest, most impenetrable version of ourselves in campaigns and in legislative debate.
Did you have to go through a process to be so fulsome in describing the experiences you've had?
Well, yeah, but I think the process I went through was those six years.
I can't remember what it was, but I was getting some surgery or something, and you're in an embarrassing position and everything, and the nurses and the doctors are like, now, are you okay with this?
And I'm like, at this point, okay, yes.
I mean, I've I've been through three surgeries, psychiatrists, everything.
I had felt already so exposed to the broader world that I guess I felt more comfortable sharing it more broadly.
And also, second big lesson after the self-worth thing is, if you're going to get to a proper place in terms of mental health, you have to be honest with yourself.
Because a lot of what drives us to anxiety is Is that you are suppressing things.
Maybe you're angry about something that you're hiding.
You're in a relationship or in a job that you know you have to keep so you kid yourself about whether or not you really like it.
Or things from your childhood that you're either angry about or feel guilty about.
So good mental health, being honest with yourself.
You can lie to other people.
You may have to to get through the day, but you have to be honest with yourself.
And I felt this was one of the best ways, A, for me to do that.
And B, to show people that this is one of the paths to getting better.
I want to understand techniques that you use.
Some people are big into meditation.
Others, I know you're a big go on walks guy.
If you stand in one place in Washington, D.C. long enough, you'll see Adam Smith walk by it.
At one point or another because you're sort of always on the move.
But if someone's going through anxiety and they don't know that they have access to exquisite tools, what's some of the advice you would give?
Meditation is one big thing.
And I was really intimidated by meditation because, well, I used to joke that I'm really stressed out because I don't have enough time to meditate, which seems like counterintuitive.
And then also when I do meditation, the idea is, you know, clear your mind, right?
And I'd be sitting there and I'd get, oh, I thought of something, you know, so I've failed.
That's not what meditation is.
What meditation can teach you to do is not to chase after every thought.
You have to give your mind space to not try to process everything.
To just experience what's going on around you.
So a couple minutes a day, whether I'm on a walk or brushing my teeth, I'll just say, okay, I'm not going to try to solve any problems right now.
Thoughts are going to occur to me.
I'm going to hear things.
I'm going to notice them and let them go.
And when you train your mind to do that, that's the other thing I do on my walks.
I don't take my phone with me, which drives my staff crazy occasionally.
Yeah, I bet they love that.
But it's like you have to give yourself some space where you're not constantly reacting to everything around you.
And the biggest lesson that this taught me was you don't have to solve every problem.
In fact, we get the question all the time.
I'm sure you get it.
What keeps you up at night as a member of the Armed Services Committee?
And I always have the same answer now.
Nothing keeps me up at night because that's not going to solve anything.
Okay, me staying up for an extra two or three hours, I'm not going to somehow solve the problem.
And I didn't used to know that.
I used to think, okay, if there's something out there in the universe that's unsettling to me.
I have to solve it.
I have to deal with it before I can relax.
And I'm like, you're not going to solve every problem.
They'll be there in the morning when you get up.
Deal with them then.
Just like every person's physical health oscillates throughout their life, there are times when you're a little more healthy or a little less healthy, I would presume mental health probably doesn't follow the same linear track.
I know in my life it certainly hasn't.
And in low points, I lean on my spouse.
I lean on faith.
You've got a very successful marriage.
What were some of the places that you always knew you could go in tough times to ensure that you were able to reset the course?
Well, I'm a little bit more introverted, and certainly there are people that are good to be around and good to talk to.
But I always say it's three things.
Sports, exercise, and humor.
Those are the three things that I lean on.
I love working out one kind or another, and I will spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what the Mariners should do at the trade deadline, which helps me go.
And also, if something strikes me funny, which, by the way, is part of the reason why I like engaging with you.
You are a clever, intelligent person.
I don't agree with you on a lot of things, but I totally agree.
We have a good back and forth.
Those things seem to give me space to let the problems go.
You know, it's interesting you mention sports because for me, thinking about Florida State University football or thinking about sports, We have to find, I think more of those places to go.
You know, when I was growing up, whether you were a Seminole or a Gator mattered a lot more about who you could be friends with and whether you were a Republican or a Democrat.
And I wonder if there are assemblies of people, whether it's churches or otherwise, that give us more of a platform to be able to escape kind of the anxieties that drive, no matter what your life is and your profession is.
Yeah, I agree.
I think it's going to be different for different people, but you do have to find those things that just bring you simple joy.
I think it can be really stressful, particularly in our profession.
You know, and I think you and I are very similar, and I think that we...
We think a lot about, okay, I'm trying to get something done.
What's the right answer?
How do I solve this?
How do I do that?
You can really get yourself on a treadmill there that never stops if you don't take a step off and think about something like sports that ultimately doesn't matter.
It's fun.
It is.
It brings me joy, so why not focus on it?
I'd love to know, you know, you're a leader among House progressives, you're a leader in the national security entities.
How have colleagues of yours reacted to really just such an honest and bare bearing of the journey you've been on?
Well, very positively.
I think that the best thing one member just said to me just last week, he had been struggling with anxiety.
He didn't think he could address it.
Reading my book made him think, yes, and he said he had the best week of his life because he actually started to address it.
They've told me stories about family members many times themselves as well.
The other way is a number of members have come up to me and said, hey, I had no idea you were going through that.
You know, some have apologized, which is completely unnecessary.
You can't know everything that's going on around you, number one.
And number two, I will tell you that professionally, Mac Thornberry, former chair of the committee, who was chair right before I was, contacted me about this.
And that committee and the staff and all members, Republican and Democrat alike, in fact, I quote Michael Turner in the book at one point, were incredibly supportive to me throughout this process, and I really appreciate that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we see even during committee at times when there'll be a debate or discussion, you'll stand up, take a few walks around the room and sit down.
And I wonder sometimes whether that's physically you wanting to get the muscle movement going or whether or not there's actually a mental health component of getting up and moving around.
And I found walking around a little bit more frequently improves my mental health.
So the walking around has a dual benefit.
Well, the good news at this point is I'm doing it just because I like to move.
There was a number of years there.
Gosh, there were times when I had to lay down on the floor in the other room because my back was killing me.
Like I said, from 2014 to 2018, it was because I can't sit here.
I'm in too much pain.
I've got to get up and move.
But now, it's just a thing that I do.
Lost and Broken is the book.
Adam Smith is the congressman.
Final note I want to end on.
We're really entering an era where there's a lot more, I think, diagnosis on the mental health front, a lot of recognition.
To be candid, it's not your generation.
It's this Zoomer generation that seems more self-aware on these matters, whereas the Gen Xers and the Boomers were probably dealing with these things without some of the tools and resources that we now know to be available.
I worry at times about the overindulgence of that, that if we want to still ensure that people confront their challenges and deal with them and don't just cloak it in a sense of, well, I'm mentally unhealthy.
What's the most encouraging thing you could say to someone who's aware that they are going through chronic pain or anxiety and they want to know that there's a better way ahead?
Well, as with most things in life, it's about balance.
And I would say generationally, you're absolutely right.
One of the big positives is younger generations are now willing to talk about these things.
There was an older ethos that was, now keep it to yourself, don't talk about it, don't engage in it.
But that has to be headed somewhere.
And I do worry, as you said, the younger generation, I don't want to just talk about it.
I don't want a solid excuse for why my life's miserable.
I want a path to a solution.
There has to be a resiliency here, not just, you know, as you said, an overindulgence, but okay, what's going on with me?
How can I get better so that I can lead a healthier and more productive life and be a more responsible person?
So, I would say the most optimistic thing, just, gosh, since I wrote the book, I wrote it in 2020 during the pandemic, I think there has been an opening in which a lot more people are speaking openly about mental health, which is step one.
But you've got to get to step two, which is how do you get better?
How do you find those treatments that can help you?
I sincerely hope that the readers of this book are able to access that critically important step to a more constructive way to think about these things.
The book is Lost and Broken.
The Congressman is Adam Smith from the great state of Washington.
And I feel smarter having conducted this interview, and I'm sure that folks will feel smarter if they get the chance to read your book.
Thanks for joining me.
Thanks, Matt.
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