Fortitude： American Resilience ｜ Dan Crenshaw ｜ EP 214 (GnpHlc8O_sY)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GnpHlc8O_sY

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. It’s part of that is also opponent processing. 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. 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 catastrophically stupid. 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. 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 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 2016 as a 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 2018, Dan was elected to serve the people of Texas’ second 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. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor, as I’ve noted many times, one of our intellectual heroes. I appreciate you. It’s something. Yeah, well, that’s really something to hear from someone like you. I can tell you that. So 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 ground’s eye view of the situation. But I’ve got you right now. So what in the world were we doing there? And what happened? And was it any use? And what’s your opinion about that? 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, why? Let’s start with some of the first questions. I mean, why do we go in there in the first place? I went there in the first place because of 9-11 and the United States invoked Article Five 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. And Americans have a long history of working with Canadians, 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. 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, you know, 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 that’s a, 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. They were just, 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. And what I tell people is, and you can kind of get what side of the debate I’m on, call it an endless 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 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. But 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 it to get rid of it. It’s hard. I mean, it’s 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, and the Taliban, the Taliban is a very strong group. Now, they’re all kind of under the same umbrella. I mean, and 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 is it an endless war? Yes, because these people are in an endless war with us. You know, we weren’t at war in 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 of months ago, but we didn’t end any war. And the intel suggests that Al-Qaeda is rapidly reforming and is now they have the space and the time to do something. And so they’re 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 reelected with the minority government, Justin Trudeau. She referred to the Taliban, the new government in Afghanistan under the Taliban as our brothers. And, 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. You know, the feeling of more hardheaded 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 cool eye patches as a result of it. So, you know, 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 was something like looked like what was it? A private eye in a porno flick or something like that, which is a good joke. But it made it a porno. That was that part was the good joke. That part was the good joke. It actually was pretty funny. That kind of sparks the history of my of the birth of my political career, I guess. We could talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s finish off with the Taliban and then let’s finish. So Taliban are finished. Taliban are terrible. And they haven’t changed one bit. If anything, they’re emboldened and ruthless. Look, the Hukani 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, there’s groups that we have in town, the 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. You know, women are under attack in Afghanistan in a very serious way. So unfortunately, yet the State Department is calling on them to be diverse, inclusive and equitable. It’s something nasty about that. It’s just it’s like, I mean, I’m not opposed to working with, you know, questionable characters around the world. I mean, 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 the 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 them 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 Waukesham 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 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 just fine 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. It’s almost guaranteed that if we go down to zero, because slogans, this is where I get very upset with the debate about all this, because I think the push to remove troops is effectively based on a slogan, an emotional slogan. Maybe two slogans in particular. Do you know what slogan means? The derivation of that word? It’s very interesting. It’s from Slueg Geream. It’s Welsh. Slueg Geream. It means battle cry of the dead. Well, that’s interesting. Yeah. Perfectly. And it fits perfectly with how I’m using the word slogan now because I think it caused these emotional slogans were effectively political battle cries that caused death. And when you say this emotional cries to bring the troops home is if I need your help, right? As if I’m not a smart individual that volunteered to go 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 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 2500. Couldn’t be 5000. 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 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. And definitely 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 this whole idea that we’re trying to export democracy. That was never the point. 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 up and running and there’d be little skirmishes, little combat operations for a while. They’re just wood. Yeah. And why do you think that that small number of troops? Sorry, we have a bit of a lag. So I’m a bit being a bit rude here. But why are you convinced that a number 5000 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 true truly modern Army is, you know, 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 you know, that’s something that’s not quite realized it and we’re also not all experience. I watched an extensive series on World War Two that concentrated and it was narrated by Eisenhower. It was it concentrated a lot of 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 amazing operation. They built these huge spools out of with as much steel in them as battleships and unrolled pipelines across the English Channel. It’s like and that was like one of amazing got some absolutely beyond comprehension that and and that it was possible and that it worked. So that logistics this the supply of the Army all of that. That’s that is really something and people don’t know how complex that is. So so you figure five to 10,000 and 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 if you know, and people say well, we’ve been there for 20 years. I mean, why can’t they handle it? I mean you you handle it being a new country after 20 years. That’s not exactly a long-standing long a long time, you know, it’s 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 and you’ve got an insurgency that’s ruthless doesn’t play by the same rules. Now, they’ve got IED set up everywhere. You know, this stuff is hard and it takes time. You 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. Yeah, absolutely. Look at it thrive away man. Hooray. And 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 I just think the art 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, in 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 their strategic thinkers. But before that when we didn’t have a treaty in an average of six to seven deaths in Afghanistan every year, I’ll tell you what the US military loses a hell of a lot more than that suicide and random accidents. So, you know, it wasn’t I wouldn’t call this a war in the traditional sense. It was not like what I was dealing with and even what I was dealing with in 2012 was certainly not like 2010. It was, you know, it’s war is relative and I don’t see what was going on since about 2014 is 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 now that’s done with and whatever was there before is 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 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 but but I’m not like an expert on this but I but I know enough. You know what we’re dealing with is 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 in the exact attack wrong. 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 will will 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. Yes, because it’s like range it’s in its, you know, why are we allies of Saudi Arabia? Well, because they’re because they’re the only geostrategic deterrence to Iran and they’re worse. This is life. You know, this is this is 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 this logical reasoning. Why why do they not like us? It must have been something we’ve done must be our foreign policy. And so I asked my okay. Well, let’s let’s take let’s take our biggest example. Let’s take Osama bin Laden. What exactly did we do to this guy? I mean, was it was it us aligning with him and the majahedin and Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 80s and we helped him and was it was it or was it when we defended his homeland of Saudi Arabia from invasion from Iraq from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War that we stopped Saddam Hussein from invading Saudi Arabia and and that was actually he so he claimed that our mere presence there was enough to to radicalize him and start al-qaeda. This is 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 it will 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 US in particular? I mean, it certainly seems to me like a religious struggle. At least that’s how they paint it. And you know, I could only go off of how they operate and how they have it’s an interesting question. I mean, I don’t know that I distinguish too much. I mean, you know, in a sense it operates like an organized crime enterprise for sure. I mean, it’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. So in practical purposes, we kind of see it the same and you know, the religious side gets into it because it goes back to the old adage winning hearts and minds and you know, turns out that ain’t that easy. And 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 it’s complicated. It’s complex. 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 what’s your day-to-day life like and your so I guess maybe what we first should do is describe the difference between a congressman and the senator for everybody that’s listening and then I’d like to know what you do day-to-day and what your fellow congressman do. Mostly senators are just much older. Look the the American system and I guess I’m just you know, 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 the Senate’s of federal structure and we’ve kind of changed that over time and we’ve we’ve sort of destroyed that by changing the Constitution, but it was originally intended where in 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 just it just it’s the people it really is the people. Senate was supposed to be this sort of kind of it’s like the House of Lords sorta in the Great Britain the UK and 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 or your state Legislatures actually choose your senators because the entire point of the senator you get to per per per state and this is important to when I say federal and national right because national implies that you’re representing the people see represent just based on numbers of people but the Senate isn’t like that. You know, there’s two senators per state and the reason it’s like that is to is 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 is 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 have this 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 to 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 were 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 a hundred so your status actually matters there a little bit more and you’d act like an adult. And for the most part, that’s how it’s operated. You also that’s a four-year term. Six years six-year term in the six years. Sorry, how I can see you. It’s a lot of people don’t notice it. So it just allows you to kind of escape the political ramifications, you know that the emotions of the people for a while and just kind of make adult decisions and that’s maybe that’s a good thing. And I think the House should probably be a little bit more. You know, 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 and it yeah, that’s well that is something I wanted that’s something I really did want to ask you about. I just when I went to Washington and met a number of congressman congressman both Democrat and Republican. The first thing I thought was there is no way I would want to have this job and they’re 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 and then but you’re also supposed to be working but then also you have to fundraise constantly and that that was really shocking to me. My 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 yours then there’s your job. So that’s going to take up a few hours as well. So I have no idea. I have no idea how you do it and do can people do it? It’s not 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 big 4th of July celebration. We do a youth summit, which of course you are 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 a lot of folks would say it’s about 20 hours a week and I spent on the phone fundraising now for me. It’s not correct. I don’t do that at all. I might spend an hour and 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 to I try to be somebody that somebody just wants to donate to that makes sense. So so I put a lot more make sense if it works and if it works, it works for me. I was under the understanding that Congress people were under congressmen were under tremendous pressure from their party brass to to do that sort of work and you can understand why because it’s so expensive to run. Maybe it doesn’t have to be you know, that is a question but and that gets into a whole other set of questions. It so to answer your it does work now. I’m very it works for me. It’s it’s it’s it’s hard for 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. Do things like this right? Like I have my own right cast. I know well that’s I want 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 you have the time to do all that as well and but I would like to talk ask you about your experiences with social media. It’s like how is that working for you politically and what do you think it 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 and look at 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 I duty is effectively just to vote on it. That doesn’t take up a whole lot of time. And it I think a lot of members going to mislead the public a little bit when they say I don’t have any time to read anything at like what there’s ways that we digest these massive bills. We’re following their development over time. Staff is combing through it, you know, they’re there the reason they’re so long to their filled with legal jargon, you know, and then you have to break apart the substantive part of it, but there’s ways that 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, it’s a release though. That’s true. Yeah. Yeah, I just 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 and because you’re representing them. So you need to communicate both up and down, right? 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. You don’t feel that I represent them. That’s fine. But I represent a majority of the people in my district. And so and I represent them based on what I ran on a set of values, a set of conservative limiting principal values. And my job is to 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 and I knew that’s what I wanted because I wasn’t 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 change the way you think about politics and I think get you detached from regular people who are 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, but which is slightly related but different than politics. And so so when I so the point is is it’s kind of regular guy and I knew what I wanted. I just wanted people to to explain why the hell they were doing what they were doing and don’t talk to me and talking points. So and to do that you do need long-form discussion and then you got to find you got to communicate with people where they’re at. So why do a podcast? So I can dive deep into issues and and be willing and no no things well enough so that you can have a long-form conversation a lot of people will struggle with that. And and so that’s number one, but not everybody listens to podcast 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 it’s the biggest following there and you know, you put out videos. I put out explainer videos and I’m not I’m not giving you a 20-minute, you know, informational episode on on it on issue X, but I’m trying to do it in a couple 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? You know, let’s just 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 and 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 it’s not like I don’t do any and I’m like and I’m like one of the number one fundraisers in the house. Oh, 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 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 I think the promises of the utopian left are very dearing to a young person and to a certain extent, you’ll never escape that but my goal is to is to give them the tools of conservatism. There’s a there’s a lot of youth groups out there. You’re probably familiar with you’ve spoken at a turning point event and you maybe you maybe you’ve dealt with the aft to 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 you have does is is a very intellectual, you know, like it’s been Ben Shapiro’s 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 answer some questions and then you got something like turning point, which is a very high production lots. 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 get because I want to give you that experience and I’m also 100% only focused on high school and college kids. So that’s a you have to have an age limit. And so mine was 24 and and I want to give them both intellectual tools that they can come away with which is why I invite somebody like you to speak 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 there’s like there’s there’s even a concert in the middle of it. You know, I don’t know what’s going on with the with you conservative types because you’ve got comedians now and you’ve got entertainment and know you’re talking to young people. It’s like this is very strange. So hey, I’ve got a question about about this issue of you 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 encourage 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 is 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 really attractive message because especially the young people now because they don’t really hear that. You know, they hear that they’re just spoilers of the environment or 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’s 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 dis-spoiler 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, he 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 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? You know, it’s different than what I do. I mean what turning point does what Charlie does is they just they just were the first ones to give conservative kids a place to go hang out with each other. Frankly, which is pretty meaningful because 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 you know, the Republican clubs are just kind of outdated. You know, 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 that’s that’s what it gives them. I mean, it’s I don’t think it’s more much more complicated than that. But to jump off of what you were saying about what conservatives deliver. Well, somebody asked a question like that always 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 use the phrase paternalistic encouragement encouragement, which is different than of course, yeah, which is different, of course than paternalism, which is I think a leftist attribute. But 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 you summit was because I’m always trying to explain to kids like how how 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 Mike, 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 it’s about the kind of love that your parents give you and it’s a little different than say the kind of love that you’re 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 you’re crazy. It’s like you’re perfect the way you are, you know, you don’t have to change. So, you know, you’re fine and 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 it’s that’s 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, yeah, 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 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 yeah, so the message is to get the message mixed. Yeah, and it’s like there’s a difference between not being perfect and being bad, you know, 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 and that yeah, well, that’s the thing right there that that that issue of something to aspire to you know, and part of the woke what would you call it pathology that we’re all engrossed in at the moment is the idea that you know 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 and there has to be 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 yeah along with warnings about the overreach of government because people who are conservative or tend to be more concerned about that. And so I think the two things that I like to say are foundations of conservatism when we just hit on which is effectively personal responsibility extensive accountability. It’s a very I think that’s important. It’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 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 a definition you’re infringing on their freedoms or you’re asking a politician to infringe on their freedom. So these are necessary foundations and this is what conservatives have the author’s this freedom. You’re and we kind of also depriving you’re also depriving yourself of the adventure of your life. Yes, one 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 and that’s that’s you can’t how can you live without that? It’s not possible. Yeah, one of the struggles I have is is how that’s not more persuasive because there’s 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 unless you have housing unless you have help free health care unless you have unless you have at least, you know some living wage then you can’t go be free. So we’re like 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 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 Victor Frankel 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 so and I think that one of our challenges is convincing people that freedom is actually a good thing and it would 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 just difficult. It’s more difficult than you might think to convince people. Well, I don’t know. I think you 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 induce suffering even in suffering that you might think is unjust. It’s 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 it is always true that more freedom leads to more prosperity over time and less of it leads to less if not if not complete another decay in fact. Well, I think the diversity argument is actually a weird. What would you call 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 wouldn’t we wouldn’t be 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. They’re 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 how do you cope with that structurally while 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 it’s part of 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 in the West because we allow for free discussion our opponent process their 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 I and I think the other point to extract from what you said is it’s diversity. It’s also the decentralization principle. Yep. See, yeah, right exactly. This is a key key elements of conservatism is this first of all the sense of humility conservatism is about a sense of humility 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 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, you know what what they want but then but then let us figure out how to get there. Yeah, well that that 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 but none of that well, so so the the people who tend towards those more liberal utopian and grand scheme views are they tend to be high and openness and that’s creativity divergent thinking and low in conscientiousness and 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 is 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 this could lead us into a discussion of climate change politics. For example, I’ve been watching the spot price of oil and and natural gas as well and what’s happening in China, which is 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 Lomborg. Yeah, we just don’t have a podcast. It’s 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 health care and environment. Mostly I don’t know. I’ve always tended to have a 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 correct about our assessments of them. You know, can I say one more thing about the decentralization part? Yes, definitely. Conservatives 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 this sense of humility it also 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 in it. There’s no governing principles in there either the limiting principles and so the decentralization arguments important and it gets to the diversity argument because it’s really why we come it’s why it’s why we end up supporting the free market. All right, it’s why we think that is important because like 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 good reason it never works and in the entire point of that diversity and in the free market that underpins it is the ability to to do something and then test out whether it’s creating value or not, you know 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 it’s as good an indication as you can get 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 environments unbelievably complex. It’s impossible to keep up with it. So you distribute decision-making and that is a fundamental conservative principle to to the 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 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 a 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 and I think it’s a good one and it’s actually good. It’s a good segue into the climate change debate. So so 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 there’s externalized costs and yeah, and that’s that’s effectively the argument about climate change. But then but then you got to put your conservative hat back on and say, okay, again, a primary tentative conservatism is assessing trade-offs because I would I would say conservatism is a governing philosophy. It’s a process oriented philosophy that set that seeks to solve problems within a set of limiting principles limiting principles means we ask questions like what are the second third-order consequences? What’s the cost benefit? 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. So, you know, the Republican mainstream position on this isn’t denying climate change, right? It’s it’s just assessing the facts and saying, okay, there’s certainly some warming going on. There’s certain some loop warming. I would say I’m just going to use the same data that everybody else is using. Let’s 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 is the simplest way to put this is yeah, there’s a cost and how do we how do we quantify that cost? Well, you can look at it this way according to the UN again, the scientific consensus. We’re going to increase global GDP by 450% in a hundred 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 we can we’re not denying it but we are saying look whatever actions we take need need to be in somewhat proportional to that cost and that would be a good place to start. You know, that’s why I like Lomborg so much is he was the only in I’m really interested in environmental issues. I studied them for a long time and tried to figure out, you know what what bothered me about most of the environmentalist discussion was there was no rank ordering of priorities and that was that’s a real problem. If you want to implement some solutions and I came across Lomborg 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 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 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 walk as I have an ideology. It’s like oh yeah, you and everyone else and dealing with market failures is is essentially what politicians are supposed to do. It’s why we create a government to to deal with market for 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. Now you really think about it, you know, there’s always going to be somebody at the bottom, but you don’t want him to be too far at the bottom. And so so this is 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 that 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. The conservative says it’s an indication. We might need to take some action and we should and we should be very careful about how we take that action and we should do so within a set of limiting principles and it’s that’s a difficult sell because and it gets back to the climate change debate because it’s a difficult sell because 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 not that exciting, especially the 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, right? Because you don’t know what the change is going to do and 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 like it’s not like we don’t think 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. Yeah, and that 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 because what we’re I mean, we’re also this week. We’re debating this reconciliation bill and reconciliation just means that you can pass it to the Senate with only 51 votes and sort of the 60 vote threshold required to overcome the filibuster and that means it has to be related to budget items. Okay, so that’s 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 four and a half 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 we’re plenty troubled by it. That’s for sure. Yeah, I mean, what even Trudeau is like, hey, why did you guys cancel the XL for the Keystone pipeline? Yeah, but he’s secretly happy about it. Yeah, that’s true. So this simultaneous attack is is unbelievably dangerous for the well-being of people across the globe. It’s going to so so right away. You’re going to see increases in energy prices. How much how much how much what are we going to see in two years? What do you think 300 bucks a barrel? Oh oil. Geez. Yeah, no, no, I don’t that the data I see doesn’t see that but you could get up to 90. I just read a Wall Street Journal article today. It’s some estimates are at 90 by the end of the year just pretty damn high. I don’t know about 300. I mean, but but I don’t know if they passed this bill and implemented their natural gas tax which would put a lot of our medium-sized producers out of business. Yeah, just and also take away take away the one thing that is decreased carbon emissions back to the US. That’s fracking. Ha ha fracking now, which Democrat would have predicted that zero nobody. No one predicted that man. And it is you know, how that nobody nobody. No, because it just kind of happened free market. It just it just kind of happened and it happened because of a government action, but the government action was just liberalizing it. It was just it was just it was just removing a barrier to it and the export ban that even Obama signed when we remove the oil export band 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? Is that make climate change worse or better? Well, the question isn’t that’s that’s the wrong question really because the question is what is demand for energy around the world? And so 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 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 and you know, on a per unit basis and this is a this is a scientific estimate. I it’s not the EPA that did it. It was one of our national labs that did this estimate. Unit of natural gas is 42% less emissions than a Russian unit of natural gas. So we’re cleaner. We’re like we’re objectively cleaner when we’re when we’re giving you oil and gas and yet this administration counter intuitively in an effort to reduce gas prices once OPEC to increase production. So we’re attacking US oil and gas and 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 know and they want to put we see this oil Canada madly. Yeah, and so it’s just it’s just if same thing’s happening Canada with regards. Sorry. Sorry. I’m just saying if we’re trying to solve a problem, you know, of reducing emissions and then fine. Let’s solve the problem. And the other thing I will is Republicans were always wondering is a second. If you really think this is an existential threat and we’re done and like 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 the 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? So what’s the answer to that? Yeah, why not like France did it? Their answer is well, there’s there’s the truthful answer. There’s the public answer and there’s the real answer that I think is true. But so the public is here. You know, they’re their 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 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, 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 into 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 I just think they should fit in where they fit in. I don’t think they should be over subsidized 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 I don’t think there’s any other reasoning behind it. Now there’s 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 and which seems to be often more 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 health care and the economy and it was kind of it’s kind of saying the quiet part out loud, which we all suspected that this was mostly about, you know, the sort of great reset that people talk about it kind of 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 with the sort of revolution and thinking they 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, I hear that all the time, but it’s really as if we’ve never had hurricanes as if we’d 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 we 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 and climate change data. If the Western world believe all developed countries, 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 what that 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 error bars become 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 you supposed to solve a problem like that? It’s you can’t and 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 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 is the more a country develops the more you industrialize it more concerned they become about the environment. That’s another truth. So maybe focus on yes, definitely. Well also, you know that 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 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 or virtually no intermediation. It’s now you’re going to make every energy all more expensive to produce these trivial changes in in climate that you won’t even be able to measure. It’s like what’s up with you exactly? Yeah, 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. 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 you know, hey, let me ask you about that infrastructure bill. Okay, cuz I mean I’ve thought and and talk 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 and 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, the so this is two things for people’s understanding this this reconciliation package and 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 1.2 3 trillion so a lot of money the the bipartisan infrastructure deal substantively is not bad. It has a lot of good things right like what like what do you see that’s good. It’s it’s just your typical boring infrastructure stuff like really highway funding like port funding sewage treatment this kind of stuff. Okay. Yeah, it’s boring when it works. It’s legitimately exactly. 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 it’s about four times three to four times too much money. Yeah, that’s 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. It’s it’s the price tag is just too much considering we’ve spent 6 trillion on on getting our economy back on 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 it’s in any case it’s not the time to just be throwing money out the door, you know with hyperinflation coming about it. You just need to be more careful is really our only opposition to the infrastructure bill. So that’s 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 two over two trillion dollars in tax increases recorders 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 will increase taxes on at least three-quarters of load lower to middle-income people will increase your taxes is it because there’s so many different types of tax increases and it looks 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 how much are people looking about about hit by about 1% which is it’s not a ton but it’s something but I think I think what’s going to happen 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 and I have proof of this and if we look at the last 15 years of data post so let’s look at two major recessions one COVID and one 2008 financial crisis and two different types of two different types of economies two different types of governing philosophies and the first time was under Obama but we need more tack when you tax the rich you just spend money on infrastructure that is nearly trillion dollar infrastructure package back then turned out everybody agrees now that turned out to be a waste did not contribute to the economy the way we’d hoped it was the shovel ready myth. Okay, that’s 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 didn’t work out. Okay, but you’re also increasing taxes your threat to businesses because you like to regulate them and you can you tend to they tend to see businesses as more of a bad actor than a good actor that creates investment in jobs. Okay, so then snow fast 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 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 since you know 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 happens to wages? Well, if you look at the wage growth the bottom quintile of earners skyrocketed and what does it mean that it like drastically reduced inequality? Okay, but as far as the proportion goes a percentage goes the bottom people were growing much much faster than the top and absolute terms obviously not and that’s what everybody looks at right there. They want to take the data that they care about and it makes their argument stronger. So they’ll say yeah, but they made a hundred million dollars more. Okay. Well, there were the 50 they had 50 billion dollars 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 a 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 who were at a very tight labor market now wages are no 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 is that Biden economics is not really hit the United States because they haven’t done anything past anything. All right, they’re they’re they’ve created this sort of they’ve what their general view on business that it’s bad and 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. All right, a lot of the lot of the shocks are maybe too much spending and also supply chains problems which are more related to the pandemic and maybe it may be a refusal of this administration to do anything about it and loosen certain restrictions. So it’s a long long anyway point is is pro-growth works and it actually helps increase wages for the lowest quintile of burgers. That’s just an economic data driven fact that we can look at over the past decade or so. So getting back to this reconciliation package is 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 right. It’s never the CEO that gets hurt because of a corporate tax hike. This is absurd notion that that you’re just like taking it to the taking it to these mean corporations. Yeah, what these corporations that employ hundreds of thousands of people. What is it? You know, 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 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 the of reality itself. In fit 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 a 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 it’s a look. Let’s look at the following math problem. If there’s if you and I are the the sole citizens of Country X you make $50,000ayearandImake$100,000 a year. Well, there’s a Delta between us of $50,000.Nowle{t}^{\prime }sbothdoubleourincome.Sonowyoumake$100,000 and I make $200,000.Well,holycrapinequalityjustdoubledbecausenowisthe$100,000 Delta. So it’s just not always what people think. I mean the question isn’t necessarily about it because 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 this is not the world we live in. You know, there’s there’s if we look at if what keeps you out of poverty and the things 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 and you’re 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 when we should argue about how much of a safety net and then the fundamental and about the negative consequences of that potentially as well, right because you know, Depends safety net doesn’t make things worse say makes you dependent and makes you unable or on wanting to find more work and be productive right? That would be the fundamental question of a safety net and and I think their Democrat policies just generally don’t care about that. Okay, so can I dig in? Can I dig into the weeds on the three? I still don’t understand the differentiation between the 1.2 trillion and the 3.5 trillion. Oh, yeah. So I got a long way to go on the left here. So let me let me do it more generally instead of getting too much into the weeds on the on the taxation stuff. So, 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 it to me. It’s a lot of bribery. Okay, it’s like we’re giving you stuff. We’re going to fund like the pre-k we’re going to fund all of these things through the government. We’re just going to do so many things any wish list they’ve ever had they’re sticking in this bill again the subsidies subsidies for solar and wind just you know a new climate Bank whatever the hell that means. I mean what for with tens of billions of dollars in it. It’s it’s stuff like that that is, you know, some of it is extremely threatening I think to because of a policy perspective and 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. Remember I remember when 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 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. I there’s some other things if you don’t mind I wanted to ask you about will pop out of the political domain to some degree to to begin with you have a book you wrote a book not too long ago. And so maybe you could well tell everybody what what the book is and then talk about that a bit if you’d like to sure appreciate it fortitude American resilience in the era of Outrage and 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 band I 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 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 the it’s like if you’re if you’re the 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 I’ve very 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 it’s a those lessons and concepts are imparted to the reader through a series of stories from the seal teams through some philosophy through some Bible verses and there’s some pop culture, you know, 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. And it’s it’s where did you learn? Where did you learn to to be resilient mean after you were terribly injured you went back and continued in your operative military operations. I mean that seems to be I mean some resilience, you know, it’s 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 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 I would what I write about in the book. I’m my first experience and this experience is laid out in a chapter called perspectives from darkness and I made a little bit that chapter because one of the first foundations of fortitude being if we define fortitude is resilience to 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. 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 in the 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 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 and so but but what I write about is is my mother because you know, 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 I watched her deal with breast cancer for five years and 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 does how on earth can someone do that? It’s extremely difficult and not show that kind of resentment bitterness and just raise your kids. So that’s that’s sort of that’s my first hero. No first hero to look at the 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 kind of see what makes him successful and see how he’s done well in his life and maybe copy some things from him. Like how does he talk to people? How does he think through things? What’s the thought process is he use and how does that apply to the hierarchy you want to be better at because it might be different like, you know, you might be an academic you might be in media might be in sports. It gets to the it’s different. So you got to look up to people within your own genre really and the SEAL teams is no different because you’re what am I trying to be a better SEAL a better leader? What makes somebody something that I want to follow? So that’s like that’s chapter two, for instance, one of my favorite chapters is I think it’s a good way to start like how because you got to know what you want to if you want to be somebody who lives with fortitude, you got to know what that looks like first, right? You got to know what you’re aspiring to. It’s a really important. Well, and you can look at you can look at what you admire spontaneously, like obviously you admired your mother spontaneously. And so that’s an instinct. That’s not 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 and kind of a materialistic way. It’s like well just what works like what are the outcomes that actually work for people and what don’t and one of the problems with postmodernism is is trying to make the things that don’t work make them work like socialism hasn’t been tried. You know, it’s like that kind of thing, right? Because it feels good. And and so, you know, then my second real interaction, I suppose, of 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 are you different? Well, I just I think you come I mean, look, I just I think maybe I’ll 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 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 SEALs who aren’t very confident in themselves. And so that’s a good thing. They weren’t cocky. They were most of them were unbelievably funny. They’re unbelievably humorous and I think I’m very funny, you know, and I’m not being overly confident. I think I’m very funny. I’m just humility is not an attribute that we have very much of. So it’s yeah, it changes you. I mean it there’s a culture like I can identify a team guy really easily. First of all, there’s definitely a look right and there’s but the and it’s but there’s a way there’s something in their eyes like I can just tell like what you’ve I can just tell and I don’t know how to describe it to be honest with you and 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. I just it 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 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 have unless you decided that you would die before you quit. You have to 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 like marriage. Yeah. Well, okay, that’s a funny story because because one of that one of the sayings in the seal teams is the only easy day was yesterday. And that that that motto is plastered on the buds grinder and so what me and my wife did knowing understanding that that there’s so many so many good parallels between seal trading and marriage. We went and took our some of our wedding photos right in front of that sign. The only easy day was yesterday. And it’s it’s it’s sort of this no quit attitude and this understanding that look at the only things get harder. So what deal with it? It’s an embrace it embrace the suck. I’m just kind of using slogans from the seal teams at this point, but but they had they have a quite a bit of meaning associated with them embrace the suck and what does that mean? Fundamental. They have meaning because people are actually acting them out. They’re not empty slogans. It’s so they might be comical represent oversimplified representations, but there’s something actually happening. And I like that particular one Bryce suck because 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 we can everything we do and so it always self-imposed like you do you do have it in the back of your mind like I’m not going to die. I’m not actually going to die feels like I’m going to die feels like they’re trying to kill me. But I’m but I know I know that they’re going to save me if I start drowning and people do drown and but we save them. Okay, it’s funny, but it’s it’s it’s it’s horrible, but it’s funny. But there’s a 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 and they love group suffering to this is why people go to organize themselves across the gyms and do these crazy things when 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 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. But you are a conservative. Yeah, right. I just I just think it’s a 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 is it’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 it might I think I think the new insights are really just the old ones like personal responsibility and doing hard things and challenging yourself and just in feeling good about a challenge even if it sucks even if it’s an injustice like I dive into that quite a bit in that because because that’s people’s next question. It’s like well, how can you say all suffering is good like even injustice even things that happened you like what if you lose your eye and go blind. I mean like what you know, well then just look at the silver lining. I mean, it’s I I’m oversimplifying it quite a bit. I 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 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 really are a victim now, I think people over victimize themselves these days to an extraordinary degree. I think they either lie about their victimhood or they or they associate victimhood with bad luck, you know, and then there’s a difference right and neither 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 victor or you can sell 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 we we traversed a lot of ground and you can have me back anytime, you know, 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 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 but you know potential political ambitions many other things but this this was good. So and that ended well. So look, thanks a lot. A and I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for your service. You know, oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, really. I know academics were 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 I never really saw the SEAL teams of service because it was it was this adventure for us. If you look at if you know Matt best he was actually the part of Black Rifle coffee with them and he wrote a book called Thank You for My Service and I think that actually gets really to the 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 yet 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 70 for used a lot a lot more than most people. Well, we need you the world needs you. Please 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.