Shawn Ryan Show - #75 Nick Freitas - Woke Schooling, Identity Crisis, National Divorce and Parenting Advice

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

This week on SRS we're diving into all things society & culture with Former Green Beret and Virginia State Delegate Nick Freitas. Shawn and Nick discuss the shifting political climate across the country as "woke culture" creates unintended targets. Freitas lays out the changing value structure of the modern family and how missing fathers are affecting the growth and success of America's youth. Shawn and Nick also touch on the epidemic of mass shootings that have become the new normal for the United States. If you're struggling to make sense of your place in the world today, this episode is a must listen. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://preparewithshawn.com https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://bubsnaturals.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://americanfinancing.net | 866-781-8900 https://shopify.com/shawn https://blackbufflao.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://gcu.edu/military Nick Freitas Links: Instagram - www.instagram.com/nickjfreitas/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NickFreitasVA Community Chat - https://bit.ly/43zQDLN Twitter - https://twitter.com/NickJFreitas YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/Nickjfreitas Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@MakingTheArgument TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/Nickfreitas3.0 Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Search Coca-Cola Y3000 to learn more. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show this week. This episode, we talk a lot about the current issues that our country faces today. But I think that the most important segment of all, in this entire show, is a discussion that I have with my next guest about all of the fatherless children, fatherless families, kids that are grown up

without a male role model, and the devastation that that can cause in their lives. And then we talk about how to be a good dad, how to be a positive male role model for both your sons and your daughters, something that every father should be paying attention to and wanting to bother themselves with. So if you get anything out of these shows, please like, comment, subscribe, head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Please leave us a review, tell us how we're doing. Patreon, if it wasn't for you guys, we wouldn't need to be doing this. Thank you for the support. Thank you for checking out all of our behind the scenes content on Patreon. Love you guys checking out all of our behind-the-scenes content. On Patreon, love you guys, love all of you. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado,

please welcome former Green Beret and Virginia delegate Nick Friedas to the Sean Ryan show. Cheers. Nick Friedas, welcome to the show, man. No, thank you very much. It's an honor. My pleasure. So, I've been tracking you on Instagram for quite a while now, and you are on Fireman.

And I love just about everything you have to say. And so, took me a couple months to digest some of your content, but we finally got you here, and we got a whole slew of topics that I want to cover with you. So, excited, I really appreciate it. Yeah, but let me give you a quick intro here. So, your Christian, husband, father, former Green Beret, combat veteran, member of the Virginia House of Delegates, grew up in Chino, California, married your high school, sweetheart Tina,

1999, your father of three, two daughters, and one son. Spend some time in the 82nd Airborne, join the Army Special Forces, Green Berets, after 9-11, two tours in Iraq, then you transition to civilian life and... Am I not saying anything? No, you got it. Podcast Earth. Yeah. How do you like doing that?

I love it. It's actually been a lot of fun in part because you get to talk about the things you want to talk about. A lot of times with people that are interesting or have inspired you or that you've read in the past. And that's a lot of fun. I remember the first time we started getting involved in more like short form content and things like that. And my kids would tease me and I loved looking at my teenage daughters. We like, how do you feel about your daddy having more followers

on Instagram than you? Yeah, but it's been good. Good. Well, I got a ton of subjects I want to cover. I'll just run you through them a little bit. I want to talk about leadership of men, veterans, and politics, second amendment, which are huge on school shootings. I'd love to dive into that.

China and Taiwan, national divorce, do some great content on what that might look like. Digital Central Bank, Southern Border, and depending on how much time we got left, we'll get into some UFO stuff, maybe. And I really want to talk to you about homeschooling. And something else that I would like to talk to you about being a man of faith is some of the hypocrisy that's going on in the church, in the Christian Catholic. I believe in Jesus' types, some of the hypocrisy that goes on within the church. But before we dive into all those heavy topics, everybody gets a gift.

Got any, oh no. I'll head lean back. This is, see, there we go, I need a day. I needed one of these because I forgot my coffee mug and that's become, that's kind of how I'm known now. We got you covered. Are these the, oh no. Nice.

So that is... So that you're a coffee guy. Oh, yeah. This is layered superfoods coffee. So that's a mushroom performance coffee. Oh, really? Yeah, so I really got into... After talking, there's a creamer in there too for your wife.

I know you like it black. Yeah. That's what I bet she does. But that's a mushroom performance creamer. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, that's right, but she does. But that's a mushroom performance creamer. Thank you. You're welcome. And so I really, as you know, we cover a lot of, you know,

former veterans, soft guys like me and yourself. And we talk a lot about post-traumatic stress. We talk a lot about traumatic brain injury and just mental health in general. And so I started looking at products to kind of promote brain health and all kind of stem from a psychedelic experience I had. Yeah. And quit drinking for two years afterwards.

Haven't had, I haven't had any caffeine or coffee since then. Not that that's bad, but in a more in the moment, a lot of like positive stuff. And it sent me on this journey to improve my brain health. And I started looking into functional mushrooms and now I'm a partner with layered superfoods. And that's the cleanest stuff you can get for brain health. So I first started reading about that with Jordan.

We actually had legislation last year in the general assembly in Virginia where they were talking about various psychedelics and things like that for treatment. And it was actually a Democrat colleague of mine called me up and said, hey, would you be one of co-patronists? Would you be one to support him? Like, yeah, I'll vote for it. Really? And she was a little bit surprised because the typical response for a lot of Republicans and whenever it comes to drugs and whatnot is like absolutely not known ever. It's all bad.

I was like, well, wait a second. This is, we're actually seeing guys that have had positive results with doing this in a responsible environment. You're just gonna say no. You're gonna make it illegal for them to do something with doing this in a responsible environment, you're just gonna say no, you're gonna make it illegal for them to do something that is helping them. So, no, I appreciate that. My pleasure, my pleasure.

Thank you for helping with the bill. Well, hopefully we'll get it passed next time. Yeah, there's a lot of talk about that all over about in politics with psychedelics and I hope they get psychedelics and I hope they hope they get it through and I hope they do responsibly too because it definitely has there's another side to this. Oh yeah. And I don't want to see psychedelics go down the same road that painkillers and and and Benzo's you know that that that path went down. But

and Benzos, you know, that path went down. But anyways, one thing that I didn't tell you that I wanted to cover is, I don't think it matters what side of the aisle you're on. Everybody thinks that the country is falling apart. It's the first topic of discussion that gets brought up with everyone I talk to. It doesn't matter what their occupation is, it doesn't matter. What side of the fence they're on? It's always what's happened into our country. And Green Brace have, I mean, you guys are the first in, you get in there, you develop a fighting force for the oppressed, and you're very familiar with how this stuff happens. So, how would

you deconstruct and demoralize a nation? I think a lot of it has to do with, I think, in simplest terms, it's an identity crisis. Why do people fight for a nation? What does it even mean to be a part of a nation? It's generally you have a shared cultural, shared experiences, shared icons. You have all of those things which build some sort of connection to the past, and then association with everybody else. So that even if you disagree on various things, there's still unifying components within your culture that you can both harken back to and look on with a certain element of pride. But that also are important for developing traditions.

One of the, there's an interesting quote, I think, I think the, the person names was Bell and he was, he gave a definition of culture and he goes, what is it? He goes, it's society's attempt to come up with a coherent set of answers to the existential questions we face throughout our lives. If you think about that, that kind of works. Culture is not, it's not just skin color, it's not race, it's not food or dress or it's kind of all, it can be all of those things. But it really comes down to fundamental questions that how does a group of people that have individual objectives for their life, different preferences and whatnot, but how do they live in society with one another where they can cooperate

in order to achieve something? And in other times, leave each other alone when they disagree, but still fill a sense of unity, camaraderie, and connection. So how do you break that apart? Well, you have to challenge the overall narrative of of the history. Like, how did you get to where you are today? Because if you take pride in it, well, then it's something worth preserving. And even if you think that there's a problem with it, you might want to fix those problems. So, perfect example within US history would be if you view US history through the lens, the philosophy, the declaration of independence, we believe, we, you know, we find these two self-evident that all men are created equal and that they're endowed by their

creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, you can look back and say, we didn't live up to that. Some people might even say, we still not totally living up to it the way that we should, which is maybe why in the preamble of the Constitution, it says to create a more perfect union is because we recognize. But that sentiment is, I believe, true and noble that you're endowed by your creator, that the rights that you have are not just preferences or gifts that the government gives you, that there's certain rights that are inherent about being a human being, that we are created equal, and that, again, we're endowed by our creator,

unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not the provision of it, the pursuit of happiness. That is a pretty strong, I believe, that's a pretty strong philosophy to build a culture around. But what if I come back later and I tell you that, yeah, that sounds really nice, but the guy that wrote it was just a slave owner.

In fact, all these people that were trying to set up liberty, they just wanted liberty for white men because women couldn't vote at the time. And you know what, they just really didn't want to pay their taxes. That's what this was really about. So what do you have? You have a white patriarchal society that was rooted in enslaving

certain people based off of the color of their skin. And they set up this system because it would be beneficial for them financially. And all of your other ideas or notions about what a wonderful philosophical concept this was, that was marketing. That was marketing to help rich white guys get what they wanted the expense of other people. That's all it was. Or right at the bat, right at the get go. I've completely undermined why you would want to fight for such a culture in the first place. So once I start undermining the cultural ties, the buy now, let's admit a couple of things. We can look back and say there are elements of that statement that are true. But then all of a sudden, when we put it back in context, and we recognized, well, wait a

second, every society at the world at that time had some form of institution of slavery, every single society at that time had some of the bad things, the negative aspects of it that we just discussed. So what was different, what was different was what they were actually rapidly expanding the concept of liberty and suggesting who it should apply to. I mean, to say in 1776, after thousands upon thousands of years of history that were rooted in, I mean, racially based discrimination that were rooted in a political elite controlling everything, you now have somebody say,

no, no, no, we're all created equal. And even if we're not living up to it, that is the standard, that's the truth. That was revolutionary, that's incredible. And it's easy to look back now 200 plus years later and say, well, of course, that's the way it's supposed to be. It wasn't of course back then. They fought for well, of course, that's the way it's supposed to be. It wasn't, of course, back then. They fought for that.

They died for that. They might not have fully lived up to it, but they set us on the path to be able to achieve a level of individual liberty, prosperity, and security that is unheard of in world history. But if I erase all that, and I view it purely from this lens without any context, I can convince you, especially if you're a younger person, I can convince you that this is all bad, especially if you can still look around at society and find certain inequities, right? There's certain disparities of outcome. Well, some disparities of outcome exist because of bad policy.

Some disparities of outcome exist because you're lazy and that dude works hard. That's not an injustice. It's not an injustice to the guy working super hard in a high demand field makes more money than the person that isn't doing those things. But if I can convince you that it actually is injustice. Well, what am I doing? I've taken away your shared history. I've taken away your shared history, I've taken away your shared connection with your neighbor,

and now I'm supplanting that with a different narrative. And that narrative has to be rooted on who do I need to be fighting with the people in power? And that's where I can come up with a whole system of press, a presser. You're the person that the entire system is stacked against. I'm going to essentially galvanize your support, and I'm going to point you at an enemy. Real or imagined.

And I'm going to give you a new narrative, because I can't just say the old narrative is bad. I got to replace it with a new one. So I give you a new narrative, and I make that the narrative worth fighting for, because now your entire identity is caught up in that narrative. It's your entire identity is caught up in that movement, because I haven't left you with anything else, right? Because your nuclear family, that's a tool of the patriarchy, right? Your country, that's just racist, bigoted, and discriminating, right? You're very identity. Well, I don't know. If you are a certain skin color or you're heterosexual

or whatever else, well, you're part of the oppressor class. How do I get you into the, how do I move you from the oppressor class into an ally class or the oppressed who are the good guys? We have to change the nature of your identity. What if it doesn't correspond with reality? What objective reality? Postmodernism tells us there is no objective reality.

There is no objective truth. There is only lived experience. There's only oppressor and oppressed. And if you're an oppressor, you're a bad guy that needs to be taken down, and there's nothing you can do. It's the, as my friend Christian puts it, it's the original sin theory with no redemption. I do all of those things, and now I have a very powerful group It's the original send theory with no redemption.

I do all of those things, and now I have a very powerful group of very disaffected people that have a philosophy rooted in nothing other than the movement. Yeah. And at that point, now it's just to run through the cultural institutions. It's everything Gramsci talked about

in Italy in the 1930s. It's the idea of looking at the institutions which form culture. And we tend to look toward politics, but politics is downstream from culture. The real culturally shaping institutions are your school system, your academia, media, the arts and entertainment, Hollywood. They're the ones that are actually telling you the stories about who you are, what your the arts and entertainment, Hollywood, they're the ones that are actually telling you the stories about who you are, what your country is, and everything else. And if they've all decided on a particular narrative, and that narrative is rooted in the like in the United

States, largely in postmodernism, deconstructionism, critical theory, and now all of a sudden, your feet are firmly planted and nothing, well then that identity crisis provides me a huge opportunity to be able to destabilize what it is and replace it with what I want it to be. How do you think they got, how do you think all these academia, the school system, Hollywood, the media, how do they all wind up on the same narrative? I think the overly simplistic answer is the Yuri Bezmanov answer. And Yuri Bezmanov was a former... He worked. He wasn't a KGB agent. He actually worked kind of in journalism

and he arranged a lot of these junkets for foreign diplomats and foreign journalists to come into the USSR at the time and write positive stories, but he essentially worked with the KGB. And he talked about a system called active measures. And this is something we know, it's not conspiracy theory. The KGB involved themselves in active measures, which were attempts to destabilize foreign countries in order to make them more friendly to Marxism and specifically the USSR.

Now you could argue, well, hasn't the United States also tried to do that in order to get people closer to them? It's a little bit different with respect to how it was done, but in certain cases, it could be, there could be similarities, or there are similarities. I don't think that's wrong in the sense that it did happen. We know what happened. We know that the Soviet Union worked very, very hard on infiltrating into areas of academia and the arts and entertainment because they realized they were culturally shaping institutions. Fidel Castro once said, he was invited to go speak at Harvard, he once said he goes, you don't find the radicals in the labor unions, you find them in the schools.

So we know that took place. The other thing that I think took place, and this was something that the Gramsci wrote about, which Gramsci was an Italian socialist who was jailed by Mussolini, who had also been an Italian socialist before he became a fascist. But one of the things they talked about was that when Marx first started talking about his concept of revolution and workers of the world unite. His idea was that people generally saw themselves as being economic entities. So the primary kind of individual identity was rooted in your economic class. And he actually believed that a nation had to go through capitalism before I could get to communism. What they found out in practice

has never worked that way. It wasn't the Western capitalist countries and democracies that embraced Marxism. It was feudal Russia, it was Zara's Russia. And they started to recognize and Graham Sheeran's a lot about this where he talks about the march through the institutions or that's what has become dubbed.

And it was this idea that it's not good enough to simply say, hey, you workers of the world unite because honestly, on a pound-for-pound basis, workers in the West and within predominantly free market economy, tend to be doing better than in these other places. It goes, it's the entire culture that has to be changed. So if you look at it from the standpoint of you, you had a already made philosophy with Marxism and critical theory, which has a very different, people look at that as almost a purely economic, people who don't really follow it, look at it as almost a purely

economic theory, it's not. It's an entire social theory. There's a reason why it's hostile to God, it's hostile to the individual family, it's hostile to everything that is, we generally think of as being rooted in Western free market, representative democracies and republics. So if you have the philosophy and you now have a government which is engaging in active measures in order to try to put that philosophy in there, you have a core that you can work with. So what else did they have within the United States? What was the legitimate critique of the United States when a lot of this was going during the Cold War,

racism and segregation? That was a legitimate critique. Oh yeah, you talk about your great freedom, you talk about your wealth, but look at what you're doing with Jim Crow laws. Look at what you're doing, perfectly valid critique. Look at what you're doing. Perfectly valid critique. Now, the Frederick Douglass response to that sort of thing that he addressed in the 1800s was he didn't throw out the constitution, the Declaration of Independence. He appealed to them.

He looked at all men are created equal and says, no, no, you're not living up to what you believe and you should live up to it. This new move and it was like, what you believe was always wrong in the first place and we need to replace it with something else. And that's the radically egalitarianism, collectivism. But these things don't just work because the KGB decided to infiltrate some universities or Hollywood.

Do you get the feeling that something unthinkable KGB decided to infiltrate some universities or Hollywood. Do you get the feeling that something unthinkable is gonna happen soon? I know I sure as hell do. But with all the distractions and smoke screens in the media, we probably won't even see it coming. That's why it's smart to invest in emergency food today. A wise man once said it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

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period at Shopify.com slash Sean. That's all lower case. Go to Shopify.com slash Sean to take your business to the next level today. Shopify.com slash Sean. It works, I believe, in part because, and this is rooted in my faith. And I think Christianity doesn't just, I don't think it's just a nice story. I don't think it's just a nice set of morals. I think it does more to explain the human condition than anything I've ever read. This idea that there is a sinful nature that we contend with, but there's also such a thing as love, justice, and redemption. There's such a thing as objective right and wrong.

There's such a thing as objective truth. Well, if you're going up in a society where you've been rooted in none of that or it's been ripped out of you or you've been convinced that this is all about inequity and disparity of outcomes, and therefore the proper way to address it is going to be through political action and the accumulation of political power

so you can punish the oppressors and lift up and liberate the oppressed. Right, and look, as a Green Beret, our motto was to free the oppressed. Mm-hmm. But that's the part where that is an appealing message in part because we ultimately don't want to come to full grips with the evil that resides in us. Spent time in combat, when you've spent time, I think, in law enforcement, and other people just by nature of finding themselves in very dangerous or abusive situations, evil becomes a very, very real thing.

It's no longer just some nice philosophical construct with a bunch of people discussing what constitutes evil or how do we measure it. When you've seen truly horrible things, the way I put it once is you don't, I don't think you fully recognize evil when you see it, you realize what it is when it looks back. Yeah. And I would agree with that.

Yeah. And so I think we have a lot of people that don't want to contend with that. They want to believe that it's kind of beyond their control. And so they're going to put the responsibility onto the movement to make everything better. And they'll act within the movement, obviously. But when the movement does something

no matter how horrible in order to achieve these positive in states, well, that's justifiable. It was necessary. What did Mao say? You know, you know, a revolution is not a dinner party. There's another book called The True Believer, where he talks about the nature of mass movements. And one of the things he really stresses in that

is the danger of movements which stress to separate people from everything they've known, from maybe it's from God, maybe it's from their family, maybe it's from their traditions. And having left orphaned, the movement becomes the new family and the movement becomes the sense of their identity. And without the movement, they don't know who they are.

And so whatever the movement needs to do in order to justify its objectives, ultimately becomes morally acceptable. Where do you think, where does this stem from? I ask everybody this when we get into these conversations, where do you personally think this is stemming from? Is it Russia? No. I think, um, I mean, I, again, I think a lot of the,

the economic, social and and political philosophy which motivates it is rooted in critical theory, which is rooted in Marxism, which is also, again, heavily picked up and influenced by postmodernism deconstruction, which leads to critical race, theory, and queer theory, and everything else. I think all of that provides an almost comprehensive picture of what's going on, but I think it's more fundamental than that. And this is the part where people get uncomfortable with this as a theological conversation.

But let's think about this logically for a minute. If everybody has a worldview, and the starting point of every person's worldview relies on some element of faith. The atheist may say, I don't know, I don't put my faith in anything. I trust logic. So you have faith in logic because logic cannot ultimately justify its own existence. You can argue it's apri or I, if you'd like, but it doesn't. You're going to run into problems.

How do you trust your own mind to properly interpret logic? Everybody's worldview starts with that fundamental position. My fundamental position is that there is a God, there is right and wrong, there is objective truth, there is objective morality, and my job is to seek out and understand that. Because in so far as I can live in accordance with that, I can achieve my purpose, I can take care of my family,

I can do noble and good things, because there's now a measurement for that, which is noble and good. If you reject that, or if you want to rebel against her, you want to replace it with something else. Because that's the key. It's this idea that once I get rid of God, it's not that I replace it. Yeah, you do. You have to. By the very definition of how you interpret reality, your world view has to have a starting point. But apart from that, what is it?

Is it your personal preference? Is it what gives you pleasure? Is it what gives you power? I mean, Nietzsche pretty much broke it down that you're going to have the quest for pleasure, the quest for power, perhaps a quest for both, but is that really enough to sustain you or give you genuine purpose or meaning? What if it's untrue?

I know a lot of unhappy rich people. I know a lot of unhappy, powerful people. So I do believe it's fundamental. And again, for me, that's really simple. I think I believe what Christ said. And I believe that's not rooted in wishful thinking. I mean, my gosh, if you were gonna try to create a religion or a worldview that was gonna make your life easier,

you would not pick Christianity. Yeah, that's true. But I wanna pick which true, because ultimately without truth, and without the believe that there's such a thing as objective truth, how do you even arrive at love? How do you arrive at logic? How do you arrive at science? How do you arrive at justice? What is justice if there's no such thing as objective truth?

How do you define it? And what I see is a lot of people that want to ignore the fundamentals and then chase after these things that give them this temporary sense of meaning or purpose or community or whatever else, but ultimately it all rings hollow because they're trying to replace something that is not going to be replaced by a movement or a feeling or a sexual act or whatever else it is. And the only thing I can say is when you find it and you know what it is, the greatest proof, for me, what I found is going to sound a little esoteric, but I don't know how else to put it.

The greatest proof that I personally experienced, aside from digging into the history of like scripture, digging into the logic of it, or digging into the logic of it or digging into the epistemology of it There's this verse that says that the talks about the peace which surpasses all understanding And we we're living in a country right now where people are desperate to find some sort of of peace like that Mm-hmm

And what I find fascinating about that verse is it doesn't say you'll have peace. It doesn't say the peace that everyone clearly understands because obviously everything's going good for you and everything's wonderful and everything's rosy. It says the peace which surpasses all understanding, which means the rest of the world is looking in going, how is this possible?

This is, it's chaos and it's poverty and it's violence and it's everything else. And for some reason, this guy isn't shaken. Why? Because I already know what I believe. Faith, my identity is in Christ. It's not in any of this temporary stuff. Some of this stuff might be good,

it might be worthwhile, it might be worth fighting for, but I know where my identity is. And if you know that, well then yeah bad things are going to happen. You got the mechanism to fight against it. You got the mechanism to create something beautiful out of struggle and challenge. But if you don't even know who you are, what you're doing here, what your purpose is, I mean that's miserable. Yeah. Man, that's miserable. Yeah.

Man, that's a great way to put it. What percentage of the population's culture here in the US do you think has changed? Because reason I'm asking, and I don't know if you've ever thought about it if you have it, and that's fine. But, you know, you look around, if you look at the media, you look at social media, you look at everything you're being told what the schools are saying, maybe not all the schools, but I mean, there's a big problem in education.

And academia, you know, it looks like this culture shift is everywhere, like everywhere. Do you think that there is actually that many people here in the U.S. who have shifted their culture into this new, whatever you want to call it, the woke agenda, or whatever, or do you think this is a facade that's put on by Hollywood, academia, media? I think that, what was it? I think it was Samuel Adams that was saying that all you need is a really dedicated

minority. It's not majorities that actually start revolutions or change things. It's a very, very dedicated and determined minority. I think, I don't think a majority of Americans, like if you sat them down, would sit there and say, yes, I genuinely believe that if you identify as X, Y, and Z, well then reality has changed or adjusted that to make it so.

I don't think they really believe that. But what does it matter if they're not willing to say it's wrong? Yeah. And there's this, there's this, there was a guy that wrote a book. He was a doctor. His pen name is Theodore Dalrumpel. I think his actual name is Anthony, I think it's Anthony Davies.

But he was a British doctor in sub-Sahara Africa, and then he worked in the British Health Service, and the prison services, like Hiatris, for many years years and he wrote a book called The Life at the Bottom. And he's not a Christian. I think he's an atheist or maybe he's a deist. Or agnostic, I'm not sure. But he had this quote. He said he goes, the more I studied communist propaganda, the more I recognized that it wasn't meant to inform, but it was meant to humiliate and intimidate. And therefore, the less it corresponded with reality, the more effective it was.

Because when you can first convince someone to be silent in the midst of obvious lies and then get them to repeat those lies, you make them a party to evil. And he concluded it by saying, such a society or a society composed of a masculated liars is easy to control. He said, I've since come to the conclusion that political correctness works the same way and for the same reasons. So I don't know that a majority believe it. What I'm wondering is, where is our strong minority that's going to stand up and call this for what it is? Because most people are very, very consumed with just trying to live their lives. And if just living their lives means going along with whatever intellectual absurdity happens to be

popular today. They may be willing to accept it thinking it's just a fat only to wake up too late to find out it wasn't. Do you think it's a fat? No, I don't either. I think I see I see more and more people starting to speak up about it. I see it in numbers, I see it in ratings, I see, I find my hope hidden in like these small pockets, you know, and I look at, I look at media numbers, they're sinking dramatically, you know, it's, it's, it it's been a huge downslope since 2020. And it's just spiraling out of control, like they're like now that they're just grabbing onto anything they can possibly get to try to get them numbers.

And you know, and then I look at things like, we're both podcasts, just we look at the top podcasts, all the top podcasts, not all of them. A lot of them are talking about things like this when that gives me help. You know, to see like the things that you can't, I mean, I guess they could fudge them, but they're not being fudged 100% yet. And you're seeing, you know, these up, you see the bud light thing, you see the target thing. You know, and that gives me hope.

I think there's, but I agree with you, you know, what's the old saying, evil prevails when good men do nothing and even just people always wanna know, I mean, I'm sure you get it on your podcast too. You know, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? What can I do? To your point, just because I don't think it's a fat

and just because I don't think, and just because I do think it has gained far more prominence than we realize, doesn't mean I'm not hopeful. And the reason why I am hopeful is because I actually don't think, I don't think it's gonna take as much as a lot of people think it will to beat it back. My concern is where they're going to look to do that. And I think a lot of people will look at it, a lot of people that, let's say, more on

the conservative or even more of like the libertarian side, less the libertarians, more the conservatives are like, well, if we just elect the right people, yeah. Look, I'm going to elect the official. I'm not telling anybody politics is important. But, you know, as we talked about at one point, if you are waiting around for a politician to preserve your liberties or to protect your family or to protect you, you're a failure. or to protect your family or to protect you, you're a failure. And I don't know how else to put it. My job, and here's the part two for,

because men are especially under attack right now. Those men that believe in traditional standards of what they're supposed to do, as men, as husbands, as fathers, as protectors, as providers, they're all being told that these are toxic attributes. And it's like, no, when you look at things like aggression, when you look at things like a capacity

and a capability for violence, those are not toxic in and of themselves. They're morally neutral. And I will tell you this, if the good guys don't know how to use those things, they're gonna be ruled by the bad guys. And so that instinct that young men have, and they're looking for leadership, and they're not seeing it, they're the ones that are start to, when they, when they see the stuff that

you talk about, when they see some of these other podcasts and all of a sudden it's like they have a sanctuary of people that are telling them that, no, those instincts that you have are good, but they have to be developed and they have to be fostered in such a way as to serve the noble and the just and the true as opposed to giving it into the other use cases for them. And that's the part where when people start recognizing

that a lot of the best way to fight against this is not just to be active politically, it's not just to, you know, go out and protest and things like that. If you want to, if you want to point out a lie, the very next thing you better do is point to the truth. And the truth is never going to be adequately defended simply by a good argumentation. It's going to be adequately defended by you living it out in your life and people seeing the fruit of that. We did these things. We told culture to go pound sand to piss off.

And we adopted these things that we knew that we're gonna be true with the way that we ran our marriage, with the way that we raised our kids, with the way that we raised our business, with the way that we conduct ourselves, with our friends, with our family, with our community, and this success speaks for itself. Because this other path will lead to chaos.

It is only a matter of time. It is not an if, it is a when, and is a how bad. And when people feel like, and when people finally wake up to the point that we were like to about this, one of two things is going to happen. They're either going to jump onto the next slide, which happens to be convenient and grab their attention, or they're actually going to be convinced of the truth because there was enough people willing to fight for it and actually display it. I love hearing that. Let's talk about sometimes people can do. Back to that quote, Back to that quote, evil prevails when good men do nothing.

There are so many, I think Americans, they've been spoon fed everything, you know? And when I say good men do nothing, I'm not saying you need to get out in protest, get out and start a revolution, any of that shit. I'm saying just do something, get loud about it. Let's talk about, like, I wanna talk about this anyway, so let's just do it now, school shootings. Yeah.

You know, what I see, and this has been going on forever. I tried to get involved with the, after Parkland happened several years ago, and all I see over and over and over again, you know, our parents, want to pass the buck, you know, it's the second amendments fault, it's the school's fault, it's the police officer's fault, it's the security guys fault, it's always everybody else's fault. My question is, what did you do as a parent to teach your kid what to do when this happens? It's happening. Politicians aren't doing anything about it. This has been going on

for, I wish I knew how many years, at least 20 years, you know, and it just happened here in happened here in Nashville, Tennessee, you know, with Covenant. And every time this happened, you see these parents, and it's, well, why aren't they gonna hire this? Why aren't they gonna hire that? And here in Franklin, there's a school, a private Christian school, and everybody goes on about this, right?

Nobody wants to do anything. The parents all got together and they said hey We want to pay you more We want to pay you more to get a field security officer in your real one and Which I think that's great. Why wouldn't you do that? Why wasn't it done 20 years ago? Well the administration at the school basically told the parents Absolutely not we're not doing that the administration at the school basically told the parents, absolutely not. We're not doing that.

I don't know anybody that took their kids out of the school and put them into a place that does have one. Yeah. That's what you do. That's how you fix this shit. You remove your kid from the business that you're supporting, the school, and put them into a school that's doing the right thing. And then when they have no more students,

they'll realize they're gonna go broke and starve and maybe they'll start doing the right thing or they'll stay on their high horse and starve. But it's little things like that. You don't agree with what Target's doing? I know it's convenient. I know you live five blocks away from there, spend the extra 15 minutes and go to Walmart

or go to whatever store that's not pushing that agenda. You know, and, but they don't do it. Well, if you, if you, it's that simple though, that's doing something. Yes. No, no, I agree. I think that I will see people come on and they'll ask the same questions. And we've done a lot of episodes on our podcast talking about what can you do? And one of the biggest things that we push to everybody is stop, stop with this idea that

what you can do is, again, vote for president or what you can do is, again, vote for president or what you can do is, you know, change things which are so far beyond your control that you're going to get easily frustrated and quit. So what are practical things you can do? And oh, by the way, how do you develop discipline? How do you develop good habits? And then don't look for the, don't look for the suckiest thing you could possibly do first. When I walked in during COVID to the grocery store

and I saw bear shelves for the first time in my adult life in America. That really hit me home when I was like, this is bad. And it's not like I thought I was going to last forever, but I didn't like the feeling. Well, there's two approaches you can take from that feeling. You can take the approach of, somebody needs to do something about this. Or you can take the approach, I need to do something about this. All right, so what can I do? Well, I can't

open up a grocery store. This is not store. Okay, can I grow a garden? Is there any sort of animals that I can raise? I started to get really, really interested in the homesteading movement, you know, right around COVID. And we had always had a garden before we'd had chickens before and stuff like that. But I started looking at that from the perspective of And we had always had a garden before we'd had chickens before and stuff like that. But I started looking at that from the perspective of how much could I grow? How much, I mean, can I really take care of, let's say, the significant amount of the needs for my family and potentially my friends and whatnot. If we just learn more about gardening, raising some really simple livestock, preserving food,

and here's what I found. It was therapeutic as hell. I'm now the main guy that loves to garden in the house. I got my tomato plants, I'm my zucchini, and my cucumbers, and everything else. We've raised pigs before, haven't had the best luck. But we've raised pigs before, meat chickens, regular chickens.

We know how to raise goats now. It's what we found is that it was a positive thing for which we already had some level of interest in, and it provided a level of resilience. And then it provided a level of opportunity to learn something new that was kind of fun. And then it provided a new community of people that thought the same way about this particular problem.

And oh, by the way, we're more than happy to help and encourage you in it. And then by the way, it provided an opportunity to be able to spend time with your kids working on something or trying something out that was fun. Like part of my son's homeschool project this year is he loves Sriracha. All right, dude. Well, I just grew a bunch of red, you know, jalapenos. They're turning red. We're just sitting there and we're're gonna learn how to make this.

So find things that you already have. Like, if something really concerns you to the point where, hey, this keeps you up. And you have some sort of talent or skill or just interest and how you could potentially alleviate that. Start there, start there, learn something new, learn a skill, get a part of a community. Again, I found, I cannot tell you how much encouragement and joy I have found in, and I would not

consider myself like a full-on-home stutter or anything like that. But just the going to one of these conferences where there's four or five thousand people there. And everyone's got their kind of things that this person keeps bees. We keep bees now, right? These person keeps bees and this person over here, they raise cattle and this person raises pork and this person has a really great process for maximizing your tomato yield or something like that. And they can't wait to tell you about it and they can't wait to help you with it. And they want you to be successful. And they're honest about, oh, dude, I did this and I tell you about it. And they can't wait to help you with it. And they want you to be successful.

And they're honest about, oh, dude, I did this and I totally botched it. That exists for all kinds of things. So finding those communities of people with like-minded values and then developing those core strengths and capabilities that make you more resilient and don't make you as dependent upon, you know, the latest policy that comes out. Like, okay, now I know that I have a community where I'm not, I don't

have to trust the public school system with my children because now I feel empowered to be able to do that myself. I don't have to trust the grocery store, this supply chain or COVID lockdowns to determine where I'm going to be able to get food because I know the rancher down the road because I met him at the Homesteaders Convention. I know how to grow a significant portion of food and you know what? I can trade and I can do these other things. And you know what? I don't need to be worried about the hospital telling me I'm not allowed to come any more

unless I've got a vaccine because I'm good friends with the nurse that I met at the Homesteaders Convention or that I met at something else I did. Build those sort of communities that add resilience to the make you less dependent because the more dependent you are upon a government, which is perfectly willing to tell you what to do and try to micromanage and control your life for your own good, of course. The more you're dependent on them, the less likely you're going to be in a position to be able to resist if you really need to. And that doesn't just apply to a government. It applies to an entertainment industry.

It applies to a food supply industry. It applies to any number of things. And so when you start looking for, how can I develop a little bit of resilience in this area? Chances are you will find something that you actually enjoy and then you'll seek out ways to expand and find other people that are like-minded and work on it.

There you go. Very point. You know, it comes down, I think in the end, it just, it comes down to sacrifice. And you see all these people just like you said, somebody's got to find, we got to find somebody to fix this. Well, if you're not willing to sacrifice anything for your own well-being, nobody else is going to give a shit about your well-being, nobody else is going to give a shit about your well-being. And it's so it could be the simplest sacrifice is don't shop there anymore. Change schools,

put your kids in a different school, homeschool, you know, that would be significant, homeschooling versus going to school, but it's all these little things that you can do. You know, don't listen to that channel, don't watch that channel, don't do this. You know, just quit supporting what doesn't align with your values. And you don't even got to, I mean, if you think about it, especially now there are so many options out there in so many ways. It's not like you're sacrificing in the sense of like,

okay, I'm pissed at target, so I'm not gonna shut, you got all kinds of options. Or I'm mad at Hulu, and so I'm not gonna, whatever it is. Okay, replace it with something else. I mean, that's how, I mean, when you talk to people when they deal with issues of addiction and things like that, very seldom is it exclusively just stop doing that thing.

It's you replace something negative with something positive. You replace something that was perverse or bad or whatever it is with something that's actually uplifting and good. And after a while, you end up seeing how your preferences change in favor of the good, the more exposure you have to it. The bad is easy. That's one of the biggest,

that's one of the biggest allurements of it is it's easy. It's dopamine hits. It's convenience. But if you think about most of the things in your life that actually give you like real, a real sense of like meaning, purpose, and accomplishment. They weren't the things that were the temporary little dopamine hits.

They were something that actually required a little bit of refinement or not just motivation but discipline. So sacrifice. Yes. Some initial sacrifice up front to where the thing that you were sacrificing to do this over here, all of a sudden became the thing that you truly enjoy. And you said something else that I like about.

I've gotten a little bit, let me put it this way. I understand the colloquial nature or the common nature of the way it's different, but I've gotten so sick of hearing people say, like, I'm gonna fight for this, I'm gonna fight for that. I'm gonna, what do, I'm gonna fight for that, I'm gonna, what do you mean going to? Yeah.

This fight didn't start yesterday, Haas. Don't tell me what you're gonna fight for, you better start showing me your scars. Where did you show up? What wounds do you have? Because of all you are, is the noble spectator shouting from the sidelines on how everyone else should be doing it better.

Dude, screw you. Yeah. Screw you, dude, screw you. Screw you. Get in the fight. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. And there's a lot of people listening right now, especially when I'm talking about this school thing who are listening and they're going, yeah, that's me.

Kids still going to the same school. Nobody's watching. There's no way there's no- How dare you make bad about there's been no security measures for the next active shooter But because it happened two months ago. We're just gonna let this slide and let it go until the next time Because what's worse than the chance a big shit storm and do a bunch of yelling and outrage and make a bunch of social media posts And then nothing's gonna change and we'll shut up and go, you know, it's the only thing. The only thing that they want to change

as far as the outrage crowd, or typically, what they want to change is they want to drastically and fringe on the rights of people that didn't go in and shoot up any schools. That's their solution. This guy went in and shot up a school. What's your solution? Hey, all of you that didn't go in and shoot up a school,

get hand over your guns. Because that's gonna deter this guy. And I'm looking at this going, wait a second, guns have been around in massive quantities in the United States for hundreds of years. Schools have been around for over 100 years in the United States. Like the large-scale public schools that we see now on some level.

It used to be that during hunting season, boys would show up with their shotguns in the truck on school so they could immediately get out to the fields as soon as school was over. Yet we didn't have this problem. So here's my question, if we're thinking about this logically, because I get the visceral emotional reaction to the tragedy, I understand that the visceral emotional reaction to the tragedy.

I understand that. But an emotional reaction, that emotion that you feel, that's an invitation to thought. And if you don't actually say, I want to understand this problem well enough to be able to actually offer something beneficial to solving it, then you're not trying to solve a problem. You're trying to solve how you feel about the problem. You're trying to get rid of your angst. This makes me feel bad and I don't want to feel bad. How can I not feel bad?

I'm gonna go on social media and I'm gonna demand that we repeal the Second Amendment, or I'm gonna call everybody that's a gun owner, complicit in the murder, even though they had nothing to do with it. And that's gonna make me feel like I'm one of the good people. Yeah. I'm one of the good people.

No, you're not. The only problem you wanted to solve was your own angst. Because if you really wanted to solve this problem, you would start asking questions like, why are school shootings like this, a recent phenomenon in American history? Gun ownership is not a recent phenomenon. Schools are not a recent phenomenon.

People taking guns to schools is not a recent phenomenon. If you not a recent phenomenon. People taking guns to schools is not a recent phenomenon. If you look at the example I use with respect to hunting, so why is it different now? And that's the part where I think there's two things you have to look at. One is how do you address the immediate problem? Why don't you address the immediate problem by telling a bunch of people that did nothing wrong,

that they have to give up essential civil liberties? I think you address it by having more security in the places which have become vulnerable targets. That's how you address the immediate problem. The larger problem that you have to address, and this is the part that they really don't want to talk about, is how do we get to a point where there is such a disregard for human life that somebody believes that a perfectly legitimate way to express their frustration with the world is to shoot the most innocent within our society. Why don't we have to start to ask some real questions about this whole concept of there being no such thing as objective truth or objective morality?

On some level, what did we expect? You teach kids that if it feels good, do it, that there's nothing wrong with them, they're just self-esteem needs to improve, that when something does go wrong, it's everybody else's fault, or it's society's fault at large, that they're part of either an oppressed or oppressor class by virtue of their birth. They don't have any say or control over it. There is no objective morality, there is no objective truth, and it's all just about self-actualization.

What's the most truest version of you that you can get to? Anything standing in the way of that is bad, even though we don't have any mechanism to declare something objectively bad. But that's bad. It stands in the way of you being you. What happens if one day you being you is manifesting that frustration and an act of violence against somebody else, within those same people that peddled that philosophy to that kid,

since they were little, show up and say, how could you do this? What do you mean, how could they do it? There's no good and evil, there's preference, there's self-actualization, there's the truest form of me. I never thought of that. You don't get to raise a society of children that have repeatedly heard from an early age, that everything is everybody else's fault

and there's no such thing as good or evil. It's just about perspective and narrative. And then be surprised when it manifests itself in something truly horrible. And now all of a sudden, you don't have a way to categorize it. Or the only way you can't categorize is you have to borrow from the very morality that you said then it exists.

Unless we're willing to address that at a fundamental level, then yeah, we're going to end up in a fundamental level, then yeah, we're going to, we're in a really horrible situation where we need more armed security at schools. I don't want that to be the perpetual existence of our educational system, but I don't know how it can't be if we're going to continue to sell kids that they're just accidents of evolution with no ultimate purpose or meaning in their life. And this is all about the quest for power or the quest for pleasure. And then be surprised when they find pleasure or they find power in ways that we never anticipated.

It's a damn good point. On the topic of school shootings, do you have any plans on, do you have any ideas on how to fix this now? I think there's two ways that we, there's a couple different ways we have to address it. So in the realm of politics, you always got to thank from the position of what's the ideal and how do I move people toward it that don't want to get there. So obviously the ideal would be we don't have to worry about this. It's just not something that we have to conceive of. It doesn't happen.

Again, we have to address the philosophical side of this. One of the biggest problems that we have on that side too is an absence of fathers in the home. Now a lot of dads today are gonna say, well, that's because the wife kicked me out or whatnot. I get it. I realize that everything is messed up with respect to the concept of the nuclear family right now. Now, a lot of dads today are going to say, well, that's because the wife kicked me out or whatnot. I get it. I realize that everything is messed up with respect to the concept of the nuclear family

right now. But if you want to look at every crime statistic out there, father's not being in the home is probably the leading indicator of whether or not your child is going to get in trouble, react violently in situations, end up in jail, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of that is not a, that's not a political solution. We can't solve that. And politicians tell me that we can't solve it by taking people's guns are either horribly ignorant or lying to you. And regardless of what the reason is, they don't deserve a position of public trust. So all right, we have it. We have a vulnerable area. The vulnerable area is the school. If you are going to insist on maintaining

the public school system the way it currently exists, where we essentially assign you a school based off of your geography, then you're going to have more armed security with respect to the schools. You're also going to have to look at other security measures that you can put in place, which make it more difficult for someone to get into that environment and commit mass

violence. So that does come to a degree with armed security because one of the things we do know is that people don't tend to target places where they know that there is competent armed security. Part of it I have to do with defensive measures with respect to how you protect kids within the classroom, how do you make it difficult for someone to be able to enter a room, all of those things. Nobody satisfied with those things because it doesn't stop the guy from showing up with the gun. It just creates a bunch of countermeasures to that. The other side of this, and this is something that has always confused me, and I don't mean to go off topic, but it's somewhat related.

There's this example that I use when I try to explain what I think is problematic about the way that we run schooling in this country. And here's how I usually explain it. I said, I want you to imagine that, you know, we all recognize education is incredibly important. We all recognize that kids should all be educated. We also recognize that we want

everybody to have enough food to eat. So let's assume one day a bunch of politicians got together and said, you know what's the primary way to solve this food issue? Is we're going to open up 10,000 government grocery stores. And we're going to assign you a government grocery store based off of your address. And when you show up to the government grocery store, you're not actually going to shop for any of your groceries. Your groceries are going to be handed to you based off of a local and state board which will determine the appropriate caloric intake for your family. Now if you don't like what's in your grocery bag, no problem. You're just going to go ahead and lobby your local board and your state board and you're

going to attempt to get them to add different things to your grocery bag and take other things out. But of course, when they make those decisions, it won't be for your family alone. They'll be making it for all of the families within the state of the jurisdiction. Not to mention the fact that none of the employees working at this government grocery store are ever going to be rewarded based off of their own ingenuity, work ethic, creativity. They're just going to be rewarded based off of seniority. The longer there, they're the more they get paid. Anybody think that would be a good way to manage food or grocery stores? It is exactly what we did with public education.

You are assigned a public school based off of your geography and you're required to go to it unless you can afford an alternative, even though we tax you for it. Then when you go to it, you have no say over your curriculum, you have no say over your class structure, you really have no say over a lot of the extracurriculars. It is what it is. Now, if you want to change it, you go to your school board, you go to the state, and you lobby the government to try to change it while powerful unions and other institutions which have far more influence than you compete against you.

And then none of the teachers are really rewarded based off of their creativity, ingenuity, or work ethic. They're just rewarded based off of their seniority. We have created a situation, which I don't think works well for education, and which I also think creates significant security issues, because if you are someone looking for a vulnerable target, well, a school full of 3,000 students might actually fit the bill.

So how could we reimagine education in such a way to where we actually get better educational outcomes, and we create better security situations? Well, if we had a system, and some people don't like this, because the government's still involved, I acknowledge that, but if you had a system where dollars follow students, well, now I as the parent, I get to choose if my kid goes to that school or that school.

Yeah. So, now when that school decides we don't think armed security is the answer, sweet. I'm taking my kid and their money and I'm going to this school over here, where they do think armed security is important. And just like you said, what happens? Well, now we have market forces in play.

And if you're at the sort of school that doesn't wanna take school security seriously, you're gonna lose students, which means you're gonna lose funding. Right now, as school screws seriously, you're going to lose students, which means you're going to lose funding. Right now, as school screws up, they get more funding in the hopes that that will make the situation better. And if it doesn't, well, it's probably because they need more funding. And you see how this perpetual loop works.

So part of it is the is, yes, if we're going to keep the school system the way it currently is, we're going to need a lot more arm security and a lot more defensive measures. And then I would argue we're also going to need a lot harsher penalties for people that actually commit those sorts of acts of violence. On the family side and on the philosophical side, we're probably going to have to stop telling kids that there is no such thing as objective morality or objective truth. From the parent side, we're going to have to start telling parents, guess what? It is ultimately your responsibility.

And I know that's, I know that kind of sucks. And I'm certainly not telling a parent who had their child shot at a school where they never anticipated there would be a problem that they're somehow to blame. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you have this as a concern and you're not doing anything about it,

I'm gonna start to ask why is that? And if it's like, because I feel powerless, well, if you feel powerless with your kid at that school, send him to a different one. Well, if you feel powerless with your kid at that school, send him to a different one. Well, I can't afford to. Okay, on some level, I'm willing to work with you to figure this out, but.

You got a sacrifice, something. You've got to figure out how big of a concern is this for you. And then secondly, if we can actually get with a model, where now parents have real power, because right now, parents' solution to security issues, or any issue at their school is, I'm gonna show up to my school board, and I'm gonna talk at my school board,

and then I'm gonna try to elect school board members, or I'm gonna try to elect state legislators that set the policy. Okay, those are worthwhile endeavors. But imagine the moment a school doesn't take the security of your child seriously. You call them up and say, just want to you know, little Sally, little Johnny, yeah, I'm pulling them out of your school. And I'm sending my kids to a school that actually puts that's an immediate response. That gives you instant power. And here's the

real question that we should be asking, why are so many people in a position of political power and influence? Why are so many people in a position of bureaucratic influence so terrified of a prospect, of a system that would give parents that kind of immediate power with respect to the education and safety of their children? Someone tells me maybe they're benefiting so much from the system as it is,

that they don't want any changes to that. They just want guns taken away. Yeah. I don't think it really solves the problem. What about, talk about bright flag laws. Yeah. I know you're big on that. I think red flag laws in a, in a,

in just like a popular setting, mm-hmm. Are the easiest ones for the other side to argue for. Because we all have this natural inclination that well, yeah, of course, we don't want, you know, violent, unstable, you know, people dealing with significant mental health issues to be able to go out and buy a gun.

That all seems infinitely reasonable. And on some level, that is, right? That narrative is reasonable. But that's not necessarily what red flag laws do. What a red flag law does is it says that like in Virginia, if you have a concern about somebody, let's say you don't like your neighbor, and you can go to the magistrate.

Magistrate is not a lawyer necessarily. They've just been appointed by the court. You can go to the magistrate and say, yeah, I think my neighbor is a real threat. That magistrate then conducts an investigation. Now, what are the guidelines or how third is that investigation have to be? There's not a whole lot of guidance on that.

A lot of it's up to the discretion of the magistrate. And so now, without any court proceeding, without any trial, without any charges level against you, an emergency protection order is now issued, law enforcement can now show up and confiscate your guns, right? And then you have to show up in order to prove why you deserve your property back and your rights back. This is this is actively happening in Virginia. Oh, exactly. Having a lot of states. Now, the argument that they will say is we'll look at all these positive use cases where somebody that, you know, had a mental illness, probably shouldn't have a gun was potentially stopped from hurting themselves.

I can acknowledge that. But do you not see how this couldn't be weaponized by a magistrate, how it couldn't be weaponized by somebody maybe going through a custody battle, by somebody that's going through any number of issues where they're just anti-gun and they don't like their neighbor and they got to magistrate that will go along with it? This ends up being not only a potential infringement on your second amendment rights from the federal level or in Virginia, it's Article 1, Section 13

of our Constitution. It's also a potential violation of fourth amendment rights, of first amendment rights, because what are they gonna use as evidence that you're a violent person and need to have your guns confiscated? Because here's the trick, if you're online making threats that you're gonna hurt someone or shoot someone, that's already a violation of law.

So now we've created this secondary category specifically for this issue. Now one of the ways that they'll try to use to justify it as they'll say, well, this is struggling with ideas of suicidal ideation. So I call up the magistrate, and I tell the magistrate, my brother just called me, he's threatening to kill himself. I need an emergency protector over so we can go and take the guns. Now, if you're the magistrate at that point, the only evidence that you have is that somebody called up and said that. But what is every ounce of you screaming to do at that point? Issue the protective order. You want to help somebody. Okay, I've definitely been on the phone with friends

that were right there on the the edge before. Had I got off the phone with them and then called up a magistrate and said issue in a protective order. Here's what would have happened. Law enforcement would have showed up. They would have searched the house and they would have found all of the guns they could find. That doesn't mean they found all the guns. Just mean they found all the guns they could find. By the way, they left all the pills, they left the knives, they left the rope, they left the hose, you can attach them and exhaust, they left all the other mechanisms that somebody could potentially do harm to themselves. But now my friend, who called me up for help, maybe because he was dealing with stuff that he went through overseas, the next thing he knows is law enforcement came over to confiscate

his property and leave and he didn't get any say in the matter. If you left him in a better mental state as a result of that, see, if you put all the emphasis on what we pass a law, which says the police have to get the guns. So clearly, that's going to be executed flawlessly, right? No. You hope it will. I hope it will. But I don't get to make decisions based off of what I hope will flawlessly happen. I don't get to make decisions with respect to your civil liberties. Based off of me, Gali G. Willikers, really hoping the government doesn't look for a way to actually extend its authority into ways that might be highly inappropriate, I have to first

inform those balance what it means to live in a free society. And there is trade-offs there. Because if we just want everyone to be safe, you don't need red flag laws. You need more prisons. Put everyone in jail, padded rooms, three huts in a cot a day, you are safe. Is that the ultimate objective of free society? No.

So yes, I'm always gonna give greater deference to your civil liberties. Now, you violate that, you violate law, you make threats, you engage in violent activities. Oh, I'll be more than happy to absolutely use the full extent of a lot of throw the book at you. Because if you're a threat to innocent people, my objective at that point is I need to protect them. I need to protect this free innocent person versus the person that is trying to exploit and hurt them. But the problem that we have with red flag laws is I think that most of the way that they're written

or far too broad, and it invites certain magistrates, Commonwealth attorneys and everything else or district attorneys depending on your state, I think it invites a mechanism which denies you what we would generally consider the appropriate due process of law before we can not only confiscate your property, but to now you, your civil liberties. I agree with it.

Do you think that there is a way to do it where that doesn't happen? I think, if I had more faith in the fact that the people that are passing these laws are only passing them because they can't get something bigger. Maybe there would be a world where I would be more comfortable with that sort of authority provided it was narrowly written and that there was far more protection for due process. But the same people that every campaign season, IC show up and say, nobody wants to take your guns. Then sit there as soon as they get power and they draft legislation that would make you a felon

for owning a 15 round magazine. Not even a gun, not even an AR, not even an AK. You have a 15 round magazine. Not even a gun. Not even an AR. Not even an AK. You have a 15 round magazine that came standard with the Glock you bought. You're a felon. By the way, you're a felon for each magazine you own, right? So now, I haven't just taken your gun rights. I haven't just made you a felon. I haven't just potentially put you in jail and put a bunch of fines on you. You know what you also lose in most states when you become a felon? Your voting rights.

Good point. It makes me wonder sometimes if there is an additional motivation with respect to care people carrying legislation that would take away the voting rights of tens of thousands of people in Virginia alone, that they know probably don't vote for them. That's a damn good point. I have not thought of that.

Wow. This is why one of the most important jobs I have in the General Assembly is I sit on subcommittee one in public safety. I'm the chairman of subcommittee one. That's where all of the gun legislation comes. And I can tell you, that is a heartbreaking committee to sit on.

Because you have to listen to some of the most horrible stories of people that were victimized. And it is, you feel an incredible amount of empathy for them. And you want to help solve that problem. The issue is, is that there's always some politicians sitting next to them that have convinced them that their little girl or the little boy or the person they love would still be alive. If only we had this assault weapons ban.

If only we had this micro stamping. If only we confiscated this. And you're sitting there looking at I'm going, you are lying to this grieving parent. And then you got to sit through it. You got to make the best arguments you can. And then you have to do what you know is the fundamentally right thing to do, which is to protect civil liberties. And then I walk over to my other committee on courts of justice. And that's where we work to make sure that the people that perpetuate these sorts of crimes go to jail for a long time or never come out.

What's fascinating is the same politician that will be sitting next to that grieving parent telling them that if only we have this assault weapons ban, their child would still be alive. Is it some of the same people that will go into the courts of justice committee and drop legislation to try to get the sort of people that killed their child out on parole earlier. Another good point. And that is the part where you will sit there with just absolute theory that the solution that they sold to this one parent was to deny people that did nothing wrong their civil liberties, not to mention the fact their ability to protect themselves.

We have over a million use cases in the United States every year of someone using a firearm to protect themselves. Those are victims that never were because they had a firearm. They're victims that would become victims if that politician had their way. They would especially become victims because that same politician goes into a separate committee

and drops a bill to let's the sort of people that engage in violent crimes out of jail early. That sort of hypocrisy, that cognitive dissonance is just infuriating. I mean, it'd be nice if they just enforced the laws that they had passed already. Oh, well, but the laws we have already are racist and part of a horrible patriarchal system which is designed to oppress people. Along the same lines would be nice if the FBI actually took the information that was fed to them and did something about it rather than why I won't even say rather than everything they're doing just in addition to the time and time again they've been tipped off about active shooters and nothing happens.

Why? Why is that? I don't know. I don't know. I don't understand some of the priorities, especially on our federal law enforcement side. I do not understand, but when I sit there and I watch the sort of things that are being taught or the sort of courses that our federal law enforcement officers are being required to go through and now increasingly are men and women in the military, I'm looking at the going, these are the most bizarre priorities I can imagine. Yeah, let's take a quick break. going, these are the most bizarre priorities I can imagine. Yeah, let's take a quick break. Remember all those life insurance ads on the TV and on the radio when you were a kid, probably not because that was your parents job, right?

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the Militia Committee, the Police and Public Safety Committee and the Finance Committee, correct? So they change around a little bit. Okay. So now I'm on courts of justice, public safety, finance and education. Okay. Interesting. I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but if I don't know it,

then I know that there are a ton of people who don't know it either. So I'm gonna have semi-ego aside. What is the Virginia House of Delegates? My civics, I'm a little rusty on. No, no, I think most states have a house of representatives or an assembly, or general assembly or something like that. And so they call their representatives

representative or assemblyman. In Virginia, we have the House of Delegates, which the best way to think of it is, it's like the House of Representatives on the federal side, it's just for Virginia. So I'm a state representative in the lower house. We have a Senate and a House of Delegates. It kind of a cool little plug for the House of Delegates or the Virginia General Assembly as a whole is actually the largest continuing, continuously operating legislative is actually the largest continuing, continuously operating legislative body in the Western Hemisphere, we're over 400 years

old. And we recently got to celebrate our 400th anniversary at the old capital in Jamestown. And I got to tell you as a history guy, I represent James Madison's district. So I got to go down there representing James Madison's district at the 400th anniversary of the largest or the longest continuously certain legislative body in the Western hemisphere. And it was awesome. That's a little man. It was awesome. Yeah.

The first time I walked into the house floor, I got there a little bit early because military, right? We're always 15 minutes early. And I remember they walked me in and the gentleman that was showing me where to go. He's like, I'm gonna go see if anybody else is here. And so he left and for a couple minutes there, it was just me sitting on the floor

of the Virginia House of delegates. And I remember looking around at the portraits of the speakers and everything else. And you're thinking about all of the decisions that have been made within this legislative body from, I mean, independence to, and I remember thinking there was got to be some mistake that I'm the guy standing here right now. But yeah, so that's what it is. So what is it, what does it you guys do? Break it down for me a little bit. So we're in a sluss.

We operate very similarly to how Congress operates. The House submits bills, the Senate submits bills, we go through that whole legislative process goes to the governor's sign and then if governor signs that it's in its bills, we go through that whole legislative process, goes to the governor's sign and then if governor signs that it's law. But a couple of things that are unique about most state legislatures and Virginia certainly falls in this category, we have what's called a citizen legislature. And that means we're not full time, like in the capital legislating all the time, which is wonderful,

because the last thing you want is politicians sitting around dreaming up new laws. We go down for, in even years, we're there for 60 days, and in 60 days, we will go through 2,000 bills, and we'll also set up our buy annual budget. And it looks kind of like how you see it. When we get on the floor, we debate with one another, bills go to the committees, we do all that process. House bills go to the Senate, Senate bills go to the House, and then we go through that process and then signing.

But we're paid a little under $18,000 a year to be a delegate. It's not supposed to be enough money to live on. And then we have our office budget to take care of a staff. It's usually enough to fund one full time staffer. The Virginia Legislature House of Delegates is a hundred members, which means each of us represent 80,000 people give or take, which is bigger than most states.

And but once we get done with our 60 day session session in 8-even years, our 45-day session in odd years, we go right back to our district. That's where we live. That's where we work. We have our regular jobs. I think it's, I think on the whole, it's much more in line with what this country was designed to be, which is to say that we have a very limited, constitutionally oriented, limited government

that is really focused on go do the business of the people and then get back to real life. So that's what we do on the legislature. Interesting. You're on the Education Committee. I have. Let's get into some of that. Before we do, I just got a question from a patron real quick, patron of a subscription account, the patrons that's what enables me to be here and

what enables you to be here. Here it is. I have three girls in a fourth child on the way. What in your opinion are the most important things men need to get right is fathers and is fathering daughters different than fathering boys. So I think the most important thing I was going back to is the faith structure that you build your family around because it is. It's the beginning of your whole world view. The other thing I'll say with with fathers, I think the most important thing is that you do represent, you are supposed to represent an element of leadership and stability within that family unit. You're supposed to

be the common the storm, not the storm. Let me put it a little bit differently. For them, you're the common the storm. For anyone that would For them, you're the common, the storm, for anyone that would hurt them, you're the storm. And when it comes to raising sons and daughters, yeah, it's different. With your son, you're training your replacement. You're training someone that is going to be a part of a legacy that maybe it started before you, maybe you're the one that's starting it, but they're going to have to take that over and they're going to have to build it up and preserve it and pass it on for their son to do the same thing. They're going to have to protect, provide, they're going to have to fill those roles. For your daughters, a lot of it is about establishing a very high level of trust where I don't care what any girl says. they all want their dad to be protective.

They don't want them to be tyrannical, but they want them to be protective. And I will tell you, you will look back. My oldest daughter is 20. I have a 17 year old son and a 15 year old daughter. And this last year for, or this year for Father's Day, I said, I want one thing from you. I want each of you to write me a letter. I want you to tell me something that we did together that was meaningful to you. And I want you to tell me something that you wish I would change

to be a better father. And what was amazing about that was the little things that made the meaning. I mean, you'd think it'd be some big trip we went on or that time we all went to Disneyland or something. Nah. Nah, it was something little. It was always something little. Give me an example. Teaching my younger daughter how to shoot. What did she want to learn how to do? She wants me to teach her how to throw a punch-necks. But it is things like that when you are present. And I would think for men, one of the things that we do,

this is one of the traps that we fall into with raising kids, we get so focused on the protection and the provision because that's how we're demonstrating love. And that's fair, those things are demonstrations of love. But you can't expect your little kids to know that. You have to verbalize it. And sometimes one of the most powerful things that you can do

is when they are asking for your attention on something where you're busy. You can't always do it. You can't always break away. But every once in a while do it. Every once in a while, set it down and go drink some fake tea. Right? Every once, set it down and go wrestle with your little boy. And sometimes they'll say, well, do they even remember it? Does your three-year-old ever remember when they're 16 that you sat there and had tea with them? No. No. But the five-year-old version of them does remember what you did when they were three. And then the five-year-old bed builds additional bonds and then the 10-year-old version of them remembers what you did when they were five. And by the time they get to a

teenager, it is muscle memory. You love them, you protect them, and they know it. Dang it, man. And so when you have to discipline them, they don't question why you're doing it. They know it's because you love them. When you have to set down rules, it's not because you're a tyrant, it's not because you say so. It's because you want something so wonderful and perfect for them and you are doing everything you can to help them achieve it. And at the times where you have to say no or buttress by all the times that you were there for them when they needed you, they will trust your judgment when you really, really want them to.

Wow. So that's what that's what I'd say. That's amazing. You must be one hell of a dad. I hope so. But I felt like all man I focused a lot on all the things I did wrong. But I will say when I open those letters from my kids, I don't know who was cutting onions next to me or doing something else, but yeah that's being able to mean, like I said,

I still see all the things that I should have done better, it could have done better, need to do better tomorrow. But man, having a good relationship with your kids, where they will trust you, especially when they want to do something, and you say, I just don't think it's right. And they will say, okay, one other thing I got to add, if you're going to teach your kids that there is such a thing as right

and wrong in this world, and it's not right or wrong because you say, it's right or wrong because God says or it's right or wrong because it's just right or wrong. There's going to be a time where they catch you being wrong. And in that moment, and this happened to me, the vividly remembered it. My daughter, she's about 13, 14 of the time, but I remember coming home from work, I was very upset. My two youngest kids had destroyed the kitchen. And soon as I walked through that corner and I saw the kitchen destroyed,

I was, I was back in the military, man. You do this, you do that, you get to your room. I don't know, daddy, daddy, no, get to your room. I don't wanna hear it, I don't wanna hear it, go. Now, right, I'm in charge, I told you what to do, go do it. I don't want to hear it, go now. I'm in charge, I told you what to do, go do it. All this daughter who is, again, 13, 14 of the time comes in, knocks on my door and says,

Daddy, can I talk to you for a second? Yes, we heard, go ahead. She had let me cool down. She was, Daddy, I don't think you handled that very well. Now, every ounce of my male ego wanted to be like, oh, well, please dispel some of your young teenage wisdom on me on it. And I was like, you know what, she knocked on my door.

She is being very respectful. Let's hear her out. And she goes, daddy, the reason why Allian Luke were down there in the kitchen is because they got permission from mommy to make you something. And they were really, really proud of being able to make this for you when you got home. And now they're too scared to say anything because of how upset you are. Oh man. Ah, and I looked at my daughter and I said, um, sweetheart, you're right. I am wrong. I did not handle that well and I apologize to you and I'm going to go apologize to them. And I really appreciate the fact that you had the courage to come and tell me.

So thank you. The reason why that part is so important is because what a lot of parents do is they don't teach their kids what to believe or why to believe it or that there is objective right and wrong, what they teach their kids is an incentive structure for obedience.

Do what I say because you'll get in trouble if you don't. Do what I say because I'll reward you if you do it. That might work out fine when you're the authority figure. What happens when it's the college professor? What happens when it's the politician? What happens when it's the boss? What happens when it's someone that doesn't have your best interest of your child in might or doesn't share your worldview on anything? Well, they're going to obey because

that's what they've been taught. And so one of the most powerful episodes you might be able to ever have with your child is the point where they catch you on being wrong because we all do it. And actually rewarding them for having the courage to stand up to authority because ultimately right and wrong doesn't flow from us. And so those are just a couple of things that I would say served me well. We definitely just impacted me. There's no doubt about that. Thank you for sharing that.

Let's push education. Let's push it to the right a little bit. Let's get into fatherless society. You talk extensively on this. How do... How much of society is fatherless? Ladies and gentlemen, pardon me for the interruption. This next segment is all about fatherlessness in the United States and what a problem it has become. Since the interview, some statistics, more updated statistics have developed And Nick contacted me and asked me to give the most

updated statistics. This is from Fathers.com. Here we go. An estimated 24.7 million children that's 33% live absent other biological fathers here in the US. That's from the US Census Bureau. here in the US. That's from the US Census Bureau. 57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent other biological father. That source is from family structure and children's living arrangements. And lastly, more than 20 million children in this country live in a home without the physical presence of a father. Millions more have dads who are physically present, but emotionally absent. If we were classified as a disease, fatherlessness would be an epidemic worthy of attention as a national emergency.

That's how bad this is. Let's get back to the show. So it depends on the overall demographics. We are probably approaching, I think we're approaching close to 50%. 50%. Actually, it's probably close to 40 at this point overall. Because I want to say the last time I looked at it within America, within the black population, I think it's 73%.

Within Hispanic, I believe it's over 50. With Caucasian, I believe it's somewhere around the mid-30s, and then with Asian, I believe it's under 10%. So when you add all that up together, I think it's somewhere around, like we're around about 40%ile mark, but don't quote me on that. Well, I think we could definitely bump it up to 50% because one thing that I'm not hearing in those statistics are the fathers who end mothers, who just passed the phone and to raise their kid. And there's a lot of that. Yeah. Yeah, and again, whenever you break that down

by demographics, people get mad at you. And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. Like this is what we see. This is what the numbers say. The guy that's probably done some of the most extensive work on this is Thomas Sol. And I have this joke where I say Thomas Sol is a national treasure and he's not allowed to die because the amount of work

that he has done on economic and social policy and the way that he explains complex principles to a very broad audience is incredible. Plus, he's a total smart ass. He's really, really fun to listen to, fun to read, I think. But Thomas Sol started working on all of this with respect to the breakdown. And part of what he was building on was work that Patrick Moynihan had done. And yeah, there's a genuine crisis in this country with respect to fathers. Now, some of those fathers want to be involved

and they're legally not permitted to because custody is usually awarded to the mother 80% of the time. Well, hold on. Why are people getting mad at you for talking about factual statistics? Because that's racist. It's racist.

Yeah. It's racist. Yeah. It's racist. Okay. Yeah. Because the implication is, is though you're saying that this, this, this, like no, I'm not making any, for instance,

it's a statistic. It's a factual statistic. I mean, you can back this up, correct? Yeah. It's a factual statistic. Yeah. How's that racist? Because it doesn't convey the narrative that's appropriate.

Or because I don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the reason why that exists is because our government has been our government has set up in fundamentally systematically racist ways designed to destroy certain families based off of their skin color. Now, I will say this. I do believe when you look at a lot of the programs that we have put in place, we've incentivized divorce, and we have incentivized taking the kids. We've incentivized breaking apart families. You get paid to break apart the family. You don't get paid to start a family.

I mean, you can argue child tax credits with things like that. But we have an era where men are growing up with the full knowledge that if they get married and they have kids and she decides to leave and take the kids, the government will pay her to do that plus the government will require you to pay her to do that. And so that has a disincentivizing component on marriage. This is one of the issues that I always get into whenever we look at public policy. People look at public policy and what they want to, they want to look at is, what are the intentions behind the policy? Here's the problem. The problem is, is, let's, for instance, it is very,

very hard for a single mother. I know I was raised by a single mother. Okay, well, how do we, how do we help single mothers? Well, let's add additional funding that will assist a single mother with respect to raising the kids. Okay, make sense. But what have you, what have you just done at that point? You've actually incentivized single motherhood. Now, you can say, well, nobody would choose that. Nobody would? Because that's certainly not true. We absolutely know that people get pregnant and part of the reasons why they do it is because obviously the activity surrounding pregnancy are usually a lot of fun. And then the other component is there's income that comes based off of having that child.

And if you're having the child out of wedlock, you get paid by the government. If you're having child within wedlock, you don't get paid by the government. So, how does that incentive structure work? Now, you can say, all day long, I don't think most people would choose that option. I agree. I absolutely agree that most people will not choose that option, but some people will. Now, what happens when all of a sudden, you've chosen that option, and now you're raising a kid without any positive meal, role model in the home,

or at least not a father in the home. Well, that has a whole host of other societal consequences that generally go with it. Now, are there kids that completely overcome it and do very well? Absolutely. Do I still put a great deal of emphasis on the response, personal responsibility

of the individual to make decisions? Yes. But should the government be incentivizing destructive behavior? No. Of course, people always look back and they're like, well, what's your solution? Well, I don't know, but last time I checked, we didn't always live in a country where we had this many out of wedlock births. And my solution is not walk them into a clinic and get rid of the kid. My solution is what if we once again recognize that the value of a strong nuclear family is beneficial not only for moral reasons, but for very practical reasons.

The treat these things like they're just arbitrary social constructs we came up with yesterday. No, there's there's reasons why centuries of humanity has said that when you have a situation where you have a stable home with a mother and a father fulfilling different but equally important roles, it's the best basis for raising a family and creating future citizens for which society will be built up. But then whenever we find any sort of problem with the system as it is, and we try to interject with the government program, we create perverse incentives. I know what it's like to be poor.

I know what it is like to have my heat turned off in the winter because I couldn't pay the bill. I know what it is to feel like a complete failure as a man and a husband. The difference was is that when I had to get help when a friend or a family member had to come in and help me, I felt a sense of gratitude, obligation, and a need to reciprocate. When the government comes in and just hands somebody a check, you're completely, you are completely disconnected from the person that actually had to sacrifice in order to help you.

And now the politician, which sacrifice nothing because all they were in charge of is taking from this person and giving to this person, they have every incentive to keep you in a perpetual state of dependence. And that's my problem with so much of this is the government, government policy has contributed to destruction of the family in this country. I absolutely believe that. The way that we get out of that is that we're going to have to start asking our question of what gives a marriage significance.

And I'll tell you this much, I don't think it's a marriage certificate from the state. That might be an element of significance. Maybe some people value that at a certain degree more than other people. But I will tell you right now, I got married at 19. And my wife and I sat down and we talked very specifically about what we believed, about the world, about our roles as husband and wife, about what our future roles would be as mother and father, what our responsibilities were, what our expectations were. And we did all of that because both of us came

from divorce families. We did all of that because we made a decision that this ends with us. Our kids will not know what that was like. And so again, sometimes my male audience gets mad at me because they feel like I am disregarding that the nature of the field with respect to finding a spouse, it has changed so much from when it was me 24 years ago.

And I don't disregard that. I know it has gotten so much harder, because the culture is just fighting against them every single chance they get. The only thing I can say to them is, dude, there's no alternative. You have to be the one to say that. And you can either say screw that. It's not my job.

Or you can embrace it. But you're going to get a whole lot more value from embracing it, even when it doesn't work, even when you have to go through things that you shouldn't have had to go through. You know that cycle they always talk about, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create strong men, bad times don't create strong men. Strong men are once again appreciated for what they bring to society in bad times. You choose to be that.

If you're waiting around for bad times to make strong men, that doesn't happen. Strong men are made by other strong men. Strong men flourish when society recognizes that the value that they bring, the stability, the leadership. When they recognize that embrace it and appreciate it for what it is, that's what creates the good times.

But young men, I don't know what to tell you. If you want to end this crisis with respect to young men growing up with no act of father, you've got to be the guy. You've got to be the guy. And you might have to be the guy for more people than just your son. Mm-hmm.

If you take an out more people than your son. So I used to teach at a homeschool co-op and then one of the things that we do with our podcast, we actually have a separate chat. And so I have a lot of dads that will come in or I have a lot of young men that will come in and they will ask for advice. And I try to spend time doing that.

We try to all will craft various videos based off of advice I'm getting asked for so I can put it out to a broader audience. So yeah, I try to look for opportunities where, you know, when it's needed. So there's so many kids going up without a father today, tons of them, you know, and like I said, and there's a lot of kids who do have a father that's not present today. I see that, I see that everywhere I go, I see it in Home Depot, I see it in it, anywhere I go. You see these teens, REI, go there a lot. And on one hand, I'm happy to see teenagers, a few teenagers still going out and getting jobs, but you see the confidence level in a lot of these kids. And it's at the floor.

You know, they can't look in the eye. They can't even articulate what they're trying to say. They can't show you where the section is you're looking for or the item that you're trying to find. They can't do it. And so you, who just said that you grew up without a father, well, I don't want to say that. I did still have my father in my life.

You did. I did. I did still have my father in my life. I always try to be careful about this, because when I say, like, I spent the school years with my mom, I spent the summers with my life. You did. I did. I did. I did sell my father in my life. I always try to be careful about this because when I say like I spent the school years with my mom and I spent the summers with my dad. I didn't get the amount of time I wanted with my dad but the time I got he really did try to make it meaningful. Where did you fill that void and how can a kid today? I mean if we're talking 50% plus of the population is fatherless. Yeah. Where are they going to find attributes to become a good father?

For me, my grandfather was heavily influential on me growing up because he lived, my dad's dad, both my grandparents, lived in Northern California where I would go to, I'd spend the school years. And so, I spend a lot of time with my grandparents. And I got to spend a lot of time with my paternal grandfather, my dad's dad. That was beneficial.

Coaches, I honestly think I have a good friend of mine where every once in a while, are you picking up another sport to coach? And I would say he loves sports, but he also recognizes that what breaks his heart is when he is there and like his son plays and whatnot. And it always broke his heart. The number of, number of boys that would be on his team that they only saw their dads on game day. You know, if that, there's another, there's another group.

My, my actually my future son-in-law, my oldest daughter's got engaged, great guy. He's a counselor and big dude to like six five. And you know, we have these different groups they've tried to set up things on how to teach men to be men, young gentlemen, like those of these like young gentlemen's clubs. And they do everything from teaching them how to like properly wear a suit, handshake, look a man in the eye, and then they'll bring in speakers to talk about, you know, everything from being in the military and combat, running a business, maybe playing sports or whatnot, but trying to convey certain ideas of what is the proper

role, what is good masculinity look like, and trying to provide some sort of model for kids that haven't seen it. Yeah. He talked about something about homeschooling. Yeah. I love to talk about that. I got a two year old, almost a two year old, and actually by the time this comes out, he will be two. And another one on the way.

Big topic of discussion between me and my life is my wife is where we're going to put these kids in school. Public school seems to be out of the question. Private school, we're on the fence about we live in a place where I see it's very family oriented here and I see more and more and more kids being yanked out of the public school system and becoming homeschooled you know and I see I see positives and and negatives to that I was homeschooled a little bit growing up Negatives obviously being socialization. We've thought a lot about this.

I'm gonna run this by, I'm just curious, what you think of this. We've come up with a plan, and I don't know if this is gonna work, because we're very, I'm an introvert. My wife's an introvert, we don't have a big community pool to draw from here, but one thing that I would like to do and is And I think this takes care of the socialization aspect is we've thought about Recruiting

Like-minded individuals because we're not happy about what's going on in the schools either. Now, I do hear that some people say this stuff is going on in the schools. Some people say it's not going on in the school. I don't have a kid in school. I don't really want to find out. I see more that are concerned about the public school than not. So, and it sounds like I haven't heard it here in Tennessee, but I have a lot of friends

in Florida. This is blood into the private schools as well. And there's a lot of things that I just don't want my kid. I don't want him to see it. And so what we thought is if we could get a group of like-minded parents, this isn't a business, this isn't anything like that. And we invest in a piece of land. Put it into a trust.

Everybody has equal ownership. Or you, I mean, you could even break the ownership up. Sure. You know, build a schoolhouse on it. This is not, it's not a school. It's not registered. It's not it is a it's a façade of land that you may put that that just happens to do homeschooling you know so you put it in a trust it becomes it becomes a real estate

investment you know for the people that are that are that are involved in the trust and then you a higher teacher, I mean, a lot of these teachers don't wanna be teaching this garbage anyways. They want out higher teacher, what's that gonna cost? I mean, about $50,000 a year, to hire the teacher. They teach the core curriculum, then everybody, who has a child in the school, for us,

it would probably all have to be kids around the same age, maybe 10 kids, let's say. And then each parent comes in and they teach their expertise, whether that's plumbing, whether that's finance, whether that's home-studying, auto mechanics, whatever. And by the time it's done, your kid is going to be so well-rounded in all these different aspects of life that schools don't teach at all. I mean look at finances now. It's a it's a disaster. It always has been a disaster. Now it's just worse. And then one that's over, the realist, the piece of real estate gets sold. Everybody gets their dispersion of money and hopefully, I mean, the real estate always goes up. It's, they're gonna make money.

What do you think of that? I'm not making any more land, yeah. I think it sounds like a great idea. Here's what I'll say. Like I always try to be careful when I talk about educational options, because I realize that there are parents and situations where it's like, look, we are fighting to keep it,

make ends meet, we take one income out of the pot and learn a lot of trouble. So my biggest problem has always been this idea that we're supposed to, that again, the government's coming in and telling everybody, this is the ideal way to educate children. Well, you're doing a bang up job. I think that most services,

because that's what education is, it's a service. Work better when the people that are using the service have options and accordance with what the objectives are. So, for instance, with a student, you kind of have two customers. You have the child and you have the parents. The child's the one that's getting the benefit of the service, but the parents have a guardianship and a responsibility over that child to make sure that the service that they are getting is actually equipping them.

We don't see that anymore, right? Any more, it's like, no, no, it's the government's job to educate my kid. That's why I pay taxes. Nope, it's yours. And whether you're rich or whether you're poor, I'm sorry, the responsibility doesn't go away. It's still yours.

Now, if you choose to team with the public school system in order to do that, you may have to, right? Maybe the only thing that you can afford. What I would say is, please don't then say, well, this is it. Now, I would tell you this, I think socialization is actually the worst reason to send your children to public school. If you're sending a child to public school because they have a lot of resources with respect to, you know, a computer lab or a music lab or whatever it is or sports and stuff like that that you can't replicate somewhere else that you think is important, totally understand.

Maybe they have teachers at that school that you really, really like, totally get it. Whenever my wife always got asked the question about socialization, she would always say, she'd always look at someone and just goes, have you ever had a puppy? Yeah. Did you train and socialize your puppy by keeping it exclusively with other puppies? No, yeah. She goes, the public school model does not replicate real life. It is the only portion, it's the only part of your life

that you will ever be running into locations based exclusively off of your age group and said these are now your peers And in that class of 25 kids you have some kids that are reading this percentile sometimes that are reading this Well, some with maybe with mental health issues you have some with learning disabilities You have all this stuff in this one class. Those are your peers. Why? Well, because age-wise and geographically, they live closest to the building. That doesn't make sense. What are their objectives for education? Well, it doesn't matter because the states already decided that these are the objectives for education. So here's all I would say. Just remember, public school, and I don't mean this to sound like nefarious or mean, it's a practical

reality. Public school is not made with your child in mind. Public school was made with the mass production of education in mind. So you're going to get a mass-produced product. When it comes to, okay, so what's the alternative to that? I mean, you can dream up a thousand different ones. You just came up with, or you guys have just been talking about one

that makes an incredible amount of sense. We did one that was a combination of homeschool and then also a co-op. So our kids one day a week would go and they would go to certain classes, especially in subjects that we didn't feel competent to train them. I mean, you throw an algebra two book at me and that might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphics, right? I don't know. Stop putting letters in my math, right?

But here's what I would say. I think it's actually, it can be a very intimidating thing for parents, but remember that it's an intimidating thing in part because there's a whole industry which profits and benefits from you believing that this is completely beyond your capability. It isn't. People have been educated for centuries without the current public school model that we have within the United States. Here's the other thing to keep in mind. I don't care if it's a public school, I don't care if it's a private school.

Almost all of those institutions, some private schools are a little bit better about this, but almost all those institutions are going to be getting their pool of teachers from the same place, and that's the university system. If you're going to Penn State, you are almost definitely going to get some aspect of critical pedagogy as part of your formal training to become a teacher. One of the big things, and when there was a huge battle in Virginia, and this showed up on the daily wire, and if they go about Loudoun County, and some of the other things that were there was a huge battle in Virginia and this this showed up on the daily wire and a thing Oh, it's about Loudoun County and some of the other things that were going on is Critical race theory in the classroom and I got said I got told that I was a racist because I claimed that yes This is this is infiltrating into our school system critical theory and critical race theory and queer theory

Know it is show me the curriculum Okay They were asking for the curriculum within their children's curriculum. I said, no, no, that's not where you need to look at it. Here is all of the various things from the Virginia Department of Education website. Here's all the classes, courses, various materials that they give to teachers to be able to use. And what were those provided for? Oh, it was provided by all these outside organizations. Let's click on that. Oh, look at this. It's teaching about how to make your child an anti-racist

child based off of things from Emermex Kindi. Emermex Kindi believes that there should be a federal department of anti-racism, which is not elected, and has the power to overrule any local state or federal law by fiat. That's authoritarianism. But I could go and I could point to all of it. And like, and that was what, that was so pernicious about the lie. I'm teaching your teachers that this is the way they need to think about society,

that this is the lens through which they should teach math and history and English and writing and everything else. So yeah, it's not in your kids' curriculum per se, which is to say your kid could come home and say, oh look, today we're studying critical race theory 101 or queer theory 101. No, what you did was you took the people responsible for educating them and you ran them through all the training. It's a so let me give me let me give you example. And I said this to my colleagues on the floor. I said, let's say we came up with something similar. And we said that now is a condition

of getting your teacher's license in the Commonwealth of Virginia, you have to go through a bunch of training taught by the Catholic Church, right? All of your training, your worldview training, everything as a teacher, you're going to be taught that what the Catholic Church says explains everything that you see with society. Now go teach math.

Would you come back here? If I came back here and I said, what do you mean Catholicisms in the school? Show me in your kids curriculum where no, you'd recognize that what I did in order to get my agenda through was I made sure that the teachers had to study it as a condition of their licensure. So the thing to keep in mind is that almost every professional school out there is going to require a certain amount of credentialing. You should probably ask some important questions with respect to where that credentialing came from and what the actual worldview of the teachers teachers that are to because there's a ton of

good teachers out there. So, there's good teachers that sat through all this crap, didn't believe it, and then came in and are doing an excellent job in the classroom. But still understand that that's the reality. So when you talk about various homeschool things and you have people tell you, show me your master's degree in education, show me your PhD in education. Do I need a PhD in education to teach my kid how to read? I mean, especially now,

with relatively little effort, I can find some of the best programs on the planet to teach literacy to my kids, which by the way, it's mainly phonics based. Right, so here's what we did with our kids. I'm not saying that everybody should do this. This is just what we did. We've been pretty happy with it.

When our kids were very little, we ran them through very, very, the kind of standard curriculum that you would expect. They learned about history, they learned about math, they learned about reading, they learned about writing. Why? Because you got to learn how to read. This is a non-negotiable. This isn't one of the... This isn't woodshop versus learning how to code. You got to learn how to read. So great. We did what we needed to.

All of our kids read. You got to learn how to do basic math. Two of our kids struggled with math. One of our kids struggled with reading. Do we wait around and call up a school board to see if we could change the curriculum? Do we ask the school, no, it's like, okay, we're gonna try this curriculum now. And we're not gonna try the curriculum three years into realizing there's a problem. We're gonna try it now.

And then what we did is very early on, we found the things that work and we found the things that didn't work. And now all of a sudden, my son, who was very good at math, but reading took him a little bit longer when he was younger. He was able to excel in math because he wasn't waiting for the rest of the class to pick up, nor was some rest of the class waiting for him to pick up in the areas where he needed more instruction.

Same thing with my girls. My girls excelled in certain areas and they had difficulty in other areas. We could adjust the curriculum as needed, but we didn't have to slow everything down on the areas that they were good at. They could excel as far as they could go. And then when it came to socialization, did we put them in situations where it was just their peers?

No. We put them in constant situations, whether it was going to places or events or me being involved with politics or things like that, where they were forced to interact with people younger than them, the same age and older than them on a regular basis. They became natural for them. They're comfortable talking to adults

because they've always had to talk to adults. They're comfortable, you know, helping out and working with little kids because they had to do that for each other with older and younger siblings, but they also had to do it with other friends that we had that would come over and they'd help babies that are whatnot. And so I feel like that created a far more well-rounded socialization experience. Plus, we got that basic core education that everyone needs to have.

Well, now when they got older, we started to ask more questions like where your interest set. So if all of your interests are associated with things that are more, let's say, English-oriented or history-oriented or science-oriented, well, then that's where I'm going to start to develop you more. Like, my oldest daughter loved things associated with English and the arts and the creative. She couldn't stand math. We got her up to a level of math that every basic person should understand, even though now you can probably pick up your phone

and figure it out anyway. We equipped her with the tools that she could use to get to the math problems that she needed to do. But am I gonna sit there and make her go through an additional three years of math just so I as a parent can say, she got trigonometry. No, I'm gonna let her focus in on the things

that actually give her joy and actually feed in the things that she wants to do as a career. And so now learning isn't drudgery. It's a thing that she's using to prepare herself. Not to mention the fact that education is no longer seen as, oh yeah, that's where I sit down and I open this book and I do this thing. Education is, these are the capabilities

I'm developing to make myself socially and financially capable. And so when you have the freedom, like when you discuss, like we're not saying to school, we're not saying that because we don't want all the rules and regulations and everyone else tell us what we've got to do. When you have the freedom to adjust and to adapt, I mean, it opens up everything.

And the one other thing I would leave on this for consideration, I have really started and I need to dive more into this. So I'm not suggesting that what I'm about to say is the correct interpretation. It's something I'm trying to work out on my own mind. I am really starting to wonder if some of the things that we call disorders are only disorders because we've pushed kids into a particular model of education and learning and it doesn't work for them. And if you just adjusted it, all of a sudden that, which is a disorder, would become a capability.

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Yes, there are times where every student needs to be disciplined, sit down, be quiet, read, do your stuff. You got to teach that. Got to teach that. But if your kids full of energy and they work well when they're able to get out there and learn kinetically, does it make sense to put them in a classroom for eight hours a day and then say, gosh, they're just, they're not, you know, we need to drug them up. That's what we need here.

Because clearly whatever they have isn't conducive to the educational model that we've assigned them. What happens when all of a sudden, you tell my son, you've got to sit here for eight hours and do stuff. He is gonna, he'll do it because discipline says he has to.

But he's gonna hate it and he's gonna feel stupid. On the other toe, by the other side, you say, hey bud, you're assignment is day, you're interested in welding your instruments and blacksmithing, you're assignment today, for the next couple days, you're gonna build a knife on the forge. He will go out there and pound steel

till one in the morning and do it with a smile on his face and feel a sense of accomplishment and he'll learn stuff and he'll figure it out and he'll problem solve and he'll go on YouTube and he'll look up another video. Why? Because he's interested. So I am, I'm almost horrified to think that one day we're going to find out that no, that kid didn't have ADD. You just stuck that kid in an environment, learning environment that was absolutely not created for him.

Yeah. When as if you would have just adjusted it over here, he would have been able to flourish. Do you think there's an attack on homeschool? Yeah, well, I'll say this, the educational establishment, the teachers unions and many with an higher academia, there are many that do not like homeschooling.

They know that they can't quite get rid of it. And in part, that's because homeschooling is oftentimes thought of as a religious or conservative thing. Go up to Washington State. I mean, it's hippies doing unschooling, which for me I'm like, hey, your kids, they get in an education, doesn't have to look the way I educate my kids. That's the amazing part, is for me I'm like, hey, your kids, you know, the getting an education doesn't have to look the way I educate my kids.

That's the amazing part, is that out of all this, I'm the tolerant one. I'm not the one saying you gotta send your kids to me for their education and I will decide what their curriculum is and I will decide what the school day looks like and I will decide what the standardized tests look like. I'm not saying that, it's the other side, the so-called tolerant people.

But no, there are people that absolutely believe that you see this in Europe a lot, that education is the province of the state. And that is a common belief within the higher ranks and higher echelons of teachers unions. They do not like homeschooling. And they will always point to bad examples of homeschooling as evidence for why they should be the ones in control,

while ignoring the failures within the public school system as evidence for why they shouldn't be in control. So I would not be surprised if in certain states over time you start to get a much more authoritarian push for bringing all education under the realm of the state. And a lot of it, and the way they will justify it is that those parents sinking maybe more of a religious based education or just not reinforcing general narratives.

All of a sudden, what will happen is it will become, I mean, you already see this in California and other places. I think Washington State, where they're saying if your kid wants to, it used to be, you shouldn't interfere with the parent if they want their kid to transition. Now, it's, you shouldn't interfere with the child if the parents don't want them to transition. Right? That's nuts. Well, you really think it's a big jump from, oh, and oh, by the way, you are not qualified to homeschool your children and they have to come to the state school, the government run school, because that's what it is.

It's a government run school. We call it public school, it's a government run school. You have to come to the government run school. Otherwise, you might teach them dangerous principles and ideologies that are oppressive and toxic. I mean, it's already happened in this county. You were talking about co-ops, homeschool co-ops. We had, I don't know if a church here in this county

who had, who was, they weren't teaching, but it was a co-op. Yeah. And I think they could come like two or three times a week. Well, now with the influx of whatever you wanna call it, Well, now with the influx of whatever you wanna call it, the influx of people coming into this county, a red county from blue counties, now we're starting to see all these things changed, you know?

And I'm like you, if you wanna send your kids to the public school, I don't care. So, in the public school. That's fine with me. Now they have a person, so they are now targeting these co-ops and they hit one church because of a septic issue. And because they run off, they run off, it's not on city water. It's on city sewage. It's on septic.

So what they did is they tried to shut the school down through a septic issue. Now it's okay, you know, in church on Sunday that there's hundreds of people going in and out of there are three times a day. That doesn't affect the septic, but the less than 100 kids that go there are three times a week, that's a septic issue.

So they tried to shut that down. Yeah. And go figure, where's this? I really try not to go here. Where's this person from? What community they're in? LGBTQ plus community. Targeting churches to shut down the co-ops so they can teach the shit in schools.

So that they can force these kids. They don't even have kids. And that's happened right here in this county. That's not, and this is another thing where, and I'm not suggesting anybody, I'm not suggesting everybody in the LGBTQ community takes the theory that I'm about to put forward, but I will say this,

Marks despise the nuclear family. He saw it as an element of oppression. And if you look at if you look at the, again, critical theory, not critical race theory, but critical theory from which all these other things kind of derive, there is a general antithesis to the idea of the nuclear family having authority, because that takes away from the collective experience that we're all supposed to have. Everything is supposed to be democratized. You want to say something to shock a room full of students. I was at UVA, which is not exactly known for a bastion of conservatism, because it's in Charlottesville, Virginia.

And I was talking about how democracy is not synonymous with freedom. Democratic processes may very well be a necessary component of a free society. It is not a sufficient component. But it's amazing to me the number of people that think they should be able to impose whatever they want provided that 50% plus one of the population agrees with them. That's not a free society. That's just the tyranny of the majority. And it is, at first it started off as confusing to me because one minute I would hear all about tolerance and acceptance and diversity. I would be like, okay, great. Then we're going to allow tolerance and diversity within our approaches to education.

And we're going to allow different people to try out various things in order to see which works best. So the best ideas can rise to the top. But we're also going to recognize that we probably need an education system as diverse as the learning and objectives, learning needs and objectives of the student body. And to shove everybody into a fairly one-size-fits-all model probably doesn't make a lot of sense, right, wrong. Because it's far easier to control not just the education but the narrative and the ideologies

that are being taught if you have a centralized bureaucracy that you have to control. There is a reason why in almost every single thing I can think of, leftist ideology prefers centralization. Our philosophy tends to prefer decentralization because we have a natural skepticism of the concentration of power in two few hands. But this idea that, well, no, no, it's fine for the power to be there. It was long as we all voted on it. I ask this is an old analogy, but I think it's one that works and it explains a lot.

You would never eat at a restaurant that was democratic. Never. You would never go into a restaurant that was democratic. Never. You would never go into a restaurant and say, okay, all right, everyone in the restaurant, here's your menu, here's all the various items. We'll be voting in 15 minutes on what the appetizer will be. And then we'll be voting in 20 minutes on what the main course will be, and then we'll be voting on dessert, we'll be voting on drinks and all of that. Well, can I just order what I want?

No, that's anti-democratic. We're all gonna vote on what everybody's gonna have. Okay, but what if I don't like what the majority of people order? Oh, so you don't like democracy? Okay, and then you get down with your meal, right? And you don't like what you ordered because you don't really have a sand based off your individual choice.

And now they all do that. Now we're gonna vote on who pays for it. And lo and behold, 50% plus one of the people in the restaurant have decided that the 50% minus one have to pay for everybody's meal. Nobody would go to that restaurant. Because the free society is one that actually values individual liberty

and choice combined with personal responsibility. So I assume responsibility for educating my child, and I will assume costs associated with that because I believe that there's greater benefits associated with it. You may choose something else, and I will respect your ability to do so. What is happening more and more now are people are assuming for themselves control and authority over other people's lives, and now over the lives of their children because they've decided that no, no, no, no, this is the standard.

This is what should be taught. And anything that doesn't hit this standard, it's toxic and mean and bad, and we need to get rid of it. And if that means we need to rip your child away from your control as the parent, so we can get them the medical care that we've decided they needed in the form of surgeries or puberty blockers or

Means that we're going to educate we're going to take over the responsibility for educating your child because you're not qualified You're not teaching the things that we believe they need to be taught At what point Do we look at that and say that's not liberal that's authoritarian? In fact, it's it's getting really close to totalitarian. And the part that I find so frustrating is that for the longest time, my attitude, my genuine attitude has been, I think this is right and I think this is wrong, but I also believe that you as a free human being, providing or not infringing on the rights and liberties and property of other people,

you can make different decisions. You can make decisions I don't like and I won't interfere with your ability to do that All I ask is that you don't interfere in mine that that construct That is what's under attack at this point And and you see it in the the reason why you see so much of it within the education system is because, are they ever gonna convince you of this? No. So they're gonna try to convince your child of it. I wanna move on from this real quick. I had a question.

We had spoken breakfast about, sorry, I'm totally changing gears. No, go for it. The, we had spoken breakfast about some of the stuff you're doing with your son, and you're getting ready to jump into, it sounds like wrestling or jiu-jitsu with him. I think that's awesome. How are you, no dad wants to lose in front of his son. When you get involved in that you're gonna lose in front of your son. Have you thought about that?

I have So it was it was interesting at this point. You know, it's all training. Mm-hmm. So there isn't a whole lot of like full-on You know, bouts. But yeah, we've been going to, you know, it's a combination of Jiu Jitsu boxing, Jim we have in our hometown, great guy. And so it's been a great experience.

Everyone in there is just very dedicated on like, hey, we all want to become better at what we're doing. Like I was a little bit worried we were gonna walk in there. I was like, oh, right, there's gonna be some hot heads that the moment I walk through the door, it's like, I'm like, hey, we all want to become better at what we're doing. I was a little bit worried we were gonna walk and then I was like, okay, there's gonna be some hot heads that the moment I walk through the door, it's like, I'm gonna beat his. And it hasn't been, everyone's been, it's been a really, it's been great.

But yeah, at some point I was thinking as we go through this and I was kind of doing it more, you know, as the stage shape. I was starting to feel guilty that, hey, am I resting on my laurels? Like, oh, you were a green beret. Yeah, like 12 years ago, you were a green beret. I mean, you're not very green beret you right now. Yeah.

So that got me back into the gym. It got me back. And I'm doing this on my son, doing the MMA training. And I love it. It's been fun. I feel it. Oh my gosh. Doing this at 43 is not doing this at 25.

I've learned that. But yeah, I've had to think about, all right, what if we, what's that gonna be like? And I don't know, but I will tell you this. In the meantime, it motivates me to work harder than I would have if he wasn't there. How better it does.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, I was thinking about that on the drive, man. I was like, you know, that would be tough. Yeah. Who's in front of your son? Yeah. Yeah.

But I guess the thing I, the thing I don't want It would be worse If my fear of losing preventive me of having that experience with him and going through it and Then I would lose the opportunity to teach him that Sometimes you lose and then what you do is you get back up and you go right back in there and you do it again. So yeah. Interesting. Yeah. As long as I convince him that he can never kick my ass, we'll be alright. Let's talk about, let's talk about central banking and the digital currency.

Central banking, I think, and specifically the Federal Reserve, is probably, if we reach a point where we talk about national divorce and things like that, if we reach a point where we talk about, you know, we've talked about national divorce and things like that. If we reach a point where you're actually looking at like significant civil unrest, I'm not talking about a summer where, you know, everybody is writing while the weather's good. I'm talking about like sustained problems. I think that will most likely come from a significant financial crisis. And the kind that are really a source of absolute revolution and upheaval, generally happens when you have a combination of a dollar collapse plus a sovereign debt crisis. Now, the government can't afford to pay the cops or the military to enforce its will.

That's what you see in other places in other countries. The reason why central banking, I think it's become such a problem with respect to monetary policy is we have engaged in inflationary monetary policy for a long time. And most people think inflation is just prices going up. Milton Friedman said this best when he goes and the generalized inflation that we're like seeing right now is at all times a monetary phenomenon. You know, if you're,

I don't think eggs, eggs becoming more expensive at the store, that's not necessarily because of inflation. If you had two age trucks crash on the way to the store and all the age were destroyed, well, okay, you just have a supply and demand issue. You have the same amount of demand, you have a diminished supply, so the price goes up. That's how it works. Inflationary monetary policy is the most, again, underhanded, pervasive and quiet way that the government screws over at citizens. Because the way this essentially works

is in conjunction between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. There's authorization to essentially print more money because the Federal Reserve is going to buy the debt. And then the Federal Reserve usually sends it over to banks or other parties that get that money first. So the most important thing for people understand is that when inflation really is, when we're talking about this large major economic issue,

it's when the government is printing more fiat currency, paper money, right? There's nothing backing our money. People still think like, oh, is it gold? Is it silver? Is it right? There's nothing backing our money. People still think like, oh, is it gold? Is it silver? No. The only thing backing our money is, quote, the good faith and credit of the United States.

That's what backs it. The fact that the United States will accept it when you pay taxes is what's backing the dollar. So when they print a bunch of money, and both Republicans and Democrats have been guilty of this. In fact, Nixon is the one that completely got us off the gold standard all together. When they print a bunch of money, the value of your individual dollar goes down. So just like if supply remains constant, but demand increases, prices go up.

If supply remains constant, demand goes down, prices go up. If supply remains constant demand goes down, prices go down. Right? And then you inverse, inverse effects, right? When the government just prints out a bunch of, print, print, print, the individual value of your individual dollar drops. And that's why prices go up because you have a bunch more, you have more money competing for the same amount of resources. The supplier resources did not go up, just the supply of paper money did. But the trick is that when they print it all out, because it takes time for prices to adjust

to supply and demand within the marketplace, whoever gets that inflated currency first gets the full value at the point where it enters the marketplace. It takes time for the value of that individual dollar to be depreciated. So if the banks get it first, or investment funds, or whatever, get the money for, get access to it first, they're getting full value for things. They can buy up resources, they can buy up assets.

Not to mention, but by the time it gets to you is the paid labor or whatever it else, or the money that you had in your savings account, that's just been diminished. There was just a quiet or a silent tax on all of that money. Because the federal government got the full value of what they were printing. And so inflation, inflationary monetary policy is one of the worst ways to destroy an economy.

So the question people ask is why do they get away with it? If you do inflation slowly over time, at the same time that your economic productivity is increasing, you can still maintain a certain level of economic growth. It doesn't mean it's necessarily good. Some people argue that by adding more units of dollars, there's more money that can be exchanged and circulated in the whole deal. But it's still problematic,

but it's nowhere near as problematic. What we saw during COVID was the Federal Reserve print three trillion dollars out of finair and just throw it at its stuff. And that caused massive inflation. Here's the problem, because some people might have, well, that was a crisis, Nick. We had to stabilize things. We're working out ourselves out of it now. No, we're not. We're well over $30 trillion in debt. And what people don't understand about like the United States budget is the amount of money

that is tied up in what they call non-desionary spending. That's things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Social Security is run like a Ponzi scheme. And every time I say that I get told you're gonna make old people mad. I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings. I'm trying to just explain what's actually going on. The money you put into Social Security today doesn't go in an account for you when you retire. The money you put into social security today goes to somebody else that is collecting on social security. If you did that in the private sector, you would be arrested for setting up a Ponzi scheme.

But when the federal government does it, it's okay because they have the legal right to do crap like this. So that's what's that's what's currently being done. So the question is, is, okay, well, how do you pay for all these entitlement programs? How do you pay for all this money that you're just sending out? How do you pay for the wars that we're fighting everywhere? How do you pay for it? There's three ways.

You can tax it, but that pisses people off. You can borrow it, but the problem is that you get to a point where people don't want to buy treasuries anymore because the interest that they're collecting off of the treasury bonds that they bought is not keeping up with inflation. So why would I invest my money in a government bond that is actually losing me money? Not to mention the fact that even during good times, they don't provide a high return of investment. They're just safe.

The third way, so tax borrow, the third way is print. And the problem with printing is that again, that's how you collapse a currency. So people will ask, well, without the central bank, what would happen? I don't think people realize that we survived in this country all the way into the early 20th century without any central bank. That's not true. We had the Bank of America early on, but they fought very hard to get rid of it. They actually got rid of the US debt

under Andrew Jackson and got rid of the bank. And then we actually had an era of free banking. Now, do some banks still fail? Yeah. But the biggest bank failures in American history have not been before the Federal Reserve. It's been after the Federal Reserve. So the only thing worse than that is a federal reserve controlled digital currency.

Before we go into digital currency, let's go. Yeah, your history guy. Let's go back to the federal reserve and the goldback dollar. Can you just walk us through a snapshot of what happened and how we got into this mess in the first ways, from way that? So the early, I think it was, oh gosh, I might get somebody day's wrong, it was 1913, and then later on, but you had a whole host of legislation that happened that kind of fundamentally changed the way

that the American government did business in the early 20th century during what they called the progressive era. So a lot of this was under Wilson, but we passed the federal income tax, which was the 16th Amendment of the Constitution. That was the first time in US history that the federal government contacts you directly

as an individual based off of your income. Now, they had Lincoln had done things before during the Civil War and whatnot, but it was all very arguably unconstitutional. This made it precedent within the United States. The other thing that we got was the Federal Reserve Act, which set up the Central Bank. Now, there's a book called The Creature of Jekyll Island that we'll talk about how this actually took place, and there was a lot of people like JP Morgan that were pushing for this,

and it was modeled in some respect off of the Bank of England. And the idea behind the central bank was, is this is going to provide stability to the currency. The Federal Reserve actually has two mission statements, essentially. One is a stable currency and a fight inflation and the other is full employment, which is actually kind of a weird thing for the Federal Reserve to be responsible for. But that was the idea. It was that this was gonna be the lender of last resort.

It was gonna prevent runs on banks. If a bank did have a run, they could give them a temporary loan to be able to get them through a crisis point and it was gonna provide overall stability. The reality is that it just, it hasn't done that in comparison to what it was like before the Federal Reserve.

And what people generally point to is that there was a major financial crisis in the United States that people like JP Morgan stepped in, private bankers actually stepped in to help fix. But then the creation was as the Federal Reserve. Well, I will say this, large banks benefit from a large central bank. They make themselves too big to fail. Who's in charge of the Federal Reserve? So the Federal Reserve is appointed, but it's this strange entity where they don't have, like there's not direct congressional oversight over the Federal Reserve.

You point the President will nominate and appoint the chairman of the Federal Reserve and you have the various Federal Reserve banks all over the country, like we got one in Richmond. And they each have their boards with respect to the Federal Reserve, and their job is to monitor their economy, monitor how the currency interplays with that, and determine what their balance sheet should look like with respect to how many treasury bonds they're buying, because them buying treasuries gives the Federal Government money to go spend.

And right now the reason why interest rates are higher is because the federal reserve is getting rid of those and it's not, we're not printing more money out. But what it's also doing is it's affecting interest rates. And I hope this isn't boring, but I need to explain this really quickly. A lot of people, because of the way the media portrays this, interest rates omens get treated like there's something the Federal Reserve decides. And in some way, they arbitrarily do. But what an interest rate is supposed to reflect is the amount of money and savings. So for instance, if you're a fractional reserve bank, which means when you deposit your money in the bank, they don't keep all of it there in a vault. They loan some of it out. And that's how the bank makes money and they

may pay you a small interest to keep it in there. It's factional reserve banking. When there is a lot of money in the bank, which means more people have saved the money they've earned. The bank has an incentive to lower interest rates in order to encourage people to take out loans. Now the signal this sends to the economy in a healthy economy the way it's supposed to work. The signal this sends to entrepreneurs, to business owners is there's a lot of money currently being saved for future consumption. Because the interest rates are lower, this is actually an ideal time for me to invest in

capital projects. That way I can expand business or I can be prepared to be able to meet future demand. That's how it's supposed to work. When the Federal Reserve comes in and arbitrarily lowers interest rates, the banks have an incentive to loan out money. There's more money to loan out, right?

At lower interest, the signal that's being sent to industry is, oh, this is a good time to take out loans for major infrastructure projects because I'm getting a secured loan at a much lower interest rate than I would over here. So this is where I'm going to build all the houses. This is where I'm going to build all the buildings. This is where I'm going to build these major projects.

But what happens when there's no payoff in the end because those banks weren't loaning out money based off of increased savings or increased productivity in the economy, they were just loaning out printed money. Well, now I've got all these people competing for resource, the same amount of resources, right? Cause no additional productivity.

Same amount of resources are being competed for. What does that cause? Cause the price of those resources to go up. Then all of a sudden, housing costs soar, sore and lumber costs, sore and concrete sores. Why? Because we're investing in all these long term projects. And then all of a sudden, it collapses because the wrong signals were being sent to the economy. So interest rates play a very, very important role in a healthy free market economy that is constantly being interfered with because quite frankly politicians want to spend more money without having to tax or borrow it and printing makes for a very, very tempting way to do that

Okay With this with the debt. Yeah, three, I'm sorry, what did you say? It's over $30 trillion. It's over $30 trillion in debt. Who do we owe that debt to? So it's a, it's a, most of it is owed, you could say it's owed to Americans. So it's people that have bought treasury bonds.

Some of it is owned by foreign entities that can also, that also have access to buy foreign treasury. Now, theoretically, what that does is it allows them to jump, if they wanted to, like all of a sudden, dump all those treasury bonds, that can have an adverse effect with respect to our currency and economic status.

So if we wanted to start paying down this debt, how would we do it? We would have to cut spending, so you'd have to do one of two things. You'd have to We would have to cut spending. So you'd have to do one of two things. You'd have to either raise taxes or cut spending and really you'd have to do both. Here's the problem. Politicians don't get rewarded for cutting spending. They get rewarded for spending more until it collapses and then they blame somebody else. If you really wanted to significantly cut in to not only the debt that we currently

have, but the unfunded mandates that we have coming forward, that's Social Security Medicaid Medicare. Because remember, when these things started out in the 19, the Social Security in the 1930s, Medicaid Medicare, I think in the 60s, was so scared. There was a lot more people paying into it than we're taking it out. Well, now we have a lot more people paying into it than we're taking it out. Well now we have a lot fewer people paying into it. And again, it's not like we're pulling from a reserve fund that you paid into,

like a regular retirement insurance per member, 401K. So that's the part where you get into a crisis of we don't have enough money to fund all of this. Is this because of the baby boomer generation starting to draw? Yeah. I mean, that's the biggest generation.

Yeah, baby boomers are, yeah, baby boomers are now moving into retirement. Baby boomers not have as many kids. They're moving in retirement age. And so they're collecting off of Social Security and they're not about to not collect the Social Security. And so, but there's fewer people in the workforce

to actually add into it, which is one of the big pushes for more immigration, because we're not producing enough children to actually keep up with the economic requirements necessary to fulfill our mandates. So when the baby boomer generation is deceased, do you think this is gonna balance? Theoretically, it could, it probably won't,

because again, the political incentive is to always spend money not to cut spending. And part of that is because, and that is not because the government spending money produces better economic results, it because it looks better in campaign ads, right? Yeah. Nobody wants the campaign ads saying, you want to cut social security? They want the campaign ads saying, we're going to make sure we take care of America's seniors. Okay, well, if the mechanism that you're using to take care of American seniors is eventually going to bankrupt the country,

you really haven't done anybody a favor. But that's the future politicians problem. That's not your politicians problem. I think that the baby boomer generation has caused a lot of issues. It seems to me that every aspect of business is catered towards the baby boomer generation. When they were having kids, when me and you were growing up, all the commercials were, it was toys, it was fast food, it was stuff like that now.

It's all, look at it, it's all medicine, it's all pharmaceuticals, so geriatric stuff. And so you start to see, like, I mean, they're the reason fast food was even, to fast food come with the baby boomer generation when they were kids, correct? I think so. Maybe that's what it's like to be understanding today. I think so.

The baby boomer generation, it just, it makes me wonder if, when they're gone, if this is all going to start to balance out. I think there'll definitely be some differences. The problem is those that are birth rates continue to decline. This is one of the things that Elon Musk said that kind of pissed off all the environmentalist.

He goes, our problem is not population growth. Our problem is going to be population decline. Because I don't believe there's a single country in the West. The US used to be the exception of this. The US and I think Ireland at one point that has a population growth above replacement. So right now, like I say, we didn't have a bunch of immigration. The United States population would essentially remain steady at the current numbers, or potentially dip, all of Europe would dip.

China is facing a significant population decline. India is going to overtake China in population in a relatively short period of time. There's 30 million more men in China than there are women right now. It's like the population in Canada. That is cause. Now people look at that. I'm like, oh, well, that won't that work itself out? Okay, well, think about this.

You have 30 million more men than you do women, which means finding a wife, which is pretty important to the civilization of men, right? It's pretty important. It's completely beyond their reach. So now you have a bunch of dispossessed young men that can't find a wife that are in serious economic problems and don't feel any real motivation.

One of two things happens with that. That either becomes an enormous economic drain on your economy or it becomes a really easy rebel group. So when I look at a lot of these issues with respect to, does the baby boomers going through solve the problem? Not if the systemic issues associated with what's going on continue. What will end up is different problems so that they might change, but the underlying issues are still there with the way that our system is set up and the way it's functioning.

How did coming off the gold standard affect all of us? Essentially, so there was a couple different moves for that. FDR made it illegal for people to own gold. And then FDR set the price of gold based off of his lucky numbers. That's not myth, that's not hyperbole. His biographers admit this. Anybody that tells you the FDR was a great president? No, he was not. He was absolutely devastating for this country in many ways. I can respect some of the stances he took during World War II and everything else, but economically, that guy was a... Anyway, I won't use the language I

want to because he did. He set up so many things. He modeled so much of what he did under the New Deal off of Mussolini's Italy. To the point where Hugh Johnson, who was responsible for actually running the Blue Eagle program and everything else within the United States, used to carry around fascist tracks

and them out to people. Yeah, funny enough, that never makes it in to your history books by the people calling all the rest of us fascists. But one of the things he did was he confiscated the private ownership of gold. And part of that, because we had a gold movement, we had a silver movement within the country on backing the currency. Then we moved on to an entirely different model where now it was going to be set up based off of exchange rates in other countries. And so it wasn't something to where you could go into a bank and trade in your dollar for the requisite amount of gold, but it still played a limiting feature on how much you

could print. So here's the bottom line. I should have led with this. Here's the bottom line. If your currency is backed by a commodity like gold, and that currency represents a certain unit of gold, you can't just print as much of it as you want, because it's going to adjust the way that gold moves between various countries, because we're working off of exchange rates and things like that. So what that does is it limits the power of the government with the ability

to just print, go, or excuse me, print money and spend it. The way they used to do this before paper money was a, was a big thing. They used to clip coins. So like the Roman Empire used to be like a denarius was so much, you know, silver or whatever precious metal they were using. What they started to do was clip the actual coins, so it didn't have as much of the actual pure metal that had the intrinsic value. And the end result was, is that all of a sudden, it took a lot more denarius to buy something.

I mean, you could still do that with gold coins today. Yeah, if you buy them on the market, they make them like that. So there's a difference between a currency, which is backed by a commodity that has intrinsic value. Gold has intrinsic value and has always been used as a currency because people will accept it. It's universally accepted that gold has value.

You could do this with other precious metals as well. The problem is, is that little dollar you have in your pocket that has no value other than the United States government will accept it to pay your taxes. So what gives that dollar value is that you know you're going to have to pay taxes. And you know the guy at the gas station is going to have to pay taxes. So I can buy gas by giving him these federal reserve notes and he'll accept them because he knows when it comes time to pay his taxes, the government will accept those Federal Reserve Notes.

But if you don't tie it to something of intrinsic value, you run the risk of inflation and labor, later hyperinflation. And the important thing to understand is that through all of history, the first time that we saw an instance of hyperinflation with a paper currency, was the Yuan dynasty in China.

So we're talking thousands of years ago, right? Or yeah, about about 1500. There's never been a purely fiat currency that didn't experience significant inflationary problems because the political incentive to spend is too great. But if you change that to a digital currency, the real problem now is that theoretically the government has a tie to your account. If you have the paper dollar in your hand and someone will accept it, there's a lot more under the table transactions that can take places as a result of that.

But if your entire monetary wealth in the form of or like currency is tied to a digital account Well, then yeah the implications that are pretty significant Now freezing your account means you're screwed Right, you're not taking your bag of money and leaving somewhere because there is no bag of money anymore. I mean I'm with you. I agree. I Think about this all the time with the digital currency. And we're seeing less and less change. You know, and, but when I think about it, I mean, we're already seeing the government, not even just the government. We've seen PayPal freeze accounts. We've seen banks turn over. I mean, let's just gen 6.

All that banking information got turned over. Canada, those, what was it, like the trucker rally or something? All the financials got turned over to the government. Not very many people even have cash in their wallet anymore. It's all, it's already digital. It's all credit card It's all checked. It's there's not a lot of money exchange like physical dollars actually changing hands. So what I'm not disagreeing with you. Sure What I'm saying is what is the actual difference when you put it in that kind of perspective and everything is already digitized,

how is the digital currency and they're already manipulating banks into controlling mind and yours money? How's it gonna be any different? So it might be a little easier. Yeah, but that's, I actually think the difference is it makes it significant easier. So let's also make a distinction between digital currency

and federally issued digital currency. Okay. Like Bitcoin, you know, she knew, she knew, like whatever, like all that stuff. That's privately, you know, mind and monitored currency. It actually provides something of a hedge against fiat currency because it's so inflationary. Now, you can have a digital coin that's also inflationary, right? Like Bitcoin is very anti-inflationary, but others are, you know, they can mind more of

it, et cetera, et cetera. The difference is that they're usually based off of equations, which is actually kind of what Milton Friedman wanted for the Federal Reserve. That prevents the government from coming in and just printing more of something and then spending it because they want to. Everybody that owns that digital currency over here actually has an incentive to not print off more of it. So the incentive structure is very, very different.

The other thing that's different about a federally produced digital currency versus like paper money or some other form of money that you can hold in your hand, you're right. The vast majority of us, we pay with our debit card. We don't pay with cash. But imagine you didn't have the option at all. That is a game changer.

Because when things become more difficult, people might start to choose that I'm going to keep more cash on hand, or I'm going to buy up more of this digital currency that isn't connected to Federal Reserve notes or whatever it is. But if the government creates a situation where it's like, we're no longer printing money anymore, their ability to reach in and hit your account and actually really hurt you has just gone up exponentially because they haven't provided you another option within their system. And that's why you're seeing competition within the private sector right now.

That's why I always tell people, regardless of what you feel about Bitcoin or whatever the Ethereum do what you want. I'm not telling you how to invest, I'm not telling you what to spend. I like the fact that they exist because complete government control over currency, I think is a problem.

What are your thoughts on Bitcoin? I wish I would have gotten into it 10 years ago. Yeah, I forget somebody was talking about how I think the first Bitcoin transaction that ever took place was eight bitcoins for a pizza. And if you look at it today, I think that would make it something like a $300,000 pizza or something like that. Again, I don't claim to be an expert with respect to cryptocurrency.

You know, I've owned a little bit before a very little bit. I find it kind of fascinating. I think ultimately it has the, it's like anything else. It is a tool and it is morally neutral. It can be used for good, it can be used for bad. For me, the biggest advantage to it right now

is that it is not owned by a government. And that gives it value to me on some level. Yeah. I don't think we are at a point right now where we're seeing enough. Most crypto is not used as currency, it's used as an investment. I think the thing that will cause it to be used more as currency is if you start to see kind of more federal pushback against things like when the federal government starts like deep like now Farage got his, they won't bank with them over there

because he led the whole issue with Brexit. Like holy crap, you're gonna, you're just gonna say you can't bank with us anymore? Like okay, that's fine, but if that's gonna be the mechanism, that's what's gonna open up the opportunity for cryptocurrencies to play more of a role as a traditional currency. I'm not familiar with what you're talking about.

Now Farage was the guy in the UK over on the kind of the conservative side he was big on Brexit and whatnot. He's actually like, he had a lot of banks, like there's been a debanking problem where a lot of these banks have just said, we're not, we're going to refuse to do business with you. And so the question becomes like, okay, where do I put my money? Because obviously that does. Well, a lot of our transactions actually take place through banks, not through just individual.

Because again, we're using that debit card. And we've seen this too. And you know, Andrew Tade had a lot of this stuff like Tade. And regardless of how you feel about Tade, but had a lot of that stuff shut down. And so a lot of the banking BlackRock does this all the time. BlackRock does this with a form of DEI ESG scores. If you don't comply with what they want to see, you don't get investors. And they control $10 trillion. I think we're, or they use to control 10. I think it's seven. But that's significant. And so the more of these traditional institutions, especially the ones most closely linked with the governments, start flexing their muscles to say that if you don't, if you don't agree with us ideologically on these things, then we won't give you access to a banking system that you absolutely rely upon to make basic transactions.

That's where cryptocurrency, I think really comes in as a useful alternative. Yeah. Do you think the dollar is going to collapse? So my buddy, Chris, and I, we debate this a lot. He says absolutely. He says absolutely. It's inevitable. It has to happen.

I think it depends, which is such a lame answer, right? But is it going to collapse in the way that, like, say, the Weimar Republic did in the 1930s or Zimbabwe recently did, which is like all of a sudden, it's $75,000 for a loaf of bread. I mean, inflation got so bad in Zimbabwe 12 years ago where you could walk into the store, pick up a piece, pick up an item and come back. And by the time you got to the checkout register, the price had increased.

You got to be kidding. No. They were carrying around like I have a trillion, I have a hundred trillion dollars in Bob Way bill. Hyperinflation had got to the point where it was like I think 75,000%. I mean, it was just, it was insane. I don't see that happening anytime soon within the United States for a couple of reasons.

One is because we still are economically the most powerful nation on earth. We still are the reserve currency, so a lot of other countries have an incentive for the dollar to not collapse. The issue that's coming up right now is the BRICS system, which is Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and Russia. I said it out of order, but that's what it is. They're announcing that they want to come up with a new currency to push back against the dollar, and they want it to be a commodity-based currency, which means like a gold-backed currency. Now 10 days ago, I would have told you, Bricks is a joke.

If they actually pull that off, I still think Bricks is going to be successful because the countries involved have so much internal economic and social problems. Like South Africa is so close to becoming a failed state and people don't even realize it. China is facing huge economic. I don't think China's gonna be the second richest country in the world in 10 years. They're facing massive, massive problems.

The Russian economy is smaller than South Korea. Is it really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, so I... Yeah, so I don't think these countries are going to be able to make good on this for a variety of social, economic, and geographical reasons.

But the smartest thing I've heard of them come up with so far is a commodity-based currency. Because that would, there's gonna be a lot of people that regardless of how they feel about the current system, they're gonna try to hedge their bets. And if they've got a bet that they can go with, that could cause real problems for the dollar. I mean, it seems like they're making a lot of traction,

more and more countries are heading to that is is it a currency yet? No, I don't think so. I mean, Argentina, I saw, seems to be all about it. All right, Argentina can talk a good day all day long, but that, if you ever wanted to see a country in the Western hemisphere that should be a world power that isn't, it's Argentina,

and it's because it's been one of the most, you know, effectively mismanaged countries with so much going forward in the way of whether natural resources and everything else, but they keep They keep electing populists, you know or socialist oriented Strong man and it's just it's devastated. They're overall economic growth. What are you putting your money in? To protect it from

ammunition ammunition and livestock no Ammunition? No, no, no. Ammunition. Ammunition in livestock. No. I didn't have somebody once come up to me and they're like, Nick, you got to invest in silver. I'm like, this was 10 years ago.

And he goes, Nick, you got to invest in silver. I'm like, why do I go to invest in silver? He goes because, when everything collapses, you're not going to buy a loaf of bread with an ounce of gold, right?

You got to have something with, you know, that's more divisible than that, and it's easier to exchange. I said, Voo, man, I don't, I don't gotta buy silver. He goes, why? I'm like, because I have guns and ammunition. Your silver is not my silver, and now go plow my field. And I kid you not a week later, he comes into work. He's like, so Nick, I took your advice.

I'm like, oh no. Dude, what are you talking about? He's like, so Nick, I took your advice. I'm like, dude, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, he goes, I just bought three more rifles. Can you teach me how to shoot? Oh man. No, I think, I still think even though this is an interesting time to be doing it, because interest rates are a little bit higher.

I will always believe that real estate has value. Now where it has value and under what circumstances can change, but they're not making any more land. And so I think there's something valuable about that. Now again, I always caveat, I do not give financial advice. I'm not a super wealthy dude. I'm nothing like that. But the place where I feel the most comfortable is having something that I can touch, not just a stock that is largely speculative. So I think real estate is still going to be

a valuable commodity to possess. As far as stocks, I try to spread it out to where there's something there. I do have a little bit of crypto, but it's almost kind of like backup planning because I needed to use it as currency. But I'm with you on the land. Yeah. I think that'll be that'll be the last to go. I think it all comes crashing down. Well, because you know, you got a good piece to go. I think it all comes crashing down. Well, because you got a good piece of land. One of the reasons why we got into home setting, is again, it's not because my lifelong dream

was to be a farmer or something, but again, I just never wanted to be in that situation where can I feed my family? And I wanted to take some control over that. And a man, a good piece of land, even if it's not, even if you don't see it as an investment, you've got five acres, a little bit, like especially if you've got some water on it

or something like that. The amount of value that that has in very, very real practical terms with the amount of food you can grow, the amount of livestock you can raise. I mean, five acres, you're feeding, you're feeding a ton of people with that, man. If you know how to manage it, right?

You know, even with the land stuff, I start to get a little bit worried. I mean, I don't know how, I don't know how true this is, but I saw a bumper sticker headline, quite a few of them, a couple of weeks ago saying that the New York City mayor is now telling people that they may have to take in illegal immigrants into their homes which means you don't own that real estate. No.

You know, and then that's always a problem. I mean, I didn't, I saw the headlines, I mean, we all know headlines can be bullshit. I didn't look into it that much because I don't live in New York, you know? So I don't really care. In fact, part of me thinks, great. Good. You guys wanted that.

We have the finally living with the consequences of their policies. Well, unfortunately a bunch of New Yorkers are moving here, but, you know, and they're bringing their ideas with them. But can I say that I think there's, I look at investment as three different levels, right? There's, the real estate is, I think, practical for, because I think it has, it has intrinsic

value. Stocks have a certain degree of intrinsic value, but so many of them, depending on what you get, right, are very speculative. You got to look at your price earnings ratio or your PE ratio in order to determine, is this company turning over profit and has good fundamentals or whatnot. And then you have the stuff like gold and whatnot. And then the question is, is how do you have the gold? Do you have gold in the stock?

Do you have gold somewhere else? Do you have gold coins sitting in your safe? I think gold is always a good, precious metals I think are always good because from time immemorial, they've had value. And they've always seemed to, you know, grabs you over time and crease in value. And it also provides that additional thing where I can pick up the bag and leave with it. I don't got to go to the bank first or ask the Federal Reserve, they will please, you know, bank of America, will you please unlock my account so I can get the money that, you know, so I think that's always valuable as both as kind of a hedge and as your go bag, you know, skid-addle bag.

Yeah, the land I like just because there's intrinsic value inherent within it. And then the speculative stock, speculative stuff. But like you said, there's always the, the first time in my life, like I am absolutely convinced I will go down fighting for my country. But I remember not that long ago, I was looking at property somewhere else. And somewhere, someone was given me crap about it. Where you looking. I can't tell. I was looking at Costa Rica.

A lot of people were looking there. Yeah, I was looking at Costa Rica. You were Paraguay, right? Paraguay. Yeah, I think that, yeah. It actually makes probably more sense. South of the, South of the cartel drug crisis. Yeah, yeah, because the Western coast of,

or Eastern coast of Costa Rica is problematic. But someone was like, why are you doing that? It's like you would honestly just, I'm like, I'm gonna, I'll fight to the bitter end. I don't think it's gonna come to that, right? I hope I'm optimistic that, you know, good men are gonna stand up, good women are gonna stand up and we're gonna take this back because ultimately what their pitching doesn't work. But if that takes a while, I want my grandkids to be able to make their own decision. Me too. Me too.

You know, the other thing that I mean, if you've seen this New York mayor, all the stuff that now he's calling for Biden to lock up the Southern border, I saw that too. I saw that yesterday. I saw that yesterday. I was like, man, it is the sanctuary anywhere. Aren't you a sanctuary? Isn't it amazing that, you know, all these border states now are shipping these illegal immigrants up to New York and all of a sudden now that they're in their backyard? They don't like it. What do you think about the what's going on down there? So initially I remember a lot of people being mad like they should ship them back across the border Why are you shipping them to these other cities?

Because they have been doing it across the border and the policy hasn't changed because the people advocating the policy don't have to deal with the consequences. And that is, I think it was Thomas Sol, one of the best quotes he ever had and he has a ton. Was he said, one of the stupidest things that you can do is take decisions out of the hands of people that pay a price for being wrong and put them into the hands of people that play no price for being wrong. And he was specifically referring to like intellectuals and politicians. It's that they could send their wax and election and talk about how wonderful and great and tolerant and nice

they are. Well, yeah, because they don't have to deal with the consequences of what they're talking about. That's somebody else's problem. The moment it became their problem, holy crap, what a bunch of border closing bigots. Golly G. Willikers turns out, turns out that there's actual, problems with respect to resource allocation and things like that, that this wasn't stuff that racist Texans and Arizonans

were making up. So I told, look, I said to people that were like, well, they should have done this, they should have do that. I'm like, you know what? Screw it. I'm sorry. The only way you are going to get woke progressives

to actually understand the consequences of their world view is for them to experience the consequences of it. That's it. As long as they can outsource the consequences to other people and they can just sit there and be happy, nice, tolerant people, well, then fine. They'll do it all day long. They will fight to the last drop of your blood. But the moment, now, look, the thing I don't like, I mean, obviously we're talking about flesh and blood people here. I mean, obviously we're talking about flesh and blood people here. But at least from what Abbott's saying and DeSantis and everyone else,

they're not running about putting on a bus and saying, they're saying, who would like to go to New York? Who would like to go to Chicago? Who would like to go to Martha's Vineyard? Now, you can argue all day long, do they truly understand what's going on or why or whatnot. But their goal, let's face it, their goal was not to get to a border town in Texas. Their goal was not to get to a border town in Arizona. Their goal was to get to the United States.

Well great, they're helping them get, even deeper into the United States as a result. No. So I think that, again, as my buddy Christian says, you can ignore reality, you just can't ignore the results of ignoring reality. And that's the problem is that a lot of people have had the benefit of ignoring reality

because their bad decisions were being paid for by other people. And now their bad decisions are being paid for by them. Well, a lot of them have just been able to escape. We talked about this earlier. I think, you know, one thing that, and I don't know how you would do this, I've been saying for a couple of years now, I think it would be tax incentives, but, you know, but you see, you see this with California, you see this with Illinois, you see this with California you see this with Illinois you see this with New York you see it with Michigan you see of Minnesota I know missing a bunch of places, but those are probably those are the primary ones that stick out in my mind and You see all these people and they created these they voted this in. They voted in the fact that

voted in the fact that the state can come in and rip your eight-year-old kid away from it if they want to change the genders. They voted in the border policy. They voted all this in and now it's happening. It's, you've got exactly what you wanted. Everything you voted, everything you wanted is now happening and you don't like it. And now all of these other states who've been avoiding this stuff are opening the gates to these people that voted this shit in. And they're coming here and they're ruining where I live.

Yeah. And they're ruining where you live, they're ruining Texas, they the ruining where you live, the ruining Texas, the ruining Florida, and it's like this It's like this disgusting plague that's just coming out in the governors are just With open arms. Yeah, come on in come on in you want a tax free state because you voted the fact the fact that the states can take 30% of your wages Yeah, come here. Just come on over here. In fact, just spend six months here.

Don't even tell anybody. You can tell all your friends that you're still a resident in California. They're coming in. What do you think about that? So what's interesting is that states don't have the ability to obviously prevent American citizens from coming through But they might if they if they I mean what if they had a Like a step-down struck tax structure like okay, you're gonna come here You're gonna pay the exact same amount of taxes that you were paying in California for the first five years

Well, then we're gonna step it down and you're gonna pay 50% of that after another five years. And then after 15 years, then you'll get the tax free. So here's what I would say. Make them have a little skin in the game. I believe me, very, very sympathetic. The issue that I have from a policy perspective. One of the phenomena that we're watching take place right now

that is actually different from what's happened in the past is that people are engaging in more ideologically oriented self-sorting. So it used to be New Yorkers moved to Arizona, not because they were trying to flee the tax policy in New York, the flood to Arizona because it's warmer weather, same thing with Florida, right,

same thing with a lot of places. Then we started to see more of this with California where you had companies getting up and moving to Texas and now Austin looks like Berkeley almost. It's disgusting. Yeah. The question has always been, because a lot of this is fostered through economic development.

It's been this whole deal like, oh, we're gonna get your industry and they're gonna become more economically powerful, but the problem is is that if the bad policies came with the business, then you're sending yourself up for future failure. We're starting to need some more ideological self sorting, which is to say people are leaving

with very, very knowledgeable of why they are leaving and why they are going to the place they go. I call it the difference between locus and refugees. So, and again, people say, oh, you're accusing people of being insect. It's a metaphor, don't be a punk. Locus destroy the wealth within a particular region and then they leave when there's no more wealth to consume.

So they create the negative conditions which forces them to leave. But then when they go to the new place that has abundance, what do they do? They engage in the exact same sort of behavior. So they just essentially go around as a wrecking ball. A refugee knows why they're leaving, knows why they're going to the place that they're

going to and is appreciative for what they now have. They want to be a part of that and they feel gratitude for where they're going in the new system that has essentially adopted them. The question is, is how do you prevent the locus while the same time accepting the people that it is a great thing for Tennessee if people with the same value system who want to work hard and raise their family come to Tennessee? It's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing if all of a sudden your state government is giving off a bunch of movie

tax credits in order to encourage Hollywood to shoot more films over here to set up more industry within Tennessee. And then all of a sudden, you've encouraged a bunch of people to come over here based off of manipulation of the tax code, right? At the expense of all your current taxpayers. You know, one of the things that I get in trouble with sometimes with fellow Republicans is that we will have bills to manipulate the tax code to encourage new business. What they're doing is they're saying, hey, all of you businesses currently in Virginia, your taxes are going to say the same.

We're going to give this out of state company a bunch of incentive to move here. We still have obligations, so we're still going to collect your taxes, but they get a break. Now, they've tried to mitigate some of this by saying, you only get the break if you meet certain numbers with respect to the number of people you employ and everything else. But the problem is, is that like if Amazon comes into Virginia, I was one of seven Republicans that voted against the Amazon deal in Virginia. If Amazon comes in and they set up shop and they build, you know, whatever, a hundred million, two hundred million, three hundred million dollar headquarters and they start to employ people and they don't make, they don't make their numbers.

They have enough political pull to now come back and get the numbers shifted. And this is the part where I got a better idea. You want to be the sort of state that people want to move to? Lower taxes. Don't try to manipulate it in order to be the sort of state that people want to move to? Lower taxes. Don't try to manipulate it in order to give that company favor over that, because that's cronism. I hate cronism. I'm a free market guy, not a cronist.

I think that would address some of what you're talking about. But I'm gonna be honest, I don't have, well, I'll take that back. be honest, I don't have, well, I'll take that back. The absolute kryptonite to the most, like, woke companies or stuff like that come into your state is not your economic policy. It's your social policy. And as someone who is obviously very, very socially conservative in my views, but I tend to be more, I tend to lean libertarian when it comes to, look, I don't like what you're doing, but I don't want the government to punish you for it.

Well, now we've moved into a realm where they don't like what I'm doing and they do want the government to punish me for it, even though I'm not hurting them. So part of the reason why I think states like Tennessee and states like Florida, this is just speculation on my part, I don't have any special insight into this. I think one of the reasons why they're pushing for this policy is not only because they believe it to be morally correct, you're not going to carve up children in the state of Tennessee.

I think they also do it because it's like, you're not going to like moving here because your values are not going to be reflected in our culture and our laws, not now, not ever. And so, you want to find a new place to move? Great. Pick somewhere else. That's the way I see it as being most effective to say, when a state kind of insists on its culture and doesn't cater to a business moving in by manipulating their own tax code or making special privileges for them that they don't give to any of their other homegrown businesses. I think that actually creates a positive economic incentive

while at the same time maybe creating the cultural conditions which tells the super woke progressive, this ain't this, this is probably not where you would want to live. Just like I don't want to live in Berkeley, California, you probably don't want to live in Franklin, Tennessee. But. Okay. In theory, I would love to agree with you,

but I'm, I'm, I'm saying, I'm not saying that happening. Yeah. And here's another thing that nobody's talking about is even if it was all just refugees, right? You're not, you as a governor or a mayor or whoever is paying you off to build these developments to put these businesses in place, it's bringing wealth into these states.

And that is screwing over the people that voted their asses in. Here's how, because the people that live here, like, you tend to see, just tend to see right now. None of the, it is like, and it's like a, it is very rare to meet and talk to a OG original born and raised teniseon. You know why? Because they can't afford to live here anymore. Because all the California wealth and all the New York wealth that, trying to watch my

language here, there's no thing, maybe in a dad, I'm trying to write down. But they have ruined where they live, made a ton of money. Now they're coming here, they're going to bring the same stuff. And the people that voted these guys, they're home. They can't afford to live here anymore. They get pushed out. You know, and that's that's bullshit The thing that I've always been

So here's the here's the skeptical part of me I don't I mean I obviously think that economic development is a good thing in the sense that I want people to again if it's free market transactions and And all I mean by that is You own property you own your labor, I own my property, I own my labor, if we decide to engage in a voluntary transaction, well, presumably it's because both of us

are gonna benefit from that transaction. And I want as much of that to take place as possible. The sort of garbage that I think we have going on right now is political manipulation of the economy. So for instance, let's say that once upon a time, old school Tennessean could live right here and now you've got a bunch of people moving into the area. What does that create?

It creates more demand for limited housing. Well, you can either grow more housing or you can either build more housing or the value of the currently property is going to go up. Well, maybe the OG Tennessee and the currently lips here goes, you know what, I am definitely willing to sell my house for twice as much as I thought it would be worth, because now I can go move deeper into Tennessee or I can get that property I always want to...

Well, that was a good, even though he might not like the politics of the person in the body, right? He might benefit from that transaction because that's what he wanted to do. And I don't want to be in the process politically of trying to micromanage and manipulate the economy. I don't want to do that. I want to let free people decide how they spend their money,

where they spend it, on what they spend it. But the biggest issue I see with what you're talking about is that's what's going on. Politicians are actively going out and saying, hey, Virginia or whatever it is, is open for business. It's going out and specifically selecting companies and saying, if you come, we'll give you tax incentives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want people to move, if someone's

going to move to the Commonwealth of Virginia, I want them to do so because they appreciate the Commonwealth of Virginia. Now, we might have some differences in opinion. We can do, that's fine, but that's what I wanted to be. I don't want it to be something where we're convincing a bunch of people that don't want to move to the Commonwealth of Virginia to do it because look at all these very, very unique and special economic incentives that we gave just you. That's a recipe for disaster. You're encouraging somebody that doesn't want to belong to what you actually have here,

doesn't really care about the culture of what represents or made it possible. And you're just essentially paying them off to come there. That's ridiculous. Set up the right, set up an environment where free people can thrive, and then let the people that want to be free and work hard thrive. I mean, if anything, it's... This is another one of the thing when I look at it. There was some... I can't remember. I don't know if this is apocryphal, but I heard it. I thought it was hysterical. And it was like of a small town that they

had kind of like the town drunk, right? He was the problem. He was everything else. He, you know, in and out of like little, like, you know, one night hotels and in and out of jail and the whole deal and just vagrancy and, you know, destruction of property and petty theft and whatnot. And so they created a circumstance where he won a flight to Hawaii. He won an all expense paid flight to Hawaii with no return ticket.

And regardless of what you think about that on a moral level, I look at policy and I'm like, you know what, you don't want to live here, you don't want to work, you don't want to contribute. I absolutely think you should go to one of these states. Preferably AOC's district, she doesn't think you should have to work. She thinks you should just be able to live and collect money. I guess from the government,

which is all from the labor of other people who do have to work, I think you should definitely go and flood those welfare states. Just like we're doing right now with immigration policy, you're great. You don't want to, you want the benefits of this society, but you don't want to actually have to contribute anything to it.

But you demand that we pay you to exist. The rest of us don't have that luxury, because if we're not out there working, they don't have tax dollars collected to give to you. Yeah, you're not, that's not liberty, that's licentiousness. That's some lazy-ass crap. So, great. California's that way.

They'd love to have you. They're nice and tolerant. And they think people like us that are working 60, 70, eight hours a week were just mean greedy, horrible human beings. Yeah, that's, let's create a reverse incentive to what's like, do you know, can, like if I was Florida right now, it would seriously be going around,

to everybody going, have you heard about the wonderful welfare benefits in California? They will give you so much more than our state will. Because I'm, nothing gets me more angry than watching, than watching a leftist stand up and talk about how, you know, mean and greedy, hardworking people are because they don't want to pay another, you know, however much it is in taxes. Not to go to roads, not even to go to people that are truly genuinely in need,

because that's the sort of stuff we should be handling through family, church, and civic organizations. No, it's to fund people that vote for a living, and they vote for the politicians that are going to give them stuff. And that is not only a horribly, that's not only a corrosive mindset on all of society. It's actually a self-destructive mindset. I have never met a happy

entitled person. Never. Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break. Alright. We'll come back. Let's talk about the national divorce. Gotcha. Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave the Sean Ryan Show review.

We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. Alright, Nick, we're back from the break. You paint a very good picture of what a national, what you call the national divorce might look like. So, I always get a caveat, right? I don't want this to happen, right?

I love my country. I don't want it to happen. But again, my background in SF was unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency. This was kind of our area to some degree of looking at discontent within an area and then mobilizing forces. It was like, okay. First of all, I think the United States is unique because we are a constitutional federated republic.

And I don't think most people appreciate how unique that is in the world. There's not a lot of countries that have a system like ours. You could argue Germany kind of does. The next closest one is probably Switzerland with their cantons and all that means is, most like you look at France, you look at the UK, they might have regions, you can't have provinces and whatnot, but the amount of sovereignty that a state has

is pretty significant. And so you have to view everything to the lens of that setup versus like other countries which are more national as opposed to federal. It's like anything else, there's conditions and then there's a catalyst. If you get a catalyst without the right conditions, you get riots, right?

If you get conditions without a catalyst, you get slowed decline or maybe even a reversal of change over time. But you get conditions, right? If you get conditions without a catalyst, you get slowed decline or maybe even a reversal of change over time. But you get conditions in catalyst. That's where you can actually have something where we see something significant happening in the United States that we haven't seen since say the Civil War. I think there's kind of three general conditions. The first one has to do with geographical self-sorting. Now what's interesting from like an early American history is that you had very, very distinct cultures between the North and the South. Now that's not to say that you wanted to have found additionally distinct cultures between

Florida and Virginia, but there was still a sense of almost kind of us in them between Northern states and Southern states. And a lot of had to do with like tariff laws and obviously slavery and things like that. But it also had a lot to do with who settled the various regions. The United States is very different now. People move all the time, people don't really take as much.

They don't view themselves by their state as much as they do by their country. So that's very different than the last time we had a major civil war or civil uprising. But we're seeing more and more people start to sort ideologically. You definitely see a migration happening in the country. Yes. And there's no doubt about that. And the migration, again, is not just happening because it's a nice place to retire or it's not just happening because they're going to give me a couple extra thousand on my retirement. That's not it. People are now leaving because screw this place. And when they show up to the new place,

they're adamant. Like they, they are every, they can't stand where they came from as much as everybody else can't stand the people coming, right? That sort of geographical self-sorting is very interesting. And kind of a necessary condition if you're actually looking at something like national divorce level, like secession or whatever you want to call it. Another condition is diametrically opposed views of what the country is supposed to be. So for most of my lifetime, Democrats and Republicans disagreed about what the marginal tax rate should be or how many government programs that we should have or what was the

best way to facilitate educational outcomes. But everyone thought the Constitution was a great thing and that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and James Madison were great people. Like there was no, I mean, nobody thought, nobody would have thought to argue on the Democrat side 10 years ago that, well, of course you would give a 10 year old child puberty blockers if they're confused about puberty. And of course we would surgically alter them at 17.

Like why, what do you do those things? Aren't you gender affirming? Like, that was not a thing. You now have a system where among the major political parties, you do have diametrically opposed visions, not only with where the United States should go, but where it's been and what that represents. So that goes what I was talking about before

when you're, when you demoralize and deconstruct a civilization. You know, I have one major political entity and movement that is fully dedicated. They have like just embraced these things. And while there are still a lot of like old school Democrats that, you know, again, still like the constitution in George Washington, don't think we're all crap, Those people are not running the show on the Democratic Party. They're not the thought leaders within the Democratic Party. And I don't mean to make this overly partisan. It's just when you talk about why would a nation split in the first place?

Well, if you have diametrically opposed disagreements, not only about where you've been, but where you should go, that's pretty significant. So the first one is geographical self-sorting where people are actually saying, I don't wanna live next to these people because we disagree fundamentally on what's going on. Then you have the ideological differences, major ideological differences that are not really reconcilable.

That's the whole, we wanna go this way, we wanna go this way, and there's no way we can do that together. There's not a real compromise in between these two positions. The third condition I would say within the United States is when one of those sides gets enough federal power, and that is house, senate, presidency,

and maybe the Supreme Court. At that point, the game is up. If the party which controls those things believes they should be able to use federal power to achieve what they want. So if the party that achieves it says, hey, look, we don't think the federal government should be doing all this stuff.

This should be done at the state level. You might be okay. But if the party that achieves that level of power, absolutely 100% believes that they should use the federal government to go around and tell everybody You might be okay, but if the party that achieves that level of power absolutely 100% believes that they should use the federal government to go around and tell everybody how they should be behaving Now you have three powerful conditions Because now there's nowhere to escape Right now if you don't like California move to Florida. You don't like Florida move to California

What happens if you moved to Florida to avoid California and now the Californians are controlling the federal government at such a level to where Florida doesn't get to do the things that wanted to do anymore because now it's a violation of federal law and you have a Supreme Court which is now dreamed up violations of the Constitution that never existed five minutes ago. And for anybody that wants to tell me that that's ridiculous, how would the Supreme Court even do that? In the 1930s, the Supreme Court held back FDR's aspects of his new deal, that they didn't like because it was horribly unconstitutional.

FDR threatened to pack the court. A couple of justices retired. He replaced them with progressive justices. And the Supreme Court in 1942 determined that it was constitutional for the federal government to regulate your garden. If you grew food for your own consumption, they could regulate that. And the reason why they could is because of a liberal interpretation of the interstate commerce clause. Because if you hadn't been growing,

I think it was wheat might have been corn. If you hadn't been growing that for your own consumption, you might have gone to the store to buy corn. And if you've gone to the store to buy corn, the corn you purchased at that store might have come from a different state. And so therefore, your economic activities with respect to your garden impacted interstate commerce, the federal government could regulate it. Well, so nobody gets to tell me that the Supreme Court would never do something like this, especially because if you had a president, a Senate, and a House, they could stack the Supreme Court.

So now you're living in a state that, let's say, is 65, 70% of one way of thinking. And the rural urban distinctions are not as great as they used to be. And now you've got a federal government that is coming in and telling you that you're not allowed to live the way that you want anymore. But you've got a governor, and the governor decides, screw that, I'm not doing it. Well, that's what we call nullification. That's where a state government essentially tells the federal government, we believe that you have violated your constitutional restrictions and limitations.

And so therefore, we're not going to help you enforce these laws within the boundaries of our state. Now right now, law enforcement doesn't have to, you know, local law enforcement doesn't have to necessarily work with federal law enforcement. If it's federal jurisdiction, the federal, the feds can do it, but that doesn't mean they get to hijack state and local resources to do it. Nullification would be a positive statement by a state to say, we're not doing that, we're not going to help you with that.

That puts the federal government in an incredibly difficult position because they don't have sufficient numbers within federal law enforcement to impose things without assistance from state and local. The way they usually get that assistance is through joint task force, whether it's revenue sharing or there's money involved, or the state threatens to withhold funds for other things that they don't get cooperation. The next level up from nullification, which is just, I'm not cooperating. I'm not going to help you is what they call inner position. Innerposition is when FBI agents show up and Texas Rangers meet him and say get the F out of Texas. What happens at that point?

Right? So you can already tell like with these sorts of conditions and not all of the, by the way, not all of those conditions are met. Right, one of them is met. One of them is kind of being met. Like the one that's been met is diametrically opposed visions for the country and diametrically opposed views of our history. The one that's starting to be met

is the geographical self-sorting. The one that hasn't been met yet is one side dominates the federal space and wants to use it to achieve their objectives. If you have all of that, the next thing you need is the catalyst. Now we went through, we did a show once we were talked about, all right, would the catalyst be if they perp walked Donald Trump into a federal prison? And we all agreed, nah, that would make people mad, you might see some rioting, you might

smell the things, but it's not a catalyst for this sort of stuff. What if they stack the Supreme Court? That probably feeds on the conditions, but it's probably not a sufficient catalyst until the Supreme Court tries to do something, like say, say you had a Supreme Court that says the second amendment no longer means what it means. All right. But if you had that and you had a catalyst such as, again, a Supreme Court saying the second amendment no longer conveys an individual right to the private ownership of firemen only applies to state-run militias, which this Supreme Court now interprets as the National Guard. And so now federal agents with the ATF are going to show up and start to confiscate weapons of local and state.

Don't support it. ATF over here, Texas Rangers is over here. And Texas Rangers ain't budget. Well, what are you gonna do, federal government? Well, you could back down, or you could open fire. You've been fired at that point. You are gonna see the biggest FU from a lot of states that are not even gonna claim we're leaving the union, right?

They're not doing that. They're just gonna claim we're not abiding by this. That's interposition. Now, a lot of times when we talk about nullification, interposition, the left will come in and be like, oh, you mean like opposition, the civil rights movement, because those terms were used to try to oppose desegregation. They were used for horrible things. But the thing that they seem to forget is one of the earliest instances of a state telling the federal government not only to pound sand, that you actually had a local sheriff that arrested a federal marshal and put him in jail was in Wisconsin. And it was because Wisconsin did not recognize the legitimacy of the Runaway Slave Act. Because the Runaway Slave Act meant that federal marshals were actually chasing down

people that had escaped slavery and then returning them to slavery. You had to make it all the way to Canada to be truly safe. And Wisconsin told the feds, you ain't doing that here, and they literally locked up the fed and they made sure the other guy got out of there. So you had this big crisis moment of what you're gonna do. Well, feds kind of, you know, back the Fed and they made sure the other guy got out of there. So you have this big crisis moment of what you're gonna do. Well, Fed's kind of, you know, back the way. And that's gonna be the point. I hope if it ever got to something like that, the federal response would be like, okay, we've overstepped our boundaries,

we don't want a situation where we're killing Americans. The thing that worries me though, is I hear some of the things that people say, I mean, we all do. When you have that level of hatred, people start itching for an excuse. And one of the things that's feeling a lot of this right now is disgust. And disgust is actually an incredibly powerful motivator when it comes to preparing someone to have the capacity for violence. And that's, that's, that should be concerning to all of us. But if the people coming, if in your mind, the people coming to confiscate your firearms

because of a liberal PACs supreme court are the same people that don't mind their being openly pornographic images within your kids' public school. And by the way, anybody that says that isn't happening is either a liar or so horribly misinformed that you shouldn't listen to anything else they say. Because that is happening. I've seen it myself. We argued this in Virginia. We had a bill that just said, you got to notify parents if it's there. We're not even banning it. You just got to notify

parents if it's there, not one Democrat voted yes. So I don't want to hear nobody wants this. So imagine now, you're going to see the disgust dwelling up at me. So imagine a situation where now someone is going to come and deny you of a constitutionally protected right, because of a process that you feel is going to come and deny you of a constitutionally protected right because of a process that you feel is illegitimate because they already stack the court. And these are the same people that represent a whole lot of other behavior that you think is horribly disgusting and directed toward children. Yeah, that's a potential powder cake. And I desperately don't want that to happen. Because as you and I mentioned before, there's a lot of people to talk with a lot of bravado

about like, yeah, let's go find in the streets. And it's usually talked by people that have never had to find in the streets. I don't want my kids having to live with that. My whole goal is to, the only reason I talk about some of this stuff and discuss it and talk about things like conditions and catalysts and how these things could take place is because they don't want it too. I would love it if the other side would agree. I would love it if the other side would just come to grips with something very quickly. We are a republic of republics. That's what the states are. Part of the reason why that was set up and this James Madison, right, the district I represent, Madison reviewed over and over and over again,

why do republics fall? And one of the biggest conclusions he came to is republics grow to such a size, to wear a small central authority, is attempting to govern things that they can't possibly understand, cultural institutions they can't possibly appreciate, norms and situations.

And so the whole idea behind a federal system, behind separation of powers, behind competing powers was this concept of national unity is going to rest around the federal government doing very, very few things. And it's right there listening to article one section, I had a constitution. For everything else, you look to your state, you look to your locality, most importantly, look to the individual as a free person to be able to make their own decisions. If we can get back to respecting that we're not going to agree on everything, but the best way to live in peace is not to force everybody else to do what you want, but to sometimes just

leave other people alone. And you know what? Reality has a great job of proving who is right and who is wrong in individual situations oftentimes. I don't know that they're willing to accept that. I think they become so convinced that they're right in where evil, whereas we think we're right in their wrong. And that's a very, very different thing. But more and more, I'm seeing people on the right say, no, no, no, they're evil.

And that's where it gets dangerous. Yeah. Do you think there's, I mean, do you think there's, we're divided on everything, everything. Is there a way to even get back to the way it was? I, yeah, I... Historically, it'll be very difficult, but it can happen.

Countries have gone through crisis moments where it looked like there was no return. And you never get back to where you were, but you can't get to a good place. But the only way you achieve something like that is first of all, you have to recognize the source of the problem. You can't hide it.

That's one of the biggest issues. Bill, I don't, don't talk about that. You're gonna encourage this. You're gonna encourage it. How are we supposed to properly diagnose a problem if we're not allowed to discuss it? Yeah. And then it really is going to take,

again, the people that believe in objective right and wrong, objective truth, logic reason, individual liberty plus personal responsibility. It's going to take those people willing to stand up and fight for it. Like right now we have people that remain silent, not because they're threatened with any physical violence or force, but because they're embarrassed. And that's the first thing to get past. I was talking with somebody really nice guy,

really nice guy and we're talking on the plane. And he's getting excited as he's talking about the missionary work he does. And he's not talking loud, but he's definitely talking loud with the people around could hear. And I remember, I even had this almost tinge like, oh, I wonder if anybody's getting offended by us,

and then I stopped myself, I'm like, no, now what this guy is talking about right now was, he's talking about raising his kids and he's talking about going out and, and preaching and he's talking about speaking hope into people's lives and, and the sacrifices that they made and where he's come from because he had gone through a lot to get to that point. And I'm like, no, no, he has every right, he has every right to be excited about what he's talking about. And I got every right to be excited for what he's talking about. And I am tired. I am tired of parents and people in general free people, which are supposed to be free people upset because well, you know, we're not allowed to talk about politics or religion.

I don't want to be accused of being a bigot because I believe that, you know, the Bible says certain things about human sexuality and I think they're true. And I'm not here to force you to believe what I believe, but I want to believe that these things are true. And I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling that these things are true. And I'm tired of feeling like a hostage of my own country because if you do that, there'll be social ostracizing for it. And I get told this, I get told this by the same people, the same people that want to look at me with a huge level of righteous indignation.

How dare you want school choice. You must hate poor kids. As if I don't want it for poor kids. And then those same people, they think I mean, and how dare I challenge them on anything. Don't I know that they're the nice altruistic kind people? I'm the mean one. And then those same people get up

and sit there and justify why there needs to be pornography in a school or why that kid needs to get puberty blockers at 10 years old or why that kid needs to be carved up or that kid needs to be aborted at month nine. And I'm the bad guy. No, I'm sorry. Only in clown world is that the bad guy. And the only reason, the only reason, I believe it's been allowed to continue to this degree because there hasn't been enough men in society, not that I don't want women to stand up to, but there hasn't been enough men in society to stand up and be like,

slow your role. Because let's face it, at the end of the day, this power that they're projecting, where does it come from? Honestly, when you look at the people, right, when you look at Antifa, are you worried about your physical safety? I don't see any one of these people that poses a physical threat to me, absolutely not. Yeah. You want to go down that road? I will show you what a bad idea it was. But because of their influence with an institutions, we've all been taught to respect.

That's where the power and authority comes from. It is a looserie. And we're going to see how much of an illusion it actually was when men start standing up and going now. Not in my house, not in my community, not in my state, not in my country. You're free to live the way you want. The moment you try to impose that on me, you got something else coming. And I think when we start doing that, and I'm not talking about engaging in violence, I'm talking about defending what we care about, and doing it with the same passion and conviction

that they seem perfectly willing to do. I mean, yeah, we're not talking about violence, we're just talking about, just do something. Yeah, speak up. Yeah, like, chop somewhere else. Yeah, put your kids somewhere else. Yeah speak up. Yeah, like Shop somewhere else. Yeah, put your kids somewhere else. Yeah It's it's just sacrifice something just anything. There's so many people living in this country who just They have they have the strongest of opinions, but they've not done one damn thing to make this a better place. Not one thing. And that's once again, you know, I'm, that's for everybody. Yeah. That's for everybody.

I'm sure a lot of the critics, a lot of your critics who are on your same side have not done anything either. It's the... I had somebody say something, he disagreed with me on like some minor policy position and he called me a coward and I haven't called a lot of things and there's a lot of things I don't really care if you call me but I was taught at a very young age that a coward was one of the worst things a man could be called. And of course, it's on social media. And I remember my wife looking over me and she goes, did you just threaten one of your constituents? What are you talking about? She goes, I just read your response. I said, all I

said was is that I hope he displays the same courage and person that he does online. That's it. Any back down. But yeah, I am tired of this class of angry conservative that is always close enough to see the battle, but never close enough to get any blood on them. Yeah I feel like that's the majority of the That's the majority of the party unfortunately. Well, the I will say the thing that I do fine encouraging all of this though is that when you do see

And I think we were talking about this a little bit offline I think we were talking about this a little bit offline. More and more, there's people that are standing up there with a different vision of masculinity, of being good husbands, being good fathers. And I think what's important about it is they have credentials. I don't mean credentials in the form of PhDs. A young man is going to listen to you in part not just because You know, you're you're heavily influential in this space and what you do But you went through things in your life and your military career as a seal work with the agency in combat

You went with things that give you credibility on a masculine level that cannot be replaced with just a good argument. And the more men that are willing to step up and say that, yeah, these are credentials, but my desire to be a good husband, my desire to be a good father, that's every bit is important for saving what it is I want to preserve about this country. And it almost, it provides something for a lot of men that feel just completely adrift right now, it provides them something to grasp onto and to rally behind. If it's just nothing more than to know, all right, these

instincts that I have, these things that I want, they're not wrong. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not the source of the world's problems by virtue of just being a young man, but they need guidance. And obviously you're not going to be able to show it physically in person for every single one of them, but it's about showing them that, yeah, once again, no, those instincts are good, but they have to be honed in the service of something true and noble because if they're not, they're going to find expression in something horrible. And the fact that I believe that can work.

That's ultimately why I'm not, I'm frustrated, but I don't feel defeated in any of this. I just feel like you go through certain points in your life where okay, you were in the military or you were in the teams or you do this and then it ends. And it's like what next? And I was kind of dealing with that a Couple years ago for a couple years wondering like you know, I thought life was gonna be this and then it changed

But it was okay because it was this I thought I was gonna and I would change and like Now this is the this is the mission now This is the mission now And This is the mission now. And it's a good one. Yeah, it's it is. Well, Nick, that was an awesome conversation, man. I really appreciate you coming out here. Now, it's entirely my pleasure.

And I really do appreciate what you do with this. I mean that very sincerely. Thank you. I'm not even sure we all realize how important the conversations are because of what it represents to people that needs to hear it. So thank you. It's my pleasure, man. It really is. I hope to pleasure, man. It really is.

And I hope to see you again. I really do. So, I'm sure I will. Yeah. Did you have a good experience? Oh, yeah. Last. Me too, man.

And I love what you're doing. Where can people find you? So, Nick J. Freitas, we kind of made it simple. If you just go and Nick J. Freitas on Twitter, on Instagram, on YouTube, we have a podcast called Making the Argument. We do a lot of long-form discussions. We try to get a lot of audience participation in. Yeah, those are probably the best areas. We also have a series on our YouTube channel. We've tried to kind of make some like easy to understand, like 10 minute videos on just experiences,

like on raising a son, raising daughters, being a husband, being a father, why you should be dangerous as a father. So hopefully those things are helpful. Well, one of my favorite discussions with this interview was about fatherhood. Yeah. And you're a hell of a dad.

I hope so. I just, if I can ever, I'm getting to a point where every time I talk about my members of the kids, like I start choking up. And I remember my grandfather warning me about that. He's like, making you get a little bit older. And he was the tough guy stuff's going to start to crack when you're talking about your children and he was right.

He was right. Well, that's the lot to you brother. Thank you, you take. Former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland keeps it real on the Mike Drop podcast. He's the co-CEO of the All Secure Foundation, which is this special operations in active duty combat that's time-satterly. Nobody helps you shoot your gun. They trained you, had a shoot your weapon, so we're gonna train you on the things you've never been trained for. I don't come home for more. Everything else that turns people away from it. We try to brand it,uce or dismiss the kind of stigma that's associated with it. You have to. Mike Drop, raw, unfiltered, intellectually sound. Wherever you listen.