Adam Kinzinger on Standing Up For The Truth

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1:46Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:32Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. To me, one of the critical Stoic exercises is this idea of getting perspective. You see in meditations, Mark's zooming out, trying to think back just a couple cycles ago. One of my favorite passages in meditations is where Mark's really talks about how for all time people have been doing the exact same things. This is the Gregory Hayes translation. He says, marrying and raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power.

3:14And one of the things that I take from the study of history is a calmness. I mean, it does create a kind of urgency and moral priority because you see how bad things can get and you see how individuals can change the world. But it also, you realize that things take time. You realize the same things have been happening over and over again. And we actually have some guests that fit in this niche coming up in the next few months. I've always sort of cultivated friendships with older people. We have Judge Block coming on the podcast in a few weeks. He's a 92-year-old judge that I know. I've talked about George traveling before.

3:53I talked about Richard Overton. And I was very close with my grandfather, who would be 100 if he was alive today. And my grandmothers as well. I've talked about Dolores, who's sort of my bonus grandmother. It's a long story. But I was with her in Sacramento this weekend. And she's 94, I believe. And I'm always like, what do you remember about 1968? What do you remember about the 30s? What do you remember about World War II? What do you remember about these moments that seem like they must have been horrible and overwhelming and terrifying, where it must have seemed like the center would not hold, that things were falling apart.

4:28And that perspective helps me calm down. It helps me see what's truly important and what's not so important. What's sort of an overemphasis or an over-exaggeration and then what truly matters. And I was with her and we were just sort of, I was like, you know, how does this current moment coming up to this election, how does it feel to you? What stands out to you? What are you worried about? And it's funny, she just kind of naturally started talking about today's guest on the podcast as someone she admired. I'm talking about Congressman Adam Kinzinger. He's a vet. He was a former congressman from Illinois.

5:02He served from 2011 to 2023. He was also an Air Force pilot. He served in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when Donald Trump was defeated in the 2020 presidential election, And Kinzinger became known for his vocal opposition to Trump's claims of voter fraud, and then his attempt to overthrow the election. The Romans were very familiar with the idea of a mob, a rabble that can get turned on the system and the idea of demagogues. And I was very struck by Adam Kinzinger, and I've gotten to know him. I read his wonderful book, Renegade, and he was on the podcast when it first came out. But I was just so struck by this person.

5:43She's 94. She's been through nine decades. She's seen the best and the worst of American politics and the best and worst of global politics. I like to ask her, what do you remember about Truman? What do you remember about people that I write about as historical figures in my books? I love to ask her about them. And so it was so fascinating. And I was like, Adam was just in the Daily Stoic studio, and we had a wonderful conversation. And even with Adam, we weren't talking about you know, sort of partisan politics. We weren't talking about, you know, these sort of micro news events, but we're talking big picture stuff.

6:18And it was a great conversation. I'm going to split this one into two parts because he and I really got into a great conversation. I think he's awesome. I don't think this conversation could be more timely. You've got to check out Adam's book, Renegade. I think it's incredible. Listen to his earlier episode of the podcast. Look, Adam was one of 10 Republicans who crossed party lines and voted to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection. He served on the January 6th commission, and he basically lost his political career, which he'd worked his life to build, to do what he thought was the right thing, which is what the Stokes talk about.

6:55Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. That's why I admire him a great deal. And there's actually a great new documentary about Adam called The Last Republican. I'll play you the audio of the trailer because I think it's worth listening to. Naively, I thought there's no way people aren't going to wake up from this. I remember the day after January 6th, everybody was kind of waking up at that point. The president bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.

7:35President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. I called it, it was like Saturday morning when you had a giant party at your house Friday night and now you got chickens flying around. You have a bad headache. You know, you're only wearing a shirt. And you're like, what did we do last night? That's where I thought the party was. So your thinking, even at that moment, was the insurrection and the attempt to overthrow the government in a coup d 'etat that included 140 Republicans voting to not certify the election. You thought that just might have been a crazy bender and that they were gonna wake up and get their shit together.

8:20Yup, you wake up, you're gonna deal with the hangover, and you're going to gut it out and drink water, right?

8:29Donald Trump was a non-entity. Nobody even showed up at Andrews when he left.

8:40But you can always fix a hangover by starting to drink again. And that's when Kevin McCarthy goes to Mar-a-Lago. That changed everything. And I think he has a lot to teach us. we all want politicians to put their job, their ass on the line for what they think is principle. And so few of them do it. And so here's a guy that did it. And I'm so glad he came all the way out. Anyways, I'll just get into it. And I'll tell you a bit more about my thoughts on the conversation and what I think we can learn from Adam in part two. And by the way, you can follow Adam on Instagram at Adam underscore Kinzinger and on Twitter, Rep Kinzinger, and check out his new book, Renegade.

9:21Well, I just had this federal judge on. He wrote a book about the First Step Act. Yeah. And he was saying that nobody wants to touch it because Democrats, it's all downside. Yep. And then Republicans, they're pretending to be very tough on crime right now, so they don't want to touch it. So I think there's, I think everyone's just waiting it out, which is just weird. It's like, oh, it's only the most consequential election in American history. I know. Like, I don't want to pick a side. Yep. But I think you'll see maybe after the election kind of stuff back on the market, I guess, depending on how it goes.

9:52Yes. There's a line, I have it in, I think, my Courage book where Cicero, this is Cicero's approach in the Civil War. He's like, I don't want to pick a side. And then there's this famous poet who gets up at this event that Julius Caesar's at, and he reads this poem, and he just insults Julius Caesar like over and over again to his face. and and as he's leaving uh cicero says like uh wow that was amazing like come sit next to me and uh the guy says oh i'm surprised there's uh room to sit next to you given that you like to sit on two different chairs i thought you might relate to that yeah that's awesome that's awesome did you fly no i just i just drove it's only two hours from i know it's nice and for me like honestly just being in the car yes and i'm listening to uh uh dana milbank's new book about like the dysfunctional 2022 class yes it was just cathartic because i'm like yeah well you guys enjoy that yeah and uh but i i love it i just love driving and you know and my plane's stuck in illinois because i my couldn't start my right engine a couple days ago so but that's kind of texas is you it's so big that everyone is just incredibly comfortable with the most abnormally long drives.

11:08It's insane. If you're in Illinois and you have to drive an hour somewhere, it's like death. But here, if it's two hours, it feels like that's going down the street. Yeah. Although I grew up in California and I lived in Southern California for many years. So the idea of spending an hour or an hour and a half in the car is not abnormal. But you might travel 19 miles. In Texas, it's like two hours, but you might drive like 150 miles. Because first off, the freeway speeds are insane and it's literally like no traffic i mean there is traffic in texas but it's like these sort of rural roads you can go as fast as you want so so it's not just you spend a lot of time in the car in texas but it's like yeah you're like houston and austin that's not that far away they're insanely far away they are i mean it's literally like if i had to drive from bloomington to madison like when i was doing guard duty yeah that's a three-hour drive and it's like oh my gosh and here it's like literally nothing so no it's it'd be like in europe you You could pass through two different countries.

12:07I know. I know. Even three if you do it right. It's crazy. The normalization of it is crazy. And I wanted to get an electric truck. And I was just like, I'm not sure it actually makes sense where I live. Because every couple weeks, you're like, oh, no, I got to drive to Dallas. And you're just like, it literally can't make it. You're going to have to use the other car. Or you're going to have to find a charging station and sit there for 30 minutes. So it's good in the city, but not when you're driving really far. No, it's just crazy. But have you driven across Texas before? You know, part. Like, usually I'll do like the three hour thing.

12:43Like, I haven't gone out to like Midland or anything. Yeah. That's tough. No, I mean, Beaumont to El Paso is like 900 miles. That's insane. Yeah. That's insane. That's how far it is from Illinois to go to vacation in Florida. i think el pa i think cuba is closer to el paso than uh like they'll show a map and you can like you can just take the distance anywhere you want and it just gets you insane places yeah when and when i fly from houston to like if i go visit my folks in illinois it's like it's like texas yeah arkansas missouri illinois i think someone told me there's a rant i could just be repeating a random thing i heard on the internet but there's a ranch in texas owned by one person that is bigger than germany i believe it yeah i believe it it's texas yeah i believe it that's crazy though and it's 98 privately owned that's the weird like the weird part too is there like big bend is one of the biggest national parks you should go to big bend incredible insane i mean talk about like the border crisis wherever there's this one area you go to this like little hot springs and then you're just like you take three steps and you're just in Mexico yeah and and uh it's totally normal and chill and regular and everything but yeah it's so because it was its own country and some weird quirk of it where like just all the land was retained by private citizens there wasn't it was never a federal territory owned majority by the government i think california is like 50 yeah i feel like any of those like desolate western states yeah like they're 80 percent federal yeah you know like wyoming is i don't know if 80 but it's huge it's like mostly federal territory yeah so there's all these cool things in texas where you're like this should be a park and it's like no it's some guy's house yeah it's great yeah it's the weirdest it is it's the weirdest state and getting used to summer is like the for me yeah you know i love heat you know and being in iraq it's like 120 every day right but that you add that you lay especially in houston you layer the humidity on it i mean it's like i'm good for a couple months and then it's like all right i mean it's like october it's 100 degrees it's crazy it's been very hot lately yeah i was wondering like given the craziness of everything that happens yeah there must be something very especially for you over the last couple years there must have been something very wonderful about having the release valve of being able to fly oh it was amazing so even still now flying so i have a bigger plane it takes a little more effort it's a little less relaxing but you know you can fly the family and just because it's more responsibility yeah you're just they always say like the bigger the plane the less you feel connected to it right so you think about if you're driving a school bus versus a little sports car and uh but i had a mooney uh just a little four-seater plane that i would commute between illinois and dc on and i like i almost get like i can feel it right now so a long hard week in dc yeah i would take it'd be a 30 minutes to the airport I kept my plane at.

15:47Yeah. And I just take off and it's, you know, you're staying under this little airspace shelf for a little bit around DC. And then you're just free. And I would usually fly what's called VFR. So I don't have to talk to anybody. Okay. And so I just climb up to this plane went pretty high, climb up, level off. And I'd throw my little iPad up with like a movie on it. Yeah, I would. And it's like, and you're looking out and you know, it's dusk. Yeah. Right. So everything's beautiful. that to me was like it was it was basically like a week of therapy in probably about a three-hour flight i loved it not on the converse when i would fly into dc i loved the flying yeah but the second i landed you just feel that like that stress come on yeah yeah astronauts call i think it's the overview effect yeah like what they feel when you're in space and you're like literally everyone is on the other side of what i'm looking at as opposed to there's people behind me there's people around and just i guess there's there's that also just the preposterousness and the flimsiness of like borders and disagreements it all kind of melts away when you're even i mean think about how long it was like the tallest mountain in like greece and rome i think it was like 10 000 feet or something so for basically all of like history up until like the discovery of the new world people are not getting and nobody's climbing these mountains either yeah so just like the highest point that a human got at and looked down at other humans was preposterously low yeah totally until very recently yep

17:30thanks to toyota trucks for sponsoring this episode when i bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County. I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

18:15We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

18:57Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone. And then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

19:38My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

20:15Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 percent off with code stoic 15 you just gotta head over to good inside.com to catch the events

20:35well there's two things so so i have a buddy his name's terry verts he was the commander of the space station for a while actually he's a texan resident and uh he always said so he was up there in when the original kind of russia ukraine thing kicked off he was up there with cosmonauts And he was like, you know, we're looking down. I can see explosions on Crimea or on the eastern part of Ukraine. But he said, all borders disappear. And so he and these cosmonauts who sadly now some of these cosmonauts are in the Duma, like cheerleading Vladimir Putin's war. But he said, you know, we're up there kind of looking down.

21:07You don't see borders. You don't even see movement. It's like, why are we fighting each other? We're all the same. In a plane, the thing that always gets me, there were kind of two moments that really stick out. One, I was flying commercial coming back from DC, probably my first term. And I look out the window and I just see nothing but lights out the window. I think we were flying over Indianapolis. And I'm looking down, I'm like, there's probably 100 ,000 people that I'm seeing. And I thought, now I represent seven times that amount of people in Congress. And imagine God just reaching down and plucking one.

21:39And it's like, that to me was kind of a moment where it's like, wow, what I'm doing is rare, right? What I'm doing is a big deal. I've got to take this seriously. And the other thing - You're responsible for all those lights, for representing the interests of all of those lights. Yeah. And whether they know it or not, they're kind of relying on me to do that job, even if they don't like me, right? That they're like, you're our guy, you're our only connection. And then the other thing is flying, you know, and you realize 99 % of this country has nothing in it. Yes. And so when people, you know, scream about the immigration issue, which obviously is a serious issue, but it's like there is room in America for people.

22:15There is room for productivity, right? Because, again, if I was to randomly just set the plane down somewhere, chances are it's a farm field somewhere. Yes. You know? When you're looking at those lights, those lights are not red and blue. No, they're not. They're just regular lights. At a certain distance, there's regular lights. And most of the things that those people are like, they might be watching different television shows, but both houses are watching TV. Both of them are getting their kids ready for school. You know, the stuff is effectively the same. And by the way, if the flight had been blown wildly off course and you were actually over Uzbekistan, it would have been indistinguishable from you effectively at night, right?

22:55Yep. Yeah. So the similarities and the shared affinities that we all have. And just the idea, I think, because the Stokes talked about and the Indians talked about this idea of taking the bird's eye view. But that was like a theoretical proposition. Right. They never did it. They couldn't physically do it. Yeah. Like that famous blue marble photo of the earth. It's crazy to be like, that was like 1972 or something. Oh, I know. Like there's songs that I listen to on a regular basis that I like recorded before that. There's books I like before that. Like just the things that we take as modern and regular and normal that just happened before we even really fully knew what the earth looked like from a distance.

23:37It's insane. And if you actually look at humanity's like kind of evolution in aviation, it's literally not even a hockey stick. It almost inverts. It's like, okay, yeah, we're doing stuff. And now we have spaceships, right? Yes. And, uh, but so I love space, right? To me, the, the, when I'm trying to fall asleep at night and I can't, I just think about how massive space is and that like kind of does it for me. It's weird. I fall asleep, but there's that, there's a little famous picture called the little blue dot. Yeah. And I think it's, uh, it's the, was it the Jupiter probe or something like that?

24:10Turns around, takes one last picture like of earth. Yeah. And before it was like kind of out of radio range and you see like this ray of sunshine and just this tiny blue dot and that tiny blue dot is earth yeah and so you look at and you realize like the voyager probe i think it's not even outside of our solar system and our solar system is a tiny dot and our galaxy the galaxy is a tiny dot in the universe and so i think when you when you take that it's not to minimize our life but it's like the things that weigh on you you know i i spent the last two years frankly and that i'm just coming out of really in a dark place with everything that i've been through the recognition of it and you talk a lot about the importance of suffering.

24:49And that's something I can now say, like suffering does produce, it produces joy on the other end and it produces strength because you're better at talking about the wise, but you have to go through that to sometimes take the bigger picture of something and look and go, man, it's - We're actually pretty little. It turns out the volume on stuff, I think. And yeah. Yeah. My son said, like sometimes kids just say things to you that are both nonsense and profound. He just said, you know, no one's ever been further away than the moon? And I was like, oh yeah, that's right. So however far the moon is from Earth, that's the most distance a human has ever directly had from what here.

25:29And maybe looking at it from the distance of the Voyager one, it would produce something profound in a person experiencing that we can't even comprehend, just like the distance you would get in that moment, let alone what you would get facing the other direction, like away from Earth entirely. But it's just kind of insane how myopic our day-to-day perspective is. And then sometimes, like, I remember right after the 2016 election, you know, you're feeling all this. And then I was at the airport and I was like, life is still happening. And then I was in the airplane and I was looking down. And you just, there's a recency bias and a myopia to all of our things.

26:07It's not to say that what's happening isn't incredibly consequential and you shouldn't care about it. But like sometimes the people that care, care too much and it becomes debilitating and you need to have like some alternating perspective that allows you to step back and not like destroy yourself as you're trying to do that thing. Yeah. And if you look down and you realize like how big things are, right, you realize like, okay, the world's massive. You look down and you say, okay, if I'm choosing to sit here angry. Yeah. Okay. And this is something I have to fight all the time. Right. But if I'm choosing to watch TV, be angry at what's happening, even though I have no direct input into it.

26:49Right. I guess as average citizens, we can vote. Maybe you can tweet some and maybe, you know, but generally voting's your thing. If you choose to be angry, that's just like taking poison. Hoping you make somebody else sick by taking that poison and actually getting yourself destroyed. And that's a choice we make. And again, for me, that's something I have to remind myself all the time is like, okay, I'm sitting around angry, upset at what happened. Like, well, you know what? That's my choice to be angry. I can if I want to be, but it's not producing any benefit. I was thinking about that the other night because I got, and you would know who this person is, I'll tell you later, but I got a pitch for some other politician to come on the podcast.

27:28And I was, I didn't think about it. And then for whatever reason, I thought about it as I was falling asleep and thinking about it made me so angry. Like this person who obviously knows better, who has all the training, who swore an oath, all these things. And then that they're, they're not just like behaving as if what they're doing is normal, but they're like proud of it. Like that's what the pitch was. And I was just mad at it. And then I woke up the next morning and I was like, I deprived myself of sleep and was angry about a person who wasn't thinking about me at all. And it didn't change the situation at all.

28:02It was just me expressing, not even expressing because I'm doing it internally. I'm just like grinding my teeth and my organs about in anger that this person exists. When as a student of history, I know that this person has not only always existed and always will exist, but was worse historically. You know, like there were more of this person 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1 ,000 years ago, and no amount of me resenting them is going to make them not exist. Yeah, that's true. And one of the things I've struggled with is like my kind of viewpoint of humanity, my view of humanity. It took a hit, right?

28:44Sure. Because particularly in Congress, when I'm like, okay, everybody has a red line they won't cross. I always assume that, right? The good guys always win. Everybody has a red line. When that didn't happen, and particularly the red line, when I started to see people that I respected, that would tell me privately, like, hey, what you're doing is good. I agree with you. I can't because X, Y, and Z. Like, yes, that bothered me a lot. But the one thing it has done as I've, again, and it's taken me time to work through it, but as I've worked through it is understanding that now actually, I think I can look at humanity and people realistically.

29:21Yeah. And that puts me in a better position instead of walking around saying, look, humans are all sunshine and rainbows. Yeah. You can either go into the dark place of humans are all bad, or you can go into the realistic place and say, some are good, some are bad. I'm going to choose to be good and I'm going to choose to leave kind of good footprints in this world. Yeah. And, uh, but again, that's a daily reminder. It's not one of those things you go in and you get a sermon and you're just like that the rest of your life. Yeah. You fight that battle every hour of every day. Have you read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison?

29:50It's this beautiful book about this guy coming of age as a sort of a black man in America in the 50s. And he was sort of this optimistic, hopeful person who gets horribly abused in this situation. And there's this line in the book that I think about all the time. He goes, he's like, and then a voice hit me in my head and it said, how does it feel to be free of illusions? And then he says, and then it came clanging back, painful and empty, painful and empty. And we have these illusions about other people that they're like us, that they have red lines, that when push comes to shove, they'll do the right thing, that we've all bought into these same share of assumptions.

30:25And that can be comfort in the moment, but it's not really based on anything real and certainly not based on a historical fact. Like if you look at the horrible things humans have done and why we have the safeguards and guardrails we have is because we've always known this to be true. And so you sort of that process of being disabused of your illusions. And oftentimes it's those of us who think we don't have illusions that are the most crushed when we realize, oh, so it's like, I imagine you weren't the most idealistic, like starry eyed politician. So probably what hurt is you understood, hey, part of the game is saying one thing, but when push comes to shove, you do the other.

31:09You understood the duality, but you had an illusion underneath the realism that there was some kind of goodness at rock bottom. Yeah. Yeah. And for me, I mean, look, I always say in politics, there is compromise. There's times I can look back and say, well, I defended something that I wouldn't have normally. Now I'm free of having to do that, which is amazing, by the way. But like, yeah, I think what the, that illusion underneath was saying, okay, we can all play this game. We can play with fire a little bit. We can, we can use fear in our campaigns to an extent, but we always have the ability to douse that fire when time would come.

31:46We don't really believe it. Yeah, we don't really believe it. And nobody here in us really believes it when we say, you know, that if you don't vote for us, your family's going to die, basically. We always thought we could douse that fire. The fire raged out of control. Yeah. But the firefighters who you thought would be there, you know, my fellow practitioners of politics. Yeah. That would be there to douse the fire, all of a sudden are stoking it because they don't want to walk into that heat. Yeah. And enough people have walked into the heat and gotten burned up that they're like, whoa, I don't.

32:14And this is the thing is when you make a choice to go into something where you play with fire, right? Whether you're a fireman, if you're going to go into a burning building, you make the choice that this is going to be uncomfortable. And I may have to put my life on the line for that, whether you're in the military, whether you're a police officer. When you're a politician, while it's not technically you're putting your life on your line, you're going to play with fire. And you have to be willing to douse that fire because if you don't, you're unqualified for the job, I think. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people that are unqualified for the job in it.

32:45One of the things I learned from Robert Greene is that as you write about stuff, and I think I try to apply this when I'm just trying to understand something, is like, you don't look at the example in front of you. You try to look at a different example from the past that's less loaded, right? So you want to understand the pandemic, look at the Spanish flu, right? And so I've been thinking about this, like, how do you get people to wake up from something that's obviously insane? And so I was really interested in that period in the 20s, 30s, 40s, where a lot of really smart Americans were all in on communism.

33:19Yeah. Like Ellison and Richard Wright, two of America's best great black writers, were ardent members of the Communist Party. And I can be sympathetic to that. I mean, there were soup – like capitalism obviously broke in the 1920s or we wouldn't have had the Great Depression. And we didn't have the government safeguards that we needed. The system was not working. And I can also imagine if you're a black American anytime in the 20th century, let alone before, you're going to be skeptical of any system of belief that – or system that subjugates you and people like you, right? So there are these communists, and then they both kind of eventually wake up from it.

34:00Richard Wright goes more in the, well, he actually kind of believes in it more, but believes it was betrayed by the, you know, like that it wasn't pure. He was like Stalin wasn't a true communist. He was using and abusing the stuff, which you could maybe make an argument for. And then Ellison just has more of a just general awakening and sort of goes more staunchly anti-communist. But there is precedent, I think, for people getting incredibly caught up in something, believing in something that is complicit or directly involved with unimaginable horrors and excess and seems inexplicable in retrospect.

34:40But it's such a – there's not some moment where it just all becomes clear for most people. I think that, look, when your engine's on redline, and so when you're a revolutionary, when you're a radical, whatever it is, like every day you wake up with this emotion and this anger and this, like you put your engine on redline, I mean like any car. You can build the best German-made car. You put that engine on redline long enough and eventually it's going to blow. And I think that happens here. It's like your exuberance of your youth, right, or whatever it is. You look at the 1920s, and I'm glad you brought that up because the parallels to today are kind of eerie.

35:20And you can see cycles of humanity in this. So in the 20s, you had the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the Midwest, right? I mean, two million people. It controlled like a whole state. Yeah. What's his name? Wrote a book about like 20 % of Indiana was in the Klan or some insane number. Yep. In fact, in my old district in Princeton, Illinois, they were rehabbing a theater. And they brought me into this room and showed me some of the stuff they found as they were rehabbing it. One of them is an invitation to the big Ku Klux Klan rally in Princeton, Illinois. I mean, Truman joined the Klan in the way that he joined Kiwanis and Knights of Klan.

35:55It was just a group. I mean, it doesn't excuse it, but it was so commonplace and seen as so not abnormal in some areas that it was like a social club, which obviously was a murderous, horrendous terrorist organization. But that's how widespread it was. It's insane in retrospect. It is. And so you look at like that, but you also looked at in that time when people felt very disconnected from the federal government, you had the rise of, and I may get the organizations wrong, but the similar is like the rise of the Kiwanis, the rise of Rotary. It was these community groups that are like, we feel so disconnected and angry.

36:32And, you know, you see that anger, but they also took matters into their own hands. And so, you know, in the political system today, I always look and say, look, you know, because people ask me, is there ever going to be a new party? Is there a centrist party? Is there whatever? And I go, well, look, I don't know, but I know this. In the Bible, it says, if nobody worships God, the rocks will cry out. Okay. In politics, it's the same. If you don't feel represented for long enough or you feel disconnected, something will organically rise up to fill that void because that's what we as Americans have done.

37:04And I think probably not just Americans, but humans do to fill that void. And so you have a lot of anger right now, a lot of division, but there's a lot of alienation. Yeah. And that my hope is that alienation is the thing that ultimately leads to, in essence, our salvation for another 70 years till we go through the cycle again. Well, yeah, the problem is when there's alienation and dysfunction and dissatisfaction are very ripe territory for demagogues. And that is a historical fact. And we are always at the mercy—large groups of people are at the mercy of singular, ambitious people with no moral compass.

37:43Like there's a hard truth you can give a group of people or there is a pleasant fiction you can give that group of people. And naturally, the latter is more profitable and easier than the former.

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39:11Probably most of the people watching or listening, and certainly you and I, could not imagine basically disconnecting ourselves from morality to do that. But if you did, if all of a sudden you decided that you had no moral compass, you just wanted to rise to power, you have a big following, you could probably find a way to begin to slowly change, to manipulate, to stoke anger, and to rise to some kind of power from it. And so what we've always had as our kind of guardrails, our actual guardrails of democracy and law, and most importantly, people's allegiance to an oath they took, which is esoteric, but means something, and then our own moral compass.

39:50And what I worry about - Just a sense of shame. Just a sense of shame. Like a cultural sense of shame is kind of an ultimate governor. It's the final check. Totally. Of like, well, I wouldn't do that because it would be uncomfortable to just get up there and completely lie. Yeah. I mean, now you look at – this isn't even one side or the other. You look at fact checks of politicians, right, that lie, and it just goes over people's heads or they don't care or they say the fact check is bias. Like I remember a time – I'm only 46, but I remember a day in which if a candidate or a president was caught in a lie, they would have to apologize for it, right, or come up with some version of an excuse.

40:27not because they necessarily felt like you said, but it was like there's a shame that overtakes. We don't want individual shame. I mean, there's healthy individual shame, but as a society, shame is what keeps people in line. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's very true. I think also what it's... Sometimes it's, okay, this is like a sociopath or a psychopath, but what you tend to see in common with demagogues or people that sort of get radicalized is always some profound personal grievance. Yeah. Like I was just listening to some story about Kash Patel. And it's like, there's some moment where like a judge embarrasses, he's like flying somewhere that for people don't know, he was like a two bit figure in the Trump administration who's now like sort of extreme MAGA.

41:10But basically, he was a federal prosecutor or something. He flies out to do this case, and he's flying from the Middle East, gets there, doesn't have a tie, runs into the courtroom, and the judge just tears him a new one. And probably racially—he is objectively mistreated in this scenario. But it triggers something in this person that starts a process by which, you know, if you nurse a grievance, it will grow. If you process it, if you don't allow it to touch or degrade you. And so there's often this kind of moment in these political figures where they were humiliated or mocked or not accepted.

41:53And then that allows them to rationalize all of the absurd because they've made this instead of interacting with individual people or society, they're interacting with this like nefarious force. And it allows them to justify saying and doing effectively anything to get what they want. Yeah. And I don't know if we want to go this deep, but like when I think of what's happening to young men today. Yes. Look, in my definition, masculinity is being in touch with your emotions, fighting for causes, right? Bigger than yourself, defending your family, defending the defense list. That to me is like the most masculine thing.

42:33I think you've just defined stoicism in my view. Yeah. But not what people think of masculinity or of stoicism. Those are not, I would say, commonly held definitions. Interesting. Interesting. And so that's what like that to me is what stoicism or masculinity is. And but what do we have today? This is so what's happened is legitimately, I think we have to give voice to this. Men felt like they were degraded, disconnected, particularly over the past 10 years when remember you heard everything about toxic masculinity. That was the word. And toxic masculinity was everything that was masculine. And eventually people just started to feel angry about that.

43:10And, you know, what you should have had then is faith leaders, community leaders, whatever thought leaders come along and say, well, no, we're not going to attack masculinity, but here's what it is. It's defending people's defense, you know, whatever. And, uh, but instead you get demagogues that come along and say, you know, Andrew Tate that says masculinity is being abusive to women who mistreated you. It's finding that grievance. Masculinity is never crying. I mean, look, I got teary eyed during the very first January 6 hearing. And so now I've gotten the nickname crying Adam because of that.

43:42Right. And I'm fine with it. But that's that goes to show how how devalued emotions are. And if you don't cry for the potential destruction of your country, then you're heartless. But but also all the all the ancient figures that these people are trying to bring back. Like there are so many Roman stories about there's there's like four stories about Marcus Aurelius. of which he's crying. He's crying over the death of his tutor. He's crying over the victims of the plague. And then we're told in one story, he cries when he's told he's going to become emperor, because he's just overwhelmed by the enormity of the responsibility and his understanding that like most kings it's not a job you come out of alive like it breaks people and so so like it's this weird paradoxical thing where people are like shaming things that actually in the classical world which they love yeah which they're they love were incredibly common also they were all having sex with each other too so like we don't even like like your homophobia uh the ancients would not understand in any way so like uh we should just maybe stop making these analogies altogether but So yeah, there's a great passage in meditation where Mark Suresko is like, actually the unmanly thing is losing your temper.

45:05And I've always found it interesting that like, we'll mock a man for crying, being overwhelmed by your emotions. But then if someone got, if you got mad and punched through a wall, people would be like, oh, he's so tough. Yeah, exactly. But that's the same thing. And in fact, like what's actually more impressive, crying because you just heard about this tragic like you're feeling for someone else or because like the television remote isn't working and you break it in half. Like what is silly? And the other is actually like, to me, a fully formed, well-adjusted human being. And what does that do?

45:39Like if you're crying on behalf of somebody, what is that? That shows that you're probably going to be compelled to fight for them, right? You know, the thing that actually had triggered me in that first thing, in the first hearing is we had all these police officers that were on the line, you know, and they were testifying and they were tearful and you could you could just see in them yeah this like you know they because most of them are republicans by the way and all of a sudden they're facing fellow republicans being called pig all these things hit you know in fanone's case you know threatened to be killed with his own gun and uh and i i was sitting there going like yeah but these guys actually won like they feel defeated but they won the day yeah and that's what kind of overwhelmed me but i'm gonna feel shame they feel people who attacked them don't feel any right and it should be the other way around.

46:23It should be the other way around. And so that's where for me, and that, you know, that is how I also knew that I was like dedicated to this probably career ending mission to bring truth. And, uh, and because I, I understood that there was so much at stake, not just these guys lives, not just these guys future, which some of them have been really damaged. I mean, they've lost a lot of friends, but over the future of this country, cause like we can't do this again, But that, it's like, I think the young man issue we have today is a serious, serious concern in this country. And it's where you're seeing radicalization.

46:57It's where you're seeing these shooters. It's where you're seeing these problems. And as a society, we have to be willing to talk about masculinity again. No, I have a bunch of thoughts on this. Because I have two young boys. And my son switched schools. And I was like, I know he loved his teacher. And I was like, are you sad that you have to change schools? He's like, no, no, I don't care at all. he's like maybe five at the time i could see it even then he was trying not to have feeling like i know he has feelings he has feelings all the time and just in this time he was not and i was trying to i was like oh this is where it starts like he he doesn't think it's okay to feel this thing about this thing and he's five you know if he's 40 and he's weeping about it still it's a problem but like you can see where the cultural assumptions start some of it's internal and then we confirm it.

47:45Some of it comes from the outside. But yeah, we don't learn to process our emotions. And then one of the things I've tried to understand for young people and people is like, the world is confusing and overwhelming. Like just period. And then our modern world, I mean, like look for basically all of human history, gender was gender. And now it's more complicated. I don't have a problem with that, but it's a lot to keep track of. There's new words that we use for things. Also, we have more information than we've ever had before. There's more people than You just think about how cognitively and emotionally overwhelming it is to be a person.

48:20The idea that you could survive that as a man or as a woman with the emotional toolkit of your parents, let alone historically, is insane. You need a different set of emotions to be able to process and make sense and handle it. Our world demands a level of sensitivity that is new and unprecedented. I think great, but it's a lot. And so if people aren't actively taught that, and then they're shamed for not having it, or they feel inferior for not having it, it becomes this kind of wicked feedback loop where you just have, you have like a have and have nots in the sense of you have people who can cut it and you people don't.

49:02It's like they talked about the digital divide. I remember when it's like people who grew up with the internet, people who didn't. People who grew up in a stunted emotional environment. If you grew up and Fox News was telling you always that the world is falling apart, that there are these other shitty people, blah, blah, blah. And your dad was like, shut the fuck up. You know, like, how are you supposed to, how are you supposed to operate in a workplace where like, because you didn't say please in an email or you put two exclamation points, you've hurt someone's feelings. You're not gonna be able to handle that.

49:33Like you're not gonna be able to handle it. It's gonna be fucking hot. That's so true. And you know, the best thing about when society like makes leaps like this, you know, you call them good leaps or bad leaps, but they're leaps, is you have to have discussion. I think conversation, discussion, openness, openness and talking about it makes a big deal. And so, you know, I think we're now at a point when it comes to the gender issue where people feel free to talk about the confusion behind it. There are people that, you know, maybe are less sympathetic to it that kind of kept their mouth shut, that are now talking, people more sympathetic.

50:04And so I think we're kind of coming to a place there where it's more respected in the discussion, but like you look at racial issues in this country the one thing you can't talk about without being scared to death of what it's going to be is like racial issues right that's the thing you never can talk about you can never talk about it and in discussion like good discussion not not television news discussion that's the way for society to come along for people to like emote their own feelings to kind of come to a conclusion you know like with the gender issue It's like, does it really affect you if somebody changes their gender or they want to be?

50:40No. Like, does it affect your life? No. Now, where you can feel offended is like if you're making me accept that reality and change everything. But these are the kinds of conversations that need to happen that just didn't. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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