Adam Kinzinger on The Future of American Leadership

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1:43Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:35Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It was funny, I was telling you that my grandmother was raving about Wednesday's guest on the show. And it's funny, I did Maria Shriver's podcast a few weeks back. I thought it was an awesome conversation. I was really honored to do that. And she was raving about Adam Kinzinger, whose book she published. He wrote this great book called Renegade. I always like when someone whose opinion you respect recommends or likes someone else that you respect. So I think today's guest is just an absolutely fascinating guy. Again, this is a guy who put his ass on the line.

3:13And I happen to know other Republican politicians who didn't do that, who were afraid to do that. They cherished their seat more than they cherished, apparently, this 200-plus-year tradition, the peaceful transfer of power here in the United States. These are dilemmas that the Stoics would have been familiar with. Certainly, the founders were familiar with the fact that the Stoics were familiar with it. I've recommended First Principles, one of my favorite books. I recommended Rosen's book, The Pursuit of Happiness. And all these guys, what they noticed, what struck the founders the most, what they were most worried about, and I talked to Francis Ford Coppola about this, Catiline was this looming figure for both the Romans and then the later sort of Enlightenment Stoics.

4:02Catiline was the demagogue who attempted to overthrow the Republic, the guy who put his personal ambition in front of his obligations, in front of the country, in front of peace and order and stability. And Cicero sort of draws on his stoicism to stop Catiline. It's a complicated story. We don't have to get into it here. But what you saw on January 6th was Catiline in the 21st century. You had a man who lost an election who couldn't stomach losing an election, for what he felt it said about him, for the power that he needed that it threatened. And he unleashed a populist mob on the Capitol to attempt to thwart the will of that people.

4:50This is exactly what they talk about in the storm before the storm. This is the looming threat that all democracies and republics face. To be able to have seen that happen, we saw it unfold live on television. And then to be able to talk to a person who stood up and said, not through me, I'm not going to participate in that. And then tried to hold the members of that mob, not just the average ordinary people, but the leaders of it. And I'm talking, of course, about Congressman Adam Kinzinger. He served in the United States Congress from 2011 to 2023. And why did he stop? His political beliefs didn't change.

5:25His constituents didn't really change, but they were turned against each other by this Catiline-esque figure. And he lost his political career for serving on the January 6th commission. He lost his political career for voting to impeach. And here, as we are on the eve now of an election where that Catiline is a candidate again, something that did not happen in ancient Rome, it's just absolutely unbelievable to me. And I wanted to talk to Adam Kinzinger about this, how he struggled after January 6th, how people need to be engaged and active in their politics. And about this upcoming presidential race and the responsibility that we have as Stoics and as individuals, it's been so awesome to get to know Congressman Kinzinger.

6:08I think this is a great conversation. You can check out his book, Renegade, which, as I said, Maria Shriver published. You can follow him on Instagram at Adam underscore Kinzinger and on Twitter, Rep Kinzinger. I think this is a great conversation. I'm so glad to have two parts of it. And then I have an earlier interview with him last year that I will also link to in today's show notes. I sent a signed copy of Renegade to my dad. I hope he reads it. He lives in Nevada and will hopefully take his responsibility as a swing state voter seriously. And I hope you do the same wherever you live.

6:45The best thing about when society like makes leaps like this, you know, you can 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, 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, are less sympathetic to it that kind of kept their mouth shut that are now talking people more sympathetic. And so I think we're, 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.

7:21The 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, and, and 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? No. 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.

7:57But these are the kinds of conversations that need to happen that just didn't. When I think we, what I always go to is like, what's the historical equivalent? I read for one of the books I was writing, I read a bunch about Muhammad Ali. And I was so fascinated with the number of people that refused to call him Muhammad Ali. They were just like, you can't just change your fucking name. And it was funny to me to watch something that seems so preposterous in retrospect, not just the way people had trouble with it, but the way certain people would use it as an epithet. They'd call him Cassius Clay, or they'd say, that's not your real name.

8:30And you go, oh, okay. There's some people also, they have conservativeness in the lowercase C sense of the word where they're just like, I don't change. That's not who you were, so I don't accept it. And that that is just a strain of society and culture and types of people. And it passes with time. But when I read that, I go, okay, you don't want to be that person. So get with the program, right? But you have to have an emotional acuity to deal with that unless some grifter or demagogue comes along and actually says, no, no, no, no, no, that's bullshit. They're making it up. You're actually heroic for not saying it.

9:14And so there is this part of it where that energy, that resistance to change is human and timeless and real. And in some ways understandable, that's not to say it's okay, but you get it. And then there is this strand of person that says, I want to tap into that. Instead of, hey, I want to help those people get from here to there. They say, no, no, no. I'm sensing they feel shame and I'm going to tell them actually that the other side is the shameful one. Yeah. Yeah. This is where leadership is so important and not political leadership necessarily, but leadership anywhere. Everybody, you know, if you're, you could be a frontline manager at McDonald's, you could be a cashier at McDonald's.

9:56You have leadership roles. And what you see is everybody's got their own fears. they've got their own like, you know, shortcomings, things are concerned about shame. If you reflect that back to them and show them that they're right. Yeah. You know, by the way, that's a very powerful technique. It's a dark technique. Very powerful. You can manipulate people easily with that. Yeah. The question is in your, do you want to be the kind of person that leads people to that dark place where maybe they follow you, maybe they listen to you, but they feel worse about themselves. They turn against society.

10:25They hate people. Or do you want to, do you want to be the person that can show like, it's okay. The best example I can use of this is after January 6th, I'm a military guy, obviously. And one of the things that really I struggled with, I had almost not real PTS, but sort of from it was seeing all the uniforms or the people wearing camouflage on the steps of the Capitol that day. Yeah. They were play acting or in some cases they were overrepresented sort of veterans and police officers and such. But yeah, that they were stealing the iconography of certain things. And yeah, to me, it's the weaponizing of the American flag really disturbs me.

11:07You know, like I think the blue, the blue lives matter flag or the, no, the thin blue line flag is so fucking disturbing. Like it's like, first off, just it's like, okay, so some guy was murdered by the police and we all saw it. and most of us were like, this is horrible. This shouldn't happen again. And then there was a group of people that said, I want to double down on the police. And I say this as a person whose father is a police officer. I have no problem with the police. But I'm saying, like, if you watch that and your sympathy is with the person whose boot is literally on someone's neck, that's weird.

11:41Yeah, it is. That's a weird choice to make. But the idea that the police are this thin blue, like, that the citizens are chaos, that there's a criminal element that is almost the majority. And then there's these good people over here and the police are this line is such a fucked up view of society. It really is. And, uh, that, that as a symbol, like I want to put that on my truck. And then I think what, what gives the energy to that is the, the underlying menace of it. Yeah. It is there. There is a Southern cultural menace. Like I, until I moved to the South, I never saw someone put a flag on the back of their truck of any kind and drive it around.

12:24I'm getting used to that. There's a, the element of that is to intimidate. Yeah, it is. It's not a patriotic celebration. It is, if you put a flag on your house, you're saying, I live here, this is what I'm doing. If you're driving it around, I think there's an element. It's like in your face. Yeah. And that's what they like about it. That's what's fun. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's where, so as I saw the, like kind of the uniforms and again, it wasn't, there wasn't a massive military presence charging the Capitol, but it burned in my head, this feeling that like all veterans are insurrectionists.

12:56Right. And I'm a veteran. I know that that's not the case. And so all of a sudden then I would have outreach from friends that, you know, I had some friends that very sympathetic to it, but some that are like, yeah, this is awful. This, this misrepresents the community. You know, we've got to be the role of the military is to defend everybody, not to defend one side. And it was when I would see in my own life, those people that would say those things to me, that was them not reflecting my fear back at me. That was them absorbing my fear and showing me a different side, which is like, there are people like us out there.

13:28You know, again, the old Bible story, and I don't even remember who it is, but, you know, he wouldn't bow the knee to bail. And then, you know, God chose him. There's 7 ,000 people that won't bow with you, right? You all of a sudden realize you're not on an island, even if you feel like you're on an island. Yes. And what a demagogue can do is give you that feeling, even though you're on the wrong side of things. So you're the anti-vaxxer or you're the insurrectionist or you're the bigot or you're the person who is shouting at the kids who are trying to integrate a school and you should be made to feel alone about that.

14:02But a grifter or a demagogue can say, no, no, no, a lot of us are uncomfortable with this too. Here's a community. Yeah. And then let me amplify it. This is the definition of what J.D. Vance is doing in Ohio. It's like, look, it would be weird if 20 ,000 people who, and weird is the wrong word, it would be noticeable if 20 ,000 people of a different country and race moved to a town that doesn't get a lot of immigration because it's smack dab in the middle of the country. So you're going to have feelings. And we have all sorts of feelings as human beings. And part of being a mature, responsible, ethical human is sorting the dark feelings from the light feeling, like the higher self and the lower self.

14:50And Martin Luther King said, you know, there is like this north and south in each of us. Yeah. And that we're in a constant civil war with each other. And yeah, you're right. Leadership is appealing to the better angels and to help you transcend those feelings. But that's hard and often unpopular and can cost you elections. It can cost you fans. It can cost you a lot of things. You find immediate valence and connection if you appeal to the demons or the lowest common denominator. And that's always there. Yeah, it really is. And it's sad to me because I always, again, I always felt like, well, let's just use politics and use society as that.

15:32I always felt like there was always an adult that was going to come in and like - That's too far. That's too far, guys. Who's that guy that kicked out of Congress from Iowa or whatever? Oh, yeah, Steve King. Yeah. So it was like, hey, you might not like where the line is, but we do have a line and we do kick people out that cross the line. Yep. And I always felt like that. you know, I still, I'm like, with some of the stuff going on, I'm like, somebody's got to come in and say this is wrong. And then I realized like, I'm in the governing class of people, or at least was, that would be the guy on the white horse coming in to save the day.

16:03And it's like, no, the guys on the white horse are now the ones doing it. And that's where it's important for everybody here and everybody listening and watching to say, you know, look, yeah, you can sit around and say, well, we have the worst people in Washington, DC. Okay. I would probably argue that probably not the worst ever, but pretty bad, but where you can make a difference, obviously making sure you vote, but you can make a difference in your community. And every time, when you even say something that kind of throws people off, like, yeah, I don't think they should be demonizing migrants.

16:30Right. And obviously they're not eating cats and dogs. You know, there might be people around you. Let's say you're a Republican and you say that, that are like, huh, well, thanks for saying that you've kind of broken that stereotype to me. And it inspires, It's like a chain reaction of inspiration. You know in your readings and your writings, if you ever feel inspired, that is such a good feeling. And it's like a chain reaction, right? That leads to this, this, this, this. And that can start at a small community. It doesn't have to be a guy in DC doing it or a podcaster doing it. It can be you and your own community starting that chain reaction.

17:02When I think about it, it's like you see someone you know say something that's really offensive, untrue, dangerous, or whatever, just like on social media. Like there's the Elon Musk says misinformation and we can't do anything about that, right? Even though he lives in this little town where it's all his stuff. He's moved all his stuff. I don't think he lives anywhere, but all his stuff is here now. But the point is we can get really upset with, oh, like, I can't believe Kyrie Irving said this dumb thing or Elon Musk said this dumb thing or can you believe Donald Trump or insert any person across any spectrum.

17:37And then people we know say things on Facebook and we're like, well, Susie's nice. I don't want to get into a thing about it with her. And I'm not saying you have to get in political arguments, but like there was a person in town that said something really bigoted about someone who is on city council. And then he emailed me the next day asking for something. And I was like, bro, get the fuck out of here with this. We're not friends anymore. Like the idea that like these larger trends should only be dealt with at like the federal level. You have to be, you can't say things like that. Don't like, I disagree.

18:13You have to, you have to be at what's less important. Yeah. It's less important in these big global things and more about what you are doing in your interpersonal relationships and connections. Yeah. And it changes how you feel. It changes the community. And like I said, I actually think, I mean, I hope I'm wrong because it's much easier if like change came from the federal level in this. But I actually think that because I'm long optimism, optimistic on America. Yeah. Short, a little pessimistic, long optimistic. But I think that change will have to come from the ground. Because I'm going to tell you, like, I travel a lot.

18:44I speak a lot, as you do. And I feel that there is just this like undercurrent that's ready to blow of people that are like, we need somebody to heal the system. Yeah. It's going to come from that. And that's a decision that we make every day. It's not a decision that, you know, we've got to wait around for the next president or the congressman or whatever to say, because they're just frankly a reflection of us anyway. Yes.

19:10we just took our kids to an outdoor performance the nutcracker they had a snow cone and then uh 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. My wife introduced me to Dr.

19:47Becky'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. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

20:29And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Thanks 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.

21:11There 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. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven 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.

21:49And 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. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

22:16Yeah, it is weird that the idea that more people have opinions about politics than vote. That is a crazy fact. that 50 % of people just don't is crazy. And then those same people go, oh, it's because I don't like the candidates. And it's like, yeah, you don't like the candidates because you also didn't vote in the primary. Right, yeah. Like 2%, like Texas is basically, hasn't elected a statewide Democrat in like 20 years or some crazy number. And so basically whoever votes in the Republican primary picks and like 2 % of the state votes in the Republican primary. So that's who picks the people.

22:56And so, look, I don't like, like, I'm actually pretty centrist, I feel, but like, I'm not enjoying either candidate in voting in a, you pick which party you're going to vote in in Texas, as you know. But like, I'm picking like an adult between the horrible and less horrible in my view, because that's my job. Who I vote for in the general, my first job is, can I have a tiny sway over? making things less bad. And that's actually where you have the biggest impact. Yes. Because that's one of the things I've tried to do in some of the political stuff is like, we beat a really bad candidate in North Carolina because we got Democrats to vote in a Republican primary.

23:37And it's so weird to them. Why would I pull a Republican ballot? Why would I help them? Yes. But it's like, well, you're going to be represented by a Republican. Let me tell you this. Now you have a choice, this guy or this guy who's really bad. And it's like, okay well i guess if i have to choose it would be this guy yeah but that's what voting in a primary does and by the way then if you vote in a party that's not yours you throw off all the political like uh uh you know surveys and stuff it's awesome yeah it's awesome yeah then you start getting all the mail it shakes the the like the very predictable machine and the logic of it totally yeah there's a mark serious writes in meditation he's like stop uh fooling yourself that you believe in Plato's Republic.

24:22Or he says, stop fooling yourself that you live in Plato's Republic. And it's like, we don't live in a perfect system. Sometimes you gotta make unpleasant decisions. That's what being an adult is. It's choosing between this delayed flight and this long ass drive. Welcome to life. But then people think politics is like something different. And first off, you have to participate, which most people don't do. There was an election here, again, for city council that was decided by two votes. that's one couple like one couple was didn't get up and vote and it would have gone in a different direction and then by the way a huge percentage of the seats are you know unopposed and so the participation is first and foremost and then when you participate holding your nose because that's what being an adult is yep well i was talking about i was doing a newspaper in houston interview yesterday and I'm supporting Colin Allred in Texas.

25:18And I was going to say, you do have the lucky privilege as a new Texan to now vote against Ted Cruz, which is our great honor and obligation. That has been my dream since I was a baby. Okay. By the way, Ted Cruz - Probably his mother's dream also. Probably true. Ted Cruz and I have been like mortal enemies on TV since he came to the Senate. Yeah. And, you know, he, I could go into it, but like, you know, he'll attack Obama for not enforcing the red line in Syria, but that was actually Ted Cruz that led the opposition to the red line. I mean, just so much hypocrisy. But I was talking to the newspaper and I said, here's the issue with Ted Cruz.

25:52When you go into the Senate or you go into a legislative body, your choice isn't, I'm going to vote for perfect or no. Your choice is, I'm going to vote for something that's not that great or no. That's it. And if you want to continually be no and go home and say, well, I'm standing against the establishment, fine. You might get reelected. Maybe people know who you are. He's famous. But you're a terrible legislator. You're a shitty legislator if you never come to yes, because there is no perfect answer. It's like in life and certainly in politics, there's never perfect. But it's also not even legislation, right?

26:26Like, because, yes, politicians' job is to Congress and the Senate, their job is to pass legislation, which people totally don't understand how our system of government works. The president is enforcing the law and is the final check against really bad laws, but policy is supposed to come from the legislative branches, which the legislative branches have decided not to wield. But what I thought was so interesting about Ted Cruz, and I think this is a larger leadership lesson, it's not that he fled to Cancun in the middle of a crisis. Which he did. Yes, but it's that he said he did it because there was nothing he could do.

27:10Like, he's not just like, look, he could vote no on every single thing, but be an effective advocate for his constituents and help them access federal service. He could be, there's still a job other than voting yes or no on laws. And what Ted Cruz thought when the state was freezing and the power grid failed and people were dying, like thousands of people cumulatively across the state died. It's just not like Katrina didn't happen in one day in one way. So like we're less aware of the magnitude of that natural disaster. He was like, well, there's nothing I can do. Like he thought the same thing that I thought.

27:49But like that's crazy. Yeah. Because there wasn't much I could do. He can call the president. You know, there's so much he could do. And he does not understand that that's how it works. So he's just a shitty leader on top of ideologically, he's just bad at being one of a hundred people who have certain amounts of access and relationships. Yeah, and that was the issue with him on that. By the way, just quick trivia note, I was the very last plane out of DFW when that hit. My wife and I were going to Hawaii and we connected through Dallas-Fort Worth. And I remember getting off the jet bridge and being like, this feels like Chicago in the middle of winter.

28:29Like, this isn't good. We were literally the last plane to take off. Otherwise, we would have been stranded at DFW. Sure. Thank you, God. But like with Ted, it's a matter of the Cancun thing. If he'd have gone to Cancun and then all of a sudden this thing hits and he puts out a press release like, I'm in Cancun. I shouldn't be here. I'm on my way back. Yes. It wouldn't be an issue. I've been on the phone with Washington every minute for the last two days, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he doesn't believe that government does things. Right, yeah. And there's a whole strain of the Republican Party, I think, that sees government as the enemy and as having effectively no role in society, which is insane.

29:10And then for those people to get in positions of government is bad for everyone because now there's one less person who can get the government to do things. Well, it's like chaos is the point with these folks. I mean, you know, I served with like the ones that are now the mainstream of the GOP that used to be kind of our, we called them the exotics. But their whole point was chaos. And they don't see a role for the federal government unless it's, you know, them. I mean, they love being in power, but they don't see a role for it. They tear it down in the process. And I look back at my party and say, look, the legacy of the GOP, we should be really proud of.

29:48We freed the slaves. We preserved the federal government. We actually built the infrastructure system in this country under Eisenhower. Like, and I think even the transcontinental railroad stuff was Republican. Like, if we could embrace and grasp that, but we have somehow now been, there's massive political alignment taking place right now, but now we're the anti-federal government party. It's just, it's, it's mad. Lincoln, I'm just writing about this now. Lincoln didn't just like preserve the federal government in the sense that he was like, no, no, no, America is one country and it's indissolvable.

30:20The Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War was 17 ,000 people. That's crazy. More people died in the Union Army at Antietam in a single day. That's insane. So he built the federal government to support an army of nearly a million people. He passed the first income tax. He built the – we talk about alienation. He built something that could serve the enormous machine that he had to build to reassert the actual governance of the union. But the number of things that didn't exist that had to exist at the end of it is incredible. And the other thing he doesn't get any credit for that if Republicans truly understood their legacy would do, he passes the Maryland Grant Act, which is the act that gives – we talked about federal territory.

31:08It gives huge chunks of federal territory, like Cornell, A &M, all the A &M, the entire University of California university system. All of these schools are built on grants that the federal government gave to the states to give to colleges, which built us as the technological powerhouse, which Lincoln understood. You know, he's the only president that had a patent. I didn't know that. Yeah. He traveled from Illinois to New Orleans on a flatboat, and they get stuck at one point. He's trying to figure out how to get the flatboat unstuck from these rocks, and later invents this thing that would float the boat up above things.

31:51Whoa, that's cool. Then he walks home. So Lincoln just had this understanding of America and science, and it's not... What people don't understand, too, the main thing that Lincoln understood, and a lot of the early Republicans did, and I guess the Whigs, too, there was one party, basically the Southern Party, that said, like, we just want to own slaves. We want to be left alone. We don't want to support any kind of federal infrastructure that's going to come from our taxes. And the more Western and Eastern people in the United States were like, dude, someone's got to damn these rivers and build canals.

32:27And like Lincoln was a big believer in large federal works. And that is actually the genesis of the Republican Party, which is utterly disavowed for this nonsensical kind of libertarianism. Like for the Texas independent energy grid that can't withstand storms. Like the Republicans are supposed to be a party of building and making and wielding an effective federal government. It doesn't have to be huge, but it should fucking do things. Yeah, it should. And, you know, we did. So I would travel a lot as a congressman. And I went to Australia, this one of my last trips in Congress. And they've basically kind of set up public private partnerships on their ports.

33:10Yes. And it's like, that's the kind of stuff we should be thinking through. Because what do they do with those infrastructure with that? They actually make money on that port that they invest in. They're basically social security. Yeah. Their social security is running a surplus. us and it's like that's what what republicans should be is this kind of innovation on this stuff to get more dollars for infrastructure actually so i lived a quarter of a mile from the inm canal i think it stands for illinois and michigan canal which abraham lincoln was part of building and it was built in the 1840s so he was a lawyer i guess at the time or maybe he was in the state house whichever it was or i think he was he voted for a bunch of stuff in the state house and then as a congressman and both of these things effectively cost him re-election yeah Because there was like economic crises after and people were like, look at these politicians spending all our money.

33:54Meanwhile, the canal still exists. It does. It does. You go to Chicago. That's it. Right. Yeah. Like that's the whole thing. And it's like, it's amazing to see that. And the thing I respect the most about Abraham Lincoln is I don't know if I could have like, I like to think of myself as like I would be a stick to it. He every day got the whatever, I guess, telegraph at the time of the casualties of every battle. And he sat there, I guess, in the basement of the White House or the executive building, like stewing over this for four years. And I would have had advisors come to me and say, listen, let's just enter negotiations with the South, right?

34:32We'll do fine as a northern country. They'll, you know, we'll live at peace, Canada, United States. It would have been hard for me to say no to that, right? Of course. Of course. And so there's a story I tell in the new book where as Kentucky's sort of wavering, this Kentucky politician visits Lincoln and then he says, anything I should tell the people back home in Kentucky because they're worried. And Lincoln gets up, he's like six, four. Yeah. And he's like, you tell him there's a man in here. I just fucking love that. That's awesome. What he did was he had like sort of stones. He had a commitment.

35:05And then he wasn't as radical on these things as people thought maybe he should have. Yeah. And there's this exchange between him and Frederick Douglass where Frederick Douglass says, you know, my problem with you is you kind of vacillate on things. And he says, look, you can say whatever you want about me, but that is not true. He was like, I might be slower than you want in doing things, but once I decide them, I never go back on them. And so I think what Lincoln understood even on the slavery issue was like, look, if you do it too early in the war, public support will evaporate. So he does it in this kind of iterative process.

35:39But he understands, and Spielberg does this well in the Lincoln movie, that it's about moving forward and then not allowing any backsliding. And that he understood that as much as he wanted the war to end, if he ended it at the wrong time, he would have to undo the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and the promise that they made to all these black soldiers. And so I think what Lincoln had was this strong sense of right and wrong, but a sort of also an intellectual humility. So he wasn't aggressive with it. But once he got there, he was like, if this is right, I'll die on this thing. And he was willing to lose re-election and not, he could have sealed up re-election by negotiating sooner also, but he understood that on the other side of re-election was the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

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37:46I'm excited for your book on this because I am so intrigued by him. So in Springfield, Illinois, there's the Lincoln Museum. And when you walk in, I don't know if it's still there. It was there when I was a kid. You see like a picture of Lincoln every year he was president. And you can just see the weight that comes onto him in four years. Like his first year, he actually looks youthful. It's not the Lincoln wears. And then the last one is the picture we always see where his eyes are like, everything's tired. Yes. And you realize that's leadership. Like Winston Churchill for 20 years is railing about the danger of Germany.

38:20Everybody calls him a kook. They say he's a warmonger. They say he's blah, blah, blah. I mean, the guy has a drinking problem probably because he's super depressed. And then all of a sudden there's a moment where it's like Churchill was right. Yes. And that's a leadership. I think so many people expect that it's going to be easy and fun and you're going to get all this attention. It's actually really hard. It's misery. And there's a reason that, you know, a lot of people fail at it. Yeah. And there's a reason that not everybody wants to get into it because if you're actually going to stand up and do what's right, uh, man, it's a, it's an impact.

38:54And Abraham Lincoln, think about that. He finally achieves everything he wants. I mean, you know, finally. And he gets shot. Yeah. It's like, dude, but he's the hero. As America, we're like Abraham Lincoln. Yes. It's crazy. No, no, it's unreal. There's a book I'll give you in the bookstore called Lincoln's Melancholy. And he basically has crippling depression his whole life. Yeah. And so they think he was just kind of at this lower tuning than everyone else. And that this was horrible for the first 50 years of his life or a slog. But then in this moment of extreme passions and despair and also exuberation, you know, this sort of oscillating, he's kind of got this kind of dysthymic even keel that allows him.

39:42He was like superhumanly incapable of losing his temper or taking things personally or reading too much into it. There were so many moments that it looked like it was lost, but he kind of stuck. He's been miserable his whole life. Yeah. And just this sheer amount of... I mean, he buries a kid in the White House. There is this levity to it also, because he was very humorous. And apparently, as he brings the cabinet in to read them the Emancipation Proclamation, he first just reads them these funny stories from a book he likes. And he understood that you had to have some kind of humor inside of it or you would break and die.

40:22That's awesome. Yeah. One of the greatest people who ever lived. It's just a superhuman feat. And I think about the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, for instance, and I'm like - Yeah. And there were kids, and I can't say guarantee, but I pretty much guarantee that none of them thought this was going to succeed. They probably thought, this may be a 50 or 100 year project. We're probably going to hang from a tree. The Brits are going to kill us. and uh like that i'll be giving the ultimate like that it blows me away when i think about that because there's no way we should have beat the brits by the way yes and and there's no way i would have signed this declaration i may have fought for the colonies yeah but i wouldn't i don't know if i would have like signed this declaration you wouldn't have bet your entire family's fortune yeah i know i know well then yeah i think so when i when i saw you tear up at that hearing, what I understood there, and when I think of Washington resigning his commission, or I think of these sort of, when I think of the Gettysburg Address, you think of these moments, and there is an otherworldliness to them.

41:30And you think of the sacrifice and the earnestness of them, and then for people to play fast and loose with them because a thrice-married tax cheat from a reality television show is too fragile to feel that he lost an election. Or even, let's say you're just very, very pro-choice or very, very pro-life or very, very pro-tax reform, or literally insert any issue, that you would value that thing more than the most essential thing, which is that the nation lives and that the experiment continues, that you would spit in the face of that. Like, I think the most operative moment, the most insightful moment, like Plutarch, the great biographer, looks at these little moments in these great lives of Caesar, who's not all good, and Cicero, who's, or sorry, Caesar, who's not all bad, and Cicero, who's not all good.

42:32He looks at these moments that give you the, that unlock the whole picture. I think Trump at Arlington, not the most recent one, but where he said, I don't get it. what's in it for them. I actually, like people say, don't take him literally. I actually think in that moment, he doesn't get it. He doesn't get it. He literally just, it doesn't make sense to him. And that is how you, the idea of doing something for someone else, let alone the ultimate sacrifice for people you will not meet is literally incomprehensible. It is and like so I wear on my wrist a buddy of mine that was killed in Iraq Andreas O 'Keefe and it's like when you think about it regardless of what your Spiritual view is when you die it's the end of your earthly movie right you give The ultimate sacrifice like boom it's over yes and you have no idea that Your sacrifice you're not even conscious of the fact that your sacrifice will or Will not have an impact sure that it's the most selfless thing anybody can do Biologically it makes no sense it makes no sense right I mean we're supposed to run away from that.

43:41And for Trump to say that, to say, I don't get it, you might be right. I think it wasn't some angry thing. He just was confused. Because if you think about a narcissist, a real clinical narcissist, everything is through this. We started this conversation with talking about looking at the globe. He can physically see a globe. He can't think that way. Can't think in the broader perspective. And so, yeah, it doesn't make sense. He would never give his life for the contrary, right? And he wouldn't give the change in his pocket. You know what I mean? Like he would literally do the idea of doing something for someone else.

44:18That is a code that doesn't - Unless he's going to get attention for it. Yeah. Literally does not buy into the premise that you should do something for someone else just because. And that's my concern is that attitudes like that catch fire and they shouldn't, right? Because we've, you remember after 9-11, it was, we would honor the people that would go fight for our country, whether you agreed or disagreed with the war, we would honor that. And, uh, and that is, I, that's the only way a society can keep its head above water, self-governing society. Otherwise you can have a dictator and live a life, you know, but to self govern, you have to have people that are willing to see the bigger picture.

44:56They're willing to sacrifice the bigger picture. Otherwise you're just a bunch of self-interested people trying to get along instead of having a mission or a cause as a country. Yeah. January 6th is not a problem because it was a destructive riot. It was all those things. And so when people go even like, well, what about the riots during Black Lives Matter, which were not good, and also put aside just the whataboutism, like as if one cancels out the other. The problem was the setting and the place and the end of the thing. That the intended aim was to disrupt the most sacred of processes that, by the way, we invented.

45:34It did not exist previously. That peaceful transfer of power in a democratic government did not exist. We invented that. I'm being a little fast and loose, but we invented that idea. At the scale we do it had never before existed and may never exist. It's unprecedented in the history of the world, especially in that fucking building to think of the smallness that it came from to get to there, that we did it peacefully during a civil war. Mm-hmm. Is to just shrug that off as whatever you want to shrug it off with because you don't want to have to face something. Mm-hmm. Is just a profound betrayal of everything that the country's about.

46:17It is. And you could burn an entire city down, right? Yeah. And democracy can survive that. You burn the Capitol down or you, most importantly, take away people's basic trust that their vote counts. Yeah. Right. That's all you need for self-governance is just like, I can vote, that vote counts, the winner wins. That's it. A January 6th style riot in March of 2021 is profoundly different than on January 6th, 2021, because it was a part of an overall coup. I remember leading up to it, people would go, oh, he's undermining our faith in democracy. No, he's attempting a slow-moving paper or two that nearly succeeded.

46:58The violence at the end was the punctuation on a series of illicit, illegal acts that were condemned. There's this thing called the Catalan conspiracy in ancient Rome. There is like an ancient Roman precedent that the founders were very aware of. And that's why they set up the process to prevent that from happening. and no one else had ever done anything like it except maybe Aaron Burr and a handful of towns in the South right after the Civil War as they attempted to, they didn't like Black people being in charge. But other than that, it never happened. And so those institutions, those rituals, there's kind of a, you have to give yourself over to the sacredness of them and get a little weepy about them.

47:41So they mean more to you than literally anything else, including your own prospects, finances, and potentially physical wellbeing. That's why we have an oath, right? The oath is all about this sacred moment. Nobody can force you to take the oath seriously. Yes. But it's that sacred moment where you say, I'm putting, I mean, in kind of a spiritual faith, taking an oath is very sacred, right? It's, you know, you take an oath to your God and you take an oath to your country in this case. And when you start taking that not seriously, or you start putting your power above it, I don't know how a society survives that when people don't take an oath seriously.

48:21And that's where I have worries for this fall, but I think we'll get through it. Yeah. That would be my last question. So let's say he wins the election. I go back and forth, what is a person to do? Because I've traveled all over. You travel to places with much worse leaders than him. And when I'm here, I'm like, I'm not doing enough. What should I do? What would I do if this happened? But then when I walk past some person in insert country on the street, I'm not like, you're abdicating your moral responsibilities. You just go, this is life. So in Stoicism, there's this kind of sense of like, you try to be a good person, you focus on what you control, you don't think you're the decider.

49:01And yet, that's also how unjust systems when they're talking about segregation or apartheid or, you know, anti-Semitism, that's how they happen is people just go, yeah, I was French and then Hitler rolled in. And so now it's Vichy France, you know, like, how do you think about that? So when I think about like, for instance, if Donald Trump wins, it's, I think there will be real damage to the faith of the institutions. He'll put people around him that don't have the honor that they frankly had his first administration. And so what I would say to people then, the first piece of advice is stay educated and be aware of what's happening.

49:38Yeah. Because there is a chance to resist, not physically, you know, to resist basically destruction of your institutions. So that is be aware, but don't also sit around in your darkness and be angry. And I have to tell myself this because I angry tweet too much. Yeah. Right. But that doesn't, that doesn't benefit anybody. So you have to be aware. And I would say to people is, look, the country's not going to end if he wins again. I don't think it's going to end. So what you can do is begin to build what happens in two years, in four years, and in your local elections. That's where the real guardrails are.

50:15You know, state leaders that are willing to certify an election that they didn't agree with. People like Stephen Richer in Arizona who said, no, here's, you know, he's a Republican voted for Trump. Here's the vote count. You know, Joe Biden won. So be that kind of person. If, you know, where I do worry is if Donald Trump loses, they've had a lot of time to prepare what this looks like. And I think it's going to happen at state capitals, not at the U.S. Capitol. And I think it's essential that we be aware of that game plan because that's the only way to stop it. If we all of a sudden, those of us that defend democracy are surprised by the game plan, we could lose it.

50:51Yeah. And again, if an election is stolen legitimately, like if Donald Trump somehow goes to the Supreme Court and wins and he lost, I mean, we can't even entertain that because that would be pretty awful. Yeah. That nearly happened. It did. It could have happened before January 6th, right? And so had that happened, what do you do when you wake up the neck? I'm not quite clear, and I would love a book or a really important thing. What is the obligation of your ordinary person in that scenario. Well, I think if an election is legitimately stolen, and this is why Donald Trump's kind of rhetoric on it is so dangerous, then I think it's a responsibility of a citizen to ensure, you know, physically, if necessary, that that election isn't stolen, right?

51:36We have to, you know, we revolted on the basis of not having representation. And that's what's dangerous about what Donald Trump did, because he convinced a significant amount of the country that an election was stolen that was not. And I mean, honestly, if it was stolen, I would have been there on the Capitol. Sure. I mean, I was on the Capitol, but in a different capacity. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's ensuring that you're building the local structures, you're building the state structures, and ultimately do what we have to do to defend this country. All right. I'm going to show you some books.

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