#143 Pete Hegseth - Secretary of Defense Nominee

Pete Hegseth is a television host, bestselling author, and U. S. Army veteran known for his role on Fox & Friends Weekend. After graduating Princeton and Harvard, he served in the Army National Guard with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning two Bronze Stars. His military experience informs his advocacy for veterans, national security, and patriotic values. Hegseth is also a New York Times bestselling author of "In the Arena," "American Crusade," and his latest book, "The War on Warriors," where he critiques American politics, media and education. Known for his direct style, he remains an active voice in media and has led veterans' advocacy groups like Concerned Veterans for America. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://betterhelp.com/srs https://preparewithshawn.com https://bubsnaturals.com/shawn - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD Pete Hegseth Links: Book “The War on Warriors” - https://www.foxnews.com/books/the-war-on-warriors Website - https://petehegseth.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/petehegseth Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/PeteHegseth YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@RealPeteHegseth X - https://x.com/PeteHegseth Rumble - https://rumble.com/c/PeteHegseth Fox News - https://www.foxnews.com/person/h/pete-hegseth Pete will be hosting the 6th annual FOX Nation Patriot Awards on December 5th - https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-nation-patriot-awards-moves-new-york-tickets-now-sale Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Pete Hegseth, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Hey, Sean, thanks for having me.

• 1:08Shawn Ryan?

  It's good to finally see you in person. I see you on TV all the time, but...

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Likewise. If I had a dollar for every person that met Hegseth, you know Sean Ryan, that guy's the man. I'd be a rich man, so thanks for making this happen.

• 1:20Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool, very cool. Well, you got a new book out, The War on Warriors. I definitely want to talk about that. Let's do, uh, let's talk about the educational system. And then we had a mini conversation about, uh, Tim Walz. And, uh, so we'll talk about his background as well. And what, uh, you know about that? Because I haven't had, uh, a minute to dive into everything he's claiming lately. So, but I figure if anybody knows, it's you. So, uh, starting off with a quick down and dirty introduction. Pete Hegseth, husband, father, patriot, and a Christian man. You're an Army veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, earning two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantry Badge.

• 2:05Shawn Ryan?

  You are most known for being the coast host of Fox and Friends Weekend and of multiple series on Fox Nation. You're the author of the New York Times bestseller Battle for the American Mind. You recently wrote a book called The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of Men Who Keep Us Free. You served as CEO of Concerned Veterans of America. What is that?

• 2:28Speaker 03

  It's a veterans advocacy organization.

• 2:30Shawn Ryan?

  What do you guys concentrate on?

• 2:31Speaker 03

  We're concentrated on trying to get the VA in the business of actually serving vets instead of serving the bureaucracy.

• 2:37Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39Shawn Ryan?

  Are you guys making headway?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not doing it anymore. The organization's still around. Yeah, we made some huge headway during the Trump administration. The Accountability Act and the Choice Act that he was a part of were, I don't know if we, yeah, I think it'd be pretty fair to say we were the brainchild of those behind the scenes, put out, just pushing hard the idea that the VA doesn't exist to perpetuate its own bureaucracy by spending more money. The veterans should be at the center. And if you're a bullshit VA employee and you're jacking around on company time, you should be able to be fired just like anywhere else in life.

• 3:13Shawn Ryan?

  So are they getting fired now?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Mostly not.

• 3:15Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, let me think. No?

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Mostly not, because of course, the bureaucracy fought against it in every single way. All the government unions came out against it, even though it was passed. It was used in some very narrow instances, but for the most part, especially under Biden, they've brought all the civil service protections, against the law, by the way. The law states you can fire. They just choose not to because even all the political appointees abide by the rules of the unions, and so they want to play nice. And so even though they could expedite firings of VA officials who are, I don't know, like watching porn at work or like not serving vets in a timely manner, they usually don't. So it's the right thing to do. I think it could be reapplied under Trump very effectively, frankly, across government, but most importantly at the VA. But in the hands of Democrats, they're not doing anything with it.

• 4:06Shawn Ryan?

  Don't figure. And you currently serve in the Individual Ready Reserve?

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Well, I did as of, not anymore. I'm out now.

• 4:13Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:15Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  The water's warm.

• 4:18Shawn Ryan?

  But do you go, let's talk about the VA. Do you go to, do you go to the VA?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  I do not.

• 4:23Shawn Ryan?

  I don't either.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:25Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think, why do you think the bureaucrats are fighting so hard just to... What's the problem? Like, why don't they want to fix the fucking VA?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  It's a permanent feeding trough. And, you know, you see of high-paying jobs and stable jobs that you can't be fired from with an upper echelon of brass numbering in the thousands that get paid more than, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And they're great, easy, comfy jobs, many of which are now remote, even at the VA. Since COVID, they've never come back. And then the problem is it's a feedback loop. You know, you and I would probably talk a lot about the military-industrial complex, all these outside, the companies that influence the way we procure weapons and the way we fight. Well, there's a veterans' industrial complex, too.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  And, you know, the traditional names, the VFW, the Legion, AMVETS, you name them, they've got big offices in Washington, DC, and they are invested in one thing, namely, a bigger VA budget. A bigger VA budget means more programs that they collaborate with. They say it is to serve their members, but if you talk to their members, which is what we actually did in the organization, is like, hey, we don't care what VFW headquarters thinks, we care what the post-level thinks. What do those guys think? They're saying, hey, why am I driving 200 miles to go to some hospital where I'll wait for months for an appointment when I could be seen inside my own community if the dollars followed me and I wanted to do that locally?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Well, the VA hates that because it would, heaven forbid, their budget might reduce or their facilities might not be used as robust, then they don't keep getting the money. Well, then the vets groups don't benefit as much from that. So it's a typical swampy feedback loop. The politicians don't really know how the VA works, and so they just want a good press conference, and that means just writing bigger checks. The whole thing never, but they get to feel good about it, right? Oh, I support the vets, I support funding for the VA. But is the VA working? Like, can you get in on time? Usually, the healthcare is actually pretty good at the VA. Once you get in, once you get to see a doctor, once you have a stable relationship with a doctor, but getting through and getting in is half the challenge. And so it's a big problem.

• 6:38Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I went there one time. One, well, I guess more than once, but after I got, you know, my benefits. Benefits.

• 6:49Shawn Ryan?

  I went there one time for an appointment and I was like, I'll buy my own health insurance like this. No, I'm not doing this. I don't need any more pills. Sorry. Thank you. I've only heard one thing good come out of the VA and that's, have you heard of this Dr. Freeze guy?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:05Shawn Ryan?

  He's, um, he's, uh, written a book on, that they're calling this, it's like a, I don't, I'm gonna butcher this. So whoever's listening that knows about this, don't kill me here, but it's, it's like another, it seems to me like they've repurposed.

• 7:23Shawn Ryan?

  Not repurposed. It's a different PTSD, I guess is basically, basically what I'm saying called operator syndrome. And they're tying in PTSD with traumatic brain injuries, but not like massive traumatic brain injuries. Like stuff you'd get from shooting a Carl Gustaf or slapping breacher charges on doors a lot. Um, I'm not talking like a big VBID or something, uh, sleep depth. And they're tying it all into like this new form of PTSD. It sounds pretty interesting and, um.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Well, dude, if, that's what the VA exists to do.

• 7:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, well.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Right? Specialize on stuff for guys that saw things that the outside world doesn't really understand. And, and focus on delivering the care that those guys and gals need. But we, right now, we fund a, a VA bureaucracy, a healthcare system that, you know, I mean, the outside world does a good job treating diabetes. The outside world does a good job treating cancer. Those aren't necessarily veteran specific illnesses. So if the VA would specialize more on the things it does really well, it's comparative advantage and you fund those things. And then you, you don't have to have the country's largest healthcare system not, that's not run very well. And instead you allow the private, private market to provide for vets that can be seen in a timely manner.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  That's, we wrote a whole report on it called the Fixing Veterans Healthcare Task Force. It feels like forever ago. It was like 2014. It was a bipartisan deal. Um, and that's exactly what we said. That's where the name came from. I don't know exactly what he did, does exactly, but these, those folks that specialize and do it best, they're the ones that should be the focus. Um, and then on the general healthcare side, that can, that can be done other ways.

• 9:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What would you personally like to see happen? In the VA or to the VA?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, I would, um, that's a great question. And we wrote a whole report on it. And I guess in a perfect world, I would have, like I just said, I would have it focus on its core mission. And then I would, the critics would say, oh, you want to privatize the VA? That's not the idea. The idea is to effectively let the dollars follow the veteran. So, and there is, the mission act did that, that Trump passed, which the VA is trying to squelch.

• 9:46Shawn Ryan?

  What is the problem with privatizing the VA? I mean, all of the, as far as I know, and I've interviewed a lot of vets that have done a lot of kind of wazoo, off the wall treatments that actually work, but all these, all these treatments that are making major headway, like psychedelics.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:05Shawn Ryan?

  None of this is being developed from within the VA. It's all privates, a lot of it's out of the country. We can't even do the shit that helps us in the country. I'm one of them. I did psychedelics, I did Ibogaine in Mexico and, I mean, changed my life in, in so many different ways. I haven't had a drop of booze in two and a half years. I didn't even go down there for that. And way more in the moment with my family. Anyways, whatever.

• 10:37Shawn Ryan?

  None of these non-traditional treatments or things that are working for, for traumatic brain injury, PTSD, anxiety, all these things that are, you know, that, that guys are dealing with coming out, none of it's, none of it's being cured by the VA.

• 10:55Shawn Ryan?

  None of it.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Big surprise. The government is not here to help.

• 10:58Shawn Ryan?

  And so why, what's, why would anybody, other than, I get the VA employees and the bureaucrats within it, but why would anybody be against privatizing veteran healthcare? It's just better health.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Let me tell you this, you're, that's exactly right. Nothing you said is wrong. I, I was, in 2016, 2017, I was under consideration by Trump to be his VA secretary.

• 11:21Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  I was interviewed multiple times. In fact, I was down to the final two. And, you know, go up to Trump Tower, up the elevator, sit with him, talk about it. And ultimately, I think he thought I was a little young and all that. But I remember he called me at one point in the process and he said, Pete, I wanna pick you. I wanna pick you, but there's one problem. Why do all the veterans groups hate you? And I sort of laughed, and he goes, "No, but they hate you." And I'm like, "Well, Mr. President, let me tell you why." Because outside-the-box thinking of, say, providing private choice for veterans is a threat, a complete threat to the ecosystem around the government bureaucracy

• 12:06Speaker 03

  and the VA and the veterans groups. They exist to defend their territory. And they'll say, "Oh, it's for the betterment of the vets." "Well, if vets are getting better treatment from non-conventional places, why aren't we exploring that?" "Well, the bureaucracy can't handle that." "Well, it's not the existing system. It's not where most of the money comes from. It doesn't support the bricks-and-mortar facilities that they wanna keep." The importance becomes keeping the facilities as opposed to what is the treatment that the vets are getting. So I had plenty of... I know I had overwhelming support from veterans across the country who were thankful, who believed that veterans' choice would unshackle them from driving 400 miles for a basic treatment when they could get it 10 miles from their house and the government pays for it. Or the idea that if you're abusing a vet,

• 12:50Speaker 03

  a VA official should be fired. So the solutions are simple. It's choice and accountability. Vets have choice, and people that aren't doing their job or doing it poorly get fired. But government doesn't do either of those things. And so if you're gonna do that, you better be ready to go to the mat in a way that's uglier than I think people could imagine. Everyone looks at the veterans' space and says, "Can't we get along? Can't we all agree that we love vets?" "Of course." "Well, if it's not... If we're spending more..." I mean, the VA has a... The budget of the VA is twice the size of the Marine Corps. It's a massive, massive budget. Is it really? Yes, it's huge. It's the second-largest department in the federal government. It's absolutely... What's number one? The DoD.

• 13:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, I had no idea.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  It's DOD and VA. And yet VA, you can't be seen in a timely manner and you're treated like a number. And, and the warm DC just hides behind the warm glow of all that. So, I hope all these traditional veterans organizations watch this. They know.

• 13:48Shawn Ryan?

  What, what traditional veterans organizations?

• 13:50Speaker 03

  I'm talking about the American Legion.

• 13:52Shawn Ryan?

  The VFW.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Talking about the VFW. I'm talking about, um, AMBETS was good at one time, but AMBETS, talking about disabled American veterans. I'm talking about paralyzed veterans of America.

• 14:03Shawn Ryan?

  All the pamphlets you see on the VA wall.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  All the, it's the funny.

• 14:06Shawn Ryan?

  That's what you're talking about.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  It's the funny hats crowd.

• 14:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yes, and I, and I respect them, their service, all of that. But they're, they don't serve the interest of their members. It's just like the unions. Like when you go, why does Donald Trump have overwhelming support from union members? But yet the union bosses keep endorsing Joe Biden. It's because they don't actually reflect at some point in Washington DC, the interests of their members. They lose touch with the interest of their members because it becomes about perpetuation. And so I, I've worked with, I'm a member of the Legion in my hometown of Forest Lake, Minnesota, post 225. Like, you know, I signed up right after I got back from my first tour. Um, and I, but I don't have any affinity for it other than that. And it's not, I know that in Washington DC, they're not actually trying to fight for

• 14:54Speaker 03

  reform or real overhaul at the VA. They're just have, they have a seat at the table and they like that seat.

• 14:59Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I didn't even realize those nonprofits were, uh, even relevant anymore. I thought that kinda died with the Vietnam generation. I mean, I joined too. I went in there and then I was like, I'm just drinking with a bunch of combat veterans kids.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Vietnam vets.

• 15:15Shawn Ryan?

  Who are wanting the free chicken wings and beer. And then I never went back.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  But that's, you're exactly right. They don't have any power except in Washington. In Washington, they still have a lot of power. You know why? Cause they'll put out press releases. And press releases are like gold, little snowflakes in Washington. And they'll also have PACs and they also give money. Uh, and they'll show up at press conferences behind you, in the uniform, saying, we support, and they love to be bipartisan because they don't wanna be pigeonholed as one or the other.

• 15:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  And so they'll, they support everything that is just more money for the status quo.

• 15:51Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, that's sad. Do you think we'll ever see any? You think it'll ever improve over there?

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Trump tried, and I think he will again. I really do. There's just, there was so much currency he had to spend in so many different places in a first term. And he got a lot done on the mission act, which is choice and VA accountability. And he's got great people on the outside watching what Biden has done. And I think when they come back in, God willing, that there's a lot of overhaul to be had there.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 17:19Shawn Ryan?

  You're not very conspiratorial, are you?

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Hmm, depends.

• 17:23Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I can't go there. I just don't feel like it's in the government's best interest to help veterans. I mean, we cost money. We cost, you can't get your, you can't get your prescriptions filled anywhere but the VA. And you can't just go to a doctor if you have an emergency that's not at the VA, at least as far as I know.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Correct. That's, that's what they were trying to change.

• 17:46Shawn Ryan?

  And once, it's a huge budget. It's, it's, why would they want to spend that money on guys like us? Who they don't need anymore.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  It's a fair point.

• 17:59Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I just, I don't trust him, Pete.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  No, I think you reflect, I mean, I don't, I don't know, tell him, find me a vet who does, who isn't in Washington DC.

• 18:07Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, look at the oxy problem, the opiate problem. A lot of that was initiated by the VA.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  All they did is handbags of pills.

• 18:14Shawn Ryan?

  Here's a grocery sack full of drugs. Hope he feel better.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:18Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe he'll kill himself and then we can pull him off the books.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Or maybe he'll kill himself in the VA parking lot.

• 18:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Which has happened time and time again.

• 18:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Because that's what, naively, or basically, you would expect, well, I went to fight for my country, and at the very least, they could take care of me when I come home. And then they meet a brick wall of numbers, of, they're just a number, nobody gives a damn, and it's too much.

• 18:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's even if you can get in.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 18:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, most people can't even get in. But, um, all right, we've pounded the VA to a pulp here.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  It's one of my favorite things to pound.

• 18:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me too, me too. Everybody gets a gift on the show, you ready?

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 19:00Shawn Ryan?

  It's my, uh, shameless plug.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  I knew this was coming.

• 19:03Shawn Ryan?

  You did?

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did.

• 19:04Shawn Ryan?

  Are you a gummy bear fan?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  I've seen it enough. Absolutely. I would consider myself a gummy bear aficionado. Now, probably not as much as you, but I'm always looking for the softest, chewiest, best gummy bear.

• 19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Those are it. I wouldn't eat those. Don't eat them 30 minutes before you go on the air, though. I'm just kidding.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Are they those kind of gummy bears?

• 19:25Shawn Ryan?

  No, no, they're legal in all 50 states.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  I'm gonna try one right now.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Well, they smell good. I find that the generic ones are often the softest.

• 19:40Shawn Ryan?

  They're good. Let me know what you think.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  Mm.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Excellent.

• 19:47Shawn Ryan?

  Not bad, huh?

• 19:48Speaker 03

  I didn't know you were in the gummy bear business.

• 19:49Shawn Ryan?

  I am, I am.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 19:52Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, well, let's move on to, I'm just, I was gonna save this to the end, because this is what I'm most excited to talk about, but let's talk about the War on Warriors. Let's talk about the book. Where are you going with this?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Well, the idea of the book, I would say, you know, I wrote a book about education, I've written some books about politics, and it just didn't feel like the right time to kind of assess. Where we were in the military, especially after 20 years of more or less ongoing combat. And, you know, it takes a while for the dust to clear and to get a sense of like, hey, what happened? Where, but then things, you know, under Obama, but really after Trump and then in Biden, you start to look around and you say, wow. And it happened really fast. It happened slowly and then it happened fast. You start to realize this institution that I love, that I gave so many years to, that you gave so many years to, and I say that humbly because I did far less than so many.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  You know, I did my one little thing that as part of a bigger effort over 20 years. But this institution's going sideways. It doesn't, and you hear time and time again. Which institution? The Department of Defense, the military, the army, pick your service. And it started with a central question, the book. Would I want my kids, would I recommend my kids join the army today or the military today? And that used to be an open and shut case for me. It used to be absolutely, hell, yeah. Like, I want my kids to have the kind of ethos where they would. And we've got a blended family of five boys and two girls, so that's a real question.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  You know, oldest is 14, youngest is seven, like, they're not that far away from having the opportunity to make that decision. Would I recommend that? And it used to be, of course, I would. And over the last couple of years, it became clear, like, I, would I? I don't know. And you talk to more and more guys and they're having the same, they're either a hell no, or they're saying, yeah, I, for the first time in my life, you know, I'm in the family business, it was my dad, my grandfather, we all served, and I'm second guessing whether I want my kids to. And so I actually, the book kind of helped me figure that out. And I, the last chapter of the book is a letter to my boys about whether I would want them to serve, but, and, and I can, I can lay that out, but I didn't write that chapter until the end.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  So I wrote the whole book and then I was like, okay, I want to look at the depth of what's happening to our warriors. Cause it's, it's not, the book isn't just how the military went woke. There's plenty of those examples. And we feature them prominently on Fox and you've seen them and they're just the nonsense. The deeper question is, how did the military allow itself to go woke? How did our general class? How did our military academies? How did military leaders who are expected to live by an ethos and a code? Who they're in the job of meritocracy and lethality? Of excellence, of no excuses, of equality and unity?

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Not equity and diversity is our... The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is our diversity is our strength. It's... Our unity is what unites us. Our unity of effort, our ability to say, yes, we're different, but we come together as a team to accomplish a mission. So I spent the better part of a year and a half talking to vets. And not just vets, but connecting through a network of a lot of guys I know. I spent... I host my show on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in New York. So I've got Saturday afternoon wide open. And I spent for months, my Saturdays, just on the phone, off the record, anonymously with guys in service.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  So senior listed, junior listed, junior officers, senior officers, all branches, MOSs, ERAs, but mostly guys in right now, generals, privates. And all the same themes came out. You know, standard are dropping, the woke stuff is everywhere. I feel like I'm walking on eggshells. I heard that all the time. Eggshells. I'm a commander, I walk on eggshells. I train commanders. They're walking on eggshells. They're afraid of one misstep on one identification, or one gender thing, or one racial thing, or one trans thing. And the priorities are upside down on what the units are focusing on.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  And every single one of those distractions means we're less good at our job, which is supposed to be closed with and destroy the enemy on behalf of our nation and bring our boys home. That's all I care about. That's what I want a military focused on. And so, yeah, I tell a few of my own stories in the book, but the book's not about me at all. How do you think that this is happening?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Well, it's a long story. So the, I think it's because there are ideologues who want to bring a meritocracy to heel. That's where I think it starts. I think you have politicians who don't want to tolerate an institution. First, they want to use it to tinker. And then they also don't want to tolerate an institution that's antithetical to their social experiments. Because the military, you know, I mean, the book lays this out. Of course, like, the integration of the military racially was a huge success. It was a huge success because black men and Hispanic men and others can perform just as well as white guys in any capacity that they're given. So the reality of life reinforced that the bigotry we saw on the outside should not be tolerated inside the military.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  And the military did a great job doing that. But now we're pushing boundaries in lots of different levels that are different than that. Because men and women are different. Because being transgendered in the military causes complications and differences. And the book kind of lays out the common arguments that those on the left or others make, which are baked in social justice. So it started, you know, we saw it under Clinton with the tinkering of don't ask, don't tell, and the reasons for those changes. And I talked to some of the people involved in when that was changed. But it really happened, started to accelerate under Obama. And you saw it with, you saw the trans stuff come at the end of the Obama administration. You saw the women in combat come at the end of the Obama administration.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  It's because they looked around at the bureaucracies that they controlled in Washington and the one that was, that they didn't control. Obama spent a disproportionate amount of time focusing on the Pentagon. They were skeptical of leadership and eventually brought in political appointees and generals who would do their bidding the way they wanted, which, as you know, in a top-down organization changes the ethos of the whole thing. So the book is meant to pull the whole curtain back, mostly from Obama forward, and explain how the army that I enlisted in, or that I swore an oath in 2001 and was commissioned in 2003, looks a lot different than the army of today, because we're focused on a lot of the wrong things.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  I mean, you know this. You could, you could talk about it all day, I bet.

• 26:55Shawn Ryan?

  We could. I'm trying to organize my thoughts here and figure out what variables to go down. But, um, I mean, I mean, they've been wildly successful in, in morphing the military into this, whatever you wanna, whatever, whatever you wanna call them. I do wanna, do you wanna talk about, I don't wanna forget about having your kids join the military.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Sure, yep.

• 27:19Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe we end with that.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 27:21Shawn Ryan?

  Because I have a lot of thoughts on that, too. But, I mean, I, I don't know, man. I mean, I, I think about this all the time. I mean, you, you know, you watch the show. I've had active duty guys on. I've had, I've had the most badass American warriors that we've ever produced on this show. And everybody says the same thing. They don't all say it on camera because it doesn't, uh, uh, we don't always go into that. But, but I do ask them, you know, all of them, like, how was it? How was it in there? You know, especially the guys that just got out. They're all disgusted. They're all demoralized.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 27:58Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like this, the gas really got turned on when, when, when the defund the police movement happened. I knew it was gonna bleed in because I thought the defund the police, I was like, this isn't about this shit. They want to rid the LE agencies of the old guard because they all think alike. They do a damn good job. And so let's destroy it and rebuild it with a new mindset. And that happened. I think that happened. Do you think it happened?

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Yes, I do. I mean, if you, if you look at the back cover of the book, it says, "I joined the army to fight extremists in 2001. Uh, 20 years later, that same army labeled me one."

• 28:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  So I got out because, and I, I can tell the story or not, but I, I was deemed extremist because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington DC. And my orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration. But all of this, so you have what happened with George Floyd.

• 28:57Shawn Ryan?

  What a punishment.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  I know. It's actually...

• 29:01Speaker 03

  You put it that way, you're exactly right. You put it, you're exactly right. You know, but you had the George Floyd riots. And then you had, I was also in the DC Guard during the, what happened in front of the White House. You remember the insurrection that no one calls an insurrection outside the White House? When they, you know, burned the church down and, and got to the gates of the White House? I was there the second night through the fifth night of all of that. I was an 04 major holding a riot shield because they didn't have enough guys. So we were just out there doing our thing and, and explain a little bit about that. That happens, then January 6th happens. And both of those moments become pretenses for the DOD with political appointees who've long since been burrowed in and generals who are all in for the politically correct agenda.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  They maybe kept their head down during Trump because he didn't want to hear about it. Guys like Milley, guys like Austin, they were right there waiting in the wings, ready to go. And once the combination of Floyd and January 6th happened, they went all in on DEI and CRT and transformation, focusing on patriot extremism. Uh, that's, we write, talk all about that in the book. You know, Gadsden flags are, are signs of radicalism. Get the bumper sticker off your car. Uh, you know, a, a Jerusalem cross tattoo, which is just a Christian symbol. Is that the ex? This is the one. Is that the tattoo? Right here. This one is, uh, is what got me, uh, disinvited. Or my, I'd never had orders revoked before. I mean, listen, it's a standard deal.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  You remember after January 6th, everyone was in Washington DC. Like Nancy Pelosi had the parking garages full of National Guardsmen. The fence was up. I was going and my commander called me a day before tepidly and was like, um, Major, you can just stand down. We, we don't need you, we're good. And I'm like, what do you mean? Everybody's there. He's like, no, no, we're, he couldn't tell me. Uh, and then of course, whereas when I was writing the book, I reached out to somebody in the unit who could confirm with 99.9% certainty because he was on, in the meetings and on the emails. Nope, someone inside the DC Guard trolled your social media, found a tattoo, used it as an excuse to call you a white nationalist, an extremist.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  And you were specifically by name, orders revoked to guard the inauguration, um, because you were considered a potential threat. How is that? It's a cross. It's a Christian symbol, that's all it is. There's a lot of guys, but I got a Christian symbol here, I got, you know. No, because it wasn't about that. It was about, I don't know, was it, I'm too conservative? Is it because I'm a Trump supporter? Uh, is it because I was a reporter on January 6th? So they just didn't want you there? Maybe I worked at Fox, maybe that's what it was. They just, they had decided, Pete Hegseth is not qualified to guard the inauguration of a Democrat president. Which is ridiculous, because I volunteered to go to Afghanistan under Barack Obama.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  I'm no Democrat, but I believed, I was hopeful the surge in Afghanistan might work, and I volunteered to go in 2011, 2012. So it's never been about, for guys like you and me, it's never been about Republicans and Democrats, it's been about the Republic. And that's all been, it's all been put into question in everyone's mind. And it, so, there's a chance to course correct it, but it would take the new, a new Trump administration going after it really hard. How would they correct it? Well, first of all, you gotta fire, um, you know, you gotta fire the Chairman and Joint Chiefs, and you gotta fire this, I mean, obviously you're gonna bring in a new Secretary of Defense, but any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke shit, has gotta go.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Either you're in for warfighting, and that's it, and that's the only litmus test we care about. You gotta get DEI and CRT out of military academies, so you're not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking. And then, you know, whatever the standards, whatever the combat standards were, say, and I don't know, 1995, let's just make those the standards. And as far as recruiting, to hire the guy that, you know, did Top Gun Maverick, and create some real ads that motivate people to want to serve. And, and there's lots of other ways in which you could identify who gets promoted and what, but there's an ethos change. I mean, there's a reason we're not, people don't want to serve, because they don't trust that their senior leaders are gonna have their best interests in mind in combat.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  I know there were mistakes made on our tours, all over the place. But I at least, for the most part, had a sense that my senior leaders were committed... To the completion of the mission for the right reasons. And maybe there were strategic differences and all that other stuff. And it wasn't always perfect. But I, and that, that trust is broken. And you have to reestablish that trust by, by putting in no nonsense warfighters in those positions who aren't going to cater to the socially correct garbage.

• 33:50Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you don't think we need to gut the entire institution? Do you think this is just coming from the top down?

• 33:57Speaker 03

  I think right now it's a top, my assessment based on talking to, I mean, is that it's a top down, bottom up problem. Is that you've got top down political generals who've gained rank by playing by all the wrong rules that cater to the ideologues in Washington DC. And so they'll do any social justice, gender, climate extremism crap because it gets them checked to the next level and gets them closer to the political appointees who don't know anything about the military really, other than they want a new first here, a new first there, and can we get the first trans this or whatever, that, just nonsense. And then now you have a junior corps, which, listen, their incentive structure, whether

• 34:40Speaker 03

  it was in university or at service academies or just coming through college, is belief in these things. That diversity is our strength, that equity, that the standards could be racially biased, that showing up on time is a social construct, all, all the, so if you spend enough time with those two things meeting, you, you could have a wholesale takeover of the Defense Department. I do think there's still a core of mostly silent, you know, they, they also pushed out a lot of vaccine folks because of the vaccine, obviously.

• 35:10Shawn Ryan?

  That's a, I think.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  That's another one, like, I'd talk about a purge.

• 35:12Shawn Ryan?

  Engineered as well.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  That's a purge of people, that's a purge of people of conscience. If you, if you have enough of a conscience, whether it's faith, belief, or whatever, purge, out. Patriot extremism, purge, out. So there was a big push of a lot of those people in the middle out. I still think, and I know enough guys and talked to enough who said, hey, I, I want to be in for the right reasons. I know what's wrong. It's jacked up. If I say something, I'm canned. But in a new environment, I think, I think there's still a core there that's not, and here's the challenge, is, in Battle for the American Mind, my other book, was about the state of education in America, which is. Government schools are, you know this as well as anybody, horror shows. But if you want to get out of them, you can.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  You can move, you can homeschool, you can, you know, you got options for the most part. We only have one defense department. What's the option? Abandon it? And so if every patriot abandons it, what does it look like? And how is it utilized in the future? In ways that are far more nefarious than foreign wars, where we get entangled and we end up trying to nation build for 20 years.

• 36:22Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like that's how we fix it. You abandon it.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Really?

• 36:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yup. I know you probably think I'm crazy.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  I would...

• 36:31Shawn Ryan?

  We have a second amendment. We have more gun owners than anything else in this country. Yeah, I know we need planes and tech and satellites and space force and all the, Navy and all the shit, but when's the last time we actually went to war to fight for our freedom?

• 36:48Speaker 03

  We won't even defend our southern border.

• 36:52Shawn Ryan?

  Should we have been in Iraq?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  I was a huge proponent of at the time, but in retrospect, absolutely not.

• 36:58Shawn Ryan?

  So was I. I don't think we should have been there. I think that was all for Cheney and KBR, Halliburton. I think we were in Afghanistan for way too... I don't even think we're defending the country. Like, why the fuck are people even signing up to go to war? For what? For what? Who's war? It's not our fucking war. We're funding the Taliban 40 to 87 million dollars...

• 37:20Speaker 03

  A week.

• 37:21Shawn Ryan?

  A week.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  A week.

• 37:24Shawn Ryan?

  They run the government over there, they're making passports for these guys, legitimate passports for these guys. They fly them all over South America and Central America. They funnel up through the southern border. You know, it's not a fucking conspiracy. It's real. And, like, what's... So what are we gonna use our military for? For Ukraine? So why, why would anybody, why would anybody sign up?

• 37:49Shawn Ryan?

  What are you defending? What are you defending?

• 37:53Speaker 03

  It's a great question. I mean, I think it's, and that's why I reserved judgment to say, "I want to know what the world looks like in four years when you're 18."

• 38:02Shawn Ryan?

  And if we do, if they do lose all the patriots, they have to change something because they have no one.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Or do they? Or do they?

• 38:10Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe you're right.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Or would they conscript?

• 38:13Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe you're right.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Or would they bring in pathway to citizenship, conscript? I mean, I think DC will find a way and it may be ugly and it may... And so I share all of your skepticisms about that. I've been a recovering neocon for six years now. Like, the foolishness with which we ricocheted around the world intervening, think it was in our best interest, when really we just overturned the table and created something worse in almost every single scenario, has led to almost... I mean, the hubris of the Pentagon is that they want to now tell other countries how to do counterinsurgency based on what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Are you kidding me? So you really have learned nothing? Okay, nothing. So you're right. The trust there that our political leaders or our generals would have our best interests in mind is totally broken. It's totally broken. I acknowledge that completely. And the last thing I want is my son deploying to the Donbass to defend eastern Ukraine. I'm with you too. At the same time, I'm fearful of what happens when the institution gets abandoned completely. And maybe it feels like the public school argument, like, "Hey, if we take all the Christians and people of faith out of public schools, then they're really going to go, 'Yeah, but you got to save your kid, right? And I'm going to save my kid.'" And that's the view. It's just, there isn't, there isn't an alternative right now to the United States military.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  There just isn't. And I don't want to lose patriotic influence over that. So my prayer, because if Donald Trump doesn't win and Kamala Harris is the commander in chief, what's happening inside our military is going to go in another level of warp speed. And you're going to see even more guys retiring, guys and gals retiring, and even more of the DEI woke focus, and it's going to continue to spiral.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  If Trump does win and goes at it... I think it might be our last sort of chance to save this institution and turn it back to what it was. Because it is a top-down organization. You put a SecDef in there who's focused on all the right things, get rid of all the

• 40:24Speaker 03

  just all the things that are described in the book, and focus on warfighting, lethality, and training, and standards, real standards, not equity, but equality. You can do it. There's still the core there. But I share all your, I mean, what has Washington shown us in the last 20 years that we should trust them with how they'll use our young men? It's fair. I mean, Trump tried to use them on the border and they shut them down.

• 40:47Shawn Ryan?

  Our power grid's fucked, our border's fucked, our education system's fucked. Everything's fucked. That's the way it feels. Everything is fucked. And we're shipping all of our money overseas. And we should be, I mean, do you know how, do you know anything about the power grid? Do you know how bad it is?

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Super, super vulnerable. I mean, one EMP, one of the right strikes, and oh yeah, we're, what happens when you're months without power?

• 41:16Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think they even need to do an EMP. We don't, they, China produces all of our transformers, all of our solar, all of our wind, everything. And so, and we don't even check it for malware, or Trojan horses, or any of these type of viruses that they, I mean, and even Ray, FBI Director Ray, came out and said, yeah, they've, they're in, they're in our grid, and they're in our water treatment plants. And all they have to do is flip the switch.

• 41:46Shawn Ryan?

  But we ship 100 and, what is it, like 175 billion thus far to Ukraine?

• 41:54Shawn Ryan?

  But...

• 41:54Speaker 03

  No, well, and, and, and Bin Laden's son is now in Afghanistan, and he's married to the daughter of Mullah Omar, and the, and the daughter of, of, what's the?

• 42:05Shawn Ryan?

  Zarqawi.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  Zarqawi. And they're, I mean, when you, when you, when the FBI director's saying that the dashboard is flashing red and smoking, he's not doing it because, he's doing it because he's covering it, his ass. He knows something's coming at some point. And, yeah, I, I...

• 42:28Shawn Ryan?

  But even on top of all the DEI stuff in the military, I don't even think that that's, I think that's just one aspect of the war on warriors. I mean, just before we started talking on, on the show, we were having a side conversation about the Biden four, the Blackwater guys, Eddie Gallagher, Goldstein, the latest one, I don't know if you're aware of this, Brad Geary. Do you know who Brad Geary is? He's a, he's a naval captain. He was in charge of Naval Special Warfare Training Center. He was the guy that was in charge when Mullin, the SEAL recruit who was in BUDS died. And now they're pinning his ass to the wall, and it's straight lies. Just his, just for an example, his, you know,

• 43:13Shawn Ryan?

  they are blaming it on the training cadre, and it was too hard, and the medical checks were, were wrong, and da, da, da, da, da. But they did three, I believe it was three separate investigations to cover up, they just kept re-investigating it until the facts were gone. And the facts were that they found a cooler, or some type of a box, full of vials of testosterone, human growth hormone, and Viagra, oh, from Pakistan. And when he died, he had, his heart was 63% larger than most. I think he was 23, was he 23 at the time? But they had all of that removed out of the investigation. I should connect to you guys.

• 43:58Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely. But that's the latest one. That's Eddie Gallagher. They tried him for, for murdering an ISIS fighter. They tried him for murdering an ISIS fighter. Correct. And they, and, you know, I was a SEAL, and I asked all my, because I thought he was guilty. I thought he was guilty, because everybody was saying that he was guilty. I was calling my buddies that were still in, hey, what's up with this Gallagher guy? Is this real? Like, I don't see the problem here. And they're like, oh, man, dude, you don't want to... It's bad. They have the videos. It was bad. They told, I think it was Green, told, went around to all the SEAL teams and briefed them saying that they had video, the proof,

• 44:43Shawn Ryan?

  that Eddie killed this guy in a, I don't know, whatever fashion.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:47Shawn Ryan?

  And, but nobody ever saw. Turns out in court, it never came up. They just fucking lied to the entire SEAL community to pin this guy's ass to the wall. A lot of people still hate him.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  You had his lawyer, Tim Pawlatory, on your show, without, without the kind of legal defense that he got. And they got the, they got the other guy to admit that he killed him in the last day of Trump.

• 45:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it wasn't even him.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Wasn't even him. So...

• 45:12Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't even kill the ICE fighter.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  So, Eddie Gallagher, or Clint Lorenz, or, um, uh, the Raven 23 guys.

• 45:22Shawn Ryan?

  And those guys were, one was going, Nick Slatten was going to prison for life.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  For life.

• 45:27Shawn Ryan?

  And the other three, I believe it was 35 years, and they, they deleted the drone footage that proved their innocence in court. That's another one. Hey, let's just retry them until we get a guilty.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  A couple of them didn't even pull the trigger in the actual incident. Um, it's, uh, Matt Goldstein's the other one I'm thinking of, a Green Beret. So, yeah, I mean, Chapter 10 and 11 are more lethality, less lawyers, and the laws of war for winners, um, talking about exactly this. And this is why, you know, I was proud to be a part of, in a small way, behind the scenes with all of those, with the pardons that came for President Trump. And what his instinct was, hey, I'm with the warfighters. Like, we sent them to do these really dangerous, dirty, difficult things that no one else would do, and then, sort of like the line from A Few Good Men, and then we challenged the manner in which they do it. And even when they do it in a way we may not like, or everybody people don't understand, rather than giving them deference, or having their back, or finding a way to

• 46:21Speaker 03

  support them, we throw them under the bus. And the Raven 23 is the most, is one of the most egregious examples of that, because it was politically expedient for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to do that. It was a gift to the Malaki government because of what, you know, the publicity that had come out because of it. And so you have a Pentagon that starts to be complicit with that way of thinking, and it's all about advancement and covering up problems, and they don't have the backs of guys. Um, rules of engagement are a huge problem, as you know.

• 46:46Shawn Ryan?

  That's another one.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  It's a big one.

• 46:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I remember, I remember, I was working for the agency at the time, and we were in Helmand Province.

• 46:57Shawn Ryan?

  And we were, the Marines were getting ready to do this big push through Marjah. Do you remember that?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  I remember that, yep.

• 47:02Shawn Ryan?

  We were co-located, right? They didn't know, but we were right alongside them. And I remember when the ROEs came out for that, under the Obama administration. It was if they shoot at you and drop their weapon, you cannot return fire.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  In a war?

• 47:19Shawn Ryan?

  And I was like, man, like, you just cut these guys' legs out, right out from under them. Like, nobody's even, what are we doing? Like, you just put the fear of God in these guys, that if they have to do their job and defend the country, that they're gonna go to prison for the rest of their life. I mean, what? They demoralized the entire battalion that was doing that offensive push. And, I mean, it's just, it's just, this has been a long process.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  That's why I say the rules of war for winners. Because why are we fighting an enemy? Why have we spent the last 20 years fighting enemies that don't abide by rules at all? And these are rules written by, like, dudes in cloakrooms in Europe after World War I, because they thought that they could fight polite wars in the future amongst European nations. When we live now in a world in 2024, where all of our enemies use all of their advantages against us, ignoring all the rules of war, and then expecting us to play by all those very same rules, where we're our largest critiquers in the middle of the process? And then we wonder why the war never ends? And why we, it perpetuates itself? And then why we're throwing our own guys in jail? Because we've written rules that are impossible, that are written for us to lose?

• 48:35Speaker 03

  That are written for our guys to be in handcuffs? I mean, I got the same, a similar brief. We had a JAG officer, JAG off, brief our platoon in Iraq in 2005, in Baghdad, prior to one of our first missions, and it was just standard ROE briefing. He's like, so you see a man in the road, and he's carrying an RPG that's not yet pointed at you. And it was, you know, an enemy. Can you shoot? My guy's like, hell yeah. No, you cannot. But you cannot shoot until he's pointing that weapon at you. And I just remember walking out, clear as day, I remember walking out of that briefing, pulling my platoon together and being like, guys, we're not doing that. You know, like if you see an enemy and you know they're engaged before he's able to point his weapon at you and shoot, we're gonna have your back.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  And that comes back down to commanders, and I felt like I could say that because I knew I had commanders echelons above me who would have our backs in that process. And the New York Times and the left and Democrats would say, you know, all they do is take one incident and yell war criminal. They never actually understand the context of what hap-- I mean, I got the same income on Eddie Gallagher. Don't touch this story. I talked to SEALs, don't touch it. Guilty as all hell, guilty as all-- and I just looked more and more, same with Clint Lorenz, same with Matt Goldstein, and the Raven 23 guys. What is Matt Goldstein? Matt Goldstein's Green Beret. I can't, I can't remember all the particulars of it right now, but he was involved, a guy who had, they had rolled up, who had been involved in killing Americans, then had gotten

• 50:04Speaker 03

  released and his sources were gonna be killed, and he laid in basically an ambush on the guy when he was released and killed him. Because they knew that their sources were all gonna be killed. Forgive me if that's wrong, something along those lines, he's probably gonna watch and text me and be like, you're an idiot. So I'm sure I got some part of that wrong. He's one of the smartest, most patriotic guys you'll ever meet. I mean, you should have him on the show sometime. Guy's phenomenal, like stupid level smart, PhD level. Did he get out of it, or is he-- He got out of it, he got a pardon. He did. From Trump. Nice. And, and because, and, and the thing with Trump is, if he, his, his wife Julie Goldstein was on our show a number of times, she's just really articulate, really passionate.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Once he sees a story and gets how it connects to something bigger, it connects to the bigger idea that we're fucking over our warfighters here. Why are we doing that? Why did we do that? Why wouldn't we back these guys up, even if they weren't perfect? And he, you know, he'd call me, be like, you know, they did some nasty, they did some tough things, he's a rough guy. But he respects people that were willing to do it on behalf of the rest of us, and he's not gonna throw them under the bus. So once he gets the information, and you're able to say, here's what happened, or here's what happened in Eddie Gallagher's trial, I mean, if that went all the way to the Secretary of the Navy, if you remember that. I mean, the guy got, Spencer got canned for misrepresenting how that entire case went out. That's what, you need leaders-- They get it, and that was Donald Trump.

• 51:28Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think it would be a good idea for whoever gets into office to put a, put like a team together of these guys that have been through what we're talking about? Like Eddie, Brad Geary, Goldstein?

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:44Shawn Ryan?

  Because, one, they know who to go after. Because it's happening to them.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:51Shawn Ryan?

  Two, they're passionate about it.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Put Tim Pawlatoria on that list, too, by the way. He's super smart.

• 51:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, Tim would be.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  He'd be good.

• 51:59Shawn Ryan?

  Tim would be a great wrecking ball.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  He would.

• 52:01Shawn Ryan?

  A level-headed wrecking ball. But, um, but I mean, I feel like maybe a little bit of an overcorrection because, you know, it's personal, but.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 52:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I've, I feel like that would be a great start.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to start with people who can say, okay, I know who the political animals were in those places.

• 52:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  Because that's, that's the challenge of a new administration. Everyone's gonna jump up and down and say, I was this, or I was never really for that, or I was, because they want to preserve their careers, and you're gonna have to have somebody that's able to call balls and strikes.

• 52:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this isn't just happening with the military, though. I mean, this is, this is in all the agencies. I know it's at the, the agency, because I was there. It was bad when I left in 2015. But, you know, and I, you know, when you say from the top down, I just, I don't, I don't know if that works. I don't know about the academies, what they're teaching.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Well, you'd have to change the academies, too, right? So that's, that's where you have to change both sides of that squeeze. You have to, I mean, admission standards, overall standards, I think, I think a huge one is, is women in combat in quotas. I think the way they pushed that under Obama in a way that had nothing, zero to do with efficacy, zero to do with lethality and capability.

• 53:22Shawn Ryan?

  You don't like women in combat?

• 53:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 53:24Shawn Ryan?

  Why not?

• 53:24Speaker 03

  I love women, service members, who contribute amazingly, uh, because everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, uh, and complication in combat.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Means casualties are worse. And when you actually go into the hood, again, and I, you know, I got response. I've got 99% positive response to this. A few, a little bit of pushback, but when you actually break down what they did in the studies to open the door for women in combat, I mean, they just ignored them. So the Marine Corps was the only service that actually tried to fight back and say, now, obviously, I'm exempting special operations, which thus far has held the line fairly well. Because if they were lowering the standard to become a Navy SEAL, just to let women inside the Navy SEALs, that's going to change the capabilities and ethos of the Navy SEALs. Except for a very small example of some, you know, female super soldier who's capable of doing it. But because of how Washington works, they're going to change the standards, they're going

• 54:25Speaker 03

  to push for quotas. We have numerous quotes in the book of, no, no, we're, the, the standards aren't changing, they're just evolving. They're just evolving to meet the needs of today.

• 54:35Shawn Ryan?

  They're not getting tougher.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  They're not getting tougher. No. So they're getting lower every, take someone like Milley. I mean, he was calling down to individual units to make sure they had female company commanders after they graduated from Ranger School. Like, what's the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs doing pushing company command slots for? It's all an agenda. It's all to say, oh, we have this first, or we have this, that. So that's proliferated everywhere. The reason women started getting in combat is because of forward support companies and they were, you know, we were integrating a lot of the rear echelon activities into BCTs, Brigade Combat Teams, that were now deploying forward as an entity. And so you had women truck drivers or fuel or mechanics on these convoys in Iraq and

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Afghanistan, and then they'd be ambushed or hit by IEDs, and suddenly now you have women in combat. That's maybe a modern reality in a 360 battlefield. That's different than intentionally saying, we're going to put women into combat roles so they will do the combat jobs of men, knowing that we've changed the standards in putting them there, which means you've changed the capability of that unit. And if you, if you say you haven't, you're a liar. Because everybody knows between bone density and lung capacity and muscle strength, men and women are just different. And so if you want to, I'm okay with the idea that you maintain the standards where they are for everybody.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  And if there's some, you know, hard charging female that meets that standard, great, cool, join the infantry battalion. But that is not what's happened.

• 56:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  What has happened is the standards have lowered because they, the general comes by and asks a question. You know what questions are when generals ask questions. They're just a command. Lieutenant or captain or major, why aren't there more women in your unit? That means get some more women in your unit now. And that moves all the way through the training pipeline. And so I, I'm surprised there hasn't been more blowback on that already in the book because I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn't made us more effective, hasn't made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated. Most of them actually are, a lot of them are pushed, I shouldn't say most, but many are pushed into a combat track because they're so highly capable, but if they had their first choice, probably wouldn't be that.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  An 11 series job, you know, armor or infantry. So, I mean, the Marine Corps did the study and, and integrated units, meaning male, female, did drastically worse than all male units. And Ray Mabus, who was the Secretary of the Navy in time in 2015, said, oh, fuck your study. We're doing it. Because that's what the Obama administration wanted. And, and everything else changed. So I, I'm not saying that was the only point, but that, and I don't know if that'll ever change. I mean, imagine the demagoguery that would come on in Washington DC if you're actually making the case for, you know, we should scale back women in combat. And as the disclaimer for everybody out there, and I'm not really in the disclaimer business, like, we've all served with women and they're great.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  It's just our institutions don't have to incentivize that in places where traditionally, not traditionally, over human history, men in those positions are more capable.

• 57:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I'm not going to argue. I know, I think women, I have to give my opinion here, I guess. I think women do have a place in combat if they want it. I think there are certain units that they need to stay out of or create their own. Because when you've said it gets complicated, yeah, it does get complicated, man. I mean.

• 58:15Shawn Ryan?

  Sex happens everywhere. And I talked about this on another one and I got blasted for it like, oh, well, you guys should be more professional. Yeah, fuck you, okay? Like, wasn't there like some senator's aide getting his ass pounded in, in DC? Like, there's your top people.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  In the hearing room.

• 58:33Shawn Ryan?

  Okay? Okay, yeah. Then we got a president getting blowjobs under the, under the, under the desk. Like, give me a break, man. Come on. This shit happens everywhere. Everybody knows it. Happens everywhere in corporate. Happens everywhere in government. Like, it's just humanity. Like, people are gonna have sex. And that creates drama. And that breaks team dynamics and creates issues between personnel. And the next thing you know, you're going to combat with a bunch of people that hate each other because there was some kind of a, some type of a love triangle going on in the platoon or the unit.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Or retreats somebody differently in the moment.

• 59:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Right? I mean, maybe something like a female engagement team. Like, I understand the role of female engagement teams.

• 59:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, there's some amazing pilots.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  I'm not even talking about pilots. I'm not talking about pilots. I'm not talking about the ability to, you know, do, I'm talking about physical

• 59:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  labor type, labor-intensive type jobs.

• 59:26Shawn Ryan?

  Shooting people in the face at close distance when it's very personal. That's the kind of stuff you're talking about.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, you know, MARSOC, infantry battalions, armor, artillery, if it's, if it's, if strength. I'm talking about something that would need, strength is a differentiator.

• 59:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  Pilots? Give me a female pilot all day long. I got no issues with that.

• 59:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  I got no issues with, you know, so, thank you for that opportunity to clarify. But on the physical stuff, there's just a difference.

• 59:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Man, I mean, what else is there? What else is going on with the, the war on warriors? I mean, where I was going with the other agencies is

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  Well, we can get there.

• 1:00:10Shawn Ryan?

  is the academia stuff, you know, and they, they get in, so it's, it's coming from the top, but it's also in the education system, which we should talk about too. And then they get in to these agencies and, I mean, that's, so it's coming from both.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  For sure, and it's happening not just at the, you know, FBI is another prominent example of that. We saw, I mean, take the assassination attempt of President Trump. I mean, in a perfect world, would you want to have like 6'3" guys guarding a 6'3" president?

• 1:00:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'll tell you what, it sure as hell doesn't make sense to have a 5'5" woman in there guarding a 6'2" man because part of personal security is you should be able to shield your principal.

• 1:00:55Shawn Ryan?

  And that obviously didn't happen.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

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• 1:01:28Speaker 01

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• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  So what's happening there? I mean, that's common sense 101. Whereas I, it's because standards and capabilities have been subordinated to agendas.

• 1:02:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  And it's subordinated to quotas. And the other one that's crazy that I heard more about than I thought is the transgender stuff in the military.

• 1:02:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Probably don't see it very much in, in special operations, but in conventional units. I mean...

• 1:02:21Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, no, you see it.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Really? I mean...

• 1:02:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yep, I have a bunch of buddies in 10th group that talk about it. Right here in Tennessee.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Because I, almost everyone I talked to, and I said, "Oh yeah, our unit's got, you know, this person is the trans, and so we have to do this additional training all the time, and there's all this, everyone's kind of, has to be really careful about what they say." And in many cases, they're sort of like the DEI director inside, their equity director inside the unit, which you've basically taken the DEI concept inside a lot of these military units, and you've, I don't know, I don't know exactly what levels, if it's at, if it's at the battalion or brigade level, but you've inserted that decision-making, kind of an HR process, which undermines the commander also, because the DEI advisor, you know, can do no wrong. And so the assessments of the unit's diversity and capabilities, it's just, and then transgenders, I mean, the idea that, do you remember, I don't know, if you go

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  through your Mobe station to deploy, if you had a CAT4 dental, they pulled your tooth. Because you can't be out in the field with a major, you know, dental emergency, where there's no dentist. And so I deploy with a lot of guys who are like, because they just had a tooth pulled, and they had to. Yet, we're now allowing people who used to be men or women, join, and then after that, we pay for medical or physical transitions to another gender, which by definition makes them non-deployable, and non-trainable, for

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  your, because they're, and, the same thing with asthma medication, or inhalers. Like, when you're in basic training, you can't have an inhaler when you're doing your exercises, because you can't count on having an inhaler in a combat situation. Well, if you're medically dependent on drugs, to maintain your gender, or a particular balance of chemicals inside your body, you're by definition non-deployable. And so you'd have, they'd have soldiers who can't train, can't deploy, have been on the books, and yet, everyone has to be careful about what pronoun you use with them.

• 1:04:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  That has nothing to do with how effective a unit's gonna be. And yet, we'll, we'll, so something like that should be banned on day one, in a Trump administration. We're not doing the treaty, and he did that. It got immediately reversed under Biden. Things like that. Because it's a top-down, I'm not saying top-down is the only way that works. I know that. I know that you top-down things and people can ignore it and they can maneuver it and they can work around it. I just think there's enough of a core inside the DOD that if you push top-down and then you change the way you do basic training and the way you do recruiting and the way you do the military academies, you have a fighting chance to restore an ethos. Now, that doesn't say anything about how the politicians will use that military in the future, which they have a horrible track record of, but institutionally, you at least

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  have a chance. Maybe. Possibly.

• 1:05:14Shawn Ryan?

  What are we missing? DEI stuff? Prosecuting our guys for doing their job?

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  Yep. Um, I don't know. I mean, I think that one of the amazing parts is the lies that our senior leaders were willing to tell us even though they knew they were not true. Like suddenly this idea that Mark Milley just discovered that the whole institution was systemically racist, that all these bases needed to be changed, like, you know, Fort Bragg can't be Fort Bragg. I mean, if I'm correct, I think he was the commander or I think he was the commander of Fort Hood, I think. You know, why didn't he speak up when he was at Fort Hood? How could you possibly command at a base named after a Confederate and not say something?

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  So what are you, complicit? But now suddenly after George Floyd, to your point, after defund the police, it became faddish to insinuate that the military ranks are infected with racists, that it's all these white nationalists under the radar with tattoos just waiting to pop up and ultimately, on the recruiting side, what you've done is you Bud Lighted yourself. You basically, we'll get to that in a second. But what they knew in the process is it wasn't true. So when the Army and the whole military got around to actually doing the studies of extremism in the ranks... The number of extremists or racists writ large in our country is like point, is like 7% or whatever, maybe it's, maybe I'm wrong.

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  Inside the military is like .07%. So the military has done a better job writ large than other institutions of keeping racism out of its ranks. I don't know about you, but I didn't tolerate racism when I was a commander. It wasn't, wasn't, if it ever happened, it was addressed. And for the most part, it didn't happen because we were all in on the same mission regardless of, and everybody knew that. Milley should have known, he knew that. But he knew what the political leaders wanted to hear. That, oh, there were some vets on Capitol Hill on January 6th. They must be extremists. We must have a racism problem. Let's do a 60-day stand down for extremism. And let's bring in Bishop Garrison, a noted, you know, white-hating, Trump-hating, DEI

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  advocate to lead it. And as if he'll be the one that identifies who's racist and who isn't racist. So they introduced more racism in the name of ending racism, which is the definition of anti-racism, which is a totally racist approach meant to divide us against ourselves. Yet anyone who was in the military knows that's not the problem we have.

• 1:07:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  And so again, the book's not about how we went woke, it's how we allowed ourselves to go woke. And it was senior leaders who opened the door because it was politically advantageous for them to do so. Rather than standing up for what they knew to be true based on an institution they were dedicated to and a constitution they swore an oath to. And that's upside down.

• 1:08:13Shawn Ryan?

  So you think, I'm not saying what I think is the right way, but I do think they would have to do something because I'm talking about abandoning the military again.

• 1:08:28Shawn Ryan?

  One, I think if something happened that people like you and I would rejoin in a, in a, in a second to actually defend the country if it was under attack or a threat of being under attack. I don't see the people that are...

• 1:08:50Shawn Ryan?

  Into the wokeness, joining the military. That's why I say, I mean, that's why the pretensions or the recruiting so bad because it's not working. Like, what is the percentage of people that are actual trans people?

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  Oh, it's very, very small.

• 1:09:06Shawn Ryan?

  It's like point something percent, correct?

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:09:09Shawn Ryan?

  So, I don't see them joining. I don't think we're gonna see a bunch of Latin Americans joining. I mean, they could have joined. They don't believe in what we're doing either. They want to come here for opportunity, right? But they don't believe in what we're doing. I mean, they could join the cartel's army. They could join the Sinaloa cartel's army. That's, that's a straight military, you know? And probably get paid just as much as they are here. It's not like you're gonna make a lot of money as a E1 in the army.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  No, you don't. No, I mean, a staggeringly low amount of money, to your point.

• 1:09:44Shawn Ryan?

  And so, how would they replenish? They would have to rid themselves of the shit that's keeping people out.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Correct, correct. And that's why I think it's our only way out is, um, and that's why I do think we're at an existential moment. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here when it comes to the DOD. I think we're at a shit or get off the pot moment.

• 1:10:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  We are at a tipping point for institu- total institutional corruption. Um, and Trump has a chance to reverse that, should he, when he wins. Because what the military did, I, I didn't finish the thought on that, is they, they committed a Bud Light. Like, they, in search of a non-traditional constituency, they offended their core constituency. So, there aren't enough lesbians in San Francisco to man the 82nd Airborne.

• 1:10:32Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  And in trying to cater to that, they lost the boys from Tennessee and Kentucky and Oklahoma. Um, the traditional dudes who did it because they wanted, they loved their country, or they wanted the adventure, or they, you know, wanted to try tough things, or they, they need an up and out of their community, whatever it is. They're like, if I wanted to do the woke crap, I could go to the local community college or local college, I don't need it here.

• 1:10:58Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  I think that could, I think that could change quicker than we think. Uh, and I'm not saying people will rush to recruiting stations, but if you bring in a commander in chief that the rank and file Americans respect. And then you speak to their patriotism and their love of country. And then you say, "We've removed this person, this person, this person. We're putting serious people in that have the best interest of the institution and of your son or daughter who's a warfighter in mind. And then we're going to create commercials that make you actually feel like you're going to be a part of something real. Fund it properly, do it properly." I don't know, I think you get rid of these recruiting shortfalls really fast. Because this is a family business right now, and families are opting out.

• 1:11:41Shawn Ryan?

  Does it, I mean, let's say, let's say Trump does get into office for another four years. And then let's say a Democrat gets in right after that. Do you think we're just going to bat this issue back and forth?

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 1:11:59Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think it needs to fall hard so that everybody learns the lesson? If you do this, this is what happens. We've seen it. Recruiting's gone, retention's gone, like, this is what happens.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  I think what falling hard looks like, and I wish this in no way, and I hope it never happens, falling hard will be when the American people have this, we have this gigantic assumption about the capability of our military. And when we have a moment where it's laid bare before us, that it's become a hollow structure of itself. That, name your historical example, but somewhere around the globe where we are expected to overperform, where our military tragically underperforms. And there's a, there's a collective sense that our collective defense is not what it was. And people start looking around and asking why. And then you start to get, you start to address training for shortfalls

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  and standard shortfalls and all the other ways in which we've lost our way. I hope it doesn't, I mean, even then, people might not recognize it. But I actually think an institution quote-unquote "falling" at this point, it feels really far off. It just feels like it'll become an anemic, it'll become an anemic shell of itself. Yeah. It'll be an anemic cell of itself, totally politically attuned, and they will conscript as necessary to meet. And then they'll just move the numbers, right? So the Army had a 25% and missed its recruiting goal, I think in 2023 by 25%. That's a lot. It's a lot. So I think it was like, I don't know what the number was. It's like 80 instead they hit 60 or something like that. It could be. And so what did they do for 2024? Well, they just reduced their standard, right?

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  So now they're only trying to recruit 50,000 into the Army. So that they won't miss their goal. They'll meet their goal, but they're already at a 30% reduction from where they were supposed to be. So the bureaucracy, the institution will always try to paper over it to make it look like we're okay. But then when you talk to the guys on the bases in the units and they say, "We are definitely not okay." Like, we are, I mean, I've got people that I'm in touch with in the DMZ in North Korea. And they're like, "We have basically enough artillery for three days. If, the rest of it's in Ukraine." Like, we don't have, we're, you know, our training days are cut down dramatically. Like, it's all very, feels like a shell.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  And, you know, history is full of examples where great empires, great countries, overextend themselves like we have for the last 20 years, have an inflated sense of hubris of who we are. And then when that next big moment comes, we're shocked by how we're not as capable as people thought. Now, I'm not talking about, the problem is guys like you make us feel really good about ourselves. Because you watch what Navy SEALs can do, and you watch what special operators can do, and the incredible things they do on our behalf that mitigate the need for us to do it in a conventional way. That... Make a lot of those questions moot points because it can be done by somebody else in a highly sanitized way, in a way that's totally detached from how we live. There'll come a point when it can't just be done that way, in some capacity.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  I think that's the moment there's the rub. It's not as much the capability of our special operators, and you could speak to that much better than I could. It's force on force conventional.

• 1:15:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's China.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  It's China.

• 1:15:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's Russia.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  Or it's Russia, or it's some massive internal attack that happens because our border's been wide open.

• 1:15:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:15:32Shawn Ryan?

  I think it hasn't happened yet because we are weakening at a pace that nobody's seen before. I mean, we are just going like this. And so, and I'm sure you're familiar with war games and simulations. And so, when it comes, I'm not saying that terrorist organizations would have that, but Russia has that, North Korea has that, Iran has that, China has that. And so, I think if I was them, what I would do is I would put in the scenario until, I would war game it and see what the probability is that we're gonna come out on top. Me, we being China, Iran, Russia, whoever. And I wouldn't make a move until after this election.

• 1:16:16Shawn Ryan?

  Because they know what's going on, they see it, they know that, I mean, look, nobody made any weird moves under Trump, not that I'm aware of, I could be missing something, but I don't remember any. And then as soon as they got in, Russia went after Ukraine, tensions with Taiwan getting stronger, the border, Israel, like all this shit, everybody's, everybody that wanted to make a chess move on the board, did it as soon as Trump was out of office. And we're seeing the country in decline, like it's never declined before. And so, if I was them, I wouldn't make a move.

• 1:16:57Shawn Ryan?

  Here's when I would make my move. I would make my move the first day that Trump is in office, because that would be the weakest point before we start to see an incline. And if they don't, if Kamala gets in there, I would wait another four years. Just let it keep declining. And I would just let this place get as weak as it possibly can, and then I would pull the trigger. And I think that's when we'll see it. I think we'll see China go after Taiwan. I think we'll see the coordinated attacks from these terrorist organizations. I think Russia probably has more up their sleeve. Iran, Korea. What do you think of that?

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Because we're dealing with enemies with long memories.

• 1:17:40Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, and they can keep war gaming this. And I forgot to bring this scenario. They keep running this scenario through. They put in the latest data, data, and they just increase their probability of winning the longer they wait. Unless we get a stronger leader that starts to turn the ship around. And all the signs are already there with our military. I mean, I wish I would have checked these numbers before we jumped on today. But, I mean, China's navy is astronomically bigger than what we have now at this point. I mean, they're building, I can't remember. Is it like a new aircraft carrier every year or every couple of months?

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Something like that, yeah.

• 1:18:24Shawn Ryan?

  We can't do that.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  The Pentagon is in the book the exact amount of years. But in the past X number of years, 10, 12, 15, the Pentagon has a perfect record in all of its war games against China. We lose every time inside the Pentagon war games. We know what our real capability. You see, we didn't even get to this part of the war on warriors. I mean, the military industrial complex, the way we procure weapon systems. You know, we're always, the way our system works, the way our bureaucratic system works, where the speed of weapons procurement works, we're always... A decade behind in fighting the last war. Whereas China, there, we have a, we have, you know, what did Romesfeld say? You go to the war, the army you have. We have the army.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  China's building an army specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America. That is, that is their strategic outset. Take hypersonic missiles. So if our whole, if our, our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers and the ability to project power that way strategically around the globe. And yeah, we have a nuclear triad and all of that, but a big part of it. And if, you know, 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict. What does that look like?

• 1:19:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  I mean, and, and when they're, if they've already got us by the balls economically, which you pointed out very well, with our grid, culturally, there's plenty of elite capture going on around the globe. I mean, and then microchips and everything. Why do they want Taiwan? They want to corner the market completely on the technological future. We can't even drive our cars without the stuff we need out of China these days. I mean, they, they have a full spectrum, long-term view of not just regional but global domination. And we are, we have our heads up our asses.

• 1:20:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  And that, that's, that's the, yes, the terrorist threat of our border. By the way, China probably has more people here, as many or more than these terrorist organizations plant.

• 1:20:22Shawn Ryan?

  You know what they're doing now? They are, they have all these crypto scams. They're trying to suck all the money out of the country now. So they have all these crypto scams going on and people are falling for it. And I'm not talking like chump change. I'm talking millions and millions of dollars. They give, they come around and basically what they do is they, they try to get you invest in Bitcoin type crypto stuff. And they'll take, they'll be like, hey Pete, give me 15 grand. I'll turn it into 45 in two weeks.

• 1:20:55Shawn Ryan?

  You give them the fifteen grand, they're like, alright, I can, I can gamble that. And then they bring you forty-five grand, the next one, you're two hundred thousand, the next one's a million. And then the million happens and it's gone. And so they're funneling all the cash out of the country.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:21:11Shawn Ryan?

  This is a big thing that's happening right now in this county.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:21:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I just got briefed up by-

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  I'd not heard that.

• 1:21:17Shawn Ryan?

  County Sheriff's Department.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:21:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yep, and this is, this shit's, I think they just did a huge, they tracked a guy all the way to Vegas, uh, who was just bouncing from state to state to state doing this, and they picked him up. And it's happening all over the place. They really have us from just about every angle.

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  And they have a grand plan and a grand strategy to, uh, they believe the, the whole twentieth century was anti-Chinese. The whole, uh, architect, uh, the whole security architecture, uh, from, from NATO to the World Bank, to everything, exists to serve America's interests, which in some parts, they did exist to serve the interests of the winner. Uh, all those institutions, of course, have been totally corrupted and all of that, but originally, they were meant to create a strategic architecture that reinforced the dominance of the West. So they can, they reject all of those things. Um, and they are seeking to, the only way they can implement a structure that serves them is by defeating us, and they know that. And they're ambitious enough, the leaders, Xi Jinping and others in the, in the CCP, to put in a plan to do it.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  And we, I mean, we're too busy, and then, and then we, not only do we not do anything about it, but we let in TikTok where they can trans our kids and they don't trans their kids.

• 1:22:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  Like, it's, it's, this is why, uh, my, and not just because of this, but like, my faith has become so much more important to me than, than politics, um, than the day-to-day grind, because, uh,

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  we can, we can invest all our time and all our energy in, in, um, a political outcome, and it's not gonna save us.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  So, I, I'm grateful to know who my Lord and Savior is, and ultimately, that's, we know who wins the victory there. Um, but, doesn't mean we can't, we don't need to still be actively involved in every way we can.

• 1:23:09Shawn Ryan?

  We still gotta try.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:10Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you, though. I am with you. But, I mean, are you, are you concerned about nuclear war?

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  I mean, yes, in a general sense, I guess. I just, I found overinflated from the beginning, this idea that Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine was gonna lead to nuclear war or war across the continent. I've always felt like it was, from the beginning, like a couple of days in, I was like, this feels like a Putin is giving my shit back war. It kind of feels like, I feel like you've been pushing pretty hard, and we used to have the former Soviet Union, and we're pretty proud of that, and Ukraine was a part of it, and all these other countries, and I want my shit back. And I think I'm at the right time where I'm powerful enough to do it, and you're not quite on my border yet,

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  and Biden's AWOL, so I'm going for it. And just like I did under, my minor incursion under Obama. I got what I could, I got Crimea, now I waited under Trump, now I'm gonna get my... And this idea that I hear all the time, and I have friends who would probably agree with us on most things. They're like, well, if you don't stop him in Ukraine, then he's gonna go all the way to Poland, and he's gonna... I don't, I don't think he's, I mean, maybe in a perfect world where he had unlimited capabilities, and he could crown himself king of Europe, he would. I think he's probably knows enough to know that he's probably not going much further than Ukraine. And I don't think he's a suicidal maniac who's hell-bent on bringing in Arbogaden through nuclear warfare.

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  So I, I, hey, if Ukraine can defend against, defend themselves from that, great. But I don't want American intervention driving deep into Europe and making him feel like he's so much on his heels that then he does have to, because early on, he was talking about nukes. If you remember, there was this, oh, we have to use nuclear weapons here or there. So, I mean, I'd be interested in your thoughts on that, but it's not current, I mean, I guess if I'm thinking nukes too, the other part that concerned me is Iran having nuclear weapons. And that was always a bright line for us, because nuclear weapons in the hands of radical Islamists, whether it's Sunni Stripe or Shia Stripe, who believe their martyrdom rhetoric, the extent to which they do.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  Changes the whole calculation. Like, if Al Qaeda had a nuke, what would they do with it? They would use it.

• 1:25:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  Because the mullahs in Iran, in Tehran, do they really believe that, you know, 70,000 martyrs in Iran is worth the destruction of Israel? I don't know, but should we find out? Or that destruction of the United States are a major American city? So I've taken very seriously for a long time this idea that Iran can, we can't tolerate an Iranian bomb. Because I think Islamists with bomb is different than communists with bomb. Even though, I don't know. But the, in, for different reasons.

• 1:26:03Shawn Ryan?

  I think, I mean, I'm probably gonna contradict myself a little bit here, but I think that, I mean, I do, we have tech that does not disgust. And I think that our tech, I mean, we're, we're this close from having the Iron Dome that Israel has. We, you know, now the new, the new thing in warfare is, you know, drones, right?

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:26:27Shawn Ryan?

  These are drone swarms.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:26:29Shawn Ryan?

  Well, a lot of people are worried about that. We actually already have the answer. Have you ever, have you heard of the company Epirus?

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 1:26:37Shawn Ryan?

  So it's basically, um, they, they make directed EMP weapons.

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:26:45Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you should check it out.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Oh, that would make sense. It gets a swarm of drones.

• 1:26:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. So they'll take out 20, 30 drones, just like that, doesn't take ammo, doesn't, I mean, it's just.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  And indirect enough?

• 1:26:56Shawn Ryan?

  It looks like one of those missile launchers that we used to use in, in Desert Storm.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:27:02Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I don't remember what you call them, but you just, they're already deployed all over the world. I know the CEO of it, the guy that invented the damn thing, and I've chatted with him, and, and he sends me videos. This shit's public, though. I mean, you can look it up, but, I mean, when you see things like that, I'm like, we're good.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  (laughing)

• 1:27:23Shawn Ryan?

  We're good. I think, I don't think these, the old tech, you know, that's coming toward, I don't think the nuclear thing is as...

• 1:27:32Shawn Ryan?

  I pray and hope, and I do believe that we probably have some sort of an answer to that when I see things like this coming out. You know, when I see the thing that's like, and it's not like it shoots all thirty drones down individually. It's just, you just see, no noise, just thirty drones, thirty helicopters. I don't know how many it can take out at once, but they all just fall. And so when I see stuff like that, I'm like, okay, we still, we still have an edge here. With that being said, I mean, I know he, he, he told me that he produced the, the chips in it himself. But, you know, I don't know if anything's coming from China. I don't know what other weapons we have and what's manufactured in China or what, what IP they have stole from us.

• 1:28:16Shawn Ryan?

  Cause that's another big thing that they've done is they've stole all of our IP. And, and, um, so that's kind of what I think. I'm not, I'm not as concerned about it as probably most people, but.

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm with you. I think our biggest threat is internal. I think it's, I think we're committing, uh, cultural suicide and we've lost complete focus on the basics and building blocks of what made Western civilization in America exceptional.

• 1:28:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  Um, fruitful, prosperous, strong, free. And we've, we've got groups of people inside our own country hell bent and determined to tear them down. And you see it in an immediate manifestation in the Pentagon, but the book I wrote before Battle for the American Mind was about the progressive takeover of the K through 12 education system. So what they've done over the last 100 years. And when you really pull the curtain back on that, yeah, we're gonna have to fight for it. All of these other things are real, but if you don't, we're in totally uncharted territory. Where we're trying to keep a republic, keep a country while simultaneously raising up and training the youth of our country to believe that that country is bad.

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  And I'd like someone else to find me a historical comp to that. Because in China, they're still teaching that China is good. In India, they're still teaching India is good. Pakistan, you name it, good or bad countries, friendly or not friendly, except for Western Europe, where they've effectively committed the same level of cultural suicide. They're not teaching that we're just imperialist, colonialist, racist, sexist, horrible land stealers from the beginning. That's what big chunks of American kids are getting every single day.

• 1:29:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  And it will form a lot of their worldview. So I, as much as the war on warriors is important to me and our military is, and it is, I mean, what we're doing to shape the next generation of kids in our country will have the longest impact.

• 1:30:13Shawn Ryan?

  I want to talk to you about the education stuff. I'm gonna ask the question right now, though, that we were gonna end with about your kids joining the military.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 1:30:23Shawn Ryan?

  What do you tell them?

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  I don't know if they've even read it yet. You know, I told them I wrote a chapter for them, but they're still not all that interested. Even when they're 14, sometimes they're not all interested.

• 1:30:32Shawn Ryan?

  I just mean, I've just been talking to them.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  No, I know. They know from spending, I don't, first of all, I can't, I'm not gonna try to push. You know, they're gonna do what they want to do. They know what their dad does and all of that and what, you know, that he was proud of his service. And that's basically what I wrote the most in the letter is, hey, besides my faith, nothing has shaped me more, nothing I'm more proud of, nothing that taught me more about myself. It's where I got the real education in my life, not college, grad school, anything. It was the University of Baghdad and Samara and Kabul and all these Gitmo. They're the best of the best. And I'm also honest with them. For the most part, if you don't serve, you will probably regret it.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Now, a lot of this is in a static context, where things are normal the way we looked at it 20, 30 years ago. I recognize that. But the human ethos is the same, for the most part. But then I turn pretty quickly to, hey, but this isn't the military that I joined. It's not the military that other guys joined. And I have huge skepticism about the leadership inside this military. And I put right in there, I reserve the right. Four years from now, 10 years from now, to give you a different recommendation because of how quickly things are changing. But ultimately, my result here at this moment is I would still want my boys, and girls if they wanted to, be willing to serve their country and raise their red hand and defend the Constitution.

• 1:32:00Speaker 03

  Because I don't think yet the institution can be completely abandoned by patriots. And filling the ranks with patriots in those bunks at the beginning, whether it's enlisted or officer, is critically important. And it would be, you know, it would be hypocritical of me to say, "Oh, we need to revive our military, but my boys are above the ability to contribute to that." I think a lot of it does have to do with whether Trump wins or not. I really do. Trump wins, I feel pretty confident in that recommendation. Trump doesn't win, I, you know, version two, we'll have some edits to it. How would you feel if... How old's your oldest, 17? 14. 14? So still four years away, I mean, if 18 was the... How would you feel if he got shipped off to Ukraine? Yeah, no, I'm not for that. No.

• 1:32:45Speaker 03

  So, I would look a lot at the world in four years. Who's in charge? What are we doing? What have we done? But the problem is, you're right. I mean, every time I make this argument, I get hole shot in it that I... I mean, the way our military has been used in retrospect. What if, let's rewind. What if it was Iraq, knowing what you know now? What if it was Iraq, knowing what I know now? I mean, I just don't have any regrets about what I did because I did what I did for reasons I think were, were... I'm with you. Understandable. I don't have any regrets, but I don't think we should have been... Knowing what I know now? Knowing what you know now. No.

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  And it's not just, it's not just because of intelligence and weapons of mass destruction and all the... It was the, it was the developing hubris and the lack of institutional capability to recognize that this whole nation-building thing is not gonna work. Like, what do we think we're building here? Especially in Afghanistan. This is biblical times with AK-47s and cellphones. And every time we hand up a new, a fresh, you know, company of Afghan National Army troops, their weapons, two weeks later, they're on sale in a Pakistani market. Or we build a school in a rural area and three weeks later, all the air conditions are gone. They're sold in the black market because they don't... What are we doing? We're trying to impose our view of the world on them

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  to include a lot of the nice social justice causes that we want to believe are good and right and true. And we're seeing the same thing play out right now in South America, say in SouthCom. Our SouthCom commanders running around talking about women in leadership, LGBT rights, and climate change in South America. SouthCom, SouthCom. So, I mean, they do other stuff. But those are the big leadership focuses. What's China doing? Yeah. They're providing security protection. They're building ports. They're debt enslaving nations so they have to work for them in the future. And they're playing for keeps. So is Russia in there. And we're running around talking about nuts. So this is an institution in my mind that hasn't learned. Hasn't learned one bit. Still thinks we did a great job on counterinsurgency.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  So, if you're not on it, I mean, and I look back at how, the reasons I was an advocate for it so directly at the time is because I believed in it. And I believe in our country. And I believe in finishing wars we fight. If you fight it, let's finish it and get the hell out. But don't leave in shame. Don't leave the way we left in Afghanistan. But because we fought a 20-year war in one-year iterations and never learned in the process, and then tried to change hearts and minds, it didn't work and it collapsed under its own weight. Now it's worse. So if you find me someone who thinks that those wars were better and that we think they should do them in 2024,

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  they need a lobotomy. Because they haven't looked at the evidence afterwards to recognize where we are. It just wasn't, it was a house of cards meant to fall. Afghanistan was a house of cards. I saw it in 2011, 2012. My job, I was the senior counterinsurgency instructor at the training center. So it wasn't a combat mission for me. I was a trainer. And I trained the units coming in, conventional, international units, all that, on the latest tactics and strategy of the Taliban. So what's the Taliban and al Qaeda doing across all the provinces? Are they gaining ground, are they losing ground? What's their approach? And it was clear by then, the shadow government structure, the shadow court structure, how they infiltrated the ANA and the ANP. So they had, they knew who their people were, would activate them as necessary. There was a lot of blue on green at that point going on.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  So you had to worry about if the guys are training you, we're going to turn their guns on you. It's all psychological warfare. The whole thing was meant to show to the population, hey, we may not be in charge right now, it's the corrupt American puppets that are. But once the Americans leave, like, we have the real power, we have the real power base here. And that is exactly what played out over 10 years. And that's exactly what our Pentagon commanders knew. But they were always in a race to green. You know what the race to green is? Race to green is, you've got red amber green, and you've got to show that your Afghan National Army unit is at green status, ready to go, whether they're at green status, ready to go or not. And so we had a shell of an army incapable of actually defending the country. And Milley and, all these folks should have known, they, McKenzie, all of them.

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  And they probably did at some level, but they knew they had to say it's A-OK. And so you get that collapse. I mean, you saw how it affected vets when what happened in Afghanistan happened. It actually affected me a lot more when the rise of ISIS happened in Iraq. When that black flag flew over Fallujah and Samara, and Tikrit, and all these other towns that we'd fought so hard for. And you realize, what the hell? All those guys, all this time, all that effort, and this is, what we got was worse? And then in retrospect, you're like, you know Saddam Hussein, wasn't a good guy. But it turns out those dictators actually keep the lid on things fairly well over there.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  And they really don't like Islamists, because they try to kill them. Maybe that would have been a better idea than overturning the whole apricard and welcoming Iran into Iraq. And I heard people making those arguments, some of which I didn't like. People I didn't like. And I just had to dismiss them at the time, because I was a believer in the mission that was in front of us at the time. But in retrospect, I mean, we have burned two decades of money, our best and brightest, our goodwill, military capabilities, strategic drift in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now...

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  We're tempted to do it again in Ukraine. Thankfully, so far, it hasn't been troops. And we've got an even bigger threat in China on the horizon. So all of that does bleed into my thoughts on my kids. You better believe when the first time one of them comes to me and says, hey, Dad, I think I might want to. All of those will be a factor in whether or not I would support that.

• 1:38:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  I'm at a solid, I'm at a yes, but trending to maybe.

• 1:38:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, I got a long time to think about that, so.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we'll see. We'll know by then.

• 1:38:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  We'll know by then.

• 1:38:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no kidding, right? But let's move into some education stuff. I really want to pick your brain on that because I have kids, but they're not in the educational system yet. So, and like I told you offline, we're going to homeschool, but.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Good for you.

• 1:39:05Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I hear about it all, but I got to be honest, Pete, I don't believe everything I hear. I mean, I know the media spin stuff, obviously. Everybody is kind of figuring that out, I think. But, you know, you have kids in, and so like, how bad is it? And you just moved to Tennessee for this specific reason.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  Specifically for this reason.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  But, you know, the state of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, who famously said that the Bill of Rights is above his pay grade. So he just doesn't really think about it. He said that about COVID, but he's an idiot.

• 1:40:37Speaker 03

  They passed a bill recently that said gender identity training, which eventually turns out to be gender fluidity and trans stuff, is mandated in all government schools, starting in first grade. First grade. And I say government schools intentionally. They're not public schools. They're government schools. I'm sure they may be open to the public in that sense, but the government is setting the tone. And I run into people all the time. I mean, you're dialed in and so you've made that choice to homeschool, but there are a lot, I mean, a lot of dudes just like us who are like, hey, I pay property taxes, you know, I work hard. You know, we moved to a nice area that say the schools are good.

• 1:41:19Speaker 03

  We moved here for the schools that feel like local control will say, even here in Tennessee, where, hey, I've got a good school. Good means, you know, a fancy gym and an iPad and, you know, high SAT scores. And those are all fine things. What I want to know is what's being pumped into the minds of those kids? And what you realize when you pull the curtain back over 100 years is the entire pipeline of our education system has been federalized intentionally. And taken over not just by like lefties or technocrats or bureaucrats. Everyone you meet through that timeline, who's pushing hard on the shoulder of, on the plow of education,

• 1:42:02Speaker 03

  is an atheist, a Marxist, or a socialist, or a humanist. There are a lot of them are humanists, which is. What's a humanist? Humanist is basically a completely rejects Christianity or faith at all. And so it's all, humanity is at the center of good and evil, right and wrong. It's effectively secularism posited as an alternative religion to Christianity. So it'll find politics as an avenue. And so humanists are often socialists or Marxists or communists in alongside being a humanist. But it's the worship of mankind as the highest being, as opposed to God as the highest being. So they're all, that's the train of people pushing this educational philosophy.

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  And when you, I used to think it started in the 60s. It actually goes back to the progressive era and even before that. But they very intentionally. The one thing they knew they had to remove from the beginning was God. God had to come out of the schools because God was the immovable object that prevented their utopian schemes. They want it, you know, if you want to manipulate children, if you want to change the way they think, rewire the relationship of families, you have to get at the God thing because the garden and the sin in the garden is all, disrupts those utopian schemes. And so, the early progressives, communists, Marxists, very intentionally worked hard in their, in creating systems that slowly but surely removed God.

• 1:43:27Speaker 03

  Because if you went into a public, public school, government school in America in the 1850s or 1870s and 1830s, the Bible's in there, prayer's in there, scripture readings in there, it's all in there. So, it's a modern court that made all those things unconstitutional based on a misreading of the First Amendment and freedom of religion versus freedom from religion, and the progressives have exploited that. And then the, the process from there to, they used patriotism falsely to sort of get rid of God. And then, once they built an allegiance to state, and, and what that was is they replaced basically the cross in the Bible with the flag and a pledge. The original pledge of allegiance was written by a socialist minister, and it did not include "under God."

• 1:44:10Speaker 03

  The pledge of allegiance originally didn't include "under God." Eisenhower added "under God" in the 50s, when we were fighting the godless communists. So, you, you have a flag and you have a pledge, a pledge allegiance to the republic. By the way, we're a republic, not a democracy, and our education system pumps democracy down people's throats and our founders couldn't stand democracy, but that's a whole nother, a whole nother ballgame. The left always changes language. They change language to change, to create an alternate reality to manipulate human beings into whatever utopian scheme of 15 minutes ago they want to advocate for that increases their power and control. And they saw the government school system as the best entity to do that in. And so, they focused and pushed. And so, the book, the other book talks about something called "pideia",

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  which "pideia" is a lost Greek word that, I don't know Greek, I don't know Latin because I didn't have a classical education. And "pideia" basically means "the enculturation of the youth." So, what kind of worldview is implanted on your heart or your soul before you're 12, 12, 13? The vision of the good life, like Afghans have a pideia. We have a, but what does it mean to be good, to be virtuous, to be healthy? What are your virtue? All those things are in a piedae. And they understood our Western Christian piedae had to go. And so, over 40 years, they turned it into an American progressive piedae. And today, we're in a culturally Marxist piedae.

• 1:45:33Speaker 03

  And I say that without hesitation, with full understanding of that there are some schools that are a little different here on the government spectrum. But ultimately, even if you're hiding out at a good school, with a good superintendent, a good principal, the pipeline of the curriculum is the same as other schools, because it's all been federalized in Washington DC by bureaucrats who are pushing a very specific agenda. And so, The Battle for the American Mind lays out the ways and layers in which they've consolidated that power to a complete takeover. And so, when you say, "Get out of, you know, get out of the military, get out of the institution." And I say, "No, charge ahead right now." My prescription in Battle for the American Mind is tactical retreat.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Get out. Get your kids out of government school systems right now, if you can, if you have any way. Save money, move, get a second job, don't take the vacation, sell the boat, whatever, drive for Uber. Figure out what you need to do to get your kid out of the government school system, because it's about saving your kid right now. Because the house is on fire, and that's the first thing. I don't need school choice, I need my kid out right now. Save them from the progressive piedae that's being pushed down their throat, subtly or not so subtly. And so, the book was meant to just wake people up to that, so that we have a fighting chance in the future, and that we have thoughtful, free-thinking, virtuous kids who don't think the world is upside down.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  There's a lot of ways you can go there.

• 1:47:05Shawn Ryan?

  Have you seen any progress since you've written the book?

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness, yes.

• 1:47:08Shawn Ryan?

  You have?

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  So, the book, we started the book before COVID. And then COVID happened and the whole, I mean, we were writing the book and we're like, we can barely keep up with the insanity because COVID brought the classroom into people's homes. And then they were looking into the Zoom screen of their laptop and they're like, whoa, what is this? Why are we doing a land recognition? Or what is this 1619 project? Or why are we using pronouns? What is the 1619 project? 1619 project was written by, her name is Hannah Jones, she's a quasi-academic, wrote something for the, for the New York Times, also wrote a book on it. And it's, the basic theory is the real founding date of America is not 1776. The real founding date of America is 1619, when the first slaves were brought to the continent.

• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  And that we should think of America not in the spirit of 1776, but in the spirit of 1619. Because everything about America is stolen from Indians and built on the backs of slaves. And only understanding the sinful founding of America, can you understand how, why we are so, such a terrible country today? So it's meant to turn the whole thing on its head and say, no, no, no, 1776, white racist dudes who were all basically Christian nationalists, extremists. And we have to understand it instead through this racial lens. And you know what it comes back to? They're all- What age does this shit start?

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Oh, that started like three, four years ago. Oh, and you mean the teaching of this stuff? Depends on your school. So if you're, if you're in a, in a inner-city school, white or black, like you might be getting it real early. You're certainly not getting the patriotism aspect that you would have gotten before. You're getting this view that, I mean, in some cases, we're talking kids. We're talking, you know, first graders, second graders, third graders. You know, if I'm white, then I've traditionally been an oppressor. Or if I'm black, I've traditionally been oppressed. And then you start, we're, we're reracializing.

• 1:49:12Speaker 03

  Groups of young kids to identify themselves by their race as opposed to what our generation, I don't know where you went to school, but it was mostly Martin Luther King's content of your character, not the color of your skin. And my parents would always admonish us if we looked at the world through the lens of race. Now, kids are encouraged to look through the world through race. And it, just a little story on that, it all goes back to Marxists. There was something called the Frankfurt School, and it was a, it was a think tank or a university in Germany in the 30s. They were Marxists, but Hitler hated them and wanted them out. So they fled Germany and landed in New York City.

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  Ironically, as they're fleeing Hitler, our boys are flying over to defend Europe from Hitler. But they were called the Frankfurt School. They were Marxists, and they showed up at Columbia University, and they had a theory. Their theory had started, it was actually called the Critical Theory University. So their theory was critical theory, the School of Critical Theory, or whatever it was, Critical Thought, or something like that. So they arrived at Columbia University with a theory called Critical Theory. Now, we know of it now as Critical Race Theory, but their theory, Critical Theory effectively exists to deconstruct Western civilization, Christianity, the patriarchy, colonialism, whatever characterized capitalism, borders, you know, all the stuff that Western civilization

• 1:50:38Speaker 03

  had traditionally appealed to or had been a part of. Critical Theory says, no, we're going to attack it and deconstruct it until it's effectively worthless or identified for the evil that it is. And so Critical Theory lands at Columbia University. And what is Columbia, they're welcomed in, by the way, in part by John Dewey, who was one of the modern founders of public education. And they're given a building, and they're welcomed in, and they start pushing Critical Theory. Pretty soon, it becomes a part of what is taught at the education school at Columbia. What's the single most powerful school of education in America? Columbia University. And it proliferated from there across the country, and you got Critical Theory. If you go to universities today, take Harvard, where I mailed my degree, I did a graduate

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  degree at Harvard, and I mailed it back to them, because I'm sick of their shit.

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  I did it live on the air, on the show. If you go to every department at Harvard University, it's all critical theory. The lens through which they look at their academic subjects are through a critical theory lens. Just look it up, it's right there on the website, they're not even trying to hide it. So, you know, everybody loves Michigan, people that are alumni at Michigan, they love Michigan sports, whatever. Critical Theory University out the wazoo. Most major universities use critical theory as a baseline. They're not just lefties anymore, they're radicals across the base. And we knew that, that's why the book's not about college, the book's about high school. So they're pushing all this stuff down into high schools, in a place where kids can't understand it, and it's really now just meant to indoctrinate.

• 1:52:08Speaker 03

  But the reason I told that story is, race was our Achilles' heel, and the Marxists knew it. They usually trafficked in class warfare, bourgeoisie, proletariat, class balances. They said, "No, no, no, in America, because of the Civil War, because of slavery and all those things that happened, we're gonna use that as our lever." And it's been far more effective. And then after, you know, with George Floyd, with all that, it's been on hyperdrive, then you get the DEI, CRT stuff. I think eventually, in some ways, they've started to begin to overplay their hand. People see it and expose it, and they realize for what it is. But it's still been a part of the educational philosophy and lens through which so many kids have seen the world. And it's super divisive and super dangerous.

• 1:52:52Speaker 03

  Man. Do you think... Are all Democrats down with this stuff? I don't think so. How come nobody's speaking up? I think Democrats are down with control, I think Democrats are down with... It's a great question. I mean, look, take Joe Biden, for example. He's always been a partisan, he's always been an egomaniac, they all are, at that level, at some level. But he made a deal with the devil, with the far left, because he thought it would keep his position stable. And I think that's what a lot of members of the left who think a lot of what the radicals think is crazy do. They just say, "I don't want, I don't

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  want the protesters, I don't want the mess, I don't want to be called a racist, I don't want to be called a sexist, my background isn't perfect, so if I ruffle feathers, they're gonna pull some clip on me and call me this or call me that, so I'm just gonna go like..." So it becomes a race to the bottom. Like, you and I have an opportunity to have a platform to speak our mind. And people can watch and they can say, "Oh, Pete, that guy's great", or "Pete, that guy's the wor- he's the worst." And they're afforded that possibility. Most people, and that's why our job is to speak as loudly, boldly, and unafraid as possible, exactly what you think, without, without filter. Because most people can't do that. You're, you're, if you're a nurse, or you're a police officer, or you're, you know, a

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  line worker, or whatever, if you speak up on the wrong side of an issue, um, you know, people will come after you, your employer might come after you, might be deemed as something. It's even worse, I would say, at some level for Democrats if they wanted to speak honestly. Like, if you wanna really cut against the grain, are you really gonna start saying, "You know what, we shouldn't, we, those books that are in the libraries about the trans kids, like, or gay sex, like, maybe we just leave that out for the third graders, how about we don't do that?" The machine comes down on you and says, "You're not a Democrat, you're a fake..." It's just like the issue of abortion or something like, you know, you're not a real Democrat if you believe that. You can't believe that. So I think there are plenty of, but, but you

• 1:55:00Speaker 03

  see people like RFK, like Tulsi Gabbard, like Elon Musk, um, I think maybe even Mark Zuckerberg, who knows, if he's had a revelation recently or not. I'm, I'm hoping he's swallowing a big ol' red pill, but probably not, who knows? He's probably just looking out for his ass. I'd say that's unlikely. I think that's probably right, right? Yeah, but he did say that the Trump thing, you know, he looked, he was badass to get up and do his, "We'll see." He did write that letter the other day. I have a theory that he's, he's probably trying to, it's risk mitigation for his company. But, but there are more and more free thinkers, Democrats, who are saying, "I'm not in for this censorship stuff, I'm not in for this group thing stuff, I'm not in for this kid stuff. What's with the kids?"

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  See, that's, that's what, that's what really gets me, Pete.

• 1:55:48Shawn Ryan?

  All this trans shit, race shit, whatever. Like, it bugs me, it really bothers me, but it's always been a thing. It's always gonna be a thing. This kid shit, though. Yep. This like, turning pedophiles into like some kind of sexual preference that everybody's okay with. I don't know how, I do not know how you can be down with that. I got family that votes this way. It disgusts me. Like, you are wanting to put fucking pedophiles on the map

• 1:56:30Shawn Ryan?

  and make it okay to molest my fucking kids. And that's not cool. And I just, I just, I don't see anybody speaking up for it on that side of the aisle. And it, it just enrages me. Like, all these other things. You know, you wanna, you wanna do that? You wanna, even the gender stuff, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the surgeries. You're a grown adult! Yeah, I don't, like, who cares, man? But, but this stuff, like, you are, you are making it legal to take the innocence of a child and ruin their entire life.

• 1:57:09Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, time after time after time, on this show, you know, I talk, I talk to the, I, I can't believe how many, how many people were molested as kids. You know, and these, these people are trying to make it okay. They're trying to make it normal. A sexual preference, we should, we should accept this shit. What the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  Amen. I mean, what's the, what's the phrase, um, in academic, minor attracted persons?

• 1:57:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, maps.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Maps. Um, that's how it always starts, right? Some kooky report that we talk about on Fox about some professor that said it over here like, "Oh, that's so crazy." And then you realize, oh, my goodness, that's

• 1:57:55Shawn Ryan?

  Spreading.

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  Then now they're, and now they're defending it.

• 1:57:58Shawn Ryan?

  Now this state's doing it.

• 1:58:00Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. Um, and it becomes a race to, race to the bottom. You know, California does it first and then Minnesota, because it really wants to be like California, does it too. And then New Jersey does it. And then pretty soon you got like a dozen states. You're like, wha- I don't understand it. I, I think it's, I think it's

• 1:58:17Shawn Ryan?

  Is that showing up in the schools yet?

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  No, no, not that I'm, not that I'm aware of.

• 1:58:22Shawn Ryan?

  Sexual preference classes?

• 1:58:23Speaker 03

  No, but think about it. If you're, I mean, so in some ways, yes. I mean, if you're, if you're

• 1:58:30Shawn Ryan?

  Is that gonna be the next, the next letter in the LGBTQ plus? Is that the plus?

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know. I don't think we can define the plus. It's just a plus. Uh, but if you start with first grade, starting to question whether you are a boy or a girl. Let's just sort of start there and say it's fluid. And then, you know, you're getting to third, fourth grade, and then it's like, well, boys and girls can be attracted to different boys and girls. And then, and then it's books in the library about what does it like to explore with a boy or exploit with a girl? And that's maybe sixth grade. And then in, in eighth grade, it used to be sex ed was like, hey, or eighth, ninth, 10th, you know, premarital sex, you know, is, it comes with risks. You can get pregnant, use a condom, whatever that was on the sliding scale. Well, what do you think it is now? Do you think it's just? My dad taught sex ed in public high school in like 19, in the 1980s.

• 1:59:18Speaker 03

  Like, I know my dad is one of the most, is the most wonderful human being I know. I know he's playing it straight. I know he's not adding some theology or some, he's saying the stuff the curriculum requires him to say, plus probably, hey, the best thing you can do is avoid premarital sex if you don't want to get pregnant and you don't want to get STDs. That's, but if you do, here's the, he's not putting banan- condoms on bananas and doing weird stuff. He's just playing it. These days, what's mandated in the curriculum is an introduction of, well, different people can be attracted to different things and want different things. And, you know, what does, what does consent look like? And, and that's, consent is obviously something important to talk about, but It all gets very, very muddy and complicated. It almost feels hypersexualized.

• 2:00:02Speaker 03

  So the point of the education system, it shouldn't be to explore each other's sexuality ad nauseam. The point, I thought, was to just make sure you're not having, you know, you're not having unwanted pregnancies. That's what they said it was. And STDs. So you want, they're teaching kids about responsible sex, which should always have been the function of parents at home. But you've got broken families and all of that. So I, I'm not saying they're pushing minor attracted persons in first grade, but if you're teaching hypersexualized topics, and there's people that are way more informed on this than me, but we touch on in the book, all the way through the pipeline, then you're introducing the idea of sexuality early and earlier, which only creates problems for everybody involved.

• 2:00:47Speaker 03

  I, that's the biggest reason we left New Jersey. We were gonna leave anyway, and we were already out of the government schools, but the idea that this stuff is being peddled and pushed. Now, you can, you can teach your, obviously you teach your kids at home. I don't want to spend my time deprogramming my kids or having to play defense on what they just heard for eight hours a day.

• 2:01:06Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:01:06Speaker 03

  And that's a lot of Americans every day.

• 2:01:08Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they may not be teaching that this year, but they probably will be next year. I mean, did you, do you know about the Furby's thing?

• 2:01:17Speaker 03

  Well, I've heard about, I don't, I've heard about it. I don't know how, I'll be honest, I don't know how widespread it is. I've heard anecdotal evidence of it.

• 2:01:25Shawn Ryan?

  It happened here. In Tennessee. It happened in, uh, hold on, is it Cookeville? Cookeville.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  Let's say I've heard of it, but I've heard of...

• 2:01:37Shawn Ryan?

  They kicked them out. They said, well, we moved here from California for whatever. And they said, cool. We don't put kids in cages in this school. Get the fuck back to California. Bye.

• 2:01:51Shawn Ryan?

  That stuck, thank God.

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  Well thankfully, for the most part, anyone, my experience, like half our church is from California. Is that most people moving from California here are moving because they want to move somewhere that reflects their values out of a crazy place like California. But that's what places like this have to do. Conservative places have to say, "We moved here for a reason, this is what we believe in, we're not doing that stuff here." Just have to have courage to do it. Because they're gonna call you every name in the book, and I'm sure they did in that scenario and everything, but it's not true, it's just common sense.

• 2:02:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:21Speaker 03

  We're not doing that.

• 2:02:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, how do we, how do you combat this?

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  Well, so you asked about, and I didn't even answer your question, you asked about, is there been an upswing? And the answer is yes, because even since the book came out, we've seen hundreds of additional classical Christian schools founded in the country. So the book is specifically, the other one, about classical Christian education. So it does a diagnosis of what's happened, K through 12, but then it says, okay, what is the form of education that created the West? That created our American founding? And it's classical Christian education. It's Latin and Greek, it's great books, it's history, it's literature, it's the Bible and theology.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  It's a form of education that the left has completely buried, and then replaced with a fraud. Take for example, did you take social studies? I took social studies. When I speak to groups, I say, "Who here took social studies?" Everybody raises their hand. Social studies, totally made up. It's a totally made up subject. Before 1940, 1930, 1950, in most places, no one taught social studies. What you taught was history, theology, geography, politics, individual disciplines that were meant to find truth. They were meant to find facts. They were meant to find the glory of God.

• 2:03:51Speaker 03

  Individually, these disciplines brought us closer to understanding truth. But if you've gotten rid of the idea of truth or real exploration, then you turn everything into a social science or a social study. So now you're studying society or social, and you're looking at different trends or different movements. And God's totally divorced from that. And you maybe de-emphasize this and emphasize this a little bit more. But it's all about the same thing the critical theorists are trying to do. The perfection, creating a human utopia by tearing down what existed for the ages, which is based on a lie. Because as a Christian, I know that I'm inherently sinful. I can't be perfected. I'm saved only by grace. And that governments don't exist to perfect my life.

• 2:04:36Speaker 03

  They exist to protect my rights endowed to me by a Creator. And I don't look for the government to solve all of those things. But for utopians, for progressives, for leftists, it's the exact opposite. And so our whole education system's been infected. The book says, "Get out." Homeschooling is on a huge ramp up. Classical Christian schools are in a huge, have exploded in the last couple of years. And we don't take credit for all of that. A lot of that is COVID. But parents waking up and saying, "You can spend all day long listening to your show, watching Fox and getting pissed." And a lot of us do. But what are you doing about your own family? What are you doing about your kids and your grandkids?

• 2:05:20Speaker 03

  That's what you have to save right now. Find a classical Christian school. Find a Christian school. Find a conservative school. Find a homeschool pod. Classical Conversations is an awesome classical Christian network of homeschoolers. That... What was that called? It's called Classical Conversations. I know the founder of it, Leah Bortens. She's amazing. And it's got a curriculum, but you come together in your community once a week or whatever with other families that are doing it. You can participate in sports and stuff. Anyway, there's way more today than there ever was five or 10 years ago. So there's a big... And then you've got school choice making its way. Governor Bill Lee's got to get that done here. Other states have done that. Now, if you can get...

• 2:06:04Speaker 03

  Parent, if you actually, I mean, you gotta be careful about this because some people are very critical and understandably so of money going from the government to a school because eventually the tentacles go into the school. So the money's gotta be as divorced as possible from the school. So it goes to the parents and then the parents make whatever choice they want. If you, if you get that kind of boost in enough states, well, now, parents are taking that $8,000 voucher and they're applying it to a classical Christian school or a Catholic school or another school and saying, and now they can afford it. Well, that kind of demand is gonna, is gonna be met eventually with supply that wants to meet that need. Now, the, the education establishment and the unions are gonna go nuts because they're in the business, just like the vets groups,

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  of defending the institution of the Department of Education in public schools. I just want my kids in the school that actually, I don't know, teaches them. And this, none of this even has to do with reading and writing and arithmetic, which our kids can't do anymore.

• 2:06:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:59Speaker 03

  Another example of that is, did you do, remember those commercials? Hooked on Phonics worked for me.

• 2:07:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:04Speaker 03

  Hooked on Phonics, I remember, I remember as a kid, I was in school, I was like, I would make fun of it, Hooked on Phonics worked for me. Those guys must be so dumb. And I'm like, and the further I get away from it, I'm like, that's me. I never took phonics. I don't know how to conjugate a verb. I don't even know what a proper sentence structure looks like because I wasn't taught that. I taught to read on a whole word method. It was the new, new fad of the educational philosophy, a whole word method. So that phonics is how we taught kids to read for hundreds and thousands of years. It worked really well. The educational bureaucrats started to tinker with it because that's what they do. What happened after that? Well, we actually got dumber. Reading scores went like this. When you teach kids phonics, they learn how to read the way they've always learned how to read,

• 2:07:47Speaker 03

  understanding our language with roots in Latin and Greek and others that you add to. I don't know any of that. Do you know any Latin words? I don't know, maybe some military Latin words. I know none. Did I know the history of Western civilizations, say, the Middle Ages? The Renaissance, the Reformation? All of the, the revival that happened in America before the revolution that, that created the, the fertile ground for the, I didn't learn any of that. I remember coming home from public school in like 10th grade and saying, Dad, why is Ronald Reagan always the bad guy in the textbooks? Why is he always the bad guy? And I, I grew up in a conservative God fearing, regular old, small-town America, Minnesota. Because the textbooks are written by lefties in New York City. And they all hate Ronald Reagan.

• 2:08:31Speaker 03

  And I gotta read that Ronald Reagan's a bad guy all day. Like, this has just been the case for a really long time. And we've ignored it for too long. And I do think we're in a huge educational renaissance. Because it's never the, it's not gonna be the 50% of Americans that wake up. It's the 1, 2, 3% that wake up, change course for their kids, they get faithful, they get involved, they get, they grow a backbone, and they fill their kids with goodness and give us a fighting chance. And that's where my hope lies. And that's, that's really, if, if there's a contribution that I hope to have in this world, it's seven kids that are believers in Christ, that know where true, know, know their history, know their Bible, love their country, and are willing to stand up for their family.

• 2:09:15Speaker 03

  Everything else, I don't care if they're a plumber, or a soldier, or a schoolteacher, or a construction worker, doesn't matter. If they, if they believe those things, I just think for too long we've chased the Harvard degree, or the, this, uh, you gotta be this, you gotta be that.

• 2:09:30Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like that's not even relevant anymore.

• 2:09:32Speaker 03

  It's not. It's not. It's what are you doing inside your home, with your family, and with your life, and your faith, and your beliefs, and are you willing to defend them? And, and I, and, and that feels like the moment we're in right now.

• 2:09:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What would you say, do these Christian schools cost money?

• 2:09:48Speaker 03

  They do.

• 2:09:49Shawn Ryan?

  What would you say to the single mom who's working two jobs with two or three kids who can't afford that? How do they combat this? Have you thought about that?

• 2:09:59Speaker 03

  Much harder, of course, much harder, thankfully. So, classical Christian, I'll just use that as an example. There's a lot of Christian, nominally Christian schools, we know, that are Christian, but they're the same progressive sects as everywhere else. Got the same nonsense. And they usually cost forty, fifty thousand dollars a year, they're totally unattainable. Because classical Christian schools are, it's a mission-driven environment, they're much lower tuition. Now, still not, still not nothing, but you're talking a fourth or a fifth of these big schools' tuition. So it is more affordable. A lot of them also have scholarship programs, where they say, hey, if you don't have the needs, our mission is to get your kids in here, so we want to try to find a way to meet those needs. There's also reductions for every additional kid,

• 2:10:44Speaker 03

  usually in the tuition cost of most of these schools. That said, it's still probably unaffordable for a lot of people. School choice and school vouchers is, you know, find a state, if you can, that provides that. Take advantage of it. Take that money and put it where you want to put it. Are there states doing that? Yes. What states? Absolutely. Florida's one of them. West Virginia's one of them. Arkansas is soon to be one of them. Arizona was, just became one of them. Iowa's one of them. And I'm gonna hear from Corey DeAngelis and others, who can give me the whole list, but there's a, there's a bunch of them. Is there any talk about this here? We're trying, yes. In fact, it failed in the legislature's last turnaround. Let me know when you want me to get loud. All right, good.

• 2:11:27Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, the problem with Tennessee is that everyone's Republicans, but some are less Republican than others. Oh, I figured that out. Yeah. It took me a while to figure that out, but no, I figured, figured it out. So there's some squishes that are, that have been in the pockets of unions for too long and too many powerful positions. A few changes and a few committees, and I think you'll get universal school choice in Tennessee, which would be awesome. Changes the whole game. So that single mom now has real options. Who do we talk to about that? Well, there's gonna, I think it's, Bill Lee's trying to do it. I don't know that what he's doing will be as robust as a lot of people want. There's a big governor's race in '26, and I think that race, in large part, could end up being fought with this being one of the key issues. So for me, as a, when I look at candidates,

• 2:12:11Speaker 03

  I'd be looking for candidates that are the most full-throated and robust on that. And then you have to make sure you have an education committee in the House and Senate that is a, has a school choice believer. But there's been a huge wave, 2022, 2023, of school choice states. And then the final thing I write in the book is kind of, hey, look at your own life. And I mentioned it briefly. Can you save money? Can you work another job? Can you drive a little further? Can you do something? And I know that's just a dig deep thing. But for that mom who loves her kids and can't homeschool, but is that a little extra effort to make sure that that is eight hours a day? You're able to go.

• 2:12:51Speaker 03

  As opposed to wringing your fingers and hoping they don't come home with a new, you know, pronoun is worth it. And again, that's not an answer necessarily, but your point's well taken. I know not everybody can do it. And so if you absolutely can't do it, then just be vigilant. Just be vigilant as all hell. Just be all over what your kids are bringing home in their backpack. Take the damn phone out of their hand. Take it out. Don't get no phones. You know, we've got a blended family, so it can come with some complications. But for our policies, all in, no phones. 14, no phones. Nice. None. And we did this summer with no video games and no TV too. It was beautiful. It was the best. Nice. Would your kids be saying that? Oh, no, no. Absolutely not.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  My three oldest boys are like, they gave up asking for the Xbox three weeks into the summer. And then they forgot about it. And they didn't play it that much anyway. Cause we never allowed them to really do that. And then you, I look at TV and I go, you can't even allow your kids Netflix kids or YouTube kids. You can't. And so the list of things that I would allow them to watch on a streaming service, Fox Nation, but even then, a lot of that is like, is more oriented toward adults. You got Angel Studios. You've got a few, you know, value, but really nothing. So why am I just turn it off or watch an old timey movie or whatever when we want to? And I don't know, I just think the phone, kids' brains are not developed to handle that. Yeah.

• 2:14:19Speaker 03

  I don't want a portal of the world inside them. So last thing and then I'll shut up. You can send them to classical Christian school or homeschool them, but if you give them a phone, you're gonna lose. Cause they're gonna get it somewhere else. That's a damn good point. You gotta have reinforcing sectors of fire. Your home life, your digital life, your school life, your church life should be, you should try to align them as much as possible. Cause a big part of when I look back at. You know, my parents are the best and I have no criticism of it. But my church life was over here and my school life was over here and they didn't really touch. And I was able to say, well, I'm a Christian, but with a secular core, really. And that that changes how you operate in life going forward. And so, you know, 20 years later, you look back and you go, man.

• 2:15:03Speaker 03

  Uh, interesting.

• 2:15:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:06Speaker 03

  You know, where was Christ in all of that in my own life? Um, and but everything happens for a reason, so.

• 2:15:12Shawn Ryan?

  So this school choice, they're actually, they're giving vouchers out.

• 2:15:17Speaker 03

  Not in every state. Some it's tax credits, but in some, I'll have to get back to you and get the list of the states. But there are a number of states where they're called educational tax credits or educational savings accounts. See, politicians are scared to call them vouchers because vouchers have been demonized so much. So call it an education savings account or something. But a dedicated amount of money, six, seven, eight thousand dollars is given to a parent via per kid. And in Tennessee, it was going to be, I think, six or 7,000.

• 2:15:45Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 2:15:46Speaker 03

  Um, and then it got it got defeated in the process. There were two competing bills. There was a Senate bill and a House bill and they weren't, they didn't get reconciled and they both failed or whatever. So I'm hopeful.

• 2:15:55Shawn Ryan?

  Is it, is it, um, is it cash or is it, this has to be spent on education?

• 2:16:03Speaker 03

  It has to be spent on education. However, most states, a lot of states, and I believe Tennessee would include things like homeschooling, uh, homeschooling materials, uh, other forms of education, and then of course tuition.

• 2:16:16Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they, I guess what I'm getting at is they actually check up on

• 2:16:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:16:19Shawn Ryan?

  that you're spending this on education and not going to the liquor store, right?

• 2:16:24Speaker 03

  That would be an important thing to to check. Uh, I don't know what the oversight, uh, parameters are on that. But again, that that's where it gets a little scary, right? Because if the dollars are coming to me. And then the government gets to check where I'm spending them? Then does the government get a say over where I'm spending them? And if I'm spending them-

• 2:16:44Shawn Ryan?

  It's a good point, but I think you could set it up like a HSA healthcare plan where, you know, you can put, what, $8,000 a year for a, for a family into the plan? And then it has to be spent on, it has to be spent on healthcare.

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  So ESA, instead of an HSA, is what they usually call it, an educational savings account. So it has to be spent on education.

• 2:17:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:03Speaker 03

  Um, is, is how it's structured. It's not cash. Um, it's, but I, I don't, I don't want any part of the government telling me what education is. Now, education doesn't mean going to the liquor store, but you have to set some parameters, I guess, at some level, but I don't want it some, you could, you could envision someday saying, "Well, if your school doesn't reinforce transgender issues or whatever, then you are a discriminatory institution." And because you're a discriminatory institution, you no longer qualify for federal funds, which means you're no longer an educational institution. So I've had debates with a lot of earnest, wonderful education people that say, "I don't want vouchers or educational savings accounts." Because the minute the government, the minute the king gives you something, the king can take it away.

• 2:17:49Speaker 03

  Uh, and so they're skeptical. But I, I still just think the net positive for all those mothers and fathers who you're talking about is so much higher. And ultimately, if you don't want to take the ESA, you wouldn't have to. And you could go to the, whatever school you want to. Um, and you just have to pay out of pocket. I just think there's so many people that would love an alternative to government schools, and they just can't afford it.

• 2:18:08Shawn Ryan?

  I got an idea. I've thought a lot about this. I'd love to pitch it to you. Maybe you can tell me I'm crazy or not. But, uh, you know, and I think the, the good thing about this is, is it can,

• 2:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  well, I'll just, I'll just tell you. I mean, the thing that I, we're, we're really worried about this, the schooling stuff. And, um, and, uh, cause it's, it has, I mean, I know you say everybody moving here is, you know-

• 2:18:34Speaker 03

  Not everybody, you're right.

• 2:18:35Shawn Ryan?

  Things like, but I sure have seen a lot of changes in seven years. But, um, the way, we invited a, like our, our inner circle over to the house. And, uh, cause everybody's talking about this. And our inner circle, everybody's got kids that are around the same age, three or under. And we thought-

• 2:18:57Shawn Ryan?

  Why don't we all pitch in and buy a piece of property, put it into a trust to make it a like a a group real estate investment? And then we'll build a structure on it. Could be a house, could be anything. That's a school. It's going to be used as a school, but it's not a school. And then whatever amount that you pitch in, so let's say, I don't know, we got a hundred thousand dollar piece of land, just for easy numbers. And there's a structure already on it. And you put in fifty thousand, you put in ten thousand, and I put in forty thousand. You have fifty percent, ten percent, forty percent of the investment. Our kids all go to to school there.

• 2:19:41Shawn Ryan?

  They happen to go to school in our real estate investment. Hire a teacher, everybody pitches in. Or you don't hire a teacher, and I teach one day, you teach one day, you teach one day. You find people that have unique skills. I mean, finance is obviously something lacking in the educational system. Everybody's drowning in debt. You you see what I'm getting at, right? And so but that can expand to, look, maybe you don't have fifty grand, or ten thousand, or forty thousand to put in on the investment. Well, then you need more people. Maybe you can get, maybe you rent a place. Maybe there is no place, and this just goes from house to house to house, so the single mom on the day off, you're teaching.

• 2:20:25Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and and I guess what I'm getting at is community, and this can be, you know, you can make it a real estate investment. It has to stay a real estate investment and not a school. That way, there is no government oversight. No, this isn't a school. This is an investment, and we rent this out to, I don't know, kids, you know, whatever. But what do you think of that? I don't understand.

• 2:20:52Speaker 03

  It sounds exactly.

• 2:20:53Shawn Ryan?

  At the end of the school, I forgot, sorry. At the end of the school, the asset liquidates and then that's how, you know, the investment has matured. And so your 50 grand is now worth 150 grand.

• 2:21:06Speaker 03

  Yep, yep, I like that. It sounds almost precisely like something like, minus the real estate side, precisely to classical conversations or what homeschool co-ops and pods are doing. This idea that like-minded groups of people get together, they work together. There might be a coordinator, but they work together based on their skills and ability to teach their kid a lot of the time, but then bring in this person or bring in that person or move to a different house or once a week meet up.

• 2:21:34Shawn Ryan?

  Have some really well-rounded kids.

• 2:21:37Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:21:37Shawn Ryan?

  In that model.

• 2:21:38Speaker 03

  Now, the real estate side of it is interesting and I've never thought of that aspect of it. I, that's another way to get out from underneath, feeling like the government's gonna have say over it. But thankfully, I mean, they tried to outlaw homeschooling in the 60s or 70s out in Oregon and the Supreme Court affirmed the ability for families. So it's a pretty enshrined, protected right right now. The left would love to get rid of. The left would love to get rid of homeschooling and all private schools.

• 2:22:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  They would. They would make everything a government school if they could. Medicare for all, Department of Education for all if they could. P S 8,493 is what they would like, if they could. So I don't mean to be dismissive about the right that we have right now, but right now, if you want to homeschool, it's pretty robust to be able to do it. But I like that idea. I mean, but even just the idea of starting that and expanding that, like, people will be attracted to that.

• 2:22:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:30Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness, Sean's involved in that. I respect that. I like that. Oh, they're involved. And then you start to get a, as long as you maintain your standards and what you want it to, what you believe in, I mean, that's the key. Culture protection is key. It's just amazing to watch all these schools.

• 2:22:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:47Speaker 03

  That were traditionally this or traditionally that. I mentioned Harvard, like, it was founded to train ministers in the, in, when it was, when it, you know.

• 2:22:55Shawn Ryan?

  Was it really?

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  Yes, it was founded to train ministers.

• 2:22:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:23:00Speaker 03

  And so the last straw for me, when I sent my degree back, was, I mean, there were a thousand straws, but then it was finally Harvard announced that its head chaplain was gonna, was, its new head chaplain was an atheist.

• 2:23:14Speaker 03

  I was like, really?

• 2:23:15Shawn Ryan?

  That's interesting.

• 2:23:16Speaker 03

  That's interesting. Yeah, sounds like the dumbest shit I've ever heard. I'm out. And so I tore my deformed out on live on the air and signed it and wrote back and I haven't obviously not heard back from him. But, I mean, iteratively over time, over hundreds of years, an institution founded on one thing became something else. And we have that job, a culture protection for people of faith and conservatives and Christians and patriots is key. Once you give on one thing, oh, this aspect of the First Amendment, or this aspect of the Second Amendment, or we're gonna start doing a little bit of D E I, a little bit of, you just keep giving. And pretty soon you give your way all the way to, we have no, we have no defense anymore.

• 2:23:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:00Speaker 03

  Let's just see it time and time again.

• 2:24:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, I like planting these seeds, because...

• 2:24:05Speaker 03

  It's good, it's a good idea.

• 2:24:06Shawn Ryan?

  We're looking for ideas and, you know, just watch it grow and...

• 2:24:10Speaker 03

  Well, it's spoken like a businessman. You know, why not make a little money while we educate the kids too?

• 2:24:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. But, well, Pete, I know we're under a time constraint and I just, I just really appreciate you coming out.

• 2:24:24Speaker 03

  Likewise.

• 2:24:25Shawn Ryan?

  And what a great conversation. I hope to see you again.

• 2:24:27Speaker 03

  Well, I appreciate everything you've done and you continue to do. And thank you for giving voice to those Raven 23 guys. And being a... I can't, like I told you, I can't tell you how many guys said, "You gotta sit down with Sean and see what he's doing there." You got huge respect and you know that.

• 2:24:43Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 2:24:43Speaker 03

  I appreciate everything you stand for.

• 2:24:45Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Pete.

• 2:24:45Speaker 03

  You got it. Thanks, brother.