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

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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent.

• 0:32Speaker 03

  You could try to find the perfect coffee to water ratio. Or you could press a button. With Keurig, each K-Cup pod is precision measured for a perfectly delicious cup. No effort, no grind, no math required.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Great coffee without the grind. Keurig.

• 0:55Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. This week, this episode, we talk a lot about the current issues that our country faces today. But I think that the most important segment of all in this entire show is a discussion that I have with my next guest about all of the fatherless children, fatherless families, kids that are growing up without a male role model and the devastation that that can cause in their lives. And then we talk about how to be a good dad, how to be a positive male role model for both your sons and your daughters, something that every father should be paying attention

• 1:40Shawn Ryan?

  to and wanting to better themselves with. So if you get anything out of these shows, please like, comment, subscribe, head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, please leave us a review, tell us how we're doing. Patreon, if it wasn't for you guys, we wouldn't even be doing this. Thank you for the support. Thank you for checking out all of our behind the scenes content on Patreon. Love you guys, love all of you. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome former Green Beret and Virginia delegate Nick Friedas to the Sean Ryan Show. Cheers.

• 2:26Shawn Ryan?

  Nick Friedas, welcome to the show, man.

• 2:29Speaker 05

  No, thank you very much. It's an honor.

• 2:31Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. So I've been tracking you on Instagram for quite a while now, and you are on fire, man. And I love just about everything you have to say. And so it took me a couple of months to digest some of your content, but we finally got you here and we got a whole slew of topics that I want to cover with you.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  No, I'm excited. I really appreciate it.

• 2:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but let me give you a quick intro here. So you're a Christian, husband, father, former Green Beret combat veteran, member of the Virginia House of Delegates, grew up in Chino, California, married your high school sweetheart Tina in 1999. You're a father of three, two daughters and one son. Spent some time in the 82nd Airborne, joined the Army Special Forces, Green Berets after 9/11, two tours in Iraq. Then you transitioned to civilian life and... Am I missing anything?

• 3:32Speaker 05

  No, that's, that's, you got it.

• 3:34Shawn Ryan?

  Podcaster.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:36Shawn Ryan?

  How do you like doing that?

• 3:38Speaker 05

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

• 4:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it's been good.

• 4:12Shawn Ryan?

  Good. Well, I got a ton of subjects I want to cover. I'll just run you through them a little bit. I want to talk about leadership of men, veterans and politics, Second Amendment, which you're huge on, school shootings. I'd love to dive into that. China and Taiwan, national divorce. Do some great content on what that might look like. Digital central bank, southern border. And depending on how much time we got left, we'll get into some UFO stuff, maybe. And I want to, I really want to talk to you about homeschooling.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:44Shawn Ryan?

  And something else that I would like to talk to you about being a man of faith is some of the hypocrisy that's going on in the church. In the, in the, in Christian Catholic. I believe in Jesus types, uh, some of the hypocrisy that goes on within the church. But, but before we dive into all those heavy topics, everybody gets a gift.

• 5:10Shawn Ryan?

  Got any, uh, go ahead, lean back.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  See, this is, uh, see, there we go. I needed, uh, I needed one of these because I forgot my coffee mug. And that's become, that's kind of how I'm known now.

• 5:20Shawn Ryan?

  We got you covered.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  Are these the, oh, nice.

• 5:24Shawn Ryan?

  So that is, so that, you're a coffee guy.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:28Shawn Ryan?

  This is Laird Superfoods Coffee. So that's a mushroom performance coffee.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 5:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So I really got into, after talking, there's a creamer in there too for your wife. I know you like it black.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. But she does.

• 5:42Shawn Ryan?

  But that's, that's a mushroom performance creamer.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 5:45Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. And so I really, as you know, we cover a lot of, you know, former veterans, soft guys, uh, like me and yourself. And we talk a lot about post-traumatic stress. We talk a lot about traumatic brain injury and just mental health in general. And so I started looking at products to kind of promote brain health and, um, and all kind of stemmed from a psychedelic experience I had.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:14Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, quit drinking for two years afterwards. Haven't had, I haven't had any caffeine, uh, or coffee since then. Not that that's bad, but, um, uh, and I'm more in the moment. A lot of like positive stuff and it sent me on this journey to. To improve my brain health and I started looking into functional mushrooms and now I'm a partner with Laird Superfoods and that's the cleanest stuff you can get for brain health.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  No, I appreciate, I first started reading about that with Jordan, we actually had legislation last year in the General Assembly in Virginia where they were talking about various psychedelics and things like that for treatment and it was actually a Democrat colleague of mine called me up and said, hey, would you be one to co-patron this, would you be one to support it, I'm like, yeah, I'll vote for it.

• 7:02Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 7:02Speaker 05

  And she was, she was a little bit surprised because you know, the typical, the typical response for a lot of Republicans and whatnot, whenever it comes to drugs and whatnot is like, absolutely not, no, never, it's, it's all bad, I was like, well, wait a second, this is, we're actually seeing guys that have had positive results with doing this in a responsible environment, you're just gonna say no, you're gonna make it illegal for them to do something that is, that is helping them. So, no, I appreciate that.

• 7:34Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure, my pleasure, thank you for helping with the bill.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  Well, hopefully we'll get it passed next time.

• 7:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of talk about that all over about in politics with psychedelics and, and I hope they, hope they get it through and I hope they do it responsibly too, because this definitely has, there's another side to this, you know, and I don't want to see psychedelics go down the same road that painkillers and, and, and benzos, you know, that, that path went down, but anyways, one thing that I didn't tell you that I wanted to cover is that I don't, I don't think it matters what side of the aisle you're on, everybody thinks that the country is falling apart, it's, it's the first topic of discussion that gets

• 8:25Shawn Ryan?

  brought up with everyone I talk to, doesn't matter what their occupation is, doesn't matter what side of the fence they're on, it's always what, what's happening to our country. And Green Berets have, I mean, you guys are the first in, you, you, you get in there, you develop a fighting force for the oppressed and you're very familiar with how this stuff happens, so.

• 8:56Shawn Ryan?

  How would you deconstruct and demoralize a nation?

• 9:03Speaker 05

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

• 9:37Speaker 05

  but that also are important for developing traditions. There's an interesting quote, I think the person's name was Bell. And he gave a definition of culture, and he goes, "What is it?" He goes, "It's society's attempt to come up with a coherent set of answers to the existential questions we face throughout our lives." If you think about that, that kind of works. Culture is not, it's not just skin color, it's not race, it's not food or dress. It can be all of those things. But it really comes down to fundamental questions that how does a group of people that have individual objectives for their life, different preferences and whatnot,

• 10:21Speaker 05

  but how do they live in society with one another where they can cooperate in order to achieve something?

• 10:29Speaker 05

  And in other times, leave each other alone when they disagree, but still feel a sense of unity, camaraderie, and connection. So how do you break that apart? Well, you have to challenge the overall narrative, both of the history. Like, how did you get to where you are today? Because if you take pride in it, well, then it's something worth preserving. And even if you think that there's a problem with it, you might want to fix those problems. So, perfect example within US history would be if you view US history through the lens, the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence. We believe, we find these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

• 11:13Speaker 05

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

• 11:55Speaker 05

  That is a pretty strong-- I believe that's a pretty strong philosophy to build a culture around. But what if I come back later and I tell you that, "Yeah, that sounds really nice, but the guy that wrote it was just a slave owner." In fact, all these people that were trying to set up liberty, now they just wanted liberty for white men because women couldn't vote at the time. And you know what? They just really didn't want to pay their taxes. That's what this was really about. So what do you have? You have a white patriarchal society that was rooted in enslaving certain people based off of the color of their skin. And they set up this system because it would be beneficial for them financially. And all of your other ideas or notions about what a wonderful philosophical concept this was, that was marketing.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  That was marketing to help rich white guys get what they want at the expense of other people. That's all it was. Or right at the bat, right at the get-go, I completely undermined why you would want to fight for such a culture in the first place. So, once I start undermining the cultural ties that bind-- Now, let's admit a couple of things. We can look back and say, "There are elements of that statement that are true." But then all of a sudden, when we put it back in context and we recognize, well, wait a second. Every society at the world at that time had some form of institution of slavery. Every single society at that time, you know, had some of the bad things, the negative aspects of it that we just discussed. So what was different?

• 13:22Speaker 05

  Well, what was different was what they were actually rapidly expanding the concept of liberty and suggesting who it should apply to. I mean, to say in 1776, after thousands upon thousands of years of history that were rooted in, I mean racially based discrimination, that were rooted in a political elite controlling everything. You now have somebody say, no, no, no, we're all created equal. And even if we're not living up to it, that is the standard, that's the truth. That was revolutionary. That's incredible. And it's easy to look back now, 200 plus years later and say, well, of course, that's the way it's supposed to be. It wasn't, of course, back then.

• 14:06Speaker 05

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

• 14:51Speaker 05

  It's not an injustice that the guy, you know, working super hard in a high demand field makes more money than the person that isn't doing those things. But if I can convince you that it actually is injustice. Well, what am I doing? I've taken away your shared history. I've taken away your shared connection with your neighbor. And now I'm supplanting that with a different narrative. And that narrative has to be rooted on who do I need to be fighting with the people in power? And that's where I can come up with the whole system of oppressed, oppressor. You're the person that the entire system is stacked against. I'm going to essentially galvanize your support and I'm going to point you at an enemy.

• 15:34Speaker 05

  Real or imagined, and I'm gonna give you a new narrative. Because I can't just say the old narrative is bad, I gotta replace it with a new one. So I give you a new narrative, and I make that the narrative worth fighting for. Because now your entire identity is caught up in that narrative. It's your entire identity is caught up in that movement. Because I haven't left you with anything else, right? Because your nuclear family, that's a tool of the patriarchy. Right? Your country, that's just racist, bigoted, and discriminating. Right? Your very identity? Well, I don't know. If you are a certain skin color, or you're heterosexual, or whatever else, well, you're part of the oppressor class. How do I get you into... How do I move you from the oppressor class into an ally class, or the oppressed, who are the good guys?

• 16:19Speaker 05

  Well, you have to change the nature of your identity. What if it doesn't correspond with reality? What objective reality? Postmodernism tells us there is no objective reality. There is no objective truth. There is only lived experience. There's only oppressor and oppressed. And if you're an oppressor, you're a bad guy that needs to be taken down, and there's nothing you can do. Right? It's the... As my friend Christian puts it, "It's the original sin theory with no redemption." I do all of those things, and now I have a very powerful group of very disaffected people that have a philosophy rooted in nothing other than the movement. Yeah. And at that point, now it's just to run through the cultural institutions.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  It's everything Gramsci talked about in Italy in the 1930s. It's the idea of looking at the institutions which form culture. And we tend to look toward politics, but politics is downstream from culture. The real culturally shaping institutions are your school system, your academia, media, the arts and entertainment, Hollywood. They're the ones that are actually telling you the stories about who you are, what your country is, and everything else. And if they've all decided on a particular narrative, and that narrative is rooted in, like in the United States, largely in postmodernism, deconstructionism, critical theory. And now, all of a sudden... Your feet are firmly planted in nothing.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Well, then, that identity crisis provides me a huge opportunity to be able to destabilize what it is and replace it with what I want it to be.

• 17:52Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think they got? How do you think all these academia, the school system, Hollywood, the media? How do they all wind up on the same narrative?

• 18:01Speaker 05

  I think the overly simplistic answer is the Yuri Bezmenov answer. And Yuri Bezmenov was a former, he wasn't a KGB agent. He actually worked kind of in journalism and he arranged a lot of these junkets for foreign diplomats and foreign journalists to come into the USSR at the time and write positive stories. But he essentially worked with the KGB. And he talked about a system called active measures. And this is something we know, it's not conspiracy theory. The KGB involved themselves in active measures, which were attempts to destabilize foreign countries in order to make them more friendly to Marxism and specifically the USSR.

• 18:44Speaker 05

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

• 19:29Speaker 05

  about, which Gramsci was an Italian socialist who was jailed by Mussolini, who had also been an Italian socialist before he became a fascist. But one of the things they talked about was that when Marx first started talking about his concept of revolution and workers of the world unite, his idea was that people generally saw themselves as being economic entities. So the primary kind of individual identity was rooted in your economic class.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  And he actually believed that a nation had to go through capitalism before it could get to communism. What they found out in practice is it never worked that way. It wasn't the Western capitalist countries and democracies that embraced Marxism. It was feudal Russia, it was czarist Russia. And they started to recognize, and Gramsci writes a lot about this, where he talks about the march through the institutions, or that's what it's become dubbed. And it was this idea that it's not good enough to simply say, you know, hey, you workers of the world unite, because honestly, on a pound-for-pound basis, workers in the West and within predominantly free-market economies tend to be doing better than in these other places. He goes, it's the entire culture that has to be changed.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  So if you look at it from the standpoint of you had a ready-made philosophy with Marxism and critical theory, which has a very different, people look at that as almost a purely economic, people who don't really follow it look at it as almost a purely economic theory. It's not. It's an entire social theory. It's a, there's a reason why it's hostile to God, it's hostile to the individual family, it's hostile to everything that is, we generally think of as being rooted in Western free-market representative democracies and republics. So if you have the philosophy, and you now have a government which is engaging in active measures in order to try to put that philosophy in there, you have a core that you can work with. So what else did they have within the United States?

• 21:27Speaker 05

  What was a legitimate critique of the United States when a lot of this was going during the Cold War? Racism and segregation. That was a legitimate critique. Oh yeah, you talk about your great freedom, you talk about, you know, your wealth, but look at what you're doing with Jim Crow laws. Look at what you're doing. Perfectly valid critique. Now, the Frederick Douglass response to that sort of thing that he addressed in the 1800s was, he didn't throw out the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, he appealed to them. He looked at all men are created equal and says, no, no, no, you're not living up to what you believe, and you should live up to it. This new movement is like, what you believed was always wrong in the first place, and we need to replace it with something else. And that's the, you know, radical egalitarianism, collectivism.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  But these things don't just work because the KGB decided to infiltrate some universities or Hollywood. Mm-hmm.

• 22:26Speaker 06

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• 22:56Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  It works, I believe, in part because, and this is rooted in my faith, and I think Christianity doesn't just, I don't think it's just a nice story, I don't think it's just a nice set of morals, I think it does more to explain the human condition than anything I have ever read. This idea that there is a sinful nature that we contend with, but there's also such a thing as love, justice, and redemption. There's such a thing as objective right and wrong, there's such a thing as objective truth. Well, if you're growing up in a society where you've been rooted in none of that, or it's been ripped out of you, or you've been convinced that this is all about inequity and disparity of outcomes, and therefore, the proper way to address it is going to be through political

• 24:10Speaker 05

  action and the accumulation of political power, so you can punish the oppressors and lift up and liberate the oppressed, right? And look, as a Green Beret, our motto was to free the oppressed. But that's the part where that is an appealing message, in part because...

• 24:30Speaker 05

  We ultimately don't want to come to full grips with the evil that resides in us.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  When you've spent time in combat, when you've spent time, I think, in law enforcement and other people, just by nature of finding themselves in very dangerous or abusive situations, evil becomes a very, very real thing. It's no longer just some nice philosophical construct with a bunch of people discussing what constitutes evil, or how do we measure it. When you've seen truly horrible things,

• 25:07Speaker 05

  the way I put it once is, you don't, I don't think you fully recognize evil when you see it, you realize what it is when it looks back.

• 25:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I would agree with that.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so, I think

• 25:21Speaker 05

  we have a lot of people that don't want to contend with that. They want to believe that it's kind of beyond their control. And so, they're going to put the responsibility onto the movement to make everything better. And they'll act within the movement, obviously. But when the movement does something, no matter how horrible, in order to achieve these positive end states, well, that's just justifiable. It was necessary. What did Mao say? You know, a revolution is not a dinner party.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  There's another book called The True Believer, where he talks about the nature of mass movements. And one of the things he really stresses in that is the danger of movements which stress to separate people from everything they've known, from, maybe it's from God, maybe it's from their family, maybe it's from their traditions.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  And having left orphaned, the movement becomes the new family, and the movement becomes the sense of their identity. And without the movement, they don't know who they are. And so, whatever the movement needs to do in order to justify its objectives, ultimately becomes morally acceptable.

• 26:25Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think, where does this stem from? I ask everybody this when we get into these conversations. Where do you personally think this is stemming from? Is it Russia?

• 26:34Speaker 05

  No. I think...

• 26:40Speaker 05

  I mean, again, I think a lot of the economic, social, and political philosophy which motivates it is rooted in critical theory, which is rooted in Marxism, which is also, again, heavily picked up and influenced by postmodernism, deconstruction, which leads to critical race theory and queer theory and everything else. I think all of that, I think all of that provides an almost comprehensive picture of what's going on, but I think it's more fundamental than that. And this is the part where people get uncomfortable with this as a theological conversation, but let's think about this logically for a minute. If everybody has a worldview, and the starting point of every person's worldview relies

• 27:25Speaker 05

  on some element of faith, right? The atheist may say, "Oh, no, no, I don't put my faith in anything. I trust logic." So you have faith in logic, because logic cannot ultimately justify its own existence. You can argue it's a priori if you'd like, but it doesn't. You're gonna run into problems. How do you trust your own mind to properly interpret logic? You know, everybody's worldview starts with that fundamental position. My fundamental position is that there is a God, there is right and wrong, there is objective truth, there is objective morality, and my job is to seek out and understand that. Because insofar as I can live in accordance with that, I can achieve my purpose, I can take

• 28:07Speaker 05

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

• 28:33Speaker 05

  What is it? Is it your personal preference? Is it what gives you pleasure? Is it what gives you power? I mean, Nietzsche pretty much broke it down that you're gonna have the quest for pleasure, the quest for power, perhaps the quest for both. But is that really enough to sustain you or give you genuine purpose or meaning? What if it's untrue? I know a lot of unhappy rich people. I know a lot of unhappy, powerful people. So I do believe it's fundamental. And again, for me, that's really simple. I think I believe what Christ said. And I believe that's not rooted in wishful thinking. I mean, my gosh, if you were gonna try to create a religion or a worldview that was gonna make your life easier,

• 29:17Speaker 05

  you would not pick Christianity. Yeah, that's true. But I wanna pick what's true. Because ultimately, without truth, without the believing that there's such a thing as objective truth, how do you even arrive at love? How do you arrive at logic? How do you arrive at science? How do you arrive at justice? What is justice if there's no such thing as objective truth? How do you define it? And what I see is a lot of people that want to ignore the fundamentals and then chase after these things that give them this temporary sense of meaning or purpose or community or whatever else. But ultimately, it all rings hollow because they're trying to replace something that is not going to be replaced by a movement

• 29:59Speaker 05

  or a feeling or a sexual act or whatever else it is. And the only thing I can say is, when you find it and you know what it is, the greatest proof, for me, what I found, this is gonna sound a little esoteric, but I don't know how else to put it. The greatest proof that I personally experienced, aside from digging into the history of Scripture, or digging into the logic of it, or digging into the epistemology of it, there's this verse that says, that talks about the peace which surpasses all understanding.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  And we are living in a country right now where people are desperate to find some sort of peace like that. And what I find fascinating about that verse is it doesn't say you'll have peace. It doesn't say the peace that everyone clearly understands because obviously everything's going good for you and everything's wonderful and everything's rosy. It says the peace which surpasses all understanding, which means the rest of the world is looking in going, how, how is this possible? This is, it's chaos and it's poverty and it's violence and it's everything else. And for some reason, this guy isn't shaken. Why?

• 31:16Speaker 05

  Because I already know what I believe.

• 31:17Shawn Ryan?

  Faith.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  My identity is in Christ. It's not in any of this temporary stuff. Some of this stuff might be good, it might be worthwhile, it might be worth fighting for, but I know where my identity is. And if you know that, well, then yeah, bad things are gonna happen. You got the mechanism to fight against it. You got the mechanism to create something beautiful out of struggle and challenge. But if you don't even know who you are, what you're doing here, what your purpose is, I mean, that's miserable.

• 31:43Shawn Ryan?

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

• 32:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:14Shawn Ryan?

  And academia, you know, it looks like this culture shift is everywhere.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:25Shawn Ryan?

  Like everywhere. Do you, do you think that there is actually that many people here in the US who have shifted their culture into this new?

• 32:37Shawn Ryan?

  Whatever you want to call it, the woke agenda, or whatever. Or do you think this is a facade that's put on by Hollywood, academia, media?

• 32:47Speaker 05

  I think that, what was it? I think it was Samuel Adams that was saying that all you need is a really dedicated minority. It's not majorities that actually start revolutions or change things. It's a very, very dedicated and determined minority.

• 33:02Speaker 05

  I think, I don't think a majority of Americans, like if you sat them down, would sit there and say, yes, I genuinely believe that if you identify as X, Y, and Z, well, then, reality has changed or adjusted that to make it so. I don't think they really believe that. But what does it matter if they're not willing to say it's wrong?

• 33:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  And there's this, there's this, there was a guy that wrote a book. He was a doctor. His pen name is Theodore Dalrymple. I think his actual name is Anthony, I think it's Anthony Davies. But he was a British doctor in Subsahara Africa. And then he worked in the British Health Service and the prison service as a psychiatrist for many years. And he wrote a book called The Life at the Bottom. And he's not, he's not a Christian. I think he's an atheist, or maybe he's a deist, or agnostic, I'm not sure. But he had this quote. He said, he goes, "The more I studied communist propaganda, the more I recognized that it wasn't meant to inform, but it was meant to humiliate and intimidate.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  And therefore, the less it corresponded with reality, the more effective it was. Because when you can first convince someone to be silent in the midst of obvious lies and then get them to repeat those lies, you make them a party to evil." And he concluded it by saying,

• 34:25Speaker 05

  "Such a society, or a society composed of emasculated liars, is easy to control." He said, "I've since come to the conclusion that political correctness works the same way and for the same reasons."

• 34:40Speaker 05

  So I don't know that a majority believe it. What I'm wondering is where is our strong minority that's gonna stand up and call this for what it is? Because most people are very, very consumed with just trying to live their lives.

• 34:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  And if just living their lives means going along with whatever intellectual absurdity happens to be popular today, they may be willing to accept it, thinking it's just a fad, only to wake up too late to find out it wasn't.

• 35:13Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think it's a fad?

• 35:14Speaker 05

  No.

• 35:15Shawn Ryan?

  I don't either. I think I see, I see more and more people starting to speak up about it. I see it in numbers, I see it in ratings, I see, I find my hope hidden in like these small pockets, you know? And I look at, I look at media numbers, they're sinking dramatically, you know, it's, it's, it's been a huge down slope since 2020. And it's just, it's spiraling out of control. I feel like now that they're just grabbing on to anything they can possibly get to try to get them numbers.

• 35:57Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, and then I look at, I look at things like, we're both podcasters, we look at the top podcasts, all the top podcasts, not all of them, a lot of them are talking about things like this. And that gives me hope, you know, to see like, the things that you can't, I mean, I guess they could fudge them, but they're not being fudged 100% yet. And you're seeing, you know, these, you see the Bud Light thing, you see the Target thing, you know, and that gives me hope. I think there's, but I agree with you, you know, what's the old saying? Evil prevails when good men do nothing. And even just, people always wanna know, I mean, I'm sure you get it on your podcast

• 36:40Shawn Ryan?

  too, you know, what, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do?

• 36:45Speaker 05

  To your point, just because I don't think it's a fad, and just because I don't think, and just because I do think it has gained far more prominence than, than we realize, doesn't mean I'm not hopeful.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  And the reason why, and the reason why I am hopeful is because I actually don't think... I don't think it's gonna take as much as a lot of people think it will to beat it back. My concern is where they're gonna look to do that. And I think a lot of people will look at it, a lot of people that, let's say, more on the conservative or even more of like the libertarian side, less the libertarians, more the conservatives, are like, "Well, if we just elect the right people." Yeah. Look, I'm an elected official. I'm not telling anybody politics isn't important. But, you know, as we talked about at one point, if you are waiting around for a politician

• 37:37Speaker 05

  to preserve your liberties, or to protect your family, or to protect you, you're a failure. And I don't know how else to put it. Yeah. My job, and here's the part too, for, because men are especially under attack right now. Those men that believe in traditional standards of what they're supposed to do as men, as husbands, as fathers, as protectors, as providers, they're all being told that these are toxic attributes. And it's like, no, when you look at things like aggression, when you look at things like a capacity and a capability for violence, those are not toxic in and of themselves. They're morally neutral. And I will tell you this, if the good guys don't know how to use those things, they're

• 38:22Speaker 05

  gonna be ruled by the bad guys. And so, that instinct that young men have, and they're looking for leadership, and they're not seeing it, they're the ones that are start to, when they, when they see the stuff that you talk about, when they see some of these other podcasts, and all of a sudden, it's like they have a sanctuary of people that are telling them that, no, those instincts that you have are good, but they have to be developed and they have to be fostered in such a way as to serve the noble and the just and the true, as opposed to giving into the other use cases for them. And that's the part where, when people start recognizing that a lot of the way, the best

• 39:03Speaker 05

  way to fight against this is not just to be active politically, it's not just to, you know, go out and protest and things like that. If you wanna, if you wanna point out a lie...

• 39:16Speaker 05

  The very next thing you better do is point to the truth. And the truth is never going to be adequately defended simply by good argumentation. It's going to be adequately defended by you living it out in your life and people seeing the fruit of that. Like, we did these things. We told culture to go pound sand, to piss off, and we adopted these things that we knew that were going to be true with the way that we ran our marriage, with the way that we raised our kids, with the way that we raised our business, with the way that we conduct ourselves with our friends, with our family, with our community. And the success speaks for itself. Because this other path will lead to chaos. It is only a matter of time. It is not an if, it is a when, and it is a how bad. And when people feel like, and when people finally wake up to the point that we were

• 39:58Speaker 05

  lied to about this, one of two things is going to happen. They're either going to jump onto the next lie, which happens to be convenient and grab their attention, or they're actually going to be convinced of the truth because there was enough people willing to fight for it and actually display it.

• 40:13Shawn Ryan?

  I love hearing that. You know, the, let's talk about some things people can do. You know, back to that quote, "Evil prevails when good men do nothing." There are so many, I think Americans have, they've been spoon-fed everything, you know? And when I say "good men do nothing," I'm not saying you need to get out and protest, get out and start a revolution, any of that shit. I'm saying, just do something, get loud about it. Let's talk about, like, I want to talk about this anyway, so let's just do it now, school shootings. You know? What I see, and this has been going on for forever.

• 40:54Shawn Ryan?

  I tried to get involved with the, after Parkland happened several years ago, and all I see over and over and over again, you know, are parents that want to pass the buck. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's the Second Amendment's fault. It's the school's fault. It's the police officer's fault. It's the security guy's fault. It's, you know, and it's always everybody else's fault. My question is, what did you do as a parent to teach your kid what to do when this happens? It's happening. Politicians aren't doing anything about it. This has been going on for, I wish I knew how many years, at least 20 years, you know? And...

• 41:37Shawn Ryan?

  And it just happened here in Nashville, Tennessee, you know, in Covenant. And every time this happens, you see these parents and it's, well, why aren't they gonna hire this? Why aren't they gonna hire that? And here in Franklin, there's a school, a private Christian school, and everybody's, everybody goes on about this, right? Nobody wants to do anything. The parents all got together and they said, hey, we want to pay you more, we want to pay you more to get a field security officer, a real one. And, which I think that's great. Why wouldn't you do that? Why wasn't it done 20 years ago?

• 42:19Shawn Ryan?

  Well, the administration at the school basically told the parents, absolutely not, we're not doing that. I don't know anybody that took their kids out of the school and put them into a place that does have one.

• 42:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:34Shawn Ryan?

  That's what you do. That's how you fix this shit. You remove your kid from the business that you're supporting, the school, and put them into a school that's doing the right thing.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:48Shawn Ryan?

  And then when they have no more students, they'll realize they're gonna go broke and starve, and maybe they'll start doing the right thing, or they'll stay on their high horse and starve. You know, but it's, it's little things like that. It's, you don't agree with what Target's doing? I know it's convenient. I know you live five blocks away from there. Spend the extra 15 minutes and go to Walmart, or go to whatever store that's not pushing that agenda. You know, and, and, but they don't do it.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  Well, if you, if you've-

• 43:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's that simple, though.

• 43:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:25Shawn Ryan?

  That's doing something.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  Yes. No, no, and I, I agree. I think that, um, I, I will see people come on and they'll ask the same questions. And we've done, we've done a lot of episodes on our, on our podcast, talking about what can you do? And one of the biggest things that we push to everybody is, stop, stop with this idea that what you can do is, again, vote for president, or what you can do is, you know, change things which are so far beyond your control, that you're gonna get easily frustrated and, and quit. So what are practical things you can do? And oh, by the way, how do you develop discipline? How do you develop good habits? And then don't look for the, don't look for

• 44:04Speaker 05

  the suckiest thing you could possibly do first. When I walked in during COVID to the grocery store and I saw bare shelves for the first time in my adult life in America, that really hit me home where it's like, this is bad. And it's not like I thought it was gonna last forever, but I didn't like the feeling. Well, there's two approaches you can take from that feeling. You can take the approach of, somebody needs to do something about this. Or you can take the approach, I need to do something about this. Alright, so what can I do? Well, I can't open up a grocery store. Okay, can I grow a garden? Is there

• 44:47Speaker 05

  any sort of animals that I can raise? I started to get really, really interested in the home steading movement, you know, right around COVID. And we'd always had a garden before. We'd had chickens before and stuff like that. But I started looking at that from the perspective of, how much could I grow? How much, I mean, could I, could I really take care of, let's say, a significant amount of the needs for my family and potentially my friends and whatnot? If we just learn more about gardening, raising some really simple livestock, preserving food. And here's what I found. It was therapeutic as hell. I'm now the main guy that loves

• 45:28Speaker 05

  to garden in the house. I've got my tomato plants and my zucchini and my cucumbers and everything else. We've raised, you know, pigs before, haven't had the best luck. But we've raised pigs before, meat chickens, regular chickens. We know how to raise goats now. It's, what we found is that it was a positive thing for which we already had some level of interest in, and it provided a level of resilience. And then it provided a level of opportunity to learn something new that was kind of fun. And then it provided a new community of people that thought the same way about this particular problem. And oh, by the way, we're more than happy to help and encourage you in it. And then, by the way, it provided an opportunity to be able to spend time with your kids, working on something or trying something out that was, that was fun.

• 46:13Speaker 05

  Like, part of my son's homeschool, you know, project this year is he loves sriracha. All right, dude, well, I just grew a bunch of red jalapenos, they're turning red. We're gonna sit there and we're gonna learn how to make this.

• 46:26Speaker 05

  So, find things that you already have, like, if something really concerns you to the point where, hey, this keeps you up. And you have some sort of talent or skill or just interest. And how you could potentially alleviate that? Start there. Start there. Learn something new. Learn a skill. Get a part of a community. Again, I found, I cannot tell you how much encouragement and joy I have found in, and I would not consider myself like a full-on homesteader or anything like that.

• 46:58Speaker 05

  But just the, going to one of these conferences where there's four or 5,000 people there. And everyone's got their, their kind of things of they, this person keeps bees, like, we keep bees now, right? These person keeps bees and this person over here, they raise, they raise cattle. And this person raises pork and this person has a really great process for, you know, maximizing your tomato yield or something like that. And they can't wait to tell you about it and they can't wait to help you with it. And they, they want you to be successful and they're honest about, oh, dude, I did this and I totally botched it. That exists for all kinds of things.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  So finding those communities of people with like-minded values and then developing those, those core strengths and capabilities that make you more resilient and don't make you as dependent upon, you know, the latest policy that comes out. Like, okay, now I know that I have a community where I'm not, I don't have to trust the public school system with my children. Because now I feel empowered to be able to do that myself.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  I don't have to trust the grocery store, the supply chain or COVID lockdowns to determine where I'm going to be able to get food. Because I know the rancher down the road, because I met him at the homesteaders convention. I know how to grow a significant portion of food. And you know what? I can trade and I can do these other things. And you know what? I don't need to be worried about the hospital telling me I'm not allowed to come anymore unless I've got a vaccine because I'm good friends with the nurse that I met at the Homesteaders Convention or that I met at something else I did. Build those sort of communities that add resilience, that make you less dependent. Because the more dependent you are upon a government, which is perfectly willing to tell you what to do and try to micromanage and control your life for your own good, of course, the more you're dependent on them, the less likely you're going to be in a position to be able to resist if you really need to. And that doesn't just apply to a government.

• 48:42Speaker 05

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

• 49:04Shawn Ryan?

  Very point. You know, it, it comes down, I think in the end, it just, it comes down to sacrifice. And you see all these people, just like you said, somebody's got to find, we've got to find somebody to fix this. Well, if you're not willing to sacrifice anything for your own well-being, nobody else is going to give a shit about your well-being, you know? And it's, it's, so it could be the simplest sacrifice is, don't shop there anymore. Change schools. Put your kids in, in a different school. Homeschool your kid, you know? I mean, that would be significant, homeschooling versus, versus going to school. But it's all these little things that you can do, you know? Don't listen to that channel. Don't watch that channel.

• 49:49Shawn Ryan?

  Don't do this. You know, just quit supporting what doesn't align with your values.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  And you don't even got to, I mean, if you think about it, especially now, there are so many options out there in so many ways. It's not like you're sacrificing in the sense of like, okay, I'm, I'm pissed at Target, so I'm not going to shop. You've got all kinds of options. Or I'm mad at, um, you know, Hulu and so I'm not going to, you know, whatever it is. Okay, replace it with something else. I mean, that's how, I mean, when you, when you, when you talk to people when they deal with issues of addiction and things like that, very seldom is it exclusively just stop doing that thing. It's you replace something negative with something positive.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  You replace something that was perverse or, or bad, or whatever it is, with something that's actually uplifting and good. And, and after a while, you end up seeing how your preferences change in favor of the good, the more exposure you have to it. The bad is easy. That's one of the biggest, that's one of the biggest allurements of it is it's easy. It's dopamine hits. It's convenience. But if you think about most of the things in your life that actually give you like real, a real sense of like meaning, purpose and accomplishment. They weren't the things that were the temporary little dopamine hits. They were something that actually required a little bit of refinement or not just motivation, but discipline.

• 51:14Shawn Ryan?

  Sacrifice.

• 51:15Speaker 05

  Yes. Some, some, like initial sacrifice upfront to where the thing that you were sacrificing to do this over here, all of a sudden became the thing that you, you truly enjoy. And you said something else that I, I like about. I've gotten a little bit, let me put it this way. I understand the, the colloquial nature or the common nature of the ways, but I've gotten so sick of hearing people say like, I'm gonna fight for this, I'm gonna fight for that. I'm gonna, what do you mean going to?

• 51:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 05

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

• 52:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 05

  Screw you. Get in the fight.

• 52:07Shawn Ryan?

  There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. And there's a lot of people listening right now.

• 52:14Shawn Ryan?

  Especially when I'm talking about this school thing who are listening, they're going, yep, that's, that's me. Kids still going to the same school. Nobody's watching them. Nobody's, there's no

• 52:25Speaker 05

  How dare you make me feel bad about my decision?

• 52:27Shawn Ryan?

  There's been no security measures for the next active shooter, but because it happened two months ago, we're just gonna let this slide and let it go until the next time.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  Cause what's, what's the chance?

• 52:36Shawn Ryan?

  And then we'll all raise a big shitstorm and do a bunch of yelling and outrage and make a bunch of social media posts and then nothing's gonna change and we'll all shut up and go, you know what I mean? It's the outrage crowd.

• 52:47Speaker 05

  The only thing that they want to change as far as the outrage crowd, or typically, what they want to change is, is they want to drastically infringe on the rights of people that didn't go in and shoot up any schools.

• 52:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  That's their solution. This guy went in and shot up a school. What's your solution? Hey, all of you that didn't go in and shoot up a school, hand over your guns.

• 53:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 05

  Because that's gonna deter this guy. And I'm looking at this going, wait a second. Guns have been around in massive quantities in the United States for hundreds of years. Schools have been around for, for, you know, over a hundred years in the United States. Like the large scale public schools that we, we see now on some level. It used to be that during hunting season, boys would show up with their shotguns in the truck on school so they could immediately get out to the fields as soon as school was over.

• 53:34Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  Yet we didn't have this problem. So here's my question. If we're thinking about this logically, because I, I get the, I get the visceral emotional reaction to the tragedy. I understand that. But an emotional reaction, that emotion that you feel, that's an invitation to thought. And if you don't actually say, I want to understand this problem well enough to be able to actually offer something beneficial to solving it, then you're not trying to solve a problem. You're trying to solve how you feel about the problem. You're trying to get rid of your angst. This, this, this makes me feel bad and I don't wanna feel bad. How can I not feel bad? I'm gonna, I'm gonna go on social media and I'm gonna demand that

• 54:16Speaker 05

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

• 54:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 05

  I'm one of the good people. No, you're not. The only problem you wanted to solve was your own angst. Because if you really wanted to solve this problem, you would start asking questions like, "Why are school shootings like this a recent phenomenon in American history?" Gun ownership is not a recent phenomenon. Schools are not a recent phenomenon. People taking guns to schools is not a recent phenomenon. If you look at the example I used with respect to hunting. So why is it different now?

• 54:52Speaker 05

  And that's the part where I think there's two things you have to look at. One is, how do you address the immediate problem? Well, I don't think you address the immediate problem by telling a bunch of people that did nothing wrong that they have to give up essential civil liberties. I think you address it by having more security in the places which have become vulnerable targets. That's how you address the immediate problem. The larger problem that you have to address, and this is the part that they really don't want to talk about, is how do we get to a point where there is such a disregard for human life? That somebody believes that a perfectly legitimate way to express their frustration with the world is to shoot the most innocent within our society? Well, I don't know. Maybe we're gonna have to start to ask some real questions about this whole concept of there being no such thing

• 55:37Speaker 05

  as objective truth or objective morality. On some level, what did we expect? You teach kids that if it feels good, do it. That there's nothing wrong with them. Their just self-esteem needs to improve. That when something does go wrong, it's everybody else's fault, or it's society's fault at large. That they're part of either an oppressed or oppressor class by virtue of their birth. They don't have any say or control over it. There is no objective morality. There is no objective truth. And it's all just about self-actualization. What's the most truest version of you that you can get to? And anything standing in the way of that is bad, even though we don't have any mechanism

• 56:21Speaker 05

  to declare something objectively bad. But that's bad. It stands in the way of you being you. What happens if one day you being you is manifesting that frustration in an act of violence against somebody else? Well, then those same people that peddled that philosophy to that kid, since they were little, show up and say, "How could you do this?"

• 56:44Speaker 05

  What do you mean, how could they do it? There's no good and evil. There's preference, there's self-actualization. There's the truest form of me.

• 56:51Shawn Ryan?

  I never thought of that.

• 56:54Speaker 05

  You don't get to raise a society of children that have repeatedly heard from an early age that everything is everybody else's fault and there's no such thing as good or evil. It's just about perspective and narrative. And then be surprised when it manifests itself in something truly horrible. And now all of a sudden, you don't have a way to categorize it.

• 57:13Speaker 05

  Or the only way you can categorize is you have to borrow from the very morality that you said didn't exist.

• 57:20Speaker 05

  Unless we're willing to address that at a fundamental level, then yeah, we're gonna, we're ending up in a really horrible situation where we need more armed security at schools. I don't want that to be the perpetual existence of our educational system. But I don't know how it can't be

• 57:38Speaker 05

  if we're gonna continue to tell kids that they're just accidents of evolution with no ultimate purpose or meaning in their life. And this is all about the quest for power or the quest for pleasure. And then be surprised when they find pleasure or they find power in ways that we never anticipated.

• 57:54Shawn Ryan?

  It's a damn good point. On the topic of school shootings,

• 58:01Shawn Ryan?

  do you have any plans on, do you have any ideas on how to fix this now?

• 58:07Speaker 05

  I think there's two ways that we, there's a couple of different ways we have to address it. So in the realm of politics, you always gotta think from this, from the position of, what's the ideal? And how do I move people toward it that don't wanna get there?

• 58:22Speaker 05

  So obviously, the ideal would be, we don't have to worry about this. It's just not something that we have to conceive of. It doesn't happen.

• 58:29Speaker 05

  Again, we have to address the philosophical side of this.

• 58:35Speaker 05

  One of the biggest problems that we have on that side too is an absence of fathers in the home. Now, a lot of dads today are gonna say, well, that's because the wife kicked me out or whatnot. I get it. I realize that everything is messed up with respect to the concept of the nuclear family right now. But if you wanna look at every crime statistic out there, fathers not being in the home is one of, is probably the leading indicator of whether or not your child is going to get in trouble, react violently in situations, end up in jail, et cetera, et cetera.

• 59:04Speaker 05

  So a lot of that is not a, that's not a political solution. We can't solve that. And politicians telling you that we can solve it by taking people's guns are either horribly ignorant or lying to you. And regardless of what the reason is, they don't deserve a position of public trust. So, all right, we have a, we have a vulnerable area. The vulnerable area is the school. If you are going to insist on maintaining the public school system the way it currently exists, where we essentially assign you a school based off of your geography, then you're gonna have to have more armed security with respect to the schools. You're also gonna have to look at other security measures that you can put in place, which make it more difficult for someone to get into that environment and commit mass, you know, violence.

• 59:48Speaker 05

  So that does come to a degree with armed security. Because one of the things we do know is that people don't tend to target places where they know that there is competent armed security. Part of it has to do with defensive measures with respect to how you protect kids within the classroom. How do you make it difficult for someone to be able to enter a room? All of those things. Nobody's satisfied with those things because it doesn't stop the guy from showing up with the gun. It just creates a bunch of countermeasures to that. The other side of this, and this is something that has always confused me, and I don't mean to go off topic, but it's somewhat related. There's this example that I use when I try to explain what I think is problematic about the way that we run schooling in this country.

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  And here's how I usually explain it. I said, I want you to imagine that, you know, we all, we all recognize education is incredibly important. We all recognize that kids should all be educated. We also recognize that we want everybody to have enough food to eat. So let's assume one day a bunch of politicians got together and said, you know what's the primary way to solve this food issue? Is we're gonna open up 10,000 government grocery stores. And we're gonna assign you a government grocery store based off of your address. And when you show up to the government grocery store, you're not actually gonna shop for any of your groceries. Your groceries are gonna be handed to you based off of a local and state board, which will determine the appropriate caloric intake for your family. Now, if you don't like what's in your grocery bag, no problem. You're just gonna go ahead and lobby your local board and your state board,

• 1:01:17Speaker 05

  and you're gonna attempt to get them to add different things to your grocery bag and take other things out. But of course, when they make those decisions, it won't be for your family alone. They'll be making it for all of the families within the state or the jurisdiction. Not to mention the fact that none of the employees working at this government grocery store are ever gonna be rewarded based off of their own ingenuity, work ethic, creativity. They're just gonna be rewarded based off of seniority. The longer they're there, the more they get paid. Anybody think that would be a good way to manage food or grocery stores? It is exactly what we did with public education. You are assigned a public school based off of your geography, and you're required to go to it unless you can afford an alternative, even though we tax you for it. Then, when you go to it, you have no say over your curriculum. You have no say over your class structure.

• 1:02:02Speaker 05

  You really have no say over a lot of the extracurriculars. It is what it is. Now, if you wanna change it, you go to your school board, or you go to the state, and you lobby the government to try to change it, while powerful unions and other institutions, which have far more influence than you, compete against you. And then, none of the teachers are really rewarded based off of their creativity, ingenuity, or work ethic. They're just rewarded based off of their seniority. We have created a situation, which I don't think works well for education, and which I also think creates significant security issues. Because if you are someone looking for a vulnerable target, well, a school full of 3,000 students might actually fit the bill. So how could we reimagine education in such a way to where we actually get better educational outcomes, and we create better security situations?

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  Well, if we had a system, and some people don't like this because the government's still involved, I acknowledge that. But if you had a system where dollars follow students, well, now, as the parent, I get to choose if my kid goes to that school or that school. So now, when that school decides... We don't think armed security is the answer. Sweet, I'm taking my kid and their money and I'm going to this school over here. Well, they do think armed security is important. And just like you said, what happens? Well, now we have market forces in play. And if you're the sort of school that doesn't want to take school security seriously, you're gonna lose students, which means you're gonna lose funding. Right now, if school screws up, they get more funding in the hopes that that will make the situation better.

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  And if it doesn't, well, it's probably because they need more funding. And you see how this perpetual loop works. So part of it is the, is yes, if we're gonna keep the school system the way it currently is, we're gonna need a lot more armed security and a lot more defensive measures. And then I would argue, we're also gonna need a lot harsher penalties for people that actually commit those sorts of acts of violence. On the, on the family side and on the philosophical side, we're probably gonna have to stop telling kids that there is no such thing as objective, you know, morality or objective truth. From the, from the parent's side, we're gonna have to start telling parents, guess what? It is ultimately your responsibility. And I know that's, I know that kinda sucks. And I'm certainly not telling a parent who had their child shot at a school where they never anticipated there would be a problem, that there's somehow to blame. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you have this as a concern

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  and you're not doing anything about it, I'm gonna start to ask, why is that? And if it's like, because I feel powerless. Well, if you feel powerless with your kid at that school, send him to a different one. Well, I can't afford to. Okay, on some level, I'm willing to work with you to figure this out, but... You gotta sacrifice something. You've gotta figure out, how big of a concern is this for you? And then secondly, if we can actually get with a model where now parents have real power, because right now, parent's solution to security issues, or any issue at their school is, I'm gonna show up to my school board and I'm gonna talk at my school board. And then I'm gonna try to elect school board members, or I'm gonna try to elect state legislators that set the policy.

• 1:04:57Speaker 05

  Okay, those are worthwhile endeavors. But imagine the moment a school doesn't take the security of your child seriously. You call them up and say, "Just wanted you to know, little Sally, little Johnny, yeah, I'm pulling them out of your school and I'm sending my kids to a school that actually puts..." That's an immediate response. That gives you instant power. And here's the real question that we should be asking. Why are so many people in a position of political power and influence? Why are so many people in a position of bureaucratic influence, so terrified of a prospect, of a system, that would give parents that kind of immediate power with respect to the education and safety of their children? Someone tells me, maybe they're benefiting so much from the system as it is,

• 1:05:43Speaker 05

  that they don't want any changes to that. They just want guns taken away.

• 1:05:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 05

  I don't think it really solves the problem.

• 1:05:50Shawn Ryan?

  What about, um, let's talk about red flag laws.

• 1:05:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Shawn Ryan?

  I know you're big on that.

• 1:05:57Speaker 05

  I, I think red flag laws in a, in a, in just like a popular setting, are the easiest ones for the other side to argue for. Because we, we all have this natural inclination that, well, yeah, of course, we don't want, you know, violent, unstable, you know, people dealing with significant mental health issues, to be able to go out and buy a gun. That all seems infinitely reasonable. And, and on some level, that is, right? That narrative is reasonable. But that's not necessarily what red flag laws do. What a red flag law does is it says that, like in Virginia, if you have a concern about somebody, let's say you don't like your neighbor,

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  and you can go to the magistrate. Magistrate is not a lawyer necessarily. They've just been appointed by the court. You can go to the magistrate and say, um, "Yeah, I think my neighbor is a real threat." That magistrate then conducts an investigation. Now, what are the guidelines or how thorough does that investigation have to be? There's not a whole lot of guidance on that. A lot of it's up to the discretion of the magistrate. And so now, without any court proceeding, without any trial, without any charges level against you, an emergency protection order is now issued. Law enforcement can now show up and confiscate your guns. Right? And then you have to show up in order to prove why you deserve your property back and your rights back.

• 1:07:25Shawn Ryan?

  This is actively happening in Virginia?

• 1:07:28Speaker 05

  Oh, exactly, happening in a lot of states. Now, the argument that they will say is, well, look at all these positive use cases where somebody that, you know, had a mental illness, probably shouldn't have a gun, was potentially stopped from hurting themselves. I can acknowledge that. But do you not see how this couldn't be weaponized by a magistrate? How it couldn't be weaponized by somebody maybe going through a custody battle? By somebody that's going through any number of issues where they're just anti-gun and they don't like their neighbor and they got a magistrate that'll go along with it? This ends up being not only a potential infringement on your Second Amendment rights from a federal level or in Virginia, it's Article 1, Section 13 of our Constitution. It's also a potential violation of Fourth Amendment rights, of First Amendment rights?

• 1:08:13Speaker 05

  Because how are they gonna, what are they gonna use as evidence that you're a violent person and need to have your guns confiscated? Because here's the trick. If you're online making threats that you're gonna hurt someone or shoot someone, that's already a violation of law. So now we've created this secondary category specifically for this issue. Now, one of the ways that they'll try to use to justify it is they'll say, well, this is gonna prevent suicides. You know, my friend, my brother, my whatever is struggling with ideas of, or suicidal ideation. So I call up the magistrate and I tell the magistrate, my brother just called me, he's threatening to kill himself, I need an emergency protector over so we can go and take the guns. Now, if you're the magistrate at that point, the only evidence that you have is that somebody

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  called up and said that. But what is every ounce of you screaming to do at that point? Issue the protective order. You wanna help somebody.

• 1:09:08Speaker 05

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

• 1:09:51Speaker 05

  The next thing he knows is law enforcement came over to confiscate his property and leave, and he didn't get any say in the matter. Have you left him in a better mental state as a result of that? See, if you put all the emphasis on, well, we passed a law which says the police have to get the guns. So clearly, that's going to be executed flawlessly, right? No. You hope it will. I hope it will. But I don't get to make decisions based off of what I hope will flawlessly happen. I don't get to make decisions with respect to your civil liberties based off of me, golly gee willikers, really hoping the government doesn't look for a way to actually extend its authority into ways that might be highly inappropriate.

• 1:10:32Speaker 05

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

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  So yes, I'm always going to give greater deference to your civil liberties. Now, you violate that, you violate law, you make threats, you engage in violent activities. Oh, I'll be more than happy to absolutely use the full extent of the law to throw the book at you. Because if you're a threat to innocent people, my objective at that point is I need to protect them. I need to protect this free, innocent person versus the person that is trying to exploit or hurt them. But the problem that we have with red flag laws is I think that most of the way that they're written are far too broad and it invites... Certain magistrates, Commonwealth attorneys and everything else, or district attorneys, depending on your state, I think it invites a mechanism which denies you what we would

• 1:11:39Speaker 05

  generally consider the appropriate due process of law before we can not only confiscate your property but deny you your civil liberties.

• 1:11:46Shawn Ryan?

  I agree with it. Do you think that there is a way to do it where that that doesn't happen?

• 1:11:53Speaker 05

  I think if I had more faith in the fact that the people that are placing, that are passing these laws are only passing them because they can't get something bigger, maybe there would be a world where I would be more comfortable with that sort of authority, provided it was narrowly written and that there was far more protection for due process. But the same people that every campaign season I see show up and say, "Nobody wants to take your guns," then sit there as soon as they get power and they draft legislation that

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

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

• 1:13:05Shawn Ryan?

  Good point.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  Makes me wonder sometimes if there isn't an additional motivation with respect to people carrying legislation that would take away the voting rights of tens of thousands of people in Virginia alone that they know probably don't vote for them.

• 1:13:23Shawn Ryan?

  That's a damn good point. I've not thought of that. Wow.

• 1:13:33Speaker 05

  This is why one of the most important jobs I have in the General Assembly is I sit on Subcommittee One on Public Safety. I'm the chairman of Subcommittee One. That's where all of the gun legislation comes. And I can tell you, that is a heartbreaking committee to sit on. Because you have to listen to some of the most horrible stories of people that were victimized. And it is, you feel an incredible amount of empathy for them, and you want to help solve that problem. The issue is, is that there's always some politicians sitting next to them that have convinced them that their little girl or their little boy or the person they love would still be alive if only we had this

• 1:14:13Speaker 05

  assault weapons ban. If only we had this micro stamping. If only we confiscated this. And you're sitting there looking at them going, "You are lying to this grieving parent." And then you gotta sit through it. You gotta make the best arguments you can. And then you have to do what you know is the fundamentally right thing to do, which is to protect civil liberties. And then I walk over to my other committee on Courts of Justice, and that's where we work to make sure that the people that perpetuate these sorts of crimes go to jail for a long time or never come out. What's fascinating is the same politician that will be sitting next to that grieving parent, telling them that if only we had this assault weapons ban, their child would still be alive, is some of the same people

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  that will go into the Courts of Justice Committee and drop legislation to try to get the sort of people that killed their child out on parole earlier. Another good point. And that is the part where you will sit there with just absolute fury. That the solution that they sold to this one parent was to deny people that did nothing wrong their civil liberties, not to mention the fact that their ability to protect themselves. We have over a million use cases in the United States every year of someone using a firearm to protect themselves. Those are victims that never were because they had a firearm. They're victims that would become victims if that politician had their way. They would especially become victims because that same politician goes into a separate

• 1:15:41Speaker 05

  committee and drops a bill to let the sort of people that engage in violent crimes out of jail early. That sort of hypocrisy, that cognitive dissonance is just infuriating.

• 1:15:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it'd be nice if they just enforced the laws that they had passed already.

• 1:15:59Speaker 05

  Oh, well, but the laws we have already are racist and part of a horrible patriarchal system which is designed to oppress people.

• 1:16:06Shawn Ryan?

  Along the same lines, it would be nice if the FBI actually took the information that was fed to them and did something about it rather than, well, I won't even say rather than everything they're doing, just in addition to.

• 1:16:19Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:20Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, time and time again, they've been tipped off about active shooters and nothing happens. Why, why is that?

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know. I don't understand, I don't understand some of the priorities, especially on our federal law enforcement side. I do understand, but when I sit there and I, and I watch the sort of things that are being taught or the sort of courses that our federal law enforcement officers are being required to go through, and now increasingly are, are men and women in the military, I'm looking at it going, these are the most bizarre priorities I can imagine. Um, yeah.

• 1:17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break.

• 1:17:47Speaker 06

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:18:22Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Nick, we're back from the break. You are a part of the Virginia House of Delegates 30th District. You are on the Science and Technology Committee, the Militia Committee, the Police and Public Safety Committee, and the Finance Committee, correct?

• 1:18:36Speaker 05

  So they change around a little bit.

• 1:18:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:38Speaker 05

  So now I'm on Courts of Justice, Public Safety, Finance, and Education.

• 1:18:43Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, interesting.

• 1:18:47Shawn Ryan?

  I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but if I don't know it, then I know that there are a ton of people who don't know it either. So I'm gonna set my ego aside. What is the Virginia House of Delegates? My civics, I'm a little rusty on.

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  No, no, I think most states have like a House of Representatives or an Assembly, or a General Assembly or something like that. And so they call their representatives Representative or Assemblyman. In Virginia, we have the House of Delegates, which the best way to think of it is it's like the House of Representatives on the federal side, it's just for Virginia. So I'm a state representative in the lower house. We have a senate and a House of Delegates. Kind of a cool little plug for the House of Delegates or the Virginia General Assembly as a whole is actually the largest continuing, continuously operating legislative body in the Western Hemisphere. We're over 400 years old. And we recently got to celebrate

• 1:19:45Speaker 05

  our 400th anniversary at the Old Capitol in Jamestown. And I gotta tell you, as a history guy, I represent James Madison's district. So

• 1:19:58Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:19:58Speaker 05

  I got to go down there representing James Madison's district at the 400th anniversary of the largest or the longest continuously serving legislative body in the Western Hemisphere. And it was awesome.

• 1:20:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool, man.

• 1:20:10Speaker 05

  It was awesome. Yeah.

• 1:20:11Shawn Ryan?

  That is.

• 1:20:12Speaker 05

  The first time I walked into the, the, uh, the House floor, um, I got there a little bit early because military, right? We're always 15 minutes early. And I remember they, they walked me in and, um, and the, the gentleman that was showing me where to go, he's like, I'm gonna go see if anybody else is here. And so we left and, and for a couple of minutes there, um, it was just me sitting on the, the floor of the Virginia House of Delegates. And I remember looking around at the portraits of the speakers and, and everything else. And you're thinking about all of the decisions that have been made within this legislative body from, I mean, independents to, um, and I remember thinking there's got to be some

• 1:20:54Speaker 05

  mistake that I've, the guy is standing here right now. But yeah, so that's, that's what it is.

• 1:21:00Shawn Ryan?

  So what is it? What is it you guys do? Break it down for me a little bit.

• 1:21:03Speaker 05

  So we're, uh, We are, so we operate, uh, very similarly to how Congress operates. Um, you know, the House submits bills, the Senate submits bills, we go through a, um, by, um, you know, that whole legislative process goes to the governor's sign, and then if governor signs it, it's law. Um, but a couple of things that are unique about most state legislatures and, and Virginia certainly falls in this category, we have what's called a citizen legislature. And that means we're not full-time, like in the Capitol legislating all the time, which is wonderful because the last thing you want is politicians sitting around dreaming up new laws. Um, we go down for, in, in even years, we're there for 60 days and in 60

• 1:21:47Speaker 05

  days, we will go through 2,000 bills. Um, and we'll also set up our biannual budget.

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  And it looks kinda like how you see it. We get on the floor, we debate with one another, bills go to the committees, we do all that process. You know, House bills go to the Senate, Senate bills go to the House, and then we go through that process and then sign it. But we're paid a little under eighteen thousand dollars a year to be a delegate. It's not supposed to be, you know, enough money to live on. And then we have our office budget to take care of a staff. It's usually enough to fund one full-time staffer. The Virginia Legislature, the House of Delegates is a hundred members, which means each of us represent eighty thousand people, give or take, which is bigger than most states. And but once we get done with our sixty-day session in even years, our forty-five-day session in

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  odd years, we go right back to our district. That's where we live, that's where we work, we have our regular jobs. I think it's, I think on the whole, it's much more in line with what this country was designed to be, which is to say that we have a very limited, constitutionally-oriented, limited government that is really focused on go do the business of the people and then get back to real life. So that's, that's what we do in the legislature.

• 1:23:12Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. You're on the Education Committee.

• 1:23:16Speaker 05

  I am.

• 1:23:17Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into some of that. Before we do, I just got a question from a patron real quick. Patron, I have a subscription account. The patrons, that's what enables me to be here and what enables you to be here. Here it is. I have three girls and a fourth child on the way. What, in your opinion, are the most important things men need to get right as fathers? And is fathering daughters different than fathering boys?

• 1:23:43Speaker 05

  So I think the most important thing I always go back to is the faith structure that you build your family around. Because it is, it's the beginning of your whole worldview. The other thing I'll say with fathers, I think the most important thing is that you do represent, you are supposed to represent an element of leadership and stability within that family unit. You're supposed to be the calm in the storm, not the storm. Let me put it a little bit differently. For them, you're the calm in the storm. For anyone that would hurt them, you're the storm.

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  And when it comes to raising sons and daughters, yeah, it's different. With your son, you're training your replacement. You're training someone that is gonna be a part of a legacy that maybe it started before you. Maybe you're the one that's starting it. But they're gonna have to take that over and they're gonna have to build it up and preserve it and pass it on for their son to do the same thing. They're going to have to protect, provide, they're gonna have to fill those roles.

• 1:24:45Speaker 05

  For your daughters, a lot of it is about establishing a very high level of trust where I don't care what any, I don't care what any girl says. They all want their dad to be protective. They don't want him to be tyrannical, but they want him to be protective. And I will tell you, you will look back, my oldest daughter's 20, I have a 17-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter. And this last year for, or this year for Father's Day, I said, "I want one thing from you. I want each of you to write me a letter and I want you to tell me something that we did together that was meaningful to you.

• 1:25:24Speaker 05

  And I want you to tell me something that you wish I would change to be a better father."

• 1:25:30Speaker 05

  And what was amazing about that was the little things that made the meaning. I mean, you'd think it'd be some big trip we went on, or that time we all went to Disneyland or something, nah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 05

  Nah, it was something little. It was always something little. Give me an example.

• 1:25:53Speaker 05

  Teaching my younger daughter how to shoot.

• 1:25:57Speaker 05

  What did she wanna learn how to do? She says, "She wants me to teach her how to throw a punch next."

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  But it is things like that when you are present. And I would think for men, one of the things that we do, this is one of the traps that we fall into with raising kids. We get so focused on the protection and the provision because that's how we're demonstrating love. And that's fair, those things are demonstrations of love.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  But you can't expect your little kids to know that. You have to verbalize it. And sometimes, one of the most powerful things that you can do is when they're asking for your attention on something where you're busy. You can't always do it. You can't always break away. But every once in a while, do it. Every once in a while, set it down and go drink some fake tea. Right? Every once, set it down and go wrestle with your little boy. And sometimes they'll say, "Well, do they even remember it?" Does your three-year-old ever remember when they're 16 that you sat there and had tea with them? No. No.

• 1:27:09Speaker 05

  But the five-year-old version of them does remember what you did when they were three. And then the five-year-old builds additional bonds. And then the 10-year-old version of them remembers what you did when they were five. And by the time they get to a teenager, it is muscle memory. You love them, you protect them, and they know it. Dang it, man. And so when you have to discipline them, they don't question why you're doing it. They know it's because you love them. When you have to set down rules, it's not because you're a tyrant. It's not because you say so.

• 1:27:53Speaker 05

  It's because you want something so wonderful and perfect for them, and you are doing everything you can to help them achieve it. And at the times where you have to say no or buttress by all the times that you were there for them when they needed you, they will trust your judgment when you really, really want them to.

• 1:28:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:10Speaker 05

  So, that's what I'd say.

• 1:28:12Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. You must be one hell of a dad.

• 1:28:17Speaker 05

  I hope so. But I, like all men, I focus a lot on all the things I did wrong. But I will say, when I open those letters from my kids, I don't know who was cutting onions next to me or doing something else. But yeah, that's... Being able to... Like I said, I still see all the things that I should have done better, could have done better, need to do better tomorrow. But man...

• 1:28:47Speaker 05

  Having a good relationship with your kids where they will, where they will trust you, especially when they want to do something. And you say, I just don't think it's, I don't think it's right. And they will say, okay. One other thing I gotta add. If you're gonna teach your kids that there is such a thing as right and wrong in this world. And it's not right or wrong because you say. It's right or wrong because, you know, God says, or it's right or wrong because it's just right or wrong.

• 1:29:18Speaker 05

  There's gonna be a time where they catch you being wrong.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  And in that moment, and this happened to me, the vividly remember it. My daughter, she was about 13, 14 at the time, but I remember coming home from work. I was very upset. My two youngest kids had destroyed the kitchen. And soon as I walked through that corner and I saw the kitchen destroyed. I was,

• 1:29:46Speaker 05

  I was back in the military, man. You do this, you do that, you get to your room. I don't know, daddy, no, get to your, I don't wanna hear it. I don't wanna hear it. Go now. Right? I'm in charge. I told you what to do. Go do it.

• 1:29:59Speaker 05

  Oldest daughter, who was again 13, 14 at the time, comes in, knocks on my door and says, Daddy, can I talk to you for a second? Yes, sweetheart, go ahead. She had let me cool down.

• 1:30:11Speaker 05

  She goes, Daddy, I don't think you handled that very well.

• 1:30:15Speaker 05

  Now, every ounce of my male ego wanted to be like, oh, oh, well, please dispel some of your young teenage wisdom on me on it. And I was like, you know what? She knocked on my door. She is being very respectful.

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  Let's hear her out. And she goes, Daddy, the reason why Ally and Luke were down there in the kitchen is because they got permission from mommy to make you something. And they were really, really proud of being able to make this for you when you got home. And now they're too scared to say anything because of how upset you are. Oh, man.

• 1:30:58Speaker 05

  And I looked at my daughter and I said, sweetheart, you're right. I am wrong.

• 1:31:08Speaker 05

  I did not handle that well. And I apologize to you, and I'm gonna go apologize to them. And I really appreciate the fact that you had the courage to come and tell me. So, thank you.

• 1:31:23Speaker 05

  The reason why that part is so important is because what a lot of parents do is they don't teach their kids what to believe, or why to believe it, or that there is objective, right and wrong. What they teach their kids is an incentive structure for obedience. Do what I say because you'll get in trouble if you don't. Do what I say because I'll reward you if you do it.

• 1:31:48Speaker 05

  That might work out fine when you're the authority figure. What happens when it's the college professor? What happens when it's the politician? What happens when it's the boss? What happens when it's someone that doesn't have your best interest of your child and mine, or doesn't share your worldview on anything? Well, they're gonna obey, because that's what they've been taught. And so, one of the most powerful episodes you might be able to ever have with your child is the point where they catch you on being wrong, because we all do it.

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  And actually rewarding them for having the courage to stand up to authority. Because ultimately, right and wrong doesn't flow from us. And so, those are just a couple of things that I would say, um, served me well.

• 1:32:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you definitely just impacted me. There's no doubt about that. Thank you for sharing that.

• 1:32:41Shawn Ryan?

  Let's push education. Let's push it to the right a little bit. Let's get into fatherless society.

• 1:32:51Shawn Ryan?

  You talk extensively on this. How do how much of society is fatherless?

• 1:33:00Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, pardon me for the interruption. This next segment is all about fatherlessness in the United States and what a problem it has become. Since the interview, some statistics, more updated statistics have developed, and Nick contacted me and asked me to give the most updated statistics. This is from Fathers.com. Here we go. An estimated 24.7 million children, that's 33%, live absent of their biological fathers here in the US. That's from the US Census Bureau.

• 1:33:36Shawn Ryan?

  57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent of their biological father. That source is from Family Structure and Children's Living Arrangements. And lastly, more than 20 million children in this country live in a home without the physical presence of a father. Millions more have dads who are physically present but emotionally absent. If it were classified as a disease, fatherlessness would be an epidemic worthy of attention as a national emergency. That's how bad this is.

• 1:34:17Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get back to the show.

• 1:34:22Speaker 05

  So it depends on the overall demographics. We are probably approaching, I think we're approaching close to 50%.

• 1:34:34Shawn Ryan?

  50%?

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  Actually, it's probably closer to 40 at this point, overall. Because I want to say, the last time I looked at it, within, in America, within the black population, I think it's 73%. Within Hispanic, I believe it's over 50. With Caucasian, I believe it's somewhere around the mid-30s. And then with Asian, I believe it's under 10%.

• 1:35:04Speaker 05

  So when you add all that up together, I think it's somewhere around like we're around in that 40 percentile mark, but don't quote me on that.

• 1:35:13Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think we could definitely bump it up to 50% because one thing that I'm not hearing in those statistics are the fathers who, and mothers, who just passed the phone to raise their kid. And there's a lot of that.

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. And the, and again, whenever you break that down by demographics, people get mad at you. And I'm like, I don't, I don't know what to tell you. Like, this is, this is what we see. This is what the numbers say. The guy that's probably done some of the most extensive work on this is Thomas Sowell. And I have this joke where I say Thomas Sowell is a national treasure and he's not allowed to die because the amount of work that he has done on economic and social policy and the way that he explains complex principles to a very broad audience is incredible. Plus, he's a total smart ass. He's really, really fun to listen to, fun to read, I think.

• 1:36:08Speaker 05

  But Thomas Sowell started working on all of this with respect to the breakdown and part of what he was building on was work that Patrick Moynihan had done. And yeah, there's a, there's a genuine crisis in this country with respect to fathers. Now, some of those fathers want to be involved and they're legally not permitted to because custody is usually awarded to the mother 80% of the time.

• 1:36:29Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on. Why are people getting mad at you for talking about factual statistics?

• 1:36:34Speaker 05

  Because that's racist.

• 1:36:35Shawn Ryan?

  It's racist?

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's racist? Okay.

• 1:36:39Speaker 05

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

• 1:36:46Shawn Ryan?

  It's a statistic. It's a factual statistic. I mean, you can back this up, correct?

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Shawn Ryan?

  It's a factual statistic.

• 1:36:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Shawn Ryan?

  How is that racist?

• 1:36:55Speaker 05

  Because it doesn't convey the narrative that's appropriate or because I don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the reason why that exists is because our government has been, our government is set up in fundamentally systematically racist ways designed to destroy certain families based off of their skin color. Now, I will say this, I do believe when you look at a lot of the programs that we have put in place, we've incentivized divorce and we have incentivized taking the kids. We've incentivized breaking apart families. You get paid to break apart the family. You don't get paid to start a family. I mean, you could argue child tax credits or things like that. But we have an era where men are growing up with the full knowledge that if they get married and they have kids,

• 1:37:40Speaker 05

  and she decides to leave and take the kids, the government will pay her to do that, plus the government will require you to pay her to do that. And so that has a disincentivizing component on marriage. This is one of the issues that I always get into whenever we look at public policy. People look at public policy and what they want to, they want to look at is what are the intentions behind the policy? Here's the problem. The problem is, is let's, for instance, it is very, very hard for a single mother. I know, I was raised by a single mother. Okay, well, how do we, how do we help single mothers? Well, let's add additional funding that will assist a single mother with respect to raising the kids. Okay, makes sense. But what have you, what have you just done at that point?

• 1:38:24Speaker 05

  You've actually incentivized single motherhood. Now, you can say, well, nobody would choose that. Nobody would? Because that's certainly not true. We absolutely know that people get pregnant, and part of the reasons why they do it is because, obviously, the activities surrounding pregnancy are usually a lot of fun. And then the other component is there's income that comes based off of having that child. And if you're having a child out of wedlock, you get paid by the government. If you're having a child within wedlock, you don't get paid by the government. So how does that incentive structure work? Now, you can say all day long, I don't think most people would choose that option. I agree.

• 1:39:09Speaker 05

  I absolutely agree that most people will not choose that option, but some people will. Now, what happens when all of a sudden you've chosen that option, and now you're raising a kid without any positive male role model in the home, or at least not a father in the home? Well, that has a whole host of other societal consequences that generally go with it. Now, are there kids that completely overcome it and do very well? Absolutely. Do I still put a great deal of emphasis on the response, personal responsibility of the individual to make decisions? Yes.

• 1:39:38Speaker 05

  But should the government be incentivizing destructive behavior? No. Of course, people always look back and like, "Well, what's your solution?" Well, I don't know, but last time I checked, we didn't always live in a country where we had this many out-of-wedlock births. And my solution is not walk him into a clinic and get rid of the kid. My solution is, what if we once again recognize that the value of a strong nuclear family is beneficial not only for moral reasons, but for very practical reasons? Like, they treat these things like they're just arbitrary social constructs we came up with yesterday. No, there's reasons why centuries of humanity

• 1:40:22Speaker 05

  has said that when you have a situation where you have a stable home with a mother and a father fulfilling different, but equally important roles, it's the best basis for raising a family and creating future citizens for which society will be built up of. But then whenever we find any sort of problem with the system as it is, and we try to interject with the government program, we create perverse incentives. I know what it's like to be poor. I know what it is like to have my heat turned off in the winter because I couldn't pay the bill. I know what it is to feel like a complete failure as a man and a husband. The difference was, is that when I had to get help, when a friend or a family member had to come in and help me,

• 1:41:04Speaker 05

  I felt a sense of gratitude, obligation, and a need to reciprocate. When the government comes in and just hands somebody a check, you are completely disconnected from the person that actually had to sacrifice in order to help you. And now the politician, which sacrificed nothing because all they were in charge of is taking from this person and giving to this person, they have every incentive to keep you in a perpetual state of dependence. And that's my problem with so much of this is government, government policy has contributed to destruction of the family in this country. I absolutely believe that. The way that we get out of that is that we're gonna have to start asking our question of what, what gives a marriage significance?

• 1:41:46Speaker 05

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

• 1:42:29Speaker 05

  Our kids will not know what that was like. And so, again, sometimes, sometimes my male audience gets mad at me because they feel like I am disregarding that the, the nature of the field with respect to finding a spouse, it has changed so much from when it was me 24 years ago. And I, and I don't disregard that. I know it has gotten so much harder because the culture is just fighting against them every single chance they get. The only thing I can say to them is, dude, there's no alternative. You have to be the one to save it. And you can either say, screw that, it's not my job, or you can embrace it.

• 1:43:13Speaker 05

  But you're gonna get a whole lot more value from embracing it, even when it doesn't work, even when you have to go through things that you shouldn't have had to go through. You know that, you know that cycle they always talk about? Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create strong men. Bad times don't create strong men. Strong men are once again appreciated for what they bring to society in bad times. But you choose to be that. If you're waiting around for bad times to make strong men, that doesn't happen. Strong men are made by other strong men. Strong men flourish when society recognizes that the value that they bring, the stability, the leadership. When they recognize that, embrace it and appreciate it for what it is, that's what creates the good times.

• 1:43:57Speaker 05

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

• 1:44:12Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:15Shawn Ryan?

  Have you taken on more people than your son?

• 1:44:17Speaker 05

  So, I, yeah, I used to teach at a homeschool co-op. And then, um, one of the things that we do with our, with our podcast, we actually have a separate chat. And so, um, I have a lot of dads that will come in, or I'll have a lot of young men that will come in and they will ask for advice. And I try to spend time doing that. We try to, I will craft various videos, um, based off of advice that I'm getting asked for, so I can put it out to a broader audience.

• 1:44:47Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I'm, I try to look for opportunities where, um, you know, when it's needed.

• 1:44:54Shawn Ryan?

  So, there's so many kids growing up without a father today.

• 1:44:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Shawn Ryan?

  Tons of them, you know? And, and like I said, and there's a lot of kids who do have a father that's not present today. I see that, I see that everywhere I go. I see it in Home Depot, I see it in, it, it, it, anywhere I go. You know, you see these teens, REI, go there a lot.

• 1:45:20Shawn Ryan?

  And on one hand, I'm, I'm, I'm happy to see teenagers, a few teenagers still going out and getting jobs.

• 1:45:26Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:45:27Shawn Ryan?

  But you see the confidence level in a lot of these kids. And it's, it's at the floor.

• 1:45:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:33Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:45:50Speaker 05

  Well, I, I don't want to say that. I did, I did still have my father in my life.

• 1:45:53Shawn Ryan?

  You did?

• 1:45:53Speaker 05

  I did. I did still have my father in my life. I, I, I always try to be careful about this, because when I say, like, I spent the school years with my mom, and I spent the summers with my dad. I didn't get the amount of time I wanted with my dad, but the time I got, he really did try to make it meaningful.

• 1:46:09Shawn Ryan?

  Where did you fill that void? And how can a kid today? I mean, if we're talking 50% plus of the population is fatherless. Where are they gonna find the attributes to become a good father?

• 1:46:22Speaker 05

  For me, my grandfather was heavily influential on me growing up because he lived, my dad's dad, both my grandparents, lived in Northern California where I would go to, I'd spend the school years. And so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. And I got to spend a lot of time with my paternal grandfather, my dad's dad. That was beneficial. Coaches, I honestly think, I have a good friend of mine where, you know, every once in a while, like, are you picking up another sport to coach? And I would say he loves sports, but he also recognizes that what breaks his heart is when

• 1:47:05Speaker 05

  he is there and like his son plays and whatnot. And it always broke his heart, the number of, number of boys that would be on his team that they only saw their dads on game day, you know, if that. There's another, there's another group. My, actually, my future son-in-law, my oldest daughter's got engaged, great guy. He's a counselor and a big dude, too, like 6'5". And, you know, we have these different groups. They've tried to set up things on how to teach men to be men, young gentlemen, like those sort of these like young gentlemen's clubs. And they do everything from teaching them how to like properly wear a suit, handshake,

• 1:47:50Speaker 05

  look a man in the eye. And then they'll bring in speakers to talk about, you know, everything from being in the military and combat, running a business, you know, maybe playing sports or whatnot, but trying to convey certain ideas of what is the, what is the proper, what does good masculinity look like? And trying to provide some sort of model for, for kids that haven't, haven't seen it. Yeah.

• 1:48:16Shawn Ryan?

  You talked about something about homeschooling.

• 1:48:20Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:48:21Shawn Ryan?

  Love to talk about that. I got a two-year-old, almost a two-year-old, and actually, by the time this comes out, he will be two. Got another one on the way.

• 1:48:35Shawn Ryan?

  Big topic of discussion between me and my life is my wife is where are we gonna put these kids in school? Yeah. Public school

• 1:48:45Shawn Ryan?

  seems to be out of the question. Private school, we're on the fence about we live in a place where I see it's very family oriented here. And I see more and more and more kids being yanked out of the public school system and becoming homeschooled. Yeah. You know, and

• 1:49:08Shawn Ryan?

  I see, I see positives and negatives to that. I was homeschooled a little bit growing up. Um, negatives obviously being socialization, you know?

• 1:49:20Shawn Ryan?

  We've thought a lot about this. I'm gonna run this by, I'm just curious what you, what you think of this. We've come up with a plan and I don't know if this is gonna work because I'm, we're very, I'm an introvert. My wife's an introvert. We don't have a big

• 1:49:37Shawn Ryan?

  community pool to draw from here, but one thing that I would like to do and is and I think this takes care of the socialization aspect is we've thought about

• 1:49:51Shawn Ryan?

  recruiting like-minded individuals because we're not happy about what's going on in the schools either. Now I do hear that some people say this, this stuff is going on in the schools. Some people say it's not going on in the school. I don't have a kid in school. I don't really wanna find out. Yeah. I see more that are concerned about the public school than not, so.

• 1:50:13Shawn Ryan?

  And it sounds like, I haven't heard it here in Tennessee, but I have a lot of friends in Florida. This has bled into the private schools as well.

• 1:50:23Shawn Ryan?

  And there's a lot of things I just don't want my kid.

• 1:50:27Shawn Ryan?

  I don't want him to see it. Yep. And so what we thought is

• 1:50:32Shawn Ryan?

  If we could get a group of like-minded parents, this isn't a business, this isn't anything like that, and we invest in a piece of land. Put it into a trust, everybody has equal ownership, or, I mean, you could even break the ownership up.

• 1:50:49Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:50:50Shawn Ryan?

  You know, build a schoolhouse on it. This is not, it's not a school. It's not registered, it's not, it is a lot of land. That you may put, that, that just happens to do homeschooling.

• 1:51:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, so you put it into trust, it becomes, it becomes a real estate investment. You know, for the people that are, that are, that are involved in the trust. And then you hire a teacher. I mean, a lot of these teachers don't want to be teaching this garbage anyways. They want out. Hire a teacher, what's that gonna cost? I mean, about $50,000 a year, you know, to hire the teacher. They teach the core curriculum, then everybody, you know, who has a child in the school. For us, it would probably all have to be kids around the same age, maybe, maybe 10 kids, let's say. You know, and then each parent comes in and they teaches their, to teach their expertise, whether that's plumbing, whether that's finance, whether that's homesteading, auto mechanics, whatever.

• 1:51:53Shawn Ryan?

  And by the time it's done, I mean, your kid is gonna be so well-rounded in all these different aspects of life that, that schools don't teach at all. I mean, look at finances now, it's a, it's a disaster. It always has been a disaster, now it's just worse.

• 1:52:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:52:09Shawn Ryan?

  And, and then when it's over, the realis, the piece of real estate gets sold. Everybody gets their dispersion of money and, and hopefully, I mean, the real estate always goes up. It's, they're gonna make money. What do you think of that?

• 1:52:26Speaker 05

  They're not making any more land. I think it sounds like a great idea. Here's, here's what I'll say, like, I always try to be careful when I talk about educational options because I realize that there are parents in situations where it's like, look, we are fighting to keep it, you know, make ends meet. We take one income out of the, the pot and we're in a lot of trouble. So, my biggest problem has always been this idea that we're supposed to, then again, that the government's coming in and telling everybody, this is the ideal way to educate children. Well, you're doing a bang-up job.

• 1:53:02Speaker 05

  I think that most, most services, because that's what education is, it's a service, work better when the people that are using the service have options in accordance with what the objectives are. So, for instance, with a student, you kind of have two customers. You have the child and you have the parents. The child's the one that's getting the benefit of the service, but the parents have a guardianship and a responsibility over that child to make sure that the service that they are getting is actually equipping them. We don't see that anymore, right? Anymore. It's like, no, no, it's the government's job to educate my kid. That's why I pay taxes. Nope, it's yours. And whether you're rich or whether you're

• 1:53:44Speaker 05

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

• 1:54:25Speaker 05

  at that school that you really, really like. Totally get it. Whenever my wife always got asked the question about socialization, she would always say, she'd always look at someone and just goes, have you ever had a puppy? Yeah? Did you train and socialize your puppy by keeping it exclusively with other puppies? No? Yeah. She goes, the public school model does not replicate real life. It is the only portion, it's the only part of your life that you will ever be running into locations based exclusively off of your age group, instead, these are now your peers.

• 1:55:04Speaker 05

  In that class of 25 kids, you have some kids that are reading this percentile, sometimes that are reading this. You have some with maybe with mental health issues. You have some with learning disabilities. You have all this stuff in this one class. Those are your peers. Why? Well, because age-wise and geographically, they live closest to the building. That doesn't make sense. Well, what are their objectives for education? Well, it doesn't matter because the states already decided that these are the objectives for education. So here's all I would say. Just remember, public school, and I don't mean this to sound like nefarious or mean. It's just, it's a practical reality. Public school is not made with your child in mind. Public school was made with the mass production of education in mind. So you're going to get a mass-produced product.

• 1:55:48Speaker 05

  When it comes to, okay, so what's the alternative to that? I mean, you can dream up a thousand different ones. You just, you just came up with, or you guys have just been talking about one that makes an incredible amount of sense. We did one that was a combination of homeschool and then also a co-op. So our kids, one day a week, would go and they would, you know, go to certain classes, especially on subjects that we didn't feel competent to train them on. I mean, you throw an Algebra II book at me and that might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphics, right? Like, I don't, I don't know. Stop putting letters in my math, right?

• 1:56:21Speaker 05

  But here's, here's what I would, here's what I would say.

• 1:56:25Speaker 05

  I, I think it's actually, it can be a very intimidating thing for parents, but remember that it's an intimidating thing in part because there's a whole industry which profits and benefits from you believing that this is completely beyond your capability. It isn't. People have been educated for centuries without the current public school model that we have within the United States. Here's the other thing to keep in mind. I don't care if it's a public school. I don't care if it's a private school. Almost all of those institutions, and some private schools are a little bit better about this, but almost all those institutions are going to be getting their pool of teachers from the same place, and that's the university system. If you're going to Penn State, you are almost definitely gonna get some aspect of critical pedagogy

• 1:57:09Speaker 05

  as part of your formal training to become a teacher. One of the big things, and when there was a huge battle in Virginia, and this showed up on the Daily Wire and everything else about Loudoun County and some of the other things that were going on, is critical race theory in the classroom. And I got sent, and I got told that I was a racist because I claimed that, yes, this is infiltrating into our school system, critical theory and critical race theory and queer theory. No, it isn't. Show me the curriculum. Okay. They were asking for the curriculum within their children's curriculum. I said, "No, no, no, that's not where you need to look at it." Here is all of the various things from the Virginia Department of Education website. Here's all the classes, courses, various materials that they give to teachers to be able to use.

• 1:57:53Speaker 05

  And what were those provided for? "Oh, it was provided by all these outside organizations." "Let's click on that." "Oh, look at this. It's teaching about how to make your child an anti-racist child based off of things from Ibram X. Kendi." Ibram X. Kendi believes that there should be a federal Department of Anti-Racism, which is not elected and has the power to overrule any local, state, or federal law by fiat. That's authoritarianism. But I could go and I could point to all of it. And they're like, and that was what was so pernicious about the lie. "I'm teaching your teachers that this is the way they need to think about society, that this is the lens through which they should teach math

• 1:58:35Speaker 05

  and history and English and writing and everything else." So yeah, it's not in your kid's curriculum per se, which is to say your kid could come home and say, "Oh, look, today we're studying critical race theory 101 or queer theory 101." No, what you did was you took the people responsible for educating them and you ran them through all of the training. I said, "So let me give you an example." And I said this to my colleagues on the floor. I said, "Let's say we came up with something similar. And we said that now is a condition of getting your teacher's license in the Commonwealth of Virginia, you have to go through a bunch of training taught by the Catholic Church." Right? All of your training, your worldview training, everything. As a teacher, you're going to be taught

• 1:59:19Speaker 05

  that what the Catholic Church says explains everything that you see with society. Now go teach math. Would you come back here? If I came back here and I said, "What do you mean Catholicisms in the school? Show me in your kids' curriculum where..." No, you'd recognize that what I did in order to get my agenda through was I made sure that the teachers had to study it as a condition of their licensure.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  So the thing to keep in mind is that almost every professional school out there is going to require a certain amount of credentialing. You should probably ask some important questions with respect to where that credentialing came from and what the actual worldview of the teachers that are... Because there's a ton of good teachers out there. A ton of good teachers that sat through all this crap, didn't believe it, and then came in and are doing an excellent job in the classroom. But still understand that that's the reality. So when you talk about like various homeschool things and you have people tell you like, "Show me your master's degree in education. Show me your PhD in education." Do I need a PhD in education to teach my kid how to read? I mean, especially now,

• 2:00:28Speaker 05

  with relatively little effort, I can find some of the best programs on the planet to teach literacy to my kids, which by the way, it's mainly phonics-based. Right? So here's what we did with our kids. I'm not saying that everybody should do this. This is just what we did. We've been pretty happy with it. When our kids were very little, we ran them through very, very kind of standard curriculum that you would expect. They learned about history. They learned about math. They learned about reading. They learned about writing. Why? Because you gotta learn how to read, right? Like, this is a non-negotiable. This isn't one of the... This isn't woodshop versus, you know, learning how to code. You gotta learn how to read. So, great, we did what we needed to. All of our kids read. You gotta learn how to do basic math.

• 2:01:13Speaker 05

  Two of our kids struggled with math. One of our kids struggled with reading. We... Do we wait around and call up a school board to see if we could change the curriculum? Do we ask the school? No. It's like, okay, we're gonna try this curriculum now. And we're not gonna try the curriculum three years into realizing there's a problem. We're gonna try it now. And then what we did is very early on, we found the things that work and we found the things that didn't work. And now, all of a sudden, my son, who is very good at math, but reading took him a little bit longer when he was younger...

• 2:01:43Speaker 05

  He was able to excel in math because he wasn't waiting for the rest of the class to pick up, nor was some rest of the class waiting for him to pick up in the areas where he needed more instruction. Same thing with my girls. My girls excelled in certain areas and they had difficulty in other areas. We could adjust the curriculum as needed, but we didn't have to slow everything down on the areas that they were good at. They could excel as far as they could go. And then when it came to socialization, did we put them in situations where it was just their peers? No. We put them in constant situations, whether it was, you know, going to places or events, or, you know, me being involved with politics or things like that, where they were forced to interact with people younger than them, the same age and older than them on a regular basis. It became natural for them. They're comfortable talking to adults because they've always had to talk to adults.

• 2:02:29Speaker 05

  They're comfortable, you know, helping out and working with little kids because they had to do that for each other with elders and younger siblings, but they also had to do it with other friends that we had that would come over and they'd help babysit or whatnot. And so I feel like that created a far more well-rounded socialization experience. Plus, we got that, we got that basic core education that everyone needs to have. Well, now when they got older, we started to ask more questions like, where are your interests at? So if all of your interests are associated with things that are more, let's say, English-oriented, or history-oriented, or science-oriented,

• 2:03:07Speaker 05

  well, then that's where I'm going to start to, that's where we're going to start to develop you more. Like, my oldest daughter loved things associated with English and the arts and the creative. She couldn't stand math. We got her up to a level of math that every basic person should understand, even though now you can probably pick up your phone and figure it out anyway. We equipped her with the tools that she could use to get to the math problems that she needed to do, but am I going to sit there and make her go through an additional three years of math just so I, as a parent, can say, "She got trigonometry"? No. I'm going to let her focus in on the things that actually give her joy and actually feed into the things that she wants to do as a career. And so now, learning isn't drudgery. It's a thing that she's using to prepare herself. Not to mention the fact that education is no longer seen as,

• 2:03:52Speaker 05

  "Oh yeah, that's where I sit down and I open this book and I do this thing." Education is, "These are the capabilities I'm developing to make myself socially and financially capable."

• 2:04:06Speaker 05

  And so when you have the freedom, like when you discuss like we're gonna, we're not staying at school, we're not staying because we don't want all the rules and regulations and everyone else telling us what we gotta do.

• 2:04:16Speaker 05

  When you have the freedom to adjust and to adapt,

• 2:04:21Speaker 05

  I mean, it opens up everything. And the one other thing I would leave on this for consideration,

• 2:04:29Speaker 05

  I have really started, and I need to dive more into this. So I'm not suggesting that what I'm about to say is the correct interpretation. It's something I'm trying to work out of my own mind.

• 2:04:40Speaker 05

  I am really starting to wonder if some of the things that we call disorders

• 2:04:45Speaker 05

  are only disorders because we've pushed kids into a particular model of education and learning, and it doesn't work for them. And if you just adjusted it, all of a sudden that which is a disorder would become a capability.

• 2:04:58Speaker 06

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• 2:05:28Speaker 05

  Yes, there are times where every student needs to be disciplined. Sit down, be quiet, read, do your stuff. You gotta teach that, gotta teach that. But if your kid's full of energy, and they work well when they're able to get out there and learn kinetically, does it make sense to put them in a classroom for eight hours a day and then say, "Gosh, they're just, they're not working, you know, we need to drug them up. That's what we need here." Because clearly, whatever they have isn't conducive to the educational model that we've assigned them. What happens when all of a sudden, you tell my son, "You've got to sit here for eight hours and do stuff." He is gonna, he'll do it because discipline says he has to. But he's gonna hate it, and he's gonna feel stupid.

• 2:06:12Speaker 05

  On the other toe, by the other side, you say, "Hey bud, your assignment today, you're interested in welding, you're interested in blacksmithing, your assignment today, for the next couple of days, you're gonna build a knife on the forge." He will go out there and pound steel till 1:00 in the morning, and do it with a smile on his face, and feel a sense of accomplishment, and he'll learn stuff, and he'll figure it out, and he'll problem solve, and he'll go on YouTube, and he'll look up another video. Why? Because he's interested. So, I am, I'm almost horrified to think that one day, we're gonna find out that, "No, that kid didn't have ADD. You just stuck that kid in an environment, learning environment that was absolutely not created for him."

• 2:06:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:57Speaker 05

  Whereas if you would've just adjusted it over here, he would've been able to flourish.

• 2:07:01Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think there's an attack on homeschools?

• 2:07:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I'll say this, the educational establishment, the teachers' unions, and many within higher academia, there are many that do not like homeschooling. They know that they can't quite get rid of it. And in part, that's because homeschooling is oftentimes thought of as a religious or conservative thing. Go up to Washington State, I mean, it's hippies doing unschooling. Which for me, I'm like, "Hey, your kids, you know, they're getting an education, doesn't have to look the way I educate my kids." That's the amazing part, is that out of all this, I'm the tolerant one. I'm not the one saying, "You gotta send your kids to me for their education, and I will decide what their curriculum is, and I will decide what the school day looks like, and I will decide what the standardized tests look like." I'm not saying that. That's the other side, the so-called tolerant people.

• 2:07:52Speaker 05

  But no, there are people that absolutely believe that, you see this in Europe a lot, that education is the province of the state.

• 2:08:02Speaker 05

  And that is a common belief within the higher ranks and higher echelons of teachers' unions. They do not like homeschooling. And they will always point to bad examples of homeschooling as evidence for why they should be the ones in control, while ignoring the failures within the public school system as evidence for why they shouldn't be in control. So I would not be surprised if in if in certain states over time, you start to get a much more authoritarian push for bringing all education under the realm of the state. And a lot of it, and the way they will justify it is that those parents sinking maybe

• 2:08:42Speaker 05

  more of a religious-based education or just not reinforcing general narratives. All of a sudden, what will happen is it will become, I mean, you always see this in California and other places, I think Washington State, where they're saying if your kid wants to, it used to be you shouldn't interfere with a parent if they want their kid to transition. Now it's you shouldn't interfere with the child if the parents don't want them to transition. Right? That's nuts. Well, do you really think it's a big jump from, oh, no, by the way, you are not qualified to homeschool your children? And they have to come to the state school, the government-run school, because that's what it is. It's a government-run school. We call it public school. It's a government-run school. You have to come to the government-run school. Otherwise, you might teach them

• 2:09:24Speaker 05

  dangerous principles and ideologies, you know, that are oppressive and toxic.

• 2:09:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's already happened in this county. You were talking about co-ops, homeschool co-ops. We had, I know of a church here in this county who had, who was, they weren't teaching, but it was a co-op.

• 2:09:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:09:41Shawn Ryan?

  And I think they could come like two or three times a week. Well, now with the influx of, whatever you want to call it, the influx of people coming into this county, a red county from blue counties. Now we're starting to see all these things change, you know, and and I'm like you, if you want to send your kids to public school, I don't care. Send them to public school. That's fine with me. Now they have a person, so they are now targeting these co-ops. And they hit one church.

• 2:10:21Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:10:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:55Shawn Ryan?

  And, go figure, where's this? I really try not to go here. Where's this person from? What community they're in? LGBTQ plus community. Targeting churches to shut down the co-ops so they can teach this shit in schools. So that they can force these kids. They don't even have kids. You know, and that's happening right here in this county.

• 2:11:19Speaker 05

  That's not, and this is, this is another thing where, and I'm not suggesting anybody, I'm not suggesting everybody in the LGBTQ community takes the theory that I'm about to put forward, but I will say this. Marx despised the nuclear family. He saw it as an element of oppression. And, and if you look at, if you look at the, again, critical theory, not critical race theory, but critical theory from which all these other things kind of derive, there, there is a general antithesis to the idea of the nuclear family having authority, because that takes away from the collective experience that we're all supposed to have. Everything is supposed to be democratized. This is, you want to

• 2:12:04Speaker 05

  say something to shock a room full of students. I was at UVA, which is not exactly known for a bastion of conservatism, because it's in Charlottesville, Virginia. And I, and I was talking about how democracy is not synonymous with freedom.

• 2:12:22Speaker 05

  Democratic processes may very well be a necessary component of a free society. It is not a sufficient component. But it's amazing to me, the number of people that think they should be able to impose whatever they want, provided that 50%, plus one of the population agrees with them. That's not a free society, that's just the tyranny of the majority. And it is...

• 2:12:46Speaker 05

  At first, it started off as confusing to me, because one minute I would hear all about tolerance and acceptance and diversity, and I'm like, "Okay, great." Then we're gonna allow tolerance and diversity within our approaches to education. And we're gonna allow different people to try out various things in order to see which works best, so the best ideas can rise to the top. But we're also gonna recognize that we probably need an education system as diverse as the learning and objectives, learning needs and objectives of the student body. And to shove everybody into a fairly one-size-fits-all model probably doesn't make a lot of sense. Right? Wrong.

• 2:13:20Speaker 05

  Because it's far easier to control, not just the education, but the narrative and the ideologies that are being taught, if you have a centralized bureaucracy that you have to control.

• 2:13:32Speaker 05

  There is a reason why, in almost every single, every single thing I can think of, leftist ideology prefers centralization.

• 2:13:43Speaker 05

  Our philosophy tends to prefer decentralization, because we have a natural skepticism of the concentration of power in too few hands.

• 2:13:55Speaker 05

  But this idea that, "Well, no, no, it's fine for the power to be there, as long as we all voted on it."

• 2:14:01Speaker 05

  I ask, this is, this is an old analogy, but I think it's one that works and it explains a lot. You would never shot, you would never eat at a restaurant that was democratic. Never. You would never go into a restaurant and say, "Okay, all right, everyone in the restaurant, here's your menu, here's all the various items, we'll be voting in 15 minutes on what the appetizer will be. And then we'll be voting in 20 minutes on what the main course will be, and then we'll be voting on dessert, and we'll be voting on drinks and all of that." "Well, can I just, can I just order what I want?" No, that's anti-democratic. We're all gonna vote on what everybody's gonna have.

• 2:14:36Speaker 05

  "Okay, but what if I don't, I don't like what the majority of people order?" "Oh, so you don't like democracy?"

• 2:14:45Speaker 05

  Okay, and then you get done with your meal, right? And you didn't like what you ordered because you didn't really have a say on it, just based off your individual choice. And now they all do that, and now we're gonna vote on who pays for it. And low and behold, 50% plus one of the people in the restaurant have decided that the 50% minus one have to pay for everybody's meal. Nobody would go to that restaurant. Because a free society is one that actually values individual liberty and choice, combined with personal responsibility. So, I assume responsibility for educating my child. And I will assume costs associated with that. Because I believe that there's greater benefits associated with it. You may choose something else, and I will respect your ability to do so. What is happening more and more now are people are assuming for themselves

• 2:15:28Speaker 05

  control and authority over other people's lives, and now over the lives of their children. Because they've decided that, no, no, no. This is the standard. This is what should be taught. And anything that doesn't hit this standard, it's toxic, and mean, and bad, and we need to get rid of it. And if that means we need to rip your child away from your control as the parent, so we can get them the medical care that we've decided they needed in the form of surgeries, or puberty blockers. Or it means that we're going to educate, we're gonna take over the responsibility for educating your child, because you're not qualified. You're not teaching the things that we believe they need to be taught. At what point do we look at that and say, that's not liberal? That's authoritarian?

• 2:16:11Speaker 05

  In fact, it's getting really close to totalitarian. And the part that I find so frustrating is that for the longest time, my attitude, my genuine attitude has been, I think this is right, and I think this is wrong. But I also believe that you, as a free human being, provided you're not infringing on the rights and liberties and property of other people, you can make different decisions. You can make decisions I don't like. And I won't interfere with your ability to do that. All I ask is that you don't interfere in mine. That construct, that is what's under attack at this point. And you see it in the... The reason why you see so much of it within the education system is because, are they ever gonna convince you of this? No.

• 2:16:55Speaker 05

  So they're gonna try to convince your child of it.

• 2:17:01Shawn Ryan?

  I want to move on from this real quick. I had a question. We had spoke at breakfast about, sorry, I'm totally changing gears.

• 2:17:09Speaker 05

  No, go for it.

• 2:17:10Shawn Ryan?

  The, we had spoke at breakfast about some of the stuff you're doing with your son.

• 2:17:15Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:17:15Shawn Ryan?

  And you're getting ready to jump into, it sounds like wrestling or jiu jitsu with him.

• 2:17:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:17:24Shawn Ryan?

  I think that's awesome.

• 2:17:27Shawn Ryan?

  How are you? No dad wants to lose in front of his son. When you get involved in that, you're gonna lose in front of your son. Have you thought about that?

• 2:17:39Speaker 05

  Uh, I have.

• 2:17:42Speaker 05

  So it was, it was interesting. At this point, you know, it's all training. So there isn't a whole lot of like full on, you know, bouts.

• 2:17:55Speaker 05

  But yeah, we've been going to, you know, it's a combination jiu jitsu boxing gym we have at our hometown. Great guy. And so far, it's been a great experience. Everyone in there is just very dedicated on like, hey, we all want to become better at what we're doing. Like I was a little bit worried we were gonna walk in there. I was like, are there gonna be some hot heads that the moment I walk through the door, it's like, I'm gonna beat his. And it hasn't been. Everyone's been, it's been a really, it's been great.

• 2:18:22Speaker 05

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

• 2:18:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:43Speaker 05

  So that got me back into the gym. It got me back.

• 2:18:48Speaker 05

  And now doing this with my son, doing the MMA training, and I love it. It's been fun. I feel it. Oh my gosh. Doing this at 43 is not doing this at 25. I've learned that.

• 2:19:02Speaker 05

  But yeah, I've had to think about, all right, what, what if we?

• 2:19:06Speaker 05

  What's that gonna be like? And I don't know, but I will tell you this, in the meantime, it motivates me to work harder than I would have if he wasn't there.

• 2:19:15Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet it does.

• 2:19:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I was thinking about that on the drive in. I was like, you know.

• 2:19:22Shawn Ryan?

  That would be tough to lose in front of your son.

• 2:19:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, but I guess the thing I

• 2:19:32Speaker 05

  the thing I don't want.

• 2:19:36Speaker 05

  It would be worse

• 2:19:39Speaker 05

  if my fear of losing prevented me of having that experience with him and going through it. And then I would lose the opportunity to teach him that sometimes you lose and then what you do is you get back up and you go right back in there and you do it again.

• 2:19:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:54Speaker 05

  So, yeah.

• 2:19:57Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:19:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:20:01Speaker 05

  As long as I convince him that he can never kick my ass, we'll be

• 2:20:07Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about, let's talk about central banking and the digital currency.

• 2:20:17Speaker 05

  Well, central banking, I think probably, and specifically the Federal Reserve.

• 2:20:24Speaker 05

  It is probably, if we reach a point where we talk about, you know, we've talked about national divorce and things like that. If we reach a point where you're actually looking at like significant civil unrest. I'm not talking about a summer where, you know, everybody is riding while the weather is good. I'm talking about like sustained problems.

• 2:20:45Speaker 05

  I think that will most likely come from a significant financial crisis. And the kind that are really a source of like absolute like revolution and upheaval.

• 2:20:58Speaker 05

  Generally happens when you have a combination of like a dollar collapse plus like a sovereign debt crisis. And now the government can't afford to pay the cops or the military to enforce its will. Right? That's, that's what you see in other places in other countries.

• 2:21:13Speaker 05

  The reason why central banking, I think has become such a problem with respect to monetary policy is we have engaged in inflationary monetary policy for a long time. And most people think inflation is just prices going up.

• 2:21:31Speaker 05

  Milton Friedman said this best when he goes in the generalized inflation that we're like seeing right now.

• 2:21:38Speaker 05

  Is at all times a monetary phenomenon.

• 2:21:43Speaker 05

  You know, the, if you're, eggs, eggs going, eggs becoming more expensive at the store, that's not necessarily because of inflation. If you had two egg trucks crash on the way to the store and all the eggs were destroyed, well, okay, you just have a supply and demand issue. You have the same amount of demand, you have a diminished supply, so the price goes up. That's how it works. Inflationary monetary policy is the most, again, underhanded pervasive and quiet way that the government screws over its citizens. Because the way this essentially works is in conjunction between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, there's authorization to essentially print more money because the

• 2:22:27Speaker 05

  Federal Reserve is going to buy the debt. And then the Federal Reserve usually sends it over to banks or other, you know, parties that get that money first. So the most important thing for people to understand is that what inflation really is when we're talking about this large, major economic issue, it's when the government is printing more fiat currency, paper money, right? There's nothing backing our money. People still think like, oh, is it gold, is it silver? No. The only thing backing our money is, quote, "the good faith and credit of the United States." That's what backs it. The fact that the United States will accept it when you pay taxes is what's backing the dollar. So when they print a bunch of money, and both Republicans and Democrats have been

• 2:23:11Speaker 05

  guilty of this, in fact, Nixon is the one that completely got us off the gold standard all together. When they print a bunch of money, the value of your individual dollar goes down, right? So just like if, if, if supply remains constant but demand increases, prices go up. If supply remains constant, demand goes down, prices go down, right? And then you, inverse proportion, inverse effects, right?

• 2:23:38Speaker 05

  When the government just prints out a bunch of, the individual value of your individual dollar drops, and that's why prices go up. Because you have a bunch more, you have more money competing for the same amount of resources. The supply of resources did not go up, just the supply of paper money did. But the trick is, is that when they print it all out, because it takes time for prices to adjust to supply and demand within the marketplace. Whoever gets that inflated currency first gets the full value at the point where it enters the marketplace. It takes time for the value of that individual dollar to be depreciated. So if the banks get it first, or investment funds, or whatever, get the money for, get

• 2:24:21Speaker 05

  access to it first, they're getting full value for things. They can buy up resources, they can buy up assets. Not to mention, but by the time it gets to you, as the paid labor, or whatever it else, or the money that you had in your savings account, that's just been diminished. There was just a, there was just a quiet or a silent tax on all of that money. Because the federal government got the full value of what they were printing. And so inflation, inflationary monetary policy is, is one of the worst ways to destroy an economy. So the question people ask is, why did they get away with it? If you do invasion, if you do inflation slowly over time, at the same time that your economic productivity is increasing, you can still maintain a certain level of economic growth.

• 2:25:06Speaker 05

  Doesn't mean it's necessarily good. Some people argue that, well, by, by adding more units of dollars, there's more, you know, money that can be exchanged and circulated and the whole deal. But it's still problematic, but it's nowhere near as problematic. What we saw during COVID was the Federal Reserve print $3 trillion out of thin air, and just throw it at stuff. And that caused massive inflation. Here's the problem, because some people might, well, that was a crisis, Nick. We had to stabilize things. We're working ourselves out of it now. No, we're not. We're well over $30 trillion in debt. And what people don't understand about like the United States budget is the amount of money

• 2:25:49Speaker 05

  that is tied up in what they call non-discretionary spending. That's things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Social Security is run like a Ponzi scheme. And every time I say that, I get told you're going to make old people mad. I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings. I'm trying to just explain what's actually going on. The money you put into Social Security today doesn't go in an account for you when you retire. The money you put into Social Security today goes to somebody else that is collecting on Social Security. If you did that in the private sector, you would be arrested for setting up a Ponzi scheme. But when the federal government does it, it's okay because they have the legal right to do crap like this. So that's what's currently being done. So the question is, okay, well, how do you pay for all of these entitlement programs? How do you pay for all this money that you're just sending out?

• 2:26:34Speaker 05

  How do you pay for the wars that we're fighting everywhere? Like, how do you pay for it? There's three ways. You can tax it, but that pisses people off. You can borrow it, but the problem is, is that you get to a point where people don't want to buy treasuries anymore because the interest that they're collecting off of the treasury bonds that they bought is not keeping up with inflation. So why would I invest my money in a government bond that is actually losing me money? Not to mention the fact that even during good times, they don't provide a high return of investment, they're just safe. The third way, so there we go, tax, borrow, the third way is print. And the problem with printing is that, again, that's how you collapse a currency.

• 2:27:17Speaker 05

  So people ask, well, without the central bank, what would happen? I don't think people realize that we survived in this country all the way into the, you know, early 20th century without any central bank. Well, that's not true. We had the Bank of America early on, but they fought very hard to get rid of it. They actually got rid of the US debt under Andrew Jackson and got rid of the bank. And then we actually had an era of free banking. Now, do some banks still fail? Yeah. But the biggest bank failures in American history have not been before the Federal Reserve, it's been after the Federal Reserve.

• 2:27:49Speaker 05

  So the only thing worse than that is a federal, a Federal Reserve controlled digital currency.

• 2:27:59Shawn Ryan?

  Before, before we go into digital currency, let's, you're a history guy. Let's go back to the Federal Reserve and the goldback dollar. Can you, can you just walk us through a snapshot of what happened and how we got into this mess in the first ways from, from way back?

• 2:28:18Speaker 05

  So the early, I think, I think it was, oh gosh, I might get some of my dates wrong. It was 1913 and then later on, but you, you had a whole host of legislation that happened that kind of fundamentally changed the way that the American government did business in the early 20th century during what they called the progressive era. So a lot of this was under Wilson, but we passed the federal income tax, which was the 16th amendment of the constitution. That was the first time in U.S. history that the federal government could tax you directly as an individual based off of your income. Now they had, Lincoln had done things before during the civil war and whatnot, but it was all very arguably unconstitutional. This made it precedent within the United States. The other thing that we got was the Federal Reserve Act, which set up the central bank.

• 2:28:59Speaker 05

  Now there, there's a book called The Creature of Jekyll Island that will talk about how this actually took place. And there was a lot of people like JP Morgan that were, were pushing for this. And it was modeled in, in some respect off of the Bank of England. And the idea behind the central bank was, is that this is going to provide stability to the currency. The Federal Reserve actually has two like mission statements essentially. One is a stable currency and to fight inflation. And the other is full employment, which is actually kind of a weird thing for the Federal Reserve to be responsible for. But that was the idea was that this was going to be the lender of last resort. It was going to prevent runs on banks. If a bank did have a run, they could give them a temporary loan to be able to get them through a crisis point. And it was going to provide overall stability.

• 2:29:43Speaker 05

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

• 2:30:27Speaker 05

  Reserve, and you have the various Federal Reserve banks all over the country, like we got one in Richmond. And they, they each have, you know, their, their boards with respect to the Federal Reserve, and their job is to monitor their economy, monitor how the currency interplays with that, and to determine, you know, what their balance sheet should look like with respect to how many treasury bonds they're buying, because them buying treasuries gives the federal government money to go spend. And right now, the reason why interest rates are higher is because the Federal Reserve is, is getting rid of those, and it's not, you know, we're not printing more money out. But what it's also doing is it's affecting interest rates. And I, I hope this isn't boring, but I need to explain this really quickly.

• 2:31:08Speaker 05

  A lot of people, because of the way the media portrays this, interest rates almost get treated like there's something the Federal Reserve decides. And in some way, they arbitrarily do. But what an interest rate is supposed to reflect is the amount of money in savings. So for instance, if you're a fractional reserve bank, which means, you know, when you deposit your money in the bank, they don't keep all of it, they're in a vault, they, they loan some of it out, and that's how the bank makes money, and they may pay you a small interest to keep it in there. It's fractional reserve banking.

• 2:31:40Speaker 05

  When there is a lot of money in the bank, which means more people have saved the money they've earned. The bank has an incentive to lower interest rates in order to encourage people to take out loans. Now, the signal this sends to the economy, in a healthy economy, the way it's supposed to work. The signal this sends to entrepreneurs, to business owners, is there's a lot of money currently being saved for future consumption. Because the interest rates are lower, this is actually an ideal time for me to invest in capital projects. That way, I can expand business or I can be prepared to be able to meet future demand. That's how it's supposed to work.

• 2:32:22Speaker 05

  When the Federal Reserve comes in and arbitrarily lowers interest rates, the banks have an incentive to loan out money. There's more money to loan out, right? At lower interest. The signal that's being sent to industry is, oh, this is a good time to take out loans for major infrastructure projects because I'm getting a secured loan at a much lower interest rate than I would over here. So this is where I'm going to build all the houses. This is where I'm going to build all the buildings. This is where I'm going to build these major projects. But what happens when there's no payoff in the end? Because those banks weren't loaning out money based off of increased savings or increased productivity in the economy. They were just loaning out printed money. Well, now I've got all these people competing for resources, the same amount of resources, right? Because no additional productivity.

• 2:33:06Speaker 05

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

• 2:33:45Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. With this, with the debt.

• 2:33:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:33:49Shawn Ryan?

  Three, I'm sorry, what did you say?

• 2:33:51Speaker 05

  It's over thirty trillion.

• 2:33:52Shawn Ryan?

  Thirty trillion dollars in debt. Who do we owe that debt to?

• 2:33:57Speaker 05

  So it's a, it's a, most of it is owed, you could say it's owed to Americans. So it's people that have bought treasury bonds. Some of it is owned by foreign entities that can also, that also have access to buy foreign treasury. Now theoretically, what that does is it allows them to jump, they, if they wanted to like all of a sudden drop, dump all those treasury bonds, that can have an adverse effect with respect to our currency and economic status.

• 2:34:25Shawn Ryan?

  So if we wanted to start paying down this debt, how would we do it?

• 2:34:30Speaker 05

  We would have to cut spending. So you'd have to do one of two things. You'd have to either raise taxes or cut spending and really you'd have to do both. Here's the problem. Politicians don't get rewarded for cutting spending. They get rewarded for spending more until it collapses and then they blame somebody else.

• 2:34:48Speaker 05

  If you really wanted to significantly cut in to not only the debt that we currently have, but the unfunded mandates that we have coming forward, that's social security, Medicaid, Medicare. Because remember when these things started out in the nineteen, the social security in the nineteen thirties, Medicaid, Medicare, I think in the sixties.

• 2:35:06Speaker 05

  With social security, there was a lot more people paying into it than were taking it out. Well, now we have a lot fewer people paying into it. And again, it's not like we're pulling from a reserve fund that you paid into like a regular retirement insurance program or a 401k. So that's the part where you get into a crisis of we don't have enough money to fund all of this.

• 2:35:26Shawn Ryan?

  Is this because of the baby boomer generation starting to draw?

• 2:35:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:35:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that's the biggest generation.

• 2:35:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, baby boomers are, yeah, baby boomers are now moving into retirement. The baby boomers not have as many kids. They're moving into retirement, they're already in retirement age.

• 2:35:42Speaker 05

  And so they're, they're collecting off of social security and they're not about to not collect off of social security. And so, but there's fewer people in the workforce to actually add into it, which is one of the big pushes for more immigration. Because we're not producing enough children to actually keep up with the economic requirements necessary to fulfill our mandates.

• 2:36:00Shawn Ryan?

  So when the baby boomer generation is deceased, do you think this is gonna balance?

• 2:36:08Speaker 05

  Theoretically, it could. It probably won't because, again, the political incentive is to always spend money, not to cut spending. And part of that is because, and that is not because the government spending money produces better economic results, it's because it looks better in campaign ads, right? Nobody wants the campaign ad saying, "You wanna cut social security." They want the campaign ad saying, "We're gonna make sure we take care of America's seniors." Okay, well, if the mechanism that you're using to take care of America's seniors is eventually going to bankrupt the country, you really haven't done anybody a favor. But that's the future politician's problem. That's not your politician's problem.

• 2:36:46Shawn Ryan?

  I think that the baby boomer generation has caused a lot of issues, you know, and it seems to me that every aspect of business is catered towards the baby boomer generation. You know, when they were having kids, when me and you were growing up, all the commercials were, it was toys, it was fast food, it was stuff like that. Now, it's all, look at it, it's all medicine, it's all pharmaceuticals, it's all geriatric stuff, you know, and so you start to see, like, I mean, they're the reason fast food was even, did fast food come with the baby boomer generation when they were kids, correct?

• 2:37:22Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 2:37:23Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so much has been catered-

• 2:37:24Speaker 05

  The fast food as we understand it today.

• 2:37:25Shawn Ryan?

  Towards the baby boomer generation, that it makes me wonder if, when they're gone, if this is all gonna start to balance out.

• 2:37:35Speaker 05

  I don't, I think there'll definitely be, there'll definitely be some differences. The problem is, though, is that our birth rates continue to decline. This is one of the things that Elon Musk said that kind of pissed off all the environmentalists. He goes, "Our problem is not population growth, our problem is gonna be population decline." Because I don't believe there's a single country in the West, the US used to be the exception to this, the US and I think Ireland at one point, that has a population growth above replacement.

• 2:38:04Speaker 05

  So, so right now, like, let's say we didn't have a bunch of immigration. The United States population would essentially remain steady at the current numbers or potentially dip. All of Europe would dip. China is facing a significant population decline. India is going to overtake China in population in a relatively short period of time. There's 30 million more men in China than there are women right now. That's like the population of Canada. That is caused, now, people look at that of like, oh, that want that work itself out of, okay, well, think about this. You have 30 million more men than you do women, which means finding a wife, which is pretty important to the civilization of men, right? It's pretty important, it's completely beyond their reach.

• 2:38:48Speaker 05

  So now you have a bunch of dispossessed young men that can't find a wife, that are in serious economic problems and don't feel any real motivation. One of two things happens with that. That either becomes an enormous economic drain on your economy, or it becomes a really easy rebel group. So, when I, when I look at a lot of these issues with, with respect to, does the baby boomers going through solve the problem? Not if the systemic issues associated with what's going on continue. What, what will end up is different problems. So they might change, but the underlying, the underlying issues are still, are still there with the way that our, our system is set up and the way it's functioning.

• 2:39:30Shawn Ryan?

  How did coming off the gold standard affect all of us?

• 2:39:37Speaker 05

  Essentially, so there was a couple of different moves for that. Like, FDR made it illegal for people to own gold. And then FDR set the price of gold based off of his lucky numbers. That's not myth, that's not hyperbole. His biographers admit this. Anybody that tells you that FDR was a great president? No, he was not. He was absolutely devastating for this country in many ways. I, I can respect some of the stances he took during World War II and everything else, but economically, that guy was a, anyway, I won't use the language I want to. Because he did, he set up so many things, like, he, he modeled so much of what he did under the New Deal off of Mussolini's Italy. To the, to the point where Hugh Johnson, who was responsible for actually running the

• 2:40:21Speaker 05

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

• 2:41:05Speaker 05

  So here's the bottom line, I should have led with this. Here's the bottom line. If your currency is backed by a commodity like gold and that currency represents a certain unit of gold, you can't just print as much of it as you want because it's going to adjust the way that gold moves between various countries because we're working off of exchange rates and things like that. So what that does is it limits the power of the government with the ability to just print gold, or excuse me, print money and spend it. The way they used to do this before paper money was a big thing, they used to clip coins. So like the Roman Empire, it used to be like a denarius with so much silver or whatever precious metal they were using.

• 2:41:47Speaker 05

  What they started to do was clip the actual coins so it didn't have as much of the actual pure metal that had the intrinsic value. And the end result was is that all of a sudden it took a lot more denarius to buy something.

• 2:42:01Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you could still do that with gold coins today.

• 2:42:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:42:05Shawn Ryan?

  If you buy them on the market, they make them like that.

• 2:42:08Speaker 05

  So there's a difference between a currency which is backed by a commodity that has intrinsic value. Gold has intrinsic value and has always been used as a currency because people will accept it. It's universally accepted that gold has value. You could do this with other precious metals as well. The problem is, is that little dollar you have in your pocket that has no value other than the United States government will accept it to pay your taxes. So what gives that dollar value is that you know you're gonna have to pay taxes. And you know, the guy at the gas station is gonna have to pay taxes. So I can buy gas by giving him these Federal Reserve notes and he'll accept them.

• 2:42:50Speaker 05

  Because he knows when it comes time to pay his taxes, the government will accept those Federal Reserve notes. But if you if you don't tie it to something of intrinsic value, you run the risk of inflation and labor later, hyperinflation. And the important thing to understand is that through all of history, the first time that we saw an instance of of hyperinflation with a paper currency was the Yuan Dynasty in China. So we're talking thousands of years ago, right? Or, yeah, about 1500. There's never been a purely fiat currency that didn't experience significant inflationary problems. Because the political incentive to spend is is too great. But if you change that to a digital currency, the real problem now is is that theoretically,

• 2:43:35Speaker 05

  the government has a tie to your account. Like, if you have the paper dollar in your hand and someone will accept it, there's a lot more under the table transactions that can take place as a result of that. But if your entire monetary wealth in the form of or like currency is tied to a digital account, well, then, yeah, the implications of that are pretty significant. Now freezing your account means you're screwed. Right? You're not taking your bag of money and leaving somewhere because there is no bag of money anymore.

• 2:44:08Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm with you. I agree. I think about this all the time with the digital currency. And we're seeing less and less change, you know? And but when I think about it, I mean, we're already seeing the government, not even just the government, we've seen PayPal freeze accounts. We've seen banks turnover. I mean, let's just Jan 6.

• 2:44:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:44:34Shawn Ryan?

  All that banking information got turned over. Canada, those, the, what was that, like the trucker rally or something? All the financials got turned over to the government. I mean,

• 2:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  Not very many people even have cash in their wallet anymore. It's all, it's already digital. It's all credit card. It's all check. There's not a lot of money exchanged, like, physical dollars actually changing hands. So what?

• 2:45:02Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not disagreeing with you.

• 2:45:04Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:45:05Shawn Ryan?

  What I'm saying is, what is the actual difference? When you put it in that kind of perspective and everything is already digitized, how is the digital currency? And they're already manipulating banks into controlling mine and yours money? How's it gonna be any different? It might be a little easier.

• 2:45:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:45:24Shawn Ryan?

  But...

• 2:45:25Speaker 05

  Well, I, that's, I actually think the difference is it makes it significantly easier. So, let's also make a distinction between digital currency and federally issued digital currency.

• 2:45:33Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:34Speaker 05

  Like Bitcoin, you know, Shimo, Shinu, like, whatever, like, all that stuff. That's privately, you know, mined and monitored currency. It actually provides something of a hedge against fiat currency because it's so inflationary. Now, you can have a digital coin that's also inflationary, right? Like Bitcoin is very anti-inflationary, but others are, you know, they can mine more of it, et cetera, et cetera. The difference is that they're usually based off of equations, which is actually kind of what Milton Friedman wanted for the Federal Reserve. That prevents the government from coming in and just printing more of something and then spending it because they want to. Everybody that owns that digital currency over here actually has an incentive to not print off more of it.

• 2:46:19Speaker 05

  So the incentive structure is very, very different. The other thing that's different about a federally produced digital currency versus like paper money or some other, you know, form of money that you can hold in your hand.

• 2:46:31Speaker 05

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

• 2:47:15Speaker 05

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

• 2:47:34Speaker 05

  What are your thoughts on Bitcoin? I wish I would have gotten into it 10 years ago. I forget, somebody was talking about how I think the first Bitcoin transaction that ever took place was eight Bitcoins for a pizza. And if you look at it today, I think that would make it something like a $300,000 pizza, or something like that. Again, I don't claim to be an expert with respect to cryptocurrency. I've owned a little bit, before a very little bit. I find it kind of fascinating. I think ultimately, it has the, it's like anything else. It is a tool, and it is morally neutral. It can be used for good.

• 2:48:18Speaker 05

  It can be used for bad. For me, the biggest advantage to it right now is that it is not owned by a government. And that gives it value to me on some level. I don't think we are at a point right now where we're seeing enough. Most crypto is not used as currency. It's used as an investment.

• 2:48:43Speaker 05

  I think the thing that will cause it to be used more as currency is if you start to see kind of more federal pushback against things like when the federal government starts like deep like Niall Farage got his, you know, they won't bank with him over there because he led the whole issue with Brexit. Like, holy crap. Like, you're gonna, you're just gonna say you can't bank with us anymore? Like, okay, that's fine. But if that's gonna be the mechanism, that's what's gonna open up the opportunity for cryptocurrencies to play more of a role as a traditional currency.

• 2:49:12Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not familiar with what you're talking about.

• 2:49:14Speaker 05

  Niall Farage was the guy in the UK, uh, over on the kind of the conservative side. He was big on Brexit and whatnot. Um, he's actually like, he had a lot of banks, like, there's been a de-banking problem where a lot of these banks have just said, we're not, we're gonna refuse to do business with you. And so the question becomes like, okay, where do I put my money? Um, because obviously that does, a lot of our transactions actually take place through banks, not through just individual, um, because again, we're using that debit card. And we've seen this too. He's, you know, Andrew Tate had a lot of his stuff like taken, regardless of how you feel about Tate, but had a lot of that stuff shut down. And so a lot of the banking, BlackRock does this all the time. BlackRock does this with a form

• 2:49:56Speaker 05

  of DEI, ESG scores. If you don't comply with what they want to see, you don't get investors. And they control $10 trillion, I think, or they used to control 10, now I think it's seven. Um, but that's significant. And so the more of these traditional institutions, especially the ones most closely linked with the governments, start flexing their muscles to say that if you don't, if you don't agree with us ideologically on these things, then we won't give you access to a banking system that you absolutely rely upon to make basic transactions. That's where cryptocurrency, I think, really comes in as a useful alternative.

• 2:50:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Do you think the dollar's gonna collapse?

• 2:50:38Speaker 05

  So my buddy Christian and I, we debate this a lot. He says absolutely. He says absolutely, it's inevitable, it has to happen.

• 2:50:48Speaker 05

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

• 2:51:15Shawn Ryan?

  You gotta be kidding.

• 2:51:16Speaker 05

  No. They were carrying around, like, I have a trillion, I have $100 trillion Zimbabwe bill.

• 2:51:26Speaker 05

  Hyperinflation, it got to the point where it was like, I think, 75,000%. I mean, it was just, it was insane.

• 2:51:34Speaker 05

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

• 2:52:20Speaker 05

  I still don't think BRICS is going to be successful because the countries involved have so much internal economic and social problems. Like, South Africa is so close to becoming a failed state and people don't even realize it. China is facing huge economic. I don't think China is going to be the second richest country in the world in 10 years. They're facing massive, massive problems. The Russian economy is smaller than South Korea.

• 2:52:45Shawn Ryan?

  Is it really?

• 2:52:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:52:48Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't know that.

• 2:52:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I, yeah, so I don't think these countries are going to be able to make good on this for a variety of social, economic and geographical reasons. But the smartest thing I've heard them come up with so far is a commodity-based currency. Because that would, there's going to be a lot of people that regardless of how they feel about the current system, they're going to try to hedge their bets. And if they've got a bet that they can go with, that could cause real problems for the dollar.

• 2:53:17Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it seems like they're making a lot of traction, more and more countries are heading to that. Is it a currency yet?

• 2:53:24Speaker 05

  No, I don't think so.

• 2:53:26Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, Argentina, I saw, seems to be all about it.

• 2:53:29Speaker 05

  Argentina can talk a good damn all day long, but that, if you ever wanted to see a country in the Western Hemisphere that should be a world power that isn't, it's Argentina. And it's because it's been one of the most, you know, effectively mismanaged countries with so much going for it in the way of weather, natural resources and everything else. But they, they, they keep, they keep electing populists, you know, or socialist-oriented strongmen and it's just, it's devastated their overall economic growth.

• 2:54:03Shawn Ryan?

  What are you putting your money in to protect it from?

• 2:54:08Speaker 05

  Uh, ammunition? No, I'm kidding. Ammunition and livestock? Uh, no. I did, I did have somebody once come up to me like, Nick, you gotta invest in silver. I'm like, why do I, this was 10 years ago. And he goes, Nick, you gotta invest in silver. I'm like, why do I gotta invest in silver? He goes, because when everything collapses, you're not going to buy a loaf of bread with an ounce of gold, right? You gotta have, you gotta have something with, you know, that's more divisible than that and it's easier to exchange. I said, Vu, man, I don't, I don't gotta buy silver. He goes, why? I'm like, because I have guns and ammunition. Your silver is now my silver. And now go plow my field. And I kid you not, a week later, he comes into work, he's like, so Nick, I took your advice. I'm like, oh no. Dude, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah.

• 2:54:53Speaker 05

  He goes, I just bought, I just bought three more rifles. Can you teach me how to shoot?

• 2:54:57Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:55:01Speaker 05

  No, I think.

• 2:55:04Speaker 05

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

• 2:55:42Speaker 05

  So I, I think real estate is, is still going to be a valuable commodity to possess. As far as stocks, I, I try to spread it out to where there's, there's something there. I do have a little bit of crypto, but it's, it's almost kind of like backup plan in case I needed to use it as, as currency. But

• 2:56:04Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you on the land.

• 2:56:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:56:06Shawn Ryan?

  I think that'll be, that'll be the last to go.

• 2:56:09Speaker 05

  I think

• 2:56:09Shawn Ryan?

  It all comes crashing down.

• 2:56:11Speaker 05

  Well, cause I, you know, you got a good piece of land. I can, one of the reasons why we got into homesteading is again, it's not because my lifelong dream was to be a farmer or something, but again, I just never wanted to be in that situation where can I feed my family? And I wanted to take some control over that. And a man, a good piece of land, even if it's not, even if you don't see it as an investment, you've got a, you got five acres, a little bit like, especially if you've got some water on it or something like that. The amount of like value that that has in very, very real, practical terms with the amount of food you can grow, the amount of livestock you can raise. I mean, five acres, you're feeding, you're feeding a ton of people with that, man.

• 2:56:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:56Speaker 05

  If you, if you know how to manage it right.

• 2:56:57Shawn Ryan?

  You know, even with the land stuff, I start to get a little bit worried. I mean, I don't know how

• 2:57:04Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know how true this is, but I saw a bumper sticker headline, quite a few of them, a couple of weeks ago, saying that the New York City mayor is now telling people that they may have to take in illegal immigrants into their homes, which means you don't own that real estate.

• 2:57:25Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:57:25Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and then...

• 2:57:26Speaker 05

  That's always, that is always a problem.

• 2:57:27Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I didn't, I didn't, I saw the headlines, I mean, we all know headlines can be bullshit. I didn't look into it that much because I don't live in New York.

• 2:57:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:57:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, so I don't really care. In fact, a part of me thinks, great, good. You guys wanted that.

• 2:57:44Speaker 05

  I'm glad they're finally living with the consequences of their policies.

• 2:57:46Shawn Ryan?

  Well, unfortunately, a bunch of New Yorkers are moving here, but, you know, and they're bringing their ideas with them.

• 2:57:53Speaker 05

  Well, can I say that I think there's, I look at investment as three different levels, right? There's, there's, the, the real estate is, I, I think, practical for, because I think it has, it has intrinsic value. Stocks have a certain degree of intrinsic value, but so many of them, depending on what you get, right, are very speculative. You gotta look at your, your price to earnings ratio or your PE ratio in order to determine, is this company turning over profit and has good, good fundamentals or whatnot? And then you have the, the stuff like, you know, gold and whatnot. And then the question is, is how do you have the gold? Do you have gold in a stock? Do you have gold somewhere else? Do you have gold coins sitting in your safe? I, I think gold is always a good, precious

• 2:58:34Speaker 05

  metals, I think, are, are always good because from time immemorial, they, they've had value and they've always seemed to, you know, gradually over time, increase in value. And it, it also provides that additional thing where I can pick up the bag and leave with it, right? I don't gotta go to the bank first or, or ask the Federal Reserve if they will please, you know, Bank of America, will you please unlock my account so I can get the money that, you know? So I think that's always valuable as, as both as kind of a hedge and as a, a your go-bag, you know, skedaddle bag. Yeah, the, the land I like just because there's intrinsic value inherent within it. And then the speculative stock, speculative stuff. But like you said, there's, there's always the...

• 2:59:20Speaker 05

  The first time in my life, like I, I, I am, I am absolutely convinced I will go down fighting for my country. Um, but I remember not that long ago, I was, I was looking at property somewhere else. And um, someone was giving me crap about it. I can't tell. I was looking, I was looking at Costa Rica.

• 2:59:38Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people are looking there.

• 2:59:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was looking at Costa Rica. Um, you were Paraguay, right?

• 2:59:44Shawn Ryan?

  Paraguay.

• 2:59:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. I think that, yeah, makes, it actually makes probably more sense.

• 2:59:49Shawn Ryan?

  South of the, south of the cartel drug crisis.

• 2:59:53Speaker 05

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

• 3:00:26Shawn Ryan?

  Me too. Me too. You know, the other thing that, uh, I mean, have you seen this New York mayor?

• 3:00:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:00:33Shawn Ryan?

  All the stuff that now he's, he's, he's calling for Biden to lock up the southern border. I saw that too. I saw that yesterday. I saw that yesterday. I was like, man.

• 3:00:43Speaker 05

  It's a sanctuary anymore.

• 3:00:45Shawn Ryan?

  Aren't you a sanctuary? Isn't it amazing that, you know, all these border states now are shipping these, these illegal immigrants up to New York and all of a sudden now that they're in their backyard, they don't like it. What is, what do you think about the, what's going on down there?

• 3:01:01Speaker 05

  So initially, I remember a lot of people being mad, like they should ship them back across the border. Why are you shipping them to these other, you know, citizens? Like, because they have been doing it across the border and the policy hasn't changed because the people advocating the policy don't have to deal with the consequences. And, and that is, um, I think it was, I think it was Thomas Sowell, one of the best quotes he, he ever had, and he has a ton, was he said, one of the stupidest things that you can do.

• 3:01:30Speaker 05

  Is take decisions out of the hands of people that pay a price for being wrong, and put them into the hands of people that pay no price for being wrong. And he was specifically referring to intellectuals and politicians. It's that they get to sit there and wax intellectual and talk about how wonderful and great and tolerant and nice they are. Well, yeah, because they don't got to deal with the consequences of what they're talking about. That's somebody else's problem. The moment it became their problem, holy crap, what a bunch of border closing bigots. Golly gee willikers, turns out, turns out that there's actual, you know, problems with respect to resource allocation and things like that, that this wasn't stuff that racist Texans and Arizonans were making up.

• 3:02:15Speaker 05

  So I told, look, I said to people that were like, well, they should have done this, or they shouldn't do that, like, you know what? Screw it, I'm sorry. The only way you are going to get woke progressives to actually understand the consequences of their worldview is for them to experience the consequences of it. That's it. As long as they can outsource the consequences to other people and they can just sit there and be happy, nice, tolerant people, well, then, fine. They'll do it all day long. They will fight to the last drop of your blood. Right, but the moment, now, look, the thing I don't like, I mean, obviously, we're talking about flesh and blood people here. But at least from what Abbott's saying and DeSantis and everyone else, they're not rounding them up, putting them on the bus and saying,

• 3:03:00Speaker 05

  who would like to go to New York? Who would like to go to Chicago? Who would like to go to Martha's Vineyard? Now, you can argue all day long, do they truly understand what's going on or why or whatnot? But their, their goal, let's face it, their goal was not to get to, you know, a border town in Texas. Their goal was not to get to a border town in Arizona. Their goal was to get to the United States. Well, great, they're... Helping them get, you know, even deeper into the United States as a result.

• 3:03:28Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:03:29Speaker 05

  So I think that, you know, again, as my buddy Christian says, you can ignore reality, you just can't ignore the results of ignoring reality. And that's the problem is that a lot of people have had the benefit of ignoring reality because their bad decisions were being paid for by other people. And now their bad decisions are being paid for by them.

• 3:03:52Shawn Ryan?

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

• 3:04:31Shawn Ryan?

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

• 3:05:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  They're ruining where you live, they're ruining Texas, they're ruining Florida. And it's like this, it's like this disgusting plague that's just coming out. And the governors are just with open arms, "Yeah, come on in, come on in. You want a tax-free state because you voted the fact that the state's going to take 30% of your wages? Yeah, come here. Just come on over here. In fact, just spend six months here. Don't even tell anybody and tell, you can tell all your friends that you're still a resident in California." You know, and they're, they're coming in.

• 3:05:45Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about that?

• 3:05:47Speaker 05

  So what's interesting is that you, you, states don't have the ability to obviously prevent American citizens from coming through.

• 3:05:54Shawn Ryan?

  But they might if they, if they, I mean, what if they had a, like a step down struck tax structure, like, okay, you're gonna come here, you're gonna pay the exact same amount of taxes that you were paying in California for the first five years. And then we're gonna step it down and you're gonna pay 50% of that after another five years. And then after 15 years, then you'll get the tax free.

• 3:06:16Speaker 05

  So here's what I, here's what I would say.

• 3:06:18Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, make them have a little skin in the game.

• 3:06:22Speaker 05

  I, believe me, very, very sympathetic. The, the issue that I have from a policy perspective, one of the phenomenons that we're watching take place right now that is actually different from what's happened in the past, is that people are engaging in more ideologically oriented self-sorting. So it used to be New Yorkers moved to Arizona, not because they were trying to flee the tax policy in New York, they fled to Arizona because it's warmer weather. Same thing with Florida, right? Same thing with a lot of places. Then we started to see more of this with California, where you had companies, you know, getting up and moving to, to Texas, and now Austin looks like Berkeley almost.

• 3:07:01Shawn Ryan?

  It's disgusting.

• 3:07:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. The, the question has always been, because a lot of this is fostered through economic development. It's been this whole deal like, oh, we're gonna get your industry and then we're gonna become more economically powerful. But the problem is, is that if the bad policies came with the business, then you're, you're setting yourself up for future failure. We're starting to see some more ideological self-sorting, which is to say, people are leaving with, with very, very knowledgeable of why they are leaving and why they are going to the place they go. I, I call it, I call it the difference between locusts and refugees. So, a, a, you know, and again, people say, oh, you're accusing people of being an insect. It's a metaphor, don't be a punk.

• 3:07:45Speaker 05

  Locusts destroy the wealth within a particular region, and then they leave when there's no more wealth to consume.

• 3:07:53Speaker 05

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

• 3:08:07Speaker 05

  A refugee knows why they're leaving, knows why they're going to the place that they're going to, and is appreciative for what they now have. They want to be a part of that, and they feel gratitude for where they're going in the new system that has essentially adopted them. The question is, is how do you prevent the locusts while at the same time accepting the people that... It is a great thing for Tennessee if, you know, people with the same value system who want to work hard and raise their family come to Tennessee. It's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing if, all of a sudden, your state government is giving off a bunch of movie tax credits in order to encourage Hollywood to shoot more films over here,

• 3:08:52Speaker 05

  to set up more, you know, industry within Tennessee, and then, all of a sudden, you've encouraged a bunch of people to come over here based off of manipulation of the tax code, all right, at the expense of all your current taxpayers. You know, one of the things that I get in trouble with sometimes with fellow Republicans is that we will have bills to manipulate the tax code to encourage new business. And what they're doing is they're saying, "Hey, all of you businesses currently in Virginia, your taxes are going to stay the same, but we're going to give this out-of-state company a bunch of incentive to move here. Now, we still have obligations, so we're still going to collect your taxes, but they get a break." Now, they've tried to mitigate some of this by saying, "You only get the break if you meet certain numbers

• 3:09:37Speaker 05

  with respect to the number of people you employ and everything else." But the problem is, is that like if Amazon comes into Virginia... I was one of seven Republicans that voted against the Amazon deal in Virginia. If Amazon comes in and they set up shop and they build, you know, whatever, $100 million, $200 million, $300 million headquarters, and they start to employ people, and they don't make their numbers, they have enough political pull to now come back and get the numbers shifted. And this is the part where, "I got a better idea. You want to be the sort of state that people want to move to? Lower taxes." Don't try to manipulate it in order to give that company favor over that. That's cronyism. I hate cronyism. I'm a free-market guy, not a cronyist.

• 3:10:20Speaker 05

  I think that would address some of what you're talking about. But I want to be honest, I don't have... Well, I take that back.

• 3:10:32Speaker 05

  The absolute kryptonite to the most like woke companies or stuff like that coming to your state is not your economic policy, it's your social policy. And as someone who is obviously very, very socially conservative in my, in my views, but I tend to be more, I tend to lean libertarian when it comes to, look, I don't like what you're doing, but I don't want the government to punish you for it. Well, now we've moved into a realm where they don't like what I'm doing and they do want the government to punish me for it, even though I'm not hurting them. So part of the reason why I think states like Tennessee and states like Florida, this is just speculation on my part, I don't have any special insight into this.

• 3:11:15Speaker 05

  I think one of the reasons why they're pushing for this policy is not only because they believe it to be morally correct, you're not going to carve up children in the state of Tennessee. I think they also do it because it's like, you're not going to like moving here. Cause your values are not going to be reflected in our culture and our laws, not now, not ever. And so you want to find a new place to move? Great, pick somewhere else. That's the way I see it as being most effective to say, when a state kind of insists on its culture and doesn't cater to a business moving in by manipulating their own tax code or making special privileges for them that they don't give to any of their other homegrown businesses.

• 3:11:59Speaker 05

  I think that actually creates a positive economic incentive while at the same time maybe creating the, the cultural conditions, which tells, you know, the super woke progressive, this ain't this, this is probably not where you would want to live. Just like I don't want to live in Berkeley, California, you probably don't want to live in Franklin, Tennessee. But.

• 3:12:23Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, in theory, I would love to agree with you, but I'm seeing, I'm not seeing that happening.

• 3:12:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:12:30Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and here's another thing that nobody's talking about is, you know, even if it was all just refugees, right? You're not, you as a governor, or a mayor, or whoever is paying you off to build these developments and put these businesses in place, is bringing wealth into these states. And that is screwing over the people that voted their asses in. Here's how, because the people that, the people that live here, like in Tennessee, just Tennessee right now, none of the, it is like, it's like a, it is very rare to meet and talk to a OG,

• 3:13:15Shawn Ryan?

  original, born and raised Tennessean.

• 3:13:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  You know why? Because they can't afford to live here anymore. Because all the California wealth, and all the New York wealth, that, trying to watch my language here, that, this is no thing of me being a dad, I'm trying to, but, but they've, they have, they have ruined where they live, made a ton of money, now they're coming here, they're gonna bring the same stuff. And the people that, that voted these guys, they're home. They can't afford to live here anymore. They get pushed out.

• 3:13:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:13:49Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and that's, that's bullshit.

• 3:13:53Speaker 05

  The thing that I've always been, so here's the skeptical part of me. I don't, I mean, I obviously think that economic development is a good thing. In the sense that I want people, again, if it's free market transactions. And, and all I mean by that is, you own property, you own your labor, I own my property, I own my labor. If we decide to engage in a voluntary transaction, well then presumably it's because both of us are gonna benefit from that transaction. And I want as much of that to take place as possible. The sort of garbage that I think we have going on right now is political manipulation of the economy.

• 3:14:33Speaker 05

  So, for instance, let's say that, once upon a time, old-school Tennessean could live, you know, right here, and now you've got a bunch of people moving into the area. What does that create? It creates more demand for limited housing. Well, you can either grow more housing, or you can either build more housing, or the value of the currently current property is going to go up. Well, maybe the OG Tennessean that currently lives here goes, "You know what? I am definitely willing to sell my house for twice as much as I thought it would be worth, because now I can go move deeper into Tennessee, or I can get that property I always wanted." That was a good, even though he might not like the politics of the person that bought it, right? He might benefit from that transaction, because that's what he wanted to do.

• 3:15:18Speaker 05

  And I don't want to be in the process politically of trying to micromanage and manipulate the economy. I don't want to do that. I want to let free people decide how they spend their money, where they spend it, on what they spend it. But the biggest issue I see with what you're talking about is, that's not what's going on. Politicians are actively going out and saying, "Hey, you, not, not, not, hey, we, Virginia or whatever state is, is open for business." It's going out and specifically selecting companies and saying, "If you come, we'll give you tax incentives." Well, I don't want to do that. I want people to move, if someone's going to move to the Commonwealth of Virginia,

• 3:16:02Speaker 05

  I want them to do so because they appreciate the Commonwealth of Virginia. Now, we might have some differences of opinion, we can do, that's fine, but that's what I want it to be. I don't want it to be something where we're convincing a bunch of people that don't want to move to the Commonwealth of Virginia to do it, because look at all these very, very unique and special economic incentives that we gave just you. That's a recipe for disaster. You're encouraging somebody that doesn't want to belong to what you actually have here, doesn't really care about the culture of what represents or made it possible, and you're just essentially paying them off to come there. That's ridiculous. Set up the right, set up an environment where free people can thrive, and then let the people

• 3:16:45Speaker 05

  that want to be free and work hard thrive. I mean, if anything, it's...

• 3:16:54Speaker 05

  This is another one of the things when I look at, there was some, I can't remember, I don't know if this is apocryphal, but I heard it, I thought it was hysterical. And it was, it was like of a small town that they had, they had kind of like the town drunk, right? He was the problem. He was, he was everything else. He, you know, in and out of like little, like, you know, one night hotels and in and out of jail and the whole deal and just vagrancy and, and, you know, destruction of property and petty theft and whatnot. And so they, they created a circumstance where he won a flight to Hawaii. He won an all expense paid flight

• 3:17:35Speaker 05

  to Hawaii with no return ticket. Regardless of what you think about that on a moral level, I, I look, I look at policy and I'm like, you know what? You don't want to live here. You don't want to work. You don't want to contribute. I absolutely think you should go to one of these states, preferably AOC's district. She doesn't think you should have to work. She thinks you should just be able to, you know, live and collect money. I guess from the government, which is all from the labor of other people who do have to work. I think you should definitely go and flood those welfare states. Just like we're doing right now with immigration policy. Great. You don't want to, you, you want the benefits of this society, but you don't want to actually have to contribute anything to it. But you

• 3:18:20Speaker 05

  demand that we pay you to, to exist? We don't, the rest of us don't have that luxury because if we're not out there working, they don't have tax dollars collected to give to you.

• 3:18:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. You're not, that's not liberty. That's licentiousness. That's some lazy ass crap. So, great. California's that way. They'd love to have you. They're, they're nice and tolerant and they, they, they think people like us that are working 60, 70, eight hours a week, we're just mean, greedy, horrible human beings. Yeah, that's.

• 3:18:53Speaker 05

  Let's create a reverse incentive where it's like, do you know, can like if I was Florida right now, we would seriously be going around to everybody going, have you heard about the wonderful welfare benefits in California? They will give you so much more than our state will.

• 3:19:07Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:19:08Speaker 05

  Um, because I'm, I'm, nothing gets me more angry than, than watching, than watching a leftist stand up and talk about how, you know, mean and greedy, hardworking people are because they don't want to pay another, you know, however much it is in taxes. Um, not to go to roads, not, not even to go to people that are truly genuinely in need, because that's the sort of stuff we should be handling through family, church, and civic organizations. No, it's, it's to fund people that vote for a living. And they vote for the politicians that are going to give them stuff. And that is not only a horribly, that's not only a corrosive mindset on all of society, it's actually a self-destructive mindset.

• 3:19:50Speaker 05

  I have never met a happy, entitled person. Never.

• 3:19:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, Nick, let's take a quick break.

• 3:19:58Speaker 05

  All right.

• 3:19:59Shawn Ryan?

  When we come back, let's talk about the national divorce.

• 3:20:02Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 3:20:06Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 3:20:27Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Nick, we're back from the break. You paint a very good picture of what a national, what you call the national divorce might look like.

• 3:20:37Speaker 05

  So I always got a caveat, right? I don't want this to happen. I love my country. I don't want it to happen. But, um, but again, I mean, my background in SF was unconventional warfare, counter insurgency. This was kind of our, our area to some degree of looking at discontent within an area and then mobilizing forces like, okay. First of all, I think the United States is unique because we are a constitutional federated republic. And I don't think most people appreciate how unique that is in the world. There's not a lot of countries that have a system like ours. You could argue Germany kinda does. The next closest one is probably Switzerland with their cantons.

• 3:21:17Speaker 05

  And all that means is, you look at France, you look at the UK, they might have regions, you know, Canada has provinces and whatnot, but the amount of sovereignty that a state has is pretty significant. And so you have to view everything through the lens of that setup versus like other countries which are more national as opposed to federal. It's like anything else, there's conditions and then there's a catalyst. If you get a catalyst without the right conditions, you get riots, right? If you get conditions without a catalyst, you get slow decline or maybe even a reversal of change over time. But you get conditions and catalysts, that's where you can actually have something where we see something significant happening in the United States that we haven't seen since,

• 3:22:02Speaker 05

  say, the Civil War. I think there's kind of three general conditions. The first one has to do with geographical self-sorting. Now, what's interesting from like an early American history is that you had very, very distinct cultures between the North and the South. Now, that's not to say that you wanted to have found additionally distinct cultures between Florida and Virginia, but there was still a sense of almost kind of us and them between northern states and southern states. And a lot of it had to do with like tariff laws and obviously slavery and things like that. But it also had a lot to do with who settled the various regions. The United States is very different now. People move all the time, people don't really take as much, they don't view themselves

• 3:22:44Speaker 05

  by their state as much as they do by their country. So that's very different than the last time we had a major civil war or civil uprising.

• 3:22:54Speaker 05

  But we're seeing more and more people start to sort ideologically.

• 3:22:58Shawn Ryan?

  You definitely see a migration happening in the country.

• 3:23:01Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:23:01Shawn Ryan?

  There's no doubt about that.

• 3:23:03Speaker 05

  And the migration, again, is not just happening because it's a nice place to retire. It's not just happening because they're going to give me a couple extra thousand on my retirement. That's not it. People are now leaving because screw this place. And when they show up to the new place, they're adamant, like they, they're every, they, they can't stand where they came from as much as everybody else can't stand the people coming, right? That sort of geographical self-sorting is, is very interesting. And kind of a necessary condition if you're actually looking at something like national divorce level, like secession or whatever you want to call it. Another condition is diametrically opposed views of what the country is supposed to be.

• 3:23:47Speaker 05

  So for, you know, most of my lifetime, Democrats and Republicans disagreed about what the marginal tax rate should be, or how many government programs that we should have, or, you know, what was the best way to, you know, facilitate educational outcomes. But everyone thought the Constitution was a great thing and that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and James Madison were great people. And like there, there was no, I mean, and nobody thought, uh, nobody would have thought to argue on the Democrat's side 10 years ago that, well, of course you would give a 10 year old child puberty blockers if they're confused about, you know, puberty and, and of course we would surgically alter them at 17, like, why wouldn't you do those things?

• 3:24:30Speaker 05

  Aren't you, you know, gender affirming? Like that was not a thing. You now have a, you now have a system where among the major political parties, you do have diametrically opposed visions, not only with where the United States should go, but where it's been and what that represents. So that goes what I was talking about before, when you're, when you demoralize and deconstruct a civilization. You now have one major political entity and movement that is fully dedicated. They have like just embraced these things. And while there are still a lot of like old school Democrats that, you know, again, still like the Constitution and George Washington and don't think we're all crap. Those people are not running the show in the Democratic Party.

• 3:25:13Speaker 05

  They're not the thought leaders within the Democratic Party. And I don't mean to make this overly partisan. It's just when you talk about why would, why would a nation split in the first place? Well, if you have diametrically opposed disagreements, not only about where you've been, but where you should go, that's, that's, that's pretty significant. All right, so the first one is geographical self-sorting, where people are actually saying, I don't want to live next to these people because we disagree fundamentally on what's going on.

• 3:25:44Speaker 05

  Then you have the ideological differences, major ideological differences, that are not really reconcilable, right? That's the whole, we want to go this way, we want to go this way, and there's no way we can do that together. There's not a real compromise in between these two positions. The third condition, I would say, within the United States is when one of those sides gets enough federal power, and that is House, Senate, presidency, and maybe the Supreme Court. At that point, the game is up. If the party which controls those things believes they should be able to use federal power to achieve what they want. So if the party that achieves it says, hey, look, we don't think the federal government should be doing all this stuff, this should be done at the state level, you might be okay.

• 3:26:28Speaker 05

  But if the party that achieves that level of power absolutely 100% believes that they should use the federal government to go around and tell everybody how they should be behaving, now you have three powerful conditions. Because now there's nowhere to escape. Right now, if you don't like California, move to Florida. If you don't like Florida, move to California. What happens if you move to Florida to avoid California, and now the Californians are controlling the federal government at such a level to where Florida doesn't get to do the things it wanted to do anymore, because now it's a violation of federal law, and you have a Supreme Court, which has now dreamed up violations of the Constitution that never existed five minutes ago? And for anybody that wants to tell me that that's ridiculous, how would the Supreme

• 3:27:13Speaker 05

  Court even do that? In 1940, in the 1930s, the Supreme Court held back FDR's aspects of his New Deal that they didn't like because it was horribly unconstitutional. FDR threatened to pack the court. A couple of justices retired. He replaced them with progressive justices. And the Supreme Court in 1942 determined that it was constitutional for the federal government to regulate your garden.

• 3:27:43Speaker 05

  Right? If you grew, if you grew food for your own consumption, right? They could regulate that. And the reason why they could is because of a liberal interpretation of the interstate commerce clause. Because if you hadn't been growing, I think it was wheat, might have been corn. If you hadn't been growing that for your own consumption, you might have gone to the store to buy corn. And if you'd gone to the store to buy corn, the corn you purchased at that store might have come from a different state. And so therefore, your economic activities with respect to your garden impacted interstate commerce. The federal government could regulate it.

• 3:28:16Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa.

• 3:28:17Speaker 05

  So nobody gets to tell me that the Supreme Court would never, you know, do something like this. Especially because if you had a president, a senate and a house, they could stack the Supreme Court. So now you're living in a state that, let's say, is 65, 70% you know, of one way of thinking. And the rural, urban distinctions are not as great as they used to be. And now you've got a federal government that is coming in and telling you that you're not allowed to live the way that you want anymore. But you've got a governor and the governor decides, screw that, I'm not doing it.

• 3:29:01Speaker 05

  Well, that's what we call nullification. That's where a state government essentially tells the federal government, we believe that you have violated your constitutional restrictions and limitations. And so therefore, we're not going to help you enforce these laws within the boundaries of our state. Now, right now, law enforcement doesn't have to, you know, local law enforcement doesn't have to necessarily work with federal law enforcement. If it's federal jurisdiction, the feds can do it, but that doesn't mean they get to hijack state and local resources to do it. Nullification would be a positive statement by a state to say, we're not doing that. We're not going to help you with that. That puts the federal government in incredibly difficult position because they

• 3:29:45Speaker 05

  don't have sufficient numbers within federal law enforcement to impose things without assistance from state and local. The way they usually get that assistance is through joint task force where there's revenue sharing, or there's money involved, or the state threatens to withhold funds for other things if they don't get cooperation. The next level up from nullification, which is just, "I'm not cooperating, I'm not gonna help you," is what they call interposition. Interposition is when FBI agents show up and Texas Rangers meet them and say, "Get the F out of Texas." What happens at that point? Right? So, you can already tell, like, with these sorts of conditions, and not all of the,

• 3:30:29Speaker 05

  by the way, not all of those conditions are met. Right? One of them is met, one of them is kind of being met, like, the one that's been met is diametrically opposed visions for the country and diametrically opposed views of our history. The one that's starting to be met is the geographical self-sorting. The one that hasn't been met yet is one side dominates the federal space and wants to use it to achieve their objectives. If you have all of that, the next thing you need is the catalyst. Now, we went through, I went, we went, we did a show once where we talked about, "All right, would the catalyst be if they perp-walk Donald Trump into a federal prison?" And we all agreed, "No, that would make people mad, you might see some rioting, might some other things, but it's not a catalyst for this sort of stuff." What if they stacked the Supreme Court?

• 3:31:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, that probably feeds onto conditions, but it's probably not a sufficient catalyst until the Supreme Court tries to do something like, say, say you had a Supreme Court that says the Second Amendment no longer means what it means. It did. All right? But if you had that, and you had a catalyst such as, again, a Supreme Court saying, "The Second Amendment no longer conveys an individual right to the private ownership of firearms, it only applies to state-run militias," which this Supreme Court now interprets as the National Guard. And so now federal agents with the ATF are gonna show up and start to confiscate weapons if local and state don't support it.

• 3:31:48Speaker 05

  ATF over here, Texas Rangers over here. And Texas Rangers ain't budget. Well, what are you gonna do, federal government? Well, you could back down. Or you could open fire. You open fire at that point, you are gonna see the biggest FU from a lot of states that are not even gonna claim we're leaving the union, right? They're not doing that. They're just gonna claim we're not abiding by this. That's interposition. Now, a lot of times when we talk about nullification, interposition, the left will come in and be like, oh, you mean like opposition to the civil rights movement? Because those terms were used to try to oppose desegregation. They were used for horrible things. But the thing that they seem to forget is one of the earliest instances of a state telling the federal government

• 3:32:34Speaker 05

  not only to pound sand, but you actually had a local sheriff that arrested a federal marshal and put him in jail was in Wisconsin. And it was because Wisconsin did not recognize the legitimacy of the Runaway Slave Act. Because the Runaway Slave Act meant that federal marshals were actually chasing down people that had escaped slavery and then returning them to slavery. You had to make it all the way to Canada to be truly safe. And Wisconsin told the feds, you ain't doing that here. And they literally locked up the fed and they made sure the other guy got out of there. And so you have this big crisis moment of what you gonna do? Well, the feds kind of backed away and that's gonna be, that's gonna be the point.

• 3:33:19Speaker 05

  I hope if it ever got to something like that, the federal response would be like, okay, we've overstepped our boundaries. We don't want a situation where we're killing Americans. The thing that worries me, though, is I hear some of the things that people say. I mean, we all do. When you have that level of hatred, people start itching for an excuse. And one of the things that's fueling a lot of this right now is disgust. And disgust is actually an incredibly powerful motivator when it comes to preparing someone to have the capacity for violence.

• 3:34:01Speaker 05

  And that's, that's, that should be concerning to all of us.

• 3:34:07Speaker 05

  But if the people coming, if in your mind, the people coming to confiscate your firearms because of a liberal PAC Supreme Court are the same people that don't mind there being openly pornographic images within your kids' public school. And by the way, anybody that says that isn't happening is either a liar or so horribly misinformed that you shouldn't listen to anything else they say. Because that is happening. I've seen it myself. We argued this in Virginia. We had a bill that just said, "You gotta notify parents if it's there." We're not even banning it. You just gotta notify parents if it's there. Not one Democrat voted yes. So I don't want to hear nobody wants this. So imagine that. You can already see the disgust welling up in me. So imagine a situation where now someone is gonna come and deny you of a constitutionally

• 3:34:50Speaker 05

  protected right because of a process that you feel is illegitimate because they already stacked the court. And these are the same people that represent a whole lot of other behavior that you think is horribly disgusting and directed toward children. Yeah, that's a potential powder keg. And I desperately don't want that to happen. Because as you and I mentioned before, there's a lot of people that talk with a lot of bravado about like, "Yeah, let's go fight in the streets." And it's usually talked by people that have never had to fight in the streets. Yeah. I don't want my kids having to live with that. My whole goal is to... The only reason I talk about some of this stuff and discuss it and talk about things like conditions and catalysts and how these things could take place is because I don't want it to.

• 3:35:33Speaker 05

  I would love it if the other side would agree. I would love it if the other side would just come to grips with something very quickly. We are a republic of republics. That's what the states are. Part of the reason why that was set up, and this, James Madison, right? The district I represent. Madison reviewed over and over and over again, "Why do republics fall?" And one of the biggest conclusions he came to is, republics grow to such a size to where a small central authority is attempting to govern things that they can't possibly understand, cultural institutions they can't possibly appreciate, norms and situations. And so the whole idea behind a federalist system, behind separation of powers, behind competing powers, was this concept of...

• 3:36:21Speaker 05

  National unity is going to rest around the federal government doing very, very few things, and it's right there, listen to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. For everything else, you look to your state, you look to your locality, and most importantly, look to the individual as a free person to be able to make their own decisions. If we can get back to respecting that we're not going to agree on everything, but the best way to live in peace is not to force everybody else to do what you want, but to sometimes just leave other people alone, and you know what? Reality has a great job of proving who was right and who was wrong on individual situations, oftentimes. I don't know that they're willing to accept that. I think they've become so convinced that they're right and we're evil, whereas we

• 3:37:04Speaker 05

  think we're right and they're wrong, and that's a very, very different thing. But more and more, I'm seeing people on the right say, "No, no, no, they're evil." And that's where it gets dangerous.

• 3:37:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Do you think there's, I mean, do you think there's, we're divided on everything, everything. Is there a way to even get back to the way it was?

• 3:37:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Historically, it'll be very difficult, but it can happen. Countries have, countries have gone through crisis moments where it looked like, it looked like there was no return. And you never get back to where you were, but you can, you can get to a good place. But the only way, the only way you achieve something like that is, first of all, you have to recognize the source of the problem. You can't, you can't hide it. That's one of the biggest issues. People, "I don't, don't talk about things, you're going to encourage this, you're going to encourage..." How are we supposed to properly diagnose a problem if we're not allowed to discuss it?

• 3:38:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:15Speaker 05

  And then it really is going to take,

• 3:38:20Speaker 05

  again, the people that believe in

• 3:38:24Speaker 05

  objective right and wrong, objective truth, logic, reason,

• 3:38:32Speaker 05

  individual liberty plus personal responsibility.

• 3:38:37Speaker 05

  It's going to take those people willing to stand up and fight for it. Like, right now, we have people that remain silent, not because they're threatened with any physical violence or force, but because they're embarrassed.

• 3:38:47Speaker 05

  And that's the first thing to get past. I was talking with somebody, really nice guy, really nice guy, and we're talking on the plane, and he's getting excited as he's talking about the missionary work he does. And he's, and he's, he's not talking loud, but he's definitely talking loud enough where the, you know, people around could hear. And I remember, like, I even had this almost tinge like, "Oh, I wonder if anybody's getting offended by us talking." And then I stopped myself, I'm like, "No. No, what this guy's talking about right now was, he's talking about raising his kids, and he's talking about going out and preaching, and he's talking about speaking hope into people's lives, and the sacrifices that they made, and where he's come from." Because he'd gone through a lot to get to that point. You know, like, "No, no, no, he has every right,

• 3:39:30Speaker 05

  he has every right to be excited about what he's talking about. And I got every right to be excited for what he's talking about. And I am tired, I am tired of, of parents and people in general, free people, what are supposed to be free people, upset because, "Well, you know, we're not allowed to talk about politics or religion."

• 3:39:53Speaker 05

  I don't want to be accused of being a bigot because I believe that, you know, the Bible says certain things about human sexuality, and I, and I think they're true. And I'm not here to force you to believe what I believe, but I, I want to believe that these things are true. And I'm not, I'm tired, I'm tired of feeling like a hostage of my own country because, well, if you do that, there'll be, there'll be social, you know, ostracizing for it.

• 3:40:21Speaker 05

  And I get told this, I get told this by the same people, the same people that want to look at me with a huge level of righteous indignation. How dare you want school choice? You must hate poor kids. As if I don't want it for poor kids. And then those same people, they think I'm mean and I mean, and how dare I challenge them on anything? Don't I know that they're the nice altruistic, kind people? I'm the mean one.

• 3:40:48Speaker 05

  And then those same people get up and sit there and justify why there needs to be pornography in a school, or why that kid needs to get puberty blockers at 10 years old, or why that kid needs to be carved up. Or that kid needs to be aborted at month nine.

• 3:41:02Speaker 05

  And I'm the bad guy? No, I'm sorry. Only in clown world is that the bad guy. And, and the only reason, the only reason, I believe it's been allowed to continue to this degree, because there hasn't been enough men in society. Not that I don't want women to stand up too, but there hasn't been enough men in society to stand up and be like, slow your roll. Because let's face it, at the end of the day, this power that they're projecting, where does it come from? Honestly, when you look at the people, right? When you look at Antifa, are you worried about your physical safety?

• 3:41:36Speaker 05

  I don't see any one of these people that poses a physical threat to me. Absolutely not.

• 3:41:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:41Speaker 05

  You want to go down that road? I will show you what a bad idea it was.

• 3:41:46Speaker 05

  But because of their influence within institutions, we've all been taught to respect. That's where the power and authority comes from. It is illusory.

• 3:41:56Speaker 05

  And we're going to see how much of an illusion it actually was when men start standing up and going, no. Not in my house, not in my community, not in my state, not in my country. You're free to live the way you want. The moment you try to impose that on me, you got something else coming. And I think when we start doing that, and I'm not talking about engaging in violence. I'm talking about defending what we care about and doing it with the same passion and conviction that they seem perfectly willing to do.

• 3:42:22Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, yeah, we're not talking about violence. We're just talking about just do something.

• 3:42:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:42:28Shawn Ryan?

  Speak up.

• 3:42:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:42:32Shawn Ryan?

  Shop somewhere else.

• 3:42:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:42:34Shawn Ryan?

  Put your kids somewhere else.

• 3:42:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:42:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's, just sacrifice something, just anything. There's so many people living in this country who just, they're a pin, they have, they have the strongest of opinions, but they've not done one damn thing to make this a better place, not one thing. And that's, once again, you know, I'm, it, that's for everybody.

• 3:43:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:43:03Shawn Ryan?

  That's for everybody. I'm sure a lot of the critics, a lot of your critics who are on your same side have not done anything either.

• 3:43:10Speaker 05

  Oh, it's, it's the, I, I had somebody say something, he disagreed with me on like some minor policy position.

• 3:43:20Speaker 05

  And, um, he called me a coward. And, um, I've been called a lot of things, and there's a lot of things I don't really care if you call me, but, um, I was taught at a very young age that a coward was one of the worst things a man could be called.

• 3:43:34Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 3:43:35Speaker 05

  And, um, and of course it's on social media.

• 3:43:40Speaker 05

  And I remember my wife looking over at me and she goes, "Did you just threaten one of your constituents?" I'm like, "What are you talking about?" She goes, "I just read your response." I said, "All I said was, is that I hope he displays the same courage in person that he does online." That's it. And he backed down.

• 3:44:00Speaker 05

  But yeah, they, I, I am tired of this class of angry conservative that is always close enough to see the battle, but never close enough to get any blood on them.

• 3:44:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:15Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like that's the majority of the, uh, that's the majority of the party, unfortunately.

• 3:44:20Speaker 05

  Well, the, I, I will, the, the thing that I do find encouraging in all of this, though, is that when you do see, well, and I think we were, we were talking about this a little bit offline.

• 3:44:33Speaker 05

  More and more, there's people that are standing out there with a different vision of masculinity, of being good husbands, being good fathers. And I think what's important about it is they have credentials. And I don't mean credentials in the form of PhDs. A young man is going to listen to you, in part, not just because you're heavily influential in this space and what you do, but you went through things in your life, in your military career as a SEAL, working with the agency in combat. You went with things that give you credibility on a masculine level that cannot be replaced with just a good argument.

• 3:45:17Speaker 05

  And the more men that are willing to step up and say that, "Yeah, yeah, these are credentials, but my desire to be a good husband, my desire to be a good father, that's every bit as important for saving what it is I want to preserve about this country." And it almost... It provides something for a lot of men that feel just completely adrift right now. It provides them something to grasp onto and to rally behind. If it's just nothing more than to know, "All right, these instincts that I have, these things that I want, they're not wrong. There's nothing wrong with me.

• 3:45:59Speaker 05

  I'm not the source of the world's problems by virtue of just being a young man." But they need guidance. And obviously, you're not going to be able to show it physically in person for every single one of them, but it's about showing them that, yeah, once again, no, those instincts are good, but they have to be honed in the service of something true and noble, because if they're not, they're going to find expression in something horrible.

• 3:46:29Speaker 05

  And the fact that I believe that can work.

• 3:46:33Speaker 05

  That's ultimately why I'm not, I'm frustrated, but I don't feel defeated in any of this. I just feel like.

• 3:46:44Speaker 05

  You go through certain points in your life where, okay, you were in the military, or you were, you were in the teams, or you do this, and then, and then it ends. And it's like, what next? And I, I was kind of dealing with that a couple of years ago, for a couple of years. Wondering like, you know, I thought life was gonna be this, and then it changed, but it was okay because it was this. And I thought it was gonna be, now it changed, I'm like.

• 3:47:07Speaker 05

  No, this is the, this is the mission now. This is the mission now.

• 3:47:13Speaker 05

  And it's a, it's a good one.

• 3:47:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, it is.

• 3:47:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Nick. I just. That was an awesome conversation, man. I, I really appreciate you coming out here.

• 3:47:26Speaker 05

  No, it is, uh, it's entirely my pleasure, and, and I really do. I really do appreciate what you, what you do with this. I mean that very sincerely.

• 3:47:36Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 3:47:36Speaker 05

  I don't.

• 3:47:39Speaker 05

  I'm not even, I'm not even sure we all realize how. How important the conversations are. Because of what it represents to people that needs to hear it, so, so thank you.

• 3:47:50Shawn Ryan?

  It's my pleasure, man. It really is, and I hope to see you again.

• 3:47:54Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:47:54Shawn Ryan?

  I really do.

• 3:47:55Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 3:47:56Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure I will.

• 3:47:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:47:58Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have a good experience?

• 3:47:59Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:47:59Shawn Ryan?

  Good. Me too, man. And, and I love what you're doing. Where can people find you?

• 3:48:05Speaker 05

  So, Nick J. Freitas, we kind of made it simple. If you just go Nick J. Freitas on Twitter, on Instagram, on, on YouTube. We have a podcast called Making the Argument. We do a lot of long-form discussions. We try to get a lot of audience participation in.

• 3:48:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, those are, those are probably the best areas. We also have a series on our YouTube channel. We've, we've tried to. Kind of make some like, easy to understand, like 10-minute videos on, on just experiences, like on raising, raising a son, raising daughters, being a husband, being a father.

• 3:48:40Speaker 05

  Why you should be dangerous as a father, so hopefully those things are helpful.

• 3:48:44Shawn Ryan?

  Well, one of my favorite discussions with this interview was about fatherhood.

• 3:48:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:48:49Shawn Ryan?

  And.

• 3:48:51Shawn Ryan?

  You're a hell of a dad.

• 3:48:53Speaker 05

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

• 3:49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Well, best of luck to you, brother.

• 3:49:16Speaker 05

  Thank you. You too.