Green Beret on Men, War and Masculinity - Nick Freitas
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 21 minutes
Words per Minute
191.75533
Summary
In this episode of the Trigonometry podcast, we interview retired Marine Corps Sergeant Major Jerry Freitas. Jerry talks about how he became a Marine, why he left the military, and why he decided to become a politician.
Transcript
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We're at a point right now where young men are going to revolt.
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They're the ones that we use to police streets.
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You don't get to alienate and attempt to emasculate them forever
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without them standing up and having something to say about that.
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You're right, they lied to you about these attributes.
00:00:18.140
But you have to develop in the way that they're going to go
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because the only way that you're going to save this sort of society
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that you want to live in, the only way that you're going to create it
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is if you stand up and you actually assume that role.
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And it sucks that you have to do it under these conditions, but you do.
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That for those of us that are trying to educate young men
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in a way that we think will use those traits toward a noble purpose,
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you're making it really hard for us to do our jobs right now.
00:00:43.500
And again, you're going to be the ones that pay the price, not us.
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But first, we used to ask people what their story is.
00:00:55.480
We stopped doing that because we just want to really get into the interview.
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And you've done many different things that most people haven't done.
00:01:12.780
And a couple of weeks later, I was on the bus to go to the military.
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So I went to infantry basic training in what was then Fort Benning, Georgia.
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Got to the 82nd Airborne, and then I married my high school sweethearts.
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You know, I didn't think I was going to make the military a career.
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But my wife said, well, why don't we reenlist one more time?
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And I remember looking at her going, well, babe, I know what I'm going to be doing for the next several years.
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So I volunteered for Army Special Forces, which is better known as Green Berets.
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We specialize in counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, counterinsurge, and things like that.
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Got pretty dissatisfied with the way the war was being conducted and the way things were going.
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And I remember talking to a buddy of mine who was a sergeant major.
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I said, well, I had to fill out a 42-page con-op to go do a basic operation.
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If you see a problem, you gain rank and you fix it.
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How many of these problems have you been able to fix?
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And after some more colorful language, he admitted I had a point.
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I said, the problem is the guy's making policy.
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I said, so I'm going to get involved some way to try to affect the way that we look at policy.
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So I got involved in politics like a moron, ran for the Virginia House of Delegates,
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and I've been serving in the House of Delegates for the last nine years.
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My oldest daughter just got married to a great guy, didn't have to bury any bodies.
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But in the meantime, we've actually, through politics and everything else,
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we started doing a lot of work on social media.
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And it wasn't something that we necessarily set out to go in the direction it has,
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where we've talked a lot about family, a lot about masculinity, a lot about being a girl dad
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But over the last several years, it's been amazing, both what has been happening within
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the culture and the desire for a lot of people, not just men, but women too, to kind of ask
00:03:24.620
this question about, you know, what is the proper role of men in society?
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And it's not something I often talk about, but when I go on other people's show, they
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often want to talk about it with just about anyone who's prepared to say anything about
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But the first question is, what makes an 80-year-old kid want to sign up for the military?
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I was very, so my mom and my dad divorced when I was about three.
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My grandfather was a firefighter and had served in World War II.
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And so I was always around people that engaged in service and this idea of honor and serving
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and, you know, men do dangerous things like that.
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I would say I got very, very interested in military history when I was younger as well.
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And so for me, there was always this idea that a man protects, a man provides, and he
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does that both for his family, but he also serves his country.
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And it was also, it was also as a young man wanting to test myself and wanting to prove
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something to myself and learning that that never really ends.
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But that's what initially got me interested in serving.
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And then I always joke that my friend and I wanted to go to West Point together and he
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paid attention in school and I did other things.
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So he ended up going to West Point and I ended up enlisting.
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It was a combination of really deep-seated patriotism.
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And I guess if I could sum it up in one other just quick story.
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My grandfather probably, between his own wood lathe and the materials I bought, probably
00:05:11.160
spent all of $12 on a couple of little shadow boxes that he had in his hallway when I was
00:05:16.260
But I spent a lot of time at my grandpa's house.
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And it was a picture of my great-grandfather in his uniform with his badges when he was
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And then it was a picture of my grandfather in his uniform and his badges as a fire captain.
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And then my father as a police officer with his badges from the LAPD.
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And I wanted one day my picture to be up there with my uniform, my accomplishments.
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Because I think as a not-American, just looking from the outside, I do think this country was
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built by people who had that mindset, actually, that service and patriotism.
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We just released a video with him about Israel and Palestine.
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But the first time we interviewed, he was the commander of British forces in Afghanistan.
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And when I asked him why people go into the military, he basically didn't say it like this,
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but it's basically because you want to kill people.
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But was that something that you thought about, that serving in the military would likely mean
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Well, when I went in the military, I went for infantry.
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And infantry doesn't have a whole lot of, it doesn't have a whole lot of, let's say,
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But I wanted to be, I knew that if I was going to be in the military, I wanted to do something
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And I wanted to do something that a specific mission was closed with and, you know, destroy
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Like, that's not because I had some deep-seated desire to shoot anybody.
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It was more of, if you're going to go into the military, then I wanted to serve in that
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I wanted to serve in the capacity that I thought was, you know, where there was a need, also
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And I hate this idea, I hate this idea of something dangerous going on and somebody doing
00:07:04.820
And again, I think that was because of the way I was raised.
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My father was a police officer, grandfather was a firefighter, mom was a nurse.
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It was always about being the first in the door, so to speak.
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I wanted to prove that I could be worthy of the other people that had served in that capacity.
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And Nick, we've kind of touched on masculinity and we were talking basically about male role
00:07:33.380
And so I think it's that whenever you tell someone, be a man, like if you look at somebody
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like, dude, be a man, everyone kind of intuitively understands what that means.
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No, I think everyone who's willing to give it an honest interpretation understands that
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it means you have an obligation to forego comfort, to overcome fear in order to keep your word
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People depend on you and they depend on you to do your job, so suck it up and do it.
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And I think that for a lot of people, there's still that underlying impression that that's
00:08:15.260
But I think culture is doing everything within its power to certainly change that definition.
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So you're saying that, what do you mean by that?
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Culture is doing everything in its power to change that definition.
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I think there's a lot of political motivations behind it.
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I think when you look at first wave feminism, I think all of us can say, yeah, I completely
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I completely understand wanting to be equal partners within society with respect to access
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to occupations, property ownership, and things like that.
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As you move further along the road, though, and you start to see the connections between
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later elements within the feminist movement, even some of the early ones as well, but especially
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the later ones, you definitely see a far closer connection to Marx.
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You see a far closer connection to critical theory, to postmodernism, all the way up to
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the point where you've got people like Simone de Beauvoir, where she didn't hide the ball.
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She actually said in a debate once that she didn't believe that women should be able to
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choose to be stay-at-home wife and mothers because too many of them would choose it and that
00:09:16.200
But all of that impact on how do we look at women has had an impact on how we look at
00:09:22.240
And this popular narrative, especially when you look at the oppressor-oppressed dynamic,
00:09:26.360
men have fit very neatly into that box for them.
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And it's like anything else, there's always some kernel of truth to it.
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I mean, obviously, men have the capacity to use physical force in order to impose our will.
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That's not something that most women can do, even though now we're trying to pretend like
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We're trying to both be strong, independent, and victims at the same time, and it doesn't
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So I think there's been a concerted effort for a combination of political and probably
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philosophical and ideological reasons to diminish the role of men within society.
00:10:03.760
And I do think it ultimately ties back to philosophies tied to Marx's critical theory and
00:10:10.600
I think one of the major problems as well, as somebody who saw it firsthand when I was
00:10:14.420
teaching, I was teaching in areas where most of the kids didn't have a dad.
00:10:19.100
It's very difficult to become a man if you don't have a positive male role model.
00:10:23.500
If all you see are women and the men in your life, they're either absent by choice or absent
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And then one of the problems we have, too, in the United States is absence because the state
00:10:36.240
intervenes in such a way as to disadvantaged fathers when it comes to custody.
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We, you know, we pay women to leave and take the kids.
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Now, there's certainly circumstances where that's absolutely appropriate.
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You know, if you have a man that's being abusive, well, then, yeah, of course I want that woman
00:10:53.320
And I want her to be able to have the resources to do so.
00:10:55.400
But to your point, Patrick Moynihan was talking about this problem in the United States with
00:11:04.300
respect to fatherless homes in the 60s, and he was being called a racist then.
00:11:09.620
If you look at how the trends have developed over time, almost every single demographic
00:11:14.880
within the United States is now dealing with a significantly higher percentage of fatherlessness
00:11:19.160
than at any point in the history since we've been keeping numbers in the United States.
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The one demographic that has managed to stay far lower is generally the Asian community.
00:11:30.760
But yeah, the thing is, is that a boy is going to become, you know, a man, right?
00:11:37.260
And they're going to, they're going to look around for cues on what that, what that means.
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And one of the things I don't think has been properly recognized, especially by some of
00:11:47.560
the people perpetrating this idea of toxic masculinity under very broad terms, is that
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those, those characteristics that we associate with masculinity, aggressiveness, competitiveness,
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capacity and capability for violence, those are morally neutral.
00:12:03.140
They're going to manifest themselves in positive ways or negative ways.
00:12:07.260
If you try to squash them, you don't fully do that.
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What you usually create is, is a man that feels emasculated.
00:12:14.800
And a lot of times that ends up manifesting itself in some of the worst ways possible.
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Go look at some of the worst serial killers and look at the history of how they were treated
00:12:22.600
when they were young and how that ended up manifesting itself.
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So I think it's about time that we understand that, look, we we've all recognized, I mean,
00:12:30.160
if we have categories of masculinity and femininity, and the reason why we have those is because
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we understand that there are certain traits that are generally associated to each.
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The real question we should be asking ourselves is, what are the positive manifestations and
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the negative manifestations and how do we foster the positive?
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And to try to do that without positive male role models in the life of a young man, especially
00:12:52.340
It's not impossible, but it's incredibly difficult.
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And yet we have people, especially wealthier people trying to glamorize this idea of, oh,
00:13:04.240
You don't need a man like, okay, how's that working out?
00:13:10.700
So when I was teaching, you see the boy come from a single parent household and they'd be
00:13:18.780
The moment they hit puberty, mom wouldn't be able to control them physically because the
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Desperate, desperate for male attention, especially from older boys, older men.
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If they're not getting it from dad, that's something that is really deep rooted within
00:13:38.960
They're going to look for it somewhere else, which is why they normally end up in a gang.
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Because all of us are looking for, all of us at a certain age are looking for a combination
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And that's what having a mother and father is supposed to be there.
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Because the mother and the father play unique roles both for the boy and for the girl as
00:14:01.100
And having raised two daughters and a son, I can really see that.
00:14:05.560
But if they can't find that, if there was an element missing from that, well, then yeah,
00:14:09.420
a young boy is going to obviously look to who are some of the older boys.
00:14:13.740
That seem strong, seem confident in who they are, even if they're not, right?
00:14:20.740
I had a mother once ask me, she said, do you have any advice for a mother raising young
00:14:28.520
Because I was predominantly raised by a single mother.
00:14:30.940
I said, the same thing that made your boy feel secure and loved when he was little makes
00:14:37.180
And that's one of the reasons why having the father in the picture is so important is that
00:14:42.680
he helps the boy start to understand that the world is a challenging and dangerous place.
00:14:49.880
He's to help mold it into something that is good and to find positive outlets for those
00:14:56.160
But if you don't have that, and now all he's learning is from other boys that also didn't
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have it, then typically what ends up happening is none of them want to be vulnerable, none
00:15:04.380
of them want to be hurt, none of them want to be taken advantage of.
00:15:08.160
And so the way that they deal with emotions, the way they deal with threats or anything
00:15:13.800
else is to resort to violence because it's kind of the easiest go-to in those circumstances.
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And it's the one that's respected among other men.
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It's interesting that your point about knowing the world is challenging and being prepared
00:15:28.840
for it, it sparked a thought in me about a broader thing, which just, it seems to me,
00:15:34.360
I don't know if you agree with this, but all the things you were talking about, do you think
00:15:37.800
there's an element of this where we're just massive victims of our own massive success
00:15:42.060
in that over the last 70 years, our need for, frankly, guys like you to stand on the wall
00:15:48.640
has gone down and down and down. And so we have the luxury of pretending that all of this
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luxury and prosperity, it just exists without guys like you actually having to pick up a weapon
00:16:02.000
I was listening to someone speak the other day, and he was talking about the greatest generation.
00:16:08.660
And in the United States, that usually refers to the generation that went through the depression
00:16:12.200
and fought World War II. And he made a comment where he said, they may have been the greatest
00:16:17.120
generation when it came to storming the beaches in Normandy, that they turned into kind of crappy
00:16:20.480
parents. And he didn't mean this like overtly disrespectfully, he was just, he was explaining
00:16:26.540
to them, he goes, you know, the common statement that came out of that era was, I wanted to give my
00:16:31.160
kids everything I didn't. He goes, great, but you forgot to give them what you did have.
00:16:35.700
And what you did have was grit and resilience and not an ounce of entitlement. You understand
00:16:42.520
and knew what you had to fight for. And that was everything from a meal when you were going
00:16:46.560
through the Great Depression to your survival and your country's survival in World War II.
00:16:51.700
And when you give the benefits of all of those attributes without teaching why the attributes
00:16:58.380
were necessary to make them possible in the first place, I think we end up with exactly
00:17:02.300
what you're talking about. It's a sense of entitlement. And it is amazing to me the number
00:17:06.480
of people that first of all, think that prosperity and peace is, well, of course, this is just the
00:17:12.800
way society is. I've known little else. But amazingly enough, despite the fact that they're
00:17:18.620
living in times that, by historical standards, are incredibly prosperous and incredibly safe
00:17:23.880
by comparison, they find trauma in everything. And some of that is an ideological push, I think,
00:17:31.980
to elevate trauma as the currency of the realm, especially within that oppressor-oppressed dynamic.
00:17:38.060
But some of it, too, is I think there's something inside of us that knows there's something admirable
00:17:45.780
about overcoming difficult challenges. And when you don't have a lot or you're too lazy to seek
00:17:52.240
them out or too comfortable to seek them out, then you start looking for situations to elevate your
00:17:58.820
status. And that's why we do have a lot of people right now demanding that they be considered stunning
00:18:04.460
and brave for doing things which are neither stunning nor brave. But I do think it's in some
00:18:10.440
place a result of, again, widespread prosperity and safety by historical standards, I think does breed
00:18:18.440
a certain degree of complacency. And, you know, again, we're not supposed to do the decadence anymore,
00:18:27.620
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And actually, something I worry about, you've raised your kids,
00:18:31.660
I have a young toddler now. And my probably biggest worry outside of all the fears parents always have
00:18:39.580
about, you know, no one told me this, but when you become a parent, like, the range of emotions
00:18:44.900
just widens so much, doesn't it? Because, like, your greatest fears were nothing before and your
00:18:49.700
greatest joys were nothing, too, you know. But the one thing I often think about, and I've talked about
00:18:55.120
this with other people, is the more successful I am, the harder it is for me to raise him not to be a
00:19:05.820
So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how to work around that.
00:19:10.200
I think there were, I mean, luckily, when my wife and I first got married, so we started to have kids
00:19:16.000
when we were 23. When we first got married in 19 and 20, I think we were making $1,200 a month.
00:19:21.480
And, like, I very distinctly remember for years going to the grocery store, and especially toward
00:19:28.220
the end of the month where you hand over your card and you were just sitting there praying to God that
00:19:31.620
it's going to go through. Like, I remember that. I remember having the power turned off. And so
00:19:38.600
there was an element when our kids were younger, we were there, they still knew that, hey, look,
00:19:42.680
mommy and daddy ain't rich. But the other thing that we did is we instilled a couple of things in
00:19:47.100
them very young. One was we told them, we don't owe you a college education. You're not owed that.
00:19:53.620
That doesn't mean we want to help you if you had a unique opportunity, but don't you ever think
00:19:57.300
you're entitled to that. That's something you work for. We also did things like, I don't buy you
00:20:01.700
your car. You want a car? Go get a job. You can earn the money for it. And so even though we were at a
00:20:08.960
point where, yeah, we could have go, it wouldn't have been, it would have been fancy, but we could
00:20:13.360
go buy them a car pretty easy. No, you're going to go work the night shift at McDonald's or whatnot,
00:20:19.420
or you're going to go do this. And so all of our kids bought their first car. And as a result,
00:20:25.380
they took excellent care of it. They also learned how to maintain it themselves. That was another
00:20:28.820
thing. I remember my oldest daughter, you know, oh, the brake pads are off. How much is it to get it
00:20:33.220
fixed? $1,100. How much is it to do it yourself? About $300. She learned how to do it herself,
00:20:39.540
pulled up YouTube and did it. And what that created was an extreme sense of confidence in
00:20:43.940
herself that I can figure this stuff out. And it also made them really good at budgeting
00:20:49.360
and prioritizing. That teaching of delayed gratification along with, I think that was
00:20:55.880
important. The other thing that we were pretty adamant with our kids on was dreams are great to
00:21:03.960
have, but they're yours. They're not somebody else's. They're not the world's. They're not
00:21:09.160
society's dreams. They're yours. So keep in mind, you got to feed yourself because nobody owes you
00:21:15.540
anything like that. You got to feed yourself. So if you have a dream, either pick a dream that feeds you
00:21:21.060
or pick a job that allows you to pursue your dream. But there was this constant drumbeat of you
00:21:28.800
are responsible for your life, which is not just an onerous, overwhelming. No, it's actually
00:21:36.100
somewhat miraculous when you think about it through the terms of world history, being able to be
00:21:42.260
responsible for your own life, being able to choose your path. That's important. And the more
00:21:49.560
challenges, the more age-appropriate challenges that they're given, the more they end up seeking
00:21:54.700
them out because they've developed the confidence that they can do it. And they like to be able to
00:21:59.500
say, no, I did that. My youngest daughter loved it when people were like, oh, your parents got you a
00:22:04.440
car. She's like, uh-huh, no. No, I worked for that. They didn't give me a dime for that car.
00:22:10.400
So I think that's one of the ways that you do it. Another thing too is obviously there are certain
00:22:16.680
things you do want to protect your kids from. The way I tried to break it down, I tried to explain
00:22:21.340
it to somebody like, what did it, how did I distinguish that? I said, I'm trying to prevent
00:22:25.480
them from getting scars, not bruises. So when I think it's something that's going to significantly
00:22:32.160
impact their life or cause genuine trauma, not the fake kind that we say so much, but genuine trauma,
00:22:38.620
I'm going to protect them from that. I'm going to shelter them from that because they're not
00:22:41.360
emotionally, physically, spiritually ready to tackle that particular problem. But they might
00:22:46.340
do other things that it's like, oh yeah, they're going to fall on their ass. I'm like, yeah, let
00:22:51.040
them. And then when they fall on their ass, we're like, that hurt, right? Yeah. Okay, let's go.
00:22:57.640
And again, it just, it builds that sense of resilience that they take on later. But if you're
00:23:03.980
No, you can't. Well, my worry is Nick, and this is what I really want to ask you, because
00:23:09.300
I think just speaking to lots of people, and I think a lot of the times people make this
00:23:15.040
stuff political, but I really don't think it is. Like so many people who support us, they're
00:23:20.660
not so much concerned about like, how do I teach my kid to do this? Because they know
00:23:24.380
the stuff you're talking about. This is, it's great stuff, but it's common sense to most people
00:23:28.560
of our generation, really. The thing I'm really concerned about is protecting my children from
00:23:34.540
other people who want to put shit in their heads that doesn't belong there. Now, that's
00:23:40.300
what I really wonder about in the modern age. How do we deal with that?
00:23:43.340
We pulled our kids out of school. We pulled our kids out and homeschooled. And the stereotypical
00:23:49.160
thing, I don't know how common this is in the UK. It's gotten a lot more common in the United
00:23:52.960
States, especially after COVID. You probably had maybe three to four percent of the population
00:24:00.440
homeschooling. A lot of people assume that that means they're going to be socially awkward
00:24:06.560
or they're not going to interact with people. And I always look back, I'm like, have you seen
00:24:11.360
what they're teaching in the schools right now? Yes, my kids missed out on the opportunity
00:24:15.580
to be communist. Oh, no. I'm so upset. One of the things I think is so important about that is
00:24:23.420
that, and I do think this is tied to a larger ideology, and I don't mean to make it partisan.
00:24:29.240
I just think it's ideological, which is to say that there is a very popular political theory that
00:24:35.360
says that kids should be raised and educated collectively, that this should be done by experts,
00:24:40.140
that how could you, I mean, you want to take, you want to do open heart surgery on your child.
00:24:43.720
Why would you trust yourself with something as complex as educating them on a variety of topics
00:24:48.920
for which you can't possibly have sufficient information? And what it does is it takes the
00:24:53.240
parent out of the role of being an educator, and it teaches the child to no longer see you
00:24:59.320
as an educator. But the thing is, is that in most circumstances, there's bad parents,
00:25:03.780
but in most circumstances, you care about that child, their future, their hopes, wants, needs,
00:25:07.580
desires, dreams, far more than anybody, any government bureaucrat, to include teachers who might even
00:25:13.340
be really, really good teachers. But public education was made for the mass production of
00:25:17.600
education. It was not made for your child in mind. And you do have a very prominent ideological bias
00:25:23.620
going on, especially within the credentialing institutions when it comes to education, that
00:25:28.480
they believe it is their duty to not just teach your kids how to read, write, do arithmetic, or even
00:25:33.840
basic citizenry. They believe it is their job, their moral responsibility, to educate their kids
00:25:40.680
and to prepare them for a certain social construct that you might not agree with. And the thing I
00:25:48.460
tell parents is, if you have certain values that you want to convey to your children, if you have
00:25:54.180
a certain understanding of the world, and you teach them one way at home, and let's say, what do you
00:26:01.180
get? You get the weekends, 30, 40 minutes, you know, dinner, but then you send them off to a place that
00:26:07.000
might not share any of those values. In fact, in some cases might be openly hostile to them.
00:26:11.200
And you tell your kids, because you should, right? That's your teacher, you respect them.
00:26:15.620
And they constantly get the drumbeat of, well, that's the expert. They're the educator. You're
00:26:18.960
not the educator. Well, at best, they're going to get conflicting signals on who they should listen
00:26:25.420
to. And you're at the bottom of the totem pole now. Between the teacher, Taylor Swift, you know,
00:26:30.960
and their friend group, you're at the bottom of the totem pole. You can take that dynamic back.
00:26:36.340
Because the reality is, is when your kids bond with you the way they're meant to, especially very
00:26:42.380
early on in their development, you are their natural educator. And so that is both an incredible
00:26:49.480
privilege, but it's also an incredible responsibility. The good news is, is I don't think it's ever been
00:26:54.040
easier to be able to use resources, many of them free, in order to assist with your child's
00:27:00.640
education. And this doesn't mean you can't go out and use experts. It doesn't mean you can't use
00:27:05.720
those resources or, you know, go to co-ops or tutors or whatever else it might be. But now you
00:27:11.440
have significantly more control with respect to the worldview you would like to pass along to them.
00:27:17.140
And it is amazing to me the arrogance I will see from the educational establishment where it's like,
00:27:21.800
who are you to decide what your child's worldview should be? We're the experts. Like, okay, I've
00:27:26.880
seen what you consider to be expertise, and I'm not that impressed. But the other thing I would say
00:27:32.560
too is that I've run into a lot of parents that, let's say, share my worldview, which their kids go
00:27:40.700
off to college and they get very, very frustrated. They feel like they lose their kids within two
00:27:43.720
years of college. And then I'll ask them, okay, well, how did you, how did you convey those values to
00:27:48.840
them? And it's heartbreaking when I got to look at a parent and be like, okay, you didn't convey
00:27:53.780
values. You taught an authority structure. And the authority structure was, I'm mom, I'm dad, I love
00:28:00.560
you, we gave you life, we feed you, we clothe you. This is what we believe. And what they learned was
00:28:06.440
as long as they regurgitated what mom and dad did under mom and dad's roof, they were rewarded. And
00:28:11.400
insofar as they strayed for it, they were potentially punished. So there was some sort of
00:28:14.260
disincentivization structure. I said, okay, great. But now you're not the one housing or
00:28:19.040
feeding or clothing there. You're not the primary authority figure within their life. It's a
00:28:22.920
professor. And so they took the authority structure that you taught them and you're just not the
00:28:31.080
authority anymore. What you have to do if you want to foster is you have to teach sound critical
00:28:37.340
thinking. Are you teaching your kids to somebody, and you don't got to get into all the technical
00:28:41.860
terms, right? But law of identity, law of excluded middle, law of non-contradiction. Are you teaching
00:28:47.220
about inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning? When they regurgitate something that you know that
00:28:52.600
they heard from you, do you challenge them on it? Why'd you say that? I used to love doing that
00:28:56.600
with my kids. I still do. They'll say something that I know they heard from me. I'd be like,
00:29:00.560
why do you think that? Oh, well, you know. No, no, no. I don't know. Why do you think that?
00:29:05.380
I know why I think it. Why do you think it? And then I'll challenge them. What about this?
00:29:09.120
What about that? And you engage in this sparring relationship, this intellectual sparring with your
00:29:15.640
child in order to develop those critical thinking skills. And then the big thing I always tell
00:29:20.920
parents, too, is that especially if you're, and I hope every parent is doing this, but some don't,
00:29:26.060
if you're teaching your kids that there is such a thing as objective morality, well, get ready for
00:29:30.180
when they find you breaking the objective morality you taught them. And if in the moment that they catch
00:29:35.860
you at it, now, if they're a little rude and punks about it, sure, you know, get them back into the
00:29:39.940
proper respectful mindset. But if the moment they catch you screwing up, your attitude is,
00:29:45.600
you don't tell me what to do. I run this house. Ah, once again, it's not that the truth reigned in
00:29:52.720
your household. It's not that right reigned in your household. Authority did. You were the authority.
00:29:57.720
You had the ability to impose your will. And so that's all it was. But the first time your kid,
00:30:04.200
and it's usually going to be in their teenage years, which, oh, just so dang irritating.
00:30:08.080
As soon as your kid catches you doing it, I've had cases like this. I have one story I love to
00:30:11.960
tell about it. But if you can look at them and be like, you know what? You were right. I'm wrong.
00:30:18.620
I apologize. And I want to thank you for having the courage to respectfully call me out. Man,
00:30:27.120
that sticks with them. That sticks with them. And now when it's a different authority figure that's
00:30:31.700
doing something that they believe is wrong, and they have a conviction that this is right now,
00:30:36.500
not simply because they were told it, but because they were taught why it was correct.
00:30:40.340
They were able to logically think through it. It's no longer mom and dad's belief that they're
00:30:43.760
regurgitating. It's their belief. And they're going to defend that. And all of a sudden, when that
00:30:49.060
professor gets a little bit of pushback and is like, well, this is my classroom, it's like, oh,
00:30:53.320
okay. And that isn't, it doesn't jire them anymore. They're prepared for it.
00:30:57.880
But you got to do that sparring. You got to do that sparring.
00:31:02.100
It's such a good point. And it takes me back to my own time as a teacher. But moving on,
00:31:10.420
It did. I just saw so many teachers being like, I'm the teacher. And I'm like, well,
00:31:14.580
you've already lost them now because you're not actually pushing back on what they're saying.
00:31:18.740
But you talk about your experiences in Iraq. And I've got a great empathy and a great admiration
00:31:28.340
for people who serve for their country like you did. And push back on me because maybe I'm wrong
00:31:34.740
with this. But I saw Iraq as a betrayal in many ways. Betrayal for people like you. Betrayal for
00:31:42.420
people like me who believed in what we were told. And I think if we can see people's distrust
00:31:50.140
of politicians, distrust of America and the way it's behaving overseas, even if its intentions are
00:31:56.260
good, they obviously stem from Vietnam. But for my generation, our generation, it's Iraq that was
00:32:03.080
a key moment. Yeah. Oh, no, I don't disagree. I remember if you asked me in 2001, 2002, 2003,
00:32:13.120
I was like, yeah, Afghanistan, Iraq, what's next? When do we go over with Iran? Who's next on the...
00:32:18.500
I mean, I was a 21-year-old kid. I was going to go fight. Now it's my war. You attacked us on our
00:32:26.200
home soil. We haven't had that happen in a while. I was out for blood. But the more I got into it,
00:32:35.240
especially in my second tour in 2008, we had a very good tour. It was a very successful tour.
00:32:42.360
By the same token, I'm starting to get very, very skeptical of what brought us over here in
00:32:47.660
the first place and why are we doing it this way. What got you skeptical?
00:32:52.100
Part of it was the idea that... So it wasn't even kind of like the lack of WMDs,
00:33:00.140
which for a lot of people, I think that was the thing. We all expected, oh, there's the
00:33:03.760
warehouses, we told you. I was able to justify that in my own head. Oh, well, he was operating
00:33:08.880
in such a way that made us think that he had it, but he's still a bad guy and so all this is justified.
00:33:12.840
It was more about looking back. And I'll never forget, I was writing the SITREP for my ODA,
00:33:19.900
my special force is 18. And my captain comes in, he goes, hey, Nick, you need to put more in the
00:33:25.060
SITREP before we send it up to Special Operations Task Force North. I said, we're packing our...
00:33:31.360
That's all we did that week. It was literally like our last two weeks in country, we were packing up
00:33:35.020
and transitioning with 10th group that was coming in to take our place. And he goes, just put more
00:33:40.100
in there. I'm like, government bureaucracy, right? So I wrote in and I said, okay, I got a question for
00:33:44.880
all you mucky mucks up there at Special Operations Task Force North. Why are we the only country from a
00:33:49.500
constitutional republic with a generally free market system that goes overseas, overthrows
00:33:54.400
dictatorships, and then sets up parliamentary democracies with centrally planned economies?
00:33:58.900
I put that in the SITREP. Now, our process was I would put stuff in the SITREP, he would read it,
00:34:04.740
take out the little snarky stuff I sent, and then send it up. He forgot. So we got a call down
00:34:11.460
and the operations officer for our task force is, put Freitas on the phone.
00:34:15.960
What the F is this? I'm like, oh, hey, sir, I'm sorry. I kind of put that into Raz the Captain,
00:34:22.880
and I don't think he read it before he sent it up. But now that I have you, could you answer the
00:34:27.520
question? So it was this idea that here we were attempting to nation build. Here we were attempting
00:34:36.160
to essentially impose an approach to government, and really a larger approach to just, you know,
00:34:44.160
culture. But this society never said that they particularly wanted. It wasn't organic for them.
00:34:49.900
It's not like they really decided this. We were the one calling the shots. Do you want your money?
00:34:54.860
Well, then you're going to have a parliament. Do you want this? Then you're going to do this.
00:34:58.460
And it was the same thing in Afghanistan. And then I started looking more. I'm like, you know,
00:35:02.980
constitutionally, aren't we supposed to, isn't Congress supposed to cast a vote on this?
00:35:06.760
Not just a budget amendment, a vote. And so it was a combination of, some of it was the reasoning,
00:35:15.060
the initial reasoning versus what happened. Some of it was understanding a little bit more about
00:35:18.980
how the world worked outside of, you know, my kind of Western mindset or American mindset.
00:35:26.940
It was the way the war was conducted, where, are we in this to win? Like, I remember them sending me
00:35:33.600
home two months early for my first combat deployment because I had to go to the advanced
00:35:37.060
non-commissioned officers course. Like, why would you take me out of a combat? If this is so damn
00:35:42.220
important, why are you taking me out of combat zone to go to a school?
00:35:45.440
They would rotate our, like, the commanders for our, this is special forces. We're not even
00:35:50.940
talking like a line infantry unit. In special forces, they would take your team leader, your
00:35:55.040
commander, and rotate them in with another one in the middle of your combat tour. Why? Well,
00:35:59.760
it's the rotation. He needs his OER block. That's the offshore efficiency. He needs his OER block for
00:36:05.160
combat as well. But this is stupid. We're not even serious out here. Oh, you can't go outside the
00:36:11.900
wire unless you fill out this 42-page PowerPoint presentation explaining what you're doing.
00:36:17.260
Are we serious about winning this? And so I became skeptical of the way the military was running
00:36:22.740
things. I really became skeptical of the way politicians were running things. I became very,
00:36:26.620
very skeptical of the military industrial complex, even though I recognize that we need an industry to
00:36:30.840
create weapons systems. I don't, you know, we need that. And I became really, really skeptical of
00:36:36.400
our complete unwillingness to follow our own constitutional process for deciding when we
00:36:43.140
go to war or not. And it was another thing that I realized, like, oh, Congress likes to be on board
00:36:49.840
when it's the patriotic thing to do. And then they like to blame the president when the war eventually
00:36:54.180
goes south. So nobody wants to take responsibility. And yet we're over here getting shot at because you
00:37:00.300
told us it was worth it. I'll never forget, I slipped up one day when I was telling my son a story
00:37:09.180
and my wife looked at me and said, what? And I was like, yeah, because my son's going into the military.
00:37:17.000
I said, when you plan your operation, you have a certain threshold of how many people you can lose
00:37:22.500
and it's still worth it. Now, for me, I just, well, yeah, of course that makes sense because there's a
00:37:27.800
certain threshold of people that when you lose, you can no longer effectively carry out your plan
00:37:32.220
to go get the bad guy. What my wife is hearing is like, so if three of you would have died,
00:37:39.560
but you would have got that guy, that would have been worth it? It's like, well, that's the job.
00:37:47.520
And it has to be that way, by the way. It has to be that way. Mission has to, there were commanders
00:37:53.800
that would have said, my mission is to bring everyone home alive. Well, you're a dumbass.
00:37:57.600
If that's your mission, don't leave. Don't go to war. Guaranteed, you'll bring everyone home alive.
00:38:03.800
No, we sign up for this and we're an all-volunteer force. We sign up for this to go do dangerous things
00:38:08.360
with the understanding that some of us might not come home. We will do everything we possibly can
00:38:12.520
to accomplish the mission and bring everyone home. But when we have a mission, that's the mission.
00:38:17.280
But then you start to, you start to look at it like, what was it actually? I know what my mission
00:38:22.260
was on that objective. This is why I look back with so much animosity with respect to how the
00:38:29.280
United States came about its decision-making process to go to war and the way we conducted
00:38:34.740
it. Because to this day, I can justify the early operations in Afghanistan. Not a lot of the follow-on,
00:38:40.120
but early on. But you're looking at this going, I'm mad about that. I'm not mad about my service.
00:38:48.100
I know what me and my friends did. I know what we tried to do in a difficult situation. I know the
00:38:53.980
people we helped. I know some of the guys that aren't walking around anymore, and I sleep like a
00:38:58.480
baby because they were horrible, evil men. But we destabilized the region. And then a lot of people
00:39:09.980
died that probably wouldn't have. And ultimately, we lost a lot of good people. And them and their
00:39:19.180
families have every right to be proud of their service, but we also have every right to be pissed
00:39:22.460
about what the overall justification for the mission was.
00:39:25.420
So what do you think was the real reason why we went to war in Iraq? Because obviously they said WMDs,
00:39:31.020
Yeah. I don't think it's the simple explanation a lot of people give that it's just the military
00:39:40.640
industrial complex, or it's just Bush wanted to finish it up, or Bush wanted to be a wartime
00:39:45.000
president, or they're all greedy because they had stock in Halliburton, right? I think the truth is
00:39:52.020
actually much worse. And this goes back to kind of the C.S. Lewis quote where, I'm going to botch it up,
00:40:00.560
but he said that it would be better to live under robber barons than moral busybodies because the
00:40:05.040
robber baron might have their greed or lust for power satiated, but the moral busybody will torment
00:40:09.480
you without end because they do so with the approval of their own conscience. And I think some of these
00:40:13.980
guys just have this vision for how they're going to be the one, they're going to do great things,
00:40:19.040
they're going to reorder society, they're going to bring democracy to a place that has never had it,
00:40:23.500
they're going to, whatever. And I think I chalk it more up to moral arrogance than I do greed or
00:40:33.640
lust for power on a lot of this. Because there's a lot of easier ways to get money and power.
00:40:42.500
You've got to really truly believe that you're on some sort of incredibly noble mission to do some
00:40:46.880
of the horrible things that people have done throughout history, especially in positions of
00:40:50.460
high political leadership. And what effect did that war have on the surrounding regions,
00:40:57.040
the Middle East, not just America, but on that entire region?
00:41:02.780
So I think one of the, again, one of the things that Americans have gotten wrong ever since Wilson
00:41:08.680
is this idea that our new manifest destiny, now that the Western portion of the continent has been
00:41:15.300
conquered, is to make the world safe for democracy. No, it isn't. It's like anything else. Various
00:41:25.120
cultures, various religious traditions lend themselves to particular styles of government.
00:41:29.800
And I definitely think that the dictatorship in North Korea is absolutely horrible, right? I think
00:41:36.080
there's other regimes. I think the communist regime in China is absolutely horrible. Does that mean it is
00:41:40.460
therefore the United States' mission to go in, overthrow it, and replace it with something that we think
00:41:44.960
would be more advantageous or beneficial or equitable? No, I don't think so. I think that
00:41:50.360
completely takes out any sort of understanding for how cultures develop and the sort of organic
00:41:56.420
solutions that they come. I mean, I think Daniel Bell came up with the quote that culture is society's
00:42:03.960
attempt to come up with a coherent set of answers to the existential questions we face throughout our
00:42:08.600
lives. Different cultures come up with different answers. Now, I'm not a cultural relativist. I don't think
00:42:14.460
every culture has come up with the best answers to these questions. I do prefer the answers that
00:42:19.660
the West, in most cases, have come up to it. But I also understand that that has to be an organic
00:42:24.760
realization. It's very difficult to impose that from the top down. Yeah, you can't bomb it into
00:42:30.180
people. Yeah, right? And now people will like to point to Germany or Japan as examples of how it can
00:42:37.380
work. And I think it would be incorrect to say that there's no way that you can impose it. I think
00:42:44.840
it's foolish to assume that that's the natural or best way for it to come about, especially in a way
00:42:50.220
that people can actually embrace it as their own. Well, if you think about what we had to do to both
00:42:54.960
Germany and Japan to achieve those objectives. Oh, devastating. You know, my view, having read a lot
00:43:02.420
about it, is that it was absolutely the right thing to do. But it was an awful thing to have had
00:43:08.800
to do. It's not something that you would choose to do unless you were in a position like the West was
00:43:15.360
in at the time. It wasn't quite true for America, but certainly for all of Europe and the Soviet Union,
00:43:20.300
it was a war of survival. Yes. And in that situation, you have to fight to capitulation
00:43:25.480
of the other side and then make sure that they're not going to threaten you again with the same thing.
00:43:29.880
And you have to make sure you don't repeat the mistakes of World War I and have that ended, right?
00:43:34.080
And I dare say that Japan and Germany also would not have turned out the way they did as a result of
00:43:40.960
the occupation or elements within the Marshall Plan, which I'm actually something of a critic of,
00:43:45.620
if you didn't have the looming threat of the Soviet Union or Maoist China. I think those provided
00:43:53.540
sufficient threats for people to be willing to say, okay, that's the bigger threat, not the internal
00:43:58.100
divisions that we're facing right now. And I don't think a similar thing existed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
00:44:04.520
I think the end result is the greatest threat in that area is Iran. And because Iraq is majority Shia,
00:44:14.960
and has long-term relationships with the Iranian government, I don't... Now that I'm a little
00:44:21.860
bit more, I guess, a little bit wiser, I can look at that now and say, we were going into a country
00:44:26.940
that was predominantly Shia, that had close relationships with Iran, that hated the Hussein
00:44:31.580
regime. At the same time that pretty much every other Arab country that we actually have fostered
00:44:37.440
fairly decent relationships, whether that be Qatar, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia, or UAE, are terrified
00:44:44.860
of Iran wanting to be kind of the hegemonic leader for that region. And so now we just gave Iran another
00:44:52.420
base of operations, not to mention the fact that we've facilitated further destabilization in Syria,
00:44:58.440
not to mention Lebanon. And so that's the sort of real politic that I think sometimes our idealism
00:45:04.560
gets in the way of a scene. Well, the question I want to ask you about that, Nick, is it's really
00:45:09.440
interesting because Francis talked about how there were people who believed the Republic. I didn't
00:45:14.200
believe the stuff about Iraq. I was on the streets protesting about it because it was... I mean, maybe
00:45:18.820
it was naive to think I really knew what was going on, but it was obvious to me that the whole case
00:45:23.220
for that war was bullshit. Yeah. It was pretty clear. And therefore, I'm not traumatized in the way that I
00:45:30.220
think some people are who pushed that war very aggressively, who now have said, America must never
00:45:36.140
intervene in anything. America mustn't do anything. And I was... But, you know, you laugh, and I also
00:45:41.380
laugh, to be honest, because I think that's a very naive worldview. I agree. You agree. So I'm curious about
00:45:47.000
what your thoughts are in relation to some of the conflicts that America is currently involved in, not
00:45:52.060
directly, but at least backing, you know, obviously, Ukraine and the one in the Middle East.
00:45:55.700
I think we... I think if we're going to take a... So it's funny. There are some people that say
00:46:01.700
they're America first when really what they are is everybody last. And it's... I think that's two
00:46:05.880
different things. America first, for me, is a foreign policy which understands that we have
00:46:10.700
interests. It's the whole idea of the nations don't have friends, they have interests. I think
00:46:15.740
there is an element in there where you can't have long-lasting alliances. The UK is a perfect example
00:46:19.820
of this. You can't have long-lasting alliances for which there are both interests and mutually shared
00:46:25.560
values and friendship which are beneficial and which ultimately facilitate things like better
00:46:30.560
trade and better overall relations and stability. But we have to actually put everything into that
00:46:36.440
column and say, okay, where does this weigh in the larger scheme of things? And I'm not someone...
00:46:41.500
I am not a... I don't believe in real politic to the degree that I am just a moral relativist as soon
00:46:46.840
as I get outside my borders. I don't believe in that. Slavery is evil. I don't care who's doing it.
00:46:51.780
It's evil, right? Genocide is evil no matter who's doing it. I think what the American population
00:46:59.020
is sick of is feeling like our own domestic problems take a backseat to everybody else's
00:47:05.660
essentially domestic problems. And I understand that. And I'm right there with that and I sympathize
00:47:10.580
with that. I don't think that means that we just completely pull ourselves out of every single
00:47:15.160
world engagement. When it comes to Ukraine, I've been really skeptical with respect to the amount
00:47:21.140
of money that we've sent over. I am very glad that we haven't sent over troops. I was getting very
00:47:25.580
nervous that that was going to be the case and I did not think that was appropriate.
00:47:29.080
I also tend to think, like from the very beginning of this, I was like, look, I think Putin's a bad
00:47:32.980
guy and I want Ukraine to win. That doesn't mean I think we're responsible for Ukraine winning the
00:47:37.380
war. I also think the United States and NATO has to look very, very hard at some of the positions
00:47:42.740
that we took initially that potentially exacerbated this. The other thing that I would say is the
00:47:50.560
United States needs to learn, and Trump understood this. I was not a huge fan of Trump in 2016 when he
00:47:57.400
got elected. I remembered the Trump that believed a whole bunch of things I didn't like and then had
00:48:02.340
a family life I didn't quite think was in line with what I believed. But one of the biggest areas
00:48:09.020
where he absolutely proved himself to me was the understanding that not every military engagement
00:48:14.280
is a nation-building exercise. There is such a thing as a punitive expedition. Syria was a good
00:48:19.460
example of this. The way that he went after the leader of the IRGC after the bombing of the embassy
00:48:26.320
in Baghdad. I loved that. It was like, oh, so we're not going to bomb civilians. We're not going to invade
00:48:32.920
a country and try to set up a parliamentary democracy in a place that doesn't want it.
00:48:35.820
And we're not even going to blow up a legitimate military target, which would inevitably kill a
00:48:43.380
bunch of 19-year-old conscripts or a contractor that was there that day. No, no. He went after
00:48:48.680
the guy that orchestrated this, who was a known terrorist, and he killed him.
00:48:53.480
Yeah. Excellent. Because nothing sends a message to a guy like that that you shouldn't do that
00:48:59.560
than killing him or his buddies. He doesn't care how many 19-year-old
00:49:05.700
conscripts. He goes, Hamas doesn't care how many kids they lose. In fact, they'd like to lose more
00:49:10.000
because that's the strategy they utilize in order to manipulate the West.
00:49:14.680
So I'm a big fan of how do we conduct operations as efficiently as possible, both for the moral
00:49:19.940
reasons of avoiding collateral damage and civilian casualties, but also for the larger practical
00:49:25.440
reason that we have some enemies in some cultures that they don't care how many they lose if they
00:49:30.300
know that they can use it to manipulate our Western media and academia. So I think that
00:49:35.160
what I want to see U.S. foreign policy going toward is one where our goal is to expand trade
00:49:39.980
with as many people as we possibly can. I think the joke was there's never been two countries
00:49:44.160
with a McDonald's that have gone to war with one another.
00:49:51.080
Well, it was funny. I remember being in Iraq and on some of the bigger bases, they had like
00:49:55.000
a pizza hunt and a Cinnabon. And I was like, you want to know what real military force projection
00:49:58.900
is? It's not that we'll park an armored division in your lobby or aircraft battle group in your
00:50:05.460
harbor. It's that we'll bring fast food with us when we do it.
00:50:13.940
But I think we need to properly identify when it makes sense for us to do. I think we need to
00:50:20.160
come up with better rules of engagement for how we intervene. I think to the extent that we're
00:50:24.280
going to get involved in major military operations, we need to follow the constitutional process and
00:50:29.000
Congress needs to be expected to vote on going to a declaration of war, not just funding whatever
00:50:34.300
military adventures the executive branch has chosen to partake in. And then I think that we also need
00:50:42.920
to look for allies. I think we also need to look for allies that are willing to fight their own wars,
00:50:52.320
Ukraine is closer to that. Yeah. Ukraine is closer to that. They've just been asking for
00:50:56.220
support. My problem with that is that we've never had, like in the United States, like in our,
00:51:01.640
like if we look at NATO, long lasting alliance. If we look at the UK, long lasting alliance. If we
00:51:07.360
look at Israel, that's a pretty long lasting partnership and mutually beneficial one in many
00:51:14.040
areas. We've never had that with Ukraine. The other problem that I had, and this was something
00:51:19.520
that Trump also brought up, the requirement to be a member of NATO, I think is 3% of your GDP and
00:51:27.800
No, I mean, he was absolutely 100% right. And he got laughed out of the room for talking about it.
00:51:33.000
He did. And it was also one of those things where it's like, okay, look, Germany has a bigger GDP than
00:51:38.680
Russia. France has a bigger GDP than Russia. I believe the UK has a bigger GDP than Russia. And so I'm looking at all this going,
00:51:45.260
you have superior military technology. You have the capability. The United States is still going to,
00:51:50.420
you know, we're not going to allow Russia to just arbitrarily launch nukes, but the UK has nukes.
00:51:55.240
France has nukes. Why was NATO incapable of actually providing Ukraine all the military support?
00:52:01.060
I couldn't agree. I mean, you make such good points because this is really the issue. I think
00:52:05.420
no one talks about it in Europe, but Europeans as countries, not as people, but as countries have
00:52:10.980
become incredibly arrogant in the, we've been living under the American defense umbrella for
00:52:16.900
this entire time. And so, and at the same time, sort of turning our nose up at America and like
00:52:22.680
we, Europe should be able to defend itself. And the thing we've done with Ukraine, I think
00:52:27.700
the Ukraine's really got the worst of both worlds because on the one hand, we encourage them to make
00:52:32.140
a stand. On the other hand, we didn't actually help them to the level that they needed to, to make
00:52:37.220
that stand effectively, which, you know, the American people or the European people have a
00:52:41.900
right not to want to send lots of their money over to Ukraine, but then we should have told
00:52:45.640
them that at the beginning, instead of sort of getting the pom-poms out and cheerleading.
00:52:50.000
I think on a, on a cultural level within the United States, I remember as more and more USAID
00:52:56.100
was being requested and, and I was really concerned that we were going to send more special operations
00:53:01.240
and then all it takes is for a couple of Americans to get shot or an American plane to go down.
00:53:05.380
And, and when we're all in baby, that's just kind of our history.
00:53:10.060
My other frustration with it is that I always felt as if Europe was constantly telling us
00:53:16.600
to mind our own business or European countries in general, we're always telling us to mind
00:53:21.960
our own business, talking about the arrogant hegemonic, you know, military forces, the United
00:53:26.320
States. And why can't you guys be more diplomatic and civilized? And, and yet when the Russians
00:53:34.100
were crossing over the border, all of a sudden it was like, Hey America, how are you guys doing?
00:53:39.240
Those Abrams are looking pretty cool right now. I'm, I'm, I'm so tired of that.
00:53:43.880
Yeah. You're making really, really good points, man. And I say this as someone who's very supportive
00:53:48.420
of Ukraine's standards. I think that, you know, defending their country is very important. And I
00:53:53.000
hope ultimately they get what they were fighting for, which is long-term security so that this can't
00:53:58.960
happen again. But I guess you feel Israel is a different issue because of the longstanding
00:54:04.720
alliance. I think it's, it's a combination of longstanding alliance. I think it's also a
00:54:08.880
combination of strategic positioning within the world. Now there's some people that will say,
00:54:13.040
well, yeah, our problem with that part of the world is that we've been too close to Israel.
00:54:16.520
If we just abandoned that alliance, we'd be in a much better position. I don't think that's the case.
00:54:21.420
I also think that we can't just look at the Middle East from the, the standpoint of,
00:54:25.660
of oil or, or energy. Obviously that's a huge component of it, but a lot of people will say,
00:54:30.640
yeah, but it's not a huge component of the United States. Now again, yeah, you're right. We don't
00:54:34.580
get a, we don't get anywhere near as significant a portion of our oil from the Middle East as Europe
00:54:40.500
does or as Asia does, but it's still a worldly, it's still a commodity traded on, on world markets.
00:54:47.360
And so it does have an impact on overall prices. The other thing we need to take into account is
00:54:53.320
that it's got what, probably the third, third most strategic waterway in the world. I'm, I mean,
00:54:59.400
I probably own the Suez Canal. I mean, obviously Israel doesn't have a Suez Canal, but it's, it's,
00:55:03.700
it's very strategically located within proximity to that. I would, the only two I would potentially
00:55:09.860
put above it, it would be the Panama Canal and the Malacca Straits. And so I think, I think it makes
00:55:15.380
sense for cultural reasons. And I think it makes sense for strategic reasons. And again, a lot of the
00:55:21.200
funding that we do get at Israel, and this was similar with Ukraine as well, to your point
00:55:24.260
earlier, it, we're not just dropping off pallets of cash in most of these circumstances. Um, a lot
00:55:29.180
of what's being dropped off is we have a, the military industrial complex, right? But from a
00:55:35.200
practical standpoint, we have to have arms development. Um, it makes sense for us for a variety
00:55:43.060
of strategic reasons that we sell the arms to our allies, uh, rather than having to get it from
00:55:48.700
people that are not us. Um, and so, uh, you know, I, I understand it from that standpoint as well. I,
00:55:55.160
I also think Israel has always been very good about not, not requiring or, um, requesting U.S. troops,
00:56:02.340
uh, to fight the war. So again, I think two things can be true at once. I think the United States can
00:56:07.840
say, look, it is no longer our obligation to quote, make the world safe for democracy. We will,
00:56:12.460
we do have alliances which are important and strategic to our interests. Um, our, our first
00:56:18.240
instinct should not be that we have to fight the war for you. Um, I also look at Israel as an ally
00:56:24.720
where I, I, I can look at Israel's situation and say, yes, they do need support and they're somewhat
00:56:31.180
isolated with respect to where they can get it from. I don't think Ukraine is. Um, I really do feel
00:56:36.540
like Ukraine should be a primary European responsibility. Um, but again, it's not like
00:56:42.520
I'm against any sort of assistance, but I've been really skeptical with respect to how some of it's
00:56:47.760
gone. Now I will say this, somebody asked me the day, like, what do you think is Zelensky? I said,
00:56:51.120
I think he's probably one of the best wartime politicians I've ever seen. And you would have
00:56:57.340
thought I kicked somebody's puppy. Like he's corrupt and he's this and he's that. And do you know what he,
00:57:01.400
I mean, I wish Joe Biden cared about the United States as much as Zelensky cares about Ukraine.
00:57:09.400
Zelensky's job is not to be concerned about us taxpayers. Zelensky's job is to fight a war
00:57:14.400
and he's been incredibly effective in getting the resources necessary for that. Not to mention the
00:57:20.120
fact that it would have been really easy for him to unass his country and have every excuse to do so.
00:57:24.360
And I actually think he's done a really good job. Now, do I think there's probably corruption going
00:57:29.540
on in certain areas? Yes. Do I think there's been a misappropriation of resources and funds at some
00:57:33.540
point? I'm sure there has been, but, but ultimately he's kept his country in the war. And more than
00:57:39.860
that, he's effectively fought back. And so again, from a real politics standpoint, regardless of what
00:57:45.480
I think about the internal workings of Ukrainian politics, the guy has done a great job by his
00:57:50.540
country. The reason people get annoyed about that. And I think Nick, my observation is that
00:57:55.020
a lot of people don't want to say, I don't want to give money to foreign countries because it sounds
00:58:01.080
kind of nasty or whatever. So they then say, they then have to prove that Ukraine is the wrong
00:58:06.240
country to give money to. And therefore Zelensky is evil and whatever, instead of just saying what
00:58:11.040
they actually think. And, you know, I don't agree with their position, but it is a valid position to
00:58:15.120
say our country should focus on its own problems at a time when it has a lot of them. You know,
00:58:19.660
there's a reasonable position. Well, and that, that is the other side of it right now. I think
00:58:23.800
within the U S is that so many of our, so many of our problems have, have reached kind of a critical
00:58:29.740
stage. Um, the worst thing the United States could do is have a sovereign debt crisis because we are
00:58:36.620
the world's reserve currency and that would have disastrous effects. Um, and so I do think it's time
00:58:42.780
that we have to start to deal with some of those internal problems. But to your point, if we completely,
00:58:46.880
um, I, I don't like to use the word retreat because I've seen a lot of neocons use it as an excuse to
00:58:52.860
get us involved in everything. How about we just be a little bit more strategic and a little bit
00:58:57.880
more introspective on what our involvement should be to what extent and what our goals are, what our
00:59:02.700
purpose is. And then let's foster what our aid looks like based off of what our purpose is.
00:59:07.660
Is your purpose to just keep Ukraine in the war? Is your purpose to help them win? Is the purpose to
00:59:10.820
recapture Crimea? What's the purpose? And I realized that there are certain things, and actually this is
00:59:16.120
another thing that I think Trump has been pretty good about, is not always showing his hand on what
00:59:19.840
he's going to do on everything in a campaign run. Um, so I, I think that would be a far more
00:59:26.860
reasonable position for the United States to take, which would honor this, um, I think this very,
00:59:33.980
uh, important and understandable position to say, we need to reprioritize our own stuff right now,
00:59:40.500
um, while at the same time recognizing that we still play a major role within the world. And I don't
00:59:45.000
think the world gets better with her, you know, with an isolationist style absence.
00:59:49.940
Let me just ask one more question for us about Israel. You've served, you've probably seen some
00:59:54.800
urban combat, I'm guessing. People like us who've never been in that situation, I hear,
01:00:01.520
you know, I have my own views on it and having sort of read and listened and whatever, but ultimately
01:00:06.700
I've never been there. People talk about what's happening in Gaza and they say, you know, it's genocide,
01:00:11.880
it's this, it's that. And then other people say, well, look at the civilian to combat and death
01:00:16.540
ratio. Actually, this is the like most humane operation in history. Like what do you make of
01:00:20.920
all of that? I think the people that are calling it genocide, um, are either being intentionally
01:00:25.480
dishonest or don't know what the word genocide means. Um, I think that's very intentional on their
01:00:30.540
behalf. Um, when it comes to civilian casualties, there's a lot of people that like to do what I call
01:00:37.080
Excel spreadsheet fighting. And what they do is they look at the Excel spreadsheet with Israeli
01:00:42.220
military capability and Hamas military capability and say, why do they need to do all of this?
01:00:48.460
Like, look at how much more powerful they are. The reason why asymmetric warfare exists is when you
01:00:54.540
have a weaker force that is attempting to utilize the strengths of the stronger force against them.
01:00:59.380
So they're putting themselves in the best advantage possible. So we, I did a video on this. We have a
01:01:05.740
program called the Y Minutes and we talked about what is Hamas's strategy. And one of the questions
01:01:11.180
that I asked when I looked at this from a strategic standpoint is, okay, so Hamas knew when they went
01:01:16.520
into Israel that they weren't going to overthrow Israel. Um, when they took hostages, they knew
01:01:22.840
that the IDF was coming for them. Um, and yet they did both, right? So they knew they couldn't
01:01:30.540
defeat the IDF militarily and they knew getting hostages would force the IDF to come.
01:01:35.740
after them in a big way. Um, so why'd they do that? And how did they know that Western academia
01:01:43.920
and media would almost instantly be on their side? And the reason why is because a lot of
01:01:49.660
these organizations have invested very, very heavily within America academia. Um, I don't
01:01:54.160
know the numbers for, for European academia, but I'm, I'm assuming it's probably significant.
01:01:57.760
Um, at, at the same token, they understood that the way that you manipulate Western media
01:02:04.600
and Western sensibility is civilian casualties. Because even though we can look at our own
01:02:10.620
histories, whether it's the firebombing of Dresden or dropping, you know, atomic weapons
01:02:14.440
on, on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we've, we've certainly been able to get over our, our problem
01:02:19.060
with civilian casualties, but we also pride ourselves on attempting to avoid them to the extent possible
01:02:23.320
and reasonable. Urban warfare makes it incredibly difficult to do that because the, the fight now
01:02:32.260
is not my smart weapon against your AK 47. The weapon is now my guys and, and the strategic
01:02:39.540
advantage is they have aerial oversight and they have body armor, right? And night vision maybe,
01:02:47.020
right? But you can, they can buy night vision for, you know, five grand on the black market. So it's
01:02:50.380
not like Hamas can't have access to that. And so now if you're in a position where you benefit
01:02:58.440
strategically from civilian casualties, you have the perfect environment to maximize that
01:03:02.500
in a way that no other military can mitigate other than giving up. Because if I have to,
01:03:08.560
I like, I've, I've been in that environment where you are kicking in multiple doors to try to get to
01:03:13.040
your bad guy and every other room there's women and children. And we go through an incredible level
01:03:18.420
of training in order to make sure that you hit the right target. But that's a, that's a complex
01:03:24.000
environment, especially when that one time women, kids moving on. And then the 12 year old picks up
01:03:29.380
an AK 47 and starts shooting. Is that a civilian casualty or is that a military age male? Well, in that
01:03:36.980
moment, that's a military age male. You're shooting at me. That's not how it's going to be reported by
01:03:41.740
Hamas to CNN who will dutifully report X number of children killed on the objective. So what is
01:03:49.520
considered reasonable mitigation of civilian casualties? Well, it isn't warning everybody
01:03:58.740
ahead of time that I'm going to go into your neighborhood. It certainly isn't calling them
01:04:03.340
on their cell phones ahead of time and saying, Hey, we're about to attack this area. It isn't doing
01:04:09.600
drones where you, you bring stuff down going, please leave the area. We're about to attack this
01:04:13.880
house. And yet the IDF is doing those things. I'm sorry, but there is no, there is no measurement
01:04:22.120
that we can utilize with respect to how militaries engage in combat operations with a legitimate and
01:04:29.020
honest attempt to mitigate civilian casualties and not come to the conclusion that at the very
01:04:34.300
least of the Israeli ground forces have tried to do, have gone above and beyond whatever those
01:04:38.060
standards might be. And so at this point, what an honest media would be asking is, why do you insist
01:04:46.900
on keeping women and children in combat zones? You're not, Hamas is not confused about where Israel's
01:04:53.540
going to go. Why won't they move them out of the areas? Why do they keep them in those areas? Why do
01:04:59.260
they insist that they stay? And another video we did a while back was we asked the question on why don't
01:05:04.280
more Arab countries accept Palestinian refugees? The answer is they used to. And then Palestinian
01:05:09.400
refugees sided with Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. They tried to overthrow the Jordanian
01:05:15.160
government. They did help destabilize Lebanon. They've caused problems within Egypt. And so it's not
01:05:22.340
that I don't, it's not that I am trying to minimize civilian casualties when they take place.
01:05:28.180
But I think it's absurd to rationally look at what is going on on the ground right there and then come
01:05:35.800
to the conclusion that Israel is just saying, if Israel wanted to genocide Gaza, they could. And it
01:05:42.240
wouldn't have taken them this long. They didn't. Now let's ask the reverse question. If Hamas would
01:05:50.640
have had the strength on October 7th to do everything it wanted to do, would Israel still be here?
01:05:54.360
We know what they do. I visited the music festival. I visited some of the kubuts.
01:06:02.340
I'm not confused about what they would do with similar power. And so that's the part where I get,
01:06:08.860
I get frustrated by this because again, I understand Americans that are saying it's Israel's war, not
01:06:13.860
ours. I get that. I get it when they say it's Ukraine's war, not ours. And I do believe that again,
01:06:19.960
we should think strategically about what our involvement is going to look like. But I also think
01:06:23.100
that we shouldn't engage in this kind of moral relativism where it's just, well, it's just not
01:06:27.460
our problem. Okay. Not primarily. But Hamas actively seeking, targeting, and killing women
01:06:36.840
and children because they believe it's perfectly morally justified, taking hostages. I'm looking at
01:06:43.500
some of the people on the right too that are talking about this, especially some of the tough guys on
01:06:48.560
the right. And I'm like, if it was your kid in Israel right now, you would not be calling ahead
01:06:55.680
to see, hey, just wanted to let you know we're going to be coming in. You'd be kicking doors and
01:06:59.560
beating the living piss out of people. So spare me your moral outrage when Israel wants to do the
01:07:05.440
same thing. I once did the numbers. I was like, okay, if Mexico crossed into Texas, killed 40,000
01:07:12.740
people and kidnapped another 1,500 to 2,000. And then the EU called for the United States to engage
01:07:22.580
in discretion and a ceasefire. I can tell you how quick we tell them to go F themselves before we
01:07:28.360
went down there and proceeded to demonstrate to everybody in the world that that was a really bad
01:07:33.760
idea. So I don't want, look, I don't want Palestinians to die. I don't want Israelis to die.
01:07:45.040
But if one side gets to continually engage in terrorist operations and start wars with
01:07:50.320
with the rest of the world, just immediately calling for a ceasefire, the moment you hit back,
01:07:55.460
that's absurd. And what you've actually done with the West has taught Hamas is that the more
01:08:00.900
civilian casualties you get, the more funding you get, and the more support you'll get.
01:08:04.700
We've incentivized them killing their own civilians by not demanding that they not do that.
01:08:15.660
Nick, you speak very powerfully about this and about the horrors of war. And one of the things that
01:08:20.740
I noticed when I'm in the United States is on the one hand, how highly you talk about your veterans.
01:08:26.540
On the other hand, I see the homelessness crisis. I was looking at stats. 40,000 veterans are homeless.
01:08:33.360
Roughly around 20 veterans every day commit suicide. These are terrible statistics.
01:08:46.120
That's an interesting question. I was just talking to a friend of mine, Daniel Gade, who actually ran
01:08:50.760
some of our veteran services here in Virginia. He'd worked in the White House. He'd actually lost his
01:08:55.200
leg in Iraq as a company commander, as a tanker. And ended up staying in the service and retiring
01:09:02.300
as a lieutenant colonel, I believe. We had a long conversation about that. And we have what is
01:09:07.740
probably a fairly unpopular opinion with respect to the way that we are, quote, helping veterans.
01:09:13.280
Because there's a lot of people that the immediate answer is like, well, of course,
01:09:16.960
we need more funding for veterans affairs. Of course, we need to eradicate these things that are going on.
01:09:21.660
And in the process, what we're doing is we're turning veterans into victims.
01:09:25.760
Now, do I believe that a veteran that serves and is wounded in the line of duty or is injured in the
01:09:31.560
line of duty, maybe they didn't serve overseas, maybe they had a bad jump and they broke their back,
01:09:37.660
they are entitled to every single piece of advanced medical care that we can give them.
01:09:43.400
That's a part of the contract that you sign with your country when you engage in service.
01:09:46.980
What we have right now is an incredibly inefficient system that is encouraging people to game the
01:09:55.760
system. They are encouraging people to seek out a hundred percent disability, even if a hundred
01:10:02.260
percent disability does not legitimately exist. And we've got people that are now treating this as
01:10:07.000
like, well, it's free money. No, it isn't. First of all. Second of all, I get very upset when I see
01:10:13.460
somebody, somebody that will say never served overseas and they're getting higher disability
01:10:21.240
for sleep apnea and my knee hurts. And I have a ringing in my ear than a guy that lost a leg
01:10:26.100
overseas. There is a corrupting nature to benefits when they're not properly distributed and when
01:10:35.240
they're not properly given. And so I am very skeptical of what I see as a concerted effort by some to turn
01:10:42.220
veterans into victims. We should be taking care of our veterans. But again, the proper way to do that
01:10:48.400
is to once again, help them find a place, a meaning and a purpose once they leave military service, not
01:10:54.760
just a handout. Here, take this. There was this famous line from a movie, I think it was 310 to Yuma, where
01:11:00.320
the guy in it said, he goes, I realized that they gave me money, not so I could walk away, but so they could.
01:11:05.520
I heard a comedian once say that somebody said, do you support the troops? And he goes, well, he goes,
01:11:12.440
our government certainly learned that it's easier to worship the troops than it is to take care of
01:11:15.740
them. I don't want an elaborate welfare system for the troops. I want a system that honors their
01:11:22.520
service. I want a culture that respects them for the sacrifices that they made. And I want an economic
01:11:28.440
system that values the skills and the benefits and the attributes that they bring. And insofar as we
01:11:35.460
can help facilitate that so they can find meaning and purpose in the next thing that they do within
01:11:40.160
life, that's the way that we should be doing it. But instead, I feel like we've created a,
01:11:46.720
like every bureaucracy, we have created a bureaucracy which has its own agenda apart from the reason why it
01:11:51.500
was created. But if we see, and I take on board everything that you're saying, and the worst thing that
01:11:57.140
you can do is incentivize people to not strive, to not get better, to not work, because then you're
01:12:02.300
teaching them to be victims and to be helpless. But what do you do with, you know, people who come
01:12:09.040
out with severe PTSD, who are unable to function, who end up on the streets, like 40,000 of these
01:12:15.360
veterans, what do we do with them? So I think it's important to distinguish that there are some
01:12:19.260
people that served in the military, that got out and are dealing with substance abuse issues and
01:12:24.040
whatnot. Because if you look at homeless in the United States, again, I don't say this to be
01:12:27.860
incentive. I know that there is always going to be a subset of the population that, due to
01:12:32.660
circumstances beyond their control, find themselves in bad circumstances. Having dealt a little bit
01:12:38.560
with this issue, though, there's a lot of other people that find themselves in this situation because
01:12:41.800
this is what they choose through consistent actions and behavior. And I have really good friends
01:12:47.200
that have actually been involved in this as a ministry. And they would tell you that, okay, you go into a
01:12:51.280
homeless encampment, which you're going to find, is that you're going to find a lot of people, many of
01:12:55.180
them are on the sex offender list. You're going to find others that are dealing with massive substance
01:13:02.340
abuse and mental health issues. And then when it comes to, you know, perhaps finding more stable or
01:13:07.260
steady work, they feel like they can make more panhandling in a 48-hour period than they could
01:13:12.140
at a standard job. So those are all a variety of perverse incentives. And the question is, is where is
01:13:18.980
society's responsibility versus individual responsibility? And unfortunately, I think
01:13:23.500
when we create an environment where we see society as being ultimately responsible, as opposed to the
01:13:28.480
individual, we get the worst of both worlds. So to the extent that we can, we'll isolate it to
01:13:37.580
veterans. In Virginia, we have programs to ensure that any veteran that is homeless has access to free
01:13:46.440
rent, you know, processes and services where they can get what they need. So they're there, they exist.
01:13:53.960
We can always do a better job of making sure that people are aware of it. But then we also have to
01:13:57.900
understand there's also a subset. They don't, they don't want to engage with it. The other thing that
01:14:03.040
I would say is I think we have had a huge problem with respect to the way that we treat PTSD.
01:14:08.940
There's just like this constant focus on your trauma, focus on your trauma, focus on your trauma.
01:14:12.780
Is that really healthy? Is that really the best approach? I was watching a documentary around
01:14:19.300
World War I the other day. And I think, I think, was it on the Somme? I think it was the Somme,
01:14:30.460
where the British took 54,000 casualties in a day.
01:14:35.460
Okay. I look at the 29th Infantry Division, which stormed Omaha Beach in World War II. I look at a lot
01:14:45.060
of other conditions. Look, I think, yes, we need to do a better job of identifying how we help people
01:14:52.000
dealing with the trauma they've experienced. But I don't think we're doing a good job. And I don't
01:14:55.620
think throwing more money at it is the solution to it. I think it's about getting people back into
01:15:00.680
having meaning and purpose. You send someone back, you give them a paycheck, and then you send them
01:15:05.080
to a counseling session that is designed for them to open up and just talk about their feelings with
01:15:09.840
someone that they don't feel like they can relate to. Lo and behold, that doesn't work.
01:15:14.460
I have far more hope for things that Randy Couture is doing in Vegas right now. Randy Couture was
01:15:19.840
former Army veteran, UFC champion. Every Friday, he has an event where he has veterans, police officers,
01:15:27.860
first responders, sometimes athletes that sustains injury and whatnot. They come. What do they do?
01:15:31.620
They come to the gym. They roll. They fight. They contend with one another. And then they talk with
01:15:35.360
other men that they respect and admire. And a lot of it is about finding purpose and new challenges.
01:15:42.600
So I think it's a far better remedy than just constantly telling people to focus on their trauma.
01:15:48.040
I also think that there's been a problem, too, that hit us because the majority of people are coming
01:15:55.620
home from Iraq and Afghanistan that we're dealing with significant trauma as a result of combat were
01:15:59.880
men. But we're sending them into the counseling situations that seemed like it was more geared
01:16:04.040
for women. So what do... I mean, all counseling is... Yeah. What do women generally seek? They
01:16:09.340
generally seek support, the idea that they're not alone, that it's going to be okay, that they're
01:16:15.600
going to... What do men look for? Men look for, like, what's my purpose? What's my meaning? What's my
01:16:21.680
mission? And I just think we need to get back to that. But again, I wonder sometimes if there
01:16:28.100
isn't an ideological drive, and I don't mean to make that the boogeyman of everything, but
01:16:33.340
ideological drive to take a subsection of the population, which should be some of our strongest,
01:16:40.360
most experienced, most capable people, and turn them into dependent victims.
01:16:45.400
Nick, it's been an absolute pleasure. Before we move over to Substack and get our supporters to ask you
01:16:50.880
questions, our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a
01:16:55.240
society that we really should be? Before Nick answers the final question, at the end of the
01:17:00.340
interview, make sure you click the link in the description, head on over to our Substack to see
01:17:04.900
this. How woke is the military now? Is a delay in starting a family stopping the psychological
01:17:10.340
development of adults? And this is something the right has to figure out as well. We're really good
01:17:14.740
at identifying all the things that we're very frustrated about. We better start providing a vision of
01:17:18.600
what we actually want to achieve. Gosh, I think, I can't say that we're not talking about it.
01:17:25.740
Because people like Douglas Murray, who you guys know very well, I think have talked very well about
01:17:29.400
some of the problems going on with the West. And a good friend of ours, Rudyard Lynch from What If
01:17:34.020
Alt-Hist has talked about this as well. But I will say that within the United States, and I think
01:17:39.900
this extends to other places within the West as well, we cannot continue to see the drift that we're
01:17:47.200
seeing where young women, 29 and younger, are pulling as the most liberal and progressive
01:17:51.900
they've ever been, and young men are pulling as the most conservative as they've ever been.
01:17:56.160
At the same time that we're dealing with the societal push for what can only be described as
01:18:01.540
almost kind of this nihilistic, hedonistic view. There's that little four cycle, right? Strong men
01:18:08.080
create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times. I think it's a little bit
01:18:13.720
simplistic, but not by much. We're at a point right now where young men are going to revolt.
01:18:22.000
They are going to push back against the system. And regardless of what postmodernist philosophers
01:18:28.640
think about equity within society, young men are the ones that possess the capability to impose
01:18:34.600
their will. They're the ones that we use to fight wars. They're the ones that we use to police streets.
01:18:39.740
You don't get to alienate and attempt to emasculate them forever without them standing up and having
01:18:44.220
something to say about that. The question is going to be, who are they going to look at
01:18:49.420
as their leaders in that process? Are they going to look at someone? Because I'll tell you what,
01:18:55.420
it's not going to be wokeism. It is not going to be wokeism. You're going to get a version of
01:19:03.220
masculinity, which takes all of those masculine traits, looks at all the people that they think have
01:19:08.960
attempted to emasculate them and says, unleash it on them. F those people.
01:19:16.120
You can have another group of men, older men that are telling these young men,
01:19:19.840
yeah, that sucks. It shouldn't have happened, but we need you to be strong and we need you to be
01:19:23.160
noble. You're right. They lied to you about these attributes, but you have to develop in the way that
01:19:29.480
they're going to go because the only way that you're going to save this sort of society that you want to
01:19:34.040
live in, the only way that you're going to create it is if you stand up and you actually assume that role
01:19:37.280
and it sucks that you have to do it under these conditions, but you do. So let's do it.
01:19:44.800
I honestly don't know which path they're going to choose. Right now, if I had to guess, it's not this
01:19:50.960
one. And that is going to be very, very dangerous. Not for me, but it's going to be very, very dangerous
01:19:58.480
for a lot of people that perpetuated this. And so they're going to have to wake up to the fact
01:20:01.560
that for those of us that are trying to educate young men in a way that we think will
01:20:07.720
use those traits toward a noble purpose, you're making it really hard for us to do our jobs right
01:20:16.480
now. And again, you're going to be the ones that pay the price, not us. So.
01:20:21.480
Well said. All right. Head on over to Substack to hear Nick answer your questions.
01:20:29.800
Some people are talking about, you know, Red America splitting off from Blue America and all of this.
01:20:35.480
What do you make of all of this talk and the situation more broadly?