Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 41 - Sean Hughes

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

Sean is a writer, veteran, non-profit founder (care4us.org) and a special needs father. He's contributed to multiple media outlets including the Washington Post and Quartz and his first book Sixteen: A Rational Account of an Irrational Election was released this May.  A veteran of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom and Sean launched the data, politics and society blog chartwellwest.com in 2015. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy and the University of San Diego Graduate School of Business, Sean separated from the Navy at the rank of Commander.  He lives in Southern California with his wife Annette and three boys. Sean's book - 16 on Amazon      

So I was over at my buddy's house last weekend, I think it was, doing the only thing you should do at your buddy's house in the backyard, shooting bows, obviously. And we've been out there for a little bit, shooting, and his doorbell rang, ding. He went to go get it. I think it was like an Amazon package. Amazon or FedEx, one of those two. And he came back and he kind of just had this bizarre look on his face, hard to describe, I guess. And if you know somebody pretty well, you can kind of tell when things aren't really on the way they should be. Like just something was a little bit off.

And I was asking, like, hey, man, you're all right? No real answer. Just kind of lateral. And we started talking about something else. Like an hour later, doorbell ring again. Ding. And at that moment, I realized it just sounded weird. His doorbell sounded super weird.

So we went and he came back and he had that same look on his face. I asked him, hey, man, are you right? and uh wouldn't really look at me lowered his head a little bit you know just like he was uh I guess embarrassed would be the best way to describe it

it's like yeah man my doorbell is not working good the ding's doing okay but I got a problem with my dong and if it had been two weeks ago I don't know if I'd have been able to point him in the right direction but because this episode is sponsored by bluechew.com

I knew exactly where to point him for his problem with his dong because the reality is as dudes get older sometimes things don't work the way that they're supposed to yeah I'm talking about the bedroom oh and by the way

before I go any farther earmuffs if you got kids in the car or kids are listening to this skip ahead about a couple minutes thank you now last episode was sponsored by bluechoo.com as well and I think people didn't realize that I was actually serious the company actually exists and I open with that I had

no experience with them. And I wanted to change that. So I still haven't received any of the product, but what I did is I went through the actual process of signing up at bluechew.com, B-L-U-E-C-H-E-W.com. Filled out the forms, it took me probably 90 seconds. You work your way through it. And if you enter in the coupon code, H-O-T-H-O-T-H-T-H-T-H-O-T, uppercase, it's essentially free.

You pay for shipping. So what does bluechew dot com do? I'm going to read the ad for you. It's pretty awesome. It's no way I was ever passing up the opportunity to talk about this on the podcast. So here it is. Blu-chewtchew.com has the first ever chewable that brings your performance to another level. What?

Tell me more. So listen to some of this. Same active ingredients as Viagra. Viagra. I don't know the difference. Encealas, so they work. If they ever tried either of those, but for those of you out there who do, here's another option. They're chewable, so they work faster in a pill.

You can take them any time day or night. I don't know why you would take them anytime day or night, unless you've got a crazy schedule or you work from home. You know, I guess that could work. You can even take them on a full stomach. And it's cheaper than Seattle or Viagra. Why do I keep seeing Viagra? It's Viagra.

So this is a no-brainer. Plus, you don't have to go to the doctor's office. And like I said, a few minutes ago or a minute ago, I went through this process. It doesn't require a doctor's office visit. So you don't have to spend time. awkwardly waiting in a pharmacy line, talking about your dong or your ding,

whichever one's not working properly, because it ships straight to your door in discrete packaging. And the deal, for people who listen to the podcast, the community of cleared hotters, hotter, yep, let me go with that, cleared hoters. Visit bluechew.com and get your first shipment for free when you use the promo code hot. You just pay $5 in shipping.

I'm going to say that's probably dependent on the state that you're in. I think mine was $6.9. $0.25.B-L-U-E-C-H-E-W.com. Promocode is hot. They're prescribed online by a doctor, and they're made in the U.S. So if your doorbell is having some issues, if your ding is strong, but your dong is weak, check it out. Maybe it'll make a difference.

And now on to our guest today. Mr. Sean Hughes is an interesting cat. He used to be my neighbor, not like next door, but across the street at a slight angle that I could make home after I'd had a few too many cocktails with him. But he is a writer, a voracious writer. He is a military vet. He was in the Navy also. He is the founder of a non-profit organization called Care for Us, C-A-R-E, the number four, U.S.org. And he was also a pre-profit organization. previously on the podcast. He was episode number three. And if you're interested in hearing a little bit more about care for us, I recommend going back to episode number three. We didn't talk about it

that much on this episode. He and his wife started that organization because they are a special needs family. One of his children has been diagnosed with, I would say, moderate to severe autism. And it was somebody from an outside perspective. watching their family cope with and deal with those issues. There's a lot going on there. I take my hat off to Sean and his wife or how they've been able to manage and continue to manage and deal with that situation.

So back to his writing. He's contributed to multiple media outlets, including the Washington Post and courts, which I don't know what that is. And his first book is out, and it's called 16. It is a rational account of an irrational election that was released this month. I actually just saw him, I think, tweeted out yesterday that it's for sale.

So I will include the link to the book in the written description of the podcast. A lot of his book was driven from his blog. So he is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, also known as O-I-F and O-E-F. I don't think he did it while he was in. It was post while he was working in the tech sector. He launched his blog. And it's kind of based around data politics and society. And it is called Chartwell West.

Chart like a nautical chart, well like you're drinking water. And west like the direction.com in 2015. So I'll put a link to that as well too. He churns out an incredible volume of writing. I think once a week, maybe even twice a week. And a lot of the stuff in the book is based on original posts that he can then add to. and having a blog myself, it's an interesting form because you can, you can kind of change it, but once you hit post on that bad boy, it's pretty much out there.

And you don't want to change it too much, or I don't want to change mine too much, because you need to stand behind your thoughts. At least that's my opinion. So more about Sean. Let's talk about Sean. He's a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, which, I mean, do your best not to hold that against him. I know. I get it.

but just do your best. And then the University of San Diego Graduate School of Business. He left the Navy at the rank of Commander, which that is, we'll call that right damn near in the middle of the officer ranks. Pretty high up there, though.

He lives in Southern California, like my wife and I used to do, with his wife Annette, and their three boys. Now, he probably wanted to talk more about his book. Actually, he sucks at marketing. We talked about his book a little bit. bit and I had to pull it out of him as to what the name of it was. So we're going to work with him

on his marketing skills. But as I was flying to San Diego to sit down and talk with him, I happened to be scrolling through, I think it was Twitter. And I saw his most recent article or the most recent article that morning. And it happened to be about a topic that is still unfortunately leading the headlines. And that is shootings in schools. And the cool thing I liked about his article that he wrote is it essentially listed, you know, 12 potential steps that we could take or 12 ideas for implementation, which is not something that I've readily seen across the internet. But I'll be the first to admit I'm not spending hours upon hours on my keyboard,

surfboard, you know, surfing the waves of the net. I do try to keep my fingers out there as much as possible, but I certainly could be missing some stuff. But I liked it because it was at least ideas that we could use the ping pong back and forth. So I didn't read into it too much because I wanted to read it to him. Essentially, I wanted to shotgun him with it, and I did not tell him I was going to bring that up as we sat down and began our discussion. And I think it was exactly what it was, was and should be, a discussion where nobody's saying you're right and you're wrong. It's an exploration of ideas. And I gave him some other ideas to consider with his list of 12, and he certainly gave me some other things to think about it.

well. So that's about it. Episode 41 with Sean Hughes. Coming at you. I'm looking at danger close now. This is the same place we were the first time we linked up. Yes. It looks good. A little bit more lived in but relatively the same. Yeah, we painted it. We've got we've got some different rooms we've set up and it's growing. How's a net like in it? It's good. It's like everything else, it starts to turn into work. At the beginning, it's... Jobs do that.

Joy and passion, and then, you know, hopefully that's still there, but we end up happy. We've got 20-something families we help. Yeah. That starts to feel like you can't let them down and schedules get big and it's all free, so... I got asked the other day, I think it...

We were talking about Twitter earlier and the bizarre ecosystem that is known as Twitter. But I got asked by, actually, it was over email that I generally get the question of, you know, I'm not satisfied with my job. I sit at a desk. I don't feel like I'm doing anything. How do I find my purpose at work? And my response was, maybe you don't. Maybe your work is just your work and you can find your purpose and passion elsewhere. So hopefully she has that because if it's all for free.

Yeah. You know, I mean, that's, you have your other job. or you have your job, you know, to however, maybe the family dynamic, so somebody can have some more space to find their passion. But maybe, you know, maybe work and purpose. Maybe not everybody's going to find that. Or you've got to figure out what the purpose of your actual employment is. Yeah. It may very well be.

To pay the bills. To pay the bills. I believe people that work at Starbucks and potentially McDonald's at some phase in their life are in that situation. I have X amount of bills to pay. I don't want to do this forever. I want to have something more purposeful in life. but I think I'll get there faster outside of bankruptcy. And now the way the world works technology-wise

and how easy it is to travel, it's really easy to have lives outside of work. I hope that everybody does. I honestly, truly from the bottom of my heart, hope that everybody has a work outside of life and do not become consumed by your work or your work title. Yep. So what you went up to?

It's been almost a year. I sat down with the bridges this morning as well, and I was trying to figure out how long it had been, but our first episode together, you were episode four. Three. I haven't memorized. Was it three? I listened to it once a week.

I listened to it twice a week, just to be slightly better. So, okay, so this will be 41 then. So it's actually you're on exactly the same rotation. I might as well just go back through and talk to everybody again. Yeah, he goes before me. He will again. Yep. And also I won't be the first two-time guest.

Well, it happened in the same day. So technically, I could mud shark him and just make him 41, and I'll throw you down as 40, even though I'm pretty sure I referenced episode 40. I want to be fair. Yeah. I want to do it right. Yeah, it's been an interesting year. What have you been up to?

So I got a book. Yep. That just... And you were kicking... Did we talk about that the first time? You were kicking around the concept, at least. Yeah, we were... I had some interest in it.

And it's funny because the interest has come and gone three times over since the last time we talk, which what I understand is pretty normal. When you say the interest in it, are you talking about from a publisher or you personally had interest in it, lost it, got more. Mostly, mostly, my own interest tends to go, you know, it's related to who else is interested in it. Yeah, it's a sidewave. Some days you're like, this is the best idea ever. And some days, like, I don't ever want to be involved with this again. Yeah, it was interesting. So we had a couple groups that were interested in a version of it.

And then finally we landed with a group that was actually a small publisher that was started by an old classmate of mine from the Naval Academy. Ringknocker Club, if you will. The Ring Knocker Club goes well. And what was cool about that was, is I thought what was interesting about the book wasn't. So it's a political book. Go figure. I write a political blog. And did you have to write a lot more for the book?

Because I believe the last time you and I actually talked about this, you were going to pull from what you had written before and perhaps expand or make that a collection of the essays. It ends up being a collection of the essays plus. And so I think what eventually got me to a spot where I thought it would be an interesting book for other human beings to read, besides maybe the people who had already were following my blog. And actually, because a lot of that was reading,

tread, they may or may not be interested in reading some of it over again. What the story changed from, hey, this is, this is a person's opinion of what's going on and you should listen to this person because they're smart and they know things and they do research, which is, there's a lot of books like that out there. What it turned into was this is one's person's experience during the election. So it's specifically around just the election. Yeah, it starts with essays from 2015 and goes all the way through to the first, about a year into the current administration. Which is not too long ago. Where are we at right now? 16 months?

Yeah, I think February was the last essay that I wrote that went in it, February this year. Okay. And so what was interesting is it's largely a book about how wrong I was about the election or the course of the election. What's interesting is I could write a book on that premise about just about everything in my life. Yeah. How wrong I was on Phil and the Blake. Yeah, how much I misunderstood the way the world was going to work. But what was kind of interesting about it was I kept two things.

I had a news journal that I kept that was simply a timeline that I used for research purposes. And I was writing essays, one to two a week, thousand, two thousand word essays. Yep. And putting them out on my blog. And then when you paired the two together and you watched the progression of it, it was, it's an interesting real-time commentary about going from thinking about certain candidates as a joke to thinking about it as horrifying to understanding a little bit more about what it is. And then after a year, how do we feel about it?

And there's a portion of it where I am so certain that Donald Trump is going to lose that the major risk to the world is the destruction of the conservative voice in politics. I remember reading these as you're writing. And just to make sure, before I forget, so this can stand alone, your blog is chartwellwest.com. That's correct. For people who want to, Sue, understand what we're talking about. Go check it out. And I'll give you more insight into the essays in the book that Sean's talking about.

Thank you. And so there's a point, and I think it's kind of the inflection point. And I think I lead in with how silly everybody who's supporting that specific candidate it is and how harmful there being to the general discourse of politics. And I remember distinctly there was an interview or somebody that represented the campaign, and I'm not going to remember their name. But he became a laughing stock

because he was vehemently talking about how the polls were nonsense. And I think the thing, he shouted at the screen, he sounded like a guy I went to high school with, what polls? You show me what polls. And that was now the joke that went around on Twitter It was like hashtag what polls and then put in your silly thing.

And it was joke. And, you know, 30 days later, he won the election. And that was an interesting point of learning for me. And I don't think you were alone in that. I think quite a few people woke up to, if they didn't follow it all the way through the night, they woke up to a sense of surprise. I would guess would be the polite way to say it. Yeah, yeah.

I wrote this sappy face. book post about how I went down to cast my vote and thank goodness this nightmare was over and I'm not happy with who I have to vote with but thankfully you know we'll shout down the forces of X Y or Z and I put that in the book because it's worth saying it's it's embarrassing and that's something that went out there it's a truth though which is why it's worth going in the book yeah and and that that was that's how it went and I think the what became what is the interesting story is that the underlying theme of the book is that the world is full of different people with different perspectives. And so much of how we feel about the world is largely defined by the seats we're watching the game from.

And we see things differently. And that not only is how I feel about things or how other people feel about things real, it matters. And we can't discount other people's perspectives all the way around, right? and if you do, you should be ready for some rude awakenings about the outcomes because the world is full of opinions and perspectives that aren't your own. I don't know how many people embrace the philosophy of you shouldn't discount other people's opinions and perspectives if they don't match your own. Based on what I see with my own eyes and what I hear with my ears and in person and then

watching the bizarre ecosystem of social media. I don't think there's a lot of time. Again, totally my personal opinion and my assessment from my own eyes, there's not a lot of time spent churning thoughts and allowing somebody else's opinion to challenge your own. It's almost a blanket. Nope, I have no fake news, right? Like that can be my least favorite term ever.

It is a tough one. I think my kids use it my my do too it's amazing how I told my son the other night to go to bed and he said dad that is fake news and I almost lost my shit the culture of the political debate has reached them we have a thing in my house where we won't we're not allowed to talk politics at my house because my kids physically at the house well we're in general because they they don't they watch their YouTube

and they watch their their memes and the saturday live clips and I wish at some point you know at some point we'll have some level of constructive discussion about it but not at nine yeah and I want them to form their own opinions and different stuff than the nonsense that they're seeing I don't understand why people are so afraid of challenging their ideas I don't understand the instantaneous objection or rejection of an idea that doesn't like completely mirror what you think. It's it challenges people's worldviews especially if they identify closely with with how they view the world as a defining portion of themselves.

There's loads and loads of work done on why and how people vote politically and what they affiliate with and in you know, circa 2016 and beyond America it is entirely they've their cultural identification. They don't vote their outcomes. They don't vote their socioeconomic class. They vote their cultural identity. And if you start to challenge political views when they're aligned with people's cultural identity,

you're really starting to challenge their sense of self, which people will defend to the death in many cases. And what you end up getting is either one form of people shut down or the other fun thing is they they can't imagine that the other person completely understands what's going on here yet disagrees so you get into these long if i if i had a nickel for every what you failed to realize comment email twitter response and the answer and sometimes i do fail to realize it i'm not i'm not all knowing and i there's you could write many many books with all the things that I don't know. But I usually don't write about stuff that I don't know anything about.

And so if I write something about it, it's not often that what I've failed to realize. It's that I actually do understand it and I've come to a different perspective. And it's a little bit like my nine-year-old feeling like the reason I have why he can't do something is I don't really understand what it is that he wants to do. And it's like, no, I just want to. I want one. I just want one of them. Yes, and it's clear you just want one of them. Dad understands. It's entirely obvious to me what it is that you would like and my answer is the same. What's your, if you had to throw a number to it, what would you say your ratio is between, because you write quite a bit, what would you say your ratio is between what you write to what you read? So I have, I have a consumption. It's funny you did this. I've just gone through a data tracking exercise where I spent the last month tracking. It sounds riveting. Yeah. not at all nerdy at all. So there's an app that I downloaded, and it's just a data tracking how I spend my time app.

And I wanted to do a month just to see. Do you have to input it or does it track in the background? You have to input it, but what they've got it is it's a touch. Okay. So you can open, it's two touches every time you do something. And it's reasonably good. And I'll give you the name of the app if you want to put it in the notes. I can't remember it, of course.

Somebody somewhere made the app and is like, Perfect. Fortunately, you can text it to me before I put the episode up and we'll be just fine. Yeah. And so I have a bit of a hack because I have a giant commute into where I work in my house. So I have an audiobook that I burn through probably a book a week in audiobooks. And then I have probably two to three books that I read concurrently. If I'm traveling, I have a travel book.

Yep. And depending on how quick I'm traveling, I'll burn through that. And then I have a book that helps me fall asleep, which takes me like usually almost two years to read. Because I'm old, and I read about nine sentences. And I count. Yeah.

Right. And then there's another one that I read that I'm generally interested in burning through and when I have my reading time. And I'd say it's probably two to three times reading to writing. And where do you look for for those sources? Do you try intentionally to make it broad, or do you have specific areas of interest? that you kind of dial into more than others?

It usually starts with a thread that gets me interested on something, and then I'll burn through kind of a general area for a bit until I feel like I'm somewhat bored with it. And it's interesting. You can usually track what I'm reading by what I'm writing because there's... Or what's going on in the world. What's going on in the world is one part of it. But then in the background, you'll see, boy, he's written a lot of essays about robots. And I'm clearly on...

Probably an AI kick or something like that. Yeah, I've read about nine books on AI. And my wife thinks that I'm on some sort of crazy Blade Runner Bent where I'm trying to take over the world of robots. And I told her that if that were, in fact, the case, somebody would have come back from the future and murdered me already. So we're all safe. If it were to follow the plot of a movie, yes, that is exactly what would have happened.

Speaking of interesting articles, hold on. I'm going to take my headset off and grab my laptop, because that's why I plugged it in. I got one I wanted to talk to you about. This one I dig, I found it interesting because it speaks about recent events. The article's titled Twelve Rules for Life, and I ended up to school shootings. That's the one I wrote this morning. I know it is, and I saw it this morning, and I was like, you know what?

We're going to chat. Because I don't hear a goddamn person actually talking about this stuff in a very... I hear we have to do something. Hashtag fix it. Which, yeah, cool, hashtag fix it. Can we talk about the steps between let's do something and hashtag fix it? Neither of them I think are bad ideas. I inflamed a few people the other day with a thought that I had,

that people thought that I was basically insulting religion, which I was not in any way, shape, or form. How dare you? Yes, I was expressing an opinion that was more. I mean, of course, you know, the second after you hit post, you probably think of a much better articulate way to actually describe what you would want to say. But that's how I felt in the moment. And it was along the lines of, you know, hopes and prayers, that's great. But we don't need that right now.

We need to take action and actually do something. Otherwise, in a few months or hopefully it's a few months. Maybe it's a few weeks. Maybe it's a few days. It'll be hopes and prayers or thoughts and prayers again. So. You know, it's funny. The minute you say that, though, some portion of society immediately thinks that you want to.

to repeal the Second Amendment. I was actually really surprised by a couple of the comments and people saying things like hopes and prayers are more effective than taking away my guns and my rights. And I looked back at what I wrote and I was

trying to find where that leap in logic and assumption had come from because I actually, and I've said it before, I support reasonable gun legislation and people ask me what do I mean by that? I think the legislation the gun legislation we have now is good.

Is it perfect? I don't know. Could it be better? I don't know. And I also support the Second Amendment. I don't think that they have to be mutually exclusive ideas. Reasonable gun legislation and the Second Amendment in my mind can coexist. And most of the time, if not every time that I talk about taking action, you'll never see me say,

tighter gun laws. It's like, no, I don't, that's not what I'm talking about. That's one aspect. To me, I personally think the biggest problem has to do with, and I talked about this on, I think it was episode 37, when I talked specifically about school shootings, but the detachment and people living in an online universe that has no consequences and, you know, the avatar generation.

And, I mean, just go out to a restaurant and watch families eat dinner. And instead of interacting and looking at each other like you and I are right now, they're looking down four, five phones or out. It's like, what? There's something there. I don't know what it is. I'm not an expert in causality by any stretch. But anyway, back to this article that I wrote,

that I wrote, Jesus, that I found this morning. It's interesting. So you outlined 12 steps because you talked a little bit about Jordan Peterson, who, man, that's like a subject of discussion in and of itself. So we'll table that one for later, maybe. The Jordan Peterson aspect. What was it, The New Yorker wrote an article about him, right? New York Times.

And so I wrote a month ago kind of throwing out there not to dive into this portion of it because we're not going to get there, but I knew that article was coming with 100% certainty. Yeah. Not because I knew the writer or anything like that. But I knew there was no way that that almost word-for-word article wasn't coming eventually. And you based that, you thought off of just listening to what he was saying and kind of aggregating. Yeah, and like my quick two cents on that is I think there's value both to his message and value to that article. Yeah, I think that's always the case.

Yeah. Similar to allowing somebody to voice an opinion that is counter to your. own doesn't mean that if you don't agree with them that they're not necessarily some inherent truth right in that in that statement yes so to this article you want to give the broad overbrush of why you wrote it and then I'm going to we're going to go through these 12 steps because I actually haven't seen anybody else write a list and I'm going to push back on you on a few of these they're they're meant to be pushed back yeah they're meant to be told why they're bad ideas I'm not going to say they're bad I think some of them actually are just to be fair and I know that's I know

That's a cop out because I get to choose which ones I think are bad based on how fervently you feel about them. But you know what? For me, it's not a matter of fervently feeling anything about them. I want it to stop. Yeah. I honestly, I don't care if the rules they put into place are an offense to me. I don't want somebody going into a school and shooting kids. We should have an expectation that that doesn't happen at all.

And so the perfect analogy you could use is that if we were to put the acceptance we have for vehicle automobile accidents towards airplane accidents, there would be multiple major airline crashes a week in the United States of America. For sure. But there's something specific about the place that air travel has and the fear of getting in a tube and going into the stratosphere and flying from one place to another. and the necessity of our current economy and lifestyles to fly that says the standard for airline crashes is almost never. Otherwise, people won't do it. And so an analogy to the school shooting is I get that there is 100 million kids going to school every day. And I get that 100 of them dying in a year in school shootings is literally a one in a million chance, in a literal sense.

and we don't really take action on things that are one in a million chances as a societal problem, unless it creates this broader fear and this broader dialogue where we can't get away from it. And therefore, you have to kind of get to the spot where it's just not possible. And we went a year without an airline crash. There's 10,000 flights a day. We went a year without an airline crash, but we didn't go a year without an airline incident. Right, difference. Yeah.

So the difference there is that because of all the things we've put in place, you can actually make quite a few accidents before you make the big one. Actually, I think it's been much longer than a year without a crash. I don't think there's actually been an airline crash in the U.S. catastrophic failure. I am going to say, and I'm probably totally wrong, but I think it's over a decade. An actual crash, whereas in it like, well, then that, was the Japanese airliner in San Francisco. Like a U.S. airliner cartwheeled down the runway.

It's extraordinarily rare. And it needs to be extraordinarily rare for that industry and that function of our life to exist, as should school shootings. And I actually thought one of the best, somebody tweeted to Jocko this morning, hey, what's your threat assessment of this? I think I saw it. And his response was very jocco. and also very perfect. It's a giant place with no security and hundreds of helpless people. It basically said it's an establishment,

an unsecure establishment full of innocent kids that is open to all types of threats. Yep. And so if you want to really start talking about it, if you wished to make this go down to zero, we've basically done zero things that would do that. So that's kind of where the list came from. Why do you think that we've done,

zero things. And I know that people will argue that they will say that there have been many things done. I would tend to agree with you. I cannot think of a single sweeping change. Yes, zero serious things that are institutionally put from the top down where... But why? Why do you think that is? So I think there's friction on a couple different fronts. I think that I think if I look at it from one perspective, from an educator, both my parents were teachers. My wife is a teacher, is a teacher still. and there is this sense that we ought not have to do this. This is an institution of learning. The problem lives outside these walls with either the existence of these weapons

or a societal rot that we've got. And so don't make us solve the problem. There's one aspect of it. There's another aspect of it on the other side that actually if people were to look at the firearms, which is the political friction against gun control and other things. And then there's just a resource piece where there's a lot of schools. And I grew up in a very segregated area. And my school had one standard.

And if you went 15 blocks north, there was an entirely different standard because there wasn't the amount of money. And there certainly wasn't the amount of parental involvement. involvement in the school's there. And the school that you're referencing 15 blocks away and the one you attended, were they both public? Yes. And imagine the difference between public and private.

Yeah. And the money associated with that as well. And that had, you know, limited experience in private school, but the student teacher ratio was way down. That parent and involvement was way up. The teacher involvement was, it's a very different, even alone from the economic side of the house. Yeah. All right. So let's go through this 12th.

First, though, he didn't use the type of assault. that you had access to in the military. It was a shotgun and a pistol. Okay. I actually thought it wasn't. It was a shotgun and a 38 revolver. That's a, which is a huge point, like, huge point. And the only reason I bring it up, and I do this every time I talk about this issue,

when it comes to guns and gun control in the conversation, I think you have to be very precise with your language and not use broad terms. And I just brought that up because I saw it this morning and I had, I was waiting. I almost, so I almost feel bad about this, but when I see something like this happen, I almost want to start a stopwatch until the type of weapon used is brought to the forefront and the conversation laterals to what happened

to the mechanism of pain and suffering and death that was inflicted. Yeah, so this is actually a question I was going to ask you to. So the original reports was that it was an AR-15. Correct. Which is also not. an assault rifle. Right. Well, and not exactly the same, but it's a same, same round caliber, same caliber. And I think that what gets also lost in it is that that's actually, I don't know what the reduction in fatalities would be if that weren't a part of the equation.

Well, I mean, so again, about clarity and honesty, the only criteria that an AR-15 doesn't meet, Many people think that AR stands for assault rifle. It stands for Armolite rifle as a manufacturer. Yep. But if you were to put an AR-15 side-by-side with an M-4, like the ones that we got issued to go overseas, one of those is an assault rifle, one of them is not. And really the only difference is that one of them is selectable fire, meaning you can go from safe to semi, which was one round per pull the trigger,

and then full auto, which is you depress the trigger until you run out of ammunition. And you and I both know that full auto really wasn't how that weapon would be. So what I was about, yeah, what I was about to say in all honesty is that I never had my weapon on full auto. Because unless it's from me to you, which for, again, this is audio only format, we're probably five feet apart. Yeah, you can't get anything. If I had to choose between somebody shooting at me with a rifle from 30 yards and the choices were semi-auto or full auto, I would choose to have them be on full auto to shoot at me, especially as the distance increased. It's going to pull up into the right. And most people, you know, if they don't have a lot of experience with that, they're not going to know how to handle it.

But the point is, yes, the AR-15 is not an assault rifle. But to your point, it uses the same caliber. It accepts the same type of magazine. And we could get, you know, 10, 20, and 30-round magazines for the M-4. It's not that you would carry a 20 or 10. There's no real purpose for that. But those same box type of magazines fit into an AR-15 as well. So the difference is are not huge.

You know, it's people hang up on the term assault rifle, and I actually don't, I don't know what point I'm trying to get to other than to just be really clear that they're not that far off. Although the AR-15 is, in fact, a semi-automatic weapon, professional soldiers keep fully automatic selector fire weapons on semi-auto 99.9% of the time for a reason. So, although it didn't have the ability to go full auto, I'm going to say that it has the exact same potential. for lethality. Yeah, it's as tactically proficient for the uses that you're talking about as what we used. And it is interesting. I think there's something in there for, like, I read a lot of sources that said that

was an AR-15. Shotgun at 38. Yeah. And which goes back, like, what would you use for home protection? So my, I would. Close up shotgun. Yeah. I would rather have a shotgun.

Yeah. And of all the things, when I was doing, like, when I was in Africa and we were doing maritime interception operations. Don't laugh at that, Sean. It's serious shit. I'm laughing at me. But I'm laughing because nine... Is this the same deployment where a guy sunk a forklift?

Yep. 99 times out of 100, it was like a hickory boat where I had to get off of mine and like step down into the other one. And almost push it underneath the waterline. Yeah. And like, I was like, I really would rather have a club. For home defense, I mean, again, this is something people should consider an M4 round or an AR-15 round which is a 556 NATO cartridge.

Three houses. It is zipping and overseas it wasn't an issue because if we were in a room like this, the walls were probably eight inches thick of mud and concrete. I could expend a thousand rounds in the same hole and probably not chew my way through it. Dry wall does not have the same stopping power and it could literally like you said be three houses over. Shotgun with some even a slug or some good shot and that stuff. It's not going to, a slug would probably penetrate, actually would definitely penetrate, at least a little bit.

But the shock or the shot, incredibly lethal up close. It requires less fine motor skills. It's point shoot. And if you have a pump action, the sound of is enough to make fluids start running down your legs. That usually stops everybody. I don't want to degrade into a bad story. I don't either. We did that.

The day after 9-11 happened, we were doing our health and welfare inspections of the boats that had been detained. It's one of the guys, chambers around the shotgun after we get on board, and every single human being on the boat that we were checking hit the deck. I mean, in a second. Yeah. And I looked at him, and he's just like, I forgot the chamber of the round ahead of time. I'm like, well, they know you got one in there now.

Keep that to yourself. For home defense, yeah, I would recommend a shotgun. And, you know, honestly, if I was, the only way I can skirt around this is to say, it would not be my weapon of choice to go in into an environment like this where people would probably run and they would flee because the effective range of a shotgun is super short. Yeah. And you have probably a four-round two magazine.

So what you're getting to is... What I'm trying not to do is give anybody any ideas of any kind or help them, you know what I mean? Like, it's just not what I think would be optimal because that's how I used to think about these things for a long time of what would be the optimal weapon, to take into this facility to do the most damage as possible, this would not be my first choice.

What you're saying is the thing that you would keep your house safe with is not the thing that would cause the most amount of danger if it got into the wrong hands for somebody who brought it into a school. Correct. All things being equal. Yes. Yes. All right. Let's go through these. A list of 12. And I think it's important that we go through these and we talk through these. And I didn't read them through too much because I wanted to get a fresh take can just talk our way through these. I don't even know some of my opinions on these,

which is why I love this format because we can sit here and work our way through it. And I knowing you, I know that when you wrote these, you don't even know your opinion on some of these things. That's entirely correct. You've already pointed out one thing that I've written that is factually wrong. But I love number one. And it's a paragraph, but I'm going to read just the first sentence is stopping school shootings is somebody's job. And one thing that I am I am passionately against is an idea that I have heard, in my opinion, floated far too much, and that is arming educators. Maybe the stupidest thing I've heard talked seriously in a long time.

It's an idea that I understand where the idea comes from, but unfortunately I think that idea comes from people who do not have experience of being around weapons for a long period of time. I've seen absolute consummate professionals make mistakes with weapons. And it was their job. If you were to say that a school teacher's primary instrument of profession would be, and not that this is, but let's just say chalk and a chalkboard, right? A professional soldier's primary weapon system would be a weapon of some kind.

I've seen those people who are professionals make mistakes. I've made mistakes. If you were to give somebody a weapon who is not trained and they are expected, to now have this on top of their other profession, which should be educating kids, in my opinion. That's a good place to start. In the hopes that in a chaotic panic-strickened environment, that they are going to be able to somehow,

every time either stop or make the right decision, I think the faith in that idea is so misplaced from a practical perspective. And for me, when it comes to gun control and this type of stuff, I think I fall back on two things. I want our solutions to be reasonable and practical. That's it. That's really all I want it to be.

And I think arming people and arming specifically educators who that is not their primary role in thinking that they are going to, in my honest opinion, I think sometimes they would make the situations much worse, much, much worse. And there are, if you can already Google, there are some school systems that allow teachers to be armed. And guess what? Kids have found guns in bathrooms. There was an AD in a school.

I mean, that's the type And so this is on a minimal level And AD is an accidental discharge That means it goes boom And you go, oh shit Because you didn't mean for that to happen That's on a small scale level If you aggregate that out nationwide

One in every classroom Yeah, at a minimum You know And I just I couldn't agree more Stopping school shootings is somebody's job But it's not the teachers I can say as

As a non-team guy who worked with team guys, I learned the lesson that if you're not really good at gunfighting, you're terrible at gunfighting. And so when it came to the gunfighting, I generally sat those out at the request of my fellow frogmen. And I have a lot of training, man. I've shot a lot of guns and spent a lot of time with them.

And every time it comes down to whether or not I feel good about a tactical situation, plugging non-professionals into that spot is horrifying. To me. Take it another level. Most of these shootings, and I can't say I am an expert on all of them, most of them occur with individuals who were students at that school. Now you're faced with a situation where an armed teacher may have to line up their sights and fire rounds.

It's somebody they might actually know. A student, they might actually have a relationship with. And if people think that that's a turnkey issue between your ears and that's super simple, again, from an ideological perspective, it might sound like it's this great solution that is simple, and I would say it is so much more utterly complex and gray, and I actually think it would make the classroom more dangerous than more safe. On the margin, sure.

I don't think it's introducing that many guns to untrained people, does that. So I think, and Jocko's response to go back to him, he said, armed security at every school, with their sole purpose being armed security at the school. I couldn't agree more. So I like your number one. And I agree with the end of the paragraph. You know, someone needs to stand up after every shooting

and stare into the camera. I don't know if you spell stare, STA-I-R. That's a stairway to heaven, I think. Yep, that's wrong. Into the camera until the world they failed at their only purpose. You know, a good example of this is the deputy at the Parkland School who is on camera standing outside with his pistol and his hand

while a guy is running around on the inside. You know, even having a gun, armed people on campus, there's no perfect solution as long as it terminates in human beings. Yeah. But that individual, I was reading some,

I was seeing some stuff come the other day where he's getting a pension that's about 120G a year, somewhere between 100 to 120,000 a year. It's a little irritating to me. That's the pension he gets, though. That's the pension he gets. That's the,

That's how the cookie crumbles in that particular situation. But he got that pension based on all the time of service before that moment when he failed terribly. And part of the point that I have right there is you're talking about a CQC environment with people who aren't trained to do that stuff. Correct. CQC stands for close quarters combat or the acronym changes often. It means basically going inside of a structure, room to room, door to door and clearing it. And tactically, and you. You would attest it tactically one of the hardest things you'll ever do.

It is extremely challenging. There's a lot of angles, and I've never done it in an environment where there's school kids running around chaotically. Like, I can't even imagine how that would be. It's hard enough at night, on nods, in a gunfight, trying to make your way through and maintain the tactical advantage and clear it as fast as humanly possible. That's hard enough. You introduce those kids and the chaos involved in that. I think it would be exponentially more hard.

And the point that I'm making is that guy was never going to be able to actually solve that. Well, let me rephrase that. He may have been able to solve it, but the idea that him running in there with his sidearm. Yep. Guess what, though, that's his job. Yeah, I agree. So here's the deal. Here's the thing, though.

Who knows what that guy would have done if he had encountered another armed individual. It might have stopped his forward movement. It might have barricaded him into a room. There is no knowing what could have happened, but what I would say to that, copy he was sitting right here is that was your job yeah and so there's there's failures at different levels yeah so there's a it's his job so his failure is that then it's the click up having that be that individual's job is not really setting the entire situation up for success so you need to have which goes back to their point you need to have a different approach to it yeah organizationally number two this one's

interested me if your child uses your gun in a shooting you're going to prison as if you hold the trigger. I thought a lot about that one after I wrote it, which tends to be the case. And so if you say that the most extreme version of that is what I wrote, like the most extreme we're holding people 100% accountable for another human beings actions. And probably what is right is probably not 100% accountable. Probably something though, not nothing, not what are you going to do? Hey, what are you going to do?

He had my gun. I had it legally. I bought it legally. Yeah, I was thinking about this. What about a 17-year-old kid who borrows their parents' car and goes and gets loaded and goes across the media and kills a family? Do you hold parents accountable for that because it was their car? Are there other purposes for the car besides doing that? Sure.

Are there other purposes for that assault rifle at school besides doing that? The shotgun and the revolver? Thank you. Shotgun and a revolver. Are there other purposes for bringing them to school? No. I would say from that individual. Are there other purposes that you could say that those weapons are created for?

Sure. Right. And I think... I think what you're saying, though, is you're getting to where you're at the punishment falling under the parent because it was a lack of responsibility to protect something that used improperly could inflict incredible damage and harm. Yeah, and it's not particularly difficult to make sure nobody can get your weapons. Yeah.

I'm just curious, though, how far down the rabbit hole you would feel comfortable going with that. because the vehicle is also. Yeah. And I think it's a great, it's a great discussion. I would say if there's a reasonable expectation that whatever your child is doing is in good faith and serves other purpose

besides murdering other people, then you shouldn't be entirely responsible for the outcomes of that. If there's not, and there's some reasonable ability to keep them from it with some very small actions, then you should. And so the thing that I would say is there's lots of stuff that if I did with my kid,

near my kid, around my kid, I go to jail for tomorrow. Yeah. No, I mean, I understand what you're saying. I was just curious is to dig a little deeper into your thought process on it. I think I agree with you to a large degree. In my, I think I always come back to is responsibility has got to be levied on the individual, but I agree with you when it comes to, you know. I'm talking kids.

And so the 17-year-old really starts to get a little fuzzy. He really does because you're in that gray area, even though your brain is not fully formed, you know, formed. But I agree with you. It does. And so that gets hard. But what you would say is there has to be some accountability for people who own weapons for what happens with those weapons.

Yep. And we didn't store our weapons under our pillows in our line. Well, we did a little bit. But generally speaking, there was... It is stacked mine in the corner. There was acceptable usage. But I was surrounded by professional soldiers. Right. Right. It's not...

There wasn't any... There was no need for somebody to come get my weapon because they could go to the armorer and say, I want my own. And, you know what I mean? It was a different environment. Yeah, and backstate side, it was different than when we were in theater. Strictly controlled. Yeah. We didn't bring them...

It weren't in the back of my car. They were... Yeah. You know, sometimes. It's not a big deal. No. As far as anybody knew, they were never in the back. Yeah, no, I'm totally joking.

It's actually, I mean, the weapons, the ability conis inside the U.S., like traveling to training locations, the ammo weapons, they're taken very seriously. There's no joke when it comes to accountability and responsibility of where they are at all time. So you're not just cruising around with your guns back stateside. They're locked up their inventory often. And if the red envelope ends up on the exos desk that you did something wrong, one of the first thing that goes away is your ability to access people's guns. So that was number two.

Number three, this one is interesting me because I had never thought about this, and I like it. 75% reduction in high-powered assault rifles on the street in one year. Tomorrow, every high-powered assault rifle has a value of $20,000 for exchange to the U.S. government. You can keep them if you want to, but they're worth at least $20K to you. It would cost America about $40 billion, half of what we spent bailing out the banks, a few months of what the war in Iraq cost us. That's intrigued. I've never heard anybody, I mean, I've heard about buy-back.

but that's a large sum of money. So what you could do is the goal there is how do you reduce the casual assault rifle owner? The guy who buys one because he wants to and it sits. Yeah, or he thinks it's cool and his buddy bought one, his buddy talked him into it. And then what you have is... Do you know what they cost? Because I don't. Let's say $1,500.

I bet you that's plus or minus close enough. It's up or down of $1,000. You're right. It's not much less than 1,000 dependent on if they're used or not, but it's not several thousand. So you're saying, you know, offer... 20 times market value. Yeah, 15 to 20 times market value. Okay.

And that's an outrageous number, right? Because you start there. And the interesting thing is we don't really know what percentage of guns on the street are assault rifles, which is another problem. It's anywhere between 1 to 4% of the entire guns, which means that it's actually not the big problem. Well, it's actually really hard to source one. I mean, they have been regulated and restricted for a long time. But if you wanted to, if you wanted to start, and that suggestion is designed to start a conversation,

is there a risk-associated price for all guns where you could say that there's 300-some million guns on the street, which means there's more guns than adults in the United States of America. There's more guns than adults under the age of 65 or 70, or 80 or whatever. I had heard more guns per people in general, just more guns than U.S. citizens. It's 88 per 100 presently, which is a lot.

And if you think about the fact that, you know, about a quarter to a third of our folks are below 20, right? So then immediately you know that there is... And I'd say half of them don't own a gun. They don't, and so it's extremely concentrated. That's what I'm saying. Like, it skews even more because I know plenty of people who have no desire who have never fired a gun, no desire to own a gun.

And so what you would, What you would say is one way you could attack this is what if there were less guns? We're not talking about abolishing guns. We're not talking about making it harder to get guns. What if you found a way for the density of firearms to be less than it is right now? And just straight math tells you that availability is one contributor to the outcome. And I don't know how much, I don't know how much and we don't know what it is. but the fact that we never have that discussion.

They've had it in inner cities. They do gun buybacks in inner cities. And they've had some success with them. But it's just an interesting thing where, to your point, nobody's ever even talked about it. What would, there's not an initiative that says. And what if it took 30K, right? Maybe 20K was the number.

I mean, I read an article the other day that said the Army can account for $21 trillion. It's a lot of money. It's a relatively large sum. I actually don't know how to write that out. if I were to write that many zeros. It doesn't fit on a calculator. Yeah.

It goes to the power of 10. That's a lot. Yeah, I don't know. But I like the idea. Like I said, I mean, I think I've heard about buybacks, but I don't know if I've ever seen a dollar figure associated with it. I don't know if it would work, but I think that's an awesome place to start a conversation. All you can do is figure out how much it's going to cost and test it in a neighborhood. Yeah.

Test it in a county someplace and see what happens. but the fact that I think one of the, it's a little bit of a poke at the fact that we're not allowed to even test that type of stuff. We won't find a municipality or a state that would be allowed to do that without significant attention and friction. And you know,

and I like it because the people who, the, and again, not knocking people who hold this belief at all, but the ones who, the general first thing out of their mouth is in reference to the Second Amendment, this is choice, not a legislative action that in any way, shape, or form could be viewed as an encroachment because people can, like you said, choose to or choose not to. The value judgment is theirs. The shadow of that, and this is something I thought of about the time I was writing,

but I wrote it anyway, is the shadow of that is it will disproportionately affect lower-income people. It will 100% disproportionately affect. because they're not able to do without a $20,000 lump sum of non-taxable cash. And so therefore you would then have a different problem, which is you would have poor people not have guns. But I've done about three or four papers on why poverty and guns together are the thing that makes for murder. Sometimes. So maybe not necessarily the worst thing. Yep.

All right. Number four. It's as hard to use my gun. if you're not me as it is to use my cell phone if you're not me. That technology exists if we cared enough, we'd use it. So expand on that a little bit. What are you thinking? So you can touch my cell phone with your thumb and not be able to use it. You can touch my cell phone with my thumb.

And you can have that. It's cracked and it's dirty and you can have, it's fairly resilient technology. And it's not super expensive anymore. We've cracked the, we've moved. past the scalable barrier for a thumbprint technology to be quick, consistent, and easy to use. And so you would then have something that looks like gun manufacturing going forward has some version of that. How about everything pre?

You could have programs where it becomes part. There's an installation process. There's a swap out. There's a lot of different ways to attack it. Some are stupid and don't work. But what you would say is it wouldn't be an overnight quick fix, but you could start to have some impact on who's able to actually fire a firearm and maybe limit the amount of people who ought not be firing a firearm. And the only, like, the kind of driving thing behind that is

there may be some cost on gun manufacturers to keep these guns on the streets. And I think we should look at what that is. Because right now, the gun lobby is, aimed at minimizing gun legislation. And they have a little bit around gun safety because they give classes and courses, but I don't hear a whole lot of them driving for technology that makes guns safer for the general public. I don't know if this would make it...

I would say it could make it safer. I think the difficult one with this would be adherence, especially from, you know, technology implemented moving forward is one thing, mandatory, come in and register yourself and put this on your weapon. I think you would have an adherence problem. I think you would have an adherence problem on the tails, meaning that you, what if you got 50% of the people to do it? What if you got 20% of the people to do it? And then you would say that, what level would you consider success?

And I think what's really important is that small reductions are not failures. If you reduce it, if all of a sudden tomorrow, 20% of firearms were only able to be fired by responsible gun owners, or 80%. Well, having it fire to your thumbprint and having it fired by a responsible gun owner or not synonymous. It's true. I mean, we need to be very clear with that.

Yeah. You can be, it could be a technology that would prevent an individual who does not own or is scan to the weapon from firing it, but that does not mean the person who is scanned is a responsible gun. True, but it would also probably wouldn't be the 17th. Like if you were to look at the last three or four shootings from through the perspective, but like what if that technology were in place?

It's not likely the last one at least would have happened. Yeah, assuming that it would be slaved to just one individual's print or whatever it may be. Yeah, yeah. But the point is start the discussion. You can't have no discussion. Start the discussion around how we could use technology to do things that we don't do right now at all.

Number five, I totally, I think this one is simple and no-brainer. Free modern gun safes for every household in America, whether you have a gun or not, it's building code. I mean, that doesn't change anything crazy. It would cost something, but if we are going to do the, that we are a culture that embraces gun ownership, and we are, and I don't have any problem with that, then why not do it?

then why not do that? Like I have to wrap a piece of insulation around my 55-gallon water heater in my house. I don't even know why I have to do that, but I have to. Probably to prevent people from burning themselves when they touch it. Maybe.

Same as the earthquake straps in case it falls over. Right. So you can have a program where there's a steel box that doesn't require a key because that's the problem. The inexpensive ones require keys. and numb nuts like me lose the keys. Yeah.

So nobody uses them. Well, the issue with the digital and electronic ones are similar to other electronics. Do your kids know your passwords to your phone? No. How long do you think it would take them to figure it out if they really wanted to? Not that long. Yeah. I have a gun save at my house.

And one day Tyler walked up to me and said, hey, dad, you know, your gun safe? Can I go in there? I know the code. It's like, what is it? and he rambled it off. So again, right, it's, it's, it's, there's an additional layer with that, the gun safe in and of itself. And then, and, you know, and then there's the safeguarding the actual access to the gun safe.

And I'm not saying, I actually like this idea. I don't think this would change a whole lot. But I mean, again, it could help for sure. But it just having the safe again, just like having a gun doesn't necessarily solve problems. It solves, but I would say it solves some problems. And that's like some problems. This would solve some problems. Which like I said, I love this one from the beginning.

This is a no-brainer. There's zero silver bullets. You can't, there is no, even it, like, even, we'll get, I know we'll get to number 12. Even if, even if they all want, if the rule came down tomorrow, they repealed the second amendment. Don't skip to number 12 yet. We'll get there. Number six, overwhelming trained professional armed law enforcement in every school that have no other job but to keep our children safe.

I think that ties into point number one. It's having somebody's job. You know, I made an analogy, I think on the same podcast where I was talking about school shootings. The best example I could see of our country taking action quickly was airport experiences pre-imposed 9-11. I remember literally walking through with my dad and the TS wasn't the T. I don't even know who they were before TSA. Just airport employees? Yeah, I can't.

Damn, I hadn't thought about that. Hey, my dad had a Swiss Army knife. He had this thing forever. And the guy had like pull open the blade and be like, man, that looks nice, sir. fold the backup and hand it back to him. You know, I don't remember taking my shoes off, and I think I made the thing beep every time, and the guy just, come on, through his son.

You know. And then flying in an airplane, right? How many times did you walk up to the cockpit? Like, hi, Captain, can I come in? They're just sitting there chatting with the door open. Watch the movie airplane for 25 minutes, and you'll laugh your ass off at that stuff. So how fast was it post-9-11 that it became,

what it is today. So I can give you a natural experiment on that. I was, I left on my very first deployment in June of 2001. And I got back in December of 2001. Yep. And so there had been two, three months of post-9-11 world. And it wasn't just airports.

It was everything. Yeah. It was everywhere, well, it wasn't everything. It was everywhere that they assessed that there was a legitimate threat. That's what I, it's a better way to say. The military bases were different. I used to show my Navy federal check card to get on base in Coronado. If there was a gate guard there.

And you go from, which three quarters of the time there wasn't. And I went, you went from there, from, you could do anything to, I drove, I had, I dared to drive a U-Haul truck. over the, um, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, it's controversial. Right, I was just, I was moving, right,

it was moving from one place to the next and I couldn't. They turned me around and made me drive halfway around the state. If you can't drive across that thing. Yeah. And because I couldn't open up the back and have them inspect everything because I had everything I own packed into a, you know,

and you know, and you know my point in bringing up the airport is that it didn't take that long for very, very sweeping changes. which is the exact opposite of what I see right now, and I don't understand what the holdup is. Would it cost money? Yeah.

Would it maybe potentially, not that I'm saying, by any stretch of the imagination, that the TSA is a seamlessly functioning, efficient and effective organization, but they exist for a purpose. Could we create something like that or driven around that for school protection? I don't see how the answer to that could possibly be no.

Why could we not do that? We could. And it would actually be a lot of jobs. And so you would have, there would be money, but the money isn't going into the trash. It's a people intensive resource, which means the money is going into people's pockets, which is then going back into the economy. And then it's going out that we're not talking about building static robots that don't. Yeah. In my opinion, I think until we see, at least in my opinion, until something, until there is a sweeping change, or something massive that is created. I honestly don't feel like the people who should be taking this seriously or taking it seriously. Because that was an event

for aircraft, right? Hijacked, crashed. Some of the buildings, Pentagon, field. Like, I mean, almost instantaneous. Changed a lock on the door. Like, they put a lock on the door and that specific threat, the ability to take control of an aircraft

while in flight, stopped existing within weeks of 9-11. Yeah, so, yeah, number seven or six, I totally agree. Number seven, kind of ties in. Rapid sweeping upgrades and school facilities that include armored doors, automatic locks, and other physical security measures. So I get asked, I'm sure Jocko does too, you know, what would you recommend?

And my first answer is defense in depth, which starts with things like this. We were at my son's new school up in Montana. First off, I'm obviously partially a psychopath, because every room I go into, I look at the doors. And word outward, the only thing I ever look at when I see a door, and I literally verbalized to myself in word opening. Outward open. So I'm always looking at that stuff, right? And I was looking at my son's school from the perspective of a predator.

How would I attack this school? And when I look at the facilities that have, I counted at least 10 entryways, entry points that I could see. And I intentionally went in one and out another one to see. if they were unlocked, which they were. There was no security camera footage, which can provide some early warning and standoff. I don't know, maybe somebody wearing a trench coat. You know, all of the doors open, no channelized entry point.

Yeah, I mean, I think I've heard one guy that I recently started falling was Andrew Pollock. He's the father of one of the students who was killed in the Parkland shooting. And his, you know, his thing is metal detectors, single entry point and metal. sectors at every entrance of the school. I have, I have, I can't, I can't, I can't create an argument against that. And, and there's, there's, there's, there's economics of it, and I don't mean in money,

I mean in, in decision making and human behavior that the Israelis learned a lot about, um, in their, the security measures they have to have in in every single public place that they, that they have due to the nature of the environment they live in. And they've learned simple things like their, you know, certain institutions or certain places have to have a guard, and where that guard stands alone dictates whether or not they're a target, because people don't look for hard targets. Not when there's a buffet plate of soft ones. Right.

And so eventually, once that thing goes to everything becomes hard, they move on to something else. And I think part of the point of this is it's not that hard to make it be where the schools aren't my choice to go blow things up. and that may sound somewhat callous to other places, but if I had a choice for the places I want to protect, schools are probably, I don't know if there's anything above. Schools are number one. Yeah, you know, there's never been a school shooting

at the school that the president's children go to. And I would hazard to assume that the security measures at that particular school make it anything other than a soft target. Yeah, that's fair. And honestly, there's not been very many at the scale, the mass shootings, at the inner city schools where there's heavy armed presence already. The high school I went to had cops walking around the hallways like they were on patrol. Really?

I went there for a year, and then I get thrown out. And like that was a tough environment, but it had security measures in place for different reasons. Like they weren't trying to stop somebody for coming in from mass union. They're trying to keep drug dealers out of the schools. Yeah. They could walk right in. It was right in the middle of an urban center.

So eight ties into seven. TSA-like security at entries outside of the learning area of schools to create a boundary and standoff zone. If we can keep Starbucks in an airport running under those conditions, we can do that with a school. I think this is an important point. I would have, in writing that bullet point, I think I, would have said security measures at schools,

they may not stop school shootings, but they'll stop the shootings from occurring inside of the actual school itself. It's, you know, again, and then that's why I think this one is important, is, you know, and that's why when I was talking about airports, I would like to believe, and I hope that airports have security measures

that are looking as far out as possible, and maybe their barrier zone is just a visual eyes on something so they can assess a threat, and it gives you time, right? because time is equal to the amount of reaction that you can have. This I totally agree with. I mean, my kid's schools don't even have fences. You can walk, you can walk front.

Same here. They have the railroad tie fence that you can step through. And part of the point is, you know, we talked earlier about why we don't do things, is one of the pushbacks is about the learning environment. Yeah. And so the point that this allows for is inside that environment. Like, you know the analogy is this is the airport again, over and over again. but you go through it and there's this pain in the ass friction up front that we've all learned to live with and deal with and we go through it.

And hopefully you'd figure out a way to make that less the case because it's a school and not an airport and something somebody has to go to every single day. But I'm feeling we'd be able to overcome it. We could overcome lots of stuff. But once you're inside the environment, there's this entire, you can't even see the security line. There's actually not any security people anymore. There's a few. But they're not present. They're around, but they're casual at best, passing at best.

Right. They're relying on, and it's stopped outside the environment before it gets in. And that, like, Starbucks looks like Starbucks. We wouldn't necessarily know that everybody who's in there has been through, had to take their shoes off, had to have their bags, x-rayed, had to go through a metal detector, had to have been identified on whether or not they were or weren't on a no-fly list, purchased to several hundred. ticket, et cetera, et cetera. Yep. Number nine, firearm tracking technology. Again, what can be true of my phone, can be true of my gun.

Interesting. Again, I think it comes back to the same issues as the one, where do you input, the adherence, all of that stuff. But again, we have amazing advances in technology. The discussion should, I believe, also exist about what we could do to somehow make a difference in any way, shape, or form. That's another of, let's figure something, let's try something. Let's try something interesting.

to see if it matters at all. Yeah, I can't argue against that. Number 10, stop having societal discussions about the solutions. The causes may be societal. The solution is not. We solve 9-11-style plane hijackings with the lock on the door of the cockpit, not by peace in the Middle East. Interesting. I would say we have to discuss that the solution is both actions taken immediately and still addressing what I believe to be the societal

causalities of it. We stopped 9-11-style plane hijackings with a lock on the door, but we didn't stop terrorism, and we certainly didn't stop evil. What we did is we removed a mechanism for them to exert that evil on other people. So that evil keeps searching, right? So unless you address the causality of the evil or the evil itself, it will continue. So I agree with all the things that we're talking about, the security, physical armed guards, but I also think, again, that personal belief is that the responsibility and emphasis has to come back to the individual. We have to figure out what in the fuck is making people think that taking a gun to school and killing their peers is somehow the solution. And that is certainly a societal conversation.

And unless you have that, maybe they won't do it at school, but they're still going to think that's a good idea. I have no disagreement with a societal problem. What I would add to that, though, is that one of the big drivers for school shootings is the copycat nature of them and the fact that they can happen, meaning that it sounds kind of, it's like no shit. Well, if they couldn't happen, they wouldn't happen. Yeah. And then what you would have is this would become less of a thing.

The idea is it becomes less of a thing because you've stopped it physically. You've stopped that one. expression. You stopped that one expression. And I think it's fair to say, like, what I'm really talking about here, though, is I'm talking about there's a societal rot on, that's fairly specific that I think is dealing with some of our youth. It's our youth. There's a general violent tendencies of people out there. And I don't know if, we're actually less violent now than we were even 30 years ago. We've had an uptick of the extreme mass shootings

over the last couple of years, but violence as a whole was down since the early 90s. I think what I'm focusing on squarely is this issue of people going in and shooting within a school. And if we're able to stop that, I don't know that these young 17-year-old disillusioned kids, with guns can do it somewhere else. I don't know that they can,

but I'd like to find out. I'd like to find out if you stopped this dead if they had the ability to lash out the way they do outside of their school. I personally think they would. I think if you are a pyromaniac and you have a burning sensation,

desire, drive to burn shit to the ground, and they build a new neighborhood, but it's built out of concrete cinder block, but the neighborhood next door is built out of wood, you're going to go to the neighborhood next door. What if you're just slightly troubled? Depends on how easy and soft that neighborhood next door is. Which is the point that I make.

If I spend most of my time at school, then I inherently have less opportunity. It is, like, this is starting, it starts to project in the semantics. But I think, like, it... I think the combination is both. I think we would, I think we agree more than we disagree for sure. Yeah, yeah.

I just, I honestly, I forgot, I feel like we have to address what the hell is going on with our society. I think, I mean, to me, one is dealing with the symptom, which I think we both agree it. It's got to stop. But if you don't deal with the illness and you only are focusing on the symptoms, you're never going to get to the root cause of the problem. Yeah, I don't, I, there's a, there's a hard, there's a part of me that doesn't know how much of this. has always been around. And I don't mean this, like, from a school shootings perspective, because we know a little bit about that,

because there's some data on it, and there's more high-volume school shootings now than there were before, but not low-volume. That's consistent. You can nitpick the data, which isn't really the point. The point is that I don't know if we're worse now as a manifestation of gun violence. What I do know is the word very different now, And there seems to be a lot more obvious disillusionment and that and loneliness and pain.

And pain. It feels like that, but I don't know how to quantify it and I'm a data guy. So I don't want to jump off the ledge. We're all crazy and sad and horrible now. But it feels like there is there is the ability that people can live. at being detached from others much more easily today than they have in the past. And it feels like there's something there around some depletion of empathy. Are they really living detached from others?

Because, again, go to dinner and go out to a restaurant and watch, and I do this all the time, and it drives me nuts. I watch the families not interacting, but interacting through a device. They're detached from the ones. around them, but so somehow, in air quotes, connected to everybody else. But I don't think there is any connection there. And I think that's where that lack of empathy comes from. Because, again, I talked about this and that the Children of the Gun podcast, I mean,

when there's no consequences to the words that you say, because it's not face to face, you lose, you lose that warning sign in your head, like, guys, a lot bigger than me. I'm not going to tell him what I think of his outfit today. Or even that I've got to live with the outcomes of this. relationship now. Like that I there is a definite transformation of the family unit. It's there's way more and this isn't moralizing this is just data. In fact there's way more single parent families than there were even 20, 30 years ago and they're not the way most people would say that there's there's an increase in young teen pregnancies and that's what drives it

and it's this moral failing and economic outcome. It's actually not. It's people are putting off getting married and starting family units and still continuing to have children. And I grew up in a single parent household. So I don't, and my outcomes, I was alone an awful lot as a kid. My kids presently, you know, God willing, in a two-parent household, And we're with them a lot.

And I think that matters. I think that, again, not from a morality perspective, because if you think marriage is under attack and it becomes an institution where the sanctity of marriage needs to get protected, well, then you should worry about them. Like, let more people get married. Like, don't stop people from getting married. And so there's a thing where I think the family structure has undergone a change.

And I don't, like it feels like there's an outcome there where that drives something. I also think, But add to that even now I see a lot in families that have two parents. Both of the parents are so busy trying to make ends meet that the kids, even though both parents are present in the household, are still spending an inordinate amount of time alone. And if they're like my kids, for my boys at least, the first draw that they're drawn to is this artificial world of video games

where I literally will sit and listen to the audio and the interaction. And I'm just like, you've got to be kidding. how vicious yet consequence free or just on their phone like YouTube this that that's like it they're connected to somebody somewhere through ether but totally disconnected and they're still alone in a two-family household yeah I think vicious yet consequence free is a really interesting way to describe it and I think that like I think in those few words you really nailed a bunch of it number 11 a special interest grouped that protects the Second Amendment by advocating for measures that reduce

gun violence, not by advocating for measures that reduce gun legislation? I think the biggest thing that bugs me about the NRA is not its existence and not that it represents protecting the Second Amendment. Because I believe if the NRA went away tomorrow, another organization would come in its place because it represents, to some degree, a will and desire of our population. The NRA is not causing this. What bugs me about them is they have the power in the platform to approach it differently. And I think they put the Second Amendment at risk by not being more open to things like studies and data and technology and other stuff.

Because you get that spot where if we're not allowed to do anything, we have no choice but to vilify the people who are keeping us from doing it. And I think that, like, I think they have an opportunity to do it differently, and I don't know why they don't. They take this obstinate, kind of almost childish, screw you guys, we're not changing anything. The law is on our side approach to it when they don't have to. Like, they don't. I think they could be just as strong an advocate for the Second Amendment and the spirit of the Second Amendment and why we have it. and do it from a perspective, like we want to keep people safe at the same time.

And if they are, like, if that's part of their charter, which I kind of know that it is, it's really not clear. And they can't point to things as much as I can point to. They have just straight bankrolling people who won't ever vote against their outcomes. What if the NRA tomorrow, like, let's take one of those silly technology ideas

that probably won't work. Yep. What if tomorrow they said, we're going to take $10 million of our donor's money and try to figure out how to make that work in a way that's smarter than what Sean Hughes said because he's a dope and he doesn't know anything about guns. What do you think the response would be to that? I don't know. I don't know. What do you think this response would be from the NRA members? I bet that the NRA, because it comes from them and they trust that they're not controlled by...

It was an initiative created by them. They'd get behind it. I think they have a tremendous amount of power and trust over the people who support them. because of their alignment with the Second Amendment. And I guess the question would be, what would happen if you did something like that? And it would be awfully telling who would come out against that. It's not the government.

It's not somebody trying to pass a law. It's a group trying to forward technology in a way that might make people safe, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. I don't know what the outcome would be either. It'd be interesting to sit back and watch, though. Yeah, but I mean on the other side of the argument, I have that there's a very small percentage of Americans that are part of the NRA.

Like members of the NRA, I barely even, I don't even know if I know members of the NRA. It's not something that we talk a bunch about. Yeah. It's not the thing that causes this. This is a cultural ideological part of America that that group just represents and to some degree benefits financially. There's a up in Montana there's a lot of NRA stickers on back windshields I'll pull some people over and get their numbers for you introduce I can actually be a text there's there's probably a lot there but I'm sure it's like I would say I have I have a lot of really really strong second amendment um advocates friends um and I don't know any of them have never been like hey why don't you come to the NRA event that I'm going to because I'm a member. It's just not, it doesn't seem obviously.

I've never been invited to an NRA event either now that I think of it. They're not as present in that way. They're more present in the cultural dialogue. Number 12, personally, I think this is going to be everybody's favorite. No gun ownership. This is the one that I don't want. So we'll open. This is Sean speaking.

I'm reading his writing. But the reality is the government, won't need to take it from my cold dead hands. They'll just need to stop giving me everything they do now if I've got one and refused to turn it in. No police will respond to my residence. No fire department will either. No first responders, no social security check.

No subsidized power bill, no driver's license, no school for my kids. You get the point. We have guns at the leisure of our government. Pretending that's not the case helps us minimize the dire need for us to care about gun violence. Man, some folks got mad at that. That's good.

get mad, but then talk. Yeah, I think what people get the most mad at that is that there is, we are in a different universe now than we once were from a government dependency perspective. And good, bad, or indifferent, that is, that's the score. That's where we are. and what I found relative to the gun debate is that there's this superficial or false ability to fall back on nobody could ever like this is this gives me my power this gives me my ability to have control over things and when you unpack the dependency we have on on the state and aren't environment right now, it's not the case. And so if we're not careful, we're going to find ourselves in spaces where it becomes less our own prerogative, whether or not we carry firearms.

And that would take repealing the Second Amendment. It would. And I don't think that that's ever going to happen. I was going to say, I think this one butts up against my philosophy of reasonable and practical. Yeah, it's not going to, it's not going to happen. Yeah. From a practical perspective, I think a law telling people that they have to turn in their weapons would work for law-abiding citizens. Right. It doesn't remove the weapons from society. It removes the weapons from law-abiding citizens.

Yeah, it is, the idea of a gunless society one is that's not our culture. That's not who we are. It also has practical problems, just like you said, where law-abiding citizens would not have guns. the criminals would and we would somewhat be at the mercy of all the police be able to maintain their weapons. Yeah, why not?

Okay. I think that's yes. And civilian on their own, but this gets into the spot where I think the main point that I'm making here is that the gun is not what keeps us away from tyranny anymore. I would agree with that.

And so what keeps us away from tyranny is logical expression of ideas and political discourse. And free press and social media. Those are the things that keep us away from tyranny because if you play it out, everybody loses their mind and they repeal the Second Amendment.

Somehow that happens. And then people decide they don't, they're just not going to give back their guns. Which I believe would be the stance of most people. I agree. I think it would be the stance of most people until things started going away unless you did and then it would slowly become and then it basically degrades into some some sort of outcome that is even that I think you brought up against reasonable and practical of a way to determine if somebody dials 911

do they have a weapon you know what I mean and what houses can a you know receive aid versus ones that don't yeah it's it's all a I understand I understand what you're saying, and I understand why you put that point in there. It's a philosophical bone to throw on the ground. And here's what I'd say is I think forever from here and forever after, I think that it is in the best interest of the United States of America for people to be able to purchase firearms. I think that we should aggressively pursue ways to make our society safe

within the construct of reasonably available firearms. I think that the belief that it is our firearms that protect us from our government provides a sense of, it allows you to be intellectually lazy around why we have guns and what we need to do in order to keep our society safe. And so I'm trying to deconstruct that a little bit and say, hey, this is really about us figuring out how to maintain the Second Amendment. Yeah. Maintain the Second Amendment. Earn it. Earn it. Earned the Second Amendment by thinking. about this in a way that says something other than pry it from my cold dead hands. Yeah. Change it from a sense of entitlement to a sense of ownership and earning the right. Right. And I think it is still an entitlement because we said it's a basic right and that right is ground into

the not just the right but the responsibility to take care of you in your own, right? In its best light, I think the gun advocates say that it is my responsibility to take care of me and my own. And you have the right to self-defense. Right. And I have not only the right, it's not even just a right. It's a responsibility to do that. And that's the best light of it. And I want that to continue forever.

And I don't think we're having the right arguments about it. I just don't think we're having the right discussions. And I think we have rabbit holes and pitfalls. I don't even think we're having discussions. I'd say at best we're having arguments. And I would say most of the time. And again, anecdotally from what I can see and from my own input, It's not even an argument.

I disagree with that. I choose to not pay attention to anything you're saying. You know what I mean? It's not even allowing a... You're not even getting wet from the other people's ideas because you have Gortex on all over your body to protect your ideas. Yeah. And it's very difficult to exercise a democratic society

when all things are permanently embedded in your head. I've been disconnected from the... internet almost all day. What was the response to the article? It was it was I had you know your normal hey number 12 is bullshit. I had a few folks say hey it's it's it's refreshing to hear people putting together solutions and and to be clear number 12 is bullshit which is why in the second sentence in that is this is the one that I don't want to happen. Well like you said it's more a philosophical discussion and a deconstruction. of the modern, the general narrative.

Yeah. And I think that like we, another discussion that could accompany that is, man, we're awfully dependent on our government for lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff. It'd be easier to probably list the things we're not dependent on the government. Right. And so if you continue to have the discussion like we're not and like what you're trying to avoid is a state where we're dependent on.

on the government, you're not really arguing in the current state. You're arguing in some sort of past world that doesn't necessarily exist. So then you lose both the ability to change it to that if you want it there, or the ability to make sure that the current state is sufficient to meet the means of a 21st century society. But what you can't do is say that it's not. You can't say that I don't need the government for anything. Okay, where's your kid going to school?

Where's the power coming to your house? Where are the police and the fire department coming from? Where's your retirement coming from? Where's your water coming from? Where's maintaining the roads? You want a society to fall down tomorrow? Stop picking up their trash. Stop picking up trash.

Yeah, that would be an interesting few weeks. I have a feeling that in California we pay for some of our trash pickup. It costs to be about $450 a year. I have a feeling that my family produces more than $450 a year of trash, which means to some degree the state is picking up the tab for me doing that. Do you know my trash costs per year in Montana? I didn't think there was trash in Montana. $49.

That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Per year. That's beautiful. And I'm damn sure we're producing more than $49 worth of garbage, because I see what goes in that damn bucket. But you didn't think we were going to talk about that. No.

What else you would have talked about? So we went through. Those are you still with us? Man, I would have put more thought of those if I knew we were talking about it today. Well, I thought it was the perfect opportunity, though, because for one, it's timely. Yeah. And two, you're going to have to write something else about this before the solution is implemented. And that sucks to say, but I know you're going to, you're going to, you're going to have,

to something will happen again that fits the exact criteria of what we're talking about and it will happen again and again until we actually do something about it and I think what is another weird thing is very few things go viral to the extent of like when I write about guns and that's not just me that's a in general thing yeah and that's also part of the discussion you I I've learned over the last couple of There's what, I've almost trained myself away from writing about certain things because it's just a hook. It's just designed to get the stuff out there. And I make no money off of this, right?

This is not how I make my living. So I'm trying to keep it honest and true. But even there, it's more fun when lots of people read things. So you find your tendencies moving to other stuff. And if I were to go in like, this were my job to drive clicks and revenue, holy shit. That's all I'd write about. Yeah. I'd write about.

And I guarantee you you would change something. of the language to make it slightly more controversial because then it would be aggregated even further into the churn and it would irritate more people than further aggregate. Yeah, I think most of my headlines are usually somewhat two-line and not obvious what they're talking about. Nonsense. So there's that. The book, the book went live on Kindle a couple days ago.

By the time this goes out, it'll be live. You've yet to say what the title is. 16. It's called 16. Let me help you, Mark it here just a little bit. 16, irrational account of an irrational election available on Amazon. And the Sean Patrick Hughes is how I write under it, just because there's an Irish comedian out there who recently passed away,

who takes up all my search clicks if I just go by the two names. That makes sense. And then aren't you, did you already start your podcast? We're about to launch. describe the creation of this all of the working pieces coming together here

give people an idea of what they're going to get into if they listen to your podcast which open with what it's going to be called it's called exit 38 what's that come from that is the exit that my hometown of Atlantic City

New Jersey is off the New Jersey said the Garden State Parkway not the term parkway so at 38 and so there's a it's an it's another natural experiment my natural experiment I mean something that happened due to nobody's control that provides a very very clear picture of two different outcomes that you can test with to make

it less nerdy what I'd say so there's a there's a woman I grew up with in my little town of Ventnor which is right on the south side of Atlantic City she kind of came from the right side of the railroad tracks I was not necessarily on the right on the right side of the railroad tracks But over the last 30 years since the last time I saw our, our lives kind of went entirely different. I went to the Naval Academy. I went into the military. I was a vet.

I work. You are a vet. I am a vet. I still am a vet. I've grown some conservative roots. I have, I work in the tech sector in California. So I am now this kind of established conservative person and emerald. Emily Van Dine, who is the co-host of the podcast, went and she was a poet.

She started writing poetry. She was published very early. Went to Emerson, which is a liberal, a very, very high-fluent liberal arts school. And then somewhere along the line, she was in a relationship, a very, very abusive relationship, where she basically had to turn tail with her young child and leave and write her way out of squalor. And she's now, she's a professor of women's studies and creative writing at a college in New Jersey called Stockton State College. How did you guys reconnect? I'm curious how, one, you reconnected, and then how that is now coming together into a podcast you guys are going to create together.

Yeah, so somewhere along the line, she started, she sent me a note critiquing my writing. Said, dear Sean, I hate you and you're writing. It was more along the lines. Yeah, she beat me up a little bit, but she also wanted to understand. And so we had a text dialogue started up where it was, she wanted to understand what I was writing about. And there is an interesting thing. This is where the natural experiment comes in. We've known each other since we were little kids.

There's a degree of trust where there's, I believe, that this is. Trust and familiarity. Yep, yep, yep. And so she started asking questions. questions and then I started asking questions about what she teaches, gender theory and feminism and women's studies, which is not what they taught at the United States Naval Academy. I almost hazard to say it would be the opposite. Yeah, it's the opposite. And so what happened was a running dialogue of I'm not trying to convince her.

She's not trying to convince me. We're trying to understand what the other person is saying because we both generally were friends and we know. each other a long time and I trust that she's not a horrible person. And to some degree I think she trusts that I'm not a horrible person. And we were both, you know, circa four or five years ago, not in great kind of spots in our life emotionally and we wrote ourselves out of it. So we came to this spot where we've looked back at like what was hard about my life, which was separating from the military and dealing with, you know, that transition and

multiple deployments and multiple wars and hers was getting out of a violent, abusive relationship where she had to turn tail and run with her young child, who's the son of the guy who is trying to kill her. Yeah. And then coming back and talking about what's going on. And so the podcast is really me asking her questions about what's going on and how she sees it and her asking me questions. It's not a point-counterpoint. that drives me crazy.

I can't, like, there's enough two people arguing with each other. And so I've, it's just been an interesting thing. I've learned a ton about perspectives on gender theory. Some of, some of it is, it doesn't make any sense to me. And I struggle to think there's tons of value to it. But there's a different level when you come from somebody who actually knows what they're talking about in this stuff, where it's not just the nonsense you see online where there's, you know, social justice warriors and people.

crying, foul at everything. It's really interesting to hear somebody deconstruct something from a knowledgeable place that actually understands it and to be able to ask questions about it because you really don't know whether you disagree with something unless you know what the hell the other person is saying.

Yeah, you have to understand their point before you can determine where you actually either stand for it or against it. Yeah, and like some interesting commonalities between her perspective and mine is just how annoying and pissed off it is to have the world explained, have parts of your world explain to you that are yours by people who have no experience in that stuff.

So the first episode is the best way to describe it is we start off, she asked me about guns. And they have a conversation that sounds very similar to the conversation we have. And now halfway through it, it changes to what Freud wrote on the female orgasm. You lost me about five seconds ago. Exactly. And so what you realize is she then unpacks how for the first half of the 20th century, what women were being told about their responsibilities and sex from the medical profession and how women were having surgeries to alter their private places in order to do that, like, regularly.

And I don't know, I wouldn't think about this stuff. I don't know any of this stuff. And then grounding that in some level of, like, this is where some of this frustration comes from when we talk about the ability for us to control our bodies. What does that have to do with guns? That one, we went a little bit left on. I was going to say, you took a serious detour from talking about guns to Freud's thoughts on the female orgasm. It had to do with access to the weapons, and historically women had no access to any weapons, but they also had no access. access to anything.

And including the medical field. And that expresses itself in frustration. Not related to the guns, just general frustration. Oh, boy. It's a lot to unpack. Thank God this is an audible only medium because my face right now is slightly contorted trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about. You have to listen to it.

But I think the underlying point is that it's back to one, you know, I think what was also the underlying theme of the book is that people have very different perspectives on stuff. And their perception of things, you can't tell somebody that their perception is wrong. Their perception is their perception. Their opinion of it and their points of view and what you ought to do about things can certainly be wrong and certainly different from what you want. But understanding their perspectives to understand where you can come to a common ground is interesting. But the point is that this is not a signaling thing where I'm trying to be sensitive and prove that I'm one of the team where I am also a feminist.

I'm not. I just want to understand and have discussions that matter. They're really interesting. How do you guys do it? Phone, Skype. We use Zencastr as the platform we use. Same thing I use for remote stuff. Yeah.

And it's super easy. We do an hour. we talk through a bunch of different stuff. It's more of a flowing conversation and what happens. And part of it works because we're from the same place. So we have a lot of common stuff. The remote interviews can be difficult if you don't know the person, but they're really easy if you have some type of rapport established.

Yeah. Or you know them. Actually, yeah. I'm hesitant to, I had the opportunity to interview some people remotely, but I chose not to do it. I'm just going to wait to go face to face because you have to have some level of look them in the eye and interaction, especially if you don't know them.

It's a little off the rails because they start answering yes. Yeah. And no. And then you don't know if they like you or not. Yeah, it's like, I just asked you a very complex question to which the answer could not possibly be yes or no. Did you care to expand on that? Yeah. No.

I think that I think what's important about it is there's got to be a way to, you have to, what's true of yourself, is also true of others, meaning that everybody who doesn't have the same perspective of you is not nuts. In fact, they're very rarely nuts. Something is making them think that way or feel that way. And I think what's been interesting for me is I now catch myself when I'm writing things, and it doesn't always make me change what I write, but it makes me account for that perspective. If I were to say this out loud, this person would very quickly say the following. And I get to evaluate that and say, does that person have a point? Is what I'm about to say worth what they're about to say back?

Does it have the value to what I'm going to say? If the answer is no, I don't need to say it. I don't need to piss people off for no point at all. That's not the point. The point isn't to piss people off to get attention. The point is to make your point as effectively as you can and get other people to read it and understand it and not come from a direction where they immediately want to fight you and tweet mean horrible things about you.

I wish we could change or enhance the perspective of a lot of people in this country. I do believe we have a... I don't know what the right word would be. I don't know if it would be an issue with perspective, but I think it's a very narrow me-centered perspective quite often. And I think it's problematic. Yeah, people generally see the world through their own eyes and how... The problem is most of the world is not reflective of where...

you and I are very fortunate to call home. And that's the issue that I have with the perspective and people making issues out of things that other people would be grateful to have the opportunity to make an issue out of. It's all like the hashtag first world problems is a real thing. Is that a hashtag? Yeah, it's a real life thing to feel societal stress

and feel like catastrophe is around the quarter when we basically live in the greatest period of time in the history of the world. We have more freedom than people know what to do with. If you live in the United States of America, circa 2018, you have hit the cosmic jackpot. And it's important to realize that. Let's end it there. I like it. Got anything else?

Nope. So care for us. It's still a nonprofit. God damn it. You had the chance to end it on cosmic jackpot. You can still end it there. Yeah, what do you got? Carefor us.org.

Yep. We talked about that in episode three. Yep. That's still a nonprofit. We're still giving free stuff away, free support, services, and counseling to families, special needs kids.

Check out the website if you're interested. That's it, man. Thank you for your time. All right, man. Thanks. And that is all for this week. Ladies and gentlemen, as always,

thank you for support. The danger close shirt is flying off the shelves. If you want to get one, come and get one. Go to clearedhodpodcast.com. And if you do, there's a bar across the top, and one of them is shop. Click on that, bad boy.

And pick yourself up a cleared hot t-shirt if you want to. And if you don't want to, then don't. No big deal. Appreciate all of the feedback. I love the emails that come out with questions or feedback on the podcast in and of itself. If you got some spare time, tell somebody about the podcast. If you have even more spare time,

go on to iTunes and write me a review. I still really don't know what they do other than I think it helps people find you in the listings and the ridiculous matrix of podcasts available on iTunes. But if you got time, give me some feedback. And I don't care if it's good or bad. If you have a thought about the podcast, if you have a suggestion about the podcast and you want to make it better, or I should say you want me to make it better or change something, will hit me up and I'll do it.

And with that, the last thing I'm going to say is don't forget. This episode is brought to you by bluechew.com. The first chewables with the same active ingredient is by Agro and Cialis. Get your first shipment free when you use the promo code hot. You pay about five bucks in shipping, state dependent, and B-L-U-E-C-H-E-W.com promo code H-O-T. Enter the code hot. Get some for free. Stretch it out, hydrate, pace yourself, marathon, not a spread.

That's all I got for this week. See it.