The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Back Roads and Better Angels A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY By Francis S. Barry

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Back Roads and Better Angels A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY By Francis S. Barry

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

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Chris Voss won the TikTok-y and all those crazy places on the Internet. We have an amazing multi- crazy places on the internet. We have an amazing multi-book author on the show today. He's the author of the newest book that came out June 4th, 2024. It's called Backroads and Better Angels, A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy. Francis S. Berry joins us on the show. We'll be talking to him about his insights and all the stuff that he put into this wonderful tome he's published on Amazon and other places. Francis S. Berry is a Bloomberg opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering

national affairs. He serves as a chief speechwriter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg during the 2020 presidential campaign and in New York's City Hall, where he also helped lead a variety of government and election reform Initiatives he's the author of the scandal of reform and holds degrees from University of Notre Dame and New York University Welcome to the show Francis. How are you? Very good. Thanks for having me Chris. Thanks for coming. Congratulations on the new book It's wonderful to have you give us your dot-coms any place you want to find people want to find you on the interweb, which is in the sky. Sure. You can go to my website, fsberry at fsberry.com. You can listen along. The book has a soundtrack because

there's lots of music in the book. So if you are on Spotify, I'm going to get it up on Amazon and other streaming services soon. But you can go to fBarry and listen along to the playlist as you read along. Nice! Is there lots of Metallica on there? Last one, if you're on Instagram, you can visit Looking for Lincoln, Looking for the numeral 4 of Lincoln. Ah, there you go. So, is there lots of Metallica on there? You know, there's no Metallica, but if you take a look at it, there's an incredible diversity of music there. There is the Dead Kennedys, a punk band, and there's kind of everything in between that and Stephen Foster from 150 years ago.

So it spans the range of American music, bluegrass, jazz, blues, pop, rock, funk, everything. There you go. Is there any Rush on there then? No, there's no Rush. All right. Thank you for coming by, Francis. Thanks for coming by and running the show. No, I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. So give us a 30,000 overview of your amazing new book, Backroads and Better Angels. Sure. My wife and I drove the Lincoln Highway in the fall of 2020. What's the Lincoln Highway? Most people have never heard of it. We had barely fall of 2020. What's the Lincoln Highway? Most people have never heard of it. We had barely heard of it. But it is the first road that connects the two coasts from New York to San Francisco. It was dedicated in 1913 at a time when there are very few good roads across the country.

And my wife and I took this RV across the Lincoln Highway in the fall of 2020 to talk with people about what holds the country together. And we talked, it was the middle of the election campaign, but we were interested in stepping away from the campaign and talking to people about what holds the country together. And we talked, it was the middle of the election campaign, but we were interested in stepping away from the campaign and talking to people about national issues, but from a much more local and personal perspective. There you go. The heartland, the midland of America. Yeah. Yeah. Is the Lincoln Highway the top part? I'm looking at the graphic here. There's a top part and there's a bottom part so we we drove

the lincoln highway to san francisco the we left on 9 11 and the idea was to get to san francisco by election day and we did that but of course the election didn't really end on election day because president trump didn't concede and stop the steal happened and so we kept traveling and that became a backdrop for the last third of the book. And we went out on a northerly route and came back on a southerly route. There you go. Now, have you considered doing a book on how to make a marriage survive when you're spending that much time together in an RV? Yeah, this ends up being a little bit of a how-to on that because we were only a year married.

We had no idea what we were getting in for it. We had never driven an RV before. Complete newbies. Probably made every mistake in the book. And we were learning on the fly. We definitely encountered some challenges, some of which I detail in the book. But we had an amazing time doing it. We loved it.

And it was an incredible way to spend a lot of our first year in marriage. You guys are going to be married for a hundred years because if you can survive that, you can survive it. That's a lot of, that's a lot of, I've done road trips with girlfriends to Yosemite and stuff. And after about a day or two, you're ready to, you know, go to fisticuffs with each other. We do live in New York City in a one-bedroom apartment. An RV isn't that much different. Yeah, that's probably bigger. So what was the proponent behind this?

Was this sponsored by one of the news organizations that you work with, or was there an agenda behind it, or was it kind of a a loose sort of let's go and see what's going to happen? Yeah, it was more of a let's go and see what's going to happen. But as you mentioned, I'm an editorial writer at Bloomberg. And so I wrote a weekly column about the trip for Bloomberg as I was out on the road. But there was so much more to the story that I wanted to dig into and stitch together. And that's how I quickly realized as we were doing the trip, hey, there's a book here. I think there's a really important, good

book here. And I began taking notes about all kinds of things that I wasn't writing about for Bloomberg in the column that ended up in the book. There you go. So you wanted to use the spirit of Abraham Lincoln to kind of go across the land and talk to people. Now, is that one of those presidents who has a felony? I forget. There's so many that have felonies. Why was Abraham Lincoln an inspiration for you? Because at a time when the country is so deeply divided, whose spirit better to follow than Lincoln, the guy who held the country together during the Civil War? And the idea was to use him as kind of a North Star as we traveled across the country's divisions and use his legacy and what we can learn from him to help guide us across and show us the way.

And there's an awful lot to Lincoln that is still very, very relevant to where we are today. And a lot of his life and in terms of the leadership lessons that can be learned that are applicable to the situation we're in now. Yeah. We almost need him back. Is there a way we can bring an AI back? Where's Bill and Ted when we need them? Yeah.

This country would have been vastly different if he hadn't been assassinated, if he had been able to apply all of his stuff. It's interesting to study how different this country would have been vastly different if he had been assassinated if he had been able to apply all this all the stuff it's it's interesting to study how different this country would have been but maybe you can say that with almost any assassinated president john f kennedy's etc etc of course according to some people john f kennedy is on the ticket for the next or is running the government evidently according to some people what did you find as you drove around what what's what's going on in the heartbeat of america how's it beaten is it got around? What's going on in the heartbeat of America? How's it beaten? Has it got high cholesterol?

What's going on there? We definitely heard lots of frustration. Of course, it's not surprising you'd hear frustration with Washington. But, I know, shocking, right? But the more interesting thing was there was lots of sadness and depression almost around how divided the country is. That was true from people in both parties, real frustration about our inability to do anything about it. That was one of the questions I would ask people. In fact, almost every single person that I spoke with along the way, I asked, you know, what worries you most about the future of the country? What are you most

concerned about? And not one single person said China. Not one person said Russia. Not one person said terrorism, which surprised me a little bit. And that's not to say that they weren't concerned about terrorism. But the thing that nearly every single person said was, I'm really worried about where the divisions in the country are leading us. And I'm worried about what that's going to mean for our future, what that's going to mean for my kids' future. And part of that worry was also, I think, kind of a helplessness. Everybody wanted to do something about it, but no one knew quite what to do.

And that was, I think, we haven't been out on the road that much since we did this in 2020, but I would bet, and we hope to get back on the road, I would bet that that feeling is even more prevalent and stronger than it was then. Yeah. The heartland of America, we had somebody on recently who wrote a book that talked about how climate change really impacts the smaller towns and those areas the in those areas in fact they seem to get hit economically climate change you know they seem to feel the effects more than you know say a city like new york or california sure um sure california is a city now evidently might as well be fuck it we can do what we want we're california the fifth largest economy in the world yeah but evidently is going out of business next week, according to some people. Even though they're bigger than what, Germany?

You know, this is interesting. Before COVID hit, I was traveling to a lot of events. And South by Southwest, CES. And I really got tired of putting my poor two huskies up in kennels for a week at a time. And I'd come up with an idea before COVID of getting one of those Mercedes runners and having it kitted so we could sleep in it. And I could take them with me to events and they'd have to, they'd have to stay kenneled at the events,

but at least they could sleep with me at night and I wouldn't have to stay in hotels. But the idea was, is I was going to slowly take two weeks to drive to South, South by Southwest instead of those mad flights and and i wanted to stop in like greasy spoon diners and just places along the the thing and it was going to have a pop-out studio where i could have the mics and and i could interview people and be like you know and i just wanted to interview people like you know why what's it like here

what's it like living in a town of 3,000 people? And what's the dating like, by the way? And how do you meet new people? But you wait for the truckers to drop them off, evidently, according to Frank Flusi. But I'm just curious about people because I think those people are the real salt of this earth. They're the real, I don't want to call them the real Americans, but they kind of are. They're the main street of America, right? They're those people that, they're the, I can't think of a good analogy, but they're the bread and butter.

They're the cloth of America. They're the fabric of the soul of our country. Not to say that people in New York don't have a soul, but it's true. Anyway, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Don't unsubscribe. But some people think that, evidently, according to certain news organizations.

Exactly. You watch too much cable news, you don't think that. And so I just wanted to interview him because I love people. I love their stories. I love to know, you know, I love greasy spoons, too. I love going. There's something about an old greasy spoon, some diners. Absolutely.

80 years. So were those a lot of people you came in contact with and how you'd interview them? It was a really weird time to be traveling because it was the middle of the pandemic. And a lot of places were not open. And we were also trying to be careful because we were speaking with people everywhere we went. And so we didn't want to be, if we got sick and passed it along to someone, you know, we didn't want to be a super spreader. We didn't want the RV trip to be a super spreader. Just going around spreading COVID everywhere.

That would not be a good version of this story. Thankfully, that did not happen. Come on by the COVID van, folks, and get some popsicles. Exactly. So we didn't hit, you know, normally we would have been in every greasy spoon along the way. We may not have even made it to San Francisco. But we had to very sadly drive past. Of course, we found spots to stop into.

But we had to be a bit more deliberate in terms of who we found to speak to. The good news about COVID was everyone was thrown off their schedule. And so people were willing to make time, which was really nice. People were very generous with their time, but tried to do a version of what you wanted to do, which is talk people from all different walks of life and all different professions, all different backgrounds, a little bit about themselves. And of course, those conversations veered into politics. But I was really trying not to talk about Trump and Biden and just talk about life in that town and what some of these national issues meant for their existence and their family and their community. Yeah. And it sounds like you've identified what politicians really need to start caring about more.

And alternatively, it seems they care about less. I mean, I probably shouldn't throw all of our politicians completely under the bus. There does seem to be a group in Washington that are a bit extreme. And, you know, they're usually the noisiest people that make the news, sadly. And they seem to be the most, you know, when the mics are on and the cameras are rolling, they're quite extreme. And they do it to raise money, evidently, from small donors.

Evidently, the small donor thing has really created kind of an issue of where these guys can go out and pull stunts and then get floods of money, and so they, you know, it just rewards this sort of behavior. You know, with Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, you know, they got along. We had, what's his face from, was it Dateline or no? I forget his name. He's retired now from MSNBC. But he used to run, I can't remember, but he was under Tip O'Neill's staff when Tip O'Neill was around.

And, you know, we vastly changed. Oh, Chris Matthews, maybe? Chris Matthews, yeah. Chris Matthews was on the show several years ago. And we talked about that, how things really vastly changed after Tip O'Neill. You can still see Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill sitting down, a couple of Irishmen having dinner and whatever it was, and agreeing or at least talking to each other at the end of the day. Right. And we just don't have that.

If I ever saw Mike Johnson or sitting in the oval office with the biden you know having a drink at the end of the day yeah we'd all kind of fall off our chairs and be like what's going on is yeah exactly i i spoke with a farmer in illinois who had exactly this story he was involved in local republican politics his whole life and he was very good friends with a guy who was involved in local democratic party party politics his whole life and And he was very good friends with a guy who was involved in local Democratic party politics his whole life. And he told me the night before they had been out for a beer together. And the guy said to him, you know, this just isn't fun anymore. I don't want to do this anymore because I can't sit down with people like we're doing here without someone walking away angry. And there's a lot of that, you know, that has happened to relationships where people feel they can't talk about

politics anymore without someone breaking off the relationship. And we've got to be able to find ways to carry on relationships and to prize and value relationships and still have civil conversations. Yeah. I mean, I i've i've started i started a thing about i think last year where if i'm going to have a conversation and it's it's with somebody that you know we can have a good emotional intelligence conversation i mean there's clearly some people you see on interviews that they're they're pretty far out there and i can't

even figure a way to bring them back but usually what i'll do is i'll be like okay we'll have this political conversation but we're going to work off a foundation of this fuck both parties we're both we're all americans here and we're going to have this discussion as americans and we're on the same team we want what's best for america we may have different ideas behind it but we're going to work from this basis. So we're not going to, you know, once we start floating into the Republicans do this and Democrats do this, you know, we're going to, okay, whoa, whoa, back to the foundation. We're all Americans. You know, my conversations are so much different when I lay those boundaries.

Yeah. It's a great foundation and it can make a big difference. It's amazing that it needs to be said, but it needs to be said. I mean, but it grounds people and grounds the conversation. I bet though, Chris, what you didn't say is equally true, which is you bring humor to those conversations and that makes a big difference too. It disarms people. It allows people to kind of relax a little bit and realize that, you know, you're not about to throw nuclear bombs. And that's a really important part of civility too. One of the fun things I learned about Lincoln

through this process, I always knew that he had a good sense of humor, liked to laugh, but I learned that it was absolutely crucial to his mental health. He suffered from melancholy his whole life. And reading and telling stories, humorous stories, jokes, tall tales, dirty jokes, smutty jokes. I mean, anything that made him laugh and that could make someone else laugh, he was in favor of. And I think that speaks to its power to diffuse situations and to bring people together. Yeah. When you read books on him, I think we've had some great people on the show who have written a lot of great books on Lincoln. I mean, he was that way.

I think he suffered from a little depression. He did. I think his wife, Martha, had some issues. Mary definitely had her own issues. But Lincoln, yes, I mean, they also lost children. You know, there was a lot of sadness in the Lincoln home. And, of course, he bore the weight of the Civil War on his shoulders. He read letters every day from family members, you know, who were losing children or asking children to be returned home.

I mean, and with pressure on him to end the war early, to accept peace terms that would allow for the Confederacy. Huge, unbelievable pressures on him that took a toll on him mentally. There you go. I mean, his only downfall was he loved the theater. Oh! Too soon. Too soon. Speaking of, the play that he went to see that night was a comedy wow that's that's ironic

sadly yeah yeah so i mean your book is gonna hopefully we can we mail it to all the politicians and tell them hey whatever you want to do is to get along you know i've i've reached a point where and my audience knows this very well i before 9-11, I was a hardcore Republican, a businessman sort of Republican. I don't think I understand fully what I was into. But, you know, I was like, okay, it's a party business. And then 9-11 happened, and it shocked me. And I went, why does the world hate us? I thought we were great, you know, because we all think we do because we're stupid Americans.

And so I was like, I should probably look into what's going on. And then I did. And, you know, when it became obvious, in my opinion, W. Bush was an idiot and President Dick Cheney was running the country for profit through Halliburton. I was like, I don't think I like how this works. And so I started wandering in the desert. I found myself a liberal. And I think I was driven there. Maybe, I don't know.

And, and then now I find myself over the last year or two, I've moved to the middle where I'm a, I'm a Democrat. I'm a Democrat moderate. Yeah, there we go. Democrat moderate. But I find myself trying to understand both sides. So I'll look at what my Republican friends are trying to do, and I'll say, okay, so they want this,

and the left side wants this. How is there a better way that we can make this work? Okay, you're against certain types of abortion or something like that. And just kind of thinking about a lot of the ideas that we have, maybe they're not the right ideas, but maybe the right way to focus on it isn't going, your idea is stupid, and instead going, okay, how can we meet in the middle?

How can we give you part of what you want and really part of what we want? And we all try and meet there instead of just yelling and throwing things at each other. And I've really gotten critical of both extremes, of both parties. So I'm very critical of my woke extremist party that evidently wants hamas to thinks it's a great thing and then i'm very critical of the far right and pretty much critical anybody doesn't want to get along pretty much at this point yeah i i'm i'm with you there's there's a big by the way a big part of the country is with us too right in that center the trouble is that the politicians incentives are all tilted to the extremes.

And party primaries reward, I mean, you were talking about the stunts that people pull to raise money. It's not so different in a primary election. The primaries reward the most extreme candidates because that's where the voters are in a primary. If you were to open it up and hold an open primary and allow independents to vote, you would get a different outcome. So to give you one story from the book from this, there's one state in the country that has a nonpartisan legislature. And I'm sure some of your listeners will know it's Nebraska, which the capital of Nebraska is Lincoln.

So of course, we went to Lincoln. Lincoln Highway goes by there, a little north of there. But we went into Lincoln. And I interviewed a state senator there who was a Democrat. Of course, we went to Lincoln. Lincoln Highway goes by there, a little north of there. But we went into Lincoln. And I interviewed a state senator there who was a Democrat. And he said, look, I'm a Democrat. I'm in the minority. There are more Republicans than there are Democrats in the legislature.

But technically, we're all nonpartisan. And so what does that mean? It means that we don't pick committees based on party label. We pick them based on relationships. And so there are Democrats who chair committees in the Nebraska legislature. That doesn't happen in any other legislature in the country. It also means that the minority party can get bills passed if they build the relationships and do exactly the kind of thing that you just said, which is, hey, you want this? I want that. Why don't we talk about this and see if we can kind of meet in the middle somewhere? And so this Democrat had gotten bills passed through a legislature that was controlled by Republicans.

But it wasn't actually controlled by a party because all of the people there, all the electeds had to go out and knock on doors of everybody, not just people in their own party. So this Democrat, when he goes campaigning, he goes and knocks on the doors of Republicans and independents because he wants their votes, too. It just changes the whole way of thinking about politics for elected officials. Yeah, we need to incorporate that. Because, I mean, ever since, you know, with Obama, you know, I think it was Mitch McConnell said, we're just going to kill everything, and we don't care. And he's not going to pass anything. And that's why he has to do so many executive orders.

And ever since then, a lot of that has gone on. It seems like every change over the House, you know, the opposing parties, we're just going to stall everything and not do anything nothing gets done i think this is the worst congress ever when it comes to performance of bills that there's ever been from the data i've seen and yeah i think social media has made things incredibly worse because you know if the extremes don't get what they want instead of working together they just fire up the rage machines of social media yeah the pr talking points and you know the heritage foundation the and the the the other foundation they just they just put out their pr talking points and everybody just follows along and off you go and it's just sad but it is sad it's sad it's sad especially because it's not

where most people are it's not where most americans are. And we heard that. I had a great conversation with a sheriff in Cochise County, Arizona. It's a border county in southeastern Arizona. And so they're dealing with lots of illegal crossings. And I did a ride along with the sheriff's office and they were building a wall. We saw the work being done. And he said, look, I know this is not a panacea. And he said, I blame both parties for this problem. They both totally failed. He said, one side is this extreme and the other side is that extreme. And everybody knows we need to have a balanced mix of security, border security, and we need more immigration. We need to make it easier for people who want to come here and who we want to come here to come here.

And of course, that's true. But has it gotten done? No. Has it been a problem for 15 years? Yes. And neither party is incentiv continuing to get worse. Yeah. I think your book really sends that message to everyone in politicians.

You know, we need to get along better. We need to defuse things. I don't know how well Biden has done that. It's just so hard because of the rage machines that can be activated you know i think you know at one point i believe the democrats and biden offered the republicans in the house control uh really good i think they gave most everything on immigration it was a really i totally agree it's a great border bill they should have passed it yeah and there were there was republican support for it there was a good bit of Republican support for it until Trump said, defeat it.

Because, I would say, because he didn't want to give Biden a victory and because he'd rather run against a dysfunctional border than one that's a little more highly functional. And that's a terrible way to govern. But that's where we are. Yeah. sovereign but that's where we are yeah and i mean basically there's without the abortion issue you know that was the way that the gop always got out the vote since 1970 if you understand how that whole thing got built out with the best seat of us folks the and without that now on the ballot i mean it kind of is for democrats more so there's republicans they don't really have a get out the vote thing so they've kind of turned that immigration thing into the get out the vote thing

that abortion used to be and so they need that for the thing otherwise i mean what else are you going to argue about i don't know in fact the biden's too old i guess or trump's too old or whatever what other things haven't we touched on your book we should tease out before we go one of the things to cover in the book is this idea very much keeping what we're talking about here that threats to democracy can come from both the left and the right. And so while we're rightly, I think, focused on the threat to the potential rerunning of political violence, which we had in 2020 on January 6th, and the danger that we still face in that regard, I think, you know, Democrats can be a little bit susceptible to thinking,

well, that's the only threat to democracy we face. And the truth is, it's not. And Democrats, I think, also need to do some introspection, because threats can come from the left. And one example I cover in the book is, for lack of a better phrase, and I don't love it, because everyone's got a different idea of it, but cancel culture. But people being afraid to speak their minds. And I heard that from a number of different people along the way, that they were afraid to say what they believed because of the personal or professional consequences that might result. And usually that was from the left. And that is kind of a version of censorship that is very antithetical to traditional American values around First

Amendment speech and free expression. And it's also very harmful to productive conversations, because if you were trying to get to a good solution and part of the group is afraid to say what they're thinking, you're not going to get to a good solution. It's really important that people feel comfortable speaking their minds. And the left, I think, has done a very bad job of standing up for that in recent years and has wanted to kind of push that under the rug as an issue and i really think it deserves better more attention i think so too the that's one of the things that kind of drove me you know and the woke concept of course in its origins has a very healthy ideal and you know it

came from the african-american community actually and and the interest of it you know initially in looking at the george floyd stuff and all that was great but you know i mean as you mentioned i you know i like telling jokes you can't comedians can't go on college campuses they fully embraced emotionalism and i literally you literally just watch and they're just sitting around and i you know i'm a fellow democrat but but i would see people sitting around with the you know the three monkeys hear no evil speak no evil you know all that stuff just going la la i can't hear any evil that's against my thing or my emotions or or i'm assaulted i'm traumatized and whatever by hearing you know an opinion that is not my own how dare you and the facts oh my god you know and yeah you're right that it's just you can't have a

discussion at all if you can't yeah you know we can agree that we're americans but i mean if you're like hey let's can we talk to each other and people are going to be like la la la la i mean like children you're just like that's kind of where it is i mean yeah i don't know bill maher says the same thing i do i mean we were all, and then they moved the goalposts on us. So it's not like we moved to the middle. It's just kind of they moved the goalposts. And the crazy part is that free expression, free speech was always a very liberal value. That grew out of the 60s, and the left has abandoned it in many ways, and it's something we need to reclaim.

And it's funny because, and it's ironic's something we need to reclaim and it's funny because and it's ironic because the left will be like you know you're in florida you're burning and banning books and banning books in schools and you're just like at least you know you can talk about it so there you go yeah that censorship is bad whether it happens on the left or the right exactly and it just seems like both sides are have extreme hypocrisy and i'm hoping you know i advertise that i'm in the middle i'm in the moderate middle i mean i i want what's right for this country it's really hard to support anything on the other side right now because it seems to be trump's party instead of the old gop i'm hoping that the gop i forget

what they call them the never trumpers or you know, the people who just really feel that the party's been hijacked. You know, I'm hoping that they can recover their party and take it back. We need balance. We need good politicians. I would vote for either side if we were sane and not racing towards authoritarianism. Or if it were sane or insane, what did I say? Anyway, I think most Americans are that way. I heard a lot of Republicans, you know, voted for Biden.

I hear a lot in the middle will do again. I think the lieutenant governor from, is it Arkansas or Georgia? I think it's Georgia. Georgia, yeah. He's going to cross party lines and vote. Probably just committed, you know, political suicide saying that, but good for him. We need more of that.

So your book really tells us what we need to know. We need to come together. We need respect to Heartland, because that's where our heart beats in this country, really, when it comes down to it. Yeah, I hope it will leave readers optimistic and with a different perspective on some of our history. There's lots of great American history that we dig into as we travel along the Lincoln Highway. We've been through a hell of a lot. And that's one of the big takeaways for me from the trip was we've overcome a hell of a lot. And we can overcome what we're in now, but we're going to need to benefit from reaching back and remembering how we've overcome some of our biggest challenges in the past.

And Lincoln is, of course, a perfect guy for that. I'll give you one other Lincoln quote. It's a paraphrase anyway. He said that a government policy is very rarely or almost never wholly good or wholly evil. It's almost always a compound of the two. And the trick is to figure out where the weight lies, whether it's more good or more evil. But I thought that was, you know, it's a really good recognition

that we can disagree on things and still recognize that, hey, you know, the other side's got a point here, and not demonize the other side as, oh, it's the end of the country if that person is elected. Oh, America is over if that country is elected. As soon as you do that, it's a very slippery slope to political violence, because the end of the country justifies, in that sense, taking up arms. And we have to remember that we're an incredibly strong and resilient country. And that resilience comes in a lot of ways from the faith we have in each other, and the faith that we can survive almost anything or anything, as long as we're

able to argue respectfully and respect the outcome of elections. And as soon as we abandon the outcome of elections, then we've started to lose the country. There you go. And I would even add to that, as soon as we abandoned the rule of law in respect of our courts and juries, it was alarming to me, expected, but still alarming, to see so many guys with guns on TikTok playing. There's some song they were all playing about, I don't know, the end of times or some crap. And they're saying, oh, now we're going to come out. Trump's been prosecuted by a jury of 12 of his peers. I mean, that alone is frightening on top of what you said.

Yeah. But you've given us a roadmap. See what I did there? So getting back on track with your journey around america in the heartland and the lincoln highway so there you go francis give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs sure fsberry.com b-a-r-r-y there you go and and one last thing i'll say we know we had we had eddie Glatt Jr. on the show recently with his book, We Are the Leaders That We Have Been Looking For. And I always tell people, we're each the stewards of this democracy.

We're all carrying the baton. And it's so important that we vote. It's so important that we care. It's so important that we put in for it. And you get the government you deserve so to me the politicians in this country are a mirror to our country and we need to vote better and be better citizens and care more and be leaders as he says so thank you very much for being on the show thank you very much for having me i love that idea of all of us having an obligation to carry the baton yeah i mean we're all that's why we get a vote

that's your baton yeah use it or lose it lose it. That's right. Thank you very much, Francis, for coming on the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Foss, and all those crazy places on the internet. Order the book up wherever. Fine books are sold. Backroads and Better Angels,

a journey into the heart of American democracy, and may it live again. We'd like to at least get to 250 years. That might be nice. Just a round number before we call it. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out. Francis.