The Daily Signal - The Daily Signal Presents “The “Signal Sitdown - The Man Who Wants to Make 10,000 Stephen Millers| Nick Solheim

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

“Personnel is policy” is an old truism in the conservative movement. After President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, one of the big question marks as he headed into his second term was whether or not those tasked with setting up his administration had fully appreciated that time-tested wisdom. In his first term, Trump saw his agenda undermined by deep state and Republican Party apparatchiks alike. That problem most clearly manifested at the top of the administration, with figures such as former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley playing outsized roles. But the American Right’s personnel problem runs far deeper than the Cabinet. At every level, Trump was facing a shortage of staffers who believed in the president’s vision and were willing to enact it.  Nick Solheim co-founded American Moment with Saurabh Sharma and Jake Mercier in 2021 to solve this problem beyond just a second Trump term. Solheim, now the organization's CEO, joined “The Signal Sitdown” to take viewers inside the conservative movement’s changing personnel pipeline. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk. Business. Hi, Bradley Devlin here, politics editor of The Daily Signal, and I'm excited to share this episode of my show with The Daily Signal with you. The Signal Sitdown is one of the Daily Signal's other podcasts, and each show I bring you inside the biggest battles in Washington, D.C., with some of the biggest names in politics.

So if you like what you hear today, make sure you subscribe to the Signal Sitdown for weekly episodes. We'll see you there. The core issue with the president's first term was that there were not nearly enough people that existed in the ecosystem here in Washington, D.C., that were both competent and also aligned with the president, his agenda, what he originally ran on in 2015. Our sort of thesis here was that, okay, there are not a lot of these people in D.C., right, that are both competent and aligned with the president. agenda and so we said they got to be out there somewhere and and all that they're waiting for is someone to find them. Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sitdown. But before we get to the interview, we'd love it if you'd hit that like and subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify,

or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review because we love your feedback. Remember, it's your government and together we'll expose how it really works and how to affect real change. Without further ado, here's the interview. Nick Solheim, welcome to the Signal Sitown. Thank you very much for having me. Of course. Heading into this administration,

there was one problem that everybody in Washington, D.C., at least the friends worth having the ultra-dark MAGA conservatives, they were concerned about one thing. There was one big issue heading into this administration. What was that issue? It was personnel. Personnel is policy. Yeah, I run this organization, you know, called American Moment.

We've been working on this since started working on it in 2020, publicly launched in 2021. And basically, our whole central thesis is that the core issue with the president's first term was that there were not nearly enough people that existed in the ecosystem here in Washington, D.C., that were both competent and also. aligned with the president, his agenda, what he originally ran on in 2015. And I think 15 is an important, people correct me on this all the time. They say, well, you mean 2016. That's when the election was. And people forget that a lot of the hardest content, as it were, came from 15. Like the first public conversations that we were having about mass deportations, some of these first debates where, you know, he was tearing the neocons a new one publicly in front of the American people. And then, you know, really some of the first conversations, serious conversations

that we had had about trade manufacturing in the United States that we had probably since Buchanan. And so... Muslim ban, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. But, but I mean, even on the trade issue, right? Like, that was also something, you know, that Buchanan cared a lot about. And so... So our sort of thesis here was that, okay, there are not a lot of these people in D.C. Right. That are both competent and aligned with the president's agenda.

And so we said they got to be out there somewhere. And all that they're waiting for is someone to find them. And so we basically spent all of 2020 building the plan for what would become American moment. And then when we launched in February of 2021, we launched with one main program, aside from our podcast, Moment of Truth. We launched with the Fellowship for American Statecraft. And what the plan is for the Fellowship for American Statecraft is there are a bunch of under-credentialed people out there that are highly undervalued. Like, have you ever seen the movie Moneyball? Just like that.

Like, we are looking for guys who get on base. that's that's sort of the the central tenant that we're that we're looking for so we bring these young people to dc and we initially started off you know paying them three thousand dollars a month they would come to dc for 12 weeks over the summer we'd place them in an internship four days a week and then they'd spend all day on friday with us learning from a lot of the experts who had served in the first term not on there are so many of these fellowships that exist on you know, ideology and philosophy and those. Let me tell you about little platoons.

Yeah, not to say that those things are not important, but we're pre-selecting for the ideology already. So what these guys are getting on Fridays is praxis. How do we actually do all this? Yes, we all agree that mass deportations must happen. Here's how. Here's the legal mechanism. Here's how practically it works on the ground, et cetera.

us. So, and the goal of that program was by the end of the 12 weeks, we would be able to get people into their first time job. So we provide them with this sort of credential of having gone through this fellowship. And early on, nobody knew who we were. So that, that credential didn't mean much, but they had done something here in D.C. and had a way to get their foot in the door. So that was sort of the initial launch point in every single success we've had since then has, know, blossomed out of that. And so if there were like a simple takeaway, you know, from this about what American moment actually does is that we, you know, identify, educate, and credential the next generation of junior staff. That is, you know, legislative correspondence, staff assistants

on the Hill, special and confidential assistance in the administration. Creating those is what we exist to do. Okay, so you mentioned the personnel problem off the top. And with your efforts to train the next generation of junior staffers, and hopefully they will be compensated and encouraged enough in this movement to continue moving up the ranks throughout their careers. But you suggest from your business model is that the personnel problem in the first administration was twofold. We focus so much on the top end of the personnel problem, the John Bolton's in the room. Yeah. Right.

We focus on failed cabinet secretaries and leakers at high levels or not so high levels in the example of Miles Taylor. That was the example I was going to bring up. Yes, we talk about the high level staffers, but we don't talk about the junior staffers enough. What is, is there a difference between the non-alignment with the. upper echelons of the first to Trump administration and the lower echelons of the first Trump administration. Well, so I think on the Miles Taylor point, actually I think this is very interesting to note, despite his insistence to the contrary, not a senior staffer, like at best, like, mid-level, not an extremely senior person by any means. But sort of the way that I think about

this, you know, as it relates to the administration, though this is also very prevalent on the Hill as well is junior staff do everything. They do everything from, you know, being your, the principal's gatekeeper, right? So who's allowed in the door to scheduling meetings, to doing, you know, briefings for those meetings to, you know, a lot of them, especially early on when we don't have as many people, you know, through the process yet in the administration, they end up doing a lot of the policy work, too. I had a very, smart friend at the Department of Defense one time tell me that the easiest way to learn the way that the Pentagon works is to be a special assistant first because you touch a little bit

of everything and the principles you know the more senior level folks like we're talking about you know assistant secretaries under secretaries etc they do they don't necessarily get final say on, on, you know, who serves under them, but they get a lot of input. And so my, the way that I sort of, you know, think about this from term one is if there was somebody, you know, bad in this assistant secretary slot or whatever, it's pretty safe to assume that a lot of the people under them were also bad. And I know for a fact from many conversations that the special assistance were actually where a lot of the leaking was coming from outside of the White House in the first term, particularly at DHS and some of the other, you know, high-level departments as

well. So it, my central thesis on this is, you know, that it is very important to have, you know, senior level people that are aligned with you, but you are not going to win on 100% of what you care about if the junior staff aren't with you as well. We were in conversation earlier this week at the National Conservatism Conference, and you said, this one thing is the most powerful piece in politics. It was the fact sheet. And I thought that was such a good way of summarizing not only how government works in praxis, but also just the way that information is still transmitted throughout government. I know that there's this massive modernization effort being undertaken by Doge and others. But it is still the fact sheet that dominates because you're dealing with high-level principles with so much responsibility, so much travel.

And the fact sheet matters. Yeah. Yeah. And again, that's a dynamic that's super prevalent on the hill as well. I hate to burst anyone's bubble. but 99% members of the House, the Senate do not read those bills. Right? Some are courageous enough to tell you openly that we're not able to read.

And there are actually a select few that I, I'm not going to name check anybody in this, but there are a select few that I know personally who are actually very adamant about doing this, about going through the bill with staff and that sort of thing, which I think is, I think is great and it's actually probably like your responsibility, you know, if you're like elected to represent the people from your district or from your state. But really the sort of analysis of whether a bill or an amendment or whatever is good, bad, how you should vote on it, how people in your district feel about it. All of that is coming up to you through staff. Like, by and large, the member is not, you know, doing all.

that legwork, research, you know, going back to the district and like doing a really serious listening session on this issue, you know, like that, that sort of thing is not, is not really happening on the ground by and large, like 90% of that information that you need to know about the bill or the amendment or whatever and what you should do about it comes from the people that work for you. And so if the people that work for you are bad and they're not aligned with your worldview or, you know, in the administration's case, the president's worldview or the secretary's worldview or whatever, all the way down to like the deputy assistant secretary's worldview, you're going to have a bad time. Yeah, you're going to have a bad time. And it's one of the

things that, you know, yet another thing that West Wing, the show, ruined about American politics. Never watched West Wing. Never watched West Wing. And I am going to maintain that. Good show. Good show. Good show. Good show. But it's like you watch, you know, you see the scenes. of these Senate or House committee rooms, and they're so beautiful. And it's like you actually go to Capitol Hill and like some of them are pretty, but most of them are bland.

You see the staffers from Capitol Hill coming to the White House interacting with White House staffers, et cetera. It's completely distorted the reality in Washington, D.C., where all of these. characters on West Wing and other shows like it are 30s 40s you know not only did they graduate from Yale but then they went and got their MBA and on top of that their lawyer actually too and they're supposed to be you know 32 33 34 well in reality they would just be getting out of school and doing this job it's a complete fantasy

right like even if you just ran the numbers on how much education how many degrees that they have you'd realize this is all totally fake in reality it's a bunch of 26-year-olds running your country. Doesn't it rock? Isn't it beautiful? It's beautiful, but like, it's beautiful within the context of the conservative movement where I

share the political ideas, the political persuasions of the people in my generation, right? Like, and frankly, I don't trust boomers as far as I can throw them. Yeah. Which is not very far.

Yeah. Yeah. The proof is in the pudding, though, with what they've done to this country. And so I have zero trust for them whatsoever. There is a part of me, though, that is scared of a country of the greatest Republic of all time run by 26-year-olds. But it's always been like that, though. You go back to all the signers of the Declaration of Independence, right? like by and large a lot of them were in their 20s which was different because when you were in your 30s you were like old you know and about and about to die but like men do have this capability

you know to be high level operators and decision makers from a young age like that is uh uh i actually think it's probably bad that that you know we look down upon that now but it's but it does come as a shock whenever you bring it up to somebody back at home and say oh totally Did you know that your country is run by a bunch of 26-year-olds? They go, what do you mean? I thought it was Sam Seaborne, played by Rob Lowe in the West Wing. You know, he's in his mid-30s. He's a speechwriter for the president, and he's, you know, uber credentialed elite mind.

No, no, no, that's a fantasy. Dispatch with that. It's 26-year-olds running your country. How do you feel about that? And their first reaction is, you know, the one that I sympathize with sometimes, which is a little bit of nervousness and skepticism. Yeah. Right.

And I don't think that's that's completely unfounded. You're right. It has always been like that to a certain extent. The problem in the modern era of politics is all of this has kind of been longhouse and bureaucratized and feminized to where these young men who do have this capability are stripped of that capability, whether that's through the education system or the jobs that they actually end up in. right um and it turns into you know somewhere state girl who grew up conservative and got a communications degree uh running around talking to uh her boss about how the right in america just really isn't pro woman enough yeah that's the concern is that the quality the the the structure of society writ large and the quality of the people run

running the country at age 26 are far lesser than the historical analogs or the historical precedent. Yeah, I mean, among the establishment conservative movement and the left, which I spend almost exclusively no time with, you know, I think a lot of them are still pretty mediocre. And the way, like, the proof is in the pudding on this, like, by and large, they're not married. They don't have kids. They don't really have skin in the game. And they went to the most elite universities. That's usually.

And they are out getting hammered every night. Those are usually the tells for someone who's like not, you know, maybe not the greatest hill staffer, you know, you've ever met. You can usually tell the ideological persuasion from that. But in terms of the people that come through our programming, it's a lot of very young, hungry guys. Like we had this guy in our summer fellowship this year just ended a few weeks ago. And he went to Pepperdine and got married while he was at Pepperdine out in California. And this kid, hopefully this is not, he'll know who he is. So hopefully this does embarrass him, but knows more about trade than anybody I've met in my life.

And I don't even think that's what he studied at school. He was just like reading, you know, Hamilton's report on manufacturers, like in his free time for fun. And that is a very long, dry, not so great. Well, I don't think Hamilton is necessarily a dry writer. No, no, no, but the report in and of itself is true. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. I've read it.

And someone with a touch of the tis in myself. Yeah. Yeah, we are really trying to find people like that. So let me think of some of the good tells for young people. And I think this applies for hiring in the private sector as well. So you're looking for someone who does extracurriculars like that. So, you know, yeah, maybe they played sports, but also they read. you know, Buchanan and Hamilton and stuff on the side.

We're also always looking for people with skin in the game. So whether that's, you know, they're married or they have kids or whatever. Or I think another really great example is they're really passionate about a particular policy area because they're someone in their family or maybe their entire family was personally impacted in a negative way by either the establishment conservative position on that issue or the left-wing, you know, vision for that issue. So we've had a lot of folks in our in our programming who come from blue-collar backgrounds whose dads, like, worked in manufacturing and then lost their jobs in the 90s after NAFTA. And that is a huge, like guys will come to us and say,

I want to do trade and manufacturing stuff because my dad lost his job and we spent X amount of years on unemployment and now he has this other job that he hates and I just miss what it was like, you know, when I was a kid. And that's something fundamentally and I interacted with the American moment for years at this point. That's something fundamentally different about your guys' institution, your guys' effort to credential and place this next generation of conservative saffers, replace all those bad 26-year-olds with good 26-year-olds is you don't care where they went to college. Yeah.

And in fact, you guys are setting up, you've set up the institution, you've set up your programming to encourage non-college educated, heartland people to take a massive leap of faith and come to Washington, D.C. Yeah. Yeah, and investing a lot of money in them as well. Like each one, because we pay them, they get retirement benefits, a gym membership, and then $100 a month networking stipend. We give them credit cards, go get coffees with people, made as many people as they can.

And we're making, you know, I mean, it's a lot of interviews in writing before we accept someone in as a fellow. You know, we've got to be really sure about what it is exactly what we're doing here because we're not a huge organization. You know, we have seven people on staff and it's a major part of our budget to do this program and so we got to be sure, you know, that they're going to succeed. But I mean, the proof is in the pudding here. Like, we've got eight fellows coming in next week for this fall. Out of those eight, I think two of them are community college grads. We've got two that didn't go

to college at all. One of those two is currently working in a blue collar field. And I take those guys in. So we now do this program, spring, summer, and fall. We do it three times a year. And I've seen a bunch of guys come here and and totally succeed. I was actually having a conversation with a friend just came from the State Department, had a had a meeting over there and he was asking me about, he had some special assistant slots open over there and asked me, you know, like, what do you think is like the experience level, you know, required to be a special assistant, not just here, but like anywhere. And there are there are some people who kind of have this belief like, well, it would have liked you to have had some like Hill experience and stuff first. But we've sent a bunch of

people to, we've trained a bunch of people and then they get picked up, you know, as special assistants. And like, you can be, you know, 12 weeks out of college and go do that job as long as you're willing to like, you know, scrub the floors. And a long clock, an alarm clock and a metro card would suffice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you can do that job if you're motivated for your principal and to serve the president and willing to not make a lot of money. Like, it's a lot of money. Like, You can do that in Excel for sure. And so I'm sort of, you know, I dropped out of college myself. And, you know, it disappointed my parents, so not necessarily something I'm proud of.

But I think, you know, personally, you know, I'm proof that you can drop out of school and, like, still have a successful, you know, career in D.C. I actually think one of the biggest things you have to train on for a lot of these kids coming out of. of colleges is just like how DC works or or having not gone to college at all. So a lot of the things we do early on in the fellowship is like, here's some recommendations about why you shouldn't wear that shirt with that tie. Let me tell you a little bit about that. Or you know, you did all this creative writing stuff, you know, in your gen ed courses. Here's how dry government writing works. It's a lot of that stuff, but those things can be trained. The motivation, the passion for policy, those things cannot. And so if you pre-select for those things,

everything else is teachable. And you mentioned, you know, a lot of these folks who come in from working class backgrounds were personally impacted. You know, I've made this joke with my wife who works in family policy before. It's, you know, the two types of people in family policy are I came from a stable giant Catholic family or just giant family period or my family was super effed up and I'm here to fix things. Those are the two types of people who work in family policy and there's kind of that divide all across. But beyond someone who has personal experience with the impact that misguided U.S. policy

has had in their life, why is it good to have non-college educated working? class people from the heartland come to DC and get involved in this movement because a lot of people on the right in particular kind of issues the corrective potential the potential for justice that can be found in Washington, D.C. in this town. He says, why are you pring in Joey who's really smart and talented to Washington, D.C., to do this politics thing when, like, I actually need Joey back at home. starting a business, being involved in his church, and laying the groundwork for a revitalization of that community in particular. But there's still something just at its base of bringing these

people to Washington, D.C., that you've identified, and your organization has identified at least. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I learned this really early, probably, you know, first six months after we started this this organization you go around and talk to all these staff on the hill and it was like they were not representative of the people back home right right and and the thing that's i think really good like i think the place we have had the most fellows from uh like u.s presidents I believe is Ohio. We've had the most from Ohio and a lot of them were the now vice president's groupies. They just like loved him, you know, and really, really wanted to get into the fight here. But I think it's like natural, normal and should be desired that the people that work here are like broadly representative of the people that vote for the guys that have to come.

here. I think that's a good thing. You know, there's the whole, like, obviously we all know a lot of these Ivy League universities, a lot of the state schools are like indoctrination chambers, so you can short circuit that by picking people who by and large don't come from those places. Now, I will say we have had, actually, some of these places like Harvard and Yale have very strong now like in the last you know year or two have developed a very strong like college republican chapter um and so we're starting to get more of those people but the um you know the broad base people that come through our programming are like you know they went to like i've i've never had someone actually from this school but this is the only example i can think of like the university of minnesota

you know m dash crookston yeah yeah yeah they're like doing that thing yeah um and And, you know, going to one of these like outposts of the state schools and maybe they did their generals at a community college and then just did the last two years, you know, at a state school. Or like we've had guys, we have one guy in particular a few years ago who was, you might know who I'm talking about actually, who was a dental assistant in California and now like works in the White House, you know. It's a lot of that. Like people coming from other trades, other degrees, or maybe not having degrees at all, coming and doing this program, you know, and getting their first job in politics, whether it's on the hill in the administration. We have a few former fellows that work here at the Heritage Foundation. And I think that's a great thing. I think we all want a capital city that's more representative of our friends and families back home.

So you mentioned some of the cases where these folks get activated. it's tragedy. Yeah. It's a desire to return things to the way they used to be when they were growing up, right? Some dignity in the work for their parents and their grandparents. But other motivating factors that gets these people into the fight. What has those been? Being radicalized on the internet.

Yeah. No, it's, that's what a lot of the mainstream reporting says. But there is a little bit of truth to it. I think getting exposed, I don't think that the president's views on immigration, foreign policy, and trade are radical by any means. If anything, they're radical in the traditional sense of the word. It's getting back to the root of things. Yeah.

You know, like a lot of this stuff, you know, the way it starts, I was joking with some friends about this the other day because this is the way it happened for all of us. Like, you know, you start like when you're in college, you're like, listening to Ben Shapiro. Yeah. You know, like gateway drugs. Everybody has one. This is the hard stuff, man. This is good.

And then inevitably, you become Catholic and start listening to Michael Knowles. And so then you're like a little further down. And then, you know, you graduate to after that, it's either Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson. And then you've really hit, you know, the hard stuff. Yeah, Bannon's in your ear talking about fourth generation warfare. You're like, fuck, yeah. This is awesome. I'm going to subscribe to the financial times.

But it's a lot of that. Like I, a lot of the, I'm just trying to think anecdotally going back through the people who come through the fellowship, through foundations, through Friday's, through any of our other programs. I think a lot of them actually started planning on going into different careers. And they were just like, I'm just going to be involved in college Republicans because, you know, I'm conservative. I vote Republican. This is like a good extracurricular for me. And then as they kind of go down this pipeline, it's like, oh my gosh, we have a lot at stake. You know, I see they're eating the cats.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like usually by like junior or senior year, they're like, I got to do something, you know. And so aside from, you know, personal tragedy or, you know, having read all the right books or whatever, I've actually found that a lot of this is, like, this is, here's a freebie for anyone listening to this who is going to apply for the fellowship and get an interview with me. One of the things that I always ask is, what are you listening to? Like, what podcast do you listen to? You know, who do you have tweet notifications on for? Who, you know, if they came out with a book tomorrow, would you line up, you know, outside Barnes & Noble to pick it up?

Like, who are those people? And that is a, you can always ask people about, about like, policy questions, what their views are on certain things. And they can always lie to you. But the thing that's really revealing is who you choose to associate yourself with and who you look up to. And so I always find that, you know, to be a revealing question. And I think the reason a lot of people end up in the fight here and passionate about the issues that they care about, is because of those people that they admire. Like, a really good personal example for me, someone I still look up to all the time is, have you ever had Theo Wald on this thing? No, because Theo's... Busy.

Very busy. He's also like, I'm in D.C., I'm not in D.C. I'm in D.C. I'm in D.C. I'm in D.C. I'm in D.C. Yeah, where's he at now? He's in the hinterlands. So, you know, I called him yesterday, and we were talking, and he said, so are we doing the show or not? And I said, don't... I'm always...

here. You're the transient. That's really funny because he and I, right before his flight left yesterday, we went to Alan Edmonds and I just bought new dress shoes. He showed me what dress shoes to buy. But like, so my point in bringing him up is like, he is that for me. Like I really do, you know, sometimes I, and he's on our board at American moment as well, Rachel Beauvoir is another great example of this who's also on our board. Like sometimes I will go to them and I will say, you know, hey, I have this idea. I think we should do this thing. And they both say, that's dumb. You should not do that. And I'm like, two types of people who will say that's dumb. Yeah. And my listeners know this because Rachel has been on the show before. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I always, you know, we all have people we look up to. It doesn't matter, you know, if you're eight years old or if you're 80, there's always someone that you admire and who influences the way that you view the world and what you want to do with your life. And so that, sorry to get off on a, on a tangent about this, but like, that is a very revealing thing throughout the interview processes, who that person is for these people. Well, and it's good. And it's, and it's, no, I think it's, it's a good tangent to go on because it's not, they're not slaves of the moment, right? This is not a group of people who have been so energized by Trump himself. that they're just going to leave

as soon as he's gone. Yeah. President Trump played a huge role in all of their political formations, undoubtedly. But those hoping, the enemies of the movement right now, hoping that this is going to be a flash in the pan

and those enemies are on the left hand on the right are going to be very sorry when the good 26-year-olds are running the government as 30-year-olds and 34-year-olds. Totally agree. And 38-year-olds. This is actually some very deep American moment lore.

the first public thing we ever did that Sarab and Jake, my co-founders at America Moment and I all did together before we launched American Moment. Do you remember this? Do you know what I'm about to say? I don't know what you're saying. So we, we after the election was certified in 20, Sarab had written up this whole statement. It was like it was maybe five or six hundred words. And the title of it was, we will not. not go back. And basically what this, what the statement said was, you know, despite the way things have gone, this is not over. You are not getting President Mike Pence in 2024. That is so beyond you guys don't know what's coming. Yeah. You know. And so we signed it all three of us. And just put it out on Twitter. And we had, you could like sign it. I remember. You guys got to racked it up. It was like first name, last name email. And we actually had, it was funny, at the bottom, the color scheme and the logo were totally

different than what we ended up going with. It was the shield. It was the shield. It was the little red and blue shield at the bottom. But I thought we were going to have like maybe a hundred people sign it and you know it would be like some of our cool buddies, you know, that sort of thing. We had, I think it was 6,000 people sign it in 48 hours and many of those people went on to become, you know, American Moment Fellows or people that we brought here and placed in their

first job. And that is actually, I think we met at least two of our employees, our future employees, through putting that statement out. So there really is, you know, a lot of excitement about this. And I don't think there's any sense in which we, like, go back to, like, John. McCain, George W. Bush, you know, I, neo-conservatism is dead. Yeah. A difference in how you need to train people for legislative activity and executive activity.

And of course, coming off of 2020, the plan is get people into the executive branch. But your holding chamber or your... or your incubation chamber is the legislative branch. It's nonprofit organizations. Explain to our viewers at home who don't live in this town by the grace of God, that jump, right? And the surge. How you jump from the hill to the executive branch? How many, if you jump from the hill to the executive branch, non-profits to the executive branch,

the surge of people that come to or come into Washington, D.C., when they're, is a change in power. How many people you have to place in an administration? Yeah. So I mean, we went, I think American moment is a really good example. So we had seven people on January 19th. And then on January 20th, we went down to two full time and one part time. And that is for your staff.

For our staff, like our internal staff that is managing, you know, all this identifying, educating credentialing. And that is pretty much across the whole like actually based like nonprofit ecosystem. Like I doubt this is happening at AEI, right? But like, you know, here, I know it's the case that, you know, CPI, CRA, America First Legal, like all of these organizations have incubated a lot of very desirable talent. And so a lot of them get picked up to go into the administration. And the same thing happens on the hill, although on the hill, it's much larger scale, right? Because there's thousands of Republican staff on the hill. And so the hill got, we actually spent a lot of time in the first two or three months like making personnel recommendations, you know, to our friends in the

administration, but also an equivalent amount on the hill because they were losing all their good people. And the thing that was actually really good about that is, I think it allowed for a lot of quicker accelerations of careers than would have otherwise happened. So, like, we had, there were a fair few, you know, LCs, legislative correspondence in our, I suppose I should probably actually explain, like, how one of these offices works. So you have, like, staff assistants, which are on, like, very bottom, they, like, answer the phones. They do, you know, uh, capital tours. that sort of thing. You have legislative correspondence who also do a lot of that stuff, but then they also write like form letters back to constituents, handle constituent issues,

that sort of thing. And then you get up into, and usually they're like segmented into particular policy areas depending on the office. And then those people graduate up into L.A.'s, legislative assistants, who now were like actually getting into doing policy stuff. And then you have like the the legislative director and you have the comms team and all of that and those kind of vary and by office and then you have the chief of staff and so we had a lot of people who were like like staff assistants or lCs who had been doing that for like five or six months who got promoted up into being LAs and normally that is like if you start as a staff assistant that is a couple year process it's two to three years and and on Capitol Hill that's an eternity

Yeah. That's what some people who don't live in Washington, D.C., who aren't involved in the political industry, don't understand. Yeah. Where if you're stuck in the same job for four or five years and you're in a congressional office, that's a long time to be there. Yeah. Whereas in corporate America, that's a, that's nothing. Right. It's like you're not even fully vested. What are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, 100%.

So, yeah, there, there was a lot of like rapid career acceleration happening there, which I think is. a, you know, selfishly is a, is a very good thing because I think the people that we're bringing in are uniquely capable and uniquely hardworking, you know, to be able to step into doing some of those jobs. And sure, you know, there's a learning curve, right? Going from, you know, being an LC for six months to, like, suddenly being in LA. But again, these are the guys that are, like, reading the report on manufacturers under the bed sheets with a flashlight. So, you know, they're, they're, I think, uniquely equipped to handle it. It's such a good point that you make about rapid career movement upward, right?

And the space that an administration provides for that, because if you are an employer in politics, right, if you are a Republican member who needs more staffers, if you are a President Trump coming in for another four-year term and you need to hire thousands of people, having those personnel pipelines in place and knowing that I can call up Nick Solheim or I can go to an established bank of well-qualified aligned people, well, that encourages dynamism across the movement. It encourages mobility across the movement. that I think has played out in the first seven months of this administration. Stephen Miller, of course, is the architect of a lot of this, which is just moving so quickly.

It's such a rapid pace where, you know, a traditional stint in the administration can be 12 to 18 months. But now we're seeing, you know, a crop of people leave after the first six because it's just been. They're working 20 hours. today. They've just been so dynamic. Yeah. And, and that I think has been a boon to the conservative movement, where in corporate America, if you're thinking about rapid amounts of turnover, that's not good. Yeah. In politics, it's something different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on the Stephen Miller point, this is something that, I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but like, basically our goal is to create 10,000 Stephen Miller's. That's the selling point.

Like, people forget that, you know, Stephen started as a junior staffer for then-Senator Jeff Sessions and was in that office for a number of years, was very loyal to the senator. And he is, the way that he has progressed his career is not because, you know, he sucked up to the right. people or he shook the right hands or whatever, it's because he works his ass off. It's because he works his ass off and he knows what he's talking about. So that's the goal, man. Yeah. Create 10,000 of that guy. In fact, we have like, I usually get this question from at least.

And if they spend seven months doing a thing. Yeah. And then go do another thing where they can relax a little bit, get paid a little better, and then come back. That's okay, right? You're still working in the political apparatus. Like, God bless you guys at Palantir. I don't want Palantir to come in and steal all these 10,000 Stephen Miller's after they've been trained and they moved to the hinterlands or whatever.

But I don't think that it's a problem where you have these really short dynamic stints and then you go back. It actually mirrors, and we talked about this when 26-year-olds have always kind of run the country. It mirrors the type of political careers that you would see in the founding era where someone would be a member of the Senate for a very short. short and dynamic period of time and then pulled back by the state government and then run for the House of Representatives and do that for a term or two but then go have a state position right like it's not just by it and and that wasn't just because of the structure of elections that was because they were working within a coalition in their given state or in their given political party at the time yeah to handle problems of a new republic as they arose it's like we just need to

surge the best talent there as quickly as possible. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, the other piece here is that the left has done a really good job of like rapidly credentialing a lot of their own people and then giving them these sort of like sinecures just holding off on the sidelines ready to step in. So I don't know this for a fact, but like my guess is, you know, a lot of these people in organizations on the other side have at least. probably two to four names for every single politically appointed position within an administration. And they're always right. I know where that guy is. I know everything about him. We're getting him in.

Like that's the, that's the deal. Yeah. And tanks, think tanks. It's beyond just think tanks. But think tanks is a good way to think about it. It is literally a tank of people with these aligned ideas. And a lot of these positions are like, this is one thing that I think I underrated pretty early on. Like, a lot of these positions are like, highly, highly specialized. Like, you need to know an insane, you know, amount of information about this, like, one tiny thing. And they have, like, two to four names for all of it. And one of the things that, you know,

and I think there's a mixed experience. Like some people are leaving after six months, but I also talk to a bunch of people who are like, I'm doing all four years. I'm in. I don't care about the money. Like, doesn't matter. I'm going to serve with the president all four years.

So there's, there's, I think, a pretty good mix of, of both. But to the extent that, yeah, and I might have overstayed the case. They're not abandoning ship. They've known that they've signed on for a four-year project. And they are committed to that. Yeah. Yeah. And, but those people coming out, you know, early.

And sometimes, you know, they, you know, their whole plan was, I'm going to go in, I'm going to go in for six months and I'm going to set up this policy process really well. And then we've got this guy waiting in the wings that we're going to bring in who's never done this job before. And it enables us to credential two people at once to be able to do that job. Right. So in the next, you know, conservative administration, it's like, cool. We have at least like two names for two guys that could do that job. And then here's two or three other people waiting in the wing waiting in the wings who are like that are ready to probably be able to do

that job. And so that's something that I think, you know, the conservative movement is learning and actually executing on really well right now is starting to rapidly credential a lot of these people for a very broad base of roles, I guess not just in the administration, but also on the hill. Yeah, that was the genius of the left. And we learned so much about it with the fight against USAID, right? Just how much of this money was going to, like, everyone's like, it wasn't propping up the left. It was propping up a nonprofit organization that's committed to. And it's committed to seeing democracy thrive here and all around the world. And it's like, no, we know that.

Like, we see. We know what it is. We have LinkedIn. We have LinkedIn. We can look up and see that this person worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign. And you are just waiting for her. You're paying her six figures a year, waiting for her to come in at some junior level or mid-level at the State Department and bring transgenderism to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Like, we know what this is.

Do you, do you remember that a, that a, uh, uh, uh, I think he was an energy official. That bald guy from the Biden administration who stole that African woman's clothing. It was like MASH. It was like corporate clinger who always dresses in drag and says, I'm crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the nuclear waste person. So that guy, a bunch of Fox News headlines about it.

I think the lady whose clothes he stole went on Tucker Carlson, right, with her husband to talk about like, Why is this guy stealing my bespoke clothing? We shouldn't have a kleptomaniac in charge of nuclear waste. But I think the thing that's really important there is that guy got hired by some nonprofit and got paid $600 grand a year within two weeks of that whole controversy. The left takes care of their own very well. They've built a very good revolving door. And I'm not saying we should do it for like weird.

people who are like stealing like cross-dressing and stealing women's clothes but like but like are our guys who you know have done you know good faithful service uh you know to the president we we should have a place for them to go and be prepared to pull them back in the moment we we we we need them and so like my whole thought process around this is like why don't we have our own revolving door we should do that it's team sport yeah It's 100% of team sport. You never know when your number is going to get called. I don't know if you're cool with cussing on this podcast or not, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Like, I ain't shit, you know? Like, everything that we've been able to build at, you know, American moment and all the, you know, people that we've been able to help. That's come from, like, great friends and people that were willing to pour into us from day one since before we were anybody. you know, like Theo and Rachel are both very good examples of that. Ryan Grodesky is another. You know, these were people who are willing to jump on day one and invest into us. And they've, you know, given us so much, so many connections and insight and advice, like all things that I can ever pay back. And that is the way this is supposed to work.

We, conservatives are the ones that care about family, about relationships. about loving our neighbor. And so like, it actually makes much more sense for us to have this sort of revolving door where we take care of our own people. Yeah. And since you're hesitating to name drop throughout the episode, I'm going to say, and the vice president as well. Yeah.

Before he was running for even Senate in Ohio. Yeah. Was a believer. First American moment board member. First American moment board member. He was a believer in the project. But again, he gets to reap the rewards of it, which is exciting to see. But again, that had nothing to do with us and who.

we were again I was how old was I was I was the first time we met him I was 23 you know Sarab was he or younger than me so he was 22 and I think Jake I don't even think by the Jake was like 12 I had this conversation with him I was up in New York the other day and he said that at our launch party he couldn't drink because he was still 20 so like I remember this it had nothing to do with us and like how great we were it was that you know we as a movement have a lot of these and a lot of them are like you know millennials a lot of these guys and gals that are really willing to pour into people who you know yeah we were nobody but we had a pretty good idea you know and so so I think this is the thing that I always try to remind myself

as we're running like we're running four academic programs at once we have programming 45 out of 52 Fridays a year. And the thing that I'm always trying to remind myself is like, I at the very least, the best way I can pay back this sort of investment in trust and in time and advice that people have given to us is to pass that on to the people coming through our programming. And so I think, you know, creating that sort of ecosystem where we're all going to take care of each other and have each other's back is a very important part of this process. And let's talk about the team sport. This coalition that Trump has assembled in the last election. It's nothing short of remarkable. We've talked about it ad nauseum

on this show because it's just not something anyone could have ever envisioned and it sure as hell wasn't going to happen if the Republican Party followed the plan that it laid out in the, what was it, the postmortem of the 2012 election where we need to get soft on a whole bunch of issues. We need to become the left to win elections against the left. Oh, that's really going to work out for us. But the coalition, let's draw the circle a little bit. smaller, this coalition on the right with 18 to 30 year olds, the people that you are training, interacting with on a day-to-day basis. I'm about to fall out of that age category, by the way.

I'm not far behind you, brother. But this smaller subsection of the right is bold, daring, aggressive, wants to win, and they will not get tired of winning, but they are wildly divided on certain aspects of their worldview, whether they are more traditionally conservative or they are post-liberal Catholic, or they are post-liberal techno-right, post-liberal. I don't even know. You know, all the characterizations of BAP have been pretty deep. terrible, but I'll just say, you know, post-liberal bap types versus post-liberal

techno-optimists versus post-liberal Catholic conservatives versus the traditional conservatives versus the just kind of uber-entrenched in MagoWorld people. I mean, these are all parts of the pie that could be pulling away from each other. The slices could be taken off and put on a separate plate if it's not managed properly. What are those? How would you explain the, the, the, different camps? What are the forces keeping them together and what are the forces that could pull them apart? Yeah, well, I mean, I think you've done a pretty good job, you know, talking about the

different factions there and sort of what what their ideological worldview is. I think there are a few things that I would say. One would be that I think it's it's way too early to start pulling at those loose strings, right? Like all of this is actually relative. new and has specifically gotten a lot stronger in the last five years. I mean, you look at like neo-conservatism, it took much longer for that to fall out of favor. So I think the first thing I would say is to like, you know, talk about how this coalition could break up, you know, it's way too premature for that. I think that generally speaking with some caveats, the big difference between a lot of those coalitions is not necessarily outcome, but motivation. Like, why? Why do you,

you know, feel this way about, about this particular, you know, issue? Which I think is fine, you know, as long as the policy outcomes are aligned, like we can be co-belligerence, you know, on those issues. I mean, even all the way down to the micro, like, you know, Catholics versus Protestants, right? Like, we're going to be aligned on 99% of policy outcomes. And, you know, if we want to fight over the 1% when we've won on everything else, fine. But really, what we want to do is we want to win on 99% of those issues. And then to the extent that there is some difference in, you know, policy outcomes. So I think, like the H-1B visa program is a good example.

I think everyone should learn, and I say this, you know, frequently to a lot of our young people, to have a little grace for one another. I think not having a big tent is good when it comes to people who disagree on the majority of the policy outcomes. Like, you know, I do not think that we should be having, I don't know, like, like Dick Cheney lovers, you know, in our, there's basically nothing in that worldview that has anything in common with me. So I feel pretty good about like that being, you know, outside of the tent. But I think people need to learn to have a little more grace with one another on. Like the example that I always give, you know, we have this.

list of 10 priorities on our website. And when fellows start to get into a heated, you know, disagreement about something, I'm like, I'm going to remind you that you agree on like nine of the 10 things, you know, out of our, out of our priorities here. And actually, you guys don't disagree with this priority. You just disagree with this like one little niche policy outcome. I'm going to give you some advice. Get over it. You know, there's no need to like kick this guy out with a tent. Now, there's always, you know, a bit of shaving that happens, you know, after you, you know, win a big victory or suffer, you know, a big loss, that sort of thing is always going to happen. But I think there are a lot of people in this administration who have brought

a lot of factions together. You know, there's a very good speech. I would encourage a lot of people to listen to it that the vice president made at the American Dynamism Summit. I think it was, it was like February. Yeah, I was on pool with him. And gave a very good speech on how, you know, very conservative Christians and, you know, a lot of the tech people who may not necessarily hold the same views or motivations on these things can work together on the core set of issues that we agree on. And I think a lot of members of the cabinet actually have, you know, sort of a foot in each world. or at the very least have good relationships with people in both. So the overarching thing that I would say is like it's way too early for something like this

to break apart. And everybody just like needs to learn to not be a jerk and just have a little bit of grace. Yeah. Yeah. One of my mentors for me, Dillon, when I was in college, she told me, you know, young conservatives or young politicos are like baby snakes. What she meant by that is kind of an old wife's tale that baby snakes, when they bite you, they inject. If they're venomous, they inject way too much venom because they haven't learned how to control how much venom is going to kill something.

That's very wise and she said, and that's how young politicos operate. Like you see, you know, silly little stories coming out of your college newspaper about how this one college elected to student government person, his life and his on campus has been destroyed because. a group of mean people or of mean girls have decided that they're going to come down like a ton of bricks on this other student body representative. And it's like, gosh, you don't realize like this is going to be on Google for forever, but no one actually cares. Yeah. Nobody cares. Well, and this is sort of like a central thesis of us being conservatives is we're not Bolsheviks. Yeah.

Like I'm not going to exile you to Mexico and then kill you later. You know, that's like not. that's not what we do. We take care of our own people. Now again, like, you're always going to want to monitor your flanks, right? Like, there are going to be people who they're going to start falling into,

they only agree with you on two or three out of the ten things. And then, okay, yes, we should have a serious conversation about that. But we can't blow any of these, like, interpersonal things way too far out of proportion. You said it earlier, you ain't bleep. I disagree because I think you've lived one of the most interesting lives of any of my friends.

Super boring. You were born and raised where? Well, so I was, well, so it's even more complicated than that. I was, so I was born in, my dad enlisted the Marine Corps at 17. And so I was born while he was stationed at Camp Pendleton. So lived in California. I don't remember it at all. So I was only there for like a year and a half for two years.

And then we moved back to Minnesota. I lived in Minnesota for about 10 years. Then my parents became missionaries to Honduras when I was 10. Okay. So lived in Honduras for eight years. Yeah, lived in Honduras for eight years. And what did you do while you were in Honduras? A lot of things.

But my, if you're referring to my job. You know what I want on a day-to-day basis. I worked on a hog farm for six years. And then the last few years I was there, our whole, we worked at this at this school in Honduras that had them, they'd installed like a hydroelectric dam in the 70s that was like very out of shape by the time we had gotten there. And so those last two years I had the privilege and I don't tell them enough, but I had the privilege of getting to work with my dad every day. doing hydroelectric engineering, which is a lot of fun. This is for folks at home who understand the different types of Spanish speakers in the United States and the adjacent areas, it's a funny joke. A joke amongst our friends who interact with Spanish speakers on a regular basis, whether they're

Filipino or whether they're from California, is that Nick is fluent in a bunch of different languages. One of those is Spanish, but he has this grovely hog-farm. from Honduras Spanish accent, which is fantastic. I did not learn the proper way. Learned shoveling poop of hogs with a bunch of dudes in Honduras. It's great. Still the best job I ever had.

But, you know, you end up shoveling a lot of excrement here too. Right. No, it's not much different. Yeah, prepared me very well. But you return to the snow eventually. You know, you said you spent 10 years in Minnesota. you're not a Latin America expert. In fact, your kind of venture into expertise is Nordic.

Yeah, a lot colder. Yeah, so I moved back to the states in 15. I think it was like a few weeks before the president announced that he was going to run. So I went to this small Christian school in Minnesota for like a year and a half. dropped out after, actually right after the president got elected. But one of the ways that I made money was I ended up being through a series of convoluted events, being a camping road trip tour guide in Iceland. So I would do that specifically in like winter breaks. So like Thanksgiving break, winter break, spring break sometimes. Because being from Minnesota, I could handle the cold.

and I used to drink a lot at this at this pub in Reykjavik called the drunk rabbit it's an Irish pub in Reykjavik and it's run by all these Irish guys who like don't speak a lick of Icelandic and it turned out that I just went there because I liked it and I drank a lot of Irish car bombs and nobody ever beat me up for asking for one but anyway It was the watering hole for the Icelandic parliament and a lot of the ambassadors in country as well. So ended up having a lot of very interesting conversations there at the time the Chinese were, you know, agitating for a deep seaport in Eastern Iceland. And so it came back and I was like, wow, I'm going to like read everything ever written, you know, from an American. perspective about the Arctic, which is really like, like 25 books. It's like not actually that much.

And yeah, sort of became, you know, an under-credentialed expert on it and ended up actually shortly before I met I met Sarab, my co-founder, and my wife the same night. But about maybe like six months prior. I started this organization called the Wallace Institute for Arctic Security. And basically what I was doing was I was advocating for, you know, an increased American presence and investment in the Arctic and led to a lot of really cool experiences. Like during COVID, I ended up co-hosting a briefing with then House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Engel. It was a Democrat. And it was the first briefing they had hosted on the Arctic in like 35 years. years, like just nobody talked about it.

Ended up writing a lot of memos for people about the buying Greenland, in quotation marks, question. So, yeah, and I went to Greenland about two months ago. I wrote an article about it, and the American conservative was great, really great experience. But yeah, been moonlighting as the rights Arctic expert for the last couple years. So this is what I want to get to is nobody. talked about it and now all of a sudden it's crucially important. I know I picked a really good time.

You did pick a really good time to get into this. If you picked this 40 years ago, you would have had a very lonely existence. Yeah. But now with the technological and energy demands of the golden age and this upcoming or partially already here age of artificial intelligence, it's very important. The Chinese know this. The Americans know this. And there is a hot constestation.

Hot is the wrong word because that seems. like it's kinetic warfare. But there is a growing contest over control of or influence in the Arctic. Why is the Arctic so? Yeah. There are so many reasons. But I think one of the really interesting things that people don't know a lot about. So we know that like during the Alaska purchase, you know, we do the Alaska purchase. And then, you know, as soon as we start making automobiles and, like, like using oil and gasoline. It's like, oh, there's a lot of that up here. That's great. There's actually this great report written. We'd explored buying both Greenland and Iceland immediately after

the Alaska purchase. There's this great report you can find in the State Department archives online. It's called a report on the resources of Greenland and Iceland. And the thing they were really concerned with was cryolite, which you used to make aluminum. So there are a lot of very the Arctic is a very natural resource rich place. And I feel like a lot of people know that. So that's, I won't go too deep into it, but that's one thing. I think the thing that a lot of people don't know about is, you know, the implications of shipping.

So there are sort of two Arctic shipping routes. There is the infamous Northwest Passage, which, you know, European explorers. spent a lot of time trying to find. And then there is the NSR, the Northern Sea route, which is its equivalent over Russia. And, you know, we've seen in the data, you know, more polar ice melt over the years, which, you know, I believe is a natural phenomenon. But that is meant that it is much easier to send shipping through there without an ice breaking escort, right? So traditionally, you know, if you were to sail like just a normal steel ship through a bunch of ice, I mean, we all know, we've all seen the Titanic, right? Like we know how that goes.

That's bad. And so, you know, what you used to have to do is you would have to send, you know, these ships with ice breakers to break up the ice. And then a lot of these commercial ships would follow in the trail. But what people don't know about is that, you know, the Chinese are currently, they've done it a few times already this year. they've been sending container ships through the Northwest Passage, which has many advantages. One of which is it cuts transit time to like Western Europe or if you're sending it, you know, that way to North America in half. It saves you millions of dollars per voyage to do something like that. But the other thing is it avoids all the U.S. choke points, the Straits of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz,

the Suez Canal, places where, you know, we have military bases where frequently, you know, conducting training exercises, it misses all of those. So there's obvious concern, you know, that we've sort of driven the Russians and the Chinese together and they're doing this now. But there is also equivalent opportunity on the American side. We are currently locked in a decades long and currently dormant dispute with the Canadians over whether or not the Northwest Passage constitutes internal or international waters as according to the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea. But if we were able to resolve that in our favor, we could do the same thing. And it cuts actually more time. It cuts about 50% of the time off. You know, if you're shipping from the

West Coast to say Western Europe as opposed to the Panama Canal. So that is like one interesting example of like something really big that's happening that it seems like not a lot of people know about. So using some tariffs potentially as leverage to make that happen might not be the worst idea in the world. Some people might say that. Some people might say that. As we as we kind of move into a midterm year, I know it's crazy to say that. it feels like we just started this whole thing all over again. But as we move into a midterm year, there is going to be a lot of questions asked about the aggressiveness of the administration so far.

And you can already see this from members on Capitol Hill. Chill out, guys. I have an election to win. And if I don't win this election, you're not going to have me around to give you the thumbs up on your legislative priorities. much less that they like only passed one big beautiful bill and and the other ones are like and they're not confirming and they're not really enough most of the president's appointees of course all of these legislators all of these problems that we have with congress as it's currently constituted there's going to be calls for the administration to slow down what should the

administration's response be what should the response be from these 26-year-olds all across government making the fact sheets. I mean, look, like, I'll add this caveat on the front end. I'm not in the business of politics. I don't do campaign stuff. I don't do any of that. I don't do polling. None of that is my area of expertise. But, you know, the thing that I would remind any members who may be saying something like that, who's, who are the only two people who got elected nationally based on what they were promising to do that they are now doing. Maybe you should take a cue from those guys. Nick Solhine. Thank you for coming on the Signal Siton. Thank you.

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