The Daily Stoic - Adam Kinzinger on Standing Up For The Truth

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Adam Kinzinger was 1 of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump back in 2021 following the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now, as we head into the final days before the 2024 election, Adam joins Ryan to talk about looking beyond politics at the bigger picture of humanity. Adam shares his perspective on how Stoicism can be a solution for toxic masculinity, the impact that shame (or a lack thereof) has in shaping society, and why we shouldn’t be afraid to have conversations around sensitive topics.Adam Kinzinger is an American former politician, veteran, and senior political commentator for CNN. He served as a United States representative from Illinois from 2011 to 2023. 🎥 Watch Adam’s first interview on the Daily Stoic | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQKoFR1MIJo📚 Check out Adam Kinzinger’s book Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country Follow Adam on Instagram @Adam_Kinzinger and on X @RepKinzinger✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited that they're a sponsor of the show.

And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audio books in the car.

Instead of having that be dead time, we wanna use it to have a live time. We really wanna help their imagination soar and And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories, self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app. And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You can get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits

that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. To me, one of the critical stoic exercises is this idea of getting perspective. You see in meditations, Marcus is zooming out, trying to think back just a couple cycles ago. One of my favorite passages in meditations is where Marcus really talks about how for all time people have been doing the exact same things. This is the Gregory Hayes translation. He says, marrying and raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties,

doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power. And one of the things that I take from the study of history is a calmness. I mean, it does create a kind of urgency and moral priority because you see how bad things can get and you see how individuals can change the world. But it also, you realize that things take time, you realize the same things have been happening

over and over again. And we actually have some guests that fit in this niche coming up in the next few months. I've always sort of cultivated friendships with older people. We have Judge Block coming on the podcast the next few months. I've always sort of cultivated friendships with older people. We have Judge Block coming on the podcast in a few weeks. He's a 92 year old judge that I know. I've talked about George Raveling before.

I talked about Richard Overton, and I was very close with my grandfather, who would be 100 if he was alive today, and my grandmother's as well. I've talked about Dolores, who's sort of my bonus grandmother. It's a long story, but I was with her in Sacramento this weekend and she's 94, I believe. And I'm always like, what do you remember about like 1968? What do you remember about the 30s? What do you remember about World War II? What do you remember about these moments that seem like they must've been horrible and overwhelming

and terrifying where it must've seemed like the center would not hold that things were falling apart. And that perspective helps me calm down. It helps me see what's truly important and what's not so important. What's sort of an overemphasis or an over-exaggeration, and then what truly matters. And I was with her and we were just sort of,

I was like, how does this current moment coming up to this election, how does it feel to you? What stands out to you? What are you worried about? And it's funny, she just kind of naturally started talking about today's guest on the podcast as someone she admired. I'm talking about Congressman Adam Kinzinger. He's a vet, he was a former congressman from Illinois.

He served from 2011 to 2023. He was also an Air Force pilot. He served in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when Donald Trump was defeated in the 2020 presidential election, Kinserger became known for his vocal opposition to Trump's claims of voter fraud and then his attempts to overthrow the election. The Romans were very familiar with the idea of a mob, a rabble that can get turned on, you know, the system and the idea of demagogues.

And I was very struck by Adam Kinzinger and I've gotten to know him. I read his wonderful book, Renegade, and he was on the podcast when it first came out, but I was just so struck by this person. She's 94, she's been through nine decades. She's seen the best and the worst of American politics and the best and worst of global politics.

I like to ask her, what do you remember about Truman? What do you remember about people that I write about as historical figures in my books? I love to ask her about them. And so it was so fascinating. And I was like, you know, Adam was just in the Daily Stoke studio and we had a wonderful conversation. And even with Adam,

we weren't talking about, you know, sort of partisan politics. We weren't talking about, you know, these sort of micro news events, but we're talking big picture stuff. And it was a great conversation. I'm going to split this one into two parts because he and I really got into a great conversation. I think he's awesome. I don't think this conversation could be more timely. You've got to check out Adam's book, Renegade. I think it's incredible. Listen to his earlier episode of the podcast.

Look, Adam was one of 10 Republicans who crossed party lines and voted to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection. He served on the January 6th commission and he basically lost his political career, which he'd worked his life to build to do what he thought was the right thing, which is what the Stokes talk about. Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. That's why I admire him a great deal. And there's actually a great new documentary about Adam called The Last Republican. I'll play you the audio of the trailer

because I think it's worth listening to. Naively, I thought there's no way people aren't going to wake up from this. I remember the day after January 6th, everybody was kind of waking up at that point. The president bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.

These facts require immediate action by President Trump. President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. I called it, it was like Saturday morning when you had a giant party at your house Friday night and now you got chickens flying around, you have a bad headache, you know,

you're only wearing a shirt, and you're like, what did we do last night? That's where I thought the party was. So your thinking, even at that moment, was the insurrection and the attempt to overthrow the government and a coup d'etat that included 140 Republicans voting to not certify the election. You thought that just might have been a crazy bender

and that they were going to wake up and get their shit together. Yep. You wake up, you're going to deal with the hangover, and you're going to gut it out and drink water, right? Donald Trump was a non-entity. Nobody even showed up at Andrews when he left. But you can always fix a hangover by starting to drink again. And that's when Kevin McCarthy goes, tomorrow I go, that changed everything. And I think he has a lot to teach us. We all want politicians to put their job, their ass on the line for what they think is principle. And so few of them do it. And so here's a guy that did it. And I'm so glad he came all the way out. Anyways, I'll just get into it and I'll tell you a bit more about my thoughts on the conversation

and what I think we can learn from Adam in part two. And by the way, you can follow Adam on Instagram at Adam underscore Kinzinger and on Twitter rep Kinzinger and check out his new book Renegade. Well, I just had this federal judge on, he wrote a book about the First Step Act. And he was saying that nobody wants to touch it because Democrats, it's all downside. And then Republicans, they're pretending to be very tough on crime right now, so they don't want to touch it. So I think everyone's just waiting it out, which is weird.

It's like, oh, it's only the most consequential election in American history. I don't want to pick a side. Yep, but I think you'll see maybe after the election kind of stuff back on the market. I guess, depending on how it goes. Yes, there's a line, I have it in, I think my Courage book where Cicero, this is Cicero's approach in the Civil War.

He's like, I don't want to pick a side. And then there's this famous poet who gets up at this event that Julius Caesar's at, and he reads this poem and he just insults Julius Caesar like over and over again to his face. And as he's leaving, Cicero says like, wow, that was amazing, like come sit next to me. And the guy says, oh, I'm surprised there's room

to sit next to you given that you like to sit on two different chairs. I thought you might relate to that. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Did you fly? No, I just drove. It's only two hours from me.

I know, it's nice. And for me, like honestly, just being in the car and I'm listening to Dana Milbank's new book about like the dysfunctional 2022 class. Yes. It was just cathartic cause I'm like, yeah, well you guys enjoy that, right? Yeah.

And, but I love it. I just love driving and you know, and that's Texas. And my point is stuck in Illinois cause I couldn't start my ride engine a couple days ago. But that's kind of Texas is you, it's so big that everyone is just incredibly comfortable with the most abnormally long drives Yeah, it's insane. If you have to if you're in Illinois and you have to drive an hour somewhere. It's like death

Yes, but here if it's two hours, it feels like that's like going down the street Yeah, although like I grew up in California and I lived in Southern California for many years So like the idea of spending an hour or an hour and a half in the car is not abnormal. But you might travel 19 miles. In Texas, it's like two hours, but you might drive like 150 miles. Because first off, the freeway speeds are insane. And it's literally like no traffic.

I mean, there is traffic in Texas, but it's like these sort of rural roads, you can go as fast as you want. So it's not just you spend a lot of time in the car in Texas, but it's like these sort of rural roads, you can go as fast as you want. So it's not just you spend a lot of time in the car in Texas, but it's like, yeah, you're like Houston and Austin, that's not that far away. It's insanely far away. I mean, it's literally like,

if I had to drive from Bloomington to Madison, like when I was doing guard duty, that's a three hour drive and it's like, oh my gosh. And here it's like literally nothing. No, it'd be like in Europe, you could pass through two different countries. I know, I know. Even three if you do it right, it's crazy.

The normalization of it is crazy. And I want, like I wanted to get like an electric truck and I was just like, I'm not sure it actually makes sense where I live because every couple of weeks you're like, oh no, I gotta drive to Dallas. And you're just like, it literally can't make it. Yeah, you're gonna have to use the other car or you're gonna have to find a charging station

and sit there for 30 minutes. So it's good in the city, but not when you're driving really far. No, it's just crazy. But have you driven across Texas before? Yeah, you know, part. Like usually I'll do like the three hour thing. Like I haven't gone out to like Midland or anything

Yeah, that's that's tough. No the direct I mean Beaumont to El Paso is like 900 miles that's insane. Yeah, that's insane That's how far it is from Illinois to go to vacation in Florida I think I'll pass I think Cuba is closer to El Paso then I think Cuba is closer to El Paso than, like, they'll show a map and you can, like, you can just take the distance anywhere you want and it just gets you insane places. Yeah, and when I fly from Houston to, like,

if I go visit my folks in Illinois, it's like, it's like Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois. I think someone told me there's a ranch, I could just be repeating a random thing I heard on the internet, but there's a ranch in Texas owned by one person that is bigger than Germany. I believe it. I believe it. It's Texas. I believe it. That's crazy though. And it's 98% privately owned. That's the weird like the weird part too,

is there like, Big Bend is one of the biggest national parks, you should go to Big Bend, incredible. Yeah, I've never been. Insane. I mean, let's talk about like the border crisis or wherever, there's this one area, you go to this like little hot springs and then you're just like, you take three steps

and you're just in Mexico. Yeah. And it's totally normal and chill and regular and everything. But yeah, it's so, because it was its own country and some weird quirk of it where like just all the land was retained by private citizens, there wasn't, it was never a federal territory owned majority by the government.

I think California is like 50%. Yeah, I feel like any of those like desolate Western states, like they're 80% federal. Yeah. Like Wyoming is, I don't know if 80%, but it's huge. It's mostly federal territory. Yeah, so there's all these cool things in Texas where you're like, this should be a park.

And it's like, no, it's some guy's house. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. It really is. It's the weirdest state. And getting used to summer is like the, for me, I love heat, and being in Iraq, it's like 120 every day, right? It's the weirdest state. And getting used to summer is like the, for me. Yeah. You know, I love heat, you know, and being in Iraq,

it's like 120 every day, right? But you add that you lay, especially in Houston, you layer the humidity on it. I mean, it's like, I'm good for a couple of months. And then it's like, all right. I mean, it's like October, it's a hundred degrees. It's crazy. It's been very hot lately.

Yeah. I was wondering, like, given the craziness of everything that happens, there must be something very, especially for you over the last couple of years, there must have been something very wonderful about having the release valve of being able to fly. Oh, it was amazing.

So even still now flying, so I have a bigger plane, it takes a little more effort, it's a little less relaxing, but you know, you can fly the family. Just because there's more responsibility. Yeah, they always say like the bigger the plane, the less you feel connected to it, right? So you think about it, but you can fly the family. Just because it's more responsibility. Yeah, they always say the bigger the plane, the less you feel connected to it, right? So you think about it, if you're driving a school bus versus a little sports car.

But I had a Mooney, just a little four-seater plane that I would commute between Illinois and DC on. And I almost get, I can feel it right now. So a long, hard week in DC, I would take, it'd be a 30 minutes to the airport I kept my plane at. And I just take off and it's, you know, you're staying under this little airspace shelf

for a little bit around DC, and then you're just free. And I would usually fly at what's called VFR, so I don't have to talk to anybody. And so I'd just climb up to, this plane went pretty high, climb up, level off, and I'd throw my little iPad up with like a movie on it. You're watching a movie while you're flying. I would. And it's like, and you're looking out and you know,

it's dusk. Yeah. So everything's beautiful. That to me was, it was basically like a week of therapy in probably about a three hour flight. I loved it. Not on the converse when I would fly into DC, I loved the flying. Yeah. But the when I would fly into DC, I loved the flying, but the second I landed,

you just feel that like, that stress, come on. Yeah. Yeah, astronauts call it, I think it's the overview effect. Yeah, it's true. Like what they feel when you're in space and you're like, literally everyone is on the other side of what I'm looking at, as opposed to there's people behind me, there's people around.

And just, I guess there's that also, just the preposterousness and the flimsiness of like borders and disagreements, it all kind of melts away when you're even, I mean, think about how long it was, like the tallest mountain in like Greece and Rome, I think it was like 10,000 feet or something. So for basically all of like history up until like

the discovery of the new world, people are not getting, and nobody's climbing these mountains either. So just like the highest point that a human got at and looked down at other humans was preposterously low. Yeah, totally. Until very recently. Yep. Buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List. A cache of chilling documents containing hundreds of names, photos, addresses and specific instructions

for their murders. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Follow Kill List on the Wanderer app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more exhibit C true crumb shows like Morbid early and ad free right now by joining Wanderer Plus. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenbaum.

And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're talking about the life of US President JFK. He steered the world through moments of terrifying geopolitical crisis. But was he quite the shining hero he seemed? A complex personal life, and of course,

the source of countless conspiracy theories. There's so much to cover, right? What are you most looking forward to talking about? I'm really looking forward to the Cuban Missile Crisis because it's just one of the most dramatic things that's ever happened in history. I don't know, there's something about Kennedy, you know, as a growing up,

thinking of him as an all-American hero, the good looks. I want to scratch the surface and see what's really underneath. I'm a slightly different generation. I never really understood what the big deal was. I just knew that there was a big deal. Well, I'm a different generation. I feel old, but historians love the dating process. So follow legacy now from wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad free on Wondery Plus. Well, there's two things.

So I have a buddy, his name's Terry Virts. He was the commander of the space station for a while, actually he's a Texan resident. And he always said, so he was up there in when the original kind of Russia, Ukraine thing kicked off. He was up there with cosmonauts. And he was like, you know, we're looking down, I can see explosions on Crimea or on the eastern part of Ukraine. But he said all borders disappear.

And so he and these cosmonauts who sadly now some of these cosmonauts are in the Duma like cheerleading Vladimir Putin's war. But he said, you know, we're up there kind of looking down. You don't see borders, you don't even see movement. It's like, why are we fighting each other? We're all the same. In a plane, the thing that always gets me,

there were kind of two moments that really stick out. One, I was flying commercial coming back from DC, probably my first term, and I look out the window and I just see nothing but lights out the window. I think we were flying over Indianapolis. And I'm looking at them like, there's probably 100,000 people that I'm seeing. And I thought, now I represent seven times

that amount of people in Congress. And imagine God just reaching down and plucking one. And it's like, that to me was kind of a moment where it's like, wow, what I'm doing is rare, right? What I'm doing is a big deal. I've got to take this seriously. And the other thing- You're responsible for all those lights,

for representing the interests of all of those lights. Yeah, and whether they know it or not, they're kind of relying on me to do that job, even if they don't like me, right? That they're like, you're our guy, you're our only connection. And then the other thing is flying, you know, and you realize 99% of this country has nothing in it.

Yes. And so when people, you know, scream about the immigration issue, which obviously is a serious issue, but it's like there is room in America for people. There is room for productivity, right? Because, again, if I was to randomly just set the plane down somewhere,

chances are it's a farm field somewhere. Yes. You know? When you're looking at those lights, those lights are not red and blue. No, they're not. Just regular lights. At a certain distance, there's regular lights, and most of the things that those people are,

like, they might be watching different television shows, but both houses are watching TV. Both of them are getting their kids ready for school. You know, the stuff is effectively the same. And by the way, you could, if the course, if the flight had been blown wildly off course and you were actually over Uzbekistan, it would have been indistinguishable from you

effectively at night, right? Yeah, so the similarities and the shared affinities that we all have. And just the idea, I think, because the stoics talked about and the engines talked about this idea of taking the bird's-eye view, but that was like a theoretical proposition.

Right, they never did it. They couldn't physically do it. Yeah, like that famous blue marble photo of the Earth, it's crazy to be like, that that famous blue marble photo of the earth. It's crazy to be like, that was like 1972 or something like, oh, I know, like there's songs that I listen to on a regular basis that I like recorded before that. There's books I like before that, like just then the things that we take

as modern and regular and normal that just happened before we even really fully knew what the earth looked like from a distance. Yep. Insane. And if you actually look at humanity's kind of evolution in aviation, it's literally not even a hockey stick. It almost inverts. It's like, okay, yeah, we're doing stuff.

And now we have spaceships, right? Yes. And so I love space, right? To me, when I'm trying to fall asleep at night and I can't, I just think about how massive space is, and that kind of does it for me. It's weird, I fall asleep. But there's a little famous picture

called the Little Blue Dot, and I think it's the, was it the Jupiter probe or something like that, turns around, takes one last picture, like, ch-ch-ch-ch, of Earth, before it was kind of out of radio range. And you see like this ray of sunshine and just this tiny blue dot, and that tiny blue dot is Earth. And so you look at it and you realize like the Voyager probe, I think, it's not even outside of our solar system.

And our solar system's a tiny dot, and our galaxy, the galaxy's a tiny dot in the universe. And so I think when you take that, it's not to minimize our life, but it's like the things that weigh on you. You know, I spent the last two years, frankly, that I'm just coming out of, really in a dark place with everything

that I've been through and the recognition of it. And you talk a lot about the importance of suffering, and that's something I can now say, like suffering does produce. It produces joy on the other end, and it produces strength, because you're better at talking about the wise, but you have to go through that to sometimes take the bigger picture of something

and look and go, man, it's... We're actually pretty good at that. It turns out the volume on stuff, I think. And yeah, yeah, my son said, like sometimes kids just say things to you that are both nonsense and profound. He just said, you know, no one's ever been further away than the moon. And I was like, oh yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's true. Like, so that, however far the moon is from earth, that's the most distance a human ever has ever directly had from what here. And maybe looking at it from the distance of the Voyager one, it would produce something profound in a person experiencing that we can't even comprehend. Just like the distance you would Voyager one, it would produce something profound in a person experiencing it that we can't even comprehend.

Just like the distance you would get in that moment, let alone what you would get facing the other direction, like away from Earth entirely. But it's just kind of insane how myopic our day-to-day perspective is. And then sometimes, like I remember right after the 2016 election, you're feeling all this,

and then I was at the airport and I was like, life is still happening. And then I was in the airplane and I was looking at, and you just, there's a recency bias and a myopia to all of our things. It's not to say that what's happening isn't incredibly consequential and you shouldn't care about it,

but like sometimes the people that care, care too much and it becomes debilitating and you need to have some alternating perspective that allows you to step back and not destroy yourself as you're trying to do that thing. Yeah, and if you look down and you realize how big things are, right? You realize, okay, the world's massive. You look down and you say, okay, if I'm choosing to sit here angry, okay, the world's massive. You look down and you say, okay,

if I'm choosing to sit here angry, okay? And this is something I have to fight all the time, right? But if I'm choosing to watch TV, be angry at what's happening, even though I have no direct input into it, right? I guess as average citizens, we can vote. Maybe you can tweet some and maybe, but generally voting's your thing.

If you choose to be angry, that's just like taking poison, hoping you make somebody else sick by taking that poison and actually getting yourself destroyed. And that's a choice we make. And again, for me, that's something I have to remind myself all the time is like, okay, I'm sitting around angry, upset at what happened. Like, well, you know what?

That's my choice to be angry. I can if I wanna be, but it's not producing any benefit. I was thinking about that the other night because I got, and you would know who this person is, I'll tell you later, but I got a pitch for some other politician to come on the podcast. And I didn't think about it, and then for whatever reason, I thought about it as I was falling asleep.

And thinking about it made me so angry. Like, this person who obviously knows better, who has all the training, who's sworn oath, all these things. And then that they're not just like behaving as if what they're doing is normal, but they're like proud of it. Like that's what the pitch was.

And I was just mad at it. And then I woke up the next morning and I was like, I deprived myself of sleep and was angry about a person who wasn't thinking about me at all. And it didn't change the situation at all. It was just me expressing, not even expressing, because I'm doing it internally. I'm just like grinding my teeth and my organs about

in anger that this person exists. When as a student of history, I know that this person has not only always existed and always will exist, but was worse historically. You know, like there were more of this person 50 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago, and no amount of me resenting them is gonna make them not exist.

Yeah, that's true. And one of the things I've struggled with is like my kind not exist. Yeah, that's true. And one of the things I've struggled with is like my kind of viewpoint of humanity, my view of humanity, it took a hit, right? Sure. Because particularly in Congress, when I'm like, okay, everybody has a red line they won't cross.

I always assume that, right? The good guys always win, everybody has a red line. When that didn't happen, and you know, particularly the red line, when I started to see people that I respected, that would tell me privately like, hey, what you're doing is good, I agree with you, I can't because X, Y, and Z.

Like, yes, that bothered me a lot. But the one thing it has done, as I've, again, and it's taken me time to work through it, but as I've worked through it, is understanding that now actually, I think I can look at humanity and people realistically. And that puts me in a better position. Instead of walking around saying,

look, humans are all sunshine and rainbows, you can either go into the dark place of humans are all bad, or you can go into the realistic place and say, some are good, some are bad. I'm gonna choose to be good, and I'm gonna choose to leave kind of good footprints in this world. I'm gonna choose to be good, and I'm gonna choose to leave kind of good footprints

in this world. And, but again, that's a daily reminder. It's not one of those things you go in and you get a sermon and you're just like that the rest of your life. You know, you fight that battle every hour of every day. Have you read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison? It's this beautiful book about this guy coming of age

as a sort of a black man in America in the 50s. And he was sort of this optimistic, hopeful person who gets horribly abused in this situation. And there's this line in the book that I think about all the time. He goes, he's like, and then a voice hit me in my head and it said, how does it feel to be free of illusions?

And then he says, and then it came clanging back, painful and empty, painful and empty. And we have these illusions about other people that they're like us, that they have red lines, that when push comes to shove, they'll do the right thing, that we've all bought into these same share of assumptions. And that can be comfort in the moment, but it's not really based on anything real,

and certainly not based on a historical fact. Like if you look at the horrible things humans have done and why we have the safeguards and guardrails we have is because we've always known this to be true. And so you sort of, that process of being disabused of your illusions. And oftentimes it's those of us who think we don't have illusions

that are the most crushed when we realize, oh, so it's like, I imagine you weren't the most idealistic, like starry-eyed politician. So probably what hurt is you understood, hey, part of the game is saying one thing, but when push comes to shove, you do the other. You understood the duality, but you had an illusion underneath the realism

that there was some kind of goodness at rock bottom. Yeah, and for me, I mean, look, I always say in politics, there is compromise. There's times I can look back and say, well, I defended something that I wouldn't have normally. Now I'm free of having to do that, which is amazing, by the way. But like, yeah, I think what that illusion underneath

was saying, okay, we can all play this game. We can play with fire a little bit. We can use fear in our campaigns to an extent, but we always have the ability to douse that fire when time would come. We don't really believe it. Yeah, we don't really believe it. And nobody here in us really believes it when we say,

you know, that if you don't vote for us, your family's gonna die, basically. We always thought we could douse that fire. The fire raged out of control, but the firefighters who you thought would be there, my fellow practitioners of politics, that would be there to douse the fire, all of a sudden are stoking it because they don't wanna walk into that heat.

And enough people have walked into the heat and gotten burned up that they're like, whoa, I don't. And this is the thing is when you make a choice to go into something where you play with fire, right? Whether you're a fireman, if you're gonna go into a burning building, you make the choice that this is going to be uncomfortable and I may have to put my life on the line for that.

Whether you're in the military, whether you're a police officer. When you're a politician, while it's not technically you're putting your life on your line, you're gonna play with fire and you have to be willing to douse that fire. Because if you don't, you're unqualified for the job, I think. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people that are unqualified for the job in it.

One of the things I learned from Robert Greene is that as you write about stuff, and I think I try to apply this when I'm just trying to understand something, is like, you don't look at the example in front of you. You try to look at a different example from the past that's less loaded, right? So you wanna understand the pandemic, look at the Spanish flu, right? And so I've been thinking about this, like, how do you get people to wake up

from something that's obviously insane? And so I was really interested in that period in the 20s, 30s, 40s, where a lot of really smart Americans were all in on communism. Like Ellison and Richard Wright, two of America's best great black writers were ardent members of the Communist Party.

And I can be sympathetic to that. I mean, there were soup, like capitalism obviously broke in the 1920s or we wouldn't have had the Great Depression and we didn't have the government safeguards that we needed. It was, the system was not working. And I can also imagine if you're a black American anytime in the 20th century, let alone before,

you're gonna be skeptical of any system of belief that, or system that subjugates you and people like you, right? So there are these communists, and then they both kind of eventually wake up from it. Richard Wright goes more in the, well, he actually kind of believes in it more, but believes it was betrayed by the, you know, like that it wasn't pure,

he was like Stalin wasn't a true communist. He was using and abusing the stuff, which you could maybe make an argument for. And then Ellison just has more of a just general awakening and sort of goes more staunchly anti-communist. But there is precedent, I think, for people getting incredibly caught up in something, believing in something that is complicit

or directly involved with unimaginable horrors and excess and seems inexplicable in retrospect. But it's such a... There's not some moment where it just all becomes clear for most people. I think that, look, when your engines on red line, and so when you're a revolutionary, when you're a radical, whatever it is, every day you wake up with this emotion and this anger and this, you put your engine on red line,

I mean like any car, you can build the best German made car, you put that engine on red line long enough and eventually it's gonna blow. And I think that happens here. It's like your exuberance of your youth, right, or whatever it is. Look at the 1920s, and I'm glad you brought that up,

because the parallels to today are kind of eerie. And you can see cycles of humanity in this. So in the 20s, you had the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the Midwest, right? I mean, two million people. They controlled like a whole state base. Like, What's His Name wrote a book about, like 20% of Indiana was in the Klan,

or some insane number. Yep, in fact, in my old district in Princeton, Illinois, they were rehabbing a theater, and they brought me into this room and showed me some of the stuff they found as they were rehabbing it. One of them is an invitation to the big Ku Klux Klan rally in Princeton, Illinois. I mean, Truman joined the Klan in the way that he joined, like, Kiwanis and Knights of...

Like, it was just a group. I mean, it doesn't excuse it, but it was so commonplace and seen as so not abnormal in some areas that it was like a social club, which obviously was a murderous, a horrendous terrorist organization, but that's how widespread it was. It's insane in retrospect.

It is. And so you look at like that, but you also looked at it in that time when people felt very disconnected from the federal government, you had the rise of, and I may get the organizations wrong, but the similar is like the rise of the Kiwanis, the rise of Rotary. It was these community groups that are like,

we feel so disconnected and angry, and you know, you see that anger, but they also took matters into their own hands. And so, you know, in the political system today, I always look and say, you see that anger, but they also took matters into their own hands. And so, in the political system today, I always look and say, look, because people ask me, is there ever gonna be a new party? Is there a centrist party?

Is there whatever? And I go, well, look, I don't know, but I know this. In the Bible, it says, if nobody worships God, the rocks will cry out, okay? In politics, it's the same. If you don't feel represented for long enough, or you feel disconnected, something will organically rise up to fill that void

because that's what we as Americans have done. And I think probably not just Americans, but humans do to fill that void. And so you have a lot of anger right now, a lot of division, but there's a lot of alienation. And that, my hope is that alienation is the thing that ultimately leads to, in essence, our salvation for another 70 years, till we go through the cycle again.

Well, yeah, the problem is when there's alienation and dysfunction and dissatisfaction are very ripe territory for demagogues. And that is a historical fact. And we are always at the mercy, large groups of people are at the mercy of singular, ambitious people with no moral compass. Who can, like, there's a hard truth

you can give a group of people, or there is a pleasant fiction you can give that group of people. And naturally, the latter is more profitable and easier than the former. podcast, The Socially Distanced Sports Bar, is going to be your new favourite comedy podcast with just a little bit of sport thrown in. You don't have to love sport, like sport or even know anything about sport to listen. Because nobody has conversations which stay on topic and it's the same on our podcast. We might start off talking about ice hockey but end up discussing, I don't know,

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Probably most of the people watching or listening, and certainly you and I, could not imagine basically disconnecting ourselves from morality to do that. But if you did, if all of a sudden you decided that you had no moral compass, you just wanted to rise to power, you have a big following, you could probably find a way to begin to slowly change, to manipulate, to stoke anger, and to rise to some kind of power from it. And so what we've always had as our kind of guardrails,

our actual guardrails of democracy and law, and most importantly, people's allegiance to an oath they took, which is esoteric but means something, and then our own moral compass. And what I worry about- Just a sense of shame. Just a sense of shame. Like a cultural sense of shame

is kind of an ultimate governor. It's the final check. Totally. Of like, why wouldn't do that? Because it would be uncomfortable to just get up there and completely lie. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, if you could, I mean, now you look at,

this isn't even one side or the other, you look at fact checks of politicians, right, that lie, and it just goes over people's heads, or they don't care, or they say the fact check is bias. Like, I remember a time, I'm only 46, but I remember a day in which if a candidate or a president was caught in a lie, they would have to apologize for it, right?

Or come up with some version of an excuse. Not because they necessarily felt like, like you said, but it was like, there's a shame that overtakes. We don't want individual shame. I mean, there's healthy individual shame, but as a society, shame is what keeps people in line. Yeah, yeah, no, that's very true. I think also what it's, sometimes it's,

okay, this is like a sociopath or a psychopath, but what you tend to see in common with demagogues or people that sort of get radicalized is always some profound personal grievance. Like I was just listening to some story about Cash Patel. And it's like, there's some moment where like a judge embarrasses, he's like flying somewhere that for people don't know he was like a two bit figure

in the Trump administration who's now like sort of extreme MAGA. But basically he was like, he was a federal prosecutor or something, he flies out to do this case and he's flying from like the Middle East, gets there, doesn't have a tie, he runs into the courtroom

and the judge just like tears him a new one and probably racially, like he is objectively mistreated in this scenario, but it triggers something in this person that starts a process by which, you know, if you nurse a grievance, it will grow. If you process it, if you don't allow it to touch or degrade you. And so there's often this kind of moment in these political figures where they were humiliated

or mocked or not accepted. And then that allows them to rationalize all of the absurd, because they've made this, instead of interacting with individual people or society, they're interacting with this like nefarious force. And it allows them to justify saying individual people or society, they're interacting with this like nefarious force. And it allows them to justify saying and doing effectively anything to get what they want.

Yeah, and I don't know if we wanna go this deep, but like when I think of what's happening to young men today, look, in my definition, masculinity is, you know, being in touch with your emotions, fighting for causes, right? Bigger than yourself, defending your family, defending the defense list. That, to me, is like the most masculine thing.

I think you've just defined stoicism, in my view. Yeah. But not what people think of masculinity or of stoicism. Those are not, I would say, commonly held definitions. Interesting, interesting. And so that's what, like, that to me is what stoicism or masculinity is. And, but what do we have today?

This is, so what's happened is legitimately, I think we have to give voice to this, men felt like they were degraded, disconnected, particularly over the past 10 years, when remember you heard everything about toxic masculinity. That was the word. And toxic masculinity was everything that was masculine. And eventually people just started to feel angry about that.

And what you should have had then is faith leaders, community leaders, whatever, thought leaders come along and say, well, no, we're not gonna attack masculinity, but here's what it is. It's defending people's, defending, you know, whatever. And, but instead you get demagogues that come along and say, you know, Andrew Tate that says, masculinity is being abusive to women who mistreated you.

It's finding that grievance. Masculinity is never crying. I mean, look, I got teary-eyed during the very first January 6th hearing. And so now I've gotten the nickname crying Adam because of that, right? And I'm fine with it, but that goes to show how devalued emotions are.

And if you don't cry for the potential destruction of your country, then you're heartless. But also all the ancient figures that these people are trying to bring back. There are so many Roman stories about, there's like four stories about Marcus Aurelius, of which he's crying. He's crying over the death of his tutor.

He's crying over the victims of the plague. And then we're told in one story, he cries when he's told he's gonna become emperor, because he's like just overwhelmed by the enormity of the responsibility and his understanding that like most kings, it's not a job you come out of alive, like it breaks people.

And so like it's this weird paradoxical thing where people are like shaming things that actually in the classical world. Which they love. Yeah, which they love were incredibly common. Also, they were all having sex with each other too. Yeah, true. Like, your homophobia, the ancients would not understand in any way.

So, like, we should just maybe stop making these analogies altogether. But yeah, there's a great passage in meditations where Marcus Rizzo goes like, actually, the unmanly thing is losing your temper. And I've always found it interesting that we'll mock a man for crying, being overwhelmed by your emotions. But then if you got mad and punched through a wall,

people will be like, oh, he's so tough. But it's the same thing. And in fact, what's actually more impressive? Crying because you just heard about this tragic thing, like you're feeling for someone else, or because, like, the television remote isn't working and you break it in half. Like, one is silly, and the other is actually, like, to me, a fully-formed, well-adjusted human being.

And what does that do? Like, if you're crying on behalf of somebody, what is that? That shows that you're probably gonna be compelled to fight for them, right? You know, the thing that actually had triggered me in that first thing, in that first hearing is, we had all these police officers that were on the line,

you know, and they were testifying, and they were tearful, and you could just see in them what this like, you know, because most of them are Republicans, by the way, and all of a sudden they're facing fellow Republicans being called pig, all these things, hit, you know, and Fanon's case, you know, in Fanon's case, you know, threatened to be killed with his own gun.

And I was sitting there going like, yeah, but these guys actually won. Like they feel defeated, but they won the day. Yeah. And that's what kind of overwhelmed me, but I'm gonna also- They feel shame. But the people who attacked them don't feel any shame.

Right, and it should be the other way around. It should be the other way around. And so that's where for me, and that is how I also knew that I was dedicated to this, probably career-ending mission to bring truth. And because I understood that there was so much at stake, not just these guys' lives, not just these guys' future, which some of them have been really damaged.

I mean, they've lost a lot of friends. But over the future of this country, because we can't do this again. But that, it's like, the, the, I think the young man issue we have today is a serious, serious concern in this country, and it's where you're seeing radicalization, it's where you're seeing these shooters, it's where you're seeing, like, these problems. And as a society, we have to be willing

to talk about masculinity again. No, I have a bunch of thoughts on this, because I have two young boys, and my son switched schools, and I a society, we have to be willing to talk about masculinity again. No, I have a bunch of thoughts on this because I have two young boys and my son switched schools and I was like, I know he loved his teacher and I was like, are you sad that you have to change schools? He's like, no, no, I don't care at all. He's like, maybe five at the time. I could see it even then,

he was trying not to have feelings. Like I know he has feelings. He has feelings all the time and just in this time he was not and I was trying to, I was like, oh, know he has feelings. He has feelings all the time. And just in this time, he was not. And I was trying to, I was like, oh, this is where it starts. Like he doesn't think it's okay to feel this thing about this thing.

And he's five. You know, if he's 40 and he's weeping about it still, it's a problem. But like, you can see where the cultural assumptions start. Some of it's internal and then we confirm it. Some of it comes from the outside. But yeah, we don't learn to process our emotions. And then one of the things I've tried to understand

for young people, animal people, is like the world is confusing and overwhelming. Like just period. And then our modern world, I mean, like look for basically all of human history, gender was gender. And now it's more complicated. I don't have a problem with that,

but it's a lot to keep track of. There's new words that we use for things. Also, we have more information than we've ever had before. There's more people than I've ever. You just think about how cognitively and emotionally overwhelming it is to be a person. The idea that you could survive that as a man or as a woman with the emotional toolkit of your parents,

let alone like historically is insane. You need a different set of emotions to be able to process and make sense and handle it. Like our world demands a level of sensitivity that is new and unprecedented. I think great, but it's a lot. And so if people aren't actively taught that, and then they're shamed for not having it,

or they feel inferior for not having it, it becomes this kind of wicked feedback loop where you just have, you have like a have and have nots in the sense of you have people who can cut it and you people don't. It's like they talked about the digital divide. I remember when it's like people who grew up with the internet, people who didn't.

People who grew up in a stunted emotional environment. If you grew up and Fox News was telling you always that the world's falling apart, that there are these other shitty people, blah, blah, blah. And your dad was like, shut the fuck up. Like how are you supposed to operate in a workplace where like, because you didn't say please in an email or you put two exclamation points,

you've hurt someone's feelings, you're not gonna be able to handle that. Like you're not gonna be able to handle it. It's gonna be fucking hot. That's so true. And you know, the best thing about when society like makes leaps like this, you know, you can call them good leaps or bad leaps,

but they're leaps, is you have to have discussion. I think conversation, discussion, openness, openness and talking about it makes a big deal. And so, you know, I think we're now at a point when it comes to the gender issue where people feel free to talk about the confusion behind it. There are people that, you know,

maybe are less sympathetic to it, that kind of kept their mouth shut, that are now talking, people more sympathetic. And so I think we're kind of coming to a place there where it's more respected in the discussion, but like, you look at racial issues in this country, the one thing you can't talk about without being scared to death of what it's gonna be

is like racial issues, right? That's the thing you never can talk about. You can never talk about it. And discussion, like good discussion, not television news discussion, like good discussion, not television news discussion, that's the way for society to come along, for people to like, emote their own feelings,

to kind of come to a conclusion. You know, like with the gender issue, it's like, does it really affect you if somebody changes their gender or they wanna be? No. Like, does it affect your life? No. Now, where you can feel offended is like,

if you're making me accept that reality and change everything. But these are the kinds of conversations need to happen that just didn't. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.

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