The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 395. Difficult Conversation as the Precondition to Progress | Adam Smith

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

Dr. Jordan B Peterson sits down with lawyer, state representative, and author Adam Smith. They discuss his new book “Lost and Broken: My Journey Back from Chronic Pain and Crippling Anxiety.” From this they explore the differences between cognitive and behavioral therapy, the dogmatization of nuance, the rise of “harm reduction” in the current era of identity politics, and the ideal goal of argument: it’s much more than just scoring points. Congressman Adam Smith is an American lawyer and politician, having served in the Washington state senate from 1991 to 97. His new book, “Lost and Broken: My Journey Back from Chronic Pain and Crippling Anxiety,”  has just recently been released. - Links - For Adam Smith: On X https://twitter.com/electadamsmith?lang=en Lost and Broken (Book) https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Broken-Journey-Chronic-Crippling-ebook/dp/B0B3YC7KLJ 

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with lawyer, former Washington State Senator and now Federal congressman Adam Smith. We discuss the difficulties and promise of genuine political dialogue, practical and psychological. The dangers of a too narrow definition of merit and accomplishment, the difference between negotiating and winning and topics related to mental health and political action outlined in his new book, Lost and Broken, my journey back from chronic pain and crippling anxiety. I've been attempting to bring Democrats on my podcast for several years. Congressman Smith is the first sitting House member or senator for that matter, willing

to take the risk and to combat in that manner the dangerous polarization that presently confronts us. All right. Well, Congressman Smith, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me and to everyone watching and listening today. You and I have met a couple of times before in Washington in preparation for this. I've met a lot of Democrats in Washington, congressmen and senators. Many of them were willing, if not pleased, to speak with me there often pleased too, I suppose.

It's been somewhat tricky getting Democrats to talk to me on my podcast for a variety of reasons. And so I think that's unfortunate, but I'm pleased that you have decided to do that. And I guess I'm probably curious to begin with why you agreed to do this. And also what you're hoping to accomplish, and then we'll dive into the political mess a bit. Sure. I mean, it has been my sort of approach to politics from the very start.

And I've been doing this a long time. I got elected to the state Senate when I was 25 years old. Heck, I started that campaign two years before it ended. So the age of 23, I decided I wanted to run for office. One thing I sort of learned as I campaigned back then, doorbelling, basically I knocked on every door in my district, well, if we door from registered voter to be personally honest about it,

is the best thing we can do is be open in our conversations. And as a general I'll listen to anybody. You know, I represent 750,000 people and I represent every single one of not just the ones who voted for me. And I have found that I learned a lot if I'm open to listening to people, particularly people that I disagree with. Then also just from a messaging standpoint, I developed a campaign philosophy, which is never let the other side occupy the space. Way back when when conservative radio started in the 90s, they wanted me on and I went on, let's talk.

I'm not afraid of the conversation. By coming on someone's show, I am not endorsing everything that they've ever said. I believe that that is the most effective way to represent the district and the most effective way to be a successful politician in general. I'm regular on Fox News. I did Matt Gaetz's podcast just a couple of weeks ago.

I've been on Tucker Carlson's show and back in the day, Sean Hannity. I just believe that's the right way to engage in general. And in this particular moment, when our country is becoming more and more divided, it seems to me like more and more people are simply deciding, you know, part of their decision is, who am I not going to listen to? Who am I not going to engage with? And I think in a representative democracy that is an incredibly dangerous thing to get that divided. So I definitely want to engage. And certainly I know a number of people who are big fans of yours, you have a very wide

following. You are an influential person when it comes to culture and politics. And for any side of the debate to say, we're just going to try to like block that. I think it's incredibly counterproductive. That's for what I'm hoping to get out of it. It's just hopefully an informative discussion. Whatever I go into these things for the most part, I hope to learn something. And I hope to offer something that the other person can learn as well. And one final point on this is, I think too often now when we're getting engaged in debates, the goal is to force the other person to agree with you. And don't get me wrong, there are moments and politics in a life when you're trying

to do that. If a bill is finally on the floor of the house and I'm trying to pass it, I'm trying to win an argument. And in that moment, I'm going to try to get as many people as possible to agree with me. But for the most part, when you're engaging with someone, your mission shouldn't be to bludgeon the other side into absolutely agreeing with you on everything. It should be to learn. It should be grow when you're understanding.

Maybe you're missing something, first of all, second of all, maybe if you listen to the other side, you will better understand how to make your own argument. So I always find the most interesting discussions to be with people who I don't agree with on everything. So to me, it's a logical thing. So there's two things there. I mean, the first is part of the reason to talk to people with whom you disagree is that you're going to run into disagreements with what you think in the world on the from nature and from

culture from other people from yourself. And if you set yourself up so that you're optimally challenged by resistance in the abstract realm through discussion, then at least in principle your ideas are going to be a lot more battle-hardened and tested. So, and there's no real difference between that and thinking. So, so given that, I'm curious also given the self-evidence of that and the necessity of that, even in terms of getting your own ideas straight, What do you think it is that's produced these increasingly insuperable barriers to communication? And also more specifically, why have you got

away with talking to the opposition, let's say, when so many other people are, appear increasingly unwilling to do so? I mean, you said, you know, you've talked to all sorts of reprehensible people on the right wing side. I did not say reprehensible. I did not say reprehensible. And I don't believe that. Yes, I don't believe reprehensible.

Did yes. I said that definitely, definitely. And, you know, the walls haven't come tumbling down on you. Now, people are af there are afraid of being and they're often afraid of step across whatever the to be at the moment. But y

testimony, you've been to across the aisle and the wa phone down on you. So why is that? And why, if that's the case, and it can be done, why do you think so many people are loathed to do it? Well, I think the biggest reason I'm trying to figure out how to put this, because it's hard, okay, it is difficult. And I will tell you right up front,

you know, and it's gotten, and also I've been doing this for a long time. I think it's one of the benefits. If you take me back to my 20s and everything, I'd develop, I would develop strong opinions about things. I'm a very passionate person. I believe strongly in a number of different things and I believe in advocating for them. And I, I would build up to a good belief and then I'd run into someone who would say a bunch of things that I hadn't thought of. And it's an incredibly unsettling experience.

All right. Because first of all, you're like, oh my goodness, I just put myself out there. And am I wrong? Okay. Am I missing some huge thing? And I sort of run back in my mind. I was just at this event and I just told these people, this is the way it is. This is the way it has to be.

Oh my gosh, I've spread this message and I just told these people, this is the way it is, this is the way it has to be. Oh my gosh, I've spread this message and I'm wrong. Yeah. You know, so it's difficult in that regard. And then whenever that happens, there's, I think, I've taught my head, two possibilities. One, you are in fact wrong. You miss something that is crucial to what your position is. Or two, the argument has come at you that you haven't had the chance to think your way

through it, okay? Because I frequently will get hit with things. And this happens a lot when we're debating an issue in the Armed Services Committee. I prepare for a lot of it, but a lot of it, it's happening, okay? And it's always joke, after the debate, you're like, oh, I should have made that point. That's hard. It's really hard to go back and how do I counter that argument? I know what I believe. I believe it. I can just go out there and say it, but now I've got to counter this. I think a lot of people are drawn to the easier thing. The easier thing is, oh, all these people are preaching to the choir.

I mean, pick your favorite cliche at this point. And that's one of the big things. And one of the reasons actually why, I mean, and certainly there are things you and I disagree on. But from what I've seen of your speeches and from our conversations, you are a believer in doing things that are difficult and the inherent benefit that comes to us as human beings from doing that. And so am I. But by definition, it's not easy. Okay. And as human beings, we are, as I said, I think before we started this, we're incredibly adaptable. And that's what I learned from my own personal experience when I went through my mental health and my physical health problems is human beings are incredibly capable of getting better.

If you work at it, that's number one, but number two, it is rarely our first inclination to do something that's uncomfortable. We are going to look for the more comfortable option just instinctively. So you have to fight that instinct. It's not easy. It's not easy to do the thing that's uncomfortable. It's going to make you better. And I think a lot of people struggle with that.

And of course, modern technology makes it very easy to never have to encounter things that you don't agree with. You can filter every aspect of your life to make sure it stays in the lane you want to stay at. Final point on this, don't want to give a long-winded answer to the second question here, but is, you know, I think it's the recent people say, wow, we never talk about politics in religion. Okay, what's the fun in that? Okay, you know, how do we learn and grow if we don't talk about the things that make us a little bit uncomfortable so that we can better understand each other and not be off in our own little corners, thinking all kinds of

awful, terrible things about each other, and then never trying to bridge that divide. So, by temperament, I am a very agreeable person, which is a rather feminine trait because women tend to be more agreeable than man and agreeable people don't like conflict and I've been embroiled in a lot of conflict and there's a very specific reason for that and the reason is is that I learned mostly through clinical experience although that wasn't all of it that conflict delayed is conflict multiplied. And, you know, you pointed out that it's challenging to be shown to be wrong. And the reason for that, I've looked at this technically, the reason for that is that our beliefs orient us like a person is oriented with a map. And if you find out that your map is wrong, then you don't

know where you are and you don't know where you're going. And that produces anxiety and hopelessness. And the bigger the mistake, the more of the map is invalidated. And that's very disorienting, profoundly disorienting. We don't like to be lost. And so then you might say, well, why would you ever bother challenging your beliefs or engaging in conflict with someone? And the answer to that, this is a bit of a reiteration, but the answer to that is quite clear. It's a lot better to have your ideas tested in the abstract than it is to have your convictions demolished by reality itself. And so you need to, this is partly what I think has gone wrong, for example, in the education system. Luke in office written a fair bit about this along with Jonathan

Height is that we believe that students, because of the fragility of their mental health, should be shielded from uncomfortable conversations, let's say, or uncomfortable conversations. conversations, let's say, are uncomfortable conversations. And the clinical reality is very, very clear. It's very clear. This is one thing that all reliable clinicians have agreed upon over a 50-year period, which is that voluntary encounter with what you're afraid of and even potentially disgusted by is clearly salutary and curative. And so you want to give people a hair of the dog that bit them constantly, right, to fortify them against challenge. And the best way to do that is to engage voluntarily in

the exchange of ideas, of representations. So, and the reason I'm dwelling on this in part is because people might be listening and thinking, why in the hell should I ever have a difficult conversation? Why should I ever talk to someone who disagrees with me? And the answer is, well, if you're 100% about right, about everything, and you're currently living in paradise itself, and everything in your life is as good as it can possibly be. Then you don't ever have to encounter a negative opinion because you've got everything right. But if there's some unfurled corner of your soul, it still isn't in the order that it could be. And you're feeling that as a consequence of

your own suffering, then you should be out there testing your ideas against everything you possibly can on the off chance that you might be fortunate enough to learn how you're stupid and wrong. So you can stop being both of those. And of course, that's painful, but it's not as painful as being stupid and wrong. So, well, I mean, a couple of things about them. First of all, as I document, I grew up a very anxious person. I did not like conflict either because I had massive insecurities, psychological issues that became significant problems later in life. So yeah, right there with you, because I think it's worth pointing out that there are some people who like conflict and seek it out. And that's not a good thing. And that's sort of brings me to a third point.

And dealing with what you're talking about, to me, it's all about balance. And that's something that we've sort of lost. And again, I think part of the problem is balance is difficult. You tell me that in every situation, this is the way it is. All right, I'm good. I know what to do. You tell me in every situation that it's the... Great. But if you tell me, in every situation, this is the way it is. All right, I'm good, I know what to do. You tell me in every situation that it's the other great, but if you tell me, well, it depends. Okay, you know, what did the person say? What are the circumstances? Well, then you're back into a situation

where you got to work pretty hard to figure out what the right way to be is, and that's hard, but that's life. We need to teach people how to balance that. And I'm completely with you on the fact that in our education system, in many aspects of our life right now, we do not teach resilience. Okay. We teach people to be protected. Now, the one caveat I'll throw out there is a lot of these people who

light conflict, you know, get to the point where they take a certain amount of joy in putting people in difficult circumstances, which is not for any clinically beneficial person. It's just because they're being jerks. So you can empower a lot of people acting like jerks. I say, well, of course, we have to test them. So you always have to try to have a balance here. The purpose of conflict is to help people get better. And you have to understand that.

Purpose of conflict is not so that you can attack somebody. I see this frankly a lot of times in parenting. It's really important. I have a 23-20-year-old child, but my wife and I have raised two children now. I don't experience this. We're human. We're trying to educate our children along the way. Teach them how to be better. Also, we've got our own stuff going on here. Okay, so when you're getting angry at a child, is it because you're trying to make them better, or is because you're trying to score a point? And you really need to try to figure out how to balance that. And I think a lot of people don't.

So if you can balance those two things, it's fine. And I'm completely with you on the resilience thing, but you also have to guard against resilience being just an excuse to abuse somebody. So with regard to scoring a point, so you imagine that there are two ways of establishing a modicum of psychological and possibly social stability. And one would be to negotiate a settlement voluntarily so that you and I could exchange our opinions and come to a negotiated agreement about the nature of the present and about the nature of the desirable future.

Now, the advantage to that is that if it's voluntarily negotiated, you can go off on your own and I can go off on my own. We'll walk down the same path without a lot of mutual without a lot of mutual supervision. So that's very helpful. Another alternative though, is to attain a certain degree of comparative status. And so it turns out that the serotonin system monitors comparative status. And so if I score a point on you, in principle, that elevates my status above you. And then you might ask, well, what's the advantage to that? And the advantage to status acquisition is a raise in central serotonergic function. And that dampens negative emotion. And so you can imagine, you can imagine there's two deep places, there's two deep sources of the conflict between two different approaches to problem solving, right?

If I can attain comparative status, this is people are trying to obtain comparative status very constantly in our culture, often without doing the requisite effort. But the advantage to that is that the status boost does produce a quelling of negative emotion. Now, it's not as good as solution as a negotiated piece. The problem with a negotiated piece is that you have to wander through the bloody disagreement and sort out all the intervening conflicts in order to establish the piece. If I can try to put a little bit more simply, when you're having a discussion with somebody, are you trying to solve a problem?

Are you trying to get to a fair result? Or are you trying to win? Okay. And there's a big difference. And I think in a lot of the disagreements out there in the world too often now, people are trying to win. Okay. They're trying to own the other side.

Me, temperamentally, I don't know why, but I'm a peacemaker. Well, I think it's partially because I grew up anxious. And there were things in my family that were a little disrupted, but I just want peace and stability. And I learned early on. And it's not that I'm not selfish and not passionate and don't have things that I personally want. But as I grew, I realized that above all of those things

is I wanted a peaceful environment around me. And if I'm going to achieve a peaceful environment around me, I have to care what other people want and what other people think too. And you have to work at that. And that's where I think the conflict goes. I think you're right. And you do, you get that initial high. I was right. You know, now I'm going to win the argument, now everybody has to do what I say from here on out because I've proven that I am the superior intellect in this place. It's like, yeah, that doesn't work too well past a certain point. We all have our ups and downs.

And again, I really want to emphasize this point. I've negotiated a lot of things over what is it now, 33 years that I've been an elected official. And it's so crucial I've been an elected official. And it's so crucial you're going to negotiate something. Ashley, I'll quote something a good friend of mine who's a very successful businessman told me if he's involved in a business deal and when it's all over said and done with he got everything he wanted, he knows he did it wrong. Okay.

Right. Because it's got to be about how we keep everybody on board. And I worry that as we've become more dogmatic in our politics and our business and our my gosh and literally for crying out loud, you know, it's like, no, we have to win. We have to be the one on top. It's like, okay, but you're in for a whole lot of conflict. If you don't care at least a little bit about whether or not the community as a whole was getting to a fair place.

Okay, so that's a great segue as far as I'm concerned into a political issue that I'd be longing to hash out with the Democrats, for example, who will talk to me. I'd like to explain momentarily why I'm not a fan of identity politics. And it's relevant, politics. It's relevant. I think it's relevant to the concerns that you just laid out.

It's incredibly relevant. Yes. Okay. So, what I see happening in the broad culture, and this is part of the culture, or is this increasing insistence that I can define myself in precisely the terms that I want to define myself. Now, that tends to devolve into something like sexual identification or ethnic identification or some other group identification, which is also something I think is incredibly dangerous.

But here's the problem with this, and I've been trying to think it through from the perspective of the psychotherapist. On the one hand, I could claim that one of my clients, for example, has the perfect right to define themselves subjectively. But that runs into a number of problems. And the problems are, for example, that sometimes people's subjective self-identification

is clearly counterproductive. So anorexics, for example, think they're too fat. When, in fact, they're generally on the verge of absolute starvation. And people who are manic get a very expanded sense of self-confidence and believe that they can do all sorts of things that they can't and that they have resources that they don't. And so forth, almost everything about psychotherapies actually about identity. And so it's clearly the case that you cannot merely identify yourself subjectively and proceed appropriately in the world on that basis. And here's why, I believe. And this is partly, I think, what's tilted me more towards conservatism

in so far as I am tilted in that direction. So psychotherapists who are inheritors of a kind of a Protestant and humanistic tradition have presumed that mental health is something that you that characterizes the structure of your psyche. It's something internal. And I think that that's incorrect. I think that what mental health is, is the net benefit of experiencing a harmonious nested relationship with the broader community. So it's very difficult to be saying

if you're not getting along with your wife. And you and your wife can't be saying if you're not getting along with your children. And your family can't be saying if you're having a scrap with your local community. And the local community can't be saying if it's not well integrated into the town and the state and the nation and then whatever might happen to be above that. And so the right manner of conceptualizing mental health is that it's the manifestation of the harmony that comes from having

the hierarchy of being put in its proper place. Now, when we turn to subjective self-identification on the sexual or ethnic front, for example, the insistence that I am whoever I say I am, the problem with that is, well, what the hell are the other people supposed to do? I mean, you've been married for decades. You have kids. You know, 30 years. Congratulations. I just had my 34th this week.

You know perfectly well that, and this is your main also to your point about conflict, is that you have to establish a negotiated piece in order for stability to maintain itself and Negotiation what you're negotiating constantly as far as I can tell is your identity Right, so I'm very concerned about okay, so what so first of all do you think that that's those observations are relevant to the culture war that's raging now not least over subjective self-identification. And what's your opinion about how the political landscape has laid itself out around those issues? Sure, I think it's very relevant. When they come a couple of quick points to walk through this. First of all, and we haven't talked about it,

but I keep making references to physical mental pain. I went through a severe anxiety problem, severe chronic, I wrote a book about it, which sort of outlined how I got through that. When you started talking about psychotherapy, I went through three and a half years of psychotherapy that was enormously helpful. And I think you're right. Your internal mental health is going to be dictated a lot by your relationships. I would say in defense of the psychotherapist out there in the world, your ability to have those positive relationships has a lot to do with your own internal mind. And whether or not you are a psychologically stable person, whether or not you've dealt with the issues in your life.

So just that little quick shout out to the psychotherapist. I think there is an important component of that. Second, I think you're working your way around the broader culture issue that we have. And I think it is incredibly important. I read Christopher Rufo's book along the lines of me being engaged with that. And I spoke to Chris just last week and walked through some of this. And you're getting down sort of into the granular level of okay What has happened as an outgrowth of our concern about racism bigotry and discrimination and the conversations that people have had about How identity factors into that? But I think the big problem and I think that I hope and I can try to convince folks on the conservative side of this

That when it comes to the fight on the conservative side of this that when it comes to the fight in the battle that we have, and certainly I think Christopher Rufo did a pretty good job of outlining some of the more extreme elements of the left approach to this. But what motivates people like me is the fact that racism, bigotry, and discrimination are problems in American society. They are. Okay, you can't fairly look at the history of the United States and conclude otherwise. Now, I also think you can't fairly look at the history of the United States and conclude that that's all we've ever been about.

Okay, is racism, bigotry, discrimination. I think as with most things, it's a balance and there's a lot of things going on. I think the problem I have with the conservative movement, I had this conversation with Mr. Rufo, is yes, what the left is doing is problematic, but the right conservative Republicans, they don't offer a reasonable alternative, because their alternative is racism and bigotry aren't really a problem. Let's just stop worrying about it and move on. Okay. And logically, I have all kinds of problems with that approach. So then we get trapped between, you know, the far right in terms of how they want to approach that and the far left and they're very specific way

of approaching it. And to answer one of your earlier questions that I skipped over as to why I can be successful doing this, I think the overwhelming majority people are in fact looking for what I'm talking about and open and engaging approach. They're just not offered it altogether that often. And that's where we're trapped in identity politics is these two extremes, okay? Racism, bigotry and discrimination is everything.

Every single decision, every single thought you've ever had has to be focused on identity. And then the other side, pit, not a problem that we're thinking about. There's a lot in between there that I think we could work on to build a better society. So when I've gone to Washington and spoken, in this case, primarily to Democrats, I've also worked with the Democrats a lot. I work with a group of people in California, my friend and former student, Greg Herwitz, on Democrat messaging for about five years. And I've had a lot of conversation with Democrats. And one of the things I've often asked them, this is a very complicated problem, is when does the left go too far? And it's a complicated problem for a variety of reasons, I would say. The first reason is that

most of the excesses on the progressive left make themselves, camouflage themselves in the guys of compassion. Now, I know there are bad actors on both side of the political spectrum. There's bad actors in the religious domain, there's bad actors in the scientific domain, and these are always people to have a very identifiable set of personality characteristics, generally bordering on the psychopathic, that will use a moral stance to put forward their own agenda instrumentally or to torment other people. And there's a very well-developed psychological literature indicating this. And the problem there is that boundaries have to be drawn to stop those actors, the psychopathic types, from invading the general culture and taking

it out. And a small proportion of people like that can do that. Psychopaths in general, by the way, run about 3% of the population. That's about as successful as they ever get, but they're an omnipresent threat to cultural stability. Well, I guess that's a lower lower than I thought. So I'll take that as good news. But yeah, yeah, well, it is good news because it means that 95% of people aren't like that.

It's very good news. Now, the bad news is that it doesn't take very many people like that to cause an awful lot of trouble. Now the other thing that happens on the left and this is different than the right is that people on the left do have more difficulty temperamentally drawing boundaries. And you can see this in the rhetoric that right and left use. Well, this isn't the criticism exactly. No, no, I'm just thinking. A boundary can keep good things out just as much as it can keep bad things out. And so the liberal bat, especially the leftist bat is the more information that flows freely, the better off everyone is. And the conservative rejoinder is, yeah, but not

all information, because some things are so toxic, they can't be digested. And then the discussion is, well, what should we allow in and what's too toxic to be digested? And that's constant, that has to be constantly discussed because it shifts and changes. And that's part of the reason why free speech is necessary. But what I've observed, like I've asked, for example, virtually every Democrat I've ever come in contact with, when does the left go too far? I'm going to decorate that with one other observation. So one of the disciplines I studied social psychology, the social psychologists insisted for 70 years that there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism. That didn't crack until 2016. Yeah, well, right.

That's utterly insane. But it is actually troublesome because it is hard to point to an exit to access is on the left. And to say, well, there's a policy that purports to be put forward in a compassionate manner that's actually not that at all. And that's highly toxic. And so you've been involved in the scrum of Washington politics for a long time. I asked Robert Kennedy this question A and he said before bloody YouTube took my conversation with him down, he said, I don't, he said essentially that he didn't want answer that because he wasn't trying to run a campaign of divisiveness.

And, you know, fair enough, but it doesn't get to the heart of it. We have a culture war going on. There's excesses on both sides, a fair bit of it's driven by psychopathy. It isn't obvious to me that the Democrats have done a good job of drawing a dividing line between them and the people who are, you know, the moderate Democrats, who I know are most of them. And the small minority of extreme radicals who have a disproportionate influence.

And so, well, I'm curious about what you think about that. Well, you went in a whole bunch of different directions here, and let me try to make sure I can sift through. I mean, first of all, on your point about this, such thing is left when you throw a tantrum. I've stayed in regular contact with some pretty hardcore conservative people over the years, and a number of them have argued with me that there's no such thing as right-wing violence. Okay, so when it comes to that ability to try to like, I don't know, twist the world to

fit your ideology, I haven't noticed any particular difference between the left and the right on that. They both are capable of it. Second, you raise a really interesting point, which I will just mention briefly and not go down that rap. I won't go down that discussion because I want to get back into that, you know, when does the let go too far question. But yeah, I went to Ford Immuneversity, which is a fascinating place to go to. I'm not Catholic. I'm at a disc beli. I thought about becoming a Catholic after leaving Fordham, and the primary reason

that I didn't is because it's too much work. Okay, I was 23 years old, they said, well, you gotta go to classes for six months and I'm like, I'm gonna class this for like a month and I was like, I don't wanna do that. Anyway, minor point. But anyway, I took a cloud. Things is interesting about Fordham,

particularly Fordham in the eighties. I don't know about now, is Jesuit schools have both some really, really left leaning professors and then some hard core conservative professors as well. And I had this professor at a class with about Edmund Burke and sort of studying the importance of tradition. Eric conservative professor was pro-life, and at one point during our discussion, he said, the worst thing our country ever did was to allow people to debate abortion. And at the time, I was 21 years old, at a very liberal mind. My parents had raised me that we have open debate, we do all this other stuff, and it was just struck me as like, just, who is this guy, saying that we shouldn't even talk about

it. But when he stopped and think about it from a logical standpoint, he was pro-life. He didn't want any abortion to be legal at all. It was illegal. So if we didn't talk about it, he was going to stay uptown. So that's an interesting little debate about how much freedom of information and, you know, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Personally, I'm with you.

The more we talk about it, the more we get to the right answers is what I believe on that front. But on your question, when does the left go too far? When does the right go too far? One thing I've discovered is it's best not to engage in that type of conversation. I take a vastly more practical approach to it, and I will specifically explain what you mean.

And then I will answer that question. So when I look around the Seattle King County area that I represent, my district's now, entirely within King County, it's changed over the course of my 27 years of representing it. We have a significant problem with some very specific issues. We have a problem with homelessness, we have a problem with drug abuse, we have a problem with crime, and we have a problem with affordable housing. All right?

So when I dive into this, I don't dive into it going, okay, who's the moron who let this happen? I dive into it like, okay, what are we going to do about it? All right? What's working? What's not working? How do we actually get to the point where we better redress those issues? And within that context, the specific answer to your question as to what's problematic

is that the left has moved too far in the direction of, let's look at the broader societal causes of these things, which by the way is important. It is. Okay. You know, if you have more economic opportunity, if you have better access to healthcare, if you have better access to education, all of those things that I just mentioned

with the possible accepting of the Affordable Housing Problem, which is complicated, get better. That is true. But if you take individual responsibility completely out of the equation and say, we're just going to look at broader societal problems. That's where you get into trouble. We need to get about. And I've had this conversation with a number of different folks, community-based organizations, county government, city government,

as I'm trying to sort of work through this. And I asked the question, you know, well, okay, broader societal stuff I get. But what role does individual choice play in a decision to abuse drugs in a decision to commit crime? And frequently the answer I get back is, well, it really doesn't, which is wrong. I'm not getting into some broader ideological, oh my gosh, you've gone too far. And I don't care about that. You're adopting a policy that is going to get more difficult to actually help people.

And I'm progressive on this. I believe in alternatives to incarceration. Okay, I believe in, you know, getting people into treatment. So you've got, that's issue one, is there any individual responsibility here? Do we set expect expectations for people? Do we hold them accountable for their actions? And, and at a small level, okay, you don't take a homeless, drug addict with a mental problem and say, okay, you got to go to work 40 hours a week, starting right now.

Not, okay, I get that, but you could be a little something. Okay, let's do a little something today. We'll do a little more tomorrow and we'll do a little more than next day. They're rejecting that. And then the second problem is individual agency. Okay, and I also, you know, I believe in that. Okay, you know, you can't just again grab somebody, pull them off the street, throw them in a mental hospital and tell them to get better. Okay. You want to work with them to get to the point where they're making individual choices,

but they're making the right choices. And I think we've gone too far in the other direction of, look, we can't tell this person what they should do. Okay. When they're ready, okay. They'll seek treatment. When they're ready, they'll move on this. It's a lot more of a balance, okay?

And I think in our approach, looking at the broader societal issues, also looking at some of the authoritarian problems. I mean, look, we incarcerated too many people in this country of the course of 60 years. It became the easy button for public policy and everyone in a lot of lives. It absolutely did.

And we should fix that. But you don't have to go all the way over to the other side where, okay, we can abolish the whole criminal justice system and everything will be fine. The problem we run into in our community, is so we've got a lot of people pushing that, that further out agenda on those two issues. And then as I keep saying, what's the conservative alternative?

The conservative alternative is, well, let's just keep locking them up unless pretend that racism doesn't exist. Well, my community isn't going to go for that. I'm not going to go for that. You know, I think we need a more balanced approach, but that fundamentally to answer your question of, they, it'd be wrong to say, and when we spoke once you had you put the question, what is the Democratic Party doing wrong? Democratic Party is a big amorphous thing. You put the question a little differently

today. What is the left doing wrong? I would say those are the two issues. We need a better balance that takes into account personal responsibility, individual choice, and the need to help people get to a better place. I've taken to summing it up from meeting ahead a week ago. You know, the phrase, meet people where they are. I completely agree with that. It's long been my philosophy. When I'm trying to pass a bill or get a vote, I got to understand that person before I'm not going to come in and tell them to be something different. So meet people where they are. I am then that to say yes, but don't leave them there. Okay? You know, yes versus homeless they always have. Of course, now what are we going to do to help them get to a

better place? That is the way I would describe that that challenge. So I agree with you in relationship to the dearth of let's say conservative alternative alternative vision i think that's a real weakness on the conservative side and maybe even more specifically on the republican side so we can return to that later i wanted to embellish your comments about agency and responsibility a bit so technically there's not much difference between agency and hope. They run on the same neurological circuit. So if you believe you can do something, well, that's a hopeful vision. And hope is positive emotion, broadly speaking. It's mediated by the systems that produce positive emotion and indicates the probability

of successful movement forward. And so by attributing all problems to society, you risk removing individual agency and the consequence of removing individual agency is you destroy whole. And that's not a positive thing. And then there's another element that plays into that that I'd be interested. I want your opinions and all of this. But one of the things I've noticed as I've traveled around the world speaking to my audiences, let's say the people who come to listen and to consider, is that if I draw a relationship between responsibility and meaning, the crowd always falls silent. And the reason for

that, as far as I can tell, is that the meaning that sustains us in life is actually a consequence, not so much of having the right to do whatever we want. So that would be on the hedonic side, which can lead to a very short-term and impulsive orientation, self-centered orientation. Instead, it's the meaning emerges as a consequence of bearing the responsibility for yourself and for your partner and for your family and for your community. I mean, literally, that's where the meaning comes from. And if that's demolished and that's on the personal responsibility side, if that's demolished, you leave people bereft of meaning. And that is one of the dangers of abstracting the diagnosis of societal problems all the way up to the highest level of social organization, the pathology of the patriarchy

is that you demolish the domain of useful attention and action on the individual side. And I also think that that's one of the cardinal sins, let's say, of the radical left, is that it's that combination of excessive abstraction. And also the, now, the leftists, their point fundamentally is, well, how do you discriminate assigning responsibility from laying blame? Right?

I mean, well, and that's, it's really a good question. And it is a good question. It is a good question. You always wrestle within psychotherapy, you know, I personally don't think it's that hard. I'm with you. Everyone I run into says it is, but having been apparent, the way you do that, it's almost a matter of tone. You can have a conversation with your child, we have done something wrong, and I had

to try to drag my children too much into this, but I could think some specific conversations when you calmly walk through an explanation of, here's what you did. Here's the choice you made. Here's why it was a problem. Or you just scream at them for being terrible, awful, horrible human beings. Okay. To me, that's how you differentiate. Okay. Blame is an affirmative, you're tired. You know, responsibility is just, okay, we're offlawed, we're all humans, we're all going to screw things up. I'm not saying because you did that wrong, okay, that that means you're a terrible, awful, horrible human being and I can't stand to look at you. But you did something wrong. So let's not pretend that that didn't happen just because it's going to make you feel bad to realize that you did something wrong.

Let's have a professional grown up kind caring, helpful conversation about how you can do it better. And it just kills me that on the one hand we got all, oh gosh, no, if you criticize somebody, you know, that makes them feel bad. So we have to make sure that we don't do that. This is harm reduction, okay? Which we talk about, which is a major impediment to efficiently running organizations, by the way. If you get to that level, and then you get the people on the other side who just say, you know, that they ought to be able to yell and abuse whoever they want because they're

in charge. Why is it so hard? You delve into the mind a lot more than I do. Why is it so hard to just go delve into the mind a lot more than I do? Why is it so hard to just go, okay, let's just balance that and reasonably and responsibly help people get better instead of trying to tear them down? Well, it's part of the problem that you point to in your book. And your book, I thought I just point this out to everyone. Sure.

The book is called, I've got it written down here, I want to get it exactly right, lost and broken. My journey back from chronic pain and crippling anxiety, one of the things you discuss in that book is the difficulty of diagnosis and this is relevant with regard to the judicious decisions and conversations that are necessary in assigning responsibility. And you might ask, well, why bother calling your kids out on something they've done wrong if it hurts their feelings? And certainly parents will avoid doing that, especially if they're the kind of parents that foster dependence. But the answer is, well, if your child did something stupid that hurt them and other people in a manner that's counterproductive if continued, the price they have to pay to realize

that flaw is offset by the advantage of not doing the stupid thing again. Now the diagnostic complexity is twofold, right? One is, first of all, things are complex and deciding how someone went to hell in a hand basket, parsing that up, the responsibility up there with regard to social contribution, familial contribution, and individual responsibility. I mean, that can take hundreds of hours of dialogue. It's very, very complicated. So, complexity is part of it. And then the conflict that might come along with mediating responsibility and blame, that's difficult. You know, if you're talking to your kids,

they might say, well, you know, if you weren't such a son of a bitch, I wouldn't be so rebellious. And that's, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable potential proposition, but there's no shortage of conflict that has to be had in sorting that out. And of course, one other layer on that is, one of the throw-in is, so I have two children and I married. And when you're negotiating between, okay, an argument between, like, my son and my wife or my son, my daughter, then it's like, okay, well, what about what they did? Right. And then that throw, that throw is in a little bit more complexity as well.

Personally, I think it's all navigable. I guess you can work your way through it. Let's put it that way. It's not easy for the reasons you describe, but I think it is more doable than most people give a credit for it. That's all I'm saying. Well, the alternative is to put your head in the sand and continue to get kicked as a consequence or to degenerate and to outright conflict.

I mean, it's either it's negotiation, slavery, or tyranny. Those are the fundamental options. And so, well, on that front, one of the things I've also viewed, and you can help me with this if you would, is I'm watching you guys in the US, tear yourself apart, we're doing it to some degree in Canada you guys in the US, Terry yourselves apart, we're doing it to some degree in Canada with regard to the idea of systemic racism, let's say. Now, you pointed out quite rightly that the proclivity to alienate and manifest prejudice because of innate group differences is pervasive.

And I think the anthropological literature suggests that, you know, most tribal groups around the world describe their people as human and everyone else is non-human. It's an extraordinarily common linguistic categorization proclivity. And so I think you can make a strong Hobbesian case that although people are cooperative and will reach across the aisle, that generally we tend to think of the people like us as human and the people who aren't like us as not

human. And so out of that comes just to be clear. I don't have bias and racism. I don't know that I would go quite that far. I would say we tend to be tribal. We tend to think of the group that we belong to as being somehow better than other groups. I don't know that we necessarily decide that other groups aren't human, just that there's the tendency to think that you're better. And that will vary, obviously, situation to situation. But it is a human tendency. Well, you see, it's complex because obviously tribal groups can trade and intermingle.

And so there is a countervailing tendency, but the linguistic tendency is literally to define the non-tribal members as not human. Now I'm not saying that we necessarily do that fully, but we can easily be tempted in that direction. Now the radical leftist critique of American society is that the society itself is systemically racist. And this actually really bothers me as an outside observer and an admirer

of the American system. Now, the Canadian system is quite similar all that we're doing everything we can to mock it up at the moment. But you see, my sense is exactly the opposite, which is that the proclivity for systemic bias and racism is deeply rooted in the human soul. And it's a bloody miracle that there was any progress,

there's ever been any progress made in that direction at all. And I would say that your society grounded as it is in a broader UK tradition is the stellar example of the countervailing tendency, which is to attribute to all human souls something approximating divine value, regardless of the particulars of their group identity. And so then when I see these radical critiques of American society accusing it of systemic racism and being even founded on those principles, I think this is very counterproductive because not only is

it not the case, it's actually the case that the UK slash American tradition that has made of slavery, let's say an absolute moral evil, is rare and most pronounced in the case of, well, the Anglo-American tradition. And so what I see happening with the radical leftists, for example, is they're actually throwing out the very thing that they purport to support. Because, well, and you can tell me what you think about this. The idea that might makes right and that if I can force you into servitude, I have the right to do that. That's pretty damn self-evident. The notion that you have some intrinsic worth, even if you're weak and easily, what would you say, easily manipulated

and forced, that you still have some worth, that's a very difficult proposition to put forward. And yet, both the UK and the US managed it. And whatever degree of true interracial harmony and freedom has prevailed, particularly in the West, particularly in the US, is actually a consequence of that countervailing tendency. And I think that's the fundamental forward thrust of the American enterprise. So when I see the leftists go after that, and that's something that's become increasingly dogmatically taught in universities, I think, God, you guys, you're killing the very thing that in principle

has been the closest thing to bringing about what you want that's ever made itself manifest in history. Yeah, I mean, I think you've hit upon what is one of this principled, divisive issues in American politics that is making things more difficult to get things done because people are locked into that debate, which side is going to win that debate. As I've said a couple of times, and we'll likely say more frequently as this interview progresses,

I take a more practical problem solving approach to things. what do we need to do to build a better society? Now when it comes to what is America founded on? There's no one thing, there's no one thing to one group of people. I tend to agree with you that the principal idea is equality, is the idea that we are not going to be as tribal, that's certainly what the documents said. But I think the thing to remember for conservatives is this approach to dealing with racism, bigotry, and discrimination didn't come from nowhere. It came from, in addition to all those traditions that you rightly just described,

we've had a pretty rich history of also some pretty thorough discrimination. Now, that's changed, gotten better, I'm comfortably asserted of the course of the last 60 years, but from much of American history, I mean, let's start with, you know, the founding principles of everyone should have a say in how they are governed, democracy, which was one of the big ideas that we tried to introduce. Well, at the time we introduced it, everyone knows. I mean, it applied to white male property owners. And that was it. Now, my personal take on this is at the time we did that, democracy in its true sense really didn't exist anywhere on the glow. So to take that step was a significant step,

and ever since then, we've been expanding on that. We've been trying to get better at it. But also along the way, incredible history of white supremacy, patriarchy, all manner of hidden discriminant discrimination that have in fact been more locked in to how we've governed ourselves than most people realize. And I'll give you just one example and then expand out on how I think we should handle this.

And I agree with you, the way the far left is handling it, I don't agree with it. Okay, I also don't agree with the way the right is handling it. But you know, we have this debate and it's something that I led the fight on in Congress to rename military bases in our country. We have a lot of military bases and installations and other things, ships that were named after civil war, southern generals and southern leaders. And so we've pushed this effort to say we should change those names. And we get into this debate about, you can't, it's our history, it's, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as I debated this and I found out what a lot of people don't realize about that stuff,

this stuff was not named in 1870 or 1880. The names came about in the early 20th century. After reconstruction failed, there was a concerted effort in many parts of this country to reestablish white supremacy. You go back and you listen to some of the speeches, I think I forget the name of this, the Stone Mountain Georgia, which is this etching of, I think, four Confederate generals. Go back to, I'm like, 1910 when it opened and you listen to the speeches, to the people commemorating that, it's a lot of white supremacy. All right. It's the same time that the Ku Klux Klan rose up at the same time that Jim Crow got put

in place. It was actually a pretty interesting book. I forget the name of it. I think it's a fever in the heartland by Tim Egan about how the clan took over Indiana. Okay. Not talking Alabama, talking Indiana, early 20th century in the fight that had to go to move that back. So that history exists, all right, and we have to wrestle with that history and fair. What does it mean?

How do we better treat people equal and not fall back into that? Now, I have participated in some DEI trainings, not that many. And there's two parts of it that I really like, and then I think there's an incredible missed opportunity. The part that I like is we talk about this history, because a lot of people don't understand this history. I mean, they don't know.

It's like, well, okay, yeah, the Civil War happened, the North won, and there was discrimination in the South, and then everything sort of sorted itself out. Well, no's like, well, okay, a civil war happened in North one and there was a discrimination in the South and then everything sort of sorted itself out. Well, no, actually, it didn't well into the 70s, 80s, 90s, okay. There were significant problems in all of these areas. If we educate ourselves about that history, we will better understand our own country. Frankly, I think we'll better understand how difficult it is to achieve the ideals that you talked about. This is what we're trying to do, but it doesn't necessarily come easily. So understand that history. And then the second piece of what they try to do

is, and the individual that you're working with, what's their story? Who are they? Okay, you know, if you are a black person growing up in America, you had a different experience than if you were a white person growing up in America. And if you're going than if you were a white person growing up in America. And if you're gonna work for somebody, whether it's in an office or a school or wherever, having a conversation and understanding your colleagues, I think is a very positive thing. Now, where it goes off the beam in my estimation,

is it then sort of talks about how discrimination and bigotry is unique to white Western culture, okay? Yeah, that's pretty, that's, that's, well, to call that wrong is to barely scrape the surface. It's a universal human proclivity. It is, but understand that under the circumstances, and there's a lot of different reasons,

but white European culture emerged as the dominant culture around a 19th century thereabouts. Actually, I'm reading a book called When China Rules the World. It's written in 2009. It's an assumption about how China's coming and what's it going to be like. And it sort of walks through this history of how, and to some degree, it was an accident of history. Guns, germs, and to some degree it was an accident of history, guns, germs and steel, right?

Whatever it played out, this particular group of people became dominant. It was white men, so therefore that discrimination was the discrimination that dominated a significant chunk of the globe. It's not irrelevant to point out that that came to pass. I think it is more helpful in going all the way back and I'll close with this, to your identity comment. What I find most useful is when we talk about things that talk about our shared humanity as opposed to the things that make us different. And of course, we're different. Of course, men are different from women. Of course, whatever your cultural background is,

it's going to make you a little bit different from somebody else. It's so much better when we talk about the things that we have in common. And I think one of the things we have in common, no matter who you are, is a feeling that other people don't understand you. Okay, I mean, that's a pretty universal thing in my experience. So if you want to get together and talk about what here's my experience, but we shouldn't segregate it based on race, or anything like that, we should put humans together and say, discrimination, bigotry bias, these can be problems. You know, let's talk about how we have things in common instead of how we're different.

So I think we could do a lot better, but again, the problem is, and we had this debate in the House Armed Services Committee on this year's defense bill, now that the Republicans have retaken the House, I was the chairman of the Committee for four years when Democrats were in charge. Now I'm the righty member. Diversity, equity, inclusion was a huge part of debate. And the debate on the right was, we got to get rid of it.

Locked stock and barrel, we just got to get rid of it. I just think this got to be a better answer. I don't necessarily, I don't like the way the far left does diversity, equity and inclusion. But the idea that we can just say, that's all good. No racism here, no bigotry. Let's just move forward and not talk about it. I am at least equally troubled by. Yeah.

Well, what seems to have happened to me on the DEI front, especially, is that, and this has been partly abetted by psychologists who put forward the implicit association test, for example, which reports to indicate that the standard psyche is wired up right with implicit biases of sufficient magnitude to warp the entire social enterprise. These are very weak tests, by the way. They're not very valid. They're nowhere near valid enough to be used for clinical diagnosis

because there are very stringent criteria established to allow a test to be used for clinical diagnosis. And the accusation of racism is a kind of diagnosis. And you cannot do that with implicit association tests. Period. Two of the people who made the tests, there are three, have already disavowed their use for such purposes. And so what I see happening with the DEI movement, at least in some not small part, is that people who are advancing a particular view of their own moral virtue and who are misusing the science in a, in what would you unforgivable manner are elevating their status in the public domain by purporting to be compassionate when in

fact all they're doing, most of what they're doing is feathering their own nests at the expense of broader social harmony. I see there are a lot of good in the... Yeah, and I hear that. And certainly, people will always try to push the debates in their favor. And as I said, I go to great lengths to avoid those sorts of traps and get back to sort of just practically what are we trying to accomplish here? I'm thinking as we're talking about this about the question that was popular, you know,

and it may still be, you know, do you think healthcare is a privilege or a right? They'll ask that question is that the answer has some sort of significant impact on the quality of your healthcare system. You know, I mean, call it what you want to call it. It's a public good that we need to figure out how to deliver in the most efficient and effective way possible. Let's work on that. But people always try to position themselves. If I can get people to use the right language, I win. Okay. And things that's not entirely wrong, okay? But it also distracts from the practical problem solving of how do we actually improve things.

So more so than just about anybody you're ever going to come across, I will fight against that. I will not answer those sort of well, do you believe it? It's like, let's talk about what we want to do with the policy. I'll talk about that. I'm not going to pick your word or her word or his word. Let's just work on solving the problem. But I'll give you one of the examples that I give a lot of times about why I think the EI is important, and my district is kind of fascinating. I graduated from Taiyi High School, which is right by C-Tech Airport. My father was a baggage handler for United at C-Tech. That's why I grew up there. And when I graduated, South King County, which is south of Seattle, was a white blue collar suburb, that's what it was. It has diversified massively in the 40 years

since I graduated from high school. One of the things that I've noticed in the community, you know, talked about me first of all, I don't know, I was like 10, 15 years into my career in Congress when I looked around and noticed that most of the people who were working in my office were white. There was no problem between men and women, but in the reason for that, most of the time, the first job that you're going to get is going to be because you know somebody.

I mean, it does happen that someone just answers a one-add and they get a job, but for the most part, it's connections that help move you forward. I grew up in an entirely white community. I came from an entirely white family. The people I knew by and large were white. The people who I knew knew were by and large white. I wasn't biased against anybody. I just, well, I was biased in the sense that I wanted to hire people who I knew. I looked at this and I said, okay, this is a problem. Now, I think a lot of people would say, well, no, it's not a problem. Do you think you're hiring bad people? No, I don't think I'm hiring bad people. Are you not having a rigor? No, I think we're doing a decent job.

It's still a problem because you're not reaching out to a broader community. So what my office did is, well, let's work with some community groups. And there's a variety of different, you know, there's a thing called Table 100 that tries to help African-American business people. And I'd work with them a lot.

There's the black collective in Tacoma, there's El Centradela Raza that works with the Hispanic community. A variety of different groups. And I said, when we have a job opening now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to reach out to them. I'm going to say, I got this position, who you got. And it diversified my workforce. It ebbs and flows for a whole bunch of different reasons.

I think it's really important that you, and I'm gonna go ahead and use the left wing word here, it's about the only one that I like. You have to be intentional, and I believe in that. If you're trying to get something done, it doesn't happen by accident. So you have to affirmatively reach out in that way, and I think we need to have those types of programs.

And a lot of people, yeah. Well, you're... I would say just on technical grounds, your argument is correct in relationship to confidence, because the case you're laying out essentially is that because of the ethnocentric structure of your connection network, there were potentially qualified candidates that you are unlikely to come into contact with. And so by diversifying your outreach in relationship to candidate selection, you were able to, in principle, find more qualified people because it's a broader pool and with a subsidiary

with a subsidiary benefit of potentially providing a workforce that was more representative of the community. But it seems to me that all of that can be accomplished by the mere observation that a broader and more differentiated candidate who all things considered is technically preferable, rather than concentrating, particularly on equity issues. And equity, this is another thing that I've talked to Democrats across the country about, and most particularly in Washington,

equity is a word that really disturbs me because equity fundamentally means equality of outcome. And equality of outcome is a very bad idea because there's no difference between inequality of outcome and ownership. Like if you own something, that means that you have an unequal access to it in relationship to someone else. And there's no way of eradicating inequality without eradicating ownership per se. And the notion that we can calculate the fairness

of our society by dividing people, subdividing people into their group identities, and checking every single enterprise to make sure that proportionality exists, which would be impossible in any case, definitely puts the cart before the horse. And I also see in the term equity, and of course Christopher Rufo is concentrated on this too. That's the place that I see the most radical form of quasi Marxist ideation invading the democratic discussion.

So that's a concern. Yeah. So I both agree with you and disagree with you on this point. I think if you, if you, well, the way I disagree with you is equity, equality, they mean a lot of different things. Okay, back to my, whenever, well, ask me, are you a socialist? I don't know. What do you mean? Okay.

You know, equity in equality are the same kind of the same way. They can mean a lot of different things. If you just say I'm for equity or I'm against equity, you haven't added anything to the conversation whatsoever. Now, where it is true is what you've said. There is a certain segment of the left wing political world that is defined equity in a very specific way. It has sort of got them wrapped up in a lot of confusion, because when you get past the point where it's okay, you can certainly focus, I mean, okay, I'm not getting myself in trouble here.

But the two most discriminated groups in America, broadly speaking, are black people and Native Americans. Okay, you know, if you wanted to start somewhere in terms of who America has treated poorly, that's a pretty good place to start. But this goes beyond that. Okay. Well, what about recent immigrants?

How do you, as Salami slice it, pass a certain point? Let's say, okay, you've improved equity, you have more people of color in your office, but you don't have any Asian Americans. Okay. Or you could go right down the road, okay? You've got a bunch of people from India, but you don't have many people from Southeast. I mean, you can go down that road to the point where it's impossible to achieve that. And I think that has, in many instances, happened. And that is a challenge.

However, I don't think equity and equality are, well, irrelevant to our I think equity and equality are things that we need to work with towards. Not in the sense that you just described where equity means absolutely everybody regardless of anything has everything the same. That's ridiculous. But if you simply go the equality of outcome route, then you're leaving out a whole bunch of stuff that comes before you get a chance to have that outcome. Yeah, well, that's for sure. So, so we need to think about that and we need to think about in that case, historical racism, historical discrimination, redlining, okay.

Whole bunch of different things do factor into what the outcome is today. This is very difficult because there's no simple way to do this. There's no formula that you're going to come up with. In fact, one of the big things that I frequently say, problem we have in the world, if you are after perfect justice, then you are going to be any permanent state of war. I have this vivid image in my mind of Meloso Vitch back in 1988 when, you know, on what I think was the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo where long story short, the Serbs got their asses kicked by somebody and they've been bitter about it ever since

and they were going to, they were going to write that wrong 600 years later. And a number of people got slaughtered over the course of power because of that fight. All right, if you're constantly focused on everything has to be equitable, then you're in a bad place. If on the other hand, just sort of shrug and go, well, you know, not anything we need to worry about, you're also going to be in trouble.

And I just think that the human mind is in fact capable of striking that balance without having to choose one side or the other. Okay. We can work and say, okay, here's a group of people that don't seem to be achieving. Is it the case that they're somehow just inferior? You. Okay. So let's think creatively. How can we be more inclusive? How can we help them get to a better outcome? Knowing that it's never going to be perfectly equal. It seems to me you're certainly an American politics I don't know anything about Canadian politics So I will not speak to that that we've just set up this false choice

You know, either you have to be like full-on equity identity politics far left person or you have to be on the right and not care about it at all. You know, and you know, that dynamic is something that I'm trying to fight. It's to get to people and say, no, we can find a more reasonable place in between here. It doesn't have to be this deathmatch between two extreme ideologies. Yeah, well, you make a constant case in your conversation with me today for differentiation and diagnosis. I mean, one of the problems is that it's easy for us, for everyone, to abstract a problem way too far up the abstraction hierarchy and to talk about such things, for example, as

healthcare. When, in fact, there's no such thing as healthcare. There's 10,000 different variants of caring for people, each of which is a complex problem on its own. And you can understand why people would rather have a one-size-fits-all solution because, well, if you could have that, it would be wonderful, and it certainly decreases the cognitive complexity, but it is necessary and challenging to differentiate. I wanted to turn to something.

Can I ask you a question before we move off? It's an interesting your cognitive take on this, because my shorthand all of this, that's a quote that I quote in my book, I always misquote it because I prefer it this way, but Sue Grafton, who was a mystery writer, she wrote the A-Disease, the Kinsey Maholum mysteries. She wanted more to approach. She said, thinking's hard work. That's why most people don't do it. I'm sort of torn between that and also a passionate belief that if we engage and take on difficult problems, we get more joy out of it. We don't have to accept the fact, well, let's dumb everything down because nobody wants to work hard. I don't really believe that.

And actually, there's a professor at Yale University, I think it's Dr. Santos, who teaches a class on happiness. It's the most highly subscribed class, I'm apparently in the history of Yale. And her big point is what makes us happy is to be productive, but our basic instinct is to not be productive. So we have to work through that. And I just from someone like yourself who has much more medical background than I do, why can't we get the human brain to embrace that a little bit more? Well, you take on, to see complexity is a good thing, not a bad thing. That's what I'm trying to say. Well, you put your finger on a fundamental problem, the problem of complexity. The problem of complexity is essentially that there's there's farm more entropy in the cosmos in the world than there is organizational capacity in the psyche, right?

Because things overwhelm us and that's actually a technical problem because if you're exposed involuntarily to a situation that's complex, you will manifest a stress response, and that's accompanied by an increase, for example, in the production of cortisol. And what that does is start to have you burn up resources that you could be saving for future use now. And if you're chronically stressed, you will age. There's very little difference between those two things. And so if you're exposed to too much complexity, especially involuntarily, it will take you out physiologically, psychophysiologically. And so people are very motivated to avoid it. Now then, well, we'll let me add one more, let me have one more detail to that, because it's the rest of the answer to your question.

So then you might ask yourself, well, how do you calibrate the optimal amount of exposure to complexity? And the answer to that technically seems to be by moving towards something approximating the spirit of voluntary play. So now you and I, like we have agreements and disagreements in the way that we map the world. And what we're doing, and I think we've done this successfully so far in this conversation,

is to push each other in an optimized manner that enables something approximating the spirit of cooperative and competitive play to emerge. And you can tell that's happening because to the degree that we're successful at it, we're deeply engrossed in the conversation, and we're developing as a consequence of doing that. And so, I believe that the instinct of meaning, and it manifests itself, for example, and play, the instinct of meaning is exactly the instinct that tells you when you're optimizing your confrontation with complexity.

Yeah. Here's the interesting thing about that to me, going back to my psychological problems and my anxiety and what psychotherapy ultimately did for me. I believe that you can train the brain to better deal with complexity. Something somebody said to me, and I mentioned this in my book early on, was that it's not the amount of stress in your life, it's how you process it.

Now, at the time she told me that, I was in the early stages of my second bout with crippling anxiety, and I completely rejected what she said. My whole life had been a combination between, on the one hand, I was incredibly ambitious. I wanted a lot out of my life. So I had to push myself to get there and I understood that. But even as I was doing that, I sort of thought of it as, I've got a tank here. All right.

And I'm going to use it up. And then I'm done. Okay. And then I got to retreat. And so in my early battles to deal with anxiety, I was focused on, okay, what can I sort of declutter my life, right? How can I do, how can I change things so I don't have as much stress? But the central insight, she gave me that insight. It took me several years and three and a half years with the psychotherapy to understand it, is she's right. It is not the amount of complexity in your life. It is how you process it. And that's the basics to my mind of simple meditation.

I say simple meditation because complex meditation is something I've never been able to do. Meditation is not about eliminating every thought in your head. Okay, I thought that for the longest time. It's a very, it has a very difficult thing to do and it will drive you crazy. You know, I'm meditating, I'm meditating, oh my gosh, I have a thought, I failed. Not the way to do it. The point is a whole lot of stuff is going to come at you. Every single day, it's coming at you. Thoughts, feeling, sounds.

You have to teach yourself to be able to, from time to time, just sort of let it bounce off. Notice it and move on. So we could walk down a road here. I know you wanted to go in a different direction, but that's what I find most interesting about the brain is I think you can teach it. It's not just okay. Here's my complexity jar. Once it hits here, I'm out. Okay. I think you can train your brain to better process complexity. And in that sense, I think basic mental health has a lot to do with some of our broader societal problems.

Well, you're, you made a case there that you could imagine that you could protect yourself against being swamped by entropy, you could protect yourself against complexity by defensively armoring yourself, for example, and by walling yourself off from complex problems. That idea goes along with the kind of zero sum mentality that you also described, which is, well, I have a limited amount of resource and when that's exhausted, I'm done. And so I better be careful. Now, we know that's not true, for example.

And I think this is best illustrated when you think about people playing a game is that if you are playing one-on-one basketball with someone, you're gonna wanna find somebody who's about as good as you are or slightly better. And the reason for that is because you might wanna win, but actually what you wanna do is get better at playing basketball. And the same is true of the proper attitude towards complexity. Like people often

wall themselves, often defend themselves and retreat because they're afraid they'll be overwhelmed. But you can teach people, and you do this through graduated exposure and incremental improvement, you can teach people to stay on the edge, an edge they define, right, an edge of competence. And in consequence, what happens is that their capacity to deal with complexity continues to expand. And that's really a process of optimized maturation. And what's fun about that, I love this being a clinician,

is that there's nothing more in grossing and entertaining than helping someone negotiate to a point where they can discover that it's the edge between chaos and order by the way the developmental edge. It's the zone of proximal development to help people discover that and learn to stay there. There isn't anything more rewarding than that. And there isn't anything that expands people's competence and social competence more than having that occur.

This is also part of the problem with such things as trigger warnings and the protection of students say in the university environment because you don't want protection and safety. You want optimized challenge because that increases your competence. Yeah, now I think that that makes a great deal of sense. So, but you were going somewhere else before I took us in this direction. Why do you think you were resistant to that or why do you think that hadn't occurred to you because you you intimated that much when you were dealing with the anxiety problems that you had? Where do you think the inculcation of that idea that you had in some ways limited zero some resources? Where do you think that came from that assumption?

And how did you successfully challenge it? Well, I literally think that the reason I had that outlook is because the other thing hadn't occurred to me. That's right. And so, and that's why I again, why I enjoy having these conversations, it frequently happens in my life that I will have a very strong opinion about something. Maybe I've thought about it for years, decades, and then someone will say something that it's like, I haven't thought about before. It'll sort of play that out. So I think it was a big part of it.

And I just think it was just sort of my mentality because stress and anxiety, that was who I was. Okay. because stress and anxiety, that was who I was. I was not walking into a stressful event. It was just, it was part of me. I would think about it, worry about it. And so when I outlined this in the book, the strategy that I came up with,

there's actually one other reason why I felt this. The strategy I came up with that I describe as, think, think, worry, worry, worry, work, work, work. Basically, that was my approach. If I wanted to get somewhere and there was a problem, I had to go after it. I was supposed to be stressed. I was supposed to be worried. If I wasn't stressed, if I wasn't worried, then I wasn't doing something important.

That became mentality. And I think the biggest reason why I struggled to let go of that is aside from the mental problems, I was spectacularly successful. Okay, I won a number of campaigns that were a number that's be fair. I won three campaigns that were extraordinarily difficult but changed my life, all right, and I was able to succeed.

You know, that happy marriage, I have good, you know, good relationship with my children, knock on wood if you say that. Everything, you know, everything's good. And I thought this is how I succeed. And even if you're going to come wrong and tell me that I got to do something different, I really felt like, you know, that would make it less likely that I would be successful. That, you know, yes, okay, maybe I wouldn't be crazy, but I also, sorry, that's a majority of term, but maybe I wouldn't have the anxiety

problem, but I'd also, and I was so wrong about that. So it sounds to me like you had fallen into the presumption, and correct me if I've got this wrong, that there was no difference between your laudable moral striving and being stressed, that stress was a marker that right, right. And so you had presumed that in order to actively cope and be successful, there was no respite from being overwhelmed by complexity and by and being stressed. And what the therapist did for you, at least in part, was to lay out for you the fact that you could progress forward effectively without having to bear the burden of constant crippling stress.

That's one of the things. Yeah, it's a piece of mess here. I want to try to get to people. I used to say it's the stuff I don't worry about that gets me in trouble. And I also used to like to say I believe in the power of negative thinking, which was, you know, if I worry, oh my gosh, what can go wrong? What can go wrong? You know, and, you know, and so that's what I believed I had to do.

When in fact there, you can be every little bit is intense, every little bit is focused on getting a task done without having to feel physically stressed out. So what did you do specifically to start making changes in that direction? We talked a little bit about the utility of incremental progress. This is obviously tied in to our broader discussion about facing ideas, say, on the political and conceptual front that challenge you.

There's a very tight relationship between these things, but I'm very curious. You report in your book that you had an anxious temperament, or somewhat shy and introverted from a very early age. So it's a deeply ingrained inside you that propensity for negative emotional response. How concretely, how was it that you changed the way you were approaching things that actually made a difference? And why do you think those changes were what made the difference? Yeah, it was ultimately a couple of things. The three and a half years were at the psychotherapy, which I'll get into in a minute. Second, it was getting off of the various forms of medication that I had been on.

But most importantly, the problem that I had had is sort of a baseline. And this is incredibly important for psychology and psychiatry. There are three basic steps in my view to getting to good mental health. Number one was the one that I completely missed, and that is to have an inherent sense of your own self-worth. This is what I didn't grasp. I thought my self- worth was a measurable thing. On a day in and day out basis, but whatever measurement you want to come by, was I doing

my job well? Was I a good husband? Was I a good father? Was I being responsible? Did I make a smart decision here? Did I do that? So, every day, I was trying to judge. How am I doing?

When, in fact, an incredibly important concept in our psychology is it's the Buddhist thing for the most part, we're all worthy of love. We all have self-worth and that self-worth is not dependent upon our deeds. And in the three and a half years with the psychotherapy was me arguing with my psychologist on this point because the biggest sticking point for me on this was, wait a second, you're telling me it doesn't matter what we do, okay? That somebody who's completely a risk, I'm very responsible person. My wife and I have this in common.

She's the eldest of five children and she fits that, that oldest child measurement quite quite well. We believe in meeting our responsibilities. So you're telling me that if I don't meet my responsibilities, if I don't follow, we'll have an idea, that I'm just as good that if I don't meet my responsibilities, if I don't follow the rule of an order, then I'm just as good as if I if I don't of course that's not Actually what they're telling you all right You should always you can work to be better at things, but it's not an existential threat Right just because you make a mistake or do something wrong doesn't mean that your basic self-worth is a human being is out the window

I didn't understand that okay. I was working my whole life every day to prove that I was worth. So having someone walked me through that and explained to me was the number one biggest thing. And then the second biggest thing in psychiatry is to really understand who you are. And I love this quote about psychotherapy, which I quote in my book, which is that the purpose of psychotherapy is not to correct the past. It is to help the patient understand his history and degree for what he has lost. I wanted to correct the past.

And the very specific past I wanted to correct was my screwed up family, okay? And there are families that are more screwed up than others. And I don't walk through the whole story. I was adopted You know in my And it just fell apart by the time I was like 12 or 14 my older brother, you know, when it became He had criminal problems. He had drug problems He was you know after control my parents were stressed out and or depressed my father died when I was 19

My mother died You know a few years after that and just felt like this complete epic failure. And then after all of that happened, my life, you know, I got elected to the state Senate. I met my wife, everything went fine. I was like, okay, don't have to worry about that anymore. When in fact, it was still bugging me. Okay, it was bugging me both in terms of, you know, well, why didn't my family do a better job of handling this? And then crucially, it was also bugging me from the standpoint of, if I'm holding myself out as a leader in the community, you know, as someone who gets things done

and all these other positive things, you know, about my career, the hell did I do about that? All things fell apart while I was there. Okay. And I never really resolved that. So we talked through that and that helped resolve that. And that's a big thing now. And well, with PTSD and other things, you have to be able to resolve issues in your past. And some of it is traumatic. And we're talking real trauma. And even if it's that trauma in the classic sense of the word, things that have really bugged you, bring them out in the open, deal with them, and that can dramatically reduce

anxiety and depression. And there's a variety of different therapies now, EMDR. There's a new thing that they're working with in the military in particular, and I hope I get the initials, right? ETM, which is another way of sort of rewiring your brain through conversation to look at these events in your life in a different way. So those are the two big things. The biggest problem we have in psychology in America, and I don't want to take a too far down this road, if you have political things you want to talk about, and happen to answer them, is we start with cognitive behavioral therapy. And to my mind, probably 90% of the time, that's a mistake.

That's what they did with me. That's why I cycled through so many psychiatrists and psychologists. And cognitive behavioral therapy is important. You need to figure out how to better process things coming in and you understand exactly what it is you're worried about or depressed about how to handle it. But if you don't deal with those two baseline things first, cognitive behavioral therapy is just going to piss you off. All right, because it's not going to seem like it's working.

The analogy I came up with just a couple days ago, it's like if you break your leg, you can say physical therapy is important and it's going to be important. But if you don't set the leg first, okay, and then tell someone, okay, start doing these exercises, it's not going to work very well. So I just don't think we have that order correct. So, so by you were suffering by your own admission from a very fundamental theological dilemma, I would say. And so you could imagine that there are ways of justifying your miserable existence, so to speak, and one would be justification through works. And that is the proclivity that conscientious people have, conscientious and responsible people, which is that they derive their sense of worth, worth from an

evaluation of their continued contributions. And as you said, there's some real utility in that because you should be responsible and generous productivity is laudable. And it's reasonable to observe how you're doing in that regard and to evaluate yourself to some degree on that basis. But if that's all there is, then you are missing another important theological presupposition. And I'm speaking about those as fundamental presuppositions akin to setting your leg before you start worrying about physiotherapy is that there is an axiomatic presupposition that underlies the ethical corpus of the West that every person is made in the image of God and has intrinsic worth.

And that means that, you know, if you think about those as balanced, you could say, well, of course I should strive forward and make the appropriate sacrifices and be useful to myself and my community. But underneath that, this is probably what's provided by the way in the final analysis by the proper kind of maternal love, you know, that kind of all encompassing love is that regardless of your flaws, you have an intrinsic worth that's inviolable, that you can always return to as a source of what replenishment and self-confidence, right? That sense of intrinsic worth. And, you know, if you don't, the interesting thing too is that

if you don't apply that to yourself, it's also very difficult to apply it to other people. And so, yeah, yeah. And that's where I cross, cross over into public policy, okay? That's, you know, and I make that point at the end of my book exactly is, you know, what really helps cure you as well as everyone else. Yes, you have self worth. But think about that. That means everybody else does too. Even the person who's from the different political party. If you're pro-choice, even the person who's pro-life, okay? Whatever the issue, and if you believe that, it makes our society get together better. And frankly, that's, you know, you ask why I want to do this interview. Certainly I find you very smart. I love intellectual conversation just in general. You have a good following. It gives me an opportunity to get an audience. But I think one thing in particular about what you teach

that I think is so important that really has come to me as I've looked at the broader mental health issues is the idea of getting better and that that needs to be the focus. Because a lot of people talk about the stigma around mental health and I've had a lot of interviews about that. I think that is important. We're getting better on that. We're more willing to talk about it, but there still is a stigma that will stop people from wanting to seek treatment. But the other piece of it is, if all we're doing is talking about mental health problems, if all we're doing in essence is wallowing in it and saying, okay, now I have something identifiable for why I'm so hopelessly screwed up.

Or just sort of voyeuristically looking at it. What really gets me going, as you can see, is what I learned throughout this process about how you can get better. And I think your basic point, I watched a video, I can't move, and title it anyways, the basic point of every day try to make yourself better. And that will make you happier, and you will get better. And there's a bunch of different ways to balance it. But I worry to, in America, a lot of it on mental health has become, like I said, this is why I messed up.

Okay, so no, this is a diagnosis so that you can get better. And I think a lot of the messages you talk about start small, okay? You're not going to solve the world's problems. Don't compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to yourself and to what you want to be and what you want to do. But work to get better, I think, is such a crucial message for the mental health of society. Well, it's especially one of the things that was really, really gratifying about working as a psychotherapist was watching what happened when people did begin to take incremental

steps forward. And it was often an exercise in a painful humility, you know, because if you're weak in an area, when you start moving forward, you have to take very small steps. And it's a humbling experience often to grapple with the fact that the only thing you're capable of doing is that tiny step forward. You know, something absurd. If I counseled my clients, for example, to work on maybe I'd have a client who was 30 and still lived in his parents in the bedroom he was in in high school. And it was a complete bloody mess because he'd never done anything to keep it orderly in his whole life. And he's 30, you know, and so there's an element of that that's

pretty damn pathetic. And we'd have to struggle to find the level at which he could grapple with that problem. And so the injunction, go clean up your room and come back next week to the therapy session and tell me it's done was completely useless because it might have been that he was only capable because that because there was a big problem of lurking dependency there of cleaning up half his sock drawer. And to realize that that's the best you can do is pretty damn humbling, but the upside, and this is what's so cool, this is part of the Matthew principle, right?

To those who have everything more will be given is that once you start improving, that improvement accelerates geometrically, not linearly. And so even if you have to start with virtually nothing, that doesn't mean that you won't accelerate extraordinarily rapidly. And that's so fun. It's so fun to help people do that because they take these tiny steps forward in humility, let's say, and then very rapidly, they're the length of step they can take, lengthens, remarkably. Yeah. Well, and that's, you know, going back to our equity and equality conversation. That's something that I've always passionately believed in.

And this is one of the downsides of sort of the American meritocracy thing, okay? And we're wrestling this with this now, is, you know, we've gotten rid of affirmative action or any sort of race-based stuff in college is based on the Supreme Court. And now everyone's looking at, well, what about legacies? You know, what about the guy who plays bad men? And now he gets in.

Is I do think in America, you can go too far in this whole meritocracy thing. You know, if you have stuff, that means you're better, okay, maybe, and maybe not number one, number two, and I believe this, everybody is capable of doing better. And throughout my life, I didn't go to her like, I believe school, I grew up in a very blue collar neighborhood, those, and I see my friends from that neighborhood who have gone on, done some pretty cool things with their life, all right. And I think too often in America, we're like, we're constantly trying to call the top. Okay.

You know, it's like, oh, this guy's the best. You know, he got 1600 of the SAT. It's like, and I think one of these are motivated me. I had a three, two in high school. I had an 11, an 1190 on the SAT as a matter of fact. Figuring out how to beat those people who got a 1600 in the SAT brings me an enormous amount of joy. Okay, and I've done it throughout my life, you know, and so when I see other people people, oh gosh, you know, they're like, hey, it's not that smart. Yeah, I was going to didn't go to college, whatever it's like.

Now, if you really see people, all right, and work with them, with their capable of, is incredible. And so I get frustrated with both the right and the left on this. I get frustrated with the left that sees people like this and says, oh, you have to really care this person. They can't really do anything,

and he can't put any pressure on them. You know, I just, that's not my experience. And then on the right, when it's like, well, that person doesn't deserve to be here. You know, they just, that's not my experience. And then on the right, when it's like, well, that person doesn't deserve to be here. You know, they haven't done this, they haven't done that, they haven't gotten the scores, they haven't, well, let's just give a little bit here and we'll see what folks are capable of.

And that's what I really, really wanted to deliver. And it's been my experience in life is, you know, help people. It's funny, you know funny that in some ways it was your proclivity to engage in that kind of, let's say, right-wing meritocratic thinking that was actually contributing in no small part to the acceleration of your anxiety. It's so interesting to see that given that you are a figure of. Well, and I mean, that is the problem with a strict and narrowly defined meritocracy is that it privileges being overbecoming. That's a good way of thinking about it.

And you know, when you were talking about the 1190 SAT, you know, one of the things, there's no doubt that intellectual prowess as measured by such tests is a deadly accurate predictor of long-term success. It leaves about three quarters of the success domain unaccounted for, by the way. But it is also the case that vision and hard work can go an awful long way to redressing that difference in say initial starting point. And so, and that is something. I do want to give you what happened to be reading a Malcolm Gladwell article. And this was probably his book of essays, so it was probably 20 years

ago when he wrote it. But in this gets back into some of the racial issues that we face, he was attempting to explain the difference between panicking and choking, which is not terribly relevant here. But one of the things he analyzed was Stanford did a study, I forget when it was that they did this, where they gave the same test with two different explanations. The first time they gave the test, they said, this is an IQ test.

This is to measure, you know, how smart you are, basically, how capable you are. And when they gave that test, they gave it to black students and white students. The white students performed significantly better than the black students. But when they gave the same test and said, this is a survey, it isn't measuring anything. We just want to know how you respond to these questions. They performed at the exact same level. And the reason they exercised was because of a lot of the stigma in society, the reputation of, you know, black students can't do well on standardized tests, that the black students felt a lot more pressure.

Okay, they're like, oh my gosh, this is something I'm not good at. So, you know, I better figure this out and they, and I always get the panicking choking thing that makes up there. One of them is thinking too much. The other one is just, ah, choking. Choking is when you think too much, panicking is when you stop thinking altogether. And they got a kind of choke because they're like, okay, I got to think through this, I got to be, you know, and that's just not the right way to take that task. And it shows both that, you know, this notion of inherent, you know, capability one way of the other is ridiculous.

Number one, and number two, we have a long way to go to overcome some of the racial stereotypes in both directions to move towards a more equitable society, if you'll forgive me using that word. Well, your criticism's earlier about the conservative side of things I think are apropos there too is that one of the ways that we overcome the done much more effectively than the right is to provide a vision of equality and harmony and movement towards something approximating a utopia, whereas the right's vision is generally something like less interference is better. And there's some truth in that, but it's not a vision, right? It's the absence of the set of constraints, and it would be lovely to see the left and the right engage in the kind of dialogue that would produce a compelling vision that both sides could engage in. I want to close, because we have to close this side of the conversation fairly soon.

I want to close with one more political question, if you don't mind. It's been very interesting to me to see the response by the two front runners in the 2024 presidential campaign respond to the possibility of engaging in debate. I mean, Biden has as far as I know has indicated quite clearly that he's not going to participate in any primary debates. And now we have Trump making exactly the same statement on the Republican side. And to me, first of all, this, I think this is very bad. I think it's cowardly on both their parts. And I think it's also a huge mistake because leaders should model that, right? If you're a leader, if you're a genuine leader, and you can listen, and you can negotiate, you should model that for your people on the stage. And so I'm, I think it's a missed opportunity, and I think it's a form of instrumental behavior as well, because both Biden and Trump are assuming,

well, we're the front runners and we have nothing except loss on the debate side. And that's not a position that's associated in my estimation with confidence and authority, because the proper attitude should be, well, number one, the people deserve to hear us put our ideas forward and to have them challenged, period. And number two, well, if you're the guy, well, why not take the opportunity to indicate that? And so what do you think about the fact that, you know, the two front runners have dropped out of the debate? They've foregone the debate opportunities. Well, I am multiple thoughts about that as I alluded to earlier. It's always been my philosophy

less engaged. And I'm never afraid of engaging anywhere, anytime, asking whatever question comes, comes at me. I mean, I was, I was doing a forum at the Brookings Institute, talking about, I think it was Ukraine specifically and the code Hank people stormed the stage and tried to shut it down. This woman's yelling and asking a question. And I just said, I said, you know, actually, I think that's a really good question. I'd love to have the conversation, which, of course, she did not want to have. But so I think in general, engage. All right, as much as you possibly can. And number two, from a political standpoint,

I'm a huge sports fan. So I tend to use sports analogies. We've gotten almost to this entire interview without me using one. But, you know, if you're ahead and you're playing not to lose, you're losing. That's always been my philosophy. You know, you got to play to win every second, every play. I think my wife could hear this. It's the way I watch baseball. And she's like, my gosh, you would think this was the world's series. It's one inning and one game. And I'm like, you know, and I'll focus on it. All right, because I just think, you know, you've got to try to be doing your best at every second. You get ahead and think you're going to hold on. And I can't

exactly explain it, but I've played enough, you played enough games in my life to know psychologically. Once you get to that place, you're trying to hold on and instead of trying to win, you're vulnerable. You don't want to be. Yeah, or trying to improve. Or trying to improve, right? Right. Well, the thing is, you think about what's happened psychologically.

Here's what's happened. Is you shifted into a defensive stance. Exactly. And that means all challenge will now be experienced as stress. Now if you reverse that and say, of course, I'll take the opportunity to debate, then you're taking on the challenge voluntarily, and that produces an entirely different set of not only psychophysiological responses, because it's a challenge rather than a threat, but it also broadcasts a kind of confidence

in your own ability to progress. That's part and parcel of being willing to engage. It's a much better measure, it's a much better indication of leadership that concretely, right? Merely the willingness to get into the fray. So I did today. Yes, exactly.

So good news is, thank you. The party that I spent a lot of time wondering about, trying to be careful about this. But speaking is something that I'm good at. I'm art is my whole life. I've been able to articulate ideas in a comfortable and effective way. And I think that is an important part of leadership. But then, and this is my egalitarian side, I guess, what makes me more on the left side

of the political spectrum. I'm like, well, is it really the case, if you just happen to not be that articulate that you're necessarily a worse leader? Okay, is that the case? You know, maybe you've got the ideas, maybe you're good in a crisis, you work with the team and do all that,

but standing up and giving a speech, not the thing you're best at. And I've certainly worked with colleagues, by the way, who in a million years I wouldn't want to be sitting on the floor listening to them give a speech, but I know there's someone that I can count on. I know that they're going to do the work, they know the issues that work together. So is a public debate really the one way to figure out who's going to best lead a community. I think we follow a little bit of love with that idea.

I was thinking of a quote that Dennis Miller had about Michael DuCoccus about how Michael DuCoccus never really had a chance because he lacked that superficial charisma that we seem to look for in our leaders. So I'm mindful of that as well. I think people place too much emphasis on the debates. So all that said, I still think they should do it. I guess the final criticism I have is the debate formats are difficult.

This conversation between you and I is dependent upon both of us being reasonable with the other person. You know, yeah, I'm not going to talk over you. You're not going to talk if you have a question, you'll interject it, but you do it in a polite and respectful way. You know, you look at the debate that Trump and Biden had the first one when, you know, I mean, is that really useful when there's no construct?

And then they say, well, you got one minute, one minute, and then you're done. Okay, how informative is that? All right, when I love sharing the Armed Services Committee, because I tried to run it in a fair way, all right? I would include people in the conversation, and not everyone got the same amount of time all the time, because that's that's not how you have a good conversation. You need a moderator who's honestly trying to make sure that we get the issues out in a fair and balanced way.

And I guess I would, is that possible in today's era? Is it possible to do that the way that the two candidates are just going to be shouting over each other in an unproductive way? I don't know. Well, you know, I'm really hopeful with regards to political communication on the long form, with regards to long-term format podcasts, because they give people the opportunity to speak in an unscripted manner, relatively deeply, spontaneously, which is a good way of detecting both ability and the proclivity to deceive, and to deepen the political conversation.

We had these terrible restrictions on broadcast accessibility that were part and parcel of the legacy TV environment, but that's all gone. And so now there's no reason, even for debates. There would be no reason whatsoever not to hold a forum of this sort with a variety of different candidates and actually have a conversation. Because the thing about debates is they're very time-limited and structured and you can

see why that's necessary when television bandwidth is hyper-expensive. But in some ways, there's no reason for that anymore. Anyways, we should stop. I'm going to, for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue talking to Congressman Smith on the daily wire side and we'll do what I usually do there and delve into issues that are more autobiographical. I think that's particularly germane in this case because of Congressman Smith's new book Lost and Broken, my journey back from chronic pain and crippling anxiety. We're going to talk about that in some more detail on the daily wire plus side.

Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me. Hopefully that'll set a trend on the Democrat side. I guess we'll find out or at least somewhat of a trend because it would be lovely to be able to have discussions that reach across the aisle and to attempt to reverse some of this terrible proclivity towards polarization that really threatens the integrity. I would say of the west, the integrity of the US, the integrity of the west more broadly. So it's much appreciated. For everyone watching and listening, please join us on the Daily Wire Plus side for an additional half an hour. And thank you to the Daily Wire Plus for making this conversation possible.

Pleasure to talk to you, sir. Likewise, I appreciate the chance. Thank you.