Navy SEAL Mindset | Congressman Dan Crenshaw | EP 286

If you're in desperate straits, if your life is falling apart, if you're nihilistic and miserable, and maybe you have your bloody reasons, because maybe you do, that's still the case that if you step outside yourself and you try to make the lives of other people better, that's the best possible thing that you can do for yourself. It's defining. You know what Thomas Jefferson wrote: the Declaration of Independence, this right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And you know, those words get thrown around a lot, and some people might say, "Well, pursue my happiness," that means pursue whatever ends I want, right? Pursue whatever it gives me that short-term gratification, pursue whatever makes me just feel good.

I don't think that's what the founders meant, and there's a lot of evidence for that, because what they meant was the pursuing of purpose. You know, the idea that some sort of purpose in your life is what makes you happy, and that there's a given set of traditions and social interactions and standards of living that genuinely make people happy.

Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to be talking to Congressman Dan Crenshaw, who I've had the privilege to get to know over the last couple of years. Most recently, Congressman Crenshaw set up an event for me in Washington where I had the privilege of speaking to a large group of Republicans concentrating on policymaking about the possibility of generating a positive message going forward as a bulwark, let's say, against the possibility of a kind of reactionary populism, which is not optimal, unfortunate for everyone concerned.

Dan and I talked after that about doing another podcast concentrating on political issues, particularly focusing on the danger posed by the radicals on the left and the radicals on the right. He's had a lot of experience with the unpleasant radicals on the right. I thought that would be really interesting. But over the last few days, I've also read his new book, "Fortitude: American Resilience in the Age of Outrage," and I really liked the book. I thought it was a lovely balance of story, personal story, concept, encouragement, clear delineation of a political and sometimes theological philosophy, psychological philosophy.

So I took a lot of notes, and I thought what I would do after I read Dan's bio is walk through his book with him. There's a lot of places where our thinking dovetails, I suppose, which is why it's easy for us to get along, and I think we could have a very productive discussion as a consequence.

So I'll start with the bio. Originally from the Houston area, Representative Dan Crenshaw is a sixth-generation Texan. In 2006, he graduated from Tufts University, where he earned his naval officer commission through Navy ROTC. Following graduation, he immediately reported to SEAL training in Coronado, California, where he met his future wife, Tara. After graduating from SEAL training, Dan deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, to join SEAL Team Three, his first of five deployments overseas.

Dan was medically retired in September of 2016 as a lieutenant commander after serving 10 years in the SEAL Teams. He left service with two bronze stars, one with valor, the Purple Heart, and the Navy Commendation Medal with valor among others. Soon after, Dan completed his master's in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He then returned to Houston, where his community had been devastated by Hurricane Harvey. Inspired by their subsequent volunteer work, Dan and his wife, Tara, decided that the best way to serve the people of Texas would be in elected office.

So in November 2018, Congressman Crenshaw was elected to represent Texas's second congressional district in Congress. He serves on a number of important committees, including the House Energy and Commerce and the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, as well as the Health and Environment and Climate Change Subcommittees.

So Congressman Crenshaw, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me again. That's much appreciated. And kudos on your book. How's the book doing, by the way?

A pleasure to be on, Jordan. Appreciate it. Yeah, it did really well. It came out, it's a little old at this point, it came out in 2020, and it did quite well because it wasn't a political book, I think. There's definitely a ceiling for politicians to write a book as far as how many they'll sell. I think we did much better than that simply because it's not a political book and it's not even a SEAL book. It's a little mix of all of those things, but mostly it's, like you mentioned earlier, it's an ethics book. It's an empowerment book. It's a self-help book. It's lessons in fortitude, and it also happened to come out at a time right in the beginning of the pandemic, which was, I think, a prime time for those kind of lessons. So it did pretty well.

The book starts with your discussion of both victimization culture and outrage culture, and you make a moral case, I would say, against both. I would also attempt to do a diagnosis of why this has become front and center in some sense. On the victimization front, you make a case that in some ways the sense of victimization and the sense of oppression is opposite to a proper sense of gratitude and duty. I thought that was extremely interesting, because obviously there are situations where people feel as if they're being oppressed justifiably, but you can make much of that in a way that's not productive.

By dwelling on that, especially if it's not deserved, let's say, you also deprive yourself of the values of duty and responsibility, and that's a way to undermine the meaning of your life in a most fundamental sense. You deprive yourself of any ability to overcome it, right? You deprive yourself of agency, and that's a devastating thing psychologically for someone if they're deprived of the tools and the abilities to move forward, past, whether that trauma is real trauma, whether that victimization is justified, as you said. I mean, there's two types: there's the narratives that get built in our society about victimization, which can certainly be debated whether it's real or not, and then there's true victimization and true victimhood, or at least being a victim of some kind of injustice.

But victimhood, yeah, I would say, is a bit more of a mindset. You can either live that way or you can decide to overcome it and decide that you indeed are in charge of your own destiny.

Yeah, well there's a difference. I think there's a difference between being a seeker for justice and construing yourself as a victim. You know, if you're a victim in some sense, you're owed something, your own redress. But if you're a fighter for justice, then your decision is something like that you're going to move forward to help yourself and others despite the injustices of the world. That's a better way of thinking about it. So you get your agency that way without falling into that pit of envy that that victimization also seems to produce.

You also have to define justice correctly, and I think that's where our society has qualms with one another, is this redefining of the word justice and what injustice actually is. So I think there is a classical definition of justice, and it usually sounds something like this: maybe it's a violation of what we would consider due process. We all have a pretty good idea of what due process is based on English common law and our own constitution and a lot of court precedent.

Another way to define injustice might be the granting of some kind of status for any other reason besides merit, right? Maybe it's heritage, maybe it's a good old boys' club, whatever it is that would feel like an injustice, and you'd be right about that. Fundamentally, injustice would be infringing on someone's rights, right? Person A infringing on the rights of person B on their life, liberty, or property. That would be certainly an American classical way of defining an injustice—infringing on especially inalienable rights, these negative rights.

The left does not define justice that way. The left has come to define justice a very different way. For instance, instead of negative rights, proposing that it's an injustice if you are not getting positive rights, and by positive rights, they mean services. They mean that there's an injustice against you because you don't make the same money as someone else. It's an injustice against you because your house is smaller than someone else's. There's an injustice against you because your health care is too expensive. They consider these things injustices.

Now, it may be the case that we want everyone to have health care and affordable health care back, but that doesn't mean it's an injustice. When you start to use those kind of those morally fraught words, you make people really crazy, and you go down a path where you're demanding so-called rights for someone, and that necessarily involves coercion. Coercion's a pretty bad path to go down because you then have to literally infringe on someone's rights in order to provide someone else the same kind of services.

So while it seems like splitting hairs, this sort of redefining injustice, it's actually pretty important, and it has pretty serious consequences.

Yeah, well if your definition of justice is predicated on something like a notion of equity—no one can have more than anyone else or it's unfair—it's unjust. The net consequence of that is no one gets to have anything at all, because there's not even a hypothetical way that we could distribute all things equally to everyone at once; that's literally impossible.

And so it seems to me that the price of some prosperity for most is that some are more prosperous than others, and then hopefully to the degree that that's also just, some of the reason for that excess of prosperity is also a consequence of, let's call it effort and ability, and that's a form of justice too.

It certainly is, and like in the book, when I'm looking at these victimhood narratives that are so pervasive and how that's related to outrage culture, first of all, feeling like a victim makes you outraged. I think that's a pretty simple path to draw there. But I think what's worse about what we've seen recently is the elevation of victimhood to where it's, you know, you talk about heroic archetypes a lot. I took a lot of influence from you actually in that chapter, right? When I talked about who is your hero and what does self-improvement look like? Well, it looks like copying people who did really well.

And maybe not in everything they do; like if I want to be a great singer, a great pop star, maybe I'll look at Taylor Swift, but I'm not going to look at her for literally anything else. So it's identifying the attributes that make someone successful within a given hierarchy. That's fundamentally what defining your heroes looks like in a very practical way, and so I fleshed that out. But what concerns me is that this elevation of victimhood—Jesse Smollett was a great example of that—because he found it so compelling to pretend to be a victim that he would actually create this whole crazy conspiracy, hires two people to beat him up just so he can claim that these, you know, MAGA people beat him up. You know, that's a pretty shocking story, but what's more shocking is the underlying incentives that are prevalent in our culture.

That's what actually scares me. I see it on the right now too. When I was writing this book, I didn't see it as much on the right. Since I've written the book, I do see it on the right, and I want to lay out some sequence of events for you, and you tell me who you think it applies to.

Step number one: say something very provocative, crazy, mean, stupid, whatever, but say it and say it really loud. Step two: watch as everyone reacts to what you just said and then feign disbelief that they would be so obsessed with you, that why are they talking about you? Number three: claim victimhood because they're attacking you, right? They're the ones paying attention to you, and you're just trying to, you know, speak truth to power or whatever. Then use that victimhood as a club to wield and a tool to beat back your opponents, and maybe that's through a fundraising email.

Maybe the person who said the provocative thing is a politician or maybe they're a podcaster, maybe they have an influencer page on Instagram, and now they get more engagement because they're being attacked because they said something provocative and crazy. That's a sequence of events that you can see on both sides, right? If that sounds a lot like AOC, you're right. If it sounds a lot like Marjorie Taylor Greene, you're right because they both do it, and I think they're quite self-aware of it, but it's a scam.

Yeah, it's a claim of unearned moral virtue. And you know, I've been thinking about this a lot. I thought about it again reading your book. So we all compete for reputation, and that competition can take place many ways. The proper way for it to take place is that we compete on grounds of productivity and generosity, something like that.

And then if we establish a very positive reputation as a consequence of our productivity and generosity, then we're stably placed in a functional social hierarchy, and we're surrounded by people who will trade with us and will respect us and will treat us properly, and as a consequence, our negative emotion can be controlled.

So imagine you're virtuous, and so now you have a stellar reputation, and the consequence of that is that your nervous system views your positioning in the hierarchy as a consequence of that reputation and decreases your stress. So then when you go after someone, someone's key beliefs, the things they stand for hypothetically, you're threatening their reputation, and then you threaten their position in the hierarchy and then you threaten their emotional regulation. That's the chain.

The problem with all that is it can be gamed, and because there's nothing more important than reputation—and by the way, we pay attention to people who have a good reputation because there's nothing more important than reputation—people are motivated and willing to take shortcuts to attaining it.

Yeah, that's the issue with virtue signaling. And so you say, "Well, you can point to an injustice suffered on your behalf," and that elicits people's sympathy. And then you can claim to be a moral crusader, whether or not that's true, and then you adopt the cloak of reputation, and then you ratchet yourself up in a manipulative manner up the hierarchy of social security and esteem, and that's the narcissism, Machiavellian, psychopath game, and it's a game that threatens societies all the time. It always has.

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I think so, and I see it in politics quite often. I'm amazed by some of the people I thought I was close with who betrayed me or turned on me for the smallest of gains. I mean, you created an enemy for life for the smallest of gains. I would almost be more understanding of it if they gained something huge from doing what they did to me, and I can point out various cases; it's just unnecessary. But it's the incentive structure, unfortunately, in politics, because that kind of conflict gains people's attention, and attention is currency in today's political atmosphere.

We have unfortunately devolved into sort of this Jerry Springer, rock and soccer politics—it's tabloid politics, it's this news-of-the-day politics—opposed to taking a step back and arguing over some very fundamental differences in ideas and governing philosophies. Like, there are some proper debates to be had. And look, sometimes they do get had, but it's not what people are interested in. If these debates get had at all, it's because the people you elect are actually doing their job in committees and going through the hard work, but it's not glamorous, and they get no credit for it.

The people who get credit are the ones who don't bother with any of that boring policy stuff but who instead come out and yell and scream on the House floor about something or other and gain a lot of attention, and that's currency.

Yeah, well, it's very difficult, it's very difficult to keep that sort of attention that outrage can generate. It's very difficult to keep that under control, especially when it can spread so rapidly, let's say, on social media systems. Now in your book, you talk about the alternative to outrage and victimization. You talk about outrage as something like a combination of wrath, which is a cardinal sin, and envy, which is a cardinal sin, and pride, which is a cardinal sin.

It attracts a lot of attention; it's what elevates you morally in the face of your victimization, and you segue from that into, well, into your experience in Iraq, in the terrible medical problems, the battle injuries that you sustained as a consequence. And you talked a fair bit in there about how it was that you were able to not construe yourself as a victim. One of the things I found so striking in that section was the credit that you gave to your mother and the example she sent you.

You talked a little earlier about finding heroes or about identifying your heroes. It's like one of the things you can do to identify a hero is not so much seek out for someone that you'd like to emulate in a voluntary way but to watch yourself and see who you involuntarily admire just because of the way they are, and you make a very repeated case that that was the situation with your mother.

So maybe if you wouldn't mind, you could talk a little bit about that and then about how that experience shaped your ability to deal with catastrophe in your own life.

Well, you know, the title of that chapter is Perspectives from Darkness, and I mean the word darkness quite literally in this case because I was blind from the explosion. This was in 2012, in Afghanistan. We were on a sort of a planned mission. It's not really worth getting into exactly what we were doing or why we were there, but it was Afghanistan, and it was Helmand province, so you can imagine it's a bad place, and there's a lot of IEDs—there's IEDs everywhere in southern Kandahar and Helmand regions.

And one of my interpreters stepped on an IED right in front of me. He got all four of his limbs blown off right away, and I got knocked on the ground. I didn't quite know what happened. I immediately felt for my legs so that I knew that I wasn't the one who had stepped on it, but I knew I was hit with something. I could hear him moaning in this, you know, people think that because they watch war movies, and when somebody gets their guts blown out or an arm blown off or something, a lot of times in war movies, the person is screaming.

It's not really accurate. It's far more accurate when the person is sort of walking around in a daze, kind of like moaning. It's a much deeper pain; you can't scream. You can't possibly have the energy to scream. It's a much deeper moaning, groaning sound that you just never forget. I've heard it a few times, and so I heard that, and I put it together what had happened, and nothing you can do at that point.

I actually was in complete denial. I thought I just had dirt in my eyes, so I couldn't see anything, but I didn't have a lot of pain in my face. In hindsight, just because it would have been so numb. But I had severe pain throughout the rest of my body because frankly, the brunt of the blast was lower to the ground, and it hit the lower extremities of my body much harder just for anyone who's curious. I was wearing Kevlar underwear, so I was miraculously okay there, but heavy scarring everywhere else.

And for some reason, just never believed I was blind. Even when I woke up, I never really believed I was going to be blind. They told me the bad news, of course, when I woke up about five days later. To be clear, they put me into an induced coma on the medevac helicopter right when I left that site, so I was conscious throughout the whole thing. I remember it pretty well, but I was gone. I was out for five days after that, woke up in Germany and got all the news.

But for some reason kept a spirit, and then there's that next step, which is, "Well, I guess it's time to start feeling sorry for yourself because your life has changed pretty dramatically." And you know, this kind of self-sense of self-pity is like a warm cozy blanket. You can wrap yourself in it, and you can think about how everybody else on the team may be screwed up or how maybe the mission itself was screwed up. Maybe you can turn it into some statement about foreign policy and endless wars.

And there's no end of reasons that you could claim victimhood, and I've unfortunately watched some veterans get into politics and do exactly that, but it's pretty unhealthy, and I can't imagine being happy doing that. If I had to look to one person who had gone through severe hardship throughout her life, it was my mother. She got cancer, breast cancer, when I was five years old, and she eventually lost that battle when I was ten.

But in hindsight, I never saw her complain. I never saw her cry to us about it. She never lost her temper with us when she really should have in hindsight because I'm not sure we were the greatest. But the amount of grace and grit that she demonstrated had always stuck with me. Maybe it got me through other hard times, too. Maybe it was always subconscious; I'm not sure.

In any case, it's a model, and what I encourage people to do is if maybe you don't have—it's unlikely that you have that model in your life to that extreme extent—and thank God for it because that would really suck if everyone had that particular experience.

But you do have stories! You know, because again, there's real heroes that you know from your own life. There's real heroes from history, and then there's fake, you know, make-believe characters. I mentioned Superman as one of those make-believe characters. He's like this, he never says or does anything wrong. And for some reason, you're drawn to him. And then you have to start asking yourself, "Why am I drawn to this person?"

And maybe that person is your boss, or a leader in the military, or Superman, but you're drawn to them for some reason, and it's worth doing some introspection and thinking to yourself, "What are the traits that this person exhibits that I can emulate and be better as a result?"

Right. Well, and we should point out here too—that's also the case—like we should make a very clear distinction here that often when people are embittered and resentful and feel like they're victims, it's because really awful things have happened to them.

Now, not always, but often. And so then the question is, well, if you're in a situation and something really awful has happened to you, or has happened to you, then why shouldn't you feel like a victim? And is there a better alternative? And part of what you were trying to lay out in this part of the book is what those better alternatives are.

So part of looking for that hero is to find out from someone else's example—in your case, it was your mother—but these other sources that you described of people who were in a sort of hell, in an undeniable sense, but who chose in a very real way to make it as good as it could possibly be given the circumstances. And so they had to turn to sources of power, let's say, and strength and fortitude and resilience that weren't in some sense obviously associated with the catastrophe.

I mean, in your mother's case, it's a pretty tragic situation. She's a young mother, she has young kids, now she has breast cancer, and she fights a losing battle over a period of five years. That's pretty bad. And then you have to ask yourself, given that that's obviously pretty bad, how is it even possible that someone could handle that with not only grace and courage but the kind of grace and courage that leaves their children with an unmovable sense of the ability to prevail in the face of the deepest adversity?

I mean, that's really something. You said here, "Thousands have come before you, and they did just fine, so quit your complaining." And it's not because you have nothing to complain about; that's not the case. It's that that’s not the right approach.

The fact is—and this is such an optimistic fact as well as a judgment in some sense—the fact is, that if someone else can do it, so can you. And that's something, right? If you're reading about the great heroes in history, people who are in these terrible situations, and you see someone rise to the occasion, and then you can say, "Well, that was a person who did that, and I'm a person, and so maybe I have that capacity too," even though I don't know how to approach it.

Much of the rest of your book, I would say in some sense, is a guide to help people figure out how they could approach that. One of the things you point out first is, well, notice who you admire, and then maybe try consciously practicing becoming like that. You said, "I had many defensible reasons for bitterness after grief and grievance after getting blown up and losing an eye while you were face down after your surgery."

Right? You were face down and immobilized for six weeks. You said you couldn't even move your neck, because otherwise you might go blind, which is like a good reason not to move your neck. And you were all blown up in the front—in your chest and so forth—and you're also laying on these wounds.

And so how in the world did you manage that? You had your wife—that was obviously extremely helpful.

Oh yeah, and I'll talk about that. Six weeks was a long time, and the reason you're lying on your, on your stomach—you have to be face down. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to lie on your stomach; you can in theory walk around; you just have to be looking down the whole time. It's not like your eye will pop out if you, you know, take a break, and you're allowed to take a couple breaks, and, you know, naturally sleeping, it's very difficult to do this, and so you're gonna roll over.

The reason you do it is because when you do retina repairs, they need to put a band-aid of sorts on your retina, and you can't stick a bandage on your retina, of course. So what they do is they stick a gas bubble in your eye, and you have to face down so that gas bubble presses against your retina and holds it in place.

It's quite the surgery. In fact, I had a much worse surgery a year and a half ago. I went blind again because my retina fully detached this time due to the scar tissue from that earlier blast. And so, bam, I was right back on my stomach. A little easier this time because I didn't have all the other wounds you were referring to, and frankly, it was a nice break from politics, if I'm being perfect.

[Laughter] Yeah, I was really tired the only time I fully detached, you know, so to speak. So, you know, and I want to hit one thing you said just one more time because it's important as a foundation, and that's what I try to do in the book is foundations, our perspective and these heroes and from there now it's time to start giving lessons on how to be those heroes—

But the perspective part is important, and that quote you read is important, and I say it in speeches a lot too. If I'm giving sort of a non-political speech, they'll say, "Look, here's the truth: whatever you're going through now, you've probably been through something more difficult, so deal with this."

Now, it may be true that you've actually never been through something more difficult, but here's another truth: somebody else has been through something more difficult and they've dealt with it a lot better than you're dealing with it now.

Yeah, that's a hard truth, but it's also an optimistic truth, right? Because when you see someone in the depths of genuine suffering, hopefully what you're trying to do is to throw a lifeline, and one possible lifeline is compassion, and that's probably the right lifeline to throw an infant, you know, who's suffering that sort of overwhelming compassion.

But for someone who is an adult—or making progress towards being an adult—the lifeline that might be thrown is there’s something within you that would let you be more than you are and much more, and maybe enough more so that you could actually deal with this suffering so it didn't turn into hell and take everything along with it, and that's there isn't anything more optimistic than that.

You say something here which I think is extremely—I’m going to read something from your book here—it is true that character is to some extent innate. I would say what that does is that it provides each of us with a range of talents and a range of temptations and something like that, so it’s the hand we’re dealt, and there’s certainly a genetic element to that.

Our genetic makeup imbues in us certain proclivities, but it is as true that character is mostly a consequence of choices, strangely enough. We all make them, and we should make them deliberately with the knowledge that these choices are part of our responsibility toward a purpose other than our own selfish aims.

That responsibility is to your family, friends, community, and country. That’s something that conservatives put forward as a pathway to virtue. You know, and what’s so interesting about that as far as I’m concerned, as an antidote to atomistic liberalism, let’s say, that hyper-privileges the individual, is that it’s definitely been my observation as a clinical psychologist that in the depths of misery, the capability that you have to be of service to other people—your family, your friends, your community, your country—that's actually a saving grace under such circumstances.

You know, that people really find a deep and abiding meaning in that service, so it's not just finger-wagging and the pointing towards duty. It's like, "No, no, you don’t understand that if you’re in desperate straits, if your life has fallen apart, if you’re nihilistic and miserable, and maybe you have your bloody reasons because maybe you do, that’s still the case that if you step outside yourself and you try to make the lives of other people better, that’s the best possible thing that you can do for yourself."

And so I really like that it’s defining. You know what Thomas Jefferson wrote, the Declaration of Independence, this right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And you know, those words get thrown around a lot, and some people might say, "Well, pursue my happiness," that means pursue whatever ends I want, right? Pursue whatever gives me that short-term gratification, pursue whatever makes me just feel good—

But there's a difference, that's what when I don’t think that's what the founders meant. And there's a lot of evidence for that because what they meant was the pursuing of purpose. You know, the idea that some sort of purpose in your life is what makes you happy, and that there is a given set of traditions and social interactions, and standards of living that genuinely make people happier.

One of those you mentioned is doing good for others. Some kind of service. Having some kind of responsibility to feel useful. And so it's, it's not—we rely on the Bible a lot for this moral framework, but you don't have to if you don't want to, because you can look just like basic psychology, I think, to derive the same conclusions there. Just happens to be a lot of truth.

Well, one of the conclusions that you can draw, and we know this psychologically and psychophysiologically now, we know what neuropharmacologically—it's known from multiple dimensions simultaneously that the system that produces happiness, let's say in the founders' sense, produces that emotion in relationship to the observation of movement towards a valued goal.

And so, so you can derive some conclusions from that. The first is that without a goal, there’s no happiness by definition because happiness marks movement towards a valued goal. The next is, well, the higher the goal, the more value there is in the observation of movement towards it.

And so out of that, you might ask, well, then what’s the highest goal? Because why don’t we go for that? Well, then you could say, well, you should do your best for the best. You might say, "Well, that's just to make me hedonically happy." It's like, "Well, wait a second, you know, cocaine will work for that." Because in the end, it actually even activates this system.

But what about tomorrow and next week and next month? And so the problem with hedonism as a goal is, first of all, it vanishes when you’re suffering. But even failing that, if you’re serving yourself hedonically in the narrow sense, it's just about me and my pleasure, it's like, "Okay, which you? Today's you, tomorrow's you, next week's you, next month's you—what about next year, five years from now, ten years from now? You're going to lead a hedonic and dissolute life, and what are you going to be? A burnt-out shell and a wreck—a dismal wreck in ten years? Because that's what will happen."

And so if you don't construe yourself as a community stretched out across time, then you're not even serving yourself, and if you do construe yourself as a community stretched across time, then serving other people and serving yourself turn out to be exactly the same thing.

I have a question for you as I was hearing you go through this, and maybe I would have liked to maybe flesh this out in the book, but I didn't. I’m also not a therapist so probably best that I didn't try. But how do you advise people on how much they should give in to their pleasure-seeking, that short-term gratification, just for the—because it does seem to me that just for the sake of sanity, there has to be some balance there.

It's very difficult to be perfect. Well, it's a mistake, and you know, one of the things I just did a seminar, I just did a course on the Sermon on the Mount, and Christ in one of the sections of that sermon, he says to people that you shouldn’t lose your saltiness, you shouldn’t lose your savor, and you’re the salt of the earth.

And without that salt, everything loses its flavor, and salt is a preservative and it's a spice. That’s often conceptualized, that phrase is referring to the salt of the earth, you know, the solid, reliable types who bear all burdens. But that is not what it means!

I looked at a lot of different translations. I talked to a lot of people about that verse, and really what it means is, "Well, there should be some spiciness and unpredictability and humor about you, and there should be some play in the system, right? Because that's what stops you from just being the narrow, dead past letter of the law with no spirit.”

There should be some snake inside the tree. There should be some fire inside the bush. Those are all ways of construing that that are symbolically equivalent. There should be some dynamism in you, and a fair bit of that’s associated with, well, enthusiasm—that's fun.

But enthusiasm means to be imbued with the Spirit of God. That's why people like comedians so much too, because that's what they do. And so you have to leave in the duty with humor, and your book does a lovely job of that too, because your book, which is a very conservative book in the best possible way, and is a call to duty and responsibility, but you constantly return to themes of both stoicism and humor, which are tied together in some sense.

You know, I was just in Newfoundland for the last week doing a documentary there, and Newfoundland's a rough rock. It's beautiful and harsh, and the people there are tough and resilient, man, because they had to be. And Newfoundlanders have a great sense of humor, and they're always making fun. And that’s a necessary level, right? That ability to deal with serious matters in the light—in a light, with a light touch.

And it’s something I’m trying to learn to do more and more even in the most serious of conversations, you know? Because if you’re a master, you’ve got both. You’ve got that light touch and that sense of humor. You really see that military people who've been through rough situations—I was going to say that the best kind of humor is dark military humor.

And it is not for public consumption, but it is. Yeah, because it's everything that it's supposed to admit. It's offensive and it's dark in ways you can't even comprehend. But yeah, unless you've been in that—unless you've been in that darkness.

So you said here too—and let's go for another quote here—throughout your life, this is very practical advice too, and I think it's very wise from a therapeutic perspective. Throughout your life, you have people you look up to. Okay, so let’s think about that. You look up—what does that mean?

Why up? Well, up is something that beckons from a distance. It’s like a light on a hill, and we automatically assume that those who we admire are people we look up to. So that specifies a distance and a direction, and it’s uphill. It’s up toward a higher vista, let’s say.

So there are automatically people who elicit that spirit in you. You have noticed the way a teacher, parent, co-worker, mentor, or friend interacts with others, and you come away thinking, “Hmm, that behavior simply works better. They are respected, admired, and successful.”

And you find yourself wondering why that is. If you're a little bit humble instead of being envious, right? Because otherwise, you think that damn crook, he just stole his position, and that's why he's got it. But if you're a bit humble, you might think, "Well, no, that guy looks successful. Maybe he knows something I don't."

You are noticing attributes and character traits that are good and worth aspiring to. You are noticing attributes that make certain people more successful than others. You are noticing what a hero looks like, and in the process, you are discovering a path made up of desirable personality traits that helps you ascend in social hierarchies.

That’s Jacob’s Ladder, by the way; that ladder that is the hierarchy to the good. That’s the vision Jacob has of the pathway to God is that it’s a hierarchical structure with the thing that’s ultimately good at the pinnacle by definition, right? The best of all possible goods, and then there are intermediary structures all the way up and beings inhabiting those structures.

And this isn’t metaphysical; it’s like if you find someone you admire, the reason you admire them is because they’re higher up in that heavenly hierarchy than you are, and your whole nervous system tells you that. You’re compelled to listen; you’re compelled to pay attention by the action of your own unconscious mind.

You know, what’s interesting about this point of identifying these heroes or at least role models? You can call them either one. I just thought heroes was a more compelling word to use for the sake of writing it, but what’s interesting about it too is how pop culture actually plays a pretty important part of this.

Because, like, there’s plenty of people who simply don’t have these good role models in their lives, and you have to acknowledge that. And so where are they supposed to turn? And it’s maybe one of the reasons that it’s so important to fight these cultural wars that you and I engage in on a fairly regular basis.

That they become a serious part of our politics, which at the same time is necessary but also deeply, deeply unfortunate. I do think the attack on pop culture from this progressive victimhood left has reached a ceiling. I think there’s a serious backlash. You look at movies like Top Gun, the recent one, maybe like the highest grossing of all time.

Absolutely phenomenal movie, really fun to watch. Why? Because it just had all of these classical virtues and infused within it about relationships and about how you treat people and what the consequences are for treating people as such. That these things speak to people in a deeper way—they can't necessarily articulate them. But they get it; they understand it when they see it.

And there are these sort of radical minorities that are very loud that want that change. You know, they want something else to be on that hill, but people react against it because it’s not true; there’s no truth to that.

Yeah, well, something cries out from inside of them then, and that can be appealed to by a storyteller. I saw the same thing in the Marvel Avengers series, is that there is a return to any wide range of classical virtues—certainly brotherhood, a kind of military ethos, sacrifice, a striving upward—certainly masculine virtues.

The combination of the Hulk and Iron Man, for example, that’s a—there’s a monstrous element to the Hulk, but he’s a hero in a strange sense, and he’s also the revitalizing force for Iron Man when he just about dies. And that’s all the reason those movies were so necessary and so attractive is because they are in fact addressing a radical conceptual void in the culture.

And it’s a void that, well, that you're addressing in your book, especially with your appeal—well, trifold appeal, let’s say—to duty, responsibility, and humor at the same time, right? Which is a kind of stoicism in the face of catastrophe.

Here’s a model. So for everyone who's listening and watching, if you don't know what you should do with your life, you don't know who you should be. Sometimes you think about that as what career you should pursue, but here’s another way of thinking about it.

It’s kind of a SEAL’s ethos that Congressman Crenshaw detailed out. Here are some things you could be: Those are my words; these are his. You’ll be someone who’s never late. You will be someone who takes care of his men, gets to know them, and puts their needs before yours. You’ll be someone who does not quit in the face of adversity.

You will be someone who takes charge and leads when no one else will. You will be detail-oriented, which you discuss a lot in later sections of the book—always vigilant, attentive. You will be aggressive in your actions, but never lose your cool. You will have a sense of humor because sometimes that’s all that can get you through the darkest hours.

You will work hard and perform even when no one is watching. You’ll be creative and think outside the box, even if it gets you in trouble. You're a rebel, but not a mutineer. You are a jack of all trades and master of none.

And then you follow that a little later with this paragraph—these paragraphs: Be aggressive enough to kill the enemy, but immediately calm enough not to scare a little old lady. You’ll be that man who’s mentally tough enough to operate in horrific chaos, then immediately transition to tranquility—all without mentally breaking. You will effectively transition from hyper-masculine aggressor to gentle caretaker. You’ll be both a warrior and a gentleman.

The qualities that made SEAL leaders great were rarely physical in nature. They listened; they empowered their team to be successful, carefully entrusting individuals with additional responsibility. It’s a real conservative ethos there. They highlighted good performance publicly and criticized bad performance privately.

And so, you know, those are lists of virtues, and maybe they’re not the only list of possible virtues—probably not—but if you’re lost and you don’t know where to start practicing, you know, you also talk about this idea that this is an Aristotelian idea, you know, that we are our habits. We become what we practice, and if you imagine if you’re lost in your listing—you think, “Well, you find some things admirable”—well, you could practice those things.

And you can practice them locally and minimally in your own relationships, and you can start to get good at them. And as you get good at them, well, you get better at them, right? And then you can broaden out the scope of your action into a wider purview, and like I just can’t see how you can go wrong if you’re miserable by starting to work hard on making other people's lives better, especially if you do it to some degree in secret, you know, without trumpeting it.

Yeah, and then being able to deal with it when you’re not necessarily rewarded for it right away. It’s certainly true in politics. You know, what you were reading there was a combination of I think some general advice, but also the warrior ethos, which is a little bit more extreme, right? This ability to move from chaos to tranquility very quickly.

It’s just, it’s always a phrase that stuck with me, maybe from BUD/S instructors. As we were going through training, they were always telling you who they want you to be. And it’s a mission statement, right? It’s an ethos, and there’s a SEAL ethos which is a little long to read, but it’s incredible because it’s telling you who you should be, not what you should do necessarily—not what outcomes you’re looking for.

And you know, you tell this to corporations who have a mission statement on their website, they’re going to be like, “The number one seller on the West Coast!” Well, that’s an outcome you might be looking for, but that's not telling you anything about who you want to be.

Yeah, and if you don’t tell that to the team, they have nowhere to aim for. They also can’t switch outcomes when it’s necessary. You know, because this is a big problem in life—imagine you’re aiming for something, and then something happens to make it impossible or you find out that it’s the wrong thing because you’re aiming in the wrong direction.

Well, so then what do you have to rely on? To set your right, it's not your aim obviously, but it might be your capacity to take new aim, and that’s bloody well dependent on your character, that’s for sure.

And so I don’t think there’s a more fundamental aim than what you should be, and there’s no better way of characterizing what you should be than that you should fortify your character.

Also worth noting, the outcomes you want will come more easily if you’re striving to be something that is a known good, that is of good quality at least. And you know, I hope this book at least details some ideas of what that better person might look like, and yeah, well, it’s certainly untrue that I live up to every one of those points that I just discussed, but we’re all sinners.

But that’s also part of the point of an ideal, right? I mean the ideal should be beyond you or what the hell kind of ideal is that if it's not an uphill walk?

Then there’s nothing to do, and of course you’re going to be in sufficient relationship to that. You list some other attributes here too that all continue with here, and you want to be someone who could take a joke. That’s an amazingly important thing, eh?

And it’s been so interesting to me, especially when I interacted with physically laboring men in particular who have very, very difficult, very, very difficult jobs, and military jobs can be paramount among those, is that that’s a prime way that men size each other up. It’s like I think the question of whether or not you can take a joke is something like, “Are you humble enough to be able to rapidly and with good humor admit to your own stupidity?”

And in a fundamental sense, right? Because if you do something funny, people will call you on it. It’s like “Look at how useless you are,” and you go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, look, I'm pretty useless. You think that’s useless? Here’s something else I did yesterday that was like twice as useless as that,” and then people think, “Oh, well, he’s not afraid; he’s bigger than his flaws.”

Yeah, and he’s secure. You know, there’s a sense of insecurity when you can’t take a joke. Now, of course, the partner of that idea would be tell good jokes. Okay, yes, right. There’s, you know, if you’re going to hit somebody for something, make sure it’s at least 20 percent funny and not just insulting, and that requires judgment.

It requires a bit of balance and practice, to be honest. Timing, crack. You know, and just being in those moments. My sense of humor is perhaps a little too dry and sarcastic for some, especially outside the military, but you adapt and you learn and you take social cues, and you will become better at this.

You shouldn’t shy away from humor because it’s hard to imagine anything that gets you through difficult times better than humor.

Yeah, well, that’s a lovely thing if it was true, isn’t it, that there isn’t anything better to get you through difficulties than humor. It’d be lovely if the world was actually set up that way.

You want to be someone who can take a joke; you want to be productive. Yeah, the best definition I ever read of Christian charity, maybe just of charity in general, is generosity plus productivity.

And look, people like to stress the first, especially when they aren’t the second. It’s like, “I’m generous!” It’s like, “Yeah, but you don’t have anything,” so that’s—you know, now I’m not talking about the people who truly have nothing and are still willing to share. I’m talking about the people who pull down the productive while hyping their own generosity and forgetting that you’d be even better at being generous if you were all so productive.

So, I hear from socialists a lot that Jesus was a socialist. This is a common refrain from the progressive left, and the idea it’s not true that you should want to give charity.

And I said Jesus wasn’t saying that you should take from others and make them give charity. That wasn’t what [he] said; you need to be generous with your belongings, with your time, with your labor. That’s what he was saying. It was a generosity of the heart, not a demand on others—that's right!

Well, it was at that—it's absolutely 100 percent correct. It’s an injunction towards the highest form of self-sacrifice, period, the end. Obviously, that’s what the crucifixion means, the acceptance of that catastrophic death, all of that—what would you say? The tragedy of life? And then even a further radical acceptance of the necessity to confront hell—that’s self-sacrifice. That is not calling for moral actions on the part of others on your behalf, definitely 100 percent not.

And that self-sacrifice is called upon even if you’re innocent, right? So it’s even more than that. You want to have the ability to delay gratification.

You know, that ties in with what we talked about earlier about being able to treat yourself as if you’re a community across time, because to delay gratification means to sacrifice you, the hedonism of the present, to the security and iterability of the future.

And so that is a hallmark of maturity. That’s also the ability to make sacrifices. That’s why the sacrificial motif is stressed so hard in the Old Testament. You have to make sacrifices to what? Well, to whatever you value.

Well, what’s the highest value? Well, by definition, that’s God. So do you sacrifice to God? Well, if you sacrifice at all, you sacrifice to a God. Maybe you don’t sacrifice, well then you’re immature. Maybe you sacrifice to a lesser God, then maybe you should get your act together.

That’s all tied together integrally with the notion of the ability to delay gratification. That’s why God tells Adam and Eve that they’re condemned to work when they get thrown out of the Garden of Eden. It’s like, “Well, now you have to work because you’re aware of the future.”

Well, that’s a call to sacrifice because work is a sacrificial act. And then the question is, in service of what? And there’s another chapter in the book called “Do Something Hard.” It’s very pretty direct and straightforward there.

But what we’re getting at is that there’s a problem in our society where we do our best to alleviate any kind of suffering as if we feel that there’s this utopia available to us where suffering can be completely removed from our lives. But that's a false promise; that's a false God.

It’s impossible, and worse than that, it prevents that sacrifice that you’re talking about. It prevents that uphill climb because people feel are told to feel that there’s some sense of injustice if you have to work harder than anyone else for something.

And you know, and they’re blinded as to why. And look, maybe you do have to work harder than someone else to get to the same point. I’m not saying that’s impossible, but we all do; that's true for all of us, right?

Because with our genetic inheritance, let’s say some things come relatively easy to us, and some things are virtually impossible and have to be strived for mightily.

And I’m also not saying that some people aren’t, what would you say, condemned in some fundamental way in multiple dimensions simultaneously. I mean, I’ve had people in my clinical practice and met people in my private life who are burdened by so many difficulties simultaneously that it’s almost incomprehensible.

So I’m not saying there’s something even-handed about this, but all of us have to work very hard on certain fronts to be better and to do better. And it’s also not obvious to me that that’s actually—that’s an unbearable price in some sense, but it’s also the most fundamental disciplining adventure, right?

And we know, I know, I don’t know what it’s like for you; I suspect it’s the same. But when I look back in my life, I think when I’m thinking in a positive way, I think, “Well, that was really difficult, but it was worth it.”

And those two things are integrally associated, right? Because you don’t generally say, “Well, that was easy, but it was worth it.” You know, and so what that seems to mean is that the difficulty is intrinsically bound up with the reward.

And then, of course, we know that, right? Because how happy are you even for someone else when you see them overcome immense odds to attain something of value? Everyone stands up and cheers when that happens. You know, that's every feel-good family movie ever made.

And I think one of the hardest parts about this concept is choosing which suffering to engage in—like which challenge to embark upon—and I think it’s a bigger problem for my generation in particular, because we see everything on the internet, and we see how quickly some people made it.

And then we feel behind, if we’re 10 years older than that, let’s say. And so there’s this—and I wonder if that’s what’s behind the millennial habit of changing between jobs extremely rapidly. It’s hard for people to commit to a certain place because they’re so unsure if this is worth it.

And you know, and I don’t know how to give that kind of advice. I don’t know what the right path is for you. What I can tell you is if you’re giving 90 instead of 110, that whatever it is you’re engaged in now, the opportunities to do what you really want to do probably won’t materialize.

I’ve got another principle there too. If you’re uncertain about what you’re doing and you don’t know if you should change course, set yourself the obligation to choose something more difficult before you change course.

Because there’s a moral hazard, right? It’s like, “Well, am I unhappy or am I just useless?” It’s like, “Well, a little of column A and a little column B.” Well, how do I fortify myself against my uselessness?

I don't allow myself to switch course unless the challenge increases, and that works. You know, it’s a check against your own laziness and inertia and envy and resentment, because you know then too you can say to yourself, “Well, I moved from there. I didn’t fail; I didn’t quit. I chose something more difficult.”

And so I can have some faith in my choice—maybe I can have some faith in my choice because you accepted a bigger challenge. We talk about quitting; this gets to another chapter called "No Plan B."

What I lay out as a concept there is not necessarily that you shouldn't have plan B's, as defined as contingencies in your life. You should always have contingencies, but there’s a mindset where that contingency becomes a crutch.

You know, and I talk about this in terms of SEAL training called BUD/S—Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—that’s the famous training that everybody’s familiar with with Hell Week and the boats on your heads, running miles and miles, getting wet and sandy, coming in and out of the cold Pacific Ocean. That’s BUD/S.

And if you go into BUD/S with any other idea than you will die before you quit, then you will probably quit, because the contingency is pretty obvious. It’s warm coffee and donuts if you just go ring the bell three times and you say you’ve quit. That’s your plan B.

You will reduce your suffering to a minimum if you do that. But if that is truly an option for you in your head, then you’ll probably take it, especially in the face of great adversity, which this training certainly is.

And so plan B doesn’t mean don’t have a backup plan; it does mean have a mindset where you’re gonna aim higher—where you’re aiming for your fundamental purpose, and quitting is a tricky word because really, if you know, if you quit changing courses, as you mentioned, it's not necessarily quitting.

I already point out, you think you want to be an artist, and this has been your dream for, for God knows how long, but honestly, you suck at it, and that is, your talent just cannot catch up with your aspirations, and that’s a reality.

You know, if you move to something else, does that make you a quitter? I’m not sure—I'm not so sure it does.

Yeah, exactly! Well, then that's just learning from experience. You know, and I was thinking when you were talking about no plan B, I thought, "Oh yes, well that's marriage." You know, because the great psychologist Carl Jung, he thought, "Well, marriage has to be an unbreakable vow." Why? Because you have to be in 110 percent, and if you have a backup plan, which is, "Well, if this doesn’t work out, I can always find someone else," it’s like, “Okay, okay, fair enough.”

Maybe you mean that there’s some prominent Americans who've said the same thing. It’s like, you know, it’s terrifying. And when you were talking about attention to detail and my advice for young people got me thinking, I listened to last night to your podcast with the president of Hillsdale College, Larry Arnn.

And he was talking about how the students were demanding that he debate them about a constitutional convention. And I loved how he walked through this. It struck home with me because there is this tendency again because of this loyalty to this constant loyalty testing, this constant competition on the right of who’s the most conservative.

It’s like, “Well, I want to secure the border!” “Well, I want to stop all immigration!” “So I’m more conservative!” Right?

And so there’s this very strange tit-for-tat, and then you start to question, like, “I’m sorry, what principle are you tethered to, and how does that make you more conservative? And so that’s apparent, that’s the story he was telling basically, but he didn’t say this, but it was pretty obviously true.

And the young people inflamed with being the best conservative they can be say, “Look, if you’re a real conservative you want to go real hardcore; you want a constitutional convention.” And the way he dealt with that was saying, “Look, I’ll debate you on this, but let it go after that! We can’t spend too much time on this.”

Because the truth is you don’t really know what you’re talking—they didn’t say that. Yeah, I’m not quoting him, but it gets to my point of, by definition, you can’t possibly know really what you’re talking about.

You just don’t have the life experience for it. Well, that’s why you’re a student! Like, why the hell are you at the university if you’re not a student? Like, are you a student or a professor? If you're a student, then you don't know, and if you don't know, you don’t know. Then you’re not a student, and you should be somewhere else!

And the professors too is like, are you the guy who knows at least something, or not? Are you the equal of the students? Well then why are they paying you? It’s like, why is the hierarchy set up this way?

And the thing is, there is nothing more demoralizing you can tell young people than, “You already know everything you need to know now.” I mean, Jesus—I don’t want to know that about me! It’s like, “I know everything I need to know now.” It’s like, what the hell am I going to do for the next 20 years, then? There’s no horizon of ignorance to overcome.

I do think there’s a crisis of humility in our current generation, and I do think it comes from exposure to the internet and exposure to quite a bit of information and a total lack of gratitude and appreciation for elder wisdom.

And look, there’s an argument to be made that many, that say the Baby Boomer generation really screwed some things up for us, but there’s a counterargument to be made that this is still the best time to be alive in history.

That’s an important counterargument, the whole best time in history argument. And it’s just having a sense of humility about what state you’re really in and what you really know, and that there’s a calming factor to that too.

That measures to outrage culture, because if you do think you know everything and you’re so self-righteous that you’ll die for that belief, well then you’re going to be pretty mad about it, and you’re going to tweet about it, and you’re going to chastise others you don’t necessarily agree with or have some questions, at least as to why you feel so strongly about this.

And so that outrage also serves as a shortcut to argumentation that’s pretty dangerous too, and on the right, what’s happened is, again, that shortcut is usually some kind of epithet like "rhino." Or, “I’m more conservative than you,” so as opposed to an actual argument about, say, whether a constitutional convention makes sense to deliver our principles or makes sense for moving the ball forward on the field, which is a perfectly fine conversation to have, it just becomes about who’s more conservative, which is really just a form of insulting somebody in order to bypass strong debate.

Well, I really enjoyed your book. Thank you, Jordan; it means a lot to me. Oh, I should also point out for everybody who’s listening is that Dan, maybe you can say a few words about this—you have a youth conference every year. Do you want to just talk about that?

Maybe we’ll close with that because this is something you do that’s quite unique and I think it’s quite remarkable, and it’s also fun. It’s leveled with that sense of humor that we described earlier and it’s an invitation to young people to participate civically in a positive manner that isn't a hallmark greeting card too.

No, no, I love doing it. This is our third year doing it in October. You appeared virtually last year and answered questions for a lot of the students. Last year we also had Ben Shapiro; we had Michael Knowles, Megyn Kelly came. This year is going to be even more eclectic.

We’re going to have Dennis Prager, and we’ll have Michael Knowles again. We’ll have conservative comedians like JP Sears. We’ll also have Randy Houser, who’s a big country star; he’ll play Saturday night. So I want it to be fun.

We have the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, coming. He’s going to give you financial advice. So what I’m trying to create here is a conservative TED Talk series, more or less.

Because every speaker, I work with them; I’m going to make sure we have a particular message to deliver, and this is different from most conservative events because if you go to most conservative events, it’s political speech after political speech. I’m not sure you’re getting a hugely different message with each one.

They can be fun; I’m just different from those things, right? I’m not criticizing, say, what CPAC—it’s for a different reason. I want a liberal student to be able to walk into my event and come away thinking those conservatives aren’t as evil and crazy as I thought they were.

I want that to be possible, and more importantly, I want, because it's majority conservative students coming to this, I want them to walk away with better ideas and better ways to formulate their ideas, because a lot of people these days, it gets to that when I tell young kids, like don't make decisions too early. Don't get too adhere too quickly to an ideology, because what a lot of people end up doing is putting on a red jersey or a blue jersey and then thinking and then screaming “Okay, wait, wait. Now what do I say, and why do I say it?”

Like after they put on the jersey, and that's just not how it's supposed to work, right? You should—it should take a while for you to get to get to the decision of what team you want to be on.

And this is why the radical left, radical right have such similar traits, because on the radical right they're wearing red jerseys, but they're basically Bernie Bros. They have the same disposition.

Like the same kind of animated thought processes, and that's a problem. So I want people to have a better idea of how to work through those things. This year, I'm actually upping the age too; if you’re older, you can just pay money and come to it.

So you know, I really want to open it up. It’s really fun. And I hope you’ll appear at least virtually this year as well.

Yeah, well, I’d like to attend. I think I’ll definitely attend virtually. I’d like to attend in person at some point; I think I’m touring. But I do think too that on the conservative front, I mean, you're an interesting figure because you're an adventurous guy, and you're a creative guy, and you've got a wicked sense of humor and a real sense of fun.

And you know, that adds that kind of libertarian spice in some sense to that conservative persona. And so there’s a nice balance of tree and snake in that combination, and so I think that really comes out in that youth convention.

If you’re interested in the youth summit, it’s crenshawyouthsummit.com. That was the only thing I realized we left out: crenshawyouthsummit.com.

Well thank you, and like I said, I really appreciated your book and also the broader philosophical and motivational context that needs to be addressed because the fundamental culture war isn't happening within the political domain. It's superordinate to that, and I see your work and the way you conduct yourself in the political domain as reflective of something much deeper and more profound and necessary.

Hello everyone! I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.