Government as Force | Senator Mike Lee - Jordan B Peterson Podcast S4 E14

[Music] i'm privileged i would say today to have a discussion with senator mike lee he's been the u.s senator from utah since 2010 chair of the joint economic committee since january of 2019 i'm going to get you to tell us what that is and why it's important senator lee graduated from brigham young university with a degree in political science and gained his law degree from byu's law school in 1997. he started his career as a clerk for the u.s district court for the district of utah and then clerked for justice samuel alito on the third circuit court of appeals he served utah as governor jon huntsman's general counsel and reunited with justice alito who is now on the u.s supreme court for an additional one-year clerkship he's written four books i don't know how you find the time quite frankly the freedom agenda arguing for a balanced budget amendment why john roberts was wrong about health care which was an e-book critiquing the supreme court's obamacare ruling our lost constitution in 2015 and written out of history in 2017 he's been ranked by the new york times using a nominate system developed by political scientists to assess political position on political spectrum mostly left to right uh as indexed by roll call voting behavior as the most conservative member of the senate and i thought we could talk to senator lee today about well first of all about civics what would be what what was called civics at one point i suppose that you might have been taught in high school if you were fortunate about the structure and function of the us government and about about the day-to-day life of a senator um and what that entails about the american constitution in general and then about about the issues that he sees as most pressing the con currently confronting well the us in particular but also the world so thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me today thank you jordan it's really an honor to be with you yeah well i i we met just so everyone knows we met in washington that must be three years ago i think it was in 2018. i was very fortunate to come down to washington and meet a number of republican senators and congressmen democratic democrat senators and congressmen as well trying to get people to talk across the aisle and we'll talk about that a little bit too about that possibility so you're an expert on the us constitution uh from the legal perspective and and you have lots of practical political experience and so maybe you could just start by talking to us about how you see the how you understand the structure of the us federal government well thanks for asking that question jordan this is something i feel strongly about it's something that i think can help lead us to a place where as a country we can heal where we can avoid some of the pitfalls that have proven problematic for us at times the u.s government is based on a document written in 1787 by a a group of individuals who i believe were wise men raised up by god to that very purpose whether you believe in god or not and regardless of what form of belief you might have when you look at the us constitution you can't help but see that it has been an essential part of a puzzle it's sort of fostered the development of the greatest civilization that human history has ever known it's done this uh and not because the document itself has any magical powers or the words themselves do but because the document itself recognizes that the sovereignty in our system are the people the people have a right to be free and that's something that's embodied in our declaration of independence written 11 years before the constitution which we acknowledged uh part of as a probably is a product of the scottish enlightenment and and how that spread on both sides of the atlantic that the power of government really derives from the people and that ultimately our sovereign is god on earth sovereigns are citizens government is an earthly institution that operates by necessity in order to prevent us from harming each other and being harmed by others in order to protect life liberty and property but ultimately we realize that government is something of a necessary evil government is best understood i believe as the official collective use of force under the authority of a rule of general applicability that we call law force properly understood is something that like anything else that we deal with in the world that we find necessary like oxygen like water like fire for example absolutely an essential part of life certainly an essential part of any um thriving civilization but it's dangerous just like each of those things and left unless kept carefully in check it it will become dangerous because it's run by fallible mortal human beings that's essential to our understanding of the constitution is the fact that human beings have infinite uh uh and eternal value uh they are flawed but they're redeemable and we've got to make sure that power checks power his government is forced so within our system of government sets up two really important structural protections to guarantee liberty you see liberty and government power exists somewhat in opposition to each other and yet at the same time they kind of hold each other in check government power authority force if you will cannot expand except at the expense of individual liberty to a degree we need this to make sure that we don't kill each other hurt each other or take each other's things but it's also got to be kept in check at earlier times of human development in some parts of the world to this very day government has best been understood as being embodied the government authority is embodied in a single sovereign a monarch a caesar a king a queen in our system of government we recognize that immense danger exists in the concentration of power in the hands of the few and so we split up the sovereign authority to make sure that it really belonged ultimately to the people we split up government authority uh along two axes first on the vertical axis with something we call federalism it was embodied in the text of the original constitution and later emphasized in the 10th amendment adopted a few years later but it says basically that most power in the united states of america will be exercised at the state and local level by the people now there's a there's a principle if i remember correctly and i really like this principle i believe it was developed in england in great britain but i and maybe it's part of the scottish enlightenment that an issue should be dealt with by the most local authority capable of dealing with it and so that's one way of deciding of noting that authority has to be distributed across uh multiple levels but also of determining who should be in charge yes yes that's exactly right jordan and in fact um [Music] we learned this as americans as part of our experience uh with colonial britain uh we we were um we were british subjects prior to our revolution and over a couple hundred years we we learned something that i think the uh the english crown discovered somewhat by accident which is that once you've established a community in the in the case of what became the united states these 13 colonies if you allow them to govern themselves locally on local matters it actually works pretty well and over the couple hundred years leading up to our revolution we would go for these cycles where the crown would exercise either more or less influence it tended to exercise more in the wake of wars that it had to pay for it said more tax collectors those tax collectors would impose more regulations and then after a while they would withdraw but we prospered as they sort of let go so that's part of why we were instinctively drawn to what we today call federalism or in other words where we say let's govern ourselves at the most local level possible just a few powers will exist at the national level the federal government uh is supposed to be in charge of national defense declaring war regulating interstate and foreign trade uh bankruptcy laws immigration laws postal roads there are a few other powers but you get the idea that's the basic gist of it they're distinctively national in character unavoidably national in their impact all other things aside from that default proposition of where things are made federal are to be kept local local people have the advantage of being on the ground and being able to see exactly what's going on and and higher orders um officials let's say have the advantage of being able to aggregate large number of not large numbers of people to do the same thing at the same time but there's a tension between those two things and so and so you could think that there's a level of responsibility for the individual and for the family and then for the local community and the state and the federal government and then hypothetically international organizations as well but you want the least amount of power possible moving up precisely precisely it's a very good absolutely i think yeah and you made you made a case for force two things that i think will strike some listeners or watchers uh make them curious you made a case for force and you also made a case for the the embeddedness of the of the constitutional system inside a religious structure and associated that with sovereignty and and um i mean sovereignty historically as especially if you go back into the deep past has been associated let's say with the divine right of kings or emperors there's always been an association between political sovereignty and something like divinity and and that that connection although church and state are separate it isn't severed entirely in the united states there's still that that that's the case you're making and i think it's a general case that that connection still exists and necessarily exists so let's look at those two things you talked about the government as as uh in in relationship to force and and why start there that's what government is government is force the the only reason we have government is force and bad things happen i ironically uh violence can ensue when people start to think of it as more than force if they look at government as the arbiter of all that is right and all that is wrong of all that is fair or unfair expectations change and all of a sudden force can be brought to bear where it ought not tread under the banner of government force is there to make sure that we don't hurt each other or take each other's things to make sure that we're protected from those on the outside of our country who seek to harm us and those who are within it who would destroy us and our rights um so i think these problems become more pronounced when we lose sight of what government is we develop an almost reverence and it's almost like it's become the new idolatry we worship government that's why i wanted to concentrate on your on your discussion of force so what i understand from that is that i have a domain of rights and you have a domain of rights and we're going to bump into each other there's going to be conflict at the place we touch where our rights might conflict and what that'll mean is that there's the possibility of conflict breaking out there and that might mean that i'm going to use force on you or you use force on me now we could cede the right to that force to a different to a third party to another authority and that takes away the necessity for us to use force so for example um i remember years ago i can't remember he was the governor of massachusetts he ran for for president he was asked at one point uh about an about an escapee from a prison who uh michael ducati that's right that's right who who who was then um raped someone and dukakis was asked about his personal response that what how he would have responded if that had been someone he cared for for who was attacked for example and he uh he his response wasn't he didn't allow himself to to um what would you say to have the kind of anger that you would have if that sort of thing happened and then say look of course i should would be put in a murderous rage as a consequence of that occurrence but i've ceded that power to the government because it's too dangerous for individuals to have to seek retribution and retaliation on their own if if that was always the case we'd have nothing but constant a constant state of warfare between individuals and so we cede that power and that has something to do with the government's monopoly on force at least under some circumstances and so yes that's that's a much well it's a much different viewpoint than thinking about the government as something that's that's the benevolent provider of goods for example right right exactly and and doc braderson that is that is not to say the government is incapable of good things and that government doesn't do good things that don't directly involve force it is however important to remember that that's ultimately what government is is force the way government does things the way it does anything everywhere at least in our country is that it collects taxes from the people uh we have a number of different kinds of taxes in this country as they do in many countries but ultimately that's how government operates and while we call that a voluntary system and in many ways it is or is supposed to be ultimately we pay those uh citizens pay those because they know that if they don't pay them force will be brought to bear people will come and there will be penalties attached to it if they don't pay them that's that's why it's so important to remember that government is forced it uses force to do things that we need it to do and as you say it would be chaos it would also be terribly inefficient it would result in all kinds of problems if every one of us had to be our own sheriff our own uh department of defense our own army and our known navy uh that would be problematic just the same having delegated those things to a government we have to remember what government is why we have it and utilize government for that which only government can do and not a tribute to it uh benevolence and omniscience and an omnipotence that most people reserve for deity if they believe in god i want to get some back to another point you made a moment ago about the role of religion i i'd re-characterize one of your observations about my comments there i i don't believe that the the constitution requires uh in order for it to work for anyone to cling to any particular religious belief or for that matter to any religious belief at all in fact by its own terms it carves those things out and makes clear that government can't mess with those uh but government also may not establish those things it's important to have that boundary now that but the the they're uh i think what you're referring to there is my comment about the fact that it helps to understand these things if as was the case in america at the time of america's founding and as i believe is still the case with most americans when we understand that we are subject to an all-knowing benevolent and all-powerful creator to whom we will stand accountable at the end of this life and when we understand that our rights and our existence come from him and are a result of a bestowal of of his blessings rather than that of any government i think that helps inform the proper role of government and the proper relationship between the people and its government there seems to be a supposition in the declaration of independence that writes that there's a relationship between rights and divinity and and that is i think you can think about that conceptually rather than purely religiously although you can think about it both ways is that there's a hypothesis that there's something transcendent about each individual that that isn't subject to earthly definition let's say that always escapes definition that's what makes it transcendent there's a transcendent value in each individual and the best way that we can describe that is in religious terms in fact when we start describing it the description becomes religious and so we use language like the soul and we think of our rights our rights as something that are intrinsic to us and of the highest possible value and that that is an assumption that has to be made before the declarat before the the statements that are in the declaration of independence can even get off the ground that's why the people who crafted that document said that they held those truths to be self-evident it's an a priory presupposition that there's something transcendent about each individual and that's where sovereignty is placed when i've done my attempts at historical analysis you know in in monarchical systems there's a relationship posited between the monarch and divinity and the monarch is sovereign because of that relationship with divinity and it's a complete transformation of the view of humanity that occurred over thousands and thousands of years and certainly manifested itself in the american system that that sovereignty is actually something that is inherent in each individual not just the aristocracy or the monarchy or not just not just any single group of individuals aristocrats or or any specific group but in each individual and so that's that's exactly right and were we not the offspring of god created in his image it would probably be harder to recognize that and to accept that as the a priori supposition because the inherent worth and the infinite value of each and every human soul is part and parcel of this concept of liberty now i want to be very clear i know a lot of people who who don't share my religious beliefs who share another and a lot of other people who don't have any religious belief at all and don't believe in god they too all of them are are capable and are rendered no less capable of living in freedom uh than i am just the same one cannot mistake the significant influence of a religious belief system like that that most americans share about the existence of a god and the existence of a redeemer the other thing that i think is important about that conceptually again and the reason i insist upon the conceptual level is because of the dangers of associating this with any particular religious viewpoint or even with a religious viewpoint at all for that matter because as you said the constitution works just as well for atheists or it's just as applicable um there is some real utility i think in positing that ultimate knowledge lies beyond you you know and if you look at if you're a totalitarian let's say you're an atheistic totalitarian which and those things don't always go hand in hand but generally they do um there isn't anything even hypothetically beyond your system of knowledge but if you're if you're a believer if you're someone with faith then you're forced into a position where you always have to admit your fundamental ignorance because you don't have the answers at hand that's that's reserved for something that's beyond you or something that's beyond and so i've often thought that there's a real useful humility that's part and parcel of of belief in something that's transcendent because you leave what's omniscient well outside of you and you understand that that's something that you always approach but never can possibly attain and that all your systems are partially incomplete at best and that seems to me to be a necessary antidote to like a a potentially dangerous totalitarianism or narcissism so and i so i think the system is set up that way i mean it puts attention in it because there's there's is this nesting of the political system inside a a set of religious suppositions but then there's also this insistence and and of the separation between church and state so that's a strange tension and it's it's a tough one to to sort through but um no no that's right and it can seem um it can seem contradictory it can seem like it's in conflict i think once you unpack what government is and and how it's used and you understand human beings and their relationship to each other and to their government it becomes easier to see how this can work and how it must work in other words for me at least um my belief in my relationship with god is uh the most important thing um in this world to me it's it's right there with my relationship with my wife and my children it's something without which i cannot imagine my existence and it is for that reason and not in spite of it that i don't want government touching it in other words there there is an increasing inclination in society today in including among many americans that if something is really important then it must be something that the government does promotes funds uh or or is otherwise officially in uh involved in um and i think it this is a helpful example to all of us of the reasons why it ought to stay out it is it is because it's important that it must not touch it it's not an appropriate place for the use of force there's a good reason why people have for many many centuries sought sanctuary in places of worship people instinctively recognize that force the use of physical uh physically coercive force is not something we want to to take place inside of a church or or a synagogue or another place of worship and uh so too with many aspects of our lives that are important because they are important you don't necessarily want government in charge of it so it brings up a really complicated question which is how do you determine so how do you government can become dangerous because of its monopoly on force and its potentially expansive reach um but there's many complex problems that need to be solved and and hopeful hopefully people of goodwill can work together to solve them you're faced then with the necessity of a constant discussion about what government could and couldn't do and it seems to me that that discussion should be informed by realization that government does some things that are necessary but that like any other powerful entity it it's it needs to face constraints part of the political debate is constantly about what that domain of action should be and what those constraints should be and i suppose the conservatives are constantly on the side of pushing for constraint at least in some domains on government expansion there's exceptions to that and whereas the people on the left end of the spectrum are are more convinced that you know the the power for government to do good is so great that its power should be expanded outward that that's right and and it's important discussion to have and you've got you've got conservatives and you've got liberals we've got libertarians who um you know i consider myself a conservative with libertarian libertarian leanings um in any event regardless where you would categorize yourself it's important to recognize what government is what it's not and what its power is and and which level of government op to be operating uh for a particular issue and uh which person or office within which level of government is appropriate so a minute ago we talked about the the federalism the vertical separation of powers leaving a a fairly stable pyramid-like structure a few powers at the top most powers at the base close to the people most people know their state legislator their city council members they interact with them at the grocery store they might recognize them at their child's baseball game fewer people know their federal legislators as part of the reason why we have fewer powers and trust at the top there's also a horizontal protection in the constitution one that says once you're inside the federal government dealing with something that's a federal issue you know war powers regulate trade or international uh trade or commerce and so forth we're gonna have three distinct branches we've further subdivided the king or the caesar the king or the queen the monarch there into three distinct parts we've got one branch of government the legislative branch congress where i work that makes the laws this was designed as the most dangerous branch that's why it's made the most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals because we have the power to prescribe the rules by which the rest of government operates that's the legislative branch the executive branch headed by the president in our system uh has the power to execute implement and enforce the laws passed by congress then you've got the judicial branch headed by the supreme court that has the power to interpret the laws and disputes about the laws where they come into conflict between two or more parties properly before the jurisdiction of the courts when each of those branches stays in its lane the legislative power remains the most dangerous branch but it is made less dangerous by the fact that it's the most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals so insofar as we follow those guidelines uh the vertical protection of federals and the horizontal protection of separation of powers this document really has helped us and it's helped us prosper it's it's led more people out of poverty than any government program ever could or ever will because it unlocks unlimited human potential by restraining government over the last 80 years or so we've seen a system by which unfortunately under the leadership of white houses senates and houses of representatives of every conceivable partisan combination we've seen a shift in power we've distorted the vertical protection of federalism by pushing power that belongs to the states up to the federal government then once it's inside the federal government you've seen congress responding to that in a panic trying to shield uh individual members from political accountability that comes from all this power they shifted out to the other branches primarily the executive branch by delegating it out okay so that's a really interesting argument so i i haven't heard that before so yours my understanding of what you're stating is so as uh as increasing power has been what you abdicated let's say to to the federal level or taken by the federal level ill-advisedly the weight on the individual legislatures legislators the moral weight has become too intense and they're abdicating their legislative responsibility and that means that it's handed over to the executive is so so i mean it's confusing for a canadian well our system is confusing for a canadian but your system is even more confusing for a canadian the legislative branch in the u.s drafts the laws but the prep the president appears and this is over many administrations to be using more executive orders and so this is a reflection of what you just described is that the case as far as it is yes that is exactly what i'm saying that is the culmination of what we do when we ignore federalism by pushing too much power to the federal government okay so let me let me know lawmakers choose to this conclusion because it's a very it's a subtle argument so i want to walk through it again we're you're basically hypothesizing that at some point the weight of responsibility becomes too much for any single individual in a position of power to bear and so they'll look for avenues of escape and they can't bear it maybe because it's too complex they can't keep up they can't bear it because people are after them for making decisions there's all sorts of reasons they might be intimidated by the magnitude of their decisions all of that so if you dump too much on them then they shy away from it and then it defaults over to the executives can you are there do you have like examples at hand of that happening what sort of powers are have been taken away at the state level or abdicated where the states have abdicated the responsibility and moved towards the federal and any idea why that's happening yeah great question uh the best single example that i can think of lies with what we call the commerce clause clause 3 of article 1 section 8. article 1 section 8 is the part of the constitution that outlines the powers of congress and with it basically the powers of the federal government the commerce clause gives congress the power to regulate trade or commerce between the states with four nations and with the indian trust over the first 150 years or so of our republic this was understood and exercised as a power to regulate interstate commercial transactions for example making sure that um delaware maryland new jersey virginia and pennsylvania weren't engaging in trade wars against each other to make clear that the the federal sovereign would be in charge of interstate commercial transactions interstate uh waterways uh roadways uh things like that um and then we had that would be because no single state obviously could do that because it involves more than one state so the federal level is the logical level for that power to reside correctly correct and in that respect we were trying to set up a you know a single common market to make sure that we weren't operating as 13 independent republics who would engage in trade wars against each other um all this started to change during the great depression during franklin d roosevelt's new deal era initially there was some resistance by the supreme court but all of this changed our reading our official interpretation of the commerce clause article 1 section 8 clause 3 changed on one day in america it's very seldom recognized in a supreme court decision that very few americans even know anything about it's called nlrb versus jones and laughlin steel company it was decided on april 12 1937. in that case the supreme court concluded that congress's power to regulate trade or commerce between the states with foreign nations with indian tribes not only meant interstate commercial transactions and the regulation of interstate corridors of trade and things like that but it also extended to the power to regulate any activity that is commercially natural and that uh when replicated across every state while local and interstate by nature has an in the aggregate a substantial economic impact such that something as uh as local as trade and and labor laws or agricultural production things like agriculture labor mining uh and things like this that are economic but occur in one state had always been the bread and butter of uh something that if regulated by government would be regulated by state authority and not federal in that case on that one day april 12 1937 the supreme court said no it's it's anything that's economic and has a substantial effect ever since then uh congress uh has enacted law after law federalizing all these issues labor manufacturing agriculture mining uh and so forth the supreme court has left basically a perpetually green light since that date since april 12 1937 we've really had only three instances in which the supreme court has identified any act of congress as outside congress's legislative authority to regulate interstate and foreign trade and basically all three of them two of those three were sort of drafting errors the supreme court explained to congress how it could remedy and on the third one congress went out ahead and papered over the problem uh by by validating the act of congress in question as legitimate under a a separate uh provision of the constitution so as a result of this congress has now got all this power congress then delegates that to the executive branch passing laws that sound uh less and less like laws over time and more and more like platitudes can you give us any concrete examples of that yeah so okay now let's let's take a a good example let's say trade laws pass something regulating the minimum wage uh prescribing a nationwide minimum wage okay that seems like a main issue that is economic in nature it has a substantial effect on interstate commerce when aggregated across every state insofar as we just set the minimum wage that is is not violating the horizontal protection of separation of powers if we set it if however we were to delegate to the secretary of labor or the president of the united states or somewhat other executive branch official the power to prescribe rules making sure that the minimum wage was set fairly that would be an unacceptable delegation of that legislative power over to the executive branch now we haven't done that uh with the minimum wage it's still an improper exercise of federal power in my view but at least we haven't exercised that there in other areas let's take for example clean air clean air is something over which we have a basis for authority because if you've got a factory or a mobile source of pollution in one state it can emit things that can move into another state and cause problems downwind um but we've delegated a lot of what power we do have in the federal government to executive branch agencies we've got something for example called the clean air act now a lot of good has been done through the clean air act we've uh significantly abated things like acid rain problems other air pollutants that have caused a lot of problems for people the clean air act this is a slight oversimplification but as i explained in in our lost constitution it's a little bit like we said we shall have clean air we hereby declare that we shall have clean air and we hereby delegate to the epa the executive branch agency in charge of administering that law the power to define uh what air pollution means what are acceptable limits on particular air pollutants than to prescribe penalties for those who exceed those limits and the power to enforce those same penalties all vested in one executive branch agency that might be good for politicians because it allows them to say i like clean air but if if the epa then charged with that does things that in some circumstances make no sense like for example when they set the minimum ozone levels at a level below where mother nature herself has set them as happened in some parts of the country people become outraged they complain to congress members of congress beat their chests and say those barbarians at epa i'm going to write them a strongly worded letter as if that were our job as lawmakers to write a strongly worded letter when in reality all we've done is pass the book to the epa we've done the same thing with epa as we have with occupational safety and health requirements with osha uh msha the the mind uh uh safety and health administration alphabet soup agency after alphabet soup agency throughout the federal government has law making powers that's inappropriate sorry sorry i should remind everybody that there's a bit of a lag in this conversation because of the technology so we might interrupt each other and appear rude but the lag has something to do with that and maybe me being rude also has something to do with it but there's all this talk about the deep state and and i'm just thinking that some of that could well be generated as a consequence of what you're describing you know as more and more decisions are are uh delegated or relegated more accurately to to um entities that aren't accountable in the same way then it would seem logical that um an extra governmental government so to speak emerges i mean the same thing happens in a country like canada where the the um the civil service becomes more and more powerful across time because responsibility is relegated to it by legislators that aren't or can't aren't willing or can't maintain their responsibility or is passed on to the court to make decisions to make law de facto because the legislators won't take the initiative to do so they can put it off so so what kind of what kind of reception does this kind of argument get among your peers and among your among your political opponents it's interesting dr peterson um most of my colleagues in the senate and our counterparts in the house um would i suppose if they were part of this conversation today um say that they did they don't necessarily disagree with the fact that we've moved power from states and localities to washington and then within washington we've given power away from the people's elected lawmakers who have voluntarily delegated that power over to unelected unaccountable bureaucrats and in many cases the president of the united states many of them perhaps most of them would agree that to a degree that has happened what they would say next would depend in part on their political persuasion um some of them would say yeah that's true but it doesn't matter because this is a good thing and we really benefit from the specialized expertise of those who occupy these executive branch agencies and i want to make very clear i i've got nothing but respect for those individuals they're by and large well-educated hard-working well-intentioned people with a high degree of specialization my point is not that we can't learn from them my point is that they're not lawmakers they don't stand accountable to the people uh in regular elections or elections elections ever yeah well you said for example you said that the epa that that had had many positive effects you're all you're you you seem also still worried about it and so i might object well if it's had those positive effects then what's the problem why worry about it and so i would like to to know that why why is that a problem because our government needs to be ours and that means that the laws a law consists of a set of words that prescribe a rule a rule of general applicability imposing affirmative obligations on members of the public when a law thus understood is prescribed in our system of government by the federal government at the federal level you have to follow a formula for it to be legitimate uh and that's true for not just the philosophical constitutional reason but also for the practical reason that you don't want the law-making power which is the most dangerous of the powers of government to be ever in the hands of people you can't fire they they work for you and you if you can't fire the people who make these laws as well educated well-intentioned as they might be you got a problem so so you see something like a drift over time so that the legislative power drifts out of the bodies that are supposed to be exercising it into other specialized areas and and that escapes that escapes that has the risk of escaping public accountability so i guess what you might argue then is that the epa and legislation like it produces some short medium-term positive outcomes but it has this long-term potential payment lurking in the background and we always have to keep an eye on that so but i mean what do you do about that in this situation though because the the power has been ceded to the federal government and it looks like the legislators can't keep up so what's the solution or what are the steps towards the solution the easiest uh way that i can answer that question because it look it took us 80 plus years to get here 82 83 years from the date i identified to get here the solution to that is going to take some time it's not simple but the concept is pretty easy i think the important first step is to enact reforms including those that are embodied in a proposal called the reigns act dealing with regulatory policy another similar one that i've introduced called the global trade accountability act where you identify policies that have been handed over to the executive branch and you say insofar as we're dealing with the prescription the prescribing of of laws the making of laws from within the executive branch we're going to treat those as legislative proposals that will then themselves be become subject to the formula ordained by the constitution specifically article 1 section 7 of the constitution which says that to make a federal law you have to have passage of uh the same set of words the same bill legislative proposal within the house of representatives and in the senate same bill's got to pass then you have to present it to the president for signature or veto so your identifier you want to identify laws that have already been passed that haven't had this haven't undergone this process and bring them back into the house so to speak and that document you're holding up that particular book what is that oh i'm sorry this is uh the u.s constitution i carry this around with me you know it's it's pretty simple it's only 453 words wrong long but it's still very easy to understand and even though i've spent a lifetime studying it and defending it and i focus on it uh constantly in the senate i keep the document with me because notwithstanding the fact that i'm very familiar with it and happened for a long time i find that by having it with me i make sure that i can check what the wording says you'd be surprised at how often it comes in here i have a question for you about that too like how do you how do you check yourself against the standard human propensity to have an opinion and then to justify it by recourse to a hypothetical recourse to first principles you know what i mean is you're a constitutional expert and so you've got this whole body of argumentation at hand and that would make whatever elements of you that might tend towards corruption quite dangerous because you can justify that with the knowledge i mean and everyone tends towards to corruption to some degree so you know when you have that kind of specialized knowledge then you have to you have to ensure that the parts of you that might not be so um aligned with the light let's say don't use their knowledge in a negative way i mean scientists do that by trying to falsify their hypothesis and then having other scientists critique their work and but as a constitutional expert i mean i know you're accountable to the people so that's a huge part of this but do you have any other techniques that you use to to ensure that your conscience is clean in relationship to to your relationship with the constitution yeah yeah i do i do and that it connects to something you mentioned a minute ago refer to me as an expert in the constitution i don't call myself an expert on the constitution i don't consider myself that i consider myself a guy who has uh a copy of the constitution with him at all times and who reads it regularly that's uh that's what we need we we need fewer experts and more people who just read it and develop an opinion on what it says and how best to implement why did you fall in love with it in that way i mean it's really quite something actually that you carry it around i mean and to me that seems like a good thing i mean you're if you don't mind me saying so um you know it you're you're carrying around something that you want to be accountable to and that's a that's a big decision how did you come how did you come to how did you come to do that i don't imagine that when you were 18 you were carrying around a copy of the constitution well um maybe you were always not always i i it started uh for me at a young age the constitution was something that was um important to my parents and my mother was a schoolteacher uh uh who went on to have seven children and um my father was a lawyer and a professor of law later served as as dean of brigham university's law school and as president of brigham mayor university for a few years when i was a child he was ronald reagan's solicitor general a solicitor general in our system as the the government's chief advocate before the supreme court for the administration in question so he devoted his life and his career it died 25 years ago uh but um during his uh 61 years on this planet he devoted much of his career to the constitution it's something that we talked about around the dinner table and something that he always taught me was my responsibility to defend i have also come to believe uh since his passing he died while i was in law school that the constitution has never been more important than it is right now because it's the one thing that i think can lower the emotional temperature in this country it's it's written risen to an almost fever-pitched level in part because we've misused government we've mischaracterized what government's even capable of and we've created unreasonable expectations the constitution's whole point is to limit and restrain government power because we understand that it's dangerous and one of the things that's great about this is that it's politically agnostic it's politically neutral it doesn't require everyone to be a liberal or a conservative it simply says look here's how we're going to make decisions here's where decisions are going to be made for example i sometimes cite the example that people in vermont a majority of people in vermont i'm told would much prefer to have a single-payer government-run government-funded healthcare system perhaps sort of like what you've got in canada people in utah would not want that one of many reasons why i'm not likely ever to live in vermont but let's let vermont be vermont let's let utah be utah vermont could actually go in that direction much more easily more quickly more cost efficiently more completely if we allow them to do it on their own than if we were trying to federalize everything which we have now you'd also get the advantage of running the experiment i mean that's certainly one advantage of a multi-state system with some autonomy at the state level is you can run multiple experiments and see which one works that's much better than than legislation by fiat from the top because you're likely to be wrong no matter what your political persuasion when you're trying to solve a complex problem well that's that's exactly right and in fact uh our founding fathers thought of the states as laboratories of republican democracy places where people could experiment with what worked and what didn't work states could learn from one another follow each other not by coercion not by coercive force but by choice as people voted with their feet or with their ballot they could see what was appealing to people and what wasn't so yeah i support the doctor even from a leftist perspective because you could say well look if you want government to do good then you want to put as much power as possible as low as possible so that you could run as many experiments as possible so that government could in fact do the best possible job whereas if you aggregate power at the top you can make sweeping declarations but the magnitude of your error is going to be is going to increase as a consequence and that's a terrible thing because you can be really wrong yes yes you could be really wrong but if you split out the authority the authority becomes less concentrated and less lethal speaking of of lethality this can manifest itself even within the areas the the problems i've identified um manifest themselves sometimes even within those areas where the federal government is clearly in charge and the the the problem that we've had is once we've seen this um seepage that happens with the legislative branch delegating out its power in other areas where it's exercising power that probably should be federal in the first place by habit like a dog to its vomiting it continues the ritual and it does so even in areas like the war power federalist number 69 alexander hamilton explains that one of the key features of our system that differentiated it from uh the uh the british system that we had left was the power to declare a war you see that the english monarch had the power to take the country to war it was parliament's job to then figure out how to pay for it and support it hamilton explained we deliberately didn't do that here we wanted the power to declare war only in congress over time we've grant gradually ceded even that power to the executive speaking of vermont that's where my my friend bernie has bernie sanders and i but probably absolute opposite ends of the political spectrum within the senate there are a number of areas where we agree this is one of them uh we are uh really upset about the fact that the war power has been bastardized it's been commandeered by the executive branch with the the acquiescence and in many cases the blessing of the legislative branch and he and i have been fighting for years to get us out of an undeclared unconstitutional ridiculous civil war in yemen in which the american people have no business fortunately uh president biden's going to get us out of it it's become slippery to define war you know it seemed to be more obvious when it was one set of uniformed men against another and in two sovereign states and so i mean part part of that slippage seems to be a definitional matter but i suspect as well given your arguments or at least along the same line that it's somewhat of a relief for the legislators not to have to bear that responsibility yes and i think you're right i think some of that has has changed a little bit because times have changed it's one thing to just declare war against france spain germany the united kingdom whatever country might have been named in centuries past than it is uh uh to make a broader declaration of our region or against that philosophy today but then again then as now one could propose that congress declare war on bad people now it would be a terrible idea i wouldn't vote for that but at least you'd be subjecting it to the political process there would be some political penalty for any one crazy enough to vote for a war against all bad people why well because that concentrates discretionary power immense discretionary power ultimately in one person the president of the united states that's a bad thing and and we ought to get away from that but all these features that jordan have crept up to the point that we have glamorized and we have imperialized the american presidency oh so one of the reasons why you saw this chaos too i have a question about that this is particularly something interesting from a canadian perspective because i've often thought that there are probably four branches of government legislative judicial executive and symbolic and the advantage to the british monarchy is that they extracted out the symbolic and they placed it on a monarch and so you know there's a pronounced tendency in people to to to uh admire leaders and to and to project something like divinity onto them and in from the outside in the u.s i mean i see the constant transformation of the american president and the american quote first family into a monarchy like it was quite stunning to me for example when i moved to the united states in 1993 to see the sort of power that hillary clinton wielded as the wife of the president that would never occur in canada under our system that would be essentially impossible but i i thought that that was part of the consequence of the executive having to bear the burden of this symbolic of of the of that that should probably be be parsed out into the symbolic you know because then the queen and the king can be the the object of admiration and the royal family can play that role for people who want that but then the executive is free from that at least to some degree so i mean i'm not proposing that you establish a monarchy but it does seem to be something that's like twist and you see that also in the establishment of these familial political dynasties um that that's that tilt back towards a monarchical form of government that seems quite unfortunate i would say dangerous that is that is an interesting observation i've never thought of it quite like that it is true that under our system of government the president is the head of state in addition to being the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the chief executive officer of the you know of the executive branch he's also the head of state it's a gamble but a risk or a a decision that we made consciously as americans and i think it's a very manageable risk especially if you follow the rest of the rule book keeping in mind that that's no president may serve more than eight years as president so that's the maximum time they're going to have in some cases it's only going to be four and if if we properly managed our government if meaning if we kept the proper decisions at the proper level and on the proper branch the president of the united states would still be significant but it would the presidency would be far less emotionally charged than it has become it's become bubbling over it's become a seething hotbed of incipient uh uh tribalism and it's it's uh really a scary so you see that as well we've seen this in both parts you see that as a symptom of of the movement towards excessive executive power and so you could think about that as a principle is that if the if the office of the presidency as it becomes increasingly too hot to handle that's an indication that too much power has been placed on the president placed at the president's feet well that's an interesting hypothesis i think it's it's both an indication of that and it's also the uh in my view the foreseeable and absolutely inevitable result of doing that this is just what happens when you do that we have created this by allowing for the secretion of power remember earlier in the conversation we talked about the the unique relationship between force the use of government for force and liberty you can't really expand or contract either one without affecting the other one but you know as we as we push this power upward within the federal system to the federal government and then over to the chief executive to the president power comes from somewhere it goes somewhere ultimately that power comes from the people and and accrues within the executive branch of the federal government that's what makes it so darn contentious because he's not only the head of state and the commander-in-chief he's now the in many ways the not just the law enforcer but also the law giver the lawmaker and that's dangerous okay that's okay so so let me pull two things together here so you've alluded during this conversation i have too to the increasing political tension in the united states and so could you how would you characterize that tension like what do you think what do you think is happening what evidence do you have for that and that would be a good start i mean because i can't get my i know it seems like things are hot i don't know if they're hotter than they were under nixon i don't know if they're hotter than they were during the vietnam war i i can't tell but they're hot enough but what's going on in your in your in your view [Music] it's hard for me to compare um apples to apples then versus now um i i was uh a a young child when president nixon left office and when he was working to get us out of vietnam i wasn't uh serving in the senate or you know as a four-year-old i wasn't terribly aware of all public affairs but um but i have sensed just from my reading of the history and from my own anecdotal accounts of what i've experienced in the last 10 years in the united states senate i've sensed the emotional tension continuing to go up there are some objective measures that i think could help quantify this i'm not an expert in those but if you look for example over this 80 85 year period that i've been referencing since the new deal era prior to the new deal era in peacetime the combined expenditures of all of the states in america were always greater during peace time than the expenditures of the federal government since the new deal era the opposite has always been true it's always been the federal government spending more than all 50 states combined it was never intended to be that way is what it is growing has it grown across that period uh i haven't checked it in the last few years but generally yes and and in particular dr peterson the share of our economy that consists of government spending has itself expanded rather dramatically the most of the increase has been federal but state expenditures and federal expenditures combined have as a share of of gdp in america grown significantly since then and with it the emotional temperature is gone with it also you've seen the federal government and the federal bureaucracy in particular playing in more heavy-handed and more ominous looming uh role so for example 25 years ago when i was in law school the first time i i ever sort of started thinking about this executive branch agency law making problem we had a guest speaker come to the law school and he explained that compliance with federal regulations those prescribed by the alphabet soup agencies uh in the federal government we were talking about earlier we're really a kind of a backdoor invisible tax on america's poor middle class because americans pay uh uh through the nose for those things to the tune of he said you know three about 300 billion dollars a year and he said but they don't see the price tag for that what's what makes them devious and hidden and manipulative is that they pay for them but with higher prices on goods higher prices on services diminished wages unemployment and underemployment that's how they pay for those things because everything becomes more expensive and and that ends up being kind of a backdoor invisible highly regressive tax on america's poor middle class since then it becomes independent because of cost of of adhering to the rig to the increasingly complex regulatory environment yes yes yes this byzantine labyrinth of federal regulations uh uh like the month you spend doing your income tax yes yes one of many examples it's now estimated that you know well it was uh estimated around 300 billion dollars by our guest speaker 25 years ago they say that that same cost is now somewhere in the range of two trillion dollars a year this is immense is it a massive expense uh uh to the american people one that disproportionately affects america's poor middle class just for comparison purposes the total budget is what's the magnitude of the total budget now okay so cobit is something of an exception but we're trending toward uh annual federal outlays in the range of about four trillion dollars we've exploded that with cobit uh spending several trillion dollars more than that over the last year we hope that's temporary we know that it tends not to be completely temporary when the minute you ratchet up spinning it's something of a of a one-way ratchet i also measure some of this um in do you actually think that's a reasonable estimate the cost of it the excess cost of regulatory adherence is half the budget is equivalent to half the time yes yes i mean there are lots of estimates out there some say that two trillion dollars it doesn't really measure the whole of it uh there are others who say that it's somewhere in that range others who might try to argue it's a little bit lower but there are some who say that the true cost is even higher than that but yeah i think that's an accurate measure another somewhat imprecise but interesting metric that i use my office in washington trying to remember whether i showed you this while you were visiting if not i'll show you next time you're there i keep two stacks of documents behind my desk one document is a few inches tall it's usually either a few hundred sometimes a few thousand pages long and it consists of the laws passed by congress in the previous year the other stack uh is in some years 13 14 feet tall i keep it in three separate um cases bookcases in in my office it's sometimes as much as a hundred thousand pages long and it's last year's federal register the federal register is the annual cumulative index of federal regulations as they're released initially for notice and comment and then later as they become effective well so that's a very interesting metric too so that's ratio of of paper necessary to document regulatory change yes it is prescribing affirmative legal obligations of the relative power of the of the two institutions so to speak yes in a sense no it's not a it's not a precise measure because some of that is not an apple samples comparison but a lot of it really consists of lawmaking these are new affirmative legal obligations imposed as a generally applicable rule on the american people enforceable by the overpowering uh that force that is the federal government the difference between those two stacks is that this small stack one that's only a few hundred to a few thousand pages long made by elected lawmakers the one that's 13 14 feet tall 100 000 pages long in some years made entirely by unelected unaccountable bureaucrats that's scary yeah well it should be it should be it should be something that sets again people across the political spectrum back on their heels because if government wastes its time doing things that aren't necessary it's not going to be able to spend its time doing things that are necessary prioritization is a massive problem right there's only so many things you can attend to at the same time so you know in any country where there is a societal tendency to trust the people and be skeptical of government we call that liberty in a society where people are encouraged to trust the government and be skeptical of the people we call that tyranny but it's interesting it's interesting though you know because you you do trust the government in a really deep sense you carry the constitution around and so i the reason i'm pointing this out is because i just read something a while back about the degree to which young people distrust institutions and i've found my trust in institutions decreasing as well over the last years especially media institutions and i'm not pleased by that in the least but you like you you do definitely have faith in the constitution and so what are you so when you say to be skeptical of government you mean specifically something like the tendency of government to expand and overreach its proper domain yeah is that right i don't put words in your mouth yeah but you are obviously a patriot and you know you have great respect for your fundamental institutions and so it's necessary to separate those things out because otherwise especially young people they don't know what they can trust and they need to trust something you know it's really important yes yes and another way of i'd put it i i'd take exception to one thing you said where you suggested that i i trust government as evidence by the fact that i carry on the constitution and i seek to follow it i'd turn that a precisely on its head in other words the constitution reminds us that we don't trust government as an institution we trust people but not the government the constitution is our key to making sure that we unlock unlimited human potential by recognizing the inherent dignity and infinite worth of every human being and that we show that respect by saying that when we use force on you as we do whenever government acts we will do so respectfully and in a way that's measured restrained exercised at the appropriate level and is geared specifically toward protecting life liberty and property if it's not those things we won't do it we we need to have trust and confidence in human beings because they're god's creations and because we we're all created equal when we put trust in government itself we're putting trust in force now human beings while redeemable and basically inherently good are themselves flawed and flawed specifically in in the sense that they are covetous and powerful and we've learned through sad experience throughout human history that when someone acquires power especially power in his or her own estimation that person will eventually begin to abuse that power insofar as that person is allowed to abuse that power and so we we we have to compel the government to work for us and remind the government that it is not the sovereign okay we are otherwise people the kind of definition that i was that would that i was hoping for so let me because of course we have finite time i i would like to turn our attention to a couple of other things um we talked we talked a little bit about this rising tension and you you described some of your theories about why it's occurring um are there what else do you see as as characteristic of this rising tension like what worries you when you look at the united states right now or maybe the western world as a whole but let's stick with the u.s what what concerns you what keeps you up at night and and and then maybe what do you think should be done about it i tend to believe that the erosion of civil society is uh is concerning meaning the voluntarily uh associating the the voluntary associations that free people form when they're allowed to be free and that they form in the absence of any government telling them that they must uh or that they may or that they may not they just do it and by that i mean churches mosques synagogues fraternal orders charitable foundations universities uh neighborhood watch associations all of those things that operate as uh an organized entity outside the force of government those are things that have really helped us i've often said that the twin pillars of huma thriving of the human condition whether in american society or anyone else anywhere else they tend to be built on robust institutions of civil society and free markets if you have those two things human beings can thrive they won't always choose to do so sometimes they will make choices that will put them on a path of self-destruction but if you've got those things in place and people make the right choices human beings will thrive you'll lift people out of poverty i worry that as we've put more trust in government we've done so we've allowed the muscle of civil society and the muscle memory of free markets to atrophy [Music] and so it's not just what we've created through a a a a bloated government that is the problem it's also what we lose what we give up in the process people become less connected uh the more brooding the government's presence is in their lives and that worries me as does you know some of the things that go along with that include you know religious associations and religious beliefs and i worry that in many cases we have traded faith um either in an all-knowing loving all-powerful god who will judge us at the end of this life or even if if if not that faith in a set of principles by which we guide our lives has in many places been replaced and supplanted by an almost religious uh faith geared toward government this is in a sense the new idolatry the idolatry of our time when i whenever i study the old testament i'm struck by how much they focus almost obsessively on idolatry and i thought well that's weird we don't really see a whole lot of that here in a sense we do when we worship mortal institutions mortal institutions with immense military power aircraft carriers government offices uh four trillion dollars in annual outlays that's an almost religious amount of faith toward something that is not god and that doesn't bring us closer together that you've also said in your own personal experience that you can feel the temperatures rising in the senate say and one of the things i was struck i was struck by a number of things when i went to washington on the several occasions that i did i was struck by how absurdly busy senators and congressmen were with their multitude of duties and i it was completely mysterious to me how any business ever got done given that i was also struck by the lack of personal communication between people within political parties in the senate and in congress but more particularly across and so well you said that you've seen you've felt this rising tension and so what have how have you experienced that and what what's the consequence of that as far as you can tell well you know it's it's not good you know across the board the more issues there are where the parties are inextricably um are unavoidably at odds with each other it gets more difficult and i'm not one who believes that we have to manufacture uh or contrived unity where it doesn't exist there are some issues on which the parties really are in genuine disagreement this doesn't reflect mere petulance on the part of politicians sometimes it can do that but more than anything else it reflects a genuine disagreement among those we represent uh who feel passionately one way or the other so but sadly as we push more power up to the federal government seems like the the more areas there are for these potential conflicts that are almost irreconcilable between two competing political world views well it's the cause that makes perfect sense if what you're saying is correct because those conflicts should be resolved at a local level and maybe in a multitude of ways if they're not resolved and popped up they're going to affect more people and the conflicts themselves are going to aggregate right so right right exactly and just as saying goes if everyone's family then no one is if if everything is is an emergency then nothing is an emergency and so too here if everything is federal then the federal government's not even going to be able to do the few things that only it can do things like immigration laws trade policy and and uh uh war powers and so forth and so you know the way i've tried to deal with this in my own life and my own service in the senate um is to find scan the horizon continuously to look for areas where the parties are not unavoidably at odds with each other and to identify allies and done this in a whole host of areas from war powers to criminal justice reform fourth amendment government surveillance uh due process protections and things like that some of my very favorite people in the senate uh many many of them happen to be people who are at the opposite end of the political continuum from me i've found i don't know whether everyone's experience is is similar to mine but in the senate at least we have more of an ability to get to know each other than members of the house of representatives there are 435 of them there are only 100 of us you don't get to know all of my colleagues equally well but i have the chance to get to know uh uh most of them and it really is a great experience and i've also found that my personal life why is it a great experience i mean politicians don't generally have a good name so to speak you know i was very impressed on a personal level with the people i met when i went down to washington i mean they all seem democrat and republican like their their stories of motivation for involvement in politics were so similar they wanted to serve their country i had no reason to believe that that sentiment was false um the they they without exception seemed like admirable people to me um you you're talking about your admiration extending beyond the limits of your political party i mean why is that what what are these people like apart from the media depiction of them let's say they're great people they're fascinating people they're people who love their country they're people who in in many many respects want the same outcome that i want which is opportunities for a thriving of the human condition globally certainly and especially here in the united states those ultimate outcomes are shared by i think all 100 of us we do have different theories and different approaches about how to get there the minute i'm able to see on any particular issue uh how that particular senator no matter how much i might disagree with her or him on a particular issue if i can see why it is that they believe that their policy competing with mine or at odds with mine really gets to the same nirvana like outcome by the same positive outcome it's easier for me to try to figure out whether there's a way to reconcile the two approaches there isn't always in many cases there is not but in a whole lot of cases there are ways to get there and that's an especially rewarding part of the process there's something especially rewarding about unexpected success about something working when you don't expect it to from the outside yeah well that makes you smile i mean so so there's something about that that that must keep you going and so what are you thinking about something in particular like something a concrete example of that kind of success yeah so uh referred a few minutes ago to invoking the war powers acted adopted in 1973 bernie sanders and i got together to try to get us out of civil war in yemen the first time in the history of the war powers act we got something passed in congress before last and unfortunately it didn't make it through the house of representatives before that congress ended we got it passed again in the next congress then we got the house to pass the same thing it got to president trump's desk and unfortunately he vetoed it uh we tried to override the veto we didn't succeed um but have you got a chance now yes not only have we got a chance but president biden has the last few days announced that he's going to get us out of yemen and assuming he uh follows through with what i expect out of that uh the entire issue would mercifully uh have come to with the right conclusion um when i first started in the senate really satisfying oh it was fantastic it's a it's a really fulfilling moment it's a minor victory in in in a sense that it's smoke compared to other disputes and compared to the number of people who are aware of it but it's a huge issue it's it's a big issue criminal justice reform something i identified as a brand new senator about 10 years ago that i wanted to achieve i saw too many people within our federal criminal system in the united states being sent away to prison sometimes for decades at a time for a relatively minor non-violent defense we had a case in utah that i became aware of nearly 20 years ago it's an individual a young man who has become a dear friend since then named weldon angelos weldon angelos was caught selling three dimebag quantities of marijuana over a 72-hour period to a person who as it turned out was a confidential informant of a law enforcement agency because of the fact that he was carrying a gun at the time a gun that was neither brandished nor discharged in connection with the offense mr angelos was sentenced to 55 years in prison for selling three small sandwich bag quantities of pot it's ridiculous the federal judge who sentenced them said that they're hijackers murderers rapists terrorists who don't get this much time but i have got no discretion on this case and only congress can fix this problem those words were still echoing through my mind when i got to the senate i started reaching out initially to some fairly liberal democrats and dick durbin and i teamed up cory cory booker came to the senate a short time later he joined up with us we ended up passing the most sweeping criminal justice reform law in an entire generation in december of 2018 with the first step act and we brought judges more discretion dick durbin and i are still working on another bill to finish what we started there example after example of things like this that we've gotten done that are gratifying that are rewarding it makes it all worthwhile makes it yeah i can tell i mean you light right up when you talk about those things and it looks like 10 years falls away from you instantly it's really it's really something to see so i can see that enthusiasm untrammeled enthusiasm and still belief that the system works which is so so lovely to see in an age of cynicism what's your day like let walk walk walk us through what the what a day in the life of a senator the day of life of a senator i'd like to know when the senate's in session when we're in washington each day is filled with the combination of of committee hearings um of votes on the senate floor inside the senate chamber um sometimes giving a speech or two here or there maybe on the senate floor maybe to some group that's assembled at the capitol meetings with constituents who have to happen to be in town and in washington and then uh the balance of that time might be reserved for conducting interviews uh with reporters from the media and in many cases meeting individually or sometimes talking on the phone with colleagues debating and negotiating the terms of legislation uh that you're pushing and you're preparing for either a committee hearing or a markup which is a vote inside of a committee um or for a senate floor vote those those things take up an enormous amount of time and you noticed earlier that you were struck by how busy members are it's true we stay very busy um uh motion shouldn't always uh be confused with actual progress on this or that issue but we certainly stay in motion but it does speak to the burden of the of the job yeah there's no that's right that's right one of my favorite things that i do uh at least once a week sometimes more i'll meet with colleagues democrats and republicans alike and over a meal dinner or on other occasions breakfast we'll meet together we'll pray together we'll share our personal experiences our own walk through life and we develop a great appreciation for each other the fact that [Music] there is there's real humanity behind the the political figures that are known to media pundits but the person needs to be understood in order in order for the legislative body to function properly well that is a nice ending i was going to ask you um what you might say to viewers and listeners who find themselves becoming cynical about the political process but i think that the last 10 minutes of this discussion actually answered that question and so i'm going to i think i'll leave it at that and not ask for an explicit answer because the implicit answer is much better now i was overwhelmed with admiration i would say of the institutions that i had the privilege of visiting when i was in washington i think it's the the current level of political tension disturbs me because so much of what's established already is so great and it works and and it would be lovely if that was more widely known and the cheap cynicism that passes for wisdom these days was casually was discarded so thank you very much for talking with me today oh thank you so much if you can convince a democrat to sit down with me i would like that um i'll get right on it i i'm sure there will be many look lovely yeah i don't know they might think being seen with me in public is anathema um it might not be because i can listen so um and i think these like i think the the net is an absolutely underutilized resource for political figures who actually want to communicate with the public because it's long form there's no sound bites you can say what you want to say you can bring your thoughts directly to your to the people that you serve with no no intermediation and i know it's not a trusted venue yet for for people in the political arena but i think it's it's an opportunity that's waiting to be exploited waiting to be used not exploited you can't really exploit long-form media it's not susceptible to manipulation in the same way that that the old media forms were so people who are interested in straightforward communication can really benefit from the advantages of these podcasts and and youtube videos and i'll tell you i've learned the general public is a hell of a lot smarter than people think and hungry for information in a way that no one would have ever expected i think we were blind to that by the constraints of broadcast tv you know which had to assume that no one knew ever anything and that everything had to be compressed into something approximating you know 30 seconds to half an hour people people don't need to be spoon-fed that way so no it's brilliantly put jordan and and i want to thank you for seeing that in this particular medium you've harnessed this in a way that's inspired an entire generation of americans to utilize this resource as a tool for healing and reconciliation and understand it so thank you for doing that well i hope that i can see you again in washington at some point that would be wonderful and again thanks again on maybe you know in a couple of months if you're interested we could talk again and we'll we'll find some other topics to go at um you can tell us a little bit more about what's happening in the current government and about what you think might happen in what should happen in the future if we're lucky i'd i'd like to hear about all of that i absolutely yeah any time uh you name the moment and i'll join you i'd love nothing more great thanks thanks again thanks so much take [Music] care [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 239,006

Rating: 4.9014912 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, congress, discourse, jordan, peterson, podcast, personality, mike lee, shorts, united states, JBP, infrastructure

Id: y5Pl6DQ54X4

Length: 90min 17sec (5417 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Old_Journalist_9020]

Wait? Is Jordan Peterson a monarchist? God I love him more.