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Dan Proft on Challenging the Status Quo · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Today we have a special episode of the Liberty and Leadership podcast recorded live at our TFAS annual conference in Naples, florida.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: In this conversation I sat down with TFAS alumnus Dan Proft and we discussed his career in radio, his time as a TFAS student and his thoughts on the first months of the Trump administration.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more episodes featuring powerful conversations with incredible speakers who led sessions at our conference in Naples.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Today.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Reed.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: I'm so pleased today to have Dan Proft with us.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Dan is a radio talk show host on Chicago's Morning Answer.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: That's a morning drive time show and I've had the pleasure of being on it with his co-host, amy Jacobson.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: It's a great show.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: You can get it in Chicago or on the internet, and Dan is someone I like to refer to as a poster child for TFAS because of the success he's had in his career.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: He's run for governor of Illinois, he earned his bachelor's degree at Northwestern University, went to Chicago Loyola Law School and he's truly an entrepreneur and a great individual.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: He attended our program in 1993.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: But I thought I'd start, dan, with just a little bit of your background.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: I wondered first of all, how do you end up getting into radio?
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: I sort of fell into it.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: I didn't do the comms program at TFAS, I did comparative and political systems, and so I thought when I was an undergrad maybe I'd go work in DC, I'd go work for the Cato Institute or some other think tank.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: I was sort of policy oriented and then my first gig out of college was running a legislative race, and then I worked at the state level in politics for a lot of years.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Before I ran for office I started doing like analysis work.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: I got introduced to a very popular morning show in Chicago called the Don Wayne Roma Show, which was on WLS, which is, of course, like a flagship station in the Midwest.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: They had their program morning drive there for 30 years, and so I started doing analyst work and some other fun little bits with them and it sort of was one thing that led to the other and then I did weekly commentaries for them and then I started doing some guest hosting filling in.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: And then when I ran for office after I lost, the program director at WLS wanted to use the weekends to build out a farm team for future talent and so he was trying different combinations and he put me on Saturdays with a guy who was a longtime broadcaster, actually sports broadcaster in Chicago, named Bruce Wolf, who was on the Fox Chicago station doing sports, and he liked the combination and so we went from Saturdays to Saturdays and Sundays and then, before there was a change in ownership at WLS, they didn't like the guy that they had nine to 11 midday so they blew him out of his contract and put us in.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: We did that for two years and then a couple years into it, after we had been doing the midday for two years, don Wade unfortunately got sick.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: He got brain cancer, so we were filling in and then ultimately they decided Don and Roma, they were married, they were a couple, they decided they were going to retire and so they put us into the morning drive slot.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: We did that for another two years and there was an opportunity to go to AM560, which is the Salem station in Chicago.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: Salem is the company that syndicates like Dennis, prager and Hannity and others, and so I took that opportunity because it just gave me more of a blank slate and more control, and I've been there for going on a decade.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: So it's one of those things like I'm sure everybody experiences in life you thought you were going to do one thing, maybe in a particular sector, and you end up in that sector, but doing something very different than you envision, and I just took it as going through doors that opened and just I was having fun with it.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: So just sort of seeing where we go.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: And it's been almost 15 years now.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: I remember a number of years ago we met for coffee in Chicago and you told me a little bit about your story growing up and having been adopted.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Did you remind all of us?
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I mean I was born April 29th 1972, and I was adopted when I was three days old, and this was something I would talk about a lot in pro-life circles.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: So I was adopted eight months before the Roe v Wade decision, and so, you know, had the decision come a little bit earlier, who knows?
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: I don't know what my birth mother would have done, and then the world would have potentially been deprived of me, and that's obviously a world no one wants to live in.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: So that informed my view too.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's informed by my faith, but it's also just informed from just the thinking about that very personal level and the practicality of it and then saying, well, you know, gosh, the idea that we're taking away these opportunities for who knows what kind of people that can make, who knows what kind of contributions to our society and our country, it just was something that always stuck with me growing up is like, not only the loving decision that my birth mother made, but what my parents did and how they sacrificed for me, and just how both protecting unborn life as well as adoption itself are such loving things to do.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: And that's, I think, the position most of us want to be on in society is the position of love.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: I also wanted to ask you maybe one more question about your KFAS experience.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: You took two courses while you were in Washington, had an internship Impactful on your life.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: It was.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: I mean, first of all, it's like you know, there's certain academics, like coaches you meet over the course of your life, where you say like that was really something, that was an experience to be with that professor or teacher for a semester or a year.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: And George, george Vixens yeah, george was one of those guys you know and I had started to get into a couple of years early, free market economists and the Austrian School of Economics and it was like he jumped off the pages of a von Mises book and he was right in front of the class at Georgetown teaching us, and so he was cool because he was one of those guys, like Milton Friedman, who made economics very accessible and very tangible and very interesting.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: I mean, I was interested in it, but it wasn't just sort of theoretical, there was a lot of application of the theory.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: That, I think, brought out more of the importance and the dynamism of that field of study.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: So that, and then you know, and I hadn't spent any time in DC, you know, as a kid who's still an undergrad, and so to spend six weeks in DC, meet all the people from around the country, different schools, many of whom I kept in touch with for a long time a couple I still do now.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: It was just a cool experience because obviously there's a lot of bright people that pursued professions in a multitude of disciplines and it was just a lot to take in and a lot of experience in a relatively short amount of time.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: And, interestingly, after the TFAS program that summer I went to the World Libertarian Convention in Tallinn, estonia.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: So then it was like immediate application of some of what we had talked about in the comparative political and economic systems and then seeing it in real time, you know, in a place like Estonia that was four years removed from the wall falling.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it was cool.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: The timing of it worked out, the experience was great and it was definitely formative.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Estonia is a fascinating place.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: We have a scholarship program that brings an Estonian to our program every summer from there, and I've been over there to help establish it.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: It's a wonderful place.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: The politics are really interesting.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and George Vixens was from Latvia.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: He had that experience to share with students.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Well, let's fast forward to current events.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: What are your initial observations after six weeks?
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Is it of the Trump administration kind of top line thoughts and observations?
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: It's been pretty fun, I got to say I've been smiling a lot more during morning drive than I have the previous four years.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, I can't say I'm terribly surprised about much, maybe a little bit about some of the expressions that sort of his Monroe Doctrine 2.0 have taken.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: I didn't maybe expect he would be as aggressive, with Greenland and the Panama Canal out of the gate as he has been A little bit of a surprise.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: But generally speaking, I'm not surprised because I mean he's like a Seth Rainer golf course.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Everything's right out in front of you the stuff that he says he's going to do during a campaign.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: That's what he does, or he sets out to do.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: In fact, rusty Reno, who's the editor of First Things, who wasn't necessarily a Trump fan, particularly during his first term, but he said you know it's interesting, I don't know that Trump is the best person that's ever been president of the United States, just in terms of a character perspective.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: But by the measure of someone's character, particularly a politician, do you do or attempt to do exactly what you said you were going to do.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: He is the most honest president of my lifetime by that standard and that's a pretty good standard for politicians across the board and that's only been amplified in 2.0.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: After his exile for four years and all that fell him and many of his supporters, I'm not really surprised by anything.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: I think he is consistent with what he did largely in his first term.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: He is doing, or attempting to do, the very things that he said he would do as a candidate, which is what we should expect, and maybe he's doing it a little bit faster pace this go around as opposed to his first term, because he knows he's on a clock.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: But it's not surprising.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: But it is enjoyable to see not just that he is doing what he said he would do, but also that he is bringing a reckoning.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: That is necessary, that is overdue, sort of this common sense counter-revolution that he touched upon during his remarks at that joint session of Congress.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Do you worry at all that by doing so much through executive orders and the executive branch that needs to be done because we have so much red ink and so much over-regulation, but that either it'll be too easily undone in four years or that he's bringing too much power into the executive branch?
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: I don't know that.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: There's an example where I mean there's things he's suggested you know, I want to end birthright citizenship but he hasn't actually said birthright citizenship is over, because that's beyond his power, and this is something that confuses the left.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: You can propose something to generate a conversation, focus people's attention, but he's not saying for example, like a past president said, the Supreme Court tried to stop me, but they didn't stop me, Joe Biden talking about student loan debt forgiveness.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: So he hasn't done that.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: So I don't think there's a concentration.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: I think there's a reestablishment of the executive branch vis-a-vis the judicial branch and, to some extent, the legislative branch, or rebalancing of these co-equal branches of power.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: I would say, though, to your point about it can't just be executive orders.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: You know, House and Senate Republicans are going to have to codify a lot of this into law for it to have a staying effect.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: But one of the things that Trump has done by pushing as hard as he had with executive orders, is he's putting pressure on members of Congress, particularly in the House, to live up to their responsibilities, both in terms of spend as well as in terms of oversight that they maybe haven't.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: It's easy to speechify.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: It's tough to do the detailed work of lawmaking, and now there's pressure on the legislative branch to do just that.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: So I don't think there's been overreaches that are anything more than rhetorical at this point.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: But I do agree that Congress is going to need to statuify some of what has been done by executive order.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing I really appreciate is the executive orders and the actions he's taken that are directed at gaining control of the administrative state, which is part of the executive branch and he's supposed to.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: You know, he's the executive overseer and they've had so much independence, they've been doing so much on their own and he's reestablishing, with the help of some court decisions, the right to fire members of that branch.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: Well, that, Chevron decision, so that you know the Supreme Court, chevron decision last term and now.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: This provides him more latitude, and his cabinet secretary's more latitude, to pursue some of the internal reforms that are required to bring the administrative state.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: I mean we talk about this all the time it's sort of a de facto fourth branch of government, but it's not supposed to be, and this is something that the Doge boys and the president are addressing and his cabinet secretaries too.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: I mean some are very aggressive.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Lee Zeldin at EPA is very aggressive.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: He should be.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: This is what he said we were going to do.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: This is what people voted for him to do, and this is what he's doing yeah, making government employees work five days a week, for instance.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the whole, like every time a probationary federal employee loses their job.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: I mean it's a national story and emails are system-wide controversies.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: You have to respond to an email that someone sent about what you did or what you're doing or what you hope to do.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: I mean I think of people in the private sector.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: Look at the histrionics coming from the government sector over some of this stuff and they're like you know.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I don't like responding to my boss and doing weekly reports or checking in or giving my vision statement of what I hope to accomplish this quarter or this fiscal year either, but I know there's a pink slip on the other end of it if I don't.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: So I think it just further codifies into people's mind how entitled and out of touch this permanent bureaucracy in DC is.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Let's shift a little bit over to your profession in the media.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: I'm seeing encouraging signs of change that may impact the legacy media eventually, but one important change the president made was opening up the press briefing and not just having the legacy media there, but letting podcast hosts and conservative press have more access to the White House.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: And you have thoughts about that.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: The media landscape has been changing for a long time.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: There are podcasts and online outlets that have more consumers than the legacy dailies, than most of the shows on CNN and MSNBC, for that matter.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: They completely had a sort of outsized influence.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: I think it's great to introduce new voices into the press room, to be able to ask the press secretary questions, just to give them the standing that says basically look, you know, some of these podcasters and representatives of new media organizations are just as on the ball or more have just as incisive questions, are coming at these stories from different angles.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: So it sort of enriches the conversation and expands the parameters of debate.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: So I think that's excellent.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: I think it's long overdue, and the whole AP business too.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: I mean you know there's no constitutional right for you to be a member of the Washington press room, so I mean that again is sort of this entitlement mentality that legacy media has as well.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: That I think you know nobody is running around going to die on a hill over sort of AP's access.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: You're a news organization, nobody's stopping you from being a news organization, but you don't get the privileges you think you deserve codified by one administration to the next, that's all.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: So deal with it.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Well, particularly for those of us who live in the Washington DC area, it was refreshing to have Jeff Bezos announce that his paper in the future is going to be focused on personal liberty and free markets.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: The opinion editor there said I don't want to do that and resigned.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: So he's doing a search now for a new opinion editor.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what a tell.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: That was David Shipley, who's a DC press corps reptile New Republic, new York times.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: I mean it's like we're going to orient this to free minds and free markets.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: I'm out, right.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: Well, what does that tell you about the groupthink and the DC press corps?
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, come on, and it's not like basis would say exclusively, like you can't have the Keynesians write some piece about how every dollar government spends as a positive multiplier.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: But he's just saying like we're going to orient this to not only where some of the zeitgeist is, but maybe what some of my views are like in terms of how I became the second richest man on the planet.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, it just sort of makes sense.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Oh and, by the way, the product that you're putting out, I'm underwriting at a loss.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: So you know it's within my discretion.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: If this is going to be a business, that it'd be a little bit more successful.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: The only thing I would say about Bezos and that pivot, there's two things.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: One, it could just be, you know, sort of the rent seeker.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: Taking this angle of rent seeking, like it may not be an authentic sort of epiphany.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: It's just like I need to better align with where the zeitgeist is right now, including who's in the White House and who controls Congress.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: And the other thing is I don't want him or anybody to think I have to align with the powers that be and then realign if the powers that be change just because they're the powers that be, because then you don't really have an independent press and you don't have independent thought and you start to narrow those parameters of debate.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: As a free minds, free markets kind of guy, I want the debate to be as expansive as possible.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: There should be virtually no censorship, except when speech becomes behavior, and the Supreme Court's precedents are very clear on this.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: This is the only way you really battle test ideas.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: I mean, you have to be persuasive, you have to be able to persuade people to your way of thinking on something, and in this country and the West in general has gotten over the last couple of generations pretty far afield from that.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: It's been a little scary actually.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: We have a program at the Wall Street Journal, the Joseph Rago Fellowship, and we have three of our Rago fellows who work there now full-time and two that are currently on fellowships there.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Paul Gigo, the editor, who spoke at a dinner we had in New York on Monday.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: He mentioned in an editorial there about the changes at the Post.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: He said it's great to have a wingman and then he added that you know, except no substitutes, we're the real deal at the Wall Street Journal.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: But the Washington Post has a long way to go to get to where the Wall Street Journal is.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the good news is their publisher there, Will Lewis, came from the Wall Street Journal and was Paul's boss there, and so I'm hopeful that it's real.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: And I think the mistake Jeff Bezos made is when he bought the paper, he said but I'm not going to have any involvement in the editorial policy, it's all independent.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: And he may have just after a while realized that you know, I own this paper.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it's actually an interesting dynamic in legacy media generally, because we saw this happen in Chicago at the Tribune, where the newsroom, which are full of, like you know, medill, educated communists in places like the Chicago Tribune.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: They just took over the paper.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: I mean they, you know they got a guild and there's whatever wall of separation they're supposed to be there isn't, and they just sort of browbeat the editorial page people into, you know, aligning with the angles of their news reporting storytelling probably more accurate.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: So you lose not only that editorial independence, you lose any sort of their news reporting storytelling probably more accurate.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: So you lose not only that editorial independence, you lose any sort of intellectual diversity on those editorial pages.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: The Chicago Tribune that used to feature the Mike Roykos and the John Casses, I mean it's indistinguishable from the communist worker, and so maybe Bezos learned a hard lesson.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: You can't just turn a newspaper over to the newsroom and let them dictate terms to these other important departments within the papers.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Now what's going on in Illinois?
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: We've read stories that a third of the counties or more there want to secede and join Indiana.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: Your former leader of your house has just been convicted.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Mike Madigan, Our alum who served as minority leader in the states, and Dan McConkie has shared stories about the difficulty of changing things, about the Democrats, all in lockstep with Madigan.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Is there any hope for Illinois?
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Because we know about Chicago as well and that seems hopeless.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: You know, Chicago has been part of Illinois since the beginning, so we can't just blame Chicago's existence there.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: We have won races and we've had statewide office holders, while Chicago has also been a part of Illinois.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: So there's a little bit of a crutch that Republicans use in Illinois and other states that are dominated by the other party.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: Look, I mean with respect to Indiana.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: I've asked governors of Indiana going back to Mitch Daniels to please.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: A third of the counties have passed resolutions at the county level to leave the state.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: And now the Indiana state legislature has engaged and said yeah, we're open minded to taking you.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: It's a crazy thing because it requires the approval of both the Illinois legislature and the Indiana legislature and Congress to do that, to have counties secede.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: But it would make Indiana more Republican, which is something that the dominant party there probably likes.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: It would make Illinois more left, which is probably something the incumbent.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: So I mean it's a crazy thing, but right now it's in the interest of the respective parties in the two states to do it with Republicans in control of Congress.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, crazier things have happened, but of course it's an indictment.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: I mean Illinois leads the nation out of migration for the last decade, more so than West Virginia, and, with all due respect, illinois has more going for it than West Virginia, I mean just even in terms of where it's located and the natural resources it has and so forth.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: So it's just an indictment of a bipartisan political class that turned the state into a big kleptocracy.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: You know, brandon Johnson is not the only one with a gift closet in Illinois.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: But you know, is there hope?
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: I would say there's hope in this sense and you saw it a little bit this past week with the testimony from the sanctuary city mayors Boston, new York, denver, of course, chicago and sort of Eric Adams.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: You know his like slow, methodical move away from some of these policies in an election year Somewhere this is my prediction some big blue city, which is basically every city with more than 250,000 people in this country, some big blue city, or some big perceived deep blue state.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: There's going to be a shock to the system, deep blue state.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: There's going to be a shock to the system.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: Somebody is going to win a mayor's race in a place like New York or Chicago in the next cycle or two, or at the gubernatorial level, in a state like I don't know, maryland maybe although I know the incumbent's somewhat popular or Illinois, california, even you know if Kamala's their nominee, maybe Something's going to happen because of what you're hearing from those members of the Democrat Party that are saying we have to pivot, we have to worry more about classrooms as opposed to bathrooms, which you heard Rahm Emanuel say this week.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: I don't want to talk about boys and girls sports anymore.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: We have to recognize that blue city governance is a catastrophe from a public safety perspective, from a tax burden perspective and that's from an economic vitality perspective.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: So somebody is going to shoot the gap in one of these big cities or big states in the next cycle or two and really send a shockwave through the system.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: Because until that happens, I still think the dominant perspective on the left is that Kamala lost because of racism and misogyny.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: We don't really have to change very much.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: I don't really want to change very much.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: That's where the critical mass in that party is.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: They're going to have to take a beating at the ballot box in a place they don't expect, and I think that's going to happen.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: You ran for governor and I was curious about what that experience was like and maybe what lessons you learned from that.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: I learned yeah, don't be a conservative reform guy and run for governor in Illinois.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Basically, I had run campaigns for a long time so I had a pretty good idea of what running would look like and feel like what I would like about it, what I wouldn't, what would happen.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: And you know it pretty much held to form.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: You know, one of the things that happens for people who haven't run for office, which is always interesting because it's different for every candidate, but it's the same dynamic the people you think are going to be heroes for you, some of them just like disappear and do nothing, and the people that you didn't expect anything of are heroes.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: So it's really interesting.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: It's a very interesting sociological experiment to run for public office, just in the nature of the relationships you have with people and what you think about those relationships before becoming a candidate and what you think about them with different people in different ways after.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: So that was something that was really interesting.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: But I think you run for office if you have a point other than wanting to wear sash or wanting to get a pension or wanting to get status or something, if you really have a policy point that you want to drive as a legislator or an executive, and that's why I ran.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: I saw a party in my party in Illinois, the Republican Party, as feckless, cowardly, ineffective, bordering on irrelevant.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: And this is only a couple of cycles removed at the time from having the governorship for the better part of three decades.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: So it's amazing how quickly things can crater when you lose your way, and that's what happened to the Republican Party and I thought in 2010, this was an opportunity Obama's midterm elections, obamacare really negatively impacting his popularity and the rise of the Tea Party.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: You sort of could see this gathering storm, which did arrive throughout most of the country.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: But the thing about it was interesting is my hook when I ran for governor was Illinois isn't broken, it's fixed.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Because, what politicians always say our politics is broken, the state is broken, our federal government is broken.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: It's not broken, it's doing exactly what they set it up to do.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: It's like this is serving their interests very specifically.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: So if you don't understand that the people in charge have the system set up in a way that benefits them, and probably to the exclusion of benefiting you, then you don't understand what's happening and so you don't understand what the solution is.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: And so I mean this was about the same time Angelo Cotevilla wrote his ruling class essay that gained such traction is because there was this thing happening and there was more and more of a realization that the fix was in.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: So I was a little ahead of the learning curve.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: I'd like to think, and the Illinois electorate was well behind the learning curve, still is.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: But I think that the time I ran, I had a point.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: I had a point about my party, I had a point about the state of Illinois conversation to reorient government at every level away from centralization, to shrink the size of government at every level and increase the size of the citizen at every level, and I wanted to be a part of it.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: And you look around and you say like, well, this guy has a title, but I mean he's a doofus, so why should I defer to him?
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: And that was my attitude and that's why I think we need to have more people at that attitude.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: We need more people that don't, you know, use public office as a stepping stone to the next public office.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: They can come from outside the system with different areas of expertise and different areas of success and jump right in.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: If anything, what you've seen over the last couple of decades is you should not be intimidated by the talent that is in public office right now.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: I like to tell young people who want to get involved in politics and run for office that they should view that as a means to an end, not the end in and of itself, and that dovetails on what you just said.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: We're recording this before a live audience and we have about a dozen of our students here.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: What advice would you offer to young people today who are eager to make a difference in the world and uncertain about what the future holds?
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: So what I would say to young people read, not just X, I mean like read, read real books, like read, like real reading.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, don't just consume podcasts and Except this one.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: Well, don't just don't exclusively yeah, not excluding them but read the Western canons, read Russell Kirk and you read Jeremy Bentham and you read Bill Buckley.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's such a simple thing, but like, you have a base of knowledge, because so much of this opinion that Bandy's about on social media is sort of fact free.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: It's echo chambery.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: You know some of the words, but you don't really know where they come from.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: You know some of the lyrics, but you sort of can't hear the music.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: You know sort of out of tone.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: And the only way you get that, like for anything, you have to know what you're talking about.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: We have people and I'm talking about now in my realm, like in conservative politics who have written more books than they've read, and all you have to do is, like read one of their books.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: You know, and I'm not going to name names because I want to get no better, not, but it's obvious and they're not really advancing the flag from their platforms when they're doing that.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: We should be introducing young people to all these great thinkers, because if you start reading, it forces you to be intellectually curious.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: But you should be intellectually curious, you should be aggressive, but there should be a knowledge base from which you're operating.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: And I don't just mean political tomes, I don't just mean economists and philosophers, I mean the great you know.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: I mean like read Brideshead's Revisited right, read Evelyn Waugh's Ouvra and other great authors.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Nathaniel Hawthorne, shakespeare, obviously especially since he's been drummed out of the colleges now some kids probably never even heard of him.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: That's the only way to be a real thought leader.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: Or if you want to be next level thought leader, you may be able to get a podcast, you may be able to get a show on a cable news channel.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: But I mean, if you really want to be an impactful thought leader and you want to be aggressive and you want people to respect your opinion, then you need to be an originalist and that requires intellectual curiosity and putting the work in.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Well, dan.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much for being with us this afternoon.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast with Dan Proff.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.