Episode 47: Politics

Welcome to wisdom from the aerial view, the podcast for those who wish to learn how to crush their anxiety and find meaning and purpose in their lives. How are you today, Mark Klein?

I'm good, I'm very good. I feel fantastic. How about you? I do, I feel great.

Do you really? that's always good to feel fantastic. I don't know what's making you feel fantastic, but can you send some of that over here?

I can tell you what's made me feel fantastic. went to play golf yesterday with an old friend of mine and a friend of his, and I don't play very much golf. And I'm feeling great today because I'm not playing golf. Because I was so frustrated yesterday. Because if you don't play these games, you can't really play well. I had a good time with them. But it was a beautiful day. But was like, why am I doing this? It's too frustrating.

Tell me.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I'm not playing golf. I didn't play golf yesterday or today and I'm not feeling as good as you, but that's a good thing. have to tell all, I have to tell all, go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead. The absence of golf makes one feel good. A great walk wasted or whatever that was. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we usually don't talk about what we're going to talk about, but yesterday I got a text from you saying that you wanted to talk about politics.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The absence. No, no, go ahead. Sometimes, yes. Yeah, good work spoiled.

but not politics in that right versus left, Republican versus Democrat, just about politics in general. said, okay, let's do that. So of course I went to look at the definition of politics as did you. Let me read you what I found. And they said that politics is the art or science of government. The art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy. The art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government. And I got to thinking, who makes the decision, who makes the determination what the definition is? Who defines definition? I guess that's right. So, yeah.

person who owns the dictionary. It's like, you know, history books, whoever, whoever the opinion of the or the, yeah, I'd the opinion of whoever's writing the books, that's true of everything. You know, you watch, just before we really get into this, you know, you watch some of these presidential historians or historians in general, right, and they're always on one network or another, or you read about them, paper, whatever.

I guess, yeah.

Thank

And these are not, you think, well, presidential historian or historian, this should be like super objective, right? And of course, it's not even close to being objective. And you listen to these people and you go, come on, right? Come on. It doesn't matter which side you're on, right? So the point is that, you know, the reason I wanted to talk about this, and I'll tell you my definition, actually, which I found, which is,

No, never.

Yeah. Yeah.

Obviously can't be that much of it, but it's the process by which groups of people make collective decisions, resolve conflicts, and exercise power to shape the rules, policies, and distribution of resources within a community, organization, or society. So to me, and the reason I wanted to talk about this is because that sounds like, oh, let's all work together and make the world a better place. That sounds like what politics should be. But of course,

Yeah, would that we

We're still recording this a week or so before it gets released and we're still in middle of the government shutdown and hopefully by the time this gets released, we won't have a government shutdown anymore. But you look at the government shutdown and I don't really care which side you're on. It's totally childish. This is very immature and people are getting hurt. So. I think I've told you that I have on the same day, I often will get texts from friends on the left who tell me I'm a moron and an idiot and friends on the right who tell me I'm a moron and an idiot. And they might all be right, but they can't be right for the same reason, right? That's impossible. But here's what else I get, which is really even maybe more interesting is my friends on the right will say, look, I know you're a liberal guy or a blue guy. And so you may not agree with this. And I'll get my friends on the left to say, look, I knew you were a conservative guy and you're the, you know, lean towards the right, but you may not agree with this. And I'm thinking none of them have any, they're all assuming I'm on the other side, which is fascinating to me. I'm thinking, okay, well that means I'm doing something right because either I'm fooling them all or I'm not buying in as, as heartily as they would like me to, which is really what it is. so the reason I wanted to talk about politics, politics today. is because we are in somewhat of a mess in this country. Certainly it doesn't appear to be getting any better. And one of the things we talk about in this podcast is the things we do talk about our meaning purpose and trying to reduce our stress. And politics is smack in the middle of all this. So I thought it would be worthwhile to spend a little time talking about what politics really is. I'll ask you to summarize it in one word and then I'll summarize it in one word. And then let's get into where we are, why we are where we are, what the problem is in terms of our inability to come together and what can we do about it. And how does the aerial view affect our interpretation of what's happening and the solution. So that's my agenda. And of course you're welcome to tear it apart and change it into anything you want. But that's what I was thinking we should talk about.

No, that's fine. It's absolutely fine. guess what is your, you put out a challenge there. You put out a challenge about one word. And I guess my one word, the only thing I could think of when I think of politics is chaos. And it need not be, but it is. And that's nothing new. I mean, it's just, happened to be in the year 2025, but it's no different from the 60s and the 70s. It's always about chaos. Because I guess,

No, you go first. You go first.

I like that.

When we're at politics, if we really want it to be what it should be, we should talk about governing and not politics. It seems to me that politics is about opinion and governing is about what it should be about. How do we make the lives of our citizens better? We do that by governing in a way that values those people we're governing. And I think politics does just about the opposite. You use always the word, you always talk about what side you're on, what team you're on. And I guess in a couple of podcasts ago, I said something about it's not a team, we're Team America. And that to me is the problem, that's politics. And what we really need now is to talk about how do we govern so that the majority of those that we are governing do better. That's my two cents.

I couldn't agree more. It should be about governing. Absolutely, positively should be about governing. So my one word is power. So politics, if it was about governing, then it's not that hard. can pick any example you want, and you and I probably could sit down in five minutes and come up with something we could live with. And it would benefit not just the majority of people, as you just said, but almost everybody. Everybody but the fringes, everybody but the tail of the bell curve. We could do that. It's not that hard. But it is hard if the game is not governing and the game is politics, which I would substitute the word power. So we can use the example where, like we just mentioned, the current government shutdown. So clearly this isn't about governing. We have people, as we speak, losing their food stamp benefits. Obviously there are problems with the air traffic control system, public safety, all these things are being affected the military. they're fighting about a single thing. The single thing is the Obamacare subsidies. Okay, so let's talk about, okay, fine, great. Sounds like a legitimate topic. What's the problem here? Okay, problem is that they had these Obamacare was developed in 2009, I think, and implemented a couple of years later. I might be getting the dates a little wrong, but something in that ballpark. And one of the... There were two byproducts. One is people got coverage that couldn't get coverage. Great thing. Great thing. One other thing was you could keep your kids on your policies till they were 26. Good thing. And we got rid of pre-existing conditions. Sounds like a good thing. Let's go back to that one in a minute. That turns out to be a double-edged sword, but fine. Okay, great. And then we had COVID and we subsidized these because obviously people were in tremendous...

Good thing, good thing.

in a state of tremendous angst because they didn't have any jobs, nobody was working, so on. So Congress wisely did some things to make sure the economy didn't collapse, people could survive. One of the things was the Obamacare subsidies. So now there was supposed to be time limited. In fact, it is time limited. They expire very, very soon, within a few weeks. So the idea was, okay, let's do this. People need help. Let's help them. And then once we're out of COVID, we'll get rid of them.

Yes, they do. Right.

Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable thing. People say, yeah, Congress, good job. Sounds like a thoughtful thing to do. And here we are. So what's happening? So one side says, well, we can't get rid of the subsidies. People can't afford it. OK. The other side says, no, but we can't afford to keep these subsidies too expensive. OK. All right. So what do we do? Well, we could sit down together. over lunch or over dinner or over breakfast and talk about the pros and cons and we all care. We're all good people in Congress. Let's come up something we can all live with. We get it. It's too expensive. We're in $30 trillion in debt. And the other thing, we can't let people go bankrupt, go over healthcare costs. Okay. Let's see if we can figure out some compromise that we could all live with. It might not be perfect, but better than what we have. No. No, we're going home. We're closing the government. We're not talking about it.

All right. All right. All right.

Okay, so I can make the case, I don't even care who's right or wrong here in terms of being stubborn, but they're all stubborn. everybody's, a lot of people are gonna suffer. For a problem that's solvable, not perfectly solvable, but most problems are not perfectly solvable, you sit down together and you think, okay, what's... We got to take care of these people. We got to worry about the budget. Okay. What can we afford? Can we move money around? Can we do this? What can we do? A real conversation about what you said, governing. We have to make this work as best we could. But no, there's no governing. The Democrats say, okay, we've got the leverage now. This is our only leverage. If we cave now, or cave into Trump and his people and we can't cave. And the Republicans saying, you can't hold us hostage. We'll talk about it later, maybe. Okay. Well, so. Nobody's right here. I mean, you can say, well, my team A is worse than team B. I don't really care about it. You know how I feel. But if the issue we're governing, like you said, they sit in a room, but it's not. What is it? It's power. It's power.

Well, you know, let's think about this when it is, but it's, yeah.

And reason why, hang on, I just want to say, we're going to use that word power because that's going to be very important when we move to the aerial view to see how we can resolve this to some degree.

I guess I was thinking that it's designed that way. When you look at, let's pretend we're looking at the State of the Union address. And it's right in front of our eyes, you've got on one side of the aisle are the Republicans, on the other side of the aisle are the Democrats, never the twain chummi, they never sit together. They did once, I remember, right after 9-11. After 9-11, they decided to play a little game of optics. And they say, we're gonna have

today.

instead of one girl and one boy, we're have one Democrat sitting next to a Republican and so on and so on and so on, to show that the country was unified. And that lasted exactly 60 minutes. You know, it is a system that has been, I guess, deemed aisles. We sit on one side of the aisle, you sit on the other side of the aisle, this is like at a Jewish wedding. The boy sit on one side, the girl, it's ridiculous. You're talking about... Why don't we get together? We don't even get together when we're sitting in the halls of Congress. It's just the system is built to be doomed. We never get together because we never get together. It used to be, I remember in the old days, I'm old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill, different sides of the aisle, they would argue and then they would outside and have a beer. Two Irishmen sitting in a pub having a beer, talking. That doesn't happen anymore. In fact, just the opposite happens. You get blasted when you go and you meet with the other side. You know the old Bill Maher story when he went and had dinner with Donald Trump? He got into all sorts of difficulty because he did it. We don't sit down and talk to one, not we, they don't sit down and talk to one another because all they care about, you're right, is about power. Power means getting reelected. I can't get reelected if it looks as though I'm consorting with the enemy.

100 % correct. So it's not that the system is bad. It's that the players are bad. So you could, I agree with you, they should sit together. Why are they sitting apart? It's so, again, immature, childish, right? Sit next to each other, right? Pretend you're on the same team, that team you talked about, the American team, but they're not on the American team. And for all the reasons you said, because power, you get to park close in at the airport in Washington if you're a congressperson.

Okay, I'll buy that. Okay.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

and you get all these perks and you get invited to everything and you're on TV and you're famous and maybe a few of them say, well, this is pretty good, but I want to do even better when they run for higher office. But most of them say, I'll be a congressman or a senator for 40 years and it'll be a good life. And I get wined and dined, fine. Because the focus is not where we talk about in this podcast, Tom. The focus is not outward focused, it's inward focused.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if your goal is to get, what is your goal? Re-election. So John Feteman, who I've watched evolve when he had his stroke and he was running for Senate at that point, I thought, well, he should drop out of the race. He's severely limited. It can't be good for his health. But of course, it's not my decision, it was his decision. And fortunately he recovered. And the John Fetterman we see now is a different John Fetterman than we saw before. Now, I'm not talking about his political views. I'm talking about his view of life, right? Because he knows, right? He knows he was seconds away from death. And he sees the world now and I believe, I've not talked to the man, I'd love to meet him, but he's like 15 feet tall than I am. But I admire him because what does he say now? He said,

Right.

Yeah.

I'm always going to vote what's best for my country. think if I recall, he actually voted against the shutdown. And I heard him talk, said, because I'm not team, like you said, I'm not team Democrat, I'm team America. this shutdown is always bad for America and I'm not going to do it. And if I lose my seat, I'm going to get primaried, fine, I don't care, I'm going to do the right thing. Well, how refreshing, right?

He did, he did indeed, yes.

435 people in the Congress should be saying the exact same thing. I don't care about me. I don't care about my power. I don't care about my status. I'm going to turn the camera outward. So here's why I wanted to talk about this. This is the kind of thing we talk about every single week, turning the camera outward. But except for a John Fetterman, let's say a few others, I don't want to paint everybody with a broad brush. I'm sure they're very... many kind, generous members of Congress somewhere in disguise. But we talk about this all the time. Why are we here? What's the purpose? To turn that camera from ourselves, from inward focus, to turning the camera from the selfie mode to the outward mode to focus on other people. And we've talked ad nauseam about why this is so good for everybody. But what's interesting about these Congress people is they... did not get the memo, right? And they are not only hurting the country, which is why I think I was watching Bill Maher, think, or one of those shows, and somebody quoted an approval rating for Congress in general, like 15%. Wow. I mean, that's come on. I mean, that's a really low number. Why? Because people see this. They see that these people are after themselves. It's all about one sound bite after another.

All right, night.

Yes, right.

how great I am. I'm further to the extreme than the other person is. And it's me, me, me. And then they know how the system works. We talked about the primary system. The people on the extremes tend to be the people who vote in primaries. Therefore, if you want to win a primary, you got to head to the extreme and then look where you are. And then we have a country that's polarized. But all this goes away literally overnight if people in Congress, like all of us, realize that we're We're not paying attention to the most important thing. It's not that the people of Congress should do it because it's the right thing to do, which they should, and it's what their constituents deserve. But they're going to feel a lot better. There are a lot of people in Congress who quit because they can't stand it. They can't stand this hatefulness and this bitterness and this power grabbing. And they see it. And those are the ones that leave. The people that leave are the ones that get it. That's exactly what we don't want, right? We want the people who get it to stay, right? So this is, so we are, so when we talk about politics now, which is why I want to bring this up, it's not really a discussion of politics. It's a discussion of, of what are you going to do with your life? Why are you here? Right? This is what that. that this is not that I want to go give election to the members of Congress, but this is what they should be having for breakfast every day. A reminder, right? This is why you're here on this earth now. People have trusted you to help them. You're not helping them. You're helping yourself. This is all about you. No, except John Feteman and a couple of his friends. So this is why I want to talk about this. This is a story of our whole country. It's our whole nation and the fabric of our nation.

Yeah. You know, there's something that I throw a little bit of a monkey wrench into this, and that is that we who live right here, we live in Washington, so we see it every day. It's the local business here. It's what we do here. We do for a living. But I think the rest of the country turns off. They don't listen. They don't care. I don't blame them. And it is reflective in the way they vote. The power of incumbency is huge. So while we're upset about what's called the chaos as I call it, which is politics, the rest of the country isn't. They will re-elect the same people over and over and over again because A, it's easy and B, they just don't care they're turned off by it. So I think there are two things at play here. Yes, we need for the members of Congress, not 435 but 535, all of them, Congress, yeah you forgot the Senate but you forgot them.

that's what I meant. Sorry. I forgot to say it. Oops. Right.

We need all of them to take that camera and look out, but we also need the rest of the country to take a look at the camera and see what is going on because what happens in this little town of ours has a huge impact all over the country. And so when we're looking about turning the camera inward to outward, everybody needs to do that. Everybody needs to take a deeper look into what is going on and how do we stop the chaos? How do you do that?

I think more people outside Washington turn the camera out. Look how generous, it's a generous country. This country is generous, right? They'll give money to everything, even crazy things, right? Even Luigi Mangione's defense, but it's a generous country. So I think people do have an instinct that they want, they definitely have this instinct to help other people. They want to do it. But I don't think whether the country...

yes, yes, very.

the 340 million of us, I think it's pretty much in that ballpark, are focused on this or not, really doesn't change the responsibility of those 535 people, right?

Absolutely, sure.

And they're getting it wrong for a very fundamental reason. They're getting it wrong because they're concentrating on the wrong thing. And it will not serve... If you and I concentrate on the wrong thing, if we are talking about me, me, me, me, and we don't care about anybody else, okay, that's our deal. We're not having that large an impact. But people in Congress have, as you said, have a very large impact. They have an even greater responsibility to get this right. And so the reason to... But when you're spoon-fed a story about what life is about that's related to power, money, fame. Look at what you see on social media, the regular media, movies, streaming series, everywhere, right? It's all about power, fame, money. Look who we lift up on pedestals. Why in the world are we interviewing Hollywood actors and actresses? about their political views any more than the guy in the grocery store. And yet people want to hear, why? Why do you care what, and I don't want to pick a particular person because I don't watch a lot, and I don't want to offend anybody, but I always thought, why are we interviewing these people? Okay, it's not because they have some great insight. It's because they're famous and they bring eyeballs to the media, whatever it is. And again, it's all about the money. So as long as we focus on money, power, fame, this is what we're going to get.

Mm-hmm.

One of the things you learn from the aerial view is that money, power, and fame are nice, but they're not going to get you where you need to go. They are not going to seal a deal for you or for anybody else. You will have a life of emptiness, loneliness, unfulfillment if you follow those things. look, I believe in making a living. I've been a doctor, I've done fine. I'm not in the Jeff Bezos category, but I can pay my bills and no problem. I don't have to worry about money. I don't have to worry about paycheck to paycheck. I made enough that I could do it, but I didn't do it for the money. I never did it for the money. I did it for the reward that I still get every day of feeling like I made a difference in people's lives. That's where the joy in life comes from. So whether you have $100, well, whether you have $10,000 in the bank or a billion dollars in the bank, Let's use 100,000 so people feel more comfortable. Let's say, whether you have 100,000 or 100 billion in the bank is not going to determine the value of your life. I guarantee it. As long as you can pay your bills in a reasonable way and live a reasonable life, the extra money all of this is kick you up into a higher necessity to spend more and present a different face to the world. It doesn't, it's not, that is never gonna get you to where you need to go, nor is fame. We've seen lots of famous people who've committed suicide. Tons, right? Whether they be rock stars or actors, actresses, ballplayers, right? Lots of people. It's not gonna get you there. And that, is the message that, that, that it's so critical for each of us, but it is super critical for the people that are supposed to do what you said, govern, right? You know, we rely on them. What they do makes a difference. It does affect our lives every day. They have much greater responsibility than the individual person in the Midwest or in the South, whatever, in their neighborhood. I mean, we're all important, but you see my point? They have to do better. And they should do better for two reasons. One, number one, it's the right thing to do, right? Follow John Fetteman. Number two, it's going to make their lives much more meaningful and worthwhile. So even for a selfish reason, that's why they should do this.

I wonder if they even think about purpose. What is their purpose? And if they do, then maybe their definition or maybe their miscalculation of what purpose is, is the sticking point here. That what you and I are thinking about and talking about about purpose are really at odds with what they feel their purpose is. And crazy things are happening. A couple of things. know, and we've been talking about the World Series offline because it's important part of my life. I love it, Ella Baseball. And a strange thing happened to the World Series the other night. They were, when they were in LA, the cameras focused in on Megan Markle and that husband of hers, Harry. And there they were watching at Dodger Stadium, sitting in front of...

Okay

Cindy Koufax, one of the greatest pictures that ever lived. Not only was he a great picture, but he was a picture for the Los Angeles Dodgers. And yet they had seats in front of him. How do we value people in our society? Do we value the guy who really should have been sitting in front of them or not? That's one point. I don't know. It's what we see through this prism of the media. Yeah, go ahead.

Let's talk about that for a second. I like that. Because you don't have award shows for best physicist of the year, greatest mathematician of the year, greatest technological discovery, greatest medical discovery, your research who found cure for disease X. We don't interview them on Sunday morning talk shows. We don't see them all over social media. They're not in every tabloid. But somebody who can, I don't have anything particularly against actors and actresses, it's fine if that's what they wanna do, it's great, everybody loves a good show. But they're just pretending to be something. And there are people who won awards after not doing it very long. There are people who have won best actor, actresses who were not doing it very long, relatively speaking. Well, you're not gonna win a Nobel Prize in medicine if you're practicing for 10 minutes, it's not gonna happen, right? So. So as you said, we put these people on a pedestal. Now, why? OK, because I think it's pretty simple. They just draw eyeballs to whatever media, whether it be TikTok or YouTube or traditional news channels or cable channels. They're all trying to do the same thing. They want your attention so they can get advertising so they can make money. It's not that complicated a system, right? But that's probably why. But in essence, the society would be so much better if we gave recognition.

Yeah.

If we're going to give recognition to anybody, give it to the people that are really knocking it out of the park to use your baseball metaphor.

Yeah, yeah.

Because they are, but we don't do that in our society. We value things that are so superficial and so meaningful, meaningless, like power, like fame, like money. Why? Here's another thing. If you're a billionaire, and you know me, I have absolutely nothing against billionaires. think Bernie Sanders and AOC have this completely backwards wrong. Billionaires are fine. At the end of the day, the cascade of events that they generate through all their inventions, their jobs, and so on, is astronomically fantastic. Forget about the 800,000 billionaires in the country. you're focusing on the wrong thing. Okay, but still, why are we interested in the political views of a billionaire any more than an actress? You see, they're just, it's like we, if you have power, if you have fame and if you have money, all of a sudden you're elevated to a standard, to a level that people think, you should be listening to these people about some things, right? Listen to a business person about business or an athlete about his or her sport, but not.

Well, but one could say then why would I have to listen to who the Washington Post or the New York Times endorse for a particular office? But they still do it. One would assume they probably do. I don't know. And we could keep this conversation going all day, because it's actually rather interesting. We probably should. But I see we're running out of time. One of the things we talk about a lot on this program is our friend, Victor Frankel. And I was looking at rereading a chapter of his, I don't know,

Nobody ever does. They still do it. I don't think it makes any difference.

yesterday and it occurred to me I just wanted to read this sort of bring this together and we know who he was he was in a concentration camp and he wrote he said what was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life we had to learn ourselves and furthermore we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life, daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. That. seems to me is politics and governing and what we ought to be doing and what those 535 people up there ought to be thinking about every day.

I agree. what Victor Frankl just said in that paragraph you read was turn the camera outward. That's what he's saying. Turn the camera outward. And what I would say, when you're in the aerial view and you have the perspective all the time and you understand death and why we're here for a limited time and all the things we've talked about a million, a million times on this podcast, you realize I'm not here to get power.

That's what he's saying. Right.

I'm not here to get rich and famous. I'm here to make a difference during the limited number of records I'm on and at jukebox at time. As soon as you're on that first, as soon as you're old enough to do something on your own, start, start and don't stop and focus as much as you can. None of us get it right all the time. We're all selfish sometimes, of course, but if you stop every time you are, stop and say, wait, wait, I'm getting this wrong, which is what every member of Congress should do. should stop and say, wait, I'm getting this wrong. Viktor Frankl rule, I'm in control of how I feel, but the other Viktor Frankl rule you just mentioned, and was turn the camera outward. That's the whole point. you go back to Congress next week and you sit down and you sit next to one of your colleagues on the opposite side and you say, you know what, let's focus outward. What do we need to do to govern, just like Enid just said? How do we govern? How do we make the world better, life better for as many people as we can? It's not gonna be perfect, but let's see what we can do. That's our job. Focus outward, not about our own reelection, not about our own power and status and fame. That's the message.

The good news is that all of those members of Congress listen to this podcast and they will then do that. We have run out of time. I thank you very much for this. This was a good conversation and one that I think we should continue to have to make this country a little bit less chaotic.

Ha ha ha.

Yeah, we got to get together and it's not that hard. All right, my dear, thank you so much. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next time.

We do. No. Thank you. Peace.