Full Transcript for The Karol Markowicz Show: Stephen Yates on Losing His Daughter, Overcoming Grief, and Finding Purpose

but I mean, it's sort of this basement project. 00:02:58 Speaker 2: And he said, no, no. How would you really like to do a podcast? 00:03:01 Speaker 3: And he really nudged me in a direction that sort of got me to straighten up and fly straight. And we're giving it a go and just been blessed so far that it's seems to be working. We're not the Carol Markowitz show, but we're working on things. Yeah. 00:03:16 Speaker 1: So it's actually very funny that the Blaze, that show was the very first time I was on TV and it was with It was with Buck Sexton, Will Kane, Essie Cupp. I remember Essie asking me, like, are you nervous? And I was like, I don't know. You know, I'm okay. I'm not that nervous. 00:03:32 Speaker 2: You didn't know to be nervous. I didn't. I didn't. 00:03:35 Speaker 1: And then Buck and I, Will and I became friends shortly thereafter. But Buck and I don't become friends for a very long time, basically until COVID, where we start reading each other and listening to each other and being like, we should know. 00:03:48 Speaker 2: Each other for sure. 00:03:49 Speaker 3: Yes. 00:03:50 Speaker 2: And you should have. That's true. 00:03:51 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:03:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know why we didn't before, but yeah, now I feel like I was a big inspiration for him to move to Florida, if I do say so myself. 00:04:00 Speaker 2: Nice work. 00:04:02 Speaker 1: Love having them here. Yeah, I love the Buck and Clay Podcast Network. I know we don't have to say that. It's like not in our contracts or anything, but I think they do a really good job. 00:04:12 Speaker 2: I also love their coffee. 00:04:13 Speaker 1: You also don't have to say that, but I love Crockett coffee. I drink it every single morning. 00:04:17 Speaker 2: I actually do too. 00:04:19 Speaker 1: Not sponsored at all. Just happens to be my favorite coffee. Yeah, it's great. So you're in politics and you love it or you don't love it? 00:04:30 Speaker 3: Well, you know, I was raised in a time when, you know, I remember the bicentennial. It was a very, very patriotic time. I also remember the Carter-Malays. And the 444 days of the hostages in Iran, which was, I think, a little bit traumatizing for young people wondering, hey, where are we? Are we winning or are we losing? And my dad was fourth of 15 kids. We have a huge family. I had uncles that protested the Vietnam War and I had uncles that fought in the Vietnam War. 00:05:02 Speaker 2: Amazing. 00:05:03 Speaker 3: And so I was kind of the oldest grandkid. I was sort of watching the older generation. I was interested in politics. I really cared about the world. I don't know why, because I was growing up in a very rural part of Maryland, and there's no reason to believe that a guy growing up on Rocky Road, Maryland, was going to end up doing any of these things. But I just sort of got the bug. And after going into the White House for five years, I felt like I learned a lot, sobered up a bit about sort of the realities of some of these things. I think I made somewhat the mistake that if you advise presidential campaigns, you really understand national politics. And when I listened to the quality of the conversations that Vice President Cheney had with counterparts, I could almost feel a difference between those who'd been in the trenches and actually had to ask people for contributions and ask them for votes, had to work on coalitions, had to whip for votes. Those people had almost like a fraternal relationship that was different. And I said, I want to have some of that. I want to have that reality. 00:06:08 Speaker 1: It's a skill set, I mean, for sure. 00:06:10 Speaker 2: It is. 00:06:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:06:12 Speaker 2: Whether it's better or worse, it's definitely different. Right. 00:06:15 Speaker 3: And so I went, moved my family to Idaho. I hadn't intended to run for office very soon because people don't like new migrants running in their states. But opportunities presented, and I did run. I ran four times, and I had the good fortune of winning twice for the least glorious job in all of politics, state party chairman. 00:06:35 Speaker 2: Right. 00:06:37 Speaker 1: So from there, what happens next? You're state party chairman. You're living in Idaho. Again, how do you get here? 00:06:43 Speaker 2: What's next? 00:06:44 Speaker 3: Well, I loved life to a degree at that time. I loved the wide open spaces of Idaho. I had two brothers that were in that area. My sister was just south of us by a little bit. My brother and a lot of the rest of our family is still back in the greater D.C. area. 00:07:00 Speaker 2: My parents retired to Florida. 00:07:02 Speaker 3: And there was a few things that happened. 00:07:07 Speaker 2: I had two children. 00:07:08 Speaker 3: My daughter was starting to struggle with a few things, which is something I have talked about publicly. It's part of what I do to honor her. She struggled with addiction. 00:07:18 Speaker 2: She struggled. 00:07:19 Speaker 3: She was a rebellious teenager and she ran away. And that was she was almost 18. She might have been 18. I sort of lose track of the exact moment when she left because so much happened after. And that was after I ran for and lost the nomination to be lieutenant governor in Idaho. I was a little bit sore about that. I was supposed to win. I'd done all the things you're supposed to, raised the money, gotten all that stuff. But I sort of felt after the fact that maybe there was a divine hand that said, you know, there's something more important that you need to be doing that I want you to do. And so I spent I left politics, pulled back a bit. I went back to doing things in media, consulting things international, and I invested a lot of my time in trying to save my daughter. So she had gone to Colorado. I'd made sure that she had places to live, food to eat, tried to get her medical attention. And in the intervening time, my dad got sick. He had a long-term lung condition, and he passed

away in the early parts of COVID. And I'd gone down to Florida a number of times. During those times. And then when mom was alone, I thought, you know, I actually kind of like this part of Florida that I'm in. There's direct flights to D.C. I can I think I can actually work from here and take care of family. And that's kind of what got me to land in Florida, which I think should be a prerequisite for the Clay and Buck podcast network. 00:08:49 Speaker 1: I think so, too. Yeah, absolutely. 00:08:50 Speaker 2: Absolutely. 00:08:52 Speaker 1: What do you think, you know, you talked about addiction. What do you think people misunderstand about addiction, especially, I think, you know, Americans who haven't had any close experience with it? 00:09:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not dispassionate or unbiased about this. Everyone goes through their own journeys, and there's literally tons and tons of books written on the subject. I don't present myself as a master of all the literature on these things, but since I have opinions and you've asked, let's explore some of them. I mean, number one, I grew up thinking I pretty much knew how to raise kids. I pretty much knew, you. 00:09:28 Speaker 2: Know, every time something. 00:09:28 Speaker 1: Well, we all do. We're experts until it happens. Yeah. 00:09:32 Speaker 3: And whenever you saw something dysfunctional happening in public, the first question is, where's the parent? And now I can sort of hold my hand up and say, here I am. 00:09:41 Speaker 2: I was there. 00:09:43 Speaker 3: Now, I have sort of a caveat on this that my daughter was adopted, and I don't use that as an excuse for anything that we failed to deal with as parents or that I failed to deal with as a father. But there's a long-term conversation about nature of nurture. It's the last conversation I ever had with my grandfather. It was nine months before my daughter was born, and he didn't know we were going to adopt. He said, I envy you because you'll know the answer to this question that's vexed me my entire medical career, and it's nature versus nurture. And I have often pondered that. But the nurture part of it is the non-dominant variable. Nature is the dominant variable in my sense. And my daughter gave us all we could have ever dealt. 00:10:28 Speaker 2: With on that. 00:10:29 Speaker 3: But addiction is an illness. It might even be a genetic thing that people who have the propensity for it can only partially control. And that's with a lot of effort on their part and probably some things in their environment, too. It's not to excuse the choices people make. We're all responsible for the agency that we exercise. And so I still would hold my daughter accountable for the choices she made, and she should hold me accountable for the decisions I made. But it's a much bigger challenge than I thought going in. I also think that this age of addicted, antisocial platform dwelling is deeply damaging. And so this generation, I don't know, maybe there's something in the food diet that the RFK Jr. is going to help us deal with. But I still think spending inordinate amounts of time looking into the palm of your hand into a device is destructive to the tools that people need to defend against the disease of addiction. 00:11:32 Speaker 2: Absolutely. 00:11:33 Speaker 3: But those are just sort of some down payments on it. But I just say to any family that is listening, my heart goes out to you. 00:11:41 Speaker 2: This is really, really hard to deal with. 00:11:43 Speaker 3: It's hard to deal with the feeling that you're being judged by others. I care less about that because people could say I'm bald or I'm ugly or I worked for an evil man or whatever they wanted to say. 00:11:53 Speaker 2: I get all of that all the time. Exactly. 00:11:57 Speaker 3: But it affects our families more than it affects us. And so my wife at the time, I was subsequently divorced and remarried. It was a lovely part of life's journey. But My wife, I think, felt the judgments more deeply than I did. And there's some people in your family from time to time will say, well, why don't you impose more discipline? Why don't you do this or that? And so I would just say to the other families, I see you, I hear you. And we do need to make clear that we need communities of support and we need to come up with strategies to deal with this disease more effectively among our youth so that we don't pay more heavily for it in our hospital systems, in our criminal justice systems, and more lasting damage to the families that we need to be the foundational building block for civilization in America. 00:12:49 Speaker 1: You talk so beautifully about it. I mean, I think that that's just what people need to hear. I've lost a lot of friends to addiction. I've written about it. It was just an epidemic of it in Brooklyn at one point where it was just happening all the time. So I love to hear your perspective on it. Thank you. 00:13:08 Speaker 2: Thank you. 00:13:08 Speaker 1: This leads me into the three questions that I ask all of my guests. And the first one is, do you have something that you've changed your opinion on? 00:13:20 Speaker 3: Well, this is a big one, and it's sort of central to what my sort of professional growth arc was. It really comes down to the concept of free trade. I mean, I'm employed at the Heritage Foundation. I was employed at the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s. I was a part of the debates about most favored nation status for China and should they be brought into the WTO. I was raised reading the great works of the political economist thinkers that were foundational for. 00:13:49 Speaker 2: A lot of us. 00:13:49 Speaker 3: We believed in the power of markets and free enterprise, and that extends to the world. And I think I was, as a lot of people have remarked in other contexts, I was mugged by reality over time. Just I think anyone who is fair and businesslike about public policy needs from time to time

to pause and say, are we getting the returns that our ideology, theology, first principles told us we were going to get? And if not, don't we owe it to ourselves and our communities and our nation to try some different things or adjust course? And there's one book that I think encapsulated that after I had already made my way through that journey and I didn't know I had common cause with him until I actually worked with him later. And that was Robert Lighthizer, Bob Lighthizer. He did a book called No Trade is Free. And so it didn't shape my journey or his, but I think he summarized it better than I ever could have. And he had the added virtue of being right through that time where I was on the other side and needed to be pulled into this somewhat different conversation. So I still believe in free enterprise and free trade among free people and free nations. I don't think that we can have free trade with unfree nations. 00:15:06 Speaker 2: I see. 00:15:06 Speaker 1: I was going to say, where did you end up? 00:15:08 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. 00:15:09 Speaker 3: So, I mean, I don't love tariffs all the time for all purposes. But when you're dealing with a closed system that doesn't engage in fair, reciprocal, and transparent exchange, I think it's totally appropriate to have that as part of your toolkit. And if not that, then make more tools that replace the imperfect tool that you'd rather not use. And so I see us in a place right now where we're using some things that I would have and in fact did argue against before. And I don't think that we're achieving perfection, but we're in a transitional period to build a better toolkit and to get to a better place. But number one, I think that that is probably front and center. The biggest area where my thinking and my policy advocacy has changed. 00:16:01 Speaker 1: Interesting i still describe myself as free trade for sure i just took a one of those viral political quizzes yesterday and you know when when asked about it i still click the free trade because the other ones don't describe me either but i hear you you can't really have free trade with china they're not engaging in free trade so what are we doing here um so yeah i i'm with you on that i i don't know what what the word is though i don't know what the new phrase for us is That's. 00:16:30 Speaker 2: A fair point. 00:16:31 Speaker 3: But that's why I basically see the entire Trump leadership period as an inflection, a transition. I don't think it's an end point or a landing point. I think there's a lot of good, a lot of necessary disruption that was earned. And I'm not saying that it's, you know, it's wrong. We have to do something different. I'm just saying if we're wise stewards of the nation state, to steal a phrase from a very, very important podcast, we need to Focus on where do we go from here? What are we learning and what works? And if this isn't the right toolkit, let's get to work building the better toolkit. 00:17:08 Speaker 1: Give me something that you've experienced recently that you would call the best. It could be best restaurant, best book you read, best idea, anything at all. 00:17:18 Speaker 3: Well, this is something that gets, it sort of brings together the conversation we were having about family and sort of thinking back about, you know, I'm at a stage in life where you can look back and say, did I do things okay? And my dad passed away and I still think about my dad often. So Larry Elder's book, that is sort of a biography, but also it's really a window into a conversation he had with his dad. He grew up hating his dad to a degree and thinking his dad hated him. And he has this sort of amazing conversation that turns into a book that is a form of reconciliation. And I just think that for anyone who hasn't lived the charmed life where you just were born into a magical family and you never had any disagreements or struggles, that you never had to reconcile with someone that you deeply love. I just really, really loved the journey of listening to Larry. Number one, I learned more about him. He's a public figure that I'd known of but didn't know. Can't say I still know him at this point. But I love the example. of this idea of having this meaningful conversation where you sit down and your dad is learning what your point of view was in this journey. And he has some aha moments, but really the veil is lifted from Larry's eyes in this. He sees his father in an entirely different way and recognizing there was love coming from a very different place all along that he didn't know. And every human being should have that experience in this life's journey. So to me, I just thought it's an amazing thing. I'm going to try to make my son read it. 00:18:59 Speaker 2: He resists reading books. What is it called again? 00:19:04 Speaker 3: So it is called A Lot Like Me, A Father-Son Journey to Reconciliation. But A Lot Like Me. But I don't know. I have to ask Larry. Was this really one long conversation and he kept notes? Yeah. 00:19:18 Speaker 2: I don't know. 00:19:18 Speaker 1: I haven't had him on the show, you know. I've asked him. He hasn't come on. 00:19:22 Speaker 2: Very well worth it. Very well worth it. 00:19:24 Speaker 1: All right. Maybe this will be my pitch, you know. Somebody called your book the best thing they've read recently. Come on my show. 00:19:30 Speaker 2: Someone he doesn't even know said. 00:19:32 Speaker 1: That this is really important. 00:19:33 Speaker 2: Completely changed my life. 00:19:35 Speaker 1: Stephen, I've loved this conversation. This has been so much fun and really interesting and inspiring. Leave us here with your top tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives. 00:19:47 Speaker 3: Well, there's two things that have been deeply, deeply important to me. And so I'd say my advice is make rituals with. 00:19:58 Speaker 2: Your loved ones. 00:19:59 Speaker 3: And I'll explain what I mean by that for a minute. And then use the mastermind concept with your friends. And both of these were related to me. I had a ritual with my daughter that every time she wanted to go to bed when she was a toddler, she'd go over to the stairs, she'd hold her hands in the air and she'd say, Daddy, carry Weedy Pie. And I would go and I'd carry her up to bed and then we'd get to her bed and we would do this thing that we called hug, kiss, pat. And she would give me a hug, I'd pat her on the head, I'd give her a kiss on her forehead after she stopped letting me kiss her on the lips or the cheeks. And then she would go right down and she went to sleep. She was a very unusual child. She actually would go to sleep and sleep for eight hours because She was like a lightning bolt of energy during the rest of the day. So this hug, kiss, pat is something that mattered an immense amount to me. When I took her into a detox facility, she was 24 years old. And she said, Daddy, carry Weedy Pie. And I picked her up. I carried her in. She gave in to do the treatment. And we did a hug, kiss, pat as she went in. And then as she was leaving this life and going into the beyond, I did the hug, kiss. 00:21:04 Speaker 2: Pat with her. 00:21:05 Speaker 3: If you make these rituals at a time you don't plan for or expect, it ends up being the only thing in the universe that can console you. 00:21:13 Speaker 2: But do it. 00:21:14 Speaker 3: You will thank yourself later. The mastermind is just you get groups of friends that you commit to each other to share networking, stand up with each other, but stick with it over the decades. One of those masterminds I was a part of was just a group of China experts who also had an interest in a faith journey. And then so when my daughter passed, one of the guys that organized it, he'd lost his daughter the year before. And he was just in a unique position to really be able to talk to me through all the fog and the distraction and whatever else. And because of the years of that mastermind and because I knew and trusted him in ways that were very, very different. So these things made a huge difference in my life. But make the rituals. 00:21:58 Speaker 2: I love that. 00:22:00 Speaker 3: Do the mastermind with your friends, and I think those will do more than a college degree or anything else you'll ever do. 00:22:06 Speaker 1: That is amazing. I love that advice so much. He is Stephen Yates. Check out The Nation States with Yates on the Clay and Buck Podcast Network here on iHeart. Thank you so much, Stephen, for coming on. 00:22:17 Speaker 2: Thank you, Carol. Genuine pleasure.