... tell, tell folk about the Strait of Hormuz, of Hormuz, uh, from, draw that line from the p- from there to the pump in Moline.

Right.

So I sit on the House Armed Services Committee, and so I have that front seat in Washington, DC, you know, to be able to hold this administration to account.

Um, the, one of the biggest blunders that will be in, in history books is the fact that this administration, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, they failed to secure the Strait of Hormuz at the very beginning.

Uh, because when they lost the Strait of Hormuz, there is no way to get it open again.

It's not like you can just pull the chain and then the open light sign, you know, lights back up.

Uh, that's not how this works.

[laughs]

Draw that line from there to the pump in Moline.

Right.

So I sit on the House Armed Services Committee.

And so I have that front seat in Washington, D.C., you know, to be able to hold this administration to account.

One of the biggest blunders that will be in history books is the fact that this administration, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, they failed to secure the Strait of Hormuz at the very beginning.

Because when they lost the Strait of Hormuz, there is no way to get it open again.

It's not like you can just pull the chain and then the open light signs, you know, lights back up.

You know, the housing and water, the rate hikes, why did the water assistance program go away?

Yeah.

But this one was a little bit different in the sense that in this one, she was told that her son was gonna die, I think at age 18 or something, and she was younger.

And so she's like, oh my gosh, this is gonna happen in the future and it doesn't actually, is it actually going to happen? And it actually did, it ended up happening.

And she's much older now, this happened many years ago.

But even though going through that experience and going through losing her son, she said something that I'll never forget.

She said, everything is a gift.

And I'm thinking to myself, you know, logically, like how is losing your son at 18 years old a gift? And I'm thinking about how at the time when I'm laying in the mud, how is this a gift? What I didn't know at the time, what I know now, it was that moment that literally launched me to exactly where I am today and I would not be here without that.

What are your thoughts on that?

Tell us a little bit about what we're doing today.

Now, look, we're going we're spending some time here in in western Illinois.

First things first, our first stop talking about how we can make sure that we are keeping the nitrates from going into our waterways, understanding that what we are doing, if we are putting excess fertilizer on our fields, that with heavy rain events, that fertilizer is just running off and it's going into, you know, the Edwards River, the Rock River, and then to the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico.

And so seeing what happens when we invest in CRS and NRCS, We can confine that.

We can develop the holding structures.

And we're not talking about ponds.

We're talking about wetland areas that are really good for microbes to take care of those nitrates, eat those nitrates up.

Thoughts there?

What made you decide the next step past coaching and community was to actually build the team for them?

Well, the first thing I really do is I wanna say that I think of other people and the problems that they have, and I certainly do, but you know what I think about first? I think about my problems as a business owner.

And I think if I have these problems as a business owner, how many other business owners have these same problems? And because of those 15 painful years of hustling and grinding at the expense of my family and my future, really.

Because it was so painful, I never want to go back to that again.

So I am like constantly looking out for, to me, the most powerful asset that a business owner or entrepreneur can have is the ability to find leverage.

know and leverage to me means like if you have to plow a mile-long road in the jungle there's several ways you can tackle that you can use a shovel which might take you 10 lifetimes you can use a small tractor which might take you two years or you can use a bulldozer which might take a day and you could get the same amount of distance that the difference is what's the leverage point and the biggest thing i think that you have to solve is the challenge of time Like, how can I leverage my time? Because it's funny, there was a study done that for every dollar spent in leverage, it's shocking like the return.

It was something you get back X amount of thousands of hours per year.

I knew it set you off.

As someone who was a meteorologist for 20 years, um, wh- wh- what are we looking at here in terms of the, the sheer extremity of this?

Right.

It, it's one of those unfathomable things.

But we do know, Chris, that these types of events can happen.

Um, we know that this is one of the most flash flood prone rivers, uh, in, in the entire nation.

You know, I, as the only meteorologist in Congress, after spending 22 years on local television covering these floods, being in the floods as they, they ravaged so many places, after we see these extreme events, now we need the policy, now we need the reaction, now we need the right answers, especially from this administration that has come down so hard on the weather enterprise.

And let me just tell you, Chris, it's not just the folks in Central Texas that are affected by this.

we throw our hands up.

Uh, do you have a sense of how many of those answers are obtainable at this point?

Right.

So, so this was different than, for instance, Houston, which gets flooded by Hurricane Ike.

Uh, we knew this area of low pressure as it was exiting out of the Rio Grande Valley could produce 5, 10, 15 inches of rain.

And the meteorologists at the National Weather Service are heroes.

The meteorologists at local broadcast media are heroes, because they were getting that information out in real time at- leading up to the event.

The problem was this struck in the middle of the night.

Do you have any concerns that some of the cuts to the federal employee roster at these agencies made a difference, could have made a difference, or would affect just how they organize themselves now?