The short version of that is to say I believe that God has called me to do this. My worldview tells me if you feel like God is calling you to do something, it's not lies to ignore that. And so not only do I care about my state and my country and family, but I believe I have an obligation. If you don't like what's been happening in the country from an inflation standpoint, from a border standpoint, from a foreign entanglement standpoint, if you don't like what the Biden administration has been doing on those fronts, and you do recognize that in the prior administration, your life was better, the question is what was your representative doing to help or hurt those efforts? It's my view that the United States has been systematically removing God and the values of Judeo-Christianity for the last 60 or 70 years, really pushing hard to just get that out of the public square. Okay, welcome today. I'm very honored to have Ian Weeks with us today. He is running for a U.S. Congress. I understand in the 25th district in California. That's correct, isn't it? That's right. So first of all, where the heck is the 25th congressional district in California? I'm sure no people know. Most people don't know what number districts are where I don't. Yeah, the reality is before I got directly involved in politics, I didn't know a lot of this. I knew what Congress was, but I didn't know what number district I was in, and maybe I knew who my congressman was. But so the 25th district is more or less the whole southeastern corner of the state of California. It's an enormous area. It takes about four and a half hours for me to drive from one end to the other of it. And it basically has the cities of Hammett, San Jacino, Banning, and Beaumont, which are near the Temecula Valley. There's a lot more people that are familiar with Temecula than with where I live. So we have Hammett, San Jacino, Banning, and Beaumont. And then from there, we go out the 10 freeway all the way to the Colorado River and then down to the Mexican border. So I go out to Blythe and Needles. We have Indio and Coachella, Desert Hot Springs, Bermuda Dunes, Thousand Palms, Cathedral City. I've got El Centro, Colexico, Broly Imperial, which basically the entire Imperial County, which actually ends up being extraordinarily significant, the Imperial County produces billions of dollars worth of ag. They feed like the entire country, essentially, for about half of the year. So being ag community down there, but that's our district. Okay, so that's a huge district. And I'm guessing because Needles is right on the border of Arizona. I've driven through there many times. Yeah. And does that include Palm Springs as well? I can't remember because I met you at Palm Springs. Palm Springs and Palm Desert, if you look up the maps, the way they draw the lines for districts, whether it be US Congress or State Assembly or State Senate, is crazy. So there's these funky carve outs and there's this thing called the Independent Redistricting Commission, which a lot of people feel as anything but independent. But the way they draw the lines is crazy. As a matter of fact, my neighborhood, if I drive 100 yards south, I'm out of my district, even though my district is like 9,000 square miles or something. So I don't have Palm Springs. I don't have Palm Desert. Those are in a guy named Ken Calvert's district and I want to say that's the 39th. But yeah, so I don't have those two cities. There's Indian Wells. There's a few cities out in the desert that I don't have because there's this cutout that comes in and puts them in Calvert's district. So the district you represent is a significant agricultural district out. It's in the desert area because that's the dryer desert part of California. It's a lot of desert. And the remarkable thing is they produce just enormous amounts of ag down there and the vegetables that we eat. They also produce tons of hay to feed livestock. And the reason that they can do that is they basically have this incredible canal system that was designed over 100 years ago, I think. Yeah, I think it was like the early 1900s. They designed this canal system and it's actually pretty incredible. But this community has the largest share of water for anybody that's familiar with how they carve up water from the Colorado River. They have the largest share of anybody in the southwestern states. And so they basically bring in tons of water from the Colorado River and then grow a bunch of stuff with it. Yeah, a couple days ago, last week I drove from Orange County all the way up to Seattle. I drove all through, I guess, Central California. And you can see the signs about no water, no food. And it's an issue for sure. And I know we went through several years of drought. I think this year it's gotten a little better in some regards. But let me ask you, so what has prompted you to run for Congress? There's obviously got to be something that's compelling you to do that. Yeah, so it started out with a phone call a little over two years ago as March 11th of 2022. And it wasn't to run for Congress. It was to run for state assembly, which is basically California state's equivalent of Congress. And really that's what prompted it. Someone called me and asked me to run for that seat. And I don't know how much time I want to burn on that, but it was nothing short of providential. There was no reasonable explanation for it. I wasn't politically involved other than I was a registered voter like millions of other people. And I was voting, but I didn't have any affiliation directly. I was a registered Republican, but I wasn't involved with the county party, the state party. And rather miraculously, they get a hold of me. They asked me to run for the state assembly, and this is the very short version of the story. But they called me on what's called filing deadline day, meaning it's the last day that you can register with the county to run for office. And we just had to jump through all these crazy hoops. Nobody thought it could be done, but I stepped out in faith. God's a huge part of my life. He's the anchor of my life. And so I view everything through that lens. And I felt like God was calling me to do it. And so I went and I did that. And while we didn't win that race, we significantly outperformed expectations. We were running in a really tough district. And we came a lot closer to winning than anybody thought that we would. And basically November of 2022. So these were the midterm elections. I began to just pray and say, God, I don't really know what this is all about. I'm perfectly happy to stop doing this. But it did have a sense of obligation because we had outperformed because we had raised some money. Spent some money, built some name ID just objectively. It's a lousy thing to do that and then walk away and say, I'm not okay. I didn't win. I'm not doing this anymore because a lot of people invested time and energy into building my name ID. And so I felt like I had almost like a social duty to continue. But I prayed. I was like, God, this has been enormously disruptive in my life. This is not a personal ambition of mine. I'm okay walking away from this. So just make it clear to me. And I ended up praying for six months straight, talking to a lot of other people asking them, hey, pray for me that God would give me wisdom around about February of 2023. So about four months in, I start getting these prompts that maybe I am going to be running for U.S. Congress. And initially, I just thought I'm either not going to run again or I'm going to run for that state assembly seat that I had already run for. And then this congressional thing comes on the radar. And initially, I didn't want to do it. I thought it was crazy. It was like, I just lost a state race. Why am I going to go run a federal race? And it's almost the exact same district. So the state assembly district and the U.S. Congress district almost completely overlap. And one person represents the state in California and rather that region in Sacramento. And the other represents them federally in D.C. And so all of the doors began to open that no, you're actually going to run for U.S. Congress. And again, I guess the short version of the story is those are the doors that got open. And so I found myself basically from April of 2023 pretty much jumped into that race. And so the short version of that is to say, I believe that God has called me to do this. And I have a great life. In many respects, I feel like I would be much better to stay at home and live my life and not do these things. But at the same time, I am very concerned about the state of the country. And my worldview tells me, if you feel like God is calling you to do something, it's not wise to ignore that. And so not only do I care about my state and my country and family. But I believe I have an obligation to do the things that God calls me to do. And so that's really why I'm doing it. And I will say that most recently we had a primary election in March in California. And there were six people in my congressional race, two other Republicans, one other. There were two Democrats and no party preference person. And it's only two people that go through the primary. And in rather miraculous fashion, we ended up winning a top two spot. And again, I can tell stories for the entire hour that we've got. So I'm trying to give as abbreviated a detail as I can. Let me, so what are the issues that you hope to impact? Obviously a calling from God. And it's got to be something that you want to accomplish while you're there, how hard it is to actually get done. I know it's sometimes it's easier to say than do. But what are the big issues that are affecting the district you're in that you think you can impact at a federal level? Yeah, so the really obvious ones are things like border and foreign wars and inflation and the bad energy policy that we've had for the last three and a half years, which drives a lot of the inflation. So from a policy standpoint, it's really that simple. That's what people are concerned about right now. They're going, man, we've got a wide open southern border. We've got all these complications blowing up all over the world in Ukraine and the attack on Israel, October set up. And those things weren't happening under the previous administration, and we might go, wait, you're not running for president? No, but at the end of the day, Congress's function, the president of the United States sets the tone for policy and what's going to happen in the country. And so the question that voters have to ask themselves is, okay, if I care about policy from the executive branch, the question is my representative in favor of or against those policies? And so what I remind folks of is, look, if you don't like what's been happening in the country from an inflation standpoint, from a border standpoint, from a foreign entanglement standpoint, if you don't like what the Biden administration has been doing on those fronts, and you do recognize that in the prior administration, your life was better. The question is, what was your representative doing to help or hurt those efforts while they were in Congress? And so my opponent, he's in the company, he's been there for 12 years. He's basically rubber stamped everything that the Biden administration has done. And he opposed everything the Trump administration did. So if you go, my life was better in the previous administration, then you should vote out your congressional representative for voting against all of the policies that made your life better. And then, consequently, three and a half years, if your life's been getting harder and your representative has been voting for all of those bad policies, those harmful policies, then fire him. It's not enough to just hire the right executive, hire legislative folks that are going to support good policy. And so I'll come back and say, inflation and the border are probably from a poll tested standpoint, the two most important things to people in the district. And any person who gets into politics and tries to convince folks that they are subject matter experts on all things policy, the liars, what we're looking for representatives or people with honesty, integrity and wisdom. Because you can't be a subject matter expert on all of those things. But I look and I don't have to be a rocket scientist. I don't even have to draft our border policy. We know three and a half years ago, we didn't have this problem. So the border policy we have was working, you just need a representative that's going to support that border policy, which I will. On inflation, I'm a certified financial planner. I've been in financial planning for nearly 20 years. So I certainly have a good skill set on money and money management. Our country's $34 trillion in debt. And that's fast climbing. I do think that I've got a great skill set for that. But again, it's not rocket science. We print and spend too much money. And our energy policy has been an absolute disaster over the last three and a half years. And when everything that we consume as a country requires energy to produce and to deliver, if we have the energy. And once again, what we were doing three and a half years ago was working. So we need to go back to the Trump era energy policies, but you need representatives that are going to vote to support that, which I will. So those are the most important issues from a pragmatic standpoint. However, I do think that it's really important to point out to people that I think of the most important challenges that we face in the country are actually cultural. And that doesn't necessarily fall into the policy space from the standpoint of some of these things aren't legislative. I think that the country, with my view that the United States has been systematically removing God and the values of Judeo Christianity for the last 60 or 70 years, really pushing hard to just get that out of the public square. And as we've done that, we've watched families fall apart. And when you have families fall apart, you got a bunch of broken human beings. And that's not my opinion. That's not a religious view. Any good sociologist will tell you that crime and drugs and homelessness and mass incarceration and school shootings and all of these things that we all are horrified by in our culture. Almost all of those bad things have to do with young men that came from a home without a father in it. And so a lot of these challenges that we have as a country, the messy place that it's become the roots of that are broken families. And so what I tell people is, look, you got a bunch of broken families. You end up with a bunch of broken human beings and that breaks society. And I do think that we need leaders that are willing to say, look, I can't necessarily fix that via government. It's a cultural thing. But there is a war on traditional and conservative values in our culture that is deeply rooted in the government. And so people do have some choices to make, even govern mentally on what kind of a society we want to be. And I believe that part of my calling is not to force people to move back towards God, but certainly to exhort them to. I don't believe in force or coercion, but I do believe in persuasion. And whether we like it or not, political leaders are now very much cultural leaders. And I think that we need cultural leaders that are saying, hey, the roots of a lot of the problems that we face. Even bad fiscal management, bad border policy, I could tie those back, frankly, to the rejection of Judeo-Christian values and ethics. And so I think, look, if we want our country to move back in the direction where we are prosperous and blessed, I think we do a lot of things in this culture to basically spit in God's face. I'll put it candidly. I think that we're a nation that is under the judgment of God Almighty. And no amount of good policy will fix that. It doesn't mean that we can't walk and chew gum. There's a policy job to be done and I can do it. But one thing and one thing only, have I ever agreed with Joe Biden on? And that's that he said in his 2020 campaign that we were in a battle for the soul of the nation. And I believe that's true. And I don't think it's enough for me as a conservative Republican to just talk about inflation and the border, because that's what the polls say will win me the election. I'm interested, and actually I think this dovetails nicely into the great work that you've been doing with helping people with their health and their diet, with the carnivore method. You've got to find the root of the problem. And so if you're if you are forever dealing with symptoms, you are going to be frustrated beyond belief. And it just happens to be that I think that most of the problems, most of the symptoms that the country is dealing with, come from a much deeper place than just Republican or Democrat. And the interesting thing that I've found is when I'm out in the district having this conversation with folks, there's a lot of people that are not registered Republicans that when I have this candid talk with them, they go, you're not wrong. I agree with you, men or men, women or women. I don't want my kids being sexualized in school. These kinds of things really matter to people. And it's not really it shouldn't be partisan. It's it's right and wrong stuff. Oh, obviously you ran at the state level and now you're running at the federal level. How different is that experience? Are you getting some level of support from the RNC or how does that work? So yeah, you have to show promise and then they start to to fund things or how does that happen? That's a great question. So it's actually quite similar. So the the assembly district that I ran in had 500,000 people. And the congressional district has 750,000 people. So it is bigger by a factor of 50% and that is daunting. But trying to effectively communicate with half a million people or 750,000. There's not a whole lot of difference. It's a daunting task. My wife joked with me recently. She said, can you imagine if you just ran for city council? And God just threw me right in. Like my first race was a half a million people state assembly. But she was joking that we had one fifth of the city of Hemet, which is where I live. It's like maybe 20,000 people. You could drive across that district in probably 10 minutes. So it is really daunting. And in that regard, I would say it's it's just a different side of the same coin. Assembly versus Congress. I just took a trip to Washington, D.C. Whereas when I was running for the state assembly, I was taking trips to Sacramento. So it's a different thing just because where you're going to go is Northern California, as opposed to the other side of the country for me, which is a little little daunting. But as far as support goes, unfortunately, do you think that there's a great deal of trepidation about the kind of messaging that I bring? I think there are folks in the state party and at the federal level that are afraid to hear people talk like I do. But that being said, folks have been in a way very supportive still. They go, this guy's got some gifts and we think that we like him. I was able to get a lot of endorsements. Our county sheriff down here, Chad Bianco, who's a very prominent and very well like guy, endorsed me. And so there are folks that are happy to back me, but from a monetary standpoint, that's a real different animal. So to give you some perspective in my assembly race, there was a gentleman running in the neighboring district, a friend of mine, Greg Wallace. State party gave him two and a half million dollars for his racer invested two and a half million dollars in his race. They invested zero in the mine. And that really does have more to do with the numbers. I think than anything else, in Greg Wallace's case, he was running for an open seat, meaning there was no incumbent. And for whatever reason, that is generally viewed as, okay, that's more viable. We think we can win it. It is a game of chess. It's a game of limited resources. And so there's no hard feelings. I understand they look at it and they go, where do we have the best chance of winning? We don't have unlimited resources. So where do we get the most pain for our buck? That being said, Greg Wallace had to climb about four and a half points to win his race. And so when I did the math on that, it was like, when I say he had to climb four and a half points from his primary election to the general, he had to go from about 45 and a half to get over the 50% mark. And in effect, it cost them about $650,000 per percentage point gain. By extension, I raised 135 grand on my own and we climbed almost 3 percentage points just on 135 grand. So when you break that down, my cost per percentage gain was about 50 grand. This was 650. So I certainly looked at guys, even if you've just given me like a quarter million dollars, I might have been able to win on that. I'm facing the same challenges at the federal level. They're looking at a guy like Ken Calvert in the neighboring congressional district. And that's a tight race and they want to support the incumbent. There's another open race for the assembly. And so the short version of that is they are giving a lot of money to a lot of folks and I'm not receiving it. Part of the reason is I'm running against an incumbent. And it's also that district is about 5545 as opposed to districts that are maybe 5248. So there seems to be a margin within which they feel comfortable throwing money. And I seem to be just to the outside of that. So we are, I guess I would be foolish not to say to your audience that look, the state party and the national party have not given me my probably won't. But I do think that we actually have a decent chance of winning this race. And if folks are listening and going, Hey, like we like this guy and whether he wins or not, we'd be willing to help support him. All of my support has come from the grassroots level. I raise all of my own money. I raised about $75,000 for, for the primary. And my goal is to raise about $100,000 for the general. And if folks go to enweagress.com, f-o-r-enweeksforcongress.com, they can click the donate button. They can give five bucks. They can give $3,300, which is the federal maximum. But we certainly could use the help, but I will say that my view always is whether I get help from the party or not, whether I receive a bunch of money from other sources. I've watched God do incredible things over the last couple of years. And obviously, if you've the rest of my life, but one of the things that happened in the primary election back in March was the incumbent Democrat spent like $900,000 on the primary election. And this is my opinion by comparison. I studied about 20 grand. And what we found out, because all of this is public, is he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars boosting one of my Republican opponents who did not have the money to do that. She didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to boost her campaign. But this is one of the sneaky things they do in politics. The incumbent, if they've got a bunch of money and there are a number of people in the primary will run a poll and figure out who they think is easiest to beat in the general election. And then they'll boost that person in the primary. They'll spend a ton of money. A Democrat will spend money to boost the Republican to buy the opponent that they want in the general election. And the reason I tell that story is he outspend me like 25 30 to one in the primary very clearly to get me out. I was the one that he didn't want to run against. And we still want to talk to spot. I have demonstrated in both my last assembly race and now in the primary that I can have very little money and no real support from the party and significantly outperform expectations. So in that regard, I would say, Hey, guys, I'm a good investment. And I'm a person that's going to go up there and have honesty, integrity and wisdom put God first when I'm in office, not, not what's best for me financially. If I was doing what was best for me financially, I wouldn't be running for office. That's what the landscape looks like from a support standpoint. And if that is appealing to any of your viewers. Again, he in weeks for Congress.com, we would be really grateful for whatever you'd be willing to kick into help us try to change the entire culture in Washington, D.C. Do you have to be part of the 25th congressional district to actually donate to this or do you have to or could you be from anywhere? You could be from anywhere. I think it does have to be embarrassed that I don't know this for certain, but I'm pretty confident that you have to be American. And you have to be in the U.S. But yeah, you could live in Maine and donate to a congressional candidate in Southern California. The only limits are I can't receive corporate donations. So companies cannot give me money. It's only individuals. And the limit is $3300 of somebody's married. They both can do it. So if I've got wealthier folks that are like, Hey, we really like this guy. We'd like to support him. They can make a $6,600 contribution. But yeah, I can come from anywhere. And yeah, so it's and I always remind folks, I'm running for U.S. Congress, even if you don't live in my district. If you want to see Congress controlled by conservative Republicans, you don't necessarily care where they come from. You just want them there. And so for me right now, we have a conservative majority. But my direct representative is voting a long step with the Biden administration. I don't like that. But I'm happy to contribute to make sure that whoever is conservative is actually still winning election or reelection. So that would be the stake in the game for a lot of these folks that may not live in the district is if we want people like this controlling the federal legislature, then we got to get guys liking in. And so that's, yeah. What does your district look like demographically age wise sex rise Republican versus Democrat and racial breakdown? Is there, I'm sure you have to know this stuff. Yeah. Of course. So it is, I would say that the biggest demographic block that's really relevant is the district is 52 and a half percent Hispanic. So it's a really big deal. We got a lot, we got a lot of Hispanic folks, a lot of Spanish speakers. One of the great blessings for me is I actually speak Spanish a lot better than I look like I do. I'm not fluent, but I'm very much conversational. And so that's been a great blessing to be able to go and speak to people in that manner. It really means a lot, especially coming from a guy like me. They're like, oh, man, like this guy is really put in some effort to be able to meet us where we're at. So that's been a big factor. I think male females, pretty much 50 50 as it is in most of the country. I think if I give the whole breakdown, I think it's like maybe a 30% why it's 8% African American, like maybe 5% Asian descent. None of that is super relevant. I would say the biggest factor is I have to have a really great message and ability to communicate with the Hispanic community. So we're working very hard on that. From a Democrat Republican standpoint is a tough district. It is, it is 17 and a half percent and more registered Democrats, raw number, 17 and a half percent more registered Democrats than Republicans. So what that looks like in reality is 43 and a half percent of the, maybe 16 and a half, but anyway, 43 and a half percent of the district is registered Democrats, 27% is registered Republican. And then the remaining 30% is NPP, no party preference, but obviously the Democrats start with a massive advantage. If you're starting out at 43 and a half and you've got to get over the 50 mark and I'm starting out at 27, it's tough. But then our primary, when you add up all the Republican votes, we're about 45. So there's clearly an appetite for our message. And so in practical reality, while you might expect the incumbent Democrat to win with 60 plus percent of the vote, he hasn't been and he doesn't. He tends to win around the 55 mark. And we certainly think that the wins are shifting this year. We think that we've got a strong campaign, a better message. And so we think that 5% and that's, we better remember that. I don't have to get up to 55 to beat him. I just have to climb from 45 to 50% plus one vote and we win. So it is without question, a hard district. There are legitimate reasons why the state and the national parties aren't just let's pour a bunch of money into this race, but it's a fight that's worth fighting. I think it's a winnable fight, but it's going to require. So I will never go toe to toe short of a miracle with the incumbent Democrat on mine. He's sitting on and he spent 900 grand in the primary. I spent 20. He is sitting on $2 million right now and I have about 20,000 bucks at the moment. So I've got a good chunk that I need to raise to get to my $100,000 target. And if you want to, we can get into why I have that target and what that looks like. But we really have an ability to to outperform on limited resources. And for me, I just to look at this as something that can be done. But what I was saying is we won't win. If I raise enough money to send a mailer, the incumbent is going to send 15. If I raise enough money to do a TV ad, he's going to do 10 or 15. I'm going to lose that fight. So the way we win this fight is fewer resources, but more volunteers, more door knocking. And actually, if there's anybody watching or listening that's in the area that wants to help door knocking is going to be a huge deal. Phone banking is going to be a huge deal, but we're going to have to outwork this guy. It's going to be a grassroots, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and just outwork the incumbent. And I think in that regard, I've seen incredible things. When I go out and I work my butt off and I sweat it out and I go talk to real human beings. I had folks down in Deep Blue Empiria County tell me to my face as walking through a diner, talking to people, and a couple of guys on two separate occasions looked at me and said, I'm a liberal, but I'm going to vote for you. I think it's awesome that you're here. You seem like a reasonable guy. Sure. We don't agree on everything, but I'll be happy to vote for you. I'm grateful that you showed up. And so it's unbelievably powerful to just get out there and meet people, which is how old schools, the way it used to be done. And I think we need to get back to that. Is there is it? I don't know. I know we've got a presidential debate coming up in a couple of days here. Is there an opportunity for you to debate your end? Does that typically happen at the congressional level or is that something you don't see? It is something that you sometimes see. I will say that the world has changed a lot. Everybody knows that, right? 30 years ago, the media landscape was so different. And folks maybe only have two or three or four places that they could really get information on. They maybe got their newspapers and their major network news. And it was more, I think it was more feasible to go, Hey, these congressional came and started to do a debate and we're going to run it on the local news and people are going to watch today. Media is so fragmented. There's so much competition for people's attention that even if we had a debate, I'm not sure what that viewership would look like. I'm happy to debate him. I've said that publicly numerous times. But one of the other challenges is that oftentimes we even saw it at the presidential level. There was some question Biden had this attitude of whatever that's beneath me. I'm not going to debate the guy. I have similar challenges where the incumbent doesn't want to give that credibility to me. There's more to lose than there is to gain. And so I doubt that he's going to debate me, but I debate him all day long. He's just fundamentally wrong on all the issues. The biggest thing is this guy and his party constantly shall from the hilltops that, you know, veer the party of the little guy. They're fighting for the working man. The last three and a half years, his party has been crushing the little man and he's been voting lockstep with them. So, you know, these guys, they have massive vulnerabilities. They do not share the values of the community. The broader Hispanic community. This guy's voted against the bill that would keep men out of women's sports. This guy's voted for energy policy stuff that's driven the cost of gas through the roof. That's driven the cost of groceries through the roof. The incumbent does not have a leg to stand on. He loves to go out and talk about how he's championing the Chukwala National Monument. He wants to create a new federal land grab of a bunch of the land down here. That's whatever. That's a relevant congressional issue. It has its own importance. I'm going to talk about that. But nobody in the district is making their decisions about who they want their congressman to be because of his position on the Chukwala National Monument. They're trying to figure out how to fill their gas tank and put food on the table and just make it. And so this guy is out talking about all these fluff issues that, you know, are not core to people's lives. So he's got great vulnerability. And I think that's another reason that he's not eager to debate me because I'm calling him out of the carpet for the fact that he's focused on all of these sort of ivory tower issues while people are starving in the streets. It's so easy to indict him that he's probably not going to give me the opportunity. Like I like I mentioned there is a presidential debate coming up a couple days. I'm sure I think there's just, I think there's a couple of them scheduled for not mistaken. But how much does that impact you? How much of this sort of down ballot stuff is affected at the top of the ticket type of things? Does that impact on your race? I think it's going to have a significant impact. The reality is that folks are the countries and dire strengths and people and for whatever reason, it's unfortunate. But I don't know, people are pretty disengaged politically these days. We see it where the voter turned out 30% and you go, my goodness, like 30% of people that can vote are voting. I think a lot of it is just the people are crushed that they are so focused on just trying to eke out a living that they don't have time to think about these things. But obviously I think Northern with John Peril, like the country is falling apart. So the reason I say that is that if it gets bad enough, if the boot of governmental failure is on people's necks long enough, hard enough, it drives them to action. And so I do think that what we're seeing right now up ticket is people are really engaged. It has gotten bad enough. Maybe the pain threshold has been reached where it's wow, what we are doing is not working and we've got to go in a different direction. And so if there is tremendous engagement at the top of the ticket level, that means ballots are going to come in and those ballots are going to come in and my name is going to be on. So if they're going to make a decision about Trump and Biden, they're much more. They can't cast a vote for me if their ballot doesn't come in. So if their ballot comes in for Trump, there's a much higher likelihood that there's going to make a decision on the, on the federal representation level in US Congress. And again, what I want to remind folks is, look, if you are that concerned that you are going to get up and get out and vote in the presidential election, remember that it's so critically important who you vote for on a congressional level. Because basically, it's if you want to go back in the direction of Trump era policies, why would you hire a guy in the legislature that's going to stand in the way of all that if you want to go in that direction, don't hire a roadblock, right? And so yes, I think it will have a meaningful impact. I don't know exactly what that looks like and I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that because fundamentally my job is Ian, get out there and work your butt off and make sure that people meet you, and that you're not just another name on a piece of paper, but they go, no, I met that guy. He actually showed up, he actually cared enough to come and speak broken Spanish with me of whatever the case, maybe this guy showed up, and he's no longer a name on a piece of paper is a human being and he seems like a decent one. And the other guys had 12 years in the countries of dumpster fire. Why don't we send in this guy that's never held public office, who's run a private financial planning practice for his entire life. How's a wife has two sons seems like he's making good decisions in his life and doesn't appear to be somebody that's in this for himself. This is a guy that's lost tons of money in the last couple of years running for office. These are the things that I get to talk with people about. This is about sacrifice. This is about doing what's right. It's the addy up ticket stuff matters. I think it's going to have a meaningful impact, but at the end of the day, I got to run my race. I need volunteers to help me go knock doors and do it the old school way. And a few bucks to pay for flyers and doner envelopes and whatever cover some of my gas driving all over this massive district. That's what I need. Regardless of what happens up ticket. So it's we're almost July election, as soon as in November with the rest of the election. So you've got one. Is that four or five months, basically? Yeah, four and a half. Yeah. And if I don't know how many, if they do polling regularly, if there's like, if you know that if there's regular schedule polls that come out once a week or once every two or something like that. And if for some you start to narrow the gap a little bit, let's say you bring it from 45, 55, I don't know, 48, 52, then you get the interest on the national level. Perhaps that, hey, maybe this guy has a chance to dump a little money in there. Is that a fair, like you just have these incremental goals that can get us a little closer and closer? Absolutely. The biggest challenge there though is unfortunately polls. So like, my opponent did a couple of polls. I saw it on his public report and back in, I think it was January. He had $3 million. It's not a big deal. A poll might cost 20, 30, 40,000 bucks. He could just run a poll just for the heck of it. No big deal. I can't. I literally don't have enough money to run a poll. If the party doesn't decide to spend money and run a poll, then there is no poll. There's no independent polls. There's no EP poll or something like that. No, there's not much in the way of stuff like that. Now, one of the cool things that I have seen is miracles are a real thing. I've been living a bunch of miracles for the last couple of years. I've been watching some really incredible stuff. And one of the things that I think I've got a very good chance of winning this race and I think it's going to be a huge upset. And I'm going to get the opportunity when people go, "How did you do that?" I'm going to say, "God did that." But, man, yeah, I went out and I worked hard, but I want to win in an inexplicable fashion because I want to give all the glory to God. And so there is part of me that's the book. And I was super blessed yesterday. I opened up my email. And some random stranger, I don't know who this person is. I had a max out contribution. Some guy up in San Mateo, California sent me $3,300. I don't know how he knows me. I don't know how I don't know why he did that. But what I have found is that I just step out in faith. I do the thing that's in front of me. I do it to the best of my ability. And now I have these incredible things happen. God wants to bring about a circumstance where I'm able to run a poll or somebody runs a poll and it changes the mind of the establishment and they start sending money my way. That's awesome. I can't quite see objectively under normal circumstances how I get there, but you're not wrong. That if that were to happen, there could be a scenario where all of a sudden they go, "Holy smokes. This guy's close. Let's dump in a couple million dollars." My conviction is I'm okay with whatever, right? Like I'll ask for it. Again, we have an obligation to do our part. So I'll ask for money. I'll work my hardest. I'll do my best to give people reasons to support my race. But at the same time, one of my deepest convictions is that I believe that if this country does not voluntarily turn back to God and move back in that direction, we're done. And so that's what I want to see. I want to see a cultural change going back to more of what the country used to be like. Where more people at least gave a nod and said, "Yeah, there is a God. There is a Creator. It's important. Ten commandments are good. We should follow that." And traditional family values are good, and that's not to kick on anybody or hurt anybody's feelings. I don't want to make fun of anybody. I don't want to mistreat anybody. But I want to encourage our culture towards those traditional family values because, again, setting religion aside, the sociological data is absolutely clear that it is healthier and better for society when we are in that place. So I want it to look miraculous because I want people to be perplexed, and I want people to go, "Wait a minute. Maybe there is something to all of this God business." And me, it seems increasingly, I think that God's going to deliver me a victory in November. But it's my opinion just based on what I've been seeing over the last couple of years that God doesn't want to share the glory. So I don't think I'm going to get millions of dollars. I don't think I'm going to get all of the objective things that most people would go, "Okay, because I think that God doesn't want for people to go, "Oh, yeah, okay. He won because the RNC or the NRCC gave him $3 million. I want him to be scratching their heads going, "This guy had $100,000 and his opponent had millions of dollars. This guy is a nobody running against a 12-year incumbent. How the heck did this happen? I want to be in the position to go, "Yeah, there's no earthly explanation for it. God did this. And we should sit up and take notice." And again, not to the other side believes in coercion. The other side believes in cramming their moral values down our throats at the end of the barrel of a gun. Use the pronouns. Take the shot. All of these. All of them. Wear the mask. Lower your carbon footprint because if you're not, you're a bad person. The other side wants to impose those things legislatively. I don't. But I do want to persuade people. I want to see people go, "Man, this guy's not forcing." And his traditional Judeo-Christian values on me, but he's advocating for them and he's living them and I'm watching God do miracles in and through him. Maybe I need to look at that. And I think that's one of the biggest fears that people have about guys like me. They're like, "Oh, this guy's going to pass a law that says everybody's got to go to church on Sunday." No, not. That violates the first amendment. Even the God that I believe in, I believe is the creator of the universe and there's only one God Almighty Yahweh doesn't force us to believe in him. If you study Christianity, he doesn't demand it of you, he just says, "You should." And that's my posture and I think that's what the government's people and government should say, "Yeah, I'm not going to force it on you, but let's just look at cause and effect." It really is scientific, more than it is religious. It's look at outcomes. And this country was a heck of a lot healthier by just about every metric when we were closer to God. We haven't been perfect, of course not, but our country needs to go back there. And it's to your point about, "Hey, what if the data changes and what if this money comes in?" I welcome it. If God wants to bring those things about, "Great, but I got to say my deepest conviction is I would rather see it be a miracle." I completely would rather see it be a miracle because miracles are really fun to see. So, obviously God gave us all the power to do things and to act and we just don't sit on our butt. There's other things you can do, but let me ask you about, because you said 700,000 people in the district, I don't know what the historical voting numbers, I think that you said some like 30 percent. So you got... Oh, it's like 140,150, this race, even though there's 750,000 people in the district, that's important to point out, it's not, it's not, "Oh my gosh, I've got to talk to 750,000 people." The reality is I expect this race to be won or lost by a margin of 10,000 to 20,000 votes. I would say, "Man, if I talk to 40,000 people, that's hard, but it's a hell of a lot more doable than 750,000, and there's a lot of folks that are already going to vote for me or are already going to vote for him, got it. But if I talk to 30,000, 40,000 people that aren't sure, and that's Republicans that aren't that passionate, don't vote all the time, independents, disenfranchised Democrats, there is a large pool of people to go to. So anyway, I apologize, I interrupted. But... No, that's a point. If you have a large number of people that say, "Robert Grinch, the Republicans, but he's don't vote because, I don't know, it's hot or it's cold or the weather's whatever, I can't imagine traffic's bad, but... Or it's California and my vote doesn't count. Yeah, yeah, sure, I can see that. What do you... Here's an interesting question. There are some countries, I understand, where voting is literally mandatory. What are your thoughts on that? Is that something that we should do in the United States? Let's go back to the statement I just made, right? I'm not... I'm generally against the government forcing me to do anything. And a lot of folks like, we don't legislate morality, we don't legislate people doing the right or the wrong thing. I partially agree with that, but I would view your civic duty of voting as the right thing. But I don't want to force you to do the right thing, I want you to choose the right thing for yourself. And again, that's my example from the God that I serve. So I'm not going to force you to do the right thing, there's no merit in that. I want you to choose it for yourself. And I apologize, I don't know if you hear my dogs have heard a siren, and it's so they're going, but hopefully that's not too obnoxious, but I want people to choose it for themselves and to an extent, it's, "Look, I want to inspire people. I want to go out and do the work and cause them to go, man, I just want to... I want to go and I want to vote because, holy smokes, this is a person that really inspires me to do." And I will also say that there's this concept, right, that I think the first person I ever heard say it was my big brother, and he was telling me, "In the Constitution is a document of negative guarantees. It's what the government can't do to me and what you can't take away from other American citizens." So you can't kill people. You can't steal from people. You can't do things that disenfranchise others of their own freedom. You could make an indirect argument that people not voting disenfranchises us of our freedoms, but fundamentally, you not voting isn't taking anything from me. So the government shouldn't force you. It's like the Obamacare mandate of when everybody has to, you just have to buy health insurance. No, you can't mandate that. You can't force me. You can't say, "The government says you have to do something, or if I'm a physician. You have to provide your services. You can't compel me. You can tell me I can't kill someone. You can't tell me that I'm obligated to care for them." That same logic says, "While I like the spirit of it because I want people to be engaged, I just said earlier and I mean it. I don't believe that coercion is the way, other than, again, I have no problem with coercion in the sense of you can't murder people. Yes, I want government coercion because that's a violation of your positive right to live. So it's negative guarantee you can't take that away from somebody. So I believe in coercion as it pertains to not taking things away from other people. But everything else, you obviously dealt with the whole COVID debacle over the last few years, where they want to take our freedom away, our ability to make choices for ourselves. I'm against that. I don't want the government coercing me to do things. But again, I think the beautiful answer to that is, no, Ian, don't be lazy and try to pass a law that forces people to vote, care enough about your country, care enough about your fellow man to go work your ass off, to just inspire people to want to vote for you. And I think that's, don't scare them into it, don't lie them into it, just go talk to people and say, this is who I am, these are my values, this is why I'm doing it. This is what I intend to do when I represent you. And then live or die on that. If they say, this guy's a schmuck and I hate him, okay, that's fair. That's their right to think that, right? But it's been my experience that the more human we are, we just get out and we do the work. There's a lot of people for whom that is a breath of fresh air and they're like, I will happily vote for you. And we're about out of time. Thank you very much. Tell, just once again, remind people if they have an interest in helping you in some way, what do they do? Absolutely. So they can either email me at info at enweeksforconverse.com or for that matter, they can email me at enweeksforconverse.com, that will go directly to me. And I would love to hear from anybody, even if it's a criticism or constructive criticism or I don't care. I'm not afraid if you want to send me an email and say you're a theocratic lunatic, that's okay. But you can email me directly, en@enweeksforconverse.com or info@enweeksforconverse.com. And then my website is enweeksforconverse.com again with four spell, I don't like using the numbers. If you Google, enweeks, you'll find my social media, my webpage, you can learn more about me and certainly at the website, you can donate financially. And I will tell one quick story. I had a speaking engagement a couple of weeks ago and there were about 150 people there. And after I spoke, this was really out of the ordinary. We had donor envelopes out on the tables, about 50 people gave me a donor envelope. That was incredible. But the neatest thing, there were some big donations and that's a real blessing. But I opened a couple of these envelopes and there were two of them that had three dollars, three folded up $1 bills in there. And I can't tell you how much that blessed me. Any of you who are familiar with the poor widow back when Jesus was walking here and Jesus says, man, I value her gift more than these guys getting all this money. Go look it up. It's awesome. It's this spirit of, I don't know much, but I want to help. It will bless me. If you jump on there and you give five bucks, don't think that's insignificant. And I serve a God that multiplies. I'm just not worried about that. If you're willing to go and do that, I would be really grateful. So in weeks for congress.com and Sean, thanks so much for sharing your platform with me. I'm really grateful to be here and this was a blessing. So thank you, brother. All right.
