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Rick Green, host of the At the Core Podcast recently had me on to talk culture and poltiics.
Summary
Rick Green and Thomas Umstattd sit down at Patriot Academy's Leadership Congress in Constitution City, Texas to talk about winning culture through story, the surprising parallels between Elon Musk and Benjamin Franklin, and what young people really take away from a week on the legislative floor.
Key takeaways:
- Thomas argues it is time for people of faith and conviction to stop retreating and start engaging.
- Fiction shapes culture long before politics does, and influencing authors may be one of the most strategic long-term investments a movement can make.
- Franklin, Edison, and Musk form a recognizable American archetype Thomas calls "the Electric Man."
- Musk's management style works because he replaces committee authority with radical personal accountability, and that model is nearly impossible to transplant into government.
- Patriot Academy sells itself as constitution training but secretly delivers character training and skills training.
- Self-governance requires self-control, and self-control is a learnable discipline, not a personality trait.
Welcome to the Legislative Floor
Rick Green is coming to you live from the Patriot Academy campus in the Legislative Hall in Constitution City, Texas. The background noise is real. There are roughly 115 to 120 young people working on actual bills on the house floor, learning the Constitution by living it out.
Seated with Rick is Thomas Umstattd, a Patriot Academy graduate from 2005 who went on to serve as Speaker of the House the following year.
Thomas Umstattd: I still have that gavel in my office. Prized possession.
Thomas came back repeatedly over the years, eventually delivering half the talks at the program. This week he is back to address students in two sessions scheduled for the afternoon.
Repenting from Retreatism
Rick asked Thomas what he most hopes the students take away from his time with them.
Thomas Umstattd: This is my first time where they feel like kids to me. This is a different generation. I think the number one thing is having an attitude of victory. It is time for us to repent from retreatism. For a long time, when things got hard, the response was to retreat and build our own thing. It is time to start eating from vineyards that we did not plant, eating from fields where we did not plant the grain, and taking land from the enemy. That shift in mindset, if nothing else gets across, I want that change.
Influencing the Influencers Through Story
Rick asked Thomas to walk through what he has been working on since his Patriot Academy days, noting that the culture needs more voices in the conversation.
Thomas Umstattd: I am a professional podcaster. It was not a real job when I was at Patriot Academy and it still does not quite feel like a real job. But I have three podcasts. The oldest is Novel Marketing Podcast, the longest running book marketing podcast in the world. It covers the bread and butter of how to market your book. Then there is the Christian Publishing Show, which is about how to write good books and how to honor God through your writing. My newest show is Author Update, which gets into culture and politics and how those forces affect the kinds of stories that resonate with readers.
In some ways Thomas feels like he is out of the political game. But he sees his work differently.
Thomas Umstattd: I feel like I am influencing the influencers for the long term. Elon Musk is a big asset to the movement now, and he is a big asset now because of the books he read as a teenager. Getting beat up in South Africa, reading Asimov, reading Heinlein, encountering those ideas through fiction got him asking different questions and coming to different conclusions than everyone else around him.
Rick Green: Were you as shocked as I was when Elon Musk started sharing videos of Milton Friedman? He even called himself kind of a left-winger four or five years ago, kind of like Joe Rogan. And then all of a sudden he became one of the greatest advocates for these principles. He calls himself a cultural Christian. He is certainly not where we come from in terms of faith, but he is pushing the right principles. And what you are saying is that goes all the way back to seeds planted in him in his teens.
Thomas Umstattd: That is right.
The Electric Man
Thomas introduced a framework he calls "the Electric Man" to describe a recognizable American archetype.
Thomas Umstattd: Musk is actually a lot like Franklin. There is an archetypal American. That is Franklin, Edison, and Musk. The Electric Man. The man who is a little outside of politics but who is very smart. All three men had major breakthroughs in electricity. They were all very smart and they all changed their era. Franklin's inventions completely transformed America from a backwater to, by the time he died, a country more advanced than Europe in many categories. The very best rifles in the world were being made in backwoods Tennessee partly because the guild system in Europe was so broken. Edison is obvious. And Musk is that same outsider voice.
Thomas pointed to one of the underappreciated features of the American system as the reason figures like these can exist and matter.
Thomas Umstattd: The American system has room for non-professional politicians in political discourse. Franklin was not a professional politician. That was not his goal or driving energy, but he was really good at it. Musk realized just how toxic it gets. He burned himself on the stove.
Rick Green: So much good stuff. He brought such a strong voice into the DOGE work. They uncovered things so fast in a matter of weeks and then just hit the brick wall of the swamp. He was saying the very people that brought me here are now saying no to the thing they asked me to do.
Why Musk's Management Style Does Not Translate to Government
Thomas connected Musk's effectiveness in business to a structural approach that most organizations are simply not willing to try.
Thomas Umstattd: We are in an epochal shift. Most nations only last 250 years. That is almost a law of history. We are modeled after Rome, which is one of the exceptions. The Roman Republic lasted 400 years because it was able to self-reform and break the cycle. They added the Tribune of the Plebs as a core constitutional shift. By that 250-year timer we have just hit, the big question is whether we will continue for another 250 years and what that transformation will look like.
Musk, Thomas argues, runs his companies in a way that points toward one possible answer.
Thomas Umstattd: He does not run his companies by committee. American government, almost every organization, every church, they are all run by committee. Musk's companies are not. People come in, give a report, are held directly accountable, and go do the work. No committee. That is why in every sector he is able to outperform his competition. And I think that is why he struggled with DOGE. You cannot transform the American government into that model of direct authority. Everyone in D.C. is allergic to that level of radical accountability. The whole approach to success there is to avoid as much accountability as possible. Musk only hires the best people and then gives them authority and holds them to it.
Rick Green: He demands more than anybody else and maybe that is why he can do it. I have always wondered how in the world this guy is doing space and Tesla and all of these other things. If you just did one of those you would be one of the most successful people in history. He is doing five.
Thomas Umstattd: It is very similar to Edison. Edison's biggest invention was not the light bulb or the phonograph. It was the research industrial process of putting a bunch of smart people in a room and saying he expected them to invent a new thing every week. Every R&D program in every company is modeled after that innovation. So far no companies have had the guts to copy Musk's radical accountability approach. But if you are willing to get rid of the committees and give a person real authority, you can beat every competitor still running by committee.
Thomas extended this logic to the executive branch and to a memorable observation about artificial intelligence films.
Thomas Umstattd: Being able to replace the people at the top is not powerful if those people do not have the same authority all the way down. It is the centurion in Matthew. I am a man under authority and I have authority. You cannot give someone authority if they do not actually have it. You have to be able to fire all the way down. That requires a core fundamental shift in how bureaucracies work and in the social contract with bureaucrats. Because bureaucrats have operated very much like artificial intelligences. They do not have a lot of agency. They are just an extension of the machine. And nobody in the audience when 2001 A Space Odyssey came out in the 1960s had ever encountered a computer. But they had all encountered a bureaucrat who said "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." All of those AI films from the 80s are really about government. The Terminator is not about AI. It is about government. And we have all been to the DMV where they send you back and forth for a form that neither window can actually give you, and both of them say "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." That is what was resonant about that scene and why audiences loved it.
What Patriot Academy Really Gives You
Rick brought the conversation back to the students on the floor and asked Thomas how his own experience at Patriot Academy shaped him.
Thomas Umstattd: It was a core defining moment for my life. Patriot Academy gave me the vision that I could make a difference in the world. That was important 20 years ago and it is even more important right now. There are a lot of young people who feel like they have been dealt a bad hand. And they have been dealt a bad hand. Young people look at their parents' lives, look at where they are compared to where their parents were at the same age, see that they are behind, and it is very discouraging. It is easy to say there is nothing I can do. Patriot Academy says no, there are all kinds of things you can do.
He offered a reframe on how the program actually works that Rick found worth stopping for.
Thomas Umstattd: Patriot Academy sells itself as constitution training. You have probably heard Rick say "constitution" a million times. But what it secretly gives you is character training and skills training. Here is how to give a good speech. Here is how to control your emotions. That is not a popular concept. The idea out there is that you should get in touch with your feelings. But you can control your emotions. You can have self-control. In fact you need self-control if you want to be effective in a political environment. You cannot let fear or greed or anger run you. Those emotions can destroy you, and you can choose not to let them. But it requires discipline. And that discipline is what free people require.
Rick Green: You cannot self-govern if those people are not self-governing. That is the core of what we are teaching here.
Two Risky Talks This Afternoon
Rick asked Thomas for a quick overview of the two talks he would be delivering to students later in the day.
Thomas Umstattd: I am a big believer that a talk is not worth giving if it is not risky. My first talk is on compromise. It is about when to listen to wise counsel. To never compromise is to assert that you are always correct, and nobody is always correct. We all need to compromise, but we do not want to become compromised. How do we navigate that? I am looking at Benjamin Franklin and the founders predominantly, with some Proverbs and some Star Wars references.
Rick Green: That is a Thomas Umstattd presentation if I have ever heard one.
Thomas Umstattd: With Gen Z, I honestly do not know if they still like Star Wars. My kids are Gen Alpha and they find it very boring. They would rather watch Dude Perfect do a Star Wars sketch than watch a Disney or Lucasfilm film. We are going through a big generational shift.
His second talk, he notes, is the riskier of the two.
Thomas Umstattd: That one is on AI. I will be giving it to a group of armed Gen Zers who all hate AI. But they have been at Patriot Academy and they have learned self-discipline. And they will have just heard my talk on how to disagree agreeably. I am prepping them ahead of time.
Rick Green: You planned the order very deliberately.
Thomas can be found along with all three of his podcasts at AuthorMedia.com.
