Uncovering The Simplicities Of Life With Joey Jones 01:08:25

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Welcome to the Jason and the House podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz. Thanks for joining us today. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the things in the news. Highlight the stupid because, you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. And then we're going to phone a friend. Get on the line with Joey Jones. You've seen him. He's been all over Fox. He's on The Five pretty regularly at this point. He's a Fox News contributor. Served our nation. He's a great guy.

And served in a very valiant way. And we really want to hear his story. These stories of inspiration where ordinary Americans do extraordinary things, overcome adversity unlike anything they had planned for or thought they'd have to go through in their life. And that's Joey's story. I don't know it all.

But I can tell you that I've met him and interacted with him and been on Fox. And he's just a great patriot and a great guy and look forward to hearing his story and what, what motivates him and his love of country. So we'll get to Joey Jones pretty soon, but let me just give you a couple of little things to think about. Some of them are so obvious to me. It just really, really bothers me now in New York city.

where crime is just rampant. I've been coming to the city for a couple decades now. Love New York, love the city, but it has changed, and it's changed for the worse because I saw it go from a very dangerous place, dirty place,

But I saw the cleanup that really started with Rudy Giuliani. The city just became more and more wonderful. It was safe. My wife and I could walk at all hours of night in not every place, but a lot of places down in Manhattan and felt very comfortable doing so. But now you have these highlights coming out of some of the worst offenders, repeat offenders of crime in the city. And the one person that they highlighted here,

has been arrested 95 times. Now, how many times do we have to arrest somebody before you think, "Eh, you know, just might happen again." Because I really think that the key to whatever you're looking out in regards to criminal justice is the rate of recidivism. That is, are they going to go back out and do it again?

One of the reasons I wanted to engage on criminal justice reform is because of that. You have violent criminals, people that are brandishing guns and using guns or beating the living daylights out of people. I put them in a separate category of, yeah, you're probably not going to reform them, so let's make sure the punishment more than fits the crime, that people look at that and say, if I get caught doing this, I really don't want to do it.

And that there is an ample punishment, particularly to give the victims peace of mind along the way.

Now, the other side of the equation, you have some of the drug crimes, maybe some of the white collar crimes, some of those things, they're bad, they're crimes, you should serve time. But I deal with those, at least I think as a public policy, a bit differently, still have to be really tough on them. But you also want to make sure that when they go to prison, they don't come out as a better criminal. You want to make sure that they're moving towards reform.

And what we found is if people worked in the prison, attended religious services, were furthering their education and stayed away from fighting, those people had a better or lesser rate of recidivism than those that didn't hit those four points.

So when somebody goes out and commits 95 crimes, you're going to get let it back out. He's going to be another victim. Remember there are victims on the side of every crime, whether it's violent or nonviolent, there's still a victim.

Until New York and these DA and Governor Koch will start to look at this and say, you know what, we care more about the victims and potential victims than we do the perpetrators, we'll continue to have this problem. All right, second thing is, I hope you didn't miss this, happened a few weeks ago. There's a guy named Kevin Clinesmith. Kevin, young man, worked at the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

entitled having passed security clearances was dealing with classified information. Not only is he dealing with classified information, he was dealing with very sensitive information. Now, he had passed the bar. He was an active attorney with a law license. But it just so happens that he ended up pleading guilty to altering documents. He forged documents in the Trump case. He pled guilty. Let me tell you this. Guilty.

to forging documents. Now, there doesn't get to be anything worse, you would think, before the bar and the law.

Now, he got probation. He didn't serve time. I think the punishment was exceptionally light. It was certainly not set up as one that would repel or give others pause. He got about as light a sentence as you possibly could, and now it just came out that the bar has reinstated his law license. How in the world can he plead guilty on the public's trust that

to altering documents and then be allowed to practice law within... I just don't understand that. It gives absolutely no credibility to everybody that's an attorney out there when they let this happen. And do you really think that if it was a Republican or a conservative that they would ever be able to practice law again? No, they wouldn't. But this guy's in full status now, and it's just absolutely fundamentally wrong.

All right. Time to bring on the stupid because you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. So we're going to go first to the Salt Lake Police Department. A tweet that I saw. It's not that they did anything wrong. It's that this guy, evidently, the allegation in Salt Lake City, which, you know, I'm from Utah, so I see a lot of Salt Lake news.

Evidently, he got really, really mad. But when you get really, really mad, it doesn't give you permission to go out and steal, the allegation is, an excavator. I'm talking a big backhoe here. He went out and stole this thing, drove it a mile, and then started digging. I

And I've seen some pictures and some video of this out about 800 south, 900 west in Salt Lake City. He just started digging. Well, it went on for a while. And before they finally said, sir, we can't have you digging up the city of Salt Lake. You know, it's kind of one of those things. I guarantee you put on an orange vest. You can probably and have cones everywhere.

Who's going to stop you? You could do anything in this country with an orange vest and cones. Because you know what? People are like, oh, that person obviously knows what they're doing. Just like some guy in a backhoe. You just kind of, hey, yeah, go ahead. He's in a backhoe. He obviously knows what he's doing. Well, he just started digging. And he dug, I mean, he dug a big trench. I don't know how long it's going to take to clean this up, but...

I thought it was a bit funny. It's wrong. Somebody suffered the consequences. But come on, man. That's kind of stupid. All right. This next one probably takes the cake, though. I, again, also saw this in the Salt Lake Tribune from Robert Gerke, one of the reporters here. Evidently, there's... It's so embarrassing for Utah. There's a company that was fined. They were producing pro-USA shirts.

Okay, so the owner of Lions Not Sheep agreed to pay a big fine for the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, $211,335 as a fine after the agency found that they were cutting off labels. Again, remember, these are pro-USA shirts.

And what they did is they cut out the label that said made in China and replaced it and stamped it evidently with a made in the USA. They totally made it up, you know, and totally just absolutely changed it.

They had to pay a $211,000 plus fine. Like, come on, folks. You're doing pro-USA shirts and you go to China and you buy them. You can't just tear out the tags. Well, you know what? That's pretty stupid. And I'm glad they got fined. I'm glad they got caught. But that's bringing on the stupid. All right. So I'm excited to call Joey Jones. Let's dial him up and say hello. Hello. Joey. Hey, Jason Chaffetz.

How's it going, man? Hey, thanks so much for doing this. I do appreciate it. You know, I see you in the halls of Fox. You do an awesome job on The Five and all these other shows that I see you on. And you've got an inspirational story, so I'm looking forward to hearing it. Thanks for joining me. Well, I really appreciate it. Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, I guess, you know...

tough times around the office. Fox is looking for somebody who can fill in every now and then, and they found me. So scrape the bottom of the barrel, and that's what you get. Yeah, you're willing to get on that airplane and show up. Yeah, you know, half of life is just those are willing to show up, right? So good for you. That's exactly right.

No, but I think I first bumped into you. It's like one of your very, very – it was on Fox Nation. We were sitting in that room on the first floor, and we were on like a panel together. You and I sat next to each other. I don't know if you remember that. I do. I remember one of the very first – I don't know if we sat on the panel together or if you were hosting, but I was really impressed because I had not yet seen you host a show, and you were having to work your own –

your own teleprompter. And I was like, man, that's some pretty impressive stuff there. I can't walk and chew bubble gum, and he's over here hosting a show and running his own teleprompter. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that, you know, not when you do like Hannity or Laura Ingraham, it's much more sophisticated. But some of the shows, they have this little dial and this little foot pedal, and it takes some doing. You can't blame anybody else. Oh, go faster, go up, go down, you know. And if you start ad-libbing, you've got to figure out where to go.

Yeah, walking and chewing gum sometimes harder than it sounds. Yeah, and this is one of those jobs. You either figure it out or you don't get to. There's not a training process. Yeah, they really do just kind of throw you in there and say, all right, go. You know, you're in a high-profile position in Congress. I took bombs apart for a living. I think we would both say this is just a very different kind of stressful environment that for me has been fun, though.

And things can always blow up in our face. And evidently they have, both of us. Literally and figuratively. All right, let's go back, Joey, because I think you're from Georgia, right? And tell us about growing up, brothers, sisters, what was life like for you?

Little Joey Jones. That's so funny that you say it that way because that is how I got the name Joey. I'm Johnny Joseph Jones, Johnny being my grandfather, Joseph being my dad. And my dad went by Joey, and I was growing up Little Joey. And if you know anything about...

I grew up in northwest Georgia, but if you know anything about Appalachian America, that's where I'm from. I'm from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We call them the Smoky Mountains in north Georgia there. And my family, I had my dad and his two younger brothers and then his parents, and we all lived there.

at the end of a, I call it a road, not a neighborhood because it wasn't a subdivision. It was just a road with houses on it. And, uh, my grandfather had worked hard enough to buy five acres at the end of this road, gave each son an acre. And then there was one leftover. And of course the one that was left over, we turned into a racetrack for our four wheelers and go-karts. And, uh,

And my dad laid brick and block. My mom and aunts cleaned houses for a living. My grandparents worked in a carpet mill, which is the majority of what happens in Dalton, Georgia. And we were very much poor and didn't know it. I mean, I grew up in the 1963 single-wide.

We used a clothesline in the summertime. We used kerosene heaters, so we all probably will have COPD one day, unfortunately. But it was poor and modest, but it was not bad at all. We had so much fun. And one thing I try to get across to people is that the difference between— I think there's a Chris Rock or someone does something that says the difference between being poor and being broke, but for us, the difference between being poor and impoverished—

was a weekly job and a mindset. And that's where we were. We worked really hard, but we enjoyed the work we did. And we always made it. In the wintertime, it gets too cold to lay brick and block. And we'd either haul scrap iron or log. And logging was just hard enough work that you could not wait for that Georgia heat so you could go back and lay brick and block again. And so that was the family experience.

element. I had a mom and dad, I had a sister that was 10 years older, but really my family every night at the dinner table was my uncle Jeff, my aunt Kelly, my uncle Troy, his wife, my cousin Hannah, my grandparents.

And it was bigger than just my house. And it wasn't until I joined the Marine Corps that I realized that wasn't how pretty much every family unit was. I met Marines that were 18, 19 years old and they never had grandparents. And, you know, it's not to say they didn't have a full life, but it made me look back and go, man, I was so blessed to have this big family unit.

And as a family activity, my youngest uncle was a race car driver and everyone contributed to the race car. And every Saturday night we were at a different dirt track racing. And I'll tell you, if I could go back there right now, I probably would. Life was a lot simpler. Yeah. The simplicity of life, what really matters, it gives you a perspective that grounds you in a

And you're right. You can grow up in the richest neighborhood or the poorest neighborhood or somewhere in between and, and you can have a bad life, but you could also have a really good life. And money isn't always the determining factor. Good to have money. I get that. But, but still, if you have that love and that freedom and that ability to get out and be a kid and explore the world and,

And know that you're loved and supported. That makes all the difference. It really does. I mean, you know, people talk about, man, if kids acted the way we did because of all the different things we've learned about safety, like you wear a helmet with your bicycle, that kind of stuff, or seatbelts in cars. Those aren't the things that made things different. What made things different back then was the onus to grow up.

At a decent pace. I mean, now you hear about and this is not to be disparaging because you got to deal with the circumstances you have. But you hear about 27, 28 year olds that are on their parents insurance and medical insurance and they're still in college because they were told they had to have three postgraduate degrees to get a decent job. And there's no way that human being at 27 or 28 could grow up.

You know, my dad had me at 30. My mom was 27 and they were full grown adults. Like in my mind, they were 50, you know, and they had been on their own for 12. Careful. That's not a bad number. I'm on my way. Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying it's not to say you don't you experience your childhood in full. And that's why you're able to grow up a little bit quicker. I mean, I got out of high school at 17 and it was expected of me if I needed help, I was going to have it. But it was expected of me to go be somebody.

to go have a job or be in school and take care of myself in one way or the other. And we had a community college in town. I started there. I worked full time, got an apartment, you know, before I was 18 years old. And then that was not uncommon at all. And by 18, I was on my way to the Marine Corps because those things didn't all work out because I was only 17. So, you know, there's pros and cons to it. But the idea here being, I think what people really, you know, maybe it might actually be a time, a

past, I can't think of the terminology, but what might actually be a time that we don't experience anymore is that idea of personal responsibility after high school. Like you graduate high school, whether you're going to college or going to work or going to military, wherever you're going, you're in charge of yourself now. Act like it. That doesn't mean you have ultimate freedom. That means you have ultimate responsibility that comes with their freedom. And I was raised in preparation for that. At 16, as soon as I started driving,

I was in charge of my dad's evening crew for laying brick and block. And it wasn't because I was the boss's son. It was because for 16 years of my life, I was prepared for that. And I knew how to handle that responsibility. And, man, I feel like that's one of those things that I don't know where it is anymore. Yeah, I was watching. I saw this little clip of Jeff Foxworthy, you know, the comedian, talking.

And he said, yeah, I grew up in a time back when you actually had to come in first place to get a trophy. Like that was some radical idea. But, you know, it's self-determination, self-responsibility. And I have heard parents and others talk about, boy, you know, now they're going out of the world, but they just don't know how to live away and

And look, that's part of the parent's responsibility, but it's also a child's responsibility. You've got to prepare yourself to go out and leave the nest and go out there and be in the world by your... Not by yourself, but...

Be prepared. You can go out and fight for what you want. I mean, our country is based on the idea of the opportunity to succeed. It's not the guarantee that everybody's going to end up the same, but that's kind of the fundamental difference of the parties in conservative thought versus liberal thought in America. And it scares me that we're just getting so soft. You know, my dad wasn't a philosopher. He had an eighth grade education. My mom had a tenth grade education.

My dad owned his own business his whole life. From the time he was 19, he was an apprentice for a mason, actually in a union back when unions did what unions were supposed to do. And so from 17, 18, and 19, he was in a union, learned the trade. At 19 or 20, he started his own business as a brick mason and did that until he retired at about 60, and then he passed away at 63. And my dad didn't have any type of big philosophy on life that he was aware of.

But he said things every single day that stuck in my head and made a difference. He'd say things like this, son, don't complain about the rain. Complain about its timing.

I mean, just think about the depth there, because that's how we are. We complain about traffic and we complain about things that are actually blessings in our life. Do you know how much of the seven billion people in this world would enjoy the opportunity to sit in a fifty thousand, hundred thousand dollar car listening to their favorite song in the favorite temperature? And the worst problem they had in that moment was that they were in traffic.

But that's what we do. We complain about things because they're inconvenient, not because they're bad or wrong or a symptom of a problem, but because they're inconvenient in that moment. And he could see through that. He would say things like, son, anything worth your time is worth doing right.

And he didn't say I'm in a profound—I say I'm much more profoundly than he did. He was saying it as a fact of life, not to inspire me to be some person on television. I mean, that was the last thing in his mind. But it was always just about seeing things as what they are and what you can make them be. I mean, this is a guy, he was 5'8". His dad, his two brothers, and his son were all over 6'. Like, he had to have some grit in him just to survive. But he was just one of those people that—

I always told people he didn't have to join the Marine Corps because he was born with it. He washed his truck every Monday and every Thursday. That's just who he was. But he would say these things that in the moment I'd roll my eyes. Yeah, whatever, Dad. And then here I am, 36 years old, and so many things I do are him made over. It's almost scary. Well, it's true because I think kids, when they're growing up,

They may be rolling their eyes. They're, you know, their heads tilted back. They could not look more bored, but they're absorbing it. They're, they're understanding it. And then when something comes, it rings a bell and they connect the two parts together. Yeah. And to your earlier point, you know, the blessings that we have by just being an American, you know, I, I try to remind my kids and it's hard to grasp the, the, the perception of it when you're so young, but, but,

most people in the world don't have indoor plumbing. Most people in the world don't have a bathroom in their house. And it's just hard to comprehend that, right? With all the

prosperity that we have in this country, the idea that, oh, what do you mean you don't have running water and it's clean and you don't have a toilet? I mean, like how many toilets do you have in your house? I mean, the opulence sometimes compared to the rest of the world. And you say those things and like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then,

They go out in the world and they start thinking, wow, this is harder than I thought. And it's a good connection for them. You know, my dad built – he was a brick-and-block mason, but he had several uncles on his mom's side. And each one of them had a different trade in construction. So he had two uncles that were framers, two that were brick-and-block masons, one that was a plumber, one that owned a concrete company. And one of the things he would do outside of logging was he would frame. So he knew how to frame houses. So he built the house that I grew up in first.

from ninth grade on, during high school, he built it. And the day we moved into it, it was paid off. Now he spent seven and a half years collecting materials, doing work for materials on job sites. And it's a nice little house.

In 1977, he would have been in his early 20s, he built the first house his parents had with running water. And it was the one that was next door to us when I was growing up. And I always heard that story, but it didn't ring a bell to me. Like I just, in my mind, everything before like 1970 was the old timey days.

And now as an adult looking back thinking 1977 was not that long ago. I mean, we'd already been to the moon and my grandparents got their first house with, when I say running water, what we call city water, something they didn't have to go pump a pump to get water moving through the house. Right.

And it was also the first house that they didn't share a telephone. A lot of people don't know that. There was a time where— Party lines. Exactly, party lines. And so to think of what we have now in the palm of our hand, and I'm telling you, I walked by a bum here in New York City a few minutes ago who had a cell phone in his hand. So it's not to say there aren't people out there that can't afford one. That's not the position I'm taking. But poverty in this country essentially comes with mills

in a telephone. That's the prosperity of this country. And to think in 1977 was the first time my grandparents had their version of those things, running city water in their house, a telephone dedicated to that house. It really puts things in perspective for you. And it's not to say they had it worse. It's to say...

They went through that so we could have what we have now. How about we appreciate it? Take care of it. Be grateful for it. Find it as a blessing so we don't spend so much time looking for what's unfair because the only consistent I've ever seen in this life as a human is that things are never fair. It's not about what's fair. It's about what you have and what you do with it. Yeah. Amen to that. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Joey Jones right after this.

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All right. So let's go back to your kind of personal journey and story. So you're going along, you're going to high school. And so what's the thought process here? I mean, you could stay at home, do what you're doing, but what's the decision that you made, the direction you took in your life? So, you know, my dad was born in 1956. He should have been born in 1936. The man never operated a computer. He'd make a joke like, you know, in

Anyway, he'd make jokes, but he didn't know how to use a computer. And so the expectation in my house wasn't because my parents didn't care. It's because they didn't know what the expectation should be. My mom went through the 10th grade. My dad left in the 8th grade. Their expectation, their mandate was you will graduate high school.

But by that time, the mandate probably for most parents are you'll go to college. But they just – that wasn't on the horizon for them. Georgia got the Hope Scholarship a few years before I got to high school. They didn't even know what that was. They just in their minds, college was something they couldn't afford. And so I was labeled a gifted child early on, fifth or sixth grade, and always in advanced classes. But because the household expectation wasn't really oriented toward college, they would have never stopped me, but they didn't know how to help me. And so football –

Working after school and then when I started driving, chasing girls. Those were the priorities. Schoolwork came last. Now I was smart enough that I could show up for test day, make a 90-something and pass the class. But it was never pounded into me to be a dedicated academic because it wasn't something that my parents learned how to value.

And so my dad was the kind of guy that if you know about brick and block, it's all geometry and math. He could do long division in his head, but he didn't know how to write it out on paper.

He could do the math to make something square, to figure square footage. He could do all the stuff he didn't learn in school. He learned it on the job. And so about sixth, seventh grade, they couldn't help me with my schoolwork anymore. And so, you know, it was all on my own anyway. So they couldn't criticize me for not making an A because they would look at it and it would look like Chinese. So when I graduated high school, I was 17 years old in May of 2004.

And I had achieved what my dad expected of me. I didn't get in trouble. I wasn't irresponsible in being a teenager and chasing the opposite sex, if you know what I mean. And I graduated high school. So I'd done the things that he expected of me. And most importantly, that he didn't say out loud but were a big, big expectation. I had proven to him that I was not afraid of hard work. When I went on the job site with him, whether it be on the weekends or in the summer or when school was out,

I didn't show up saying I'm the boss's son. I showed up saying I'm the boss's son, so I have to prove to everybody else I'm here to work. And because I had done those things, from the time I was 16 when I got my driver's license and I was paying for my truck payment, I was free. I was working. I was going to school. I lived in their house. I respected their rules, but I didn't have rules necessarily other than stay out of trouble and do those things.

So when I went to the Marine Corps, that was something else. Nobody in my family had enlisted or, well, to take it a step back, nobody in my family up until my generation had walked across a stage for high school. None of them had enlisted in the military other than my great-grandfather in World War I.

And none of them had gone to college. College wasn't even on the table. And so I hit some big milestones for my lineage just by graduating high school and then enlisting in the Marine Corps. Well, go back to that decision. I mean, you could go work at McDonald's. You could go to Florida and try to go find a job there. You signed up for the Marines. I mean, so how did that happen? I mean...

It's a pretty good story. Why the Marines? And why did you do that? What was the impetus? So the options in Dalton, Georgia, if you don't know anything about Dalton, Georgia, just look down on the ground if you're listening. If you see carpet, when you look down, we made it. That was made in Dalton, Georgia. I put money on it. Ninety-some-odd percent of the world's carpet is made in Dalton, Georgia. And so that's the industry there. So you do one of three things if you grew up in Dalton. You make carpet.

Or you make buildings that make carpet, like my dad was a brick-and-block mason. Or if you're real adventurous, you drive a truck that takes carpet to wherever it's going. And that's it. So brick-and-block mason was my dad. Carpet industry was everybody else. I did both. I did brick-and-block growing up, and that's one paycheck away from slave labor. It is very difficult.

And then making carpet, working in those carpet mills in Georgia heat in the summertime with no air conditioning, that was worse. And so those were the options directly in front of me. I knew I was smart. I knew that for a fact. And I knew I was 17. If I could grow up, I'd probably have the responsibility and dedication to be something more. And I just, I came home from work one day from the carpet mill working overnight, took a shower and went to work with my dad.

And I saw him over there just, I mean, his hands are bleeding. There's a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, sweat pouring off of him. And he's working his tail to the bone. And every block he put in the wall was $1.25. And his whole life depended on him getting enough blocks in the wall today that it added up to a good paycheck. Plus, he's got to pay everybody else. And when I left the carpet mill, I started there at $9.50 an hour. My supervisor made $14 an hour. I was going to work for the rest of my life.

for four and a half dollars an hour in a job I didn't like. And it just clicked, like there's something more out there. I didn't take advantage of opportunities in college, so what is left? And my two best friends, Chris and Keith, that I went through high school with and loved to death, both of their dads were career military, and one of them being a Marine that was also our football coach. And so that was a big impact and a big influence.

And so they kind of talked me into it, honestly. Curious question. Were you playing offense, defense? What position were you playing on that football field? All the above. I didn't come off the field. I played all special teams, offense and defense. I came off the field to catch my breath. All right, all right. So, okay, so you sign up and you're now going to be a Marine. Tell us about that. I mean...

That's not an easy way to go. I chose the Marine for the same reason a lot of guys chose the Marine Corps. I dated a girl in high school. She broke up with me for a bull rider, and I thought, you know what?

You might one-up me today, but not tomorrow, brother. I'm going to the Marine Corps. No, that's kind of part of it. But really, I knew that I graduated high school young. I started school young. I graduated high school young. All the problems in my life at 18 years old essentially came from immaturity and lack of ability to apply myself. Later on in life, I learned some of that was just how my brain works. If I'm putting a puzzle together...

If I get 80% of the puzzle together, my mind can see where the rest go and I'm bored with it. I want to move on to something else. I just didn't have that in me on the execution side. And so really I joined the Marine Corps, honestly, a little bit for selfish reasons because I knew I could be a better version of me. And if I was going to make more money and have a family and catch either the girl that broke up with me or a good one, to be the kind of man that I was expected to be, I needed something else. And the Marine Corps –

offered all of that literally you sit down at the recruiter's office and back then i don't know what they do now they would put these plates these like engraved in metal plates in a row and it was really kind of a mind game because no matter what order you put them in they had a pitch on why that meant you were good for the marine corps but they told you put these in order to see if you're good for the marine corps and it was like responsibility uh dedication judgment you know and it was all these i think it's probably we have a ditty called jj did tie buckle and it's

all these different aspects of a good leader and, uh, or characteristics of a good leader. And, um, and so I did that and he's like, yeah, well, it's like tarot cards. He's like, yep. See right here, judgment, you know, you're perfect for the Marine Corps. And so away I went. Okay. So you go to the Marine Corps and then you found yourself in Afghanistan, but you,

Not just, I mean, tell us about, you were dealing with improvised explosive devices as I read, right? I mean, that, there are a lot of different jobs in the Marines. Why that one and how did you get into that position? So I was, you know, I told you nobody in my family was in the service. I had a couple of uncles and great uncles, which because the way things worked out, they were the same age. They were all about 10 years older than my parents.

I had a couple uncles and great uncles that were drafted into Vietnam. Two of them are essentially war heroes. The other two went AWOL. That just kind of tells you where I was on it. And so I just didn't have any influence. My understanding of the Marine Corps was the movie Full Metal Jacket. And if you watch that movie, the most bad A character in that movie was Combat Camera.

So in my mind, no matter what job you do, you ended up with a rifle in your hand on patrol. That's just what I knew about the Marine Corps. And I told you I could ace test like nobody's business. I was just very good at that. So when I went down and took the ASVAB, all my scores were off the charts.

which meant the recruiter couldn't in good conscience let me have the job I wanted, which was infantry. Because not everybody, anybody can qualify for infantry through the ASVAB, but not everybody can qualify for these other jobs. And those recruiters get their own kind of accolades based on filling these other jobs.

So he pushed me towards and pushed me towards other kind of nerdier jobs. And I landed on something called Communications Electronics Repairman, which meant that literally back in those days, I mean, this was 20 years ago now, you take apart radios and you fix the circuit cards inside of them so that you can keep using them. Because that was back when we were a little bit fiscally responsible and wouldn't just buy 10 new ones just like it, you know. And so I went to school for that. And I realized as I went to school that,

for this and went to the unit that was in Hawaii, that decision had gotten me further and further away from what I wanted to do, which was go to war and be that version of a Marine. So then I got a really good piece of advice. One thing the Marine Corps does different than all of the services is

is that your competency within your job field is only a fraction of how they qualify you for promotion. And the quicker you're promoted, the sooner you get to make decisions for yourself. So I said, hey, PT really hard and be the best physical fitness. Then go out and volunteer for everything, which gets you good productivity and conduct remarks.

And if you do those things, then it doesn't matter if you are the best radio repairman or pass all the extra tests involved with that because they'll let you decide what you want to do. And so that's what I did. And when I got to Hawaii, they had more radio repairmen than they needed, and they always needed somebody to go volunteer for some other duty. And that was me. I was on USS Rushmore flipping pancakes and scrubbing pans. I went on.

To coach this course, I went to the range and was coaching Marines as they qualify on the ROFL range every week. I went to heavy machine gunners course. I did everything they asked me to do. And I eventually wound up in Iraq with a unit out of Okinawa. So, I mean, I was really, really playing the game of trying to find opportunity here. Ended up in Iraq as mounted security, and we did mounted security for EOD.

for the bomb techs. And so our job was when there was an IED in Iraq, it worked a little bit different in Afghanistan. And Iraq, it was a response situation, kind of like a fire department. And

And so if there was an EOD, a unit found an IED, they needed EOD out there, IED being a roadside bomb, EOD being bomb techs. If they found a roadside bomb and they needed the bomb techs out there, they would call and my group would escort EOD out to where the bomb was. And as I learned about it, I learned some things about the Marine Corps bomb tech field that are different than all the other services.

First of all being that you could not enlist off the street to be a bomb tech. You can in the other three services, not the Marine Corps. You have to be a sergeant. You have to be 21 years old, and you have to have been in for two years. And so I had a new goal in front of me. Hey, eight more months, I'll be in for two years. Hopefully I'll get promoted around that time. I'm 19 1⁄2, so a year and a half, I'll be 21. As long as I'm 21 by the time I graduate school, which is a year long, so I start doing the math. And I laterally moved into being a bomb tech while I was in Iraq.

And when I came back, I'd done half a deployment as on-the-job training, went to school in Florida. And when I graduated, they sent me to a unit on the West Coast again in Camp Pendleton, California, and started my full-time job as a bomb tech in preparation for what would be the deadliest deployment for our field in the two wars in Afghanistan.

Now, eventually you were hit by an IED. Tell us what you can about what happened. Yeah. The first thing I try to point out to people, and a lot of people, and I understand this, because even serving, it took me a while to understand it. Iraq and Afghanistan, two totally different wars, different enemies, different battlefields, different ordinance used against us.

Both used IEDs, improvised explosive devices, but they employed them and made them in totally different ways. So that 10 months I had in Iraq as an on-the-job training with EOD, I saw a certain type of IED, and they didn't function very often. They usually, by the time we found them, something didn't go right with them, and they weren't going to blow up, and EOD's job was just basically to dispose of it.

When we got to Afghanistan, that was 2007 and 2008. When we got to Afghanistan in 2010, the Taliban had less resources, so they actually made their IEDs simpler.

And because they were simpler, they functioned more often. There was less to go wrong. So rather than focusing on out-tricking us with technology like remote control or IR sensors, they just made really solid loop circuit, just like a flashlight you buy at the dollar store. Hit the switch, the light bulb comes on. For them, you hit the switch, the bomb goes up. And they were incredibly effective. And throughout my deployment, they learned to make them where they didn't have a metallic signature.

And our number one way of finding them was a metal detector. And so going through six months of this, I deployed with about 60 Marine EOD techs, and we had dropped about 30 of them through the deployment, either killed in action or severely wounded and had to be taken out. And we couldn't backfill those 30. So we'd gone from 60 down to about 35 and back up to about 40. So we were moving guys around because we put two EOD techs in each unit.

And so we were moving guys and gals around trying to keep the numbers where they needed to be, where the work was. And ended up going on an operation called Operation Roadhouse 2 to take a town called Safar Bazaar in southern Helmand. And this was a preparatory test battle in anticipation of taking Marja, which was about 30 miles north.

And what we didn't know was the bad guys had really gotten a stronghold in Safar Bazaar. We thought they were all up in Marjah. There were actually plenty of them down in Safar Bazaar. So we took about 250 Marines and we took the city. It took us five days to take the city. A lot of IEDs. I worked about 40 IEDs in five and a half days. We only fought against them for about two days. The rest of the time, they just put IEDs everywhere, made a minefield out of the city. And for a longer story short,

I just stepped on an IED that we didn't know was there. We didn't have a metallic signature. We didn't have any other way of seeing it. It had been there long enough that the ground wasn't disturbed. It was in a very random spot. It wasn't in what we call a choke point, like in a doorway. Just luck of the draw. My foot went to the wrong spot. Stepped on an IED while responding to another IED. It blew me up, blew me through the air. When I landed on my back, the Marine engineer that was with me

was instead of behind me, now he's in front of me. It took me a year or two to realize that meant because I flew over him. He was in front of me laying on his belly looking back at me, and long story short, it took both my legs above the knee, almost took my right arm, punctured my left lung, punctured some stuff in my head that had to be fixed, and took one of my fingers or most of it, and the Marine engineer, it took his life, a piece of a rock,

Ironically enough, just a rock hit him in the head and took his life. Were you conscious through all that? Yes. Yeah, I landed on my back. If you don't get hit in the head, you don't get knocked out. The percussion alone...

generally doesn't knock you out. Sometimes you'll go into shock and you'll kind of black out. That didn't happen to me. I'd been there for six months, man. I'd seen it. I'd responded to it. I'd had it happen in front of me. Everything but happened to me. And it had happened to me, just I was far enough away it didn't hurt me in the same way. So when I landed on my back, the first thing I thought was I need to grab some tourniquets. So I had tourniquets on my shoulders and my hips.

And quite frankly, you do that because if you have them any further away from your core, they're probably going to go flying with whatever limb you need them for. And so I reached up. I was laying on my back. My left arm was twisted around underneath me. I reached up with my right hand to grab a tourniquet off my shoulder. And when I did, my right forearm was severed. It was just hanging there. If you've seen Harry Potter, there's a scene in one of the Harry Potter movies where they accidentally magically remove his bone and his hand is just flopping. That's what it looked like.

It was just kind of like a piece of spaghetti. And I just remember thinking, you know, I can live without legs, but I need my hands. And almost comically like, dang, I'm in a tight spot. And so at that point, I couldn't physically help myself. And so I started looking around. I saw the Marines coming in response, and I just tried to direct them along the path I took to get in there because if I've walked that path, then there's probably not a bomb there because nothing blew up. And I remember they started working on me.

And, you know, I grew up in church, but it had been a while since that had been a priority for me. And as the Marine was working on me, I remember saying, hey, man, won't you say the Lord's Prayer with me just in case? Because I'm bleeding out of three limbs right now. I can't hardly breathe, and it's probably not going to look good. And, you know, we were just kind of like our Father who art in heaven with liberty and justice for all. Like we didn't know what we were saying, but we were trying really hard. Your heart was in the right place. That's exactly right. And God's grace, I guess, because I'm here.

So they successfully extract you. Where did they take you? And then how and when did you eventually get home? I bounced around a little bit. So we were far enough into Helmand, which if you look at a map is southern Afghanistan, that we had actually come back behind us and built hospitals. So the first place I went was a hospital, Fort Dwyer, which was only about 30 kilometers away. And I was there long enough to get me stable enough to move me.

Then they moved me to Bastion, which was in northern or central Afghanistan near Camp Leatherneck.

And then from there, they actually might have been Bagram. I'm sorry. And then from Bagram, I stayed there a day because I'd lost so much blood that they couldn't keep my heart pumping. There wasn't anything in there to pump. So they're trying to get blood in me. And then once they got me stable enough to move me, they took me to Germany. And the same thing happened that my body was just trying to expire. And so they spun my parents up and they told them, listen, Bagram.

get ready, have a backpack. We're either going to fly you to D.C. to greet him because he's going to make it, or we're going to fly you to Germany to say goodbye to him because he won't. And so for about a day and a half, it took about two and a half days, the whole process. From the time I got blown up, which was August 8th,

until I got to Washington, D.C. Walter Reed was August 10th. But with the time change, it was about two and a half days, I think. And so all of that was just them kind of waiting to see if they could get me stable. And thankfully, you know, I've always been accused of being stubborn. So I guess I was stubborn in a good way then. So you're married.

Were you married then or did you get married after? No, it was after that. That girl that broke my heart in high school finally came to her senses. And we actually got together when I got injured.

And so that's a whole other hour-long story. But some things are just absolutely meant to be, and no matter how hard you work against them, in this case, in her case, she definitely worked against it because that 18-year-old version of me was not worth marrying. But finally, by the time I made it to about 28, I was. And so I think I was 26 when we got married. And it's not been easy. Definitely had struggles. But I got a three-year-old little girl, and, man, that makes it all worth it.

Yeah, you talk about that daughter of yours. I'm not sure how old she is now, but...

Boy, that puts a whole perspective on life, doesn't it, when you've got that one that's yours. Yeah. You know, I have a son that's 13, and he was, you know, full disclosure here, the result of a very intimate 24-hour relationship that I did not know yielded a child. And right before I deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, I got a call saying, hey, I've got a three-month-old son, and he's yours.

And I knew his mom, but she had her own struggles and in the beginning chose not to tell me. And I was far enough away getting ready to go to war. I didn't know it. Social media was not back then what it is now. Right. And so that my proudest moment in my life.

was the moment she called me and told me that her three-month-old son was mine. And my response was, okay, I'll get there as soon as I can. We need to get his name changed. We need to figure out child support. We need to figure out custody. Let's raise this kid together, regardless of what you and I are. We're his parents. And I don't say that to brag. I say that to say, what other response is there? I don't understand any other response. But deploying to what would be going into it,

a very difficult deployment to survive. And I hate to say it that way. I don't mean to be profound, but that was just the circumstances. I chose the worst time in American history to take bombs apart for a living. And going into what would be a very difficult deployment

deployment to survive and survive intact, I had a young man who deserved a dad waiting on me, waiting to meet me, really. I spent three days, four days with him before I deployed. He was a year and two weeks old when I got injured. And we learned to walk together. And so to have him in that moment was life-saving,

And then to have my daughter having gotten through all that and to experience this moment with her 10 years later, she's now three, to like experience those first steps, first words, childbirth, that's life defining. And so my kids have really been the defining and saving factors in my life. Well, good for you. You know, that should be a proudest moment because...

And that it's interesting to see how you just react and respond and don't overthink it. And you just know in your heart and your gut what you should be doing. And you're right. That is the responsible answer. And it's hard to fathom any any other answer. It is. Listen, I say this without judgment to an extent because I don't know everybody's situation. I don't know if the other circumstances maybe would have pulled something different out of me.

But I didn't have time to think about it. I didn't think about what would so-and-so think or what do I think about this woman or how hard is it going to be to live in California and have a son in Georgia. None of those things. All it was there was this is the absolute definition of innocence, and I have a responsibility to it. This child has done nothing but bad.

Come into this world and need something from me. And who am I not to give that child what it needs from me? And to this day, he's just...

Now I couldn't deny him if I wanted to because he's a spitting image of me and he has a lot of my personality but even then you know it was just you look into your child's face and there's this Old time he's saying that when a baby's born it looks just like his dad So he knows it's his and uh, and my son looked just like me the first time I laid eyes on him Well, that's that's great. That's great. So you're back you're recovering um

You get married. What were you doing? At some point, you got to get back up and go to work. So what did you do? This is my favorite part of the story. I got injured August 6, 2010. I started my recovery August 10, 2010.

I started walking on full-length prosthetics February 2011. I started working full-time on Capitol Hill July of 2011. So it took me about 10 and a half months to go from blown up on the battlefield to working at the House Veterans Affairs Committee and Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs as a fellow

completely illegally. They thought I was retired. I didn't know what they thought. All I knew was I had finished my recovery physically. All I had to do was go in for two hours a day to prove I could still do it. We were waiting on the VA paperwork and somebody finagled me at Walter Reed to go over there and talk to these people. And so I went home, probably wrote up the worst resume to ever be brought to Capitol Hill and get a job out of it.

They thought I was a retired veteran looking for stuff to do, and I thought they knew what was up. So I worked up there for six months before the Marine Corps realized they had a rogue, no-legged Marine working at a committee. And you understand this. There were officers that worked in members' offices, which is kind of a step down. And here I am as an E-5 or an E-6 at the time working at a committee. And so you talk about child by fire. There's a reason why I'm successful in this Fox job because –

At the time, I had not finished undergrad. I was barely even halfway through it, honestly. I was going to school at the same time. And I'm writing, I think they're called IRAMs, like legal briefs. You know, Googling what is a legal brief. Okay, let me go do it. And by the end of that, I was up there for almost a year. And by the end of that year, I was writing, you know, committee remarks for the chairman and responding to constituents. Would that be Chairman Jeff Miller? Yes. Okay.

Yes. He's a good man. I think he had the seat before Matt Gates had that seat over there in Pensacola. That's exactly right. And the funny thing about that seat is that's where EOD school is. That's where a lot of those EOD techs retired there. And so that district, that first district of Florida, it'll be one of my homes. I've been lucky enough to call a few places home, and that's one of them.

Yeah, Pensacola, that is a beautiful place, and I can see why people retire there. And I thought Jeff Miller did a great job with that. It was funny, just a little sidebar. When I first got elected to Congress, I was there, and we were supposed to introduce ourselves. Now, Jeff Miller had already been in Congress prior, but for whatever reason, I got introduced, and I said, Jason Chaffetz, Utah's third senator.

And at the time, the U of U football team, University of Utah football team was like number three in the nation or something. I mean, they were way up there. And Jeff Miller, of course, would say, Jeff Miller, Florida number one. And, you know, making a football reference, it was actually the timing was better than I'm giving it credit for. That is so funny. So, okay, so you're...

You're back. Things are now moving. I mean, that's, I can't even imagine the devastation and the trauma that you went through. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your service and your commitment to this country and your willingness to serve. Nobody can thank you enough for that and the sacrifices that you made. But

Now you're moving in a different direction, the right direction. How in the world did you end up at you and I sit next to each other at Fox News? How did that happen? I told you, man, they started scraping the bottom of the barrel and you just never know what you're going to get down there. No. How did you end up at Fox? Like what? It would take another podcast to tell that story. The Cliff Notes version.

I realized there was something special about living in D.C. and working in D.C., and it was up to me to take advantage of it. What that became, I had no idea what that would turn into. But I knew that if a guy who grew up in a trailer...

learned to be a brick mason and went to the Marine Corps to be a bomb tech and was now somehow at Georgetown in a liberal studies degree. If a guy was going to make a living with that kind of background with no legs, DC is a place to do it. DC is the place to figure it out. And so in that way, it was a blessing. But then I learned working on Capitol Hill, going to Georgetown, socializing, volunteering for multiple nonprofits, learning to craft, to have a voice,

to be able to speak to people in a way that they want to hear what you have to say, and to make that mean something, that that could be a talent worth harnessing. And I probably, if I'm being completely honest with you, not to be off color, but I probably crafted that skill being one of 50 people

Marines in a bar that all look the same and dress the same and realizing, hey, you got to actually bring personality to the table or a girl's not going to notice you. Like that's probably how I learned to communicate was, hey, oh, you actually have to listen to what they're saying and respond to it. That's what I'm going to do differently than all the other guys here.

And so that part of me, that outgoing, trying to be charming, trying to have a conversation with someone, I just made that my career. Like, how can I communicate for a living because I can't physical labor anymore? So I would speak on behalf of nonprofits and speak on behalf of injured veterans and

and get good things done for people because I was the one that was willing to say something. And then I became passionate about politics and about issues. I started to see how things happen, how policy is made, how the implementation of policy by the administration could yield the opposite result

that any side of Congress meant for when they passed the legislation. And now a lot of times that comes down to leadership and communication. And what role could I play in this? And I did a couple of things involved with policy before I worked on the Hill. I learned about policy on the Hill and then had a light bulb that said, if you want to have an impact on this city, you don't do it like this. You do it by going somewhere else. And at the time, my thought was to run for Congress.

But you do it by going somewhere else and investing in somewhere else and getting their nod to come back here. And so I took a job for a nonprofit outside of Austin, Texas, in Georgetown, Texas, with kind of the back burner idea of being in politics. But the forefront was to go do something worthwhile with my time.

And one opportunity after another, everything from learning to use Twitter early on to working with this nonprofit that was around celebrities and just being in front of a camera and honing that skill and always be about something you're passionate about. The Fox opportunity came in 2013 when Kyle Carpenter was about to get his Medal of Honor and a producer at Fox who had been independent and worked with me with a nonprofit said,

called me and said, hey, didn't you recover with Kyle Carpenter? I said, yeah. She's like, would you mind to come on? This was just before I left D.C. She's like, would you mind to come on and talk about him for our show? And her name was Jen Williams. She's fantastic. She was the producer for Gretchen Carlson at the time.

And Jason, what you might remember about that is the Obama administration was notorious about impromptu press conferences in that 2 o'clock time stamp. And so I'm mic'd up wanting to talk about my buddy getting a Medal of Honor, and Obama gives a speech impromptu or a spur of the moment about ISIS. And she's like, hey, do you mind to respond to the president? I was like, yeah, why not? I'll never do this again. I'll give you my comments. So I called some buddies at the Pentagon while the president talked, made my analysis, wrote something up.

If you're watching Fox, if you're watching the president tell the world we're going to go to war with ISIS on Fox, then when he cut away, you saw me. That was my first time on live TV. And I gave my rebuttal basically to what he was saying. And that coupled with a lot of other little things, they kept calling. And then other shows called. Oh, good.

To this day, Greg Gutfeld thinks he discovered me. I went on Fox for two years before he invited me on his show. But let me tell you something. When somebody like Greg Gutfeld thinks they discovered you, you let him believe it. Oh, yeah. Just go ahead and give him all the leash he wants. Yeah, yeah. I never mastered that with Greg. I got to figure out to have him say, you know, I'm the guy that told him to run for Congress. I haven't figured that out with Greg yet. Yeah.

Good for you. Good for you. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be right back. Listen, I am fascinated by stories where ordinary Americans do extraordinary things. And I think you're one of those. I think you're one of those people who...

who just put the best face on all the adversity and things that happened and just figured out and took, you know, took personal responsibility and applied those things that you said you believed in and actually did them. And for that, that's just, you know, it's inspirational.

And I can't thank you enough for your service. But, you know, before I let you go, Joey, I got to ask you some rapid questions. I hope you're up for it. Absolutely. And thank you for the kind words. I truly appreciate it. Well, again, thank you. So here we go. We just want to get to know you a little bit better. So let's just have some fun with this. First concert you ever attended. Leonard Skinner. Leonard Skinner. That's a good one. Yeah.

High school mascot. A raider, which is kind of like a buccaneer. Kind of our version of a buccaneer. Yeah. No, that's more legit than most. And we were not near the ocean, so who knows? Yeah, well, that's a good point. Your first celebrity crush.

Oh, Rachel Lee Cook. And she's all that. And and to this day, she's still my celebrity crush. I just think she's all. Yeah, you didn't really hesitate there, did you? No, I didn't really have to think about that one or contemplate it. You know, she might be a closet conservative. She may hear this podcast. You just keep telling yourself that. That's good. That's good. Yeah, she watches the five favorite vegetable.

Ooh, favorite vegetable. I'm trying to make sure I say something that's actually a vegetable because I know you can get crossed up here. Probably potatoes. Yeah, you fry up some potatoes. I'm ready to roll. Okay, they're good. Yeah, you'd be surprised because you're right. About a third of the people can't name a vegetable, let alone. Yeah, that's good.

Do you have a pet growing up? I did. I had several that were important to me. The first one was an Alaskan Spitz named Vicky, and she was so smart. Vicky? Yes. Vicky's a different name for a dog, you know? If you met my dad, you would understand. We had a dog named Fart. We had a dog named Get Down. We had a dog named Trixie. And then I had a bird named Oz. And so Vicky and Oz were my two pets growing up.

Get down. That's funny that that ends up being the name. Just get down. All right. If you could invite one person over and say, honey, you know what? We got somebody coming over tonight. Now, this person could be dead or alive. Anybody in history, who would you want to have over to break bread with the Jones family? Jimmy Stewart, Air Force general, also a Hollywood movie star.

Oh, wow. Now, why him? Probably the – well, number one, he's probably my favorite movie star of all time. He really invented the subtleness of physical comedy. If you watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, there's a scene where he goes over to the senator's house, the senior senator's house, and his daughter's real pretty, and he's all stumbling, and he keeps dropping his hat, picking it up, dropping it, and picking it up. And so when it comes to physical comedy in subtle ways, he's great at it. And then the other thing about him, this is a guy who did everything.

He was signed to Universal. World War II was about to happen. He was signed to Universal making hit movies, and he was underweight to join the Army, and Universal didn't want to let him because he had an excuse, and that was a movie star they could hang on to. He went to the weightlifting coach at the studio and said, hey, I need to gain 20 pounds for this role coming up. The weightlifting coach puts the weight on him. He goes, joins the Army, and goes off to World War II flying planes. The Universal...

The studio paid for it behind their own back. I did not know that. That's a fascinating story. Oh, absolutely. He served in Vietnam, served in World War II, served in the Korean War, lost his son in Vietnam, good friends with Ronald Reagan, and really was one of the last class acts out of that city. Yeah, he was a fantastic actor that impacted millions. That's an interesting choice. A unique talent that nobody knows about. What can you tell us about him?

that like, oh, nobody knows I can do this, but I'm actually pretty good at it. I don't know if I have any great talents. I'm a woodworker. I make stuff out of wood. I'm not talented at it yet. Do you whittle? No, I have saws and routers and band saws and chisels and wedges, and I just make different kind of furniture and just random. If somebody wants something made, it's a project I can learn about. Outside of that, as far as talent, I raced four-wheelers growing up, and I was very successful at that. Nice.

Oh, very good. You know, in shop class, I made a lamp and I'm surprised I didn't burn our house down because mom and dad were kind enough to plug it into the wall, but I can't even imagine. In fact, I don't know what they did with it, but it didn't last long. It didn't look too pretty either. So good for you. A big question for me. This is a personal one for me. Pineapple on pizza.

I'm not against it simply because I'm pretty bland on my taste buds. So anything that brings some flavor, I'll appreciate because here's the deal. You don't put red fruit on a pizza.

It's got to be with Canadian bacon and not a lot of tomato sauce. It has to be done a certain way, almost like a flatbread, and I can deal with it. A flatbread. So you want to turn it into like bruschetta or something like that. Yeah, which is the only kind of pizza I really like. I'm not a big tomato sauce guy. Even when I order pasta, I normally order like an Alfredo or something. You just like the noodles and butter? That's it. That's it with some milk and cream in there, and I'm happy. Throw me some cheese.

All right. UFOs. Oh, I don't know if UFOs are real, but I believe extraterrestrial life is real. I just – it's hard for me to believe that aliens only visit us, and we seem to be the only ones trying to prove it. And so we seem to be the only ones with like – because like if an alien visited a third world country, like they wouldn't have the infrastructure to disprove it. Right.

So we kind of live in almost a vacuum here in the United States where it's like, oh, aliens are real, but our government covers it up. Well, not every government has resources to cover it up. And it's hard for me to believe they only come to us. I'm fascinated by this. You know, this is where John Radcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence, a very good friend of mine, served in Congress, congressman from Texas, said,

I've tried to break them. I've tried to say, John, come on. Come on. Just tell me. You can trust me. I truly believe. He will not do it. He will not break a secret, and it's driving me nuts. Even if you read, even if your full belief in this is biblical, it doesn't really say we're the only ones. It just tells the story of how we came to be. And so I think there's 100% that there's life in the universe outside of us. But I don't know. I think a lot of it is just...

oftentimes they shut down the patent office in the 1950s because they said everything had been invented. Sometimes we have a little bit of hubris about us, and I think there's some things we still don't understand. And we want to define that, and sometimes we do it by explaining it away as a UFO or something. Yeah, yeah. You know what? You can ask anybody. Everybody's got an opinion on this, and it is fascinating. It really does make you wonder. And I look out at the stars every,

and the depth of the atmosphere. Where does this end? And the galaxies, it's just fascinating to me. All right, last question. Favorite childhood toy? Oh, Ninja Turtles. I had all the little figurines that we could afford.

My dad would take me to the flea market on Saturday morning, and I'd get to rummage through the action figures before all the other kids got there. And if anything looked like a Ninja Turtle, Bebop, Rocksteady, Splinter, all of them. Man, I had them all. April, O'Neil, all of them. Well, listen, you deserve all the Ninja Turtles you could possibly get.

And this country can't thank you enough. And I love working with you at Fox. Glad we get to cross paths. And it's an honor and pleasure to know you. And thanks for taking time to join us on this Jason in the House podcast. Do appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.

Hey, listen, I can't thank Joey enough. I can't thank him enough for his service to his country. The example that he sets for a lot. I'm sure he's not perfect in any way, but you know what? I love that he served his country. He's worked hard. I think he's got a good voice and understanding of this country and what makes it tick and

And it was really nice of him to take the time to join us on this Jason on the house podcast. I hope you can review it. I think he, I hope you can subscribe to the podcast. You can go over to Fox news podcast.com where you can go find other podcasts, but rate it, review it, subscribe to it. And we'll be back with more next week. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the house.

From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Janice Dean, Fox News Senior Meteorologist. Be sure to subscribe to the Janice Dean Podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And don't forget to spread the sunshine.