Jeff interviews Bahnsen

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Very excited, delighted to have this next guest right here on Next Week. He is

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David Bonson. He's the founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of the Bonson Group, a bi -coastal private wealth management boutique based in Newport Beach, California.

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He actually is often seen on CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg, and is a regular contributor to National Review and Forbes.

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He is also the son of one of my heroes of the faith,

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Dr. Greg Bonson, the man who has impacted me and my ministry greatly. So please welcome

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David Bonson, everybody. What's up, David?

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Welcome. Can you hear me, David? I can.

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I apologize. I had the mute on. Great to be with you. Thanks, brother, so much. So I'm excited. Very excited.

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Of course, I'm very familiar with yourself, with your work. I had just an amazing time,

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David. My very favorite talk from the conference a couple of years ago, the Bonson Conference in honor of your father.

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My favorite talk was yours. It was just so encouraging to hear and to listen to all the stuff with your dad and how much he just really dramatically impacted your own life.

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Well, I appreciate that. And it was actually, I give a lot of speeches and I've spoken all over the country for many years now on a whole lot of different topics.

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But that speech was one of my favorite to give as well. It was obviously a little bit more emotional and a little more personal than going and talking about the economy or investment markets or something like that, which is what

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I routinely speak on. But it was a memorable opportunity and great to be with other people who were impacted by dad's teaching ministry.

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And your dad, of course, was a prolific writer and speaker. I mean, my goodness,

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David, I'm taking a look at some of your dad's lecture series and I don't know how your dad even slept or ate.

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But the reason I bring that up is now you have this important book. It's called Crisis of Responsibility.

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So you're following in some ways a lot of, I think, impacted by so much of what your dad did. You are a bright man, intelligent.

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You care a lot about what's going on around you. And now you've written this book. Tell me about the book, David. Why did you write it?

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What's the underlying point of the book? Well, the the kind of short version background is that I work as an investment manager at the time of the financial crisis.

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I was a managing director at one of the largest investment banks on Wall Street, Morgan Stanley.

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And the financial crisis was an event that obviously profoundly affected our society, affected a lot of people in a lot of different sectors in terms of its economic impact.

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And I think a lot of cultural ramifications as well. But myself professionally kind of living through it, it particularly was something that that impacted me and motivated me to understand it better.

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And I pursued a pretty aggressive project of studying and analyzing the financial crisis, its causes and what

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I thought would be the right things to prevent it from happening again. And unfortunately, as is the case often, a lot of the material and a lot of the other perspectives that existed out there,

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I found to be lacking, sometimes just dead wrong. And that happens a lot. That's actually kind of easier to deal with.

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But the major strand I ran into was the incomplete analysis.

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In other words, someone on the left may be being critical of the banking system or Wall Street or corporate greed or something like that.

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And they kind of had it. They kind of were on to something, but I felt short of closing the circle.

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And then on the right, I think that there was a significant amount of incomplete analysis. They didn't necessarily go after Wall Street or greed or capitalism the way the left did, but they went after government housing policy,

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Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, oftentimes the Federal Reserve was a favorite little target. But what both sides were doing wrong or what both sides were not doing was providing any analysis of Main Street's culpability in the crisis.

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And in fact, I would say it was the opposite. They were actually starting off with the premise. Their sort of presupposition was that Main Street was the victim.

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And my analysis was abundantly clear that Main Street was largely the perpetrator of the financial crisis.

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Not in a way that vindicated other bad actors, government policy or excesses and Wall Street leverage, but the narrative was dead wrong.

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And it struck me that far more than even an economic story, which is my area of professional interest and passion, but I ran into a gigantic moral narrative.

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We have a society that in 17 years since the savings and loan crisis, by 2008,

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I don't consider 17 years a super long period of time, but all of a sudden it became not just okay to walk away from bills and financial obligations, liabilities, the one was perfectly capable of living up to.

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Even worse than the fact that people were so comfortable with that decision making, it became a source of pride.

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It became something people could go to the bar on Friday night and brag about. And so what exactly it was that had created this kind of very rapid degradation of our own character and that moral climate was of great concern to me.

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So I wanted to write a book about the financial crisis that told the full cultural story that really looked to evaluate

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Main Street's culpability and how the covetousness and the sort of 10th

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Amendment violation that I think was systemic across Wall Street was in fact very well marinated across Main Street as well.

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Then in 2016, my agent and publisher came to me and said, look, what do you think about taking that exact concept, this story, this thread that you're writing around the financial crisis, but applying it in an even broader sense, applying it to other issues that at the time were quite hot and in fact haven't cooled down at all around free trade, around immigration, around housing policy, the jobs market, education was a big issue, the size of government.

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So you have a lot of these sociopolitical issues that are of great concern to a lot of interested people, but I don't think that those issues are often really analyzed from the standpoint of our individual bottom -up obligations as a member of American society.

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So my premise became, and what I attempt to establish throughout the book and hopefully provide some early levels of remedy and discussion, is the fact that we have a crisis of responsibility that begins with ourselves.

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Well, that's powerful. I think, of course, and I think you've addressed that, in terms of how we handle things today in this modern society, we look at a particular group's responsible, or it's always somebody else, some other organization, and there's not a lot of intimate personal analysis over our own failures, and I think you've nailed it, and that gets ignored.

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So in terms of writing this book, Crisis of Responsibility, the main thrust of it is talking about the moral responsibility of individuals and failures and those sorts of things.

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So what is, when you talk about a solution, David, what is the solution that you offer?

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Well, I mean, I attempt in the final two chapters of the book to divide it up between, chapter 11 is a sort of individual personal checklist of starting points of things people may be able to do to address that responsibility deficit that begins at home, and then chapter 12, the final chapter of the book, is applying it more to the macro level, the broader standpoint across all society.

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So there is a top 10 list in chapter 11 of the 10 things I'm recommending people can kind of do to begin this process.

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Before I even go to some of those particular remedies, I'll highlight a couple for you to save time, but the very first thing

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I have to say is that we have to start off by acknowledging the problem itself. I think that most recovery programs are really on to something, the recovery can't begin unless there's at least the acknowledgement of a problem.

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And I'm not sure that we have really come to terms with the fact that there is, in fact, this crisis of responsibility, and that blame casting is, in fact, the issue that I think we most need to deal with as a starting point.

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Well, I kind of have been raised believing and seeing and feeling very much that the left often,

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I think, is in a sort of victimology complex. There's this heavy identity politics.

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They're very comfortable building a framework for how they view society around race, gender, and class.

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I think that there's a significant Marxian thread that is very prone to class envy.

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That's right. So victimhood is systemic in a lot of progressivism. But I'm sorry,

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I don't believe that they have a monopoly on blame casting. I think that the right has become, in recent years, equally guilty of such, often around the fact that our government is so large, and so reckless, and so ill -suited for dealing with the policy needs of the day.

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Our critiques of government are certainly spot on in that regard. But I believe they get the cause and effect totally wrong.

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I think we have a deficient government because we have an inadequately self -governed populace. Ah, there you go, yes.

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And that became a big theme of the book that I believe needs to be addressed. Well, you know, David, it's great to hear you say these things, and to see the application you're aiming for.

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Just to talk about your dad for a second here, I hear all of that. I can hear so much of your dad's really amazing influence in a lot of what you're saying.

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You said even raised believing these. You talk about in terms of bottom -up change, which is something your father talked about all the time.

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That if we're ever going to see change in society, it's going to start at the heart level of the individual. And of course, your dad was pointing people towards Christ, towards the gospel, to God's word.

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And so that's powerful. Can I ask you just a personal question, David? You sure may. So you are now involved in some very important high -level discussions financially.

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You're sought after as somebody who has a valid opinion, an important opinion on a lot of things going on in the world around us, especially financially.

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When you have now entered into this position and you have the kind of influence you have, how has your dad's influence and all that you learned from him and just his consistency, how has that influenced you and impacted you in what you're doing now?

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Do you see the world through the eyes that he gave you and has that been a blessing for you? Yeah.

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Every son sees the world largely through the eyes that their dad gave them, that their parents in the way that they were raised.

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But in my particular case, I think it's extra special because my dad was such a profound influence ideologically.

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I mean, as a father, you want, as a son, you want your father to love you, care for you.

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Well, I had that in spades, a tremendously loving and supportive dad. The side of Greg Bonson that all the folks out there read his books and heard his lectures don't know and never will be able to, unfortunately.

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But it was not something I would trade away for anything in the world. And then when you couple that with the unique giftedness of Greg Bonson, the scholar, which

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I think is a very different category of his life than Greg Bonson, my dad.

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But I did kind of get to double dip, so to speak. My dad had a profoundly rare work ethic and I very much strive to,

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I think I got that bug. I think I caught that strand of DNA, if you will. And so I, but also like my dad, it isn't a burden for me.

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It's nothing really for me to brag about because it's a joy. I absolutely love waking up. I wake up very early.

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I love working. So it isn't a sacrifice. I know what sacrifices are and I seek to be sacrificial in certain cases as my dad did.

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But for neither my father or myself is waking up early and working hard a sacrifice. It's what we were put on earth to do.

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Can you just on that point there, David, just real fast, because it was kind of a fun thing for me. I'm aware of your dad's work ethic.

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It's inspired me a lot. As a matter of fact, I hope this is an encouragement to you, David, the kind of impact we're having in this show.

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This show exists that you're on right now because of your dad, because of his influence on me. But can you just tell that quick story about how you would try to beat your dad and waking up that form of discipline?

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Yeah, that is kind of a fun story. I got to say, I wish for a whole lot of reasons he were still here, but I have him beat now.

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I mean, I couldn't beat him when he was around, although perhaps now

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I'm a 345 a .m. guy every morning and I suspect that if that were the case, he would just go to 330 and then

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I'd have to go to 315 or something. But yeah, there was a point, I believe

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I was 18. It was really just a year or two before dad died.

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And I was ready, I was a young adult and starting off life and all the different things to go there with.

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It was a summertime and I had trying to start a business and I had, you know, schooling and other things going on and I remember like getting up at six in the morning, which was kind of early for someone at that age and so I'm gonna get up and just start my day and then when dad's up and so forth, we'll kind of get things rolling for our day and I'd go down to study and he was already in there working and I go, okay,

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I guess I didn't get up that early. So the next day I said I'll get up at 530 and I did it and he was in there working and he didn't drink coffee by the way and at that time

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I didn't either. As early as I get up and as consistently as I do it now, I'm pretty heavily dependent on coffee but how he did it without coffee is sort of unfathomable to me.

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But I just did it like maybe, I don't know, four or five days in a row and just kept going a half hour earlier and each time he was still awake and I don't really know if he like kind of knew what

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I was up to and was just messing with me but essentially I got to like 430 or something and he was still, he would be in there and I knew he wasn't up all night.

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I mean he would go to bed and I was up later than him but I knew he would gone down for the night and he just every morning

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I'd get up, every morning he'd already be awake where before I never knew what time he was getting up and now

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I just said I guess I'm not gonna get to find out, I can't beat him up but I'm quite certain that my 345 habit that I have formed would probably win the award now, we'll see.

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Probably, probably, it's just really great to see and I think, and the reason why I ask is number one your dad's had such a great influence on me and I just love hearing the stories and I know for a lot of our listeners and viewers it's the same for them but a lot of what you're tackling in this book

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I think comes down to the sorts of things that you're talking about in terms of the family, the individual, personal responsibility,

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I mean just those moral issues, I mean you brought up covening David, I mean who talks about that anymore? Oh well not a lot of people do and it was very conscious to you, you know you can talk about envy in sort of a broad sense but to kind of go directly to the

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Ten Commandments and whatnot was very intentional on my part but maybe after a housing crisis that was entirely rooted about somebody covening thy neighbor's house perhaps more people should talk about covening.

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Yes, very, very much so. So David, I so appreciate what you're doing and just really, really grateful for it, you've had a lot of people actually plug this book,

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I saw John Frame even gave a plug recently and you've got Andrew Sandlin, some solid guys that can be trusted and it's marked all up here with lots of people promoting this book and so it's

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Crisis of Responsibility, Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It by David Bonson. David, where can people go to get the book, where do you want them to go?

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Well I mean Amazon .com is kind of the easiest place for most people, it's at Barnes and Noble as well and Barnesandnoble .com,

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I don't want to pick favorites in the various choices of distribution, we appreciate all of the brick and mortar stores, it's in 1 ,500 stores around the country so if people are mom and pop bookstore buyers feel free to pick it up there and if they prefer the

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Amazon deal like a whole lot of book buyers do, it's done extremely well at Amazon as well and they've had it discounted nicely for a while too, the prices started to come up a bit but there should be no challenge to finding it and we appreciate those who are interested in it and we've been blown away and humbled by the response to it so far, the book's done very well and I'm really pleased and blessed.

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Well good, I'm glad you wrote it David, I'm excited actually to get into it myself and just learn from it.

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So one more fun fact before we let you go, question, your dad, surprisingly as theologically rigorous as he was,

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I mean people would see your dad and just think man that guy has just got God on his mind all the time and just he's forgotten more theological thoughts than I'll ever have.

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Your dad hated Christian contemporary music, correct? Like with a passion. With a passion.

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I'm just being gracious by putting it that way. You don't know how happy that made me because I felt the same way and I've almost felt sinful about it so now that I know your dad was on my side

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I'm excited about that. Has that influenced your musical choices David? No, I pretty much at some point was able to formulate my own musical preferences and dad unfortunately was stuck as a lot of people of his generation were with this insane idea that the

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Beatles were the greatest band of all time and it's not something I would have chosen to argue about with him but now that he's not here to whack me in the back of the head

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I think most of us know that U2 was a better band than the Beatles. Alright David, thanks so much for spending time with us today, we look forward to talking to you again.

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Thanks so much, God bless. Alright guys, David Bonson, Crisis of Responsibility guys, our cultural addiction to blame and how you can cure it.

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Next week with Jeff Durbin, the late night show with the unpopular opinion, Tuesday only on Facebook Live.