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#AIS: Joe Lonsdale on the problem with higher education

Episode 2022-06-022022-06-02English

Guests: Joe Lonsdale

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Contents1 chapter§01Transcript · 00:00–28:49

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00:00All right, next up Joe Lonstale We go Joe Lonstale is gonna come up. He's gonna tee it up for about five or ten minutes in a solo dolo He told me he's burning the house down Well, hello Miami. It's good to be here from Austin for a day. We're a second best tech city here. It's not too bad. How many people actually are living Miami?

00:40I'm curious. It's a crowd. You know, everyone's fun and talented like me. That's pretty cool. Well, you know, I'm generally an American optimist, but I want, there's a crowd, we can even over that. So everyone's fun on town like me, that's pretty cool. Well, I'm generally an American optimist, but I want to talk about a lot of stuff that's broken right now that we know how to fix, but we aren't. And talking to these guys, especially hearing from Elon, everyone today, it's just so exciting what our civilization is going towards what it could be doing.

01:01But if you talk to a lot of our smartest friends, you look at guys like Dahlia or Bridgewater, others, they see America in decline. They see decadence, they see decay. And I think there's a lot of important questions from facing right now. Why do these happen to a civilization? Why, when there's so many exciting things going on that we know can make a really great future

01:18for our kids and grandkids and for community, why is this stuff breaking? And I want to tell you a little story. I've a policy group in Austin, and we have, we follow the homeless population there. And we're going along with a middle-aged Mexican gentleman who had just lost his job, and he went into the homeless center. He's really struggling, and he says,

01:35I really want to try to find a job. I want some job training. And the person working there, she says, you deserve a home. And he said, yeah, that's great. But what kind of gets me training? And she said, you don't need to worry about that. you know, start you deserve a home. And he said, yeah, that's great, but you know, what kind of gets him training? And she said, you don't need to worry about that. You need to worry about getting a home

01:47for people just like you, what you deserve. And I want to back up about the situation in Austin, because we're seeing this all over the country right now. You know, in 2018, the mayor of Austin went to San Francisco and L.A. And he was asking him for advice. I want to do for homelessness. There wasn't really homelessness downtown.

02:02It was funny. It was funny to me too, but there's actually a reason he's asked them for advice and it's a special interest thing Where there's actually hundreds of millions of funding that goes to these groups in SF NLA that work on this into all of their friends And to all the people with their politics and it's a huge money spigot for for politicians They're very powerful in those other cities and awesome. They didn't have that money spigot any wanted it And you know, you know what they told them I heard this from both sides He said, you know, you have to show people like, capitalism doesn't work, you got put it in their faces, and then you

02:30get funding and he went back to Austin and he brought all the camps downtown, homeless death spiked, homeless trafficking, sex trafficking, spiked drugs, spiked, but the funding went way up for him and his friends. They got massive new funding, you know, unaccountable sources of money for these people. And then of course they start deploying the answers, which is the housing first strategy. And by the way, this is not just like a right versus left thing. I think housing first was first deployed under a W-bush. So this is a general strategy.

02:56You guys probably know in LA, they spend $800,000 per new home trying to solve this problem. There's 7,000 nonprofits right now, you know, funded by HUD around our country with the same philosophy. And the philosophy is no pay for performance, no transparency, no accountability, just build the homes. And you know, when I first heard about this a decade ago, I thought, wow, that makes sense. There's 5,000 homeless people. Let's build 5,000 homes. It turns out that there's still about a couple percent of our society that really don't have a home, but they're living kind of on the edge, and people's couches, with other family, with friends. So the actual demand for homes,

03:28it turns out maybe it's about 6 million, 10 million, it's effectively infinite. There's infinite demand for homes in our society, and who do you think gets these homes when we build them? So this guy, we're following a few hundred people with my philanthropy group, and our team goes back in with them, and he gets in line, and he's been living between a camp that they help them set up in downtown, and a relative to us, but he's saying he's living outside and it can camp. And he goes back and he's just misgetting a home and he's frustrated. And they're spaying the points to someone. He says, wait a second. So you're saying that if I was on drugs, I'd qualify for a home. And they said, well, we don't like to say it

03:58that way, but that's true. And he says, you're saying if I committed a crime, I'd qualify for a home. And they're like, well, yeah, but that's, yeah, we don't like to say it that way, but that's true. That would have a crime, I'd qualify for a home. And they're like, well, yeah, we don't like to say it that way, but that's true. That wouldn't give you enough points to qualify for a home. And what happens here, if you try to bait this system, this 7,000 of these groups around the country, you're screamed at as a racist, you're screamed at with out of hominem attacks,

04:18there's three things. One, there's not the intellectual humility to see that there may be other answers and maybe correct. Two, there's no respect for the dignity of everyone in this conversation. If you just agree, you are a bad person. And three, there's no passion for the truth. These people are not trying to pursue the truth. These people already have the truth, and they're giving it to you as a

04:37dogma. And this is true of pretty much every of these broken areas in our society. And there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them right now. We have 50 trading programs. There's been a lot of money on the federal government. They're not accountable. They don't tend to work. They're very broken. There's no transparency. There's no competition.

04:53There's no debate. You're forward or against it. And you're a bad person if you're against it. There's these vocational schools around the country. Texas vocational schools were really underperforming seven years ago. And what we did is we ended up actually changing them so that the schools were only going to be funded

05:09based on the salaries of the students coming out. If you tied to graduation rates doesn't work because they can graduate everyone. We tied to the salaries coming out. We got the salaries coming out to go up 117%. Just by putting in that accountability, but most of the country doesn't do that. Most of the country, there's vocational schools,

05:23people go, very low graduation rates they fail. We're not going to go into the K to 12 issues you guys know about. But one of the facts, most people don't know, is the education inequality in this country is far greater than the wealth inequality. Far greater. So there's, you know, and you guys probably see there's an infant formula production thing,

05:40there's a crisis right now, there's really basic policy mistakes around that. The way we run our prisons, our probation and parole, there's all sorts of ways to run them much better. We're not doing it though. You know, I'll give you one other example because Elon was speaking today, Austin Infrastructure. I'm very excited about his boring company.

05:54And you know, they, and Austin, we passed a six billion, seven billion dollar plan to build really small amount of infrastructure. It's not already ballooning costs to 12 billion. You know, for less than half the original money for three billion dollars, you could do over a hundred times as many tunnels in terms of what they're building right now. And you could do with 100 more stations.

06:14So basically for a tiny fraction of the cost, and again, I go and talk to the city and talk to the guys, there's no intellectual humility. The general inspector dignity, Elon's a bad guy. I don't like Elon, whatever, because there's some kind of extreme version. And they're not interested in the truth. They're really not. They're just interested in like, what they're gonna do their way.

06:31And so you kind of come back to this, like what's going on in our society? Where is this coming from? And you know, say what causes the technical and decline? I think the more important question is, what actually works? Like why is our society functional?

06:43And yeah, I think you have to take it back to the enlightenment, right? I mean, if you look at the exponential growth that's happened that's created the wealth of all of us in joy, it really happened over the last few centuries, kind of posts enlightenment. And you had a society that really cared about, pursued the truth, really cared about,

06:58competition of ideas, right? I mean, and you need the virtues for this to work, right? The classical virtues that we talk about our civilization, justice, wisdom, temperous courage, you need the courage to this to work, right? The classical virtues that we talk about are civilization, justice, wisdom, temperous courage. You need the courage to actually fight for the truth. And so, in the long time ago, you tended to have religious dogma, which could be some form of virtue signaling, some form of, you know, basically keeping on outsiders.

07:19And then you had separately debate and substance. And debate and substance generally lost to religious dogma. And what was unique about the enlightenment Well as unique about our university system Which we which we traded was the liberal universities were a place to have debates where substance could actually win Against you know dogma and against you know people who people who disagree you actually had to disagree civilly And you actually had to pursue truth you have to have the intellectual humility to know that you don't have all the answers. You had to expect the dignity of people who were debating and you had to fight for a passion

07:50for the truth. And what's happened instead is that most of our universities have been conquered by dog mind by religion. They no longer have these things. So once again, we have the idea of heretics and blasphemy. We don't use those words, but that's what we're facing right now. If you disagree with people, you're a heretic and you're and blasphemy. We don't use those words, but that's what we're facing right now. If you disagree with people, you're a heretic, and you're committing blasphemy.

08:08If you speak against all sorts of these things, you're not supposed to speak against. If you say that DEI is actually causing problems, if you say that here's why ESG is wrong, that's like it's blasphemous. This is not allowed to attack these days. You're in trouble, you're told, not speak against it again, and also you're fired.

08:24This is written about m mass appropriations right now. This happens all sorts of people. And this is happening first and foremost on our campus. What's happening is this is zero sum, historically illiterate and tolerant virtue of signaling religion has completely taken over and is silencing people. Our founders were quite fond of heretics. I don't know if people realized that. That was kind of the equivalent debate 300 years ago

08:46to this woke religion. Is Benjamin Franklin, he said, I think all heretics I have known have been virtuous men. The other virtue of courage, they wouldn't venture their heresy. They cannot afford to be deficient in other virtues to the numerous enemies they provoke. And so, I think thinking what's going on here,

09:05all of us first of all need to go back and think about, like where do we not have enough humility to try to learn more? Where are we not respecting people who disagreed, actually engaging them and debating them, as opposed to calling them names, writing them off? And frankly, I think we should also remember, it's actually really good to be offended.

09:23It's the opposite of safe spaces. There's this weird cultural thing with the millennial generation. I guess I'm barely part of it, unfortunately, where you're basically supposed to protect people from being offended. You're supposed to protect them from blasphemy. I think it has to be the opposite of our civilization is not going to decline. I think we actually have to go out of our way to learn that when we're offended, we have to be stronger.

09:41It doesn't mean you're somehow elevated as a victim if you're offended. That's your problem if you're offended, we have to be stronger. It doesn't mean you're somehow elevated as a victim if you're offended, that's your problem if you're offended. And you just stop and think about it. And we need to use that to advance our civilization again. So that's my say for today. Jason wanted me to add a bunch more blast to me, but I'm going to hold off on that. I think you did enough. I think you did enough. Have a seat.

10:10Let's talk. Let's chop it up. Get in here. Let's talk about why people feel like they're victims. What do you think in our country makes certain people feel that they've been victimized. What are the valid reasons people might feel that they have gotten a raw deal in America? I mean, I think all of our answers have gone through

10:33as I'm Jewish and Irish, when my ancestors came over, there were signs saying no dogs are Irish allowed. My grandfather was only promoted to a certain level at Abbott because he was a Jew. It actually didn't really get hired a Jew and they laughed and said oops, that was a mistake. You can only get to this level.

10:46Yeah. So I think there has been some pretty horrible things everywhere in the world, frankly, not just America. I think everywhere you look, there's always been groups that have been treated pretty badly. I'm Irish as well. Irish need not apply. We had a pretty horrific famine.

11:00And it's obviously a lot easier to be Irish than it is to be someone who's black in America. I think it's America. Or Jewish. And the Holocaust. Yeah, yeah. So you would agree. That's true. Different people's experiences are on a spectrum of the suffering, correct?

11:14100%. And so people who've suffered more deserve a little more empathy and perhaps a little bit more consideration. It deserves more empathy, but it doesn't mean you should embrace philosophies that are wrong or harmful. So I mean, if you look at the, obviously, there's a lot of truth and positive parts of the BLM movement the last couple years, but it's actually led to thousands more deaths in the Black community because of the things that it was pushing, because of the bad ideas. We got another one of these things? Yeah, one more, one more.

11:45How many more of these do we gotta do? This is like way more work than I thought I was signing up for. Way more work. Someone get this man a drink. It's not a drink apart. We should have had cocktails. I never agreed to be in the conference business when we started doing this pod.

12:02Shake out, I respect you for what you've been up to, but this is way too much work. You for what you've been able to do, but this is way too much work. You guys said you wanted to do a look at all these fans are here. You're doing the Q&A tomorrow. OK, sounds good. I think Joe, candidly, I think that is where the argument

12:18breaks down a bit is people have had different experiences. And I would disagree that people have to stop thinking like victims. I think sometimes we have to think very deeply about the suffering people have had, especially when it's different than the suffering that you and I have had. But I'm not virtuously going here. I'm just countering myself. I think that's fully true. What I was really against is I gave 10 examples of ways in which our society's broken and hurting poor people, hurting working class people,

12:51like just wasting money on things in a dysfunctional ways. And all of that is happening because we're like going to this illiberal society where we're not able to actually like debate things logically and respect other people on the other side of the argument. It's all about demonizing people who disagree with us. I think that's just really, really scary right now. There's a website.

13:13People have tweeted this. I think the website is called What the fuck happened in 1971.com? Do you know what I'm talking about? Where? If you go to this website. I don't. I'm telling you. So in 19... If you look back socioeconomically there's a

13:27whole bunch of charts and graphs of everything from GDP to you know labor participation rates etc. and there is a moment in 1971 where just trend lines break and you know Dorsey tweeted this out a little while ago a bunch bunch of people have talked about it. And everybody is trying to figure out what actually happened to them. There's a couple of really good explanations, I think, right? So I think I think the two biggest ones,

13:52I think the two biggest ones by far is one is tech-driven globalization and the other one is going off the goal currency, which over-financialized the economy. So I think the goal currency one was important. I think the one that people don't talk about, whether you agree with it or not, I'd love to get your perspective is,

14:07the move to the great society had a whole bunch of things that I think were meant to do meaningful good. And it broke down the family as well, which is a huge problem in America. And this is, yeah, so I mean, we talk about things that make civilization prosper. I think you get the classical virtues and you get a strong families,

14:27which by the way, for whatever reason, I still can't tell BLM was strongly against, which I think is just horrible. So I think it is a problem in the white community as well, by the way, as I've almost half the kids are born out of wedlock right now. And if you statistically look at that, those kids just on average,

14:40vastly underperformed. This doesn't mean to say there's aren't one-off cases. I think you should get divorced if it's the right thing to do but but but it's like it's like it's really bad for society as a whole statistically you can't argue against that and exactly we've actually created the incentives towards divorce in the nineteen sixties which it obviously wasn't intentional but it's a huge problem you're not we're not

14:56supposed to talk about it's like a conservative thing i guess uh... and talk about the the financialization and moving off the gold standard as well how did that change that change socioeconomic dynamics in America? Well, basically, it means there's a lot more money around. And so I think it put more returns into finance. So I've been in front of this, is do you, for as an investor? From making things. Yeah, I think it put more returns into finance,

15:21and because there's this explosion of credit and money relative to, so I think finance outperformed labor in terms of it's an advantage for finance, and because there's this explosion of credit and money relative to so I think finance outperformed labor in terms of it's an advantage for finance, which is not what you necessarily want. It also really, really helped accelerate tech-driven globalization, which probably was good for India and China and Southeast Asia and even Africa, but it basically forced workers in the U.S. to compete against all these people directly. And so you had people paid like 15 times much in the U.S., these are people. And then it just wasn't sustainable.

15:50So over time, these are people who have competed over the last 50 years, which is really tough. You find it hard to find your tribe in Silicon Valley. But it intellectually has become easier, harder, the same. You know, I've just given up on having even a a tribe so much is like let's work on this together. Let's actually make prisons have lower restitivism and higher employment and here's how we're going to do it. We're going to put these transparency and accountability incentives and it's hard for anyone to really disagree with that unless you're writing the prisons union And so like we're going we're getting all these laws passed for probation and parole and that. We're getting always laws passed for our educational school work better. Yeah, and what's a noise meet,

16:26Jamoth, is that I feel like as people who've succeeded, we all sort of have a duty to go and fix these problems and almost no one else is working on. That doesn't annoy me. And then in terms of like, for example, I want to talk specifically because you mentioned higher ed, but if you go a little bit before this, we have no real form of competition in the school system.

16:48Yes. You need some mechanism for good ideas to win and bad ideas to lose. And the existing framework has been charter schools, but that's been attacked under every way, shape, or form. How does that problem get solved? How do we get kids? You know, so the problem, if you just give everybody choice right now and you just give them say

17:10funding, take them anywhere they want, it basically defunds the public schools which then hurts the poor kids the most. And so I understand why people are against like total choice for everyone. It's kind of just kind of more like policy detail. I think the way to get around that is you just give the poor kids choice. So if you just give the porcage choice, and now it's very clear, you're just doing it to help them. But even them being able to choose, we'll put pressure and get rid of the hurt the bad schools and help the good schools. So you just need some mechanism. Let's do the mechanism through the porcage because I help some of us. That's my view of this. Seems like you're like a reasonable argument.

17:39It's kind of obvious, right? I mean, my kids have choice where to go with my wife and I. Why shouldn't the poor kids have that choice? There's things that teachers usually aren't going to hate that, but at least it's the way it is, maybe built a port for it. Is there a way for unions to actually do the part of the job, which is about protecting workers, but disentangle some of the financial incentives to aggregate,

18:00you know, dues, participate actively? You just got changed about our structure. Right now they're totally in charge. They don't want to give an inch. I get it because every time they give an inch, they're going to lose more power later on. If they see that they're losing some battles, then they have to negotiate.

18:13And they're going to be more reasonable. They're going to say, oh, yeah, you're right. We're going to get rid of the bottom 20%. You know, you guys get to a point where the power changes enough that they're willing to then work with you. That's it. But I mean, the bigger thing I think is we actually need leaders who are courageous, who

18:29could speak up about problems, and in the midst of everyone yelling and screaming and saying, you're not supposed to say things, because they actually don't care what you're not supposed to say. This is my version of the truth, and this is what's going to be the best in society. And what we're teaching at universities right now is the opposite of that.

18:42What we're teaching is, Joe, just don't say that. Joe, why are you causing problems for yourself Joe? You know you're not supposed to talk about these things and I'm so sick of it because like this is wildest of broken It's because no one's speaking up. You bought a college My friends Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson and I along with a couple of bunch of others are starting a new university in Austin. Yes. Did you buy an existing university? We're just starting from a click sheet of paper. We got 500 acres in the water.

19:12It's really pretty. It's about 15 minutes from the Tesla giant Tesla plant, about 30 minutes from downtown. What will you be able to build? You teach what the majors be and what will be the approach. You know, the hypothesis, you know, as entrepreneurs, our job is to find these gaps in the world or something should exist, but doesn't. And it seems like for the first time in a few generations, you could actually build

19:34the university, the competes with the other very top universities and attracts the very, you know, most talented kids. One of my obnoxious views on this, which I think the stage might, might, might agree with just because it's in our direction, is that it used to be the smartest people in the world, a lot of them became professors. And now you get a lot of the very smartest people becoming innovators, becoming builders. Like my smartest friends, I got to drop out of their PhDs

19:53from MIT and Stanford and Caltech, actually found more intellectual expression and satisfaction in the entrepreneurship world than they did there. And so therefore, in order to compete, you want not only the top professors, but you want to involve a lot of top innovators. And we want to teach the history of thought and the free civilizations. You want to actually see how the alignment come about.

20:13What were the books? What were the debates that people were having when they found in the country and kind of were in that core? And then we also want to have centers where, keep it interdisciplinary. There was one of the key things universities. This is against somewhat technical, but they're broken because you get these departments to get conquered by certain ideology. So you get certain people to only allow people to think like them to be in those departments.

20:32So you want to spread it out and keep it interdisciplinary. How much of this is because of tenure? Ten years of big problem. You want to have some protection. And potentially, tenure would originally be a great thing. Protected you to say what you want and practice now. It's usually the other way around. And it's pretty, and yeah, it's pretty not good.

20:48But yeah, no, there's a huge gap there. I think we could fix it. And my goal, obviously, is not to have everyone educated through one great university. It's to put pressure on other universities to change and to help build multiple new ones, which I think we need to do. And the school that you start,

21:00it's interdisciplinary by nature, which means that not necessarily known as for technical people, for math and stuff. There'll be a center of like political calming history. There'll be a center of data science and innovation and et cetera. There'll be centers, you know, arts and writing and stuff. So I think you want different,

21:18there are different skills. I think everyone should get the kind of core. Is it for a prophet or is he gonna do that? No, it's not a prophet. It's probably, it's part of me core. Is it for a profit or is he gonna do that? No, it's not profit. It's probably, it's part of me wishes I made it for profit. Not cause I need to make money because it's easier to raise money for it. But we've raised about $100 million

21:32non-profit for it. We have the land. So it's gonna work. I put my name on it, so I'll pay for my money. Raise the $100 million for this? Yeah. The non-profit. Yeah, we have.

21:42I'm sorry. And when do you plan on opening it? Fall of 2024 is our goal for the first class. Be about the size of Cal Tech at first, is the hope. It's a pretty ambitious project. Yeah, well, our country needs some more leaders right now who are courageous and know to think. How do you want to cheat?

22:01What's a goal? How do you think you'll recruit the first class? How do you guess? You want to do much more active how do you uh... how do you read how do you think you'll recruit the first class how do you have you want you want to do much more activity recruiting than most of my top colleges right now especially because we want to be as known at first but you'll tell you what we have a seminar this summer of eighty kids and we had forty four thousand increase of from kids uh... about it we have uh... you know when we first the first two weeks of the story was out on twitter in november that we're doing this

22:21we have four thousand four hundred professors apply because the professors are fleeing a lot of the professors, by the way, a lot of them on the monitor are left, they're being attacked by the extremes for, again, talking and saying things, you're not supposed to talk about and say. And so a lot of them are trying to fleet other environments. There's a huge demand for it right now.

22:35It's super weird that college kids yeah, are against having debates. And discussions. It's not so much worth saying. It's just funny, it's not so weird work. So I just find it so weird. Like that was like one of the best arts at college. I don't have a, I mean, I haven't been in college in 20.

22:49So the last five years, it just gotten totally crazy. Like we had a woman of, a professor, really smart woman, you know, definitely on the left by like she was applying from NYU Law School ask against her, are we gonna do a new law school? Cause she can't stand it anymore. And we say, well, what's going on?

23:03And she said, well, for example, we used to use this is a credit method in my law school. And I't stand it anymore. And we say, well, what's going on? And she said, well, for example, we used to use a credit method in my law school. And I would ask tough questions from both sides of the kids. And now, in order not to trigger people, I have to write them an email a week ahead of time to make sure I can ask the question that I'm going to ask in class next week.

23:16So if you were an employer, this is the train of lawyer. I mean, it's just this is where we are at this point. So that's NYU law school? This NYU law school? That's the policy of NYU law. I mean, we got a bigger cycle product. I don't know, but like this is, our universities have just gone crazy

23:30the last five years. But is that an isolated incident? Or no, this is an issue. Y'all has more administrators and students. These administrators are on the whole more likely to be in Neomaraxis than in the Mimimi Republicans. I mean, it's just like these things have gotten very extreme.

23:44What do you think, sex? About. I thought you were going to get this bad when you were in the Stanford Union. No, I think you were in the Stanford Union. You live at a time, I mean, the time at Stanford was a pretty bold time when you were there in terms of freedom of speech, in terms of debate, vibrancy. Yeah, what basically happened is all those radicals who are being inculcated and trained and brainwashed at Stanford that we were reacting to, what, 25, 30 years ago, they all graduated

24:15and then they went off into society and took over all these institutions. And that's the problem we have today. Matt Teibi and Glenn Greenwell, we're talking about it earlier today, where if you actually look at polling, the biggest divide in America in terms of political and cultural beliefs is whether or not you have a college degree. So if you're basically a college graduate,

24:36you remember the professional class. If you're not a college graduate, you remember the working class. That is the biggest divide. And, you know, the members remember the working class. That is the biggest divide. And, you know, the members of the professional class by and large have very, very far left views on social cultural issues. That's the fact. I mean, whether you agree with it or not. And that is creating a huge amount of attention to our society. Because two-thirds of the

25:00country is working class. One-third is a professional class and a democracy, the side that has the larger numbers should win. So the working class has the votes, but the professional class runs all the institutions. And this is the source I think of all of our political strife. In America is that the people who are in charge of our institutions from the New York Times, to the Washington Post, to the Fortune 500, Disney, Hollywood, and you go down the list, they have views that are fundamentally intention and conflict with the views of most of the country, the working class of the country. Now, if you remember that class, you may think it's a good thing.

25:40We're going to push our views onto the country, whether they like it or not, and we're gonna convert them. That's what you call the elite class, right? That's the elite. And that's what's basically, now like what I'm describing is not like criticism. I think it's just like, I think this is a factual critique of what's happening.

25:58Well yeah, I don't think it's partisan either. I mean, there are people who are Republicans or Democrats. Right, there are elites in both parties, and there are certainly working-class people in both parties. But what I would say is that the parties are now in the process of resorting around this sort of political and cultural divide. And historically, the Democrats were the party of the working-class. They are now much more the party of the professional class. And they buy into the belief set of the college educated, you know, those sort of, you call it the woke sensibility.

26:34And the Republicans are in the process of transforming into a working class sort of populist party. And look, there are in both parties, there are outliers who don't quite fit in anymore. But that's the fundamental transformation that's happening. Yeah. I mean, you guys fit into that.

26:49You're people in the Republican Party who don't fit in anymore. I mean, I wouldn't even necessarily mind that dynamic. You described so much if they weren't breaking everything, and if they weren't not allowing conversations about how broke and things are on the better ideas, right? It's a very strange, illiberal nature. Right. So I think, and I just connected with what

27:07we were talking about with Glenn, you know, Greenwald and Taipei is that, look, if you're part of the elite and you control all of these institutions, all of the cultural high ground, but the country is not with you in just in terms of the sheer numbers, you are gonna use the tactics that people in power always use to suppress the greater numbers. That's going to use the tactics that people in power always use to suppress

27:26the greater numbers. That's where censorship comes from. The people who are running these institutions don't, they want the debate to be over. They want the power to end the debate because they're not otherwise going to win that debate. Well, we're very interested in seeing where you take it and we appreciate you taking my time to share your views. Ladies and gentlemen, show a lot.

27:52[Music]

28:23We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

28:31[Music]

— A LITTLE MORE TO THINK ABOUT. —