Higher Education Is Broken... This is How We Fix It | Ryan Streeter

Hey, it's Cody Sanchez and this is the Big Deal podcast for those who don't just want to be rich, but free and do what it actually takes to get there. Okay, today we're talking to someone who is truly taking on the traditional education institution, trying to bring back some sanity to it, my friend and someone I look up to highly. Ryan Streeter. He is going to be fascinating for you guys. Let me tell you why. He's the director of the Civitas Institute at UT University of Texas, where they are bringing free thinking markets and civil service back to our college campuses, even talking about the Constitution. But not only does he have some of the best hair a man can have, you guys can see for yourself on YouTube. He was in the inner circle of power in Washington D.C. he worked for a president, he worked for a governor, he worked for a mayor. He was actually talking about a time at which he was in the White House during one of the hurricanes. What happened. He was also a Wilson Scholar and Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American ins, at the American Enterprise Institute. One of the like most preeminent, biggest think tanks in the world. And he is a multi time author. You also might have seen him in some of the fanciest spots of journalism from the Wall Street Post, from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal, et cetera. But the part I'm most excited about today for you guys is we are in the middle of craziness when it comes to politics today. And we have an insider who's actually seen both sides, created a study institute, understands polling and politicians better than almost anyone I know, and is gonna give us the inside scoop into what the fuck is going on in the world. What is going on on our educational campuses? How do we actually take back our universities and institutions today? And I think you're gonna like what he has to say. Let's get into it with Ryan. What is a think tank and what influence do they even have on Washington and how. What was your purview of seeing in through that lens to the center of power?

Yeah, and that's, that's generally been my lens into that world is I've always been more of a policy person first and a political person second. I mean you, when you work in a think tank, especially in Washington D.C. you have to deal with politics because the people whose attention you're trying to get are politicians or their staff. You know, really it's, it's political leaders and the media are kind of your two main audiences. And so a think tank is like A catch all term for a certain type of organization, but they really exist along a continuum and they're, they're usually a combination of research, a general set of principles that the people who work there tend to agree on, and then a goal of taking that research and their commentary and the writing or their podcasts and to influence the public debate. So to change the way that policymakers are thinking about tax policy, education policy, what to think about Israel right now, how do we, how do we resource the effort in Ukraine or not, and all those things. And, and some, some think tanks are a little bit more political in the sense that they're really trying to influence how politicians in this particular cycle think. Some of them have sort of house views where all the scholars kind of have to sing off the same song sheet in their, in their work. And then some of them, like, like the American Enterprise Institute where I was, you know, the scholars, it's a little bit more like a university where the scholars are, they have independence, you know, they don't, they don't get told what to write or what to say. But they work at AEI for a reason. They believe in the principles of a free society. They're wary of regulatory intrusion into the commercial market space. So people would say, well, they're free market people, but they are, but they're across a continuum as well in terms of, some will favor a particular type of regulation while others oppose it. And sometimes AEI scholars have disagreed in public and I've always liked that about the place. But you, you see, you see think tanks to the right, to the left, who are a little bit more politically driven in terms of their mission. But they all kind of get called think tanks because they, they generally bring people that have some kind of academic training or some kind of expertise within policy. And their, their goal is to, is to influence the way that policymakers and the media think about those things.

Well, I don't think I realized before I started getting involved with any of this stuff that there's that joke in Washington D.C. that all the policy is written by 20 year old staffers.

Yeah, right.

And far from the TR where what's interesting, I think is as a person outside of the spectrum, you forget that half of the policies are like these 17,000 page overwhelming pieces of paper to people who may only be in office for one or two terms, really don't understand the political apparatus, don't know how to make real change. And so they might come to a place like AI or reference your research to say, please poll me 15 you know, different ideas on how to make a city more profitable and better to live in. But they're not pulling it from like the Wall Street Journal often they're pulling it from academic papers. Just like a scientist or a doctor might do the same thing before they prescribe something for a patient. Right. Is that kind of how that works?

Yeah. I mean, there comes a point where if you are just, for example, writing the text for the 2017 tax reform bill, there were some crazy ideas in that original version. You're not going to actually figure out what to think reading really smart writers at the Wall Street Journal or whatever, because their job is to cover it rather than to do the analysis. And so at times like that, Hill staffers, some of whom are in their twenties and then the more senior ones hopefully are older than that and have some expertise. Now you have some long standing members of committees on the Hill who really are policy experts and everybody kind of looks to them. But then they'll look to a think tank like AEI or some of the others and ask the scholars who have expertise, say, in these aspects of tax policy to come in and brief them on what their own analysis, their own modeling, their own regressions, like what they, what they see if we include this one particular provision. And so, you know, all think tanks in Washington have a lot of public events, you know, that, you know, you can live stream them, you can come and hear scholars talk. But I always felt like the, the most important work that we did was the stuff that wasn't on camera. It was the stuff that was behind those closed doors and meetings where people were debating whether or not this particular provision would have this kind of effect on the economy. And that's, that's where you have the most influence. And during the COVID relief bills that, you know, when we were all kind of trying to figure out what was going on with the, the pandemic and exactly what the right federal response should be. Again, a lot of bad ideas out there and they needed to sift through exactly what the right kind of stimulus or not should be for the economy. And our scholars were involved in those discussions and I think had an outsized influence on, on the results, whether you like them or not. I mean, you know, they, that's when think tanks can really shine. Is at times like that where you're, you realize there are, there are people who realize this is a really big deal, put politics aside. Right now we're trying to, trying to figure out what the right policy is. And then you need some experts to come in and do that work. And in universities where I am now, and I love the university world and we're building something similar at the University of Texas, a lot of people that are tenured professors in a department, they don't have experience converting their research into kind of policy briefs or whatever, and that's what think tanks can do for them, is to take their research and make it digestible for people that are trying to figure out the consequences of some decision.

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Yeah, it's a way of creating, in this case a geopolitical sort of scenario and giving people the opportunity to understand that if you make one particular decision, they invade. They don't. Our respons response is this kind of air power or this kind of naval response. That means we're moving resources from some other part of the world, for instance. Right. And so you, you, you actually start to realize what's involved in these decisions. These, there's, it's always trade offs. Right. And so when you're engaged in kind of a large scale military effort, it means there's other capabilities that you don't have elsewhere in the world. And so war game kind of puts people in that scenario and makes you understand from a cost perspective, from a personnel perspective, what sorts of decisions that might seem easy if you're just watching a cable news show all of a sudden becomes super complex. And we've used it in other scenarios too. I mean, I, I worked in the George W. Bush White House for a few years and I was there during Hurricane Katrina. And you know, we realized that there were certain war game scenarios that had been played out before that had relevance to that time. You know, when you have a half a million people displaced from an urban area. This was not too many years after 9, 11, where we thought that something like a dirty bomb could happen. Like what would happen if a radioactive bomb went off in a city and now all of a sudden a half a million people couldn't live there anymore. How would you, what would you. First of all, there's the site, but then there's the dispersion of people. And, and we were faced with a situation because of what happened in New Orleans that you basically did have a half a million people no longer living there that went to Houston or they went up to Tennessee, they, they scattered about in there. And there wasn't a really great preset federal response for how to actually get resources to people so that they could, you know, stay in hotels or pay their rent or get the resources that they, they need because of this horrific event. And you can use type of, of war game precedent to actually make, make, make decisions. So it's, it's, it's helpful in terms of guiding policy, but it's actually really interesting to participate in, as you saw.

Wait, so how does that work? So basically you're an advisor to the, the president at that time in the White House and you guys are trying to figure out what to do with Katrina. Do you go to like A file and you're like, here's all the, like historical war games option one.

Yeah, that's what I was hoping for. You know, I found that that war game there wasn't an exact working that really prepared the federal government for that. I had kind of hoped that the dirty bomb scenario would like, create some off the shelf stuff. Got us a little bit of the way there. But that was a, that was a situation of making policy kind of on the fly with imperfect information. And, and this is a time when you do also rely on, you rely on policy experts around the country. I mean, I, you know, we were calling people who had written papers about this type of scenario who'd studied, like, what kinds of federal resources could be used most nimbly. And we had to make some decisions in a really short period of time. And President Bush wanted to have a really large response to this issue. And he had a plan of being out like in New Orleans within 10 days. And we had to have a bunch of big policy proposals. So we made a lot of decisions really quickly. Some of them were mistakes, you know, in terms of the right kind of federal response. But that's different than when you're preparing for a State of the Union address maybe six months ahead of time, where you got a lot of time to plan. So you're always looking for outside expertise. No administration has all that expertise within the White House or within the Office of Management and Budget. It just doesn't exist within one administration. And so you're always looking for people outside who know more about this issue than you do, involving them in the, in the policy process. And so that's where think tanks come in. It's where people that have a perch at a university who are really good come in and you find in those jobs that you really need those people. I was there during the run up to the financial crisis too. There's a housing crisis that preceded the financial crisis. And that was the, you know, really, really smart, well known, published economists had very different views about the reality of that situation. And it was really, really hard to know what to do because some of the smartest people in the world whose advice you were relying on just saw that, saw this in sometimes 180° different ways from, from each other. But you still need to talk to those people and you still need to make smart decisions. And if, and if a White House is running well, it takes, it takes expertise actually very seriously.

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I don't.

You should have him. De Civitas. But he, anyway, he's an active member of the military, but he was one of the people that went in for Pineapple Express, remember, in Afghanistan. And then he brought a group of people into with Sabre allies to go get people out of North Carolina. And he was talking about what it looked like on the ground there. But it's really interesting to think that, you know, if you're in business, you might go to Harvard Business Review and look at the historical case studies and say, we have something going on here, like, which other company has it ever been through? And you might pull some of those ideas to think, like, could we solve it? I had never thought about, huh. Does the White House have like, components that are like that?

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's, it's really, it's interesting. I mean, you find you get thrown into these jobs and everything's moving so fast and you have all the things that you're supposed to do that day, and then by 10am there's four more things that you hadn't planned on when you got up that morning to deal with. And so people's ability to focus for a long period of time on really important things is actually really limited. I mean, time is an amazingly scarce resource. And so having worked in that environment has given me a lot of sympathy for administrations that have come, you know, after us. Because when something big is happening in the world and there's a lot of media criticism for what seems to be like double messaging coming out of the White House or the administration doesn't seem to have its act together, I'm like, it's probably because they don't yet. Like, they're, they're, they actually have had a couple Advisors go out in front of cameras saying different things from, from each other. And maybe the President didn't even know they were out there saying that because they're trying to formulate a response. I mean it, it sometimes, it sometimes just happens in sort of a chaotic way because of everything, everything that's going on. So you, a smartly run administration kind of prepares for that and you try to kind of pick your experts in advance, people that you know that you can trust, get a good catalog of people around the country on a variety of issues and hope your policy councils are all doing that. Have, like every summer we would have the heads of think tanks from around Washington and also even outside just do handpick some of their own scholars and bring them in for like a 90 minute briefing. And we'd have the President's economic advisors, domestic policy, homeland security. National security. They, they would sit in a room and just let them kind of tell us about like what they saw as kind of big issues in the world. And, and you know, they would become sort of a resource after that for, for our staff. Because you just can't, you can't staff that up internally very well.

No, I remember hearing something crazy that I don't remember if it's true or not. Is it true that the Pentagon has run like, I don't know how many war games about China versus the US and we don't win in any of them?

Yeah, I don't know that. I hope that's not true.

I didn't sound very good.

Yeah, there's gotta be a scenario within which we, with Asian, which we win. But I, I don't know.

Yeah, I remember Mackenzie, one of the scholars was talking about that they none of, we didn't win any when they did it in with Senate, the Senate and Congress. So like war games were run between the two groups and they didn't win any. But I was hoping, I mean you would think the Pentagon wouldn't let that out either. They're not. I, I imagine they're ought to be like, the thing is we're preemptively losing. Yeah, that's probably not a good idea.

Yeah, that's right. Or maybe that's what they want people to think. Yes.

3D. So this is why the business. Okay. There was one other thing I wanted to talk about. You literally just got on a plane back from D.C. and you were there all week. What's, what's the vibe like there right now? Is everybody freaking out.

It wasn't as crazy as I thought it would be. Yeah, I mean, I, this trip was planned for a while, and so I kind of expected to be there and they'd still be counting votes. You know, I, I didn't, I didn't expect it. Like, everybody didn't really expect this to be resolved the evening of. It just depends on who you talk to. There's a lot of panic among Democrats. There's kind of a, a strange amount of optimism among people on the political right. Yeah, I think probably when I say surprising, I think it's, it's more people that have been Trump skeptics, Trump wary and, and even anti Trump. I think there's a number of them now that's like, well, we've seen the show before with him, and there's also some real opportunity for maybe some disruption and reform in areas where we need that. And he's got his issues that he's really hyper focused on, but that means there's opportunity within his administration elsewhere to get all kinds of other things done. They're broadly aligned with what he cares about. So it's kind of an interesting, it was an interesting time. I mean, I think everyone's just kind of sitting there just nervously waiting to see what happens. And you go from one day where, like, Marco Rubio's name is floated for Secretary of State, everyone's like, well, that's a good decision, or whatever. And then the next day he puts forward Matt Gates, his Attorney General. Everyone's like, what in the world is going on here? So it's like, here we go again, you know, sort of chaos and disruption. So there's, there's kind of just nervous expectation and some people are kind of nervously optimistic and others are nervously really, really worried right now. So it, like everything else over the last few months, all we can say is who really knows what's going to, what it's going to look like there's come January, it's hard to say. And with John Thune becoming the Senate Majority leader, that creates maybe a little bit of a break on the sort of MAGA elements in the Senate, because that was a hotly contested race, too. Is Trump going to be able to get all of his people rubber stamped? Is he going to run into opposition within his own party? And I think given that, that vote, that's possible. So that'll create some dealing even within the GOP when it comes to appointments and decisions that are being made kind of early out of the Gates.

Yeah. What about. I mean, well, first of all, I have been watching Twitter like it's Prime Time. I mean, I can't ever remember watching every camp cabinet position and say, like, who's it gonna be? What's gonna happen next? I think it's an American phenomenon that is reminiscent probably of like, the Apprentice. I mean, it is incredible.

I think that's what. That's why they. That's what they want you to do. Right? Yeah. I actually got off to. I got off Twitter before it became Max. I mean, I. I burned out. I burned out on it. Yeah. I was. I got. Well, I got to the point where I realized I don't even like the people I like anymore. Yeah, my. My friends on Twitter, I've long loved and followed. I'm like, I don't even really like them anymore. So I'm just going to. You know, I want to keep liking them. So I'm going to stop watching them on Twitter. And I. I hung it up. And to be honest with you, I've not missed it. I mean, I. I go there because people will make announcements there. Or a lot of times in my world, there's a really interesting study that gets released, you know, and someone tweets it out. So I find myself going over there for content, but I just. I can't do it anymore because I used to do. I used to do that, too. I mean, election nights on Twitter used to be really fun, you know, because it's. Listening to everybody's hot takes now. No.

0. Watching X.

Well, no, no. Just watch the returns and stayed off of people's, you know, hot takes and, you know, all that stuff. Yeah. Decided to sit. Sit it out. I felt a lot happier and better.

That's very mature of you.

No, I don't. I don't know. It's mature. It was just some self awareness about what makes me a better and worse person.

Well, I want to talk about what you're doing today because one of the reasons I want to have you in here is because we talk about it a lot. But, you know, the university system seems to have a lot of problems today. And, you know, from us watching student protesters pro Hamas at nyu, to watching what happens with, you know, different racial divides at school, to wondering if students and teachers are really learning these days from an outside perspective, the university system kind of appears broken or at least under attack in some way. And you decided to start the Civitas Institute at University of Texas. Why? And what do you think you guys are going to be able to do different from inside one of the world's largest universities? University of Texas?

Yeah. The Civitas Institute is a great new creation. It's created to essentially be part of a much larger effort to kind of reclaim a place within this large tier, one great esteemed public research university, to kind of recover the basic principles of the American founding of a free society, of the kind of commercial and economic life that supports and it's the lifeblood of that society, to teach it in a historically accurate and proper way and to do research that kind of advances these ideas and helps us understand what a free society should be looking like in the future and what a growing and dynamic economy should look like in the future and where we can make reforms possible. So Civitas, the best way to think of it is kind of a university based think tank committed to those principles. So I've come from a think tank in Washington to build this organization into a similar type of thing, university, which gives you access to all the research power of an institution like this and really great faculty and experts from around the country to be a part of it. We are joined at the hip with this other really important new effort called the School of Civic Leadership. And now technically housed within that school, since institutes and centers typically have to be housed within a degree grant in college. And this is a really exciting effort. The school is about a year old. It was created by the regents about a year and a half ago. And so it goes through a process of getting stood up, where a dean gets appointed. That's Justin Dyer, a great political scientist, who's the inaugural dean of the school. And we've been hiring faculty into the school. And so we have gone through our first round of faculty hiring this year. Those people have shown up this fall. We're going through another round now and by about the third year we'll have about 20 full time faculty teaching in the school. And the school is very much committed to constitutional studies, Western civilization, economics. It has elements of what people are familiar with the British PPE model of education. It's kind of, yeah, it was a philosophy, politics and economics. It's like, I think every prime minister going back to who knows what did that at Oxford. It's a great way of getting a well grounded education in these topics that we don't call the degree that we have a minor that's called that. The degree is called civics honors. And it combines these great elements of what we would think of as a really strong classical liberal arts education. And so we have the school that will have its inaugural freshman class next fall. And then we have the institute which I run, which is standing up a whole bunch of different research programs and events on these issues of economic dynamism, political liberty, constitutional studies, and a bunch of policy papers on energy policy, education policy, a number of different types of things like that. So why is this important and why is it different?

Because a lot of schools have economic departments, they have history departments. So at face level, people could be like, this exists already.

Already.

What is any different about it?

So what's different about it in the School of Civic Leadership is the multidisciplinary aspect of it. So you can. The best way to think of, I think the new School of Civic Leadership at UT is think of it as kind of an elite small liberal arts college on this large public university campus. So this. Where students are studying these things together. Part of the problem in higher education today is just the fragmentation of studies. And so you can study American history without really ever studying the Constitution or without ever taking economics at a lot of universities. And this is a way for students, if they get enrolled in this school, they apply to come to UT and study in this school. This is their major, they're going to get this multidisciplinary degree. And I think that. I think we'll attract a lot of students that want to go to law school or that want to get their mba. I think we'll get a lot of students that want to go on and go do graduate studies in policy or they want to want to teach. I think it'll attract that. That sort of a student. And we're out putting out the word to get people to apply. And I think we have a lot of students coming from areas where they're just interested in the history of American institutions, and they're interested in the way that the economy is and the way it should work, and they want to study all those things together. There has been, I mean, I just think there has been this drift in higher education over the last generation to just. To monocultures where the. The. There has been this move of sort of political leftist ideology which has become entrenched within universities. And I say this as a historical and empirical matter. There have been a couple of books written about this or people done lots of surveys. And it's just a matter of fact that the political leanings of faculty have really moved to the left since the 1960s in this country. And it's happened kind of decade by decade by decade to the point where people do get screened out of certain colleges and schools and departments because of their political ideology. And I won't say where, but I'VE actually watched it happen. I've sat in a faculty meeting once before where a decision was made that we should actually look at where people's political leanings were in their writings or whatever when making decisions about hiring them or admitting students in. It's a real thing. And if you, and if you come from a perspective of more free market economics and political liberty, which kind of aligns you with the political right, or you've worked for a Republican like I have, you just, just sense it. We're on university campus or people just say things to your face where they just assume they know what you, what you think about issues. You're kind of a, you're easy to put in a box for them. And, and so I think it's, it's, it's important to, to course correct. And I think that's what's been happening not just here with this effort, but in other places around the, the country where it's, it's not a, it's not about creating something that's partisan and that's definitely not what we're doing. We don't screen any of our faculty or students based on, on political views. It's just that we're building a kind of educational environment that's probably just attractive to people that probably lean a little bit right in their worldview. Whether they're registered as a Republican or not. Doesn't, isn't the best indicator of that. It has to do with how they view the Constitution, how they view the question of political liberty and, and especially the questions of human agency. I mean, if you believe that, that people have responsibility to build and make the life that they want and they should live in a society that allows them to do that, and they should be able to exercise their free choices there. You're going to probably be attracted to an effort like what, what we have. So this is happening here at ut. The University of Florida has the Hamilton Center. The University of North Carolina has just started a new school of civic thought in leadership. Ohio State University has followed suit. This is starting to happen in a number of flagship state universities for very similar reasons because there's just this growing awareness that we kind of need to recover a classical liberal arts education that helps prepare people for life in the institutions that run our country. So we can criticize those institutions and that's what universities have become good at doing. We can try to undermine them, we can try to reinvent them or whatever, but the reality is we need people to be working in Congress. We need people in the Media. We need people in businesses that have a civic function or have some role to play civically, to actually understand the institutions that they're going to be working in. Their history, their origins, why they matter, how they function well and how they don't. And that's what I don't think our universities have been doing the best job of preparing people for. So this is a. This is a shot at doing it right?

Yeah. And you guys are attracting a ton of talent in the form of academics and professors who are kind of pissed. They're like, I'm tired of getting told what to think, where to think, how to think. The point is to find the truth, not to have group think. And so I've been really impressed at the roster that's coming over to you guys.

Yeah, it's been great. I mean, there is an awareness of some of these dysfunctions that I've been talking about among a lot of faculty around the country and what we've learned. I was pretty bullish about this when I left AEI to come down here. I was really bullish about our prospects to grow, to get good talent, to create something big and great and to make a, you know, an institution, you know, at the Sipitas Institute, to make it like an AEI or like a Hoover Institution at Stanford, something of that scale and scope. That's our ambition, and I think we're on the way to doing that. And so I was bullish from the. From the start. But even with my bullishness, I've been surprised at how attractive this has been to people. We've had people reaching out to us in an unsolicited way. We've been doing a lot of recruiting. We've also had people just reaching out to us, saying, you know what? I'm kind of tired of where I am. I'm tired of the group think. I'm tired of looking over my shoulder to see if people are going to try to cancel me or shout me down. I want to be at a place where I can pursue my work out in the open and in the true spirit of free inquiry. And that looks like what you guys are building. So it's almost serving to have a magnetic effect. And as awful and as horrific as the events of October 7th last year were, what it kind of unleashed on university campuses in the aftermath has also just accelerated that sense of urgency. There are some people, I think, that were going home and complaining about the campus culture where they worked, maybe to their partner or their spouse, where they started saying that stuff out loud. Too. So I think there's just been something in that environment from last fall, going through the spring protest here, where we've had people say, you know, what you're building looks like a true university environment. That's what I thought I was doing when I went to graduate school. Now I want to be a part of something like that. So the environment has pushed people our way, too. And then, you know, if you've been reading these articles about, you know, declining applications to Ivy League schools and people going to the SEC schools or applying there, that's true. I mean, we are seeing that at ut. And our. Someone told me last week that our applications are up 98% year over year at UT. I mean, it's just. It's amazing how many people want to come and be a part of what we're doing, not just to our school, but, I mean, to the university writ large. And I think I got that number. But the anecdotes that you see, or the reporting that you might have seen in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal about people who you would think would be applying to the Ivys, now applying to sec, we're definitely seeing that as a true thing.

That's fascinating. 98% increase in applications at University of Texas, and we're seeing the Ivy League, so Harvard and Stanford and some of the historical. Best places you could go, where every parent wishes their child would go, actually determining that they want to go a different path.

Yeah. I mean, has that ever happened before?

Would this be the.

I mean, I, I'm not aware of a historical precedent quite like this. You know, and the thing is, for those of us who've been in higher ed for a while, you know, a lot of the. The things that people have grown frustrated about over the last five, seven years. Critical race theory, seeing society as a set of structural inequalities or imbalances and, and, and all that's kind of around that. I mean, this was not just invented in the last five years or so. I mean, when I was a graduate student in the late 1990s, we had critical race theory. Back then, too, we had what we call the political correctness movement. But as a teaching fellow, as a graduate student, I had to go through trainings where we learned what words we could and couldn't say and all that stuff. I think what's happened is that that enterprise, it's gone through several iterations, and this time it's become more pervasive, and it's made its way into corporate HR offices, and it's made its way into K12 education, it's become much more widespread in places where it hadn' been before, back in the days like when I was in graduate school. So there's just a lot more people aware of its effects and they see the origins of it in the university world, in the world of higher education. And so they want, you know, now people want to send their kids to places where that's least likely to happen. And I think on large, diverse public university campuses it's least less likely to happen there. And there's more checks and balances. In a large public research institution or university you have trustees appointed by governors, you have state legislatures that provide oversight and funding, you have a student body from all across that state and beyond and just many more departments. And so the way in which the monoculture sort of might capture an elite private college or even I think some Ivy League universities very broadly is just less likely to happen here because you have these checks and balances. So people are figuring that out and that's what they want. And just anecdotally I run into this all the time. I mean, I was talking not long ago with a well known economist who lives in Washington D.C. sends her son to one of the elite schools in D.C. i'll leave it nameless, but, but people who know Washington D.C. would definitely know it. It's one of those schools where every parent thinks their kids are going to be president someday or going to be senators or whatever and they all, they all go to the ivies or they go to the, the elites. And she was telling me about how her son and his seven friends are all applying to SEC schools, you know, and that, you know, that she and her husband are freaking out a little bit about it because they, you know, they're spending all this money in this private prep school to send them to the elites. And now they found that their, their kids want to go where they can have like a real university experience and they're pretty confident they'll get pretty good jobs on the back end of it anyway. So something's happening in a, in a pretty big way right now which is going to force some kind of accountability on I think some elite institutions that they haven't really felt the pressure to react to before. But I think it's actually going to change their behavior some.

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One of my favorite CEOs used to say to me when I first came to the business that he'd eventually rub the NBA off me. And that always kind of made me chuckle. But now I understand a bit what he's talking about because I think often, especially in some of these higher level institutions, I went to Georgetown, but you're sort of taught things in a way where you're like this is the way to do it. This is the proper course to do X and Y and Z. Which is hysterical. Once you're in business, hearing somebody who's never been in business tell you the correct way to do something, it's really cute. And so I think I probably had, I had that characteristic quite a bit. I want to talk a little bit about money and universities today. So student loan debt all time highs, you know, almost $2 trillion. Over 100 of our taxpayer funded somewhere in other universities with endowments over a billion. Do you think the way we fund universities today is good for societies and kids or do we need reform on that?

Yeah, we need reform. I mean anytime you have a, a kind of a third party payer system, whether it's in healthcare education, you get all kinds of distortions. Right? And so even the way that we've done student loans over the years has just made it easier for universities to run up the costs. I actually think that one of the really big problems is that growing pie slice. If you look at the university budget as a pie chart, that growing pie slice that has to do with just all kinds of programs that really don't have to do with classrooms and hiring a lot of personnel to run all kinds of student facing sorts of things that really aren't a part of the degree programs. And I think that's a problem. I think that's had a really upward push on the cost of education at schools. And so when people are borrowing and then paying off over a long period of time, that's not really the university's problem. And so if they can continue to increase tuition every year, that's what they've been doing. And now we're at this point where it's a real problem. I, I think in some ways, you know, there, there are policy changes that, that one can propose and people have. In some ways, it's kind of like these dynamics, these marketplace dynamics will probably have more to do with cost control than anything right now when people start to realize that the value of that 55, $60,000 a year private college degree is actually not worth very much. And if employers are hiring the graduate from that public university as opposed to the elite school, because they're worried that they're going to get a culture warrior from the elite school, that's going to create some discipline as well. And I'm not just speculating there. I mean, this seems to be what's happening right now. We're seeing this, this is certainly happening anecdotally. It's been reported more than once that there's a number of large employers out there. Like, I really just, I don't want some of the students from these places where the campus protests been going on just don't want to hire them. And that bodes well for the graduates of large state schools. And so I think some of that will, will condition the way university administrators think about costs. I think smaller private schools that have gotten very expensive, their business models are just turning upside down right now. And so they have to keep from going out of business at some point. So I think those, those dynamics are, are real. But no, there's, there's definitely things we should be doing more of. I mean, the income share agreement model, that's been rolled out in a few different places, I think that has a lot of promise. I think it should be more widespread.

Yeah.

And so it's, it's basically a, a different, instead of a student loan like you would typically get from, from one of the big lenders, you're, you basically, some universities have done this through a fund where you're basically paying back a portion of your income to a group of investors or to basically a foundation that a university runs over time. And so instead of paying the set amount, you're paying a percentage of your income. So if you're a schoolteacher, you're paying one rate. If you're at Goldman Sachs, you're paying a different rate. And it's a, it's, it's of kind of just making it easier on the graduate over time to pay back the cost of their education and theoretically to.

Incentivize the school to actually increase the ROI from college because they want people who have higher incomes. So they could, theoretically they make more money off.

Yeah, right. It's a good point.

I don't know if there's second or third order effects. I don't understand There, there probably are. Like, then maybe people want deferred payment. Maybe they want more equity. Maybe you'd get them that system too. Yeah, but I think that that's interesting.

Yeah. And I think the, I mean, there have been really good efforts by some university presidents that just kind of beg to be copied by others in terms of cost control. Mitch Daniels at Purdue kept tuition at the same rate his entire decade he was there. Never raised tuition once. And I have, I'm from Indiana originally and so I have friends who have kids at Purdue. They, I mean, that's like a household hero name there. And I know also know Mitch and he's an absolutely amazing person and demonstrated that you can actually get costs under control. And, and if you add up everything that's done, you kind of get that net result, nothing of it sexy. You know, you're, you're just going around and you're, you're selling off the fleet of university vehicles that, that they don't need anymore. And you're, and you're, you're refiguring out the way that they do. Food in the dorms is one thing after another that he was able to do to make it possible to increase his ranking. Right, right. While increasing the ranking.

So rankings increased, costs went down.

Yeah.

And then flatlined for a decade.

Yeah. And really one of the national leaders now in commercializing innovation, you know, I mean, Purdue as an engineering hot house was like, I mean, they're, they have a research foundation that, where professors have been commercializing research on the scale of a Stanford or a Carnegie Mellon or whatever.

Commercializing research.

Yeah, where, where, where an engineer or another, you know, a Reese, someone, someone who's on the faculty of a university invents something or comes up with a new molecule that can be turned into a particular drug that can be built by a company or medical device or something like that. And they work with people in the private sector at companies or investors to kind of come up with a new product line. And that professor and the university's research foundation gets some of those returns. And so Stanford's always been kind of the textbook case of this and other universities, especially those with good engineering departments, have followed suit. But Purdue's done a great job there too. And they've done all of this while the cost of going there has remained, remained steady.

And how does that work. The engineer keeps a percentage of it and the school does.

And it depends. Yeah, they all have, they all have different, different ways. Yeah, I don't think very many universities do this super well. They could all improve in terms of the incentives that they create for faculty to commercialize. I looked at, I did a deep dive on this about 10 years ago and so my, my knowledge is a little bit dated, but you have a lot of various versions around the country of the same kind of bad practices where the, some universities are very heavy handed and so there's not as much of an incentive for their, their scholars to. And so some people, including at Purdue tried to kind of get, get ahead there and I think at UT we do a good job of this as, as well. There's a, there's a great opportunity actually across the country for large research based universities to kind of reconfigure the way that they do their commercialization agreements, their IP agreements with their, with their scholars to, to get more intellectual property and all that's required to, to take an idea in a lab and turn it into a product that can be good for the world and also profitable for the people that were involved in it.

Like could universities become profit centers eventually? Not based on. Oops. Could universities become profit centers eventually? Not based on government taxpayer funding and endowments, but based on that? Theoretically and tuition?

I don't know. I mean you would really have to ramp up the commercialization size because universities as big. Yeah. And these are big, huge operations that do cost a lot of money. And so when it comes to the finance of that and the model, I'm not really sure. But I think if you were going to commercialize a value, you'd almost have to have a university designed for that purpose that then also taught courses. I think it'd be pretty hard to take a large research university and make its revenue model based entirely on commercialization. But there are probably people here in Austin who might think of a way to do that.

That's true. Well, the other thing that just really ticks me off and blows my mind in two different ways is that there's a little graph that I have here that we can put up for you guys to see on YouTube. But the cost of universities gone up 4x anywhere from 4x to 160% I saw over a 40 year period. But the problem there is that the wages have really stagnated for people that have come out of it. So that's like. We have a growing gap between how much money you make from Going to university versus the relative cost. But then we also are caught in a catch 22 because the median earnings for bachelor's degree holders is like 35 to 40% higher than those who don't have it. So it's like you gotta go to college to make more, but it's more expensive than it ever is relative to how much you make. And so how do we fix that? Or do you think that the point of college is not to make us make more money?

You know, it's a great question. There's a couple questions in there and I think to step back and look at the broader issue, and this goes back to your original question too. Just the cost of a university degree right now is way more than it probably should be for the value in a lot of places. There's actually, there's a study that just came out this past week that shows actually in large state universities over the last year, costs have not risen as much. In some cases they've gone down in net terms. There's a certain methodology that they use to do that. So I think at places like University of Texas, a place like Purdue that we're talking about, I think the value is still really there in the end for the family in terms of what comes out of their pockets or what comes out of their bank account. And for the value value that they get, I think the real problem are these really, really expensive, smaller private colleges. The elites, it still remains to be seen because they are still the elites. But, but I think the, the bigger story is that when you're in your early 20s and I have two kids who are, you have the cost of school and if you're carrying that debt, you know, fortunately my kids were fortunate enough not to have to be shouldering that, that debt. But a lot of their friends are. The cost of housing is, I think that's the big one. I mean, I really do think that the cost of housing is a huge one. Health. Our healthcare system is also such that we pay a lot more personally than we would if we lived in some other countries. And that doesn't mean that you need a universalized system. You've got other competitive healthcare economies that just work better than ours does. And these things are all kind of barriers not just to being able to afford a good home and have a middle class lifestyle. They're really barriers for people being able to become entrepreneurs early in their life to, and this is your area of expertise, but to really be able to launch themselves much sooner. We really don't want to become Like a European country where you have to live with your parents until you're in your 30s or whatever before you can be afford to venture out. And we have been making decisions over time that have kind of put us on a path to that in some ways. And so a university education should prepare you for the world that you're entering in ways that I think a lot of universities just haven't. There's, and there's really, I think a growing body and really interesting and compelling body of research that shows that really the most valuable thing about going to university is actually a lot of the stuff that happens maybe in a class, but it's not the point of that class. You are giving presentations, you're having to manage your schedule, you're having to write papers and you're having to present and you're having to work in teams. And the, what are sometimes called non cognitive skills or social skills or the kinds of things that you actually perfect in that environment are the things that actually contribute to your earning power over time. So you might, you might get a job out of college because of your degree. You might be an engineering student or something and get a job because of the kind of engineering degree you got. But 10 years from now, where you are is going to be based on all these other things. It's not going to be because of that degree. That degree is going to get you your first job, maybe your second, but probably not even that as much. It's, it's these other things that you have learned how to do that really make you capable in the, in the workplace. Conscientiousness of the big five personality traits is. Conscientiousness is probably, it's one of the top two or three predictors of lifetime earnings. And that's the ability to think ahead, to be organized, to be a good listener, to be ambitious and to com. You combine all those things together and you get this trait called conscientiousness. And people who are high on that do really well. And that's what we should be thinking about when we're thinking about the best curriculum for students. So like in the school of Civic leadership that we're standing up at the University of Texas, part of the goal of a multidisciplinary degree like this is to give students a really good grounding in American institutions, but to also create the instruction in a way where they're doing a lot of these sorts of things that I'm talking about so they come out equipped for leadership within civic life in America, regardless of whether they're in business or they go into, to go to law school or what they do. That's where the real value is right now. And I think that's again, the market's kind of sorting some of this out. When you feel like what you've got are a bunch of graduates from a school that have been indoctrinated in a certain worldview and they're going to come and be like culture warriors in your company and create chaos. People don't want that. People want students that have had an experience, that have trained all these other sorts of things. So that's where the real value in a university education is, in addition to the actual topical major that you have. And I think the most innovative higher education administrators in the country are the ones who are figuring that out right now.

What about MBAs? Do you think those are worth it?

I don't know. You tell me.

Well, I don't know. I mean, I can only work from my personal experience, which is that it's a really nice credential to have people even this day will say Cody Sanchez worked at Goldman Sachs in Georgetown. Even though I wouldn't say those were at all my most formulative moments. Could I quantify the value of those two things as opposed to starting businesses very high? Probably not, but I don't know what the. I don't know if there's research or thought surrounding it, but there is the pervasive belief on the Internet. Like if we go broad based Internet, MBAs are a scam. You should never do them, they don't actually make you money. MBAs are really only good if you don't know what you're doing. And if you want to figure out where to go next or you want to climb up a corporate ladder, get an mba. But if you want to do in business, go do business. And I don't, I'm not sure what I thought about that yet.

I mean, I think, I think it's, it's one of those questions that probably has kind of the both and kind of answer to it because I think some of the critiques are going to have to do with the nature of just curricula itself, like what you're actually learning and does that really prepare you for the marketplace? And the common critique I hear back is not really like a lot of times what you're learning in the classroom and then what you experience in the world are very different. But thought of as professional schools where part of the experience of going there is the way that they are interrelated with the marketplace and with employers, they do serve as sort of funnels or training schools in many ways for really good jobs after that. That and then that also conditions the way the faculty teach the courses. Right. So, I mean, law schools are this way. Good MBA programs are this way, where, like, during the course of it, you're not just taking classes, you're actually doing summer internships at organizations that you hope to get hired by in the future. And that integration of curriculum with the marketplace does seem to serve a valuable function, at least in some sectors and in certain areas. So, you know, the large. I mean, we've got a very good business school at ut. It's got, you know, the number one accounting program in the country. I mean, I think. I think employers really value that. Yeah, she's great. Our current president, Jay Hartzell, was the dean of the school and did a phenomenal job. So I think it's had a good run of good leadership, and I think it's done well in the rankings as a reflection of how its graduates have actually landed and performed in the marketplace in the way that it's preparing people for that. So it's kind of a. I think there's so many different MBA programs around the country, it's hard to provide just one answer there. But I do think that integration with the employer marketplace is a really important thing, and some places really do that well. And when you come down from like the top five or top 10 or, you know, top 15 MBA school to all the rest of them, I think all the more that really is going to be the determinants to whether or not it's worth going there in the first place.

That's a great point. Yeah. One of the things I liked is when you and Jay and Justin, you know, so all the heads of UT and then Civitas and the School of Civic Leadership were together at that last little get together that was one of the first things you were talking about, is that we're actively right now, before the program's even been created, looking for companies that want to work with these kids. And to me, it's great to hear theory from academics, but that practical application or what you call integration is probably the real key. I think a lot of times people use this euphemism of the most important part about going to school is your network, and they think that means the other students or the faculty. But I don't actually think that's right. It's, oh, do I get to meet, you know, senior leaders at Deloitte and thus I get to go work at Deloitte later because I, they had a program for easier access to entry to these large corporations which are sometimes these large corporations are like paid MBAs, you know. Cause they put $100,000, I mean I bet Deloitte puts $100,000 into new hires in their specialty programs per year because they have massive training to do consulting team, let's say. So I think that's really cool that you guys are doing that.

Yeah. And that's the. With the new School of Civic Leadership at ut, the students will have internships all the way through. And that's an important part of it. And I.

Is that like a great. So they have to like, is it like.

Yeah, it'll be a part of it.

It was mandated for me.

Yeah, it'll be a part of the, the experience. And so they'll get this really well rounded education and they'll have internships throughout the, the time. And I. For all, for a lot of the reasons we were talking about earlier in our conversation. And I think there's a lot of employers that will just be primed to hire them for those that don't go to graduate school. I actually think they will. Yeah, that's right. Well, yeah, yeah. Because I think, you know, a lot of people like we want these sorts of graduates. You know, I don't necessarily need someone with just the narrow degree topic. I need someone that can actually function in a complex and interesting environment. And that's what I think our graduates will be.

Yeah. And I think a lot of corporations want ethics and morals in a different way. Like Tanner and I just brought on a new hire. His name is Levi. He's amazing so far. Don't listen to this Levi because you gotta keep it up. But he brings a Bible in and sets it on his desk every day. And you know, he asked if he could come in early cause he has a larger drive. So he's like, I'd like to be here at like 6:30 in the morning because I have a little bit longer of a drive and you know, finding people that are like ethically or morally aligned with not my beliefs. Like they don't have to believe the same thing that I do, but they have to want to try to be, you know, a good person that believes and free thinking and contrasting opinions. And if they are, they'll work well here and if not, they won't. So I don't want to, I don't want to get them anyway.

Absolutely. It's hard to quantify and it's hard to study. But to the extent that we can study the way that trust develops when we're doing, studying social capital, like, you know, closely knit, well functioning organizations or communities, and how trust is developed and earned, I mean, in high trust areas you have higher productivity rates. You have, in, in geographic regions where you have more social capital measured even just by civic and voluntary participation, you have higher levels of regional gdp. People, when, when people live in and work in high trust environments, they can get more done in a shorter period of time because there's less sand in the gears, there's less friction, there's less problems to sort through. And if, and if you've run an organization or I've been fortunate or cursed, however you look at it to, to, to start organizations or store organizations within organizations and grow and build things, you just know this. I mean, you just know that having people of integrity, people that are honest, people that are hard working, that are motivated by kind of a good moral framework and work well with others, you can just get so much more done and you can actually all be going down the track, the same track together, instead of having to deal with all of the friction and dysfunction that comes sometimes from the one squeaky wheel too, you know. So you know, anyone who's run something, you probably made this mistake. I know, or maybe no one else has, but I, I have where you're like, you know, that person has some, some characteristics that made me nervous, but they're really, really good at this one thing that I need done. And you're like, you know, we'll, we'll figure out how to deal with that other stuff. And it's like, yeah, you know what, you will deal with that other stuff and it'll take up a lot of your time and it'll upset other colleagues and you'll end up loading other people up with work because you don't trust this person anymore and you're, you know, and so, and it's just a real headache. And so I think this groundedness in a core set of principles that enable you to be the conscientious person that I was talking about earlier is really what anyone running a company or an organization wants. And so we should take that seriously when we're educating our children and then when we're designing higher education environments for them at university or community college or whatever the post secondary world is that they're in, it's absolutely essential when I've gone around the country and looked at effective vocational training. So for people that don't go to A four year university we have these really good programs is usually not by a policy design. It's almost in spite of federal and state workforce policy, which I think is an area that's ripe for reform that no one has ever quite figured out. You'll see that, that a lot of times it's employer partnerships with a community college or a vocational school of some kind where part of the curriculum is this stuff like saying earlier, students benefit in a four year degree program because they're just forced to do presentations and work together and plan and all those kinds of things. When you're a commuter at a community college, that's less a part of your experience. But the effective programs are often those where you have partnerships with employers where that kind of leadership training, planning, problem solving, presenting, working in teams, those kinds of things are built into the experience so that they can actually have graduates of those programs that have those same sets of skills. So there are different ways to kind of inculcate, encourage integrity, honesty, the right kind of ambition in people. And I think they should be really central to anyone designing curriculum. It shouldn't be an afterthought, it should be central to what you're doing.

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That's a good point. How do you so say you're a parent and you're trying to figure out where to send your, your kid to college or you're a student or you're a young, young person yourself and you're trying to figure out what actually matters. What do you do? How do you screen these institutions?

Well, I, I think you should send them to The School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas. But yeah, yeah, definitely send them there. There, send them our way. The I think the issues related to all the culture wars on higher, on college campuses, a lot of that could now be seen. I mean some of these schools have been out there, you know, back when they were all on the right side of history, you know, planting their flag on this or that. Cause over the last five years or so they're now paying a price for that. And you don't unwind that stuff overnight. So I would be very wary about sending my kid right now to an Ivy League school that's been all in there. And just talking with faculty at those places and people that have recently come from them, it just kind of reinforces, it's like I would just be, be worried and I have plenty of friends. I'm in that age where I've got people, you know, my peers have kids in, in college. And it's amazing over the last few years the number of complaints that I hear from people who sent their kids to what should have been not that long ago, a really great outstanding elite institution, mostly in the Northeast. So I think you want to look at how much these colleges actually spend on the non classroom facing side of the ledger. I think that's a big one. Like I was saying earlier, you want to look at the constitution of the faculty in the departments where they're going to go. Do they really have ideological diversity there? Do they have people across different disciplines? And can your child get an education where it's well rounded it where they're not just in a certain narrow track or they can just kind of choose electives to kind of just patch together something that's kind of meaningless over time. There's not just one thing to look at, there's. There's a bunch. Cool.

That's so much harder than back in the day we used to take like the US Today, USA Today rankings or whatever, see which one was best and.

Like try to figure out how there and then.

I think that was basically as crazy as I went.

Yeah, no, I think you, I think you want to be a little bit more careful now now and look at whether the university has embraced a statement of principles about the Chicago Statement of Principles of Academic freedom. A number of universities have done that as well. And I think you should take a look at that. It doesn't mean that even if they sign the statement that every department in every way is doing that, at least there's a commitment there. And I think those are, are you know, pretty, pretty important indicators right now.

So if your kid right now got into like Princeton, Harvard and Ivy League school, would you say, hey, let's think about this?

Probably, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's just probably because I have friends who have had their kids there where they've had a bad experience. Not everyone, I mean others have had a great experience. A lot of it does depend on the department, the specific school or college that you're in. But I would be wary of it right now. Now both of my now adult kids graduated from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. We used to live in the uk. They wanted to go back to the UK for, for college. And you know, that's, that's this great elite institution is over 600 years old. It stands on its, on its this amazing set of traditions, but they, they haven't, and this is typical of a lot of universities in the uk. They haven't grown that slice of the pie that I was talking about. I mean they really focus on instruction. It's students, it's professors and you have a bunch of student associations. But the academic format, the seminar based learning, it's the same as it's been for a long time. Students know why they're there to learn and they had an amazing experience. And does the student body have, as a collective, do you have all the views there of all kinds of issues that you would find on any university campus? Of course, but they haven't been weaponized in the same way that they have in a lot of American universities. And we have to ask why has it been so easy, it seems like recently to actually weaponize ideologies on university campuses when it's actually not happening in the same way in other countries? And we realize we have kind of a very, I think it's a very distinctive American problem. And when you have the president of France telling us not to import all these crazy ideas, the country they gave us Jacques Derrida and help us, that gave us that saying, please stop sending all your crazy ideas back our way. I thought that was actually kind of telling and actually a little funny.

Yeah, that gets my. I love a good conspiracy theory. So that's so many to count there. You know, I remember I was sitting at an event, I don't remember if you were at this one or not, but it was with one of the Ivy League presidents versus another well established university that was not Ivy League and the very counter opinions. And I remember being shocked because the president was basically saying, of the Ivy League school, was saying we don't have any ideological divide here. Actually we're very measured and there's no one side that has everything. And in fact like we don't even have that much of a higher percentage on one side than the other. And no, we really didn't vote for one candidate versus another. And I remember the audience all kind of looking out and then we have these beautiful library of Alexandria's at our fingertips, AKA Google. So you know, everybody's. And they're asking questions like well, how about this 80% number here and how about this? But what was fascinating to me was the depth of either the denial or the non agreement or the belief that it wasn't an issue or the gaslighting or whatever from somebody who is very intelligent.

Yeah. Now this is very common and just because of the nature of my professional work and trajectory, I spent a lot of time around kind of two communities that are, that have this attribute that you're talking about. One is just higher education, the other is the media where you, you'll talk with very smart, well meaning people and they're not trying to dissemble on purpose. They, they really do think that they're in an institution where there's a healthy amount of ideological diversity. Because from their perspective there is. But for the rest of America and for the rest of us who don't fit within the continuum of diversity they're talking about, there's like, there's all these people over here that just are not represented on, on your faculty or in your institution. And you see this in newsrooms as well, just within the media. And if you spend a lot of time in Washington D.C. as I've had to do in my career, and you go to a lot of dinners with people like this, there's just a lot of shared assumptions that people, you're in the fishbowl, you're swimming around, you can't see the water that you're in. And we all think that we're not going to become like that. But it's actually very easy to become like that when you, when you live and work with, with people that, that all share some basic assumptions. It also helps explain like why, you know, I mean even this last election, you know, in the predictions that we, we saw and then the shock at the outcome was become the. Because the people who are basically covering and also reporting and creating the news have so many shared assumptions, they just can't get themselves out of it to actually make other kinds of predictions or, or, or speculations. And there's probably some reasons for that that are related to even what we've been talking about. I think I have journalist friends who've looked into this more than I have, so I'm just reporting on what they've told me. But just over the last generation, the way that so many journalists, especially for the top papers, come from a lot of the same colleges and universities, it's that same sort of thing and the same socioeconomic status and you don't have, and like in the old days where you'd have just kind of street, street beat, like reporters walking around without an ideological agenda, just doing the investigative thing, covering the news, reporting on it from middle class backgrounds, from working class backgrounds, from all over the country that you've seen even within the media class a kind of just, it's like they've coalesced around a certain shared set of assumptions that are very consistent with what they would have gotten from universities that they went to. So I hear this a lot when I'm on university campuses. I'll hear people say, like, why are you guys doing what you're doing? Like, we've got plenty of, of diversity in higher ed. I mean, you know, like, there's a lot of people that, that, that think differently from each other. And I just think that's just clearly not true. I mean, and, and any, any survey that we've seen of university faculty shows that's not true. And there have been similar surveys done of, of journalists as well. And we realized that they have political leanings that are much more similar than they are different. And, and that becomes a, a problem. Does you understand why in the American heartland there's such a distrust of expertise? And I say this as someone who lives within the world of expertise. And as I started out saying earlier when we're talking about time with Wise, you need experts. And I, and I am a strong believer in the value of what we might call elite institutions in America. We need our universities and we need governmental organizations to help implement policy and all these kinds of things. But when there's arrogance, condescension, and a resistance to true free inquiry, then you've got a problem. And, and, and that's where just ordinary everyday Americans can sniff that out. I have them in my extended family and my friends back home, and, and it's, you don't have to look very far to find people who aren't a part of elite society who have a pretty good read on what's wrong with it.

Yeah, you know, I think that's the most fun part about having a Podcast and doing what we do with YouTube and going out. And, you know, the other day I was with a guy who runs a porta potty company, and so I'm like, helping him clean out porta potties in Houston, Texas, you know, and then we're with Spencer, who runs garbage trucks just one day a week, and he's a software guy during the week. And so, like, you get all these different perspectives that, you know, quite honestly, in America, we have a lot of diversions of socioeconomics that we don't touch that much. And so when I go and stand in the lobby of AEI and I'm sort of in awe of, like, the beauty of this institution, well, guess who's not coming in there often? Spencer, who drives the truck outside of Dallas, Texas. And so, you know, I think part of this and what's. What's happening in the US Is interesting because it's. It's. I think it's showing a light on average Americans, which, like, you know, they want to have a couple weeks vacation, they want to be with their kids. They don't want you to tell them what to do about their kids. And this kind of transcends race, actually. You know, and I'm Latino, and I just always have a chuckle when a white person who's never been to the border tells me about what's going on at the border when I used to be a journalist there, and I've crossed the border innumerable times. And so I always kind of chuckle a little bit about how we are so set in our ways when we haven't seen them from another's perspective.

Yeah, for sure. And that is, I think, what we're seeing play out kind of on the national stage right now. There was a really great, large national survey this last week, and I'm forgetting the organization that. That did it.

We can find it, which is.

Yeah, I can send you the link.

Okay.

The.

Put it on the show notes.

Yeah, put it in the show notes. Because it's. It's a really, really great survey.

It's.

The sample is like over 3,000, 3,500 people or so. And it's a. It's a meaningful sample where they. They looked at, you know, after the election, who people voted for.

What.

What category are they? Were they swing voters and swing states? And what issues motivated them? And for all swing voters, inflation was a huge thing. And just the sense that. That the Biden administration and then Kamala Harris as a candidate wasn't paying attention to that. But when you look at the people who identified themselves as swing voters who eventually broke for Trump, the culture wars issue outranked the inflation issue for them. And we know now that the Trump campaign spent $250 million on that one ad about transgender in prisons. When Kamala Harris was talking about supporting transgender surgery in prisons and all that, that they found that that moved undecided voters, and they're testing more than anything. So they just ran that thing like crazy.

Well, how about this one liner too? Ish. Was like, he's. You can love him or hate him, and most people are only on one end or the other of the spectrum. But his line about she's for they them, I'm for you. I was like, the guy is made for tv.

Yeah. No. And that. That turns out that for people in those swing states that were really important, those battleground states, Pennsylvania, you know, the ones we all were hearing about and watching for, for months, I found it hard to believe there were still undecided voters in this country a month ago or so. But I guess there were. And these issues really mattered for people. So I think the reckoning on, I think the COVID era, school closures, public health experts dissembling before Americans are getting caught doing so. So I think these gender issues that have, again, it's the amount of time they've taken up, it's not so much that people have these strong views about the issues themselves. It's being told that this has to be the most important thing when inflation is high and then the free speech on campus stuff has actually played a lot. So these now have emerged in surveys. These have emerged as issues we now know that really motivated a lot of voters. And back when we were building the Survey center on American Life at aei, which my now former colleague Dan Cox is doing a great job of running, great pollster. We did all these big, large national surveys, trying to drill down a few layers beyond just political attitudes to see what really motivated people. And we found, like other large surveys, like more in Common has done and a few other organizations that from just the heated summer of 2020, the George Floyd pandemic, you know, when we had all this unrest in our cities and all the aftermath of that, when culture wars were really kind of taking off two thirds of Americans, you know, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, when you were asking them to rank order the things that were most important in their lives, it was jobs for their kids, it was public safety in their neighborhoods. It was. It was really bread and butter issues and culture war issues that seemed to be on the national stage and bright lights were really not showing up at all. All except the public safety one, because of the unrest in cities. We've saw even people in suburbs of cities that were experiencing a lot of violence were saying they felt really unsafe, even though crime hadn't gone up on their streets, because it was just around, you know, it was in the news so much. And so I think, you know, just so many people in the elite class, especially on the elite left, just did not learn these lessons. And, and this, this, they should have seen this coming because, you know, a lot of people, including myself, were writing about this, were like, look, I mean, even in the, the, even in the wake of the George Floyd murder, you have a lot of inner city residents saying that public safety is the most important thing. The last thing they want is to defund the police. You know, we've just, it's been kind of one thing after another where there's been this kind of arrogant disconnection from what ordinary people, even their own constituents in their own cities and neighborhoods were telling them that they, that they refused to believe were all that important. And now they've paid a political price for it. And now Donald Trump's president going to be president again because of this. And I think, you know, know a lot of the narrative has been on him capturing the, the popular vote. And that is incredible given how Republicans haven't done that in a long time. But he still got a lot fewer votes than Joe Biden. She got way less than that. And so there's another, you know, his victory is an amazing kind of political comeback story, one of the most ever. But her slide from 2020, like her performance with key demographics doing so much worse than, than Joe Biden, I think is explained mostly by these, by these issues. And I think as, as we, we study this more, I think the inflation one, clearly just feeling like you have an administration that's not doing enough about the cost of living was a big thing. We know that's true. But these other issues of elevated importance when most Americans wanted them ranked more like 9, 10, 11 on a survey. And you have this kind of progressively trying to get you to rank them. 1, 2, 3. People were just exhausted by that and were for a long time. And now we can see that more clearly.

Yeah, this is a little bit off topic, but the, these like I was looking at a survey the other day, the survey said I'm going to mess up the exact numbers. I'll link it below. The survey says at the, the, the highlight of the article is women owned businesses have a 35% higher ROI than male owned businesses. And I was like, that's fascinating. Really? That would be stark different. Yes. How so? Then I clicked on it and as I clicked on it, what the actual survey was was in one private equity fund, their portfolio at that time had 35% higher ROI from the female owned companies than the male, which, you know, was maybe a couple hundred companies, you know, highly specified in the CPG space, which is dominated by women predominantly, lots of beauty products, so not exactly the same headline. You have specialized in studies and polls and how to conduct them for a long time. Do you have like a couple tips for those of us who we see these headlines everywhere? We're seeing polls everywhere, they're fucking wrong all the time. They're like lying to us with numbers. How do we quickly ascertain like hey, that's not a reasonable piece of data to use or that's not a good study to be conducted. Are there a few like red flags we can look for?

Yeah, yeah. No, it's a good question because people are citing surveys all the time to make the point that they want to make. You know, the, the, and you've seen this in the political polling, you probably heard people talk about it, just the margin of error, you know, thing. There's a whole debate about margins of error and, and all that too. But if, you know, if, if, if a sample size is small on a margin of errors like 5 to 6%, then 52 to 48 doesn't really mean anything in that regard. Right. And so that's not a four point advantage.

It could be the other way.

So that's the main one. I tend to look for the size of the sample. Is it a lot of people that they're surveying and is it a credible survey company that has successfully built sort of panel studies over time that where they predicted things pretty well. And so I think when you have these really small samples, large margins of error, and it's not clear that this sample is representative of the population as a whole or the population we're trying to learn something about some subsector, then then you should be, be wary of it. And if it's a complete outlier from other surveys, that might tell you something too. It's like, well, maybe they have found something that no one else found or maybe that's just completely wrong. So that, that's a, that, that's another one. You know, when we, when we started building the survey center at aei, one of the Things we wanted to do and did early on was a. A big national survey on a whole bunch of issues. But included within the questions we asked asked were the 20 questions from the UCLA Loneliness Index, because we learned there was. Everyone was talking about the crisis of loneliness in America. But when we were trying to figure out what surveys, they were like, like, exactly how they were measuring that, we realized that we kept clicking back to this one. I won't name the organization that did, like, a survey with about 800 people. Most of it was skewed old in terms of the average age of the. The participants. And everyone were drawing. Everyone was drawing all these conclusions from this very small, kind of crappy survey. And so we could only find one other large national survey that had been done in, like, the last decade that could be considered representative and kind of credible. And I felt like the results were mixed. So we did a large national survey, and our results were fairly similar to that other large national survey. And so we found that the question of loneliness is very nuanced. It's, you know, you have to be careful when you're saying, like, all young people are suffering a crisis of loneliness, because it's actually not true. There are certain types of young people that are very lonely. And it's like, you want to tailor your response to that population and not start drawing conclusions from everything. You know, well, that means all social media is bad. And, you know, there's that whole mean, like, if, if you're on Instagram, and that means you're probably miserable. And. And so it's like, well, some people are, but there's a lot of people who are on social media a lot who aren't miserable. And so that, that tells you something. It's like, well, let's try to understand what it is about the people who are miserable so that we can fashion either a policy response or public health response or something that's. That's accurate. And we were motivated to do that work precisely because of the problem that you said. It was just accepted by everyone. We have a, a pandemic of loneliness in America. And then we're like, show me the evidence for that. It's like, well, you know, it's this one survey that's really bad that everyone kept citing.

What's fascinating is that's kind of how it goes. It's like turtles all the way down. There was another survey I was trying to find original data for, and it was something about entrepreneurship. Like, oh, you know what it was? It was a statistic that I've Used before that. Now I'm worried about, which is that the average, average entrepreneur of a company makes like $47,000 a year on average. And I thought, God, that's, that's not that high for the risk that one takes to become an entrepreneur. If that is true, then your risk reward basis is actually super off and we should rethink this whole thing. And I cannot find for the life of me that study linked anywhere except to a very small study done by, like a one off company I've never heard of that did it in one year. That was like 2000, 2019. And so now we're trying to figure out, like, what actually is the average pay. And I think I came to you too, with a lot of this stuff around small business. And you were like, the thing is, small business statistics are really hard to find. And even the SBA doesn't survey that well. And so, you know, yeah, you're not going to know about this because you're healthy and not on Twitter. But I did have this little giggle about, you know who Nate Silber is, right?

Sure.

So he kind of famously did this tweet that said, you know, I ran 80,000, 444 surveys, polls for Kamala Harris versus Trump, and in every single one except X percent, those really, really tiny Kamala wins. And so after the election comes out, the memes were incredible. They were like, you should have ran 81,445. And so it's just one after the other. But I think it goes to this point of, who are you surveying? Are you surveying the same group of people 80,000 times with the same methodology? Because then you're probably not going to get anything else and you're in your own bubble. Okay, one thing I want to talk about to sort of wrap us out here is Trump has made a lot of comments this week on education. And one of the more intense ones was that he wants to end the Department of Education and send all the education back to the States. Let's show this clip really quick. It's like 30 seconds. Seconds. They'll show it. What do you think about that? Can that really happen? The Subaru Share the Love event is on from November 20 to January 2. For 18 years, Subaru and its retailers have supported over 2,700 local charities through the Share the Love event. When you purchase or lease a new vehicle during the 2025 Subaru Share the Love event.

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This has been proposed before. It's when the, the Tea party election of 2010, when Republicans overwhelmingly took the House of Representatives. And this was during the, the, the first Obama term. It was kind of a reaction to Obamacare and you know, all the kind of political divides. It was grassroots movement. That was actually one of the things that they were calling for back then too. And it's the view that the federal Department of Education can allow you to nationalize education and wreak all kinds of havoc on America's schools. The reality is that, you know, schools are still public. Schools are still very much a function of state, state budgets.

Right.

It's in most states, it's like it's the biggest part or next to maybe your Medicaid population, depending on which state you are. I mean, you know, what you spend on K12 education is a huge part of your budget. The, the amount you get from the federal government is actually a very small percentage of the total. So if you did away with the Department of Education, would you undo the finances of America's public schools around the country? And no, you, you know, it's not like you would be defunding them in some way, way. So that's, you know, it's a way of basically trying to get, you know, the federal government out of the business of monitoring or creating policies that have to be implemented in public schools. You know, I would put this one up there at number, I don't know, 15, 16, 17. What Donald Trump's not talking about are the huge drivers of our debt and deficit. He refuses to, to our entitlements, these fiscally imbalanced programs that are oriented towards older Americans. And as I get older, I care about issues facing older Americans. The reality is we did a pretty good job in the post World War II era of protecting older Americans against indigent poverty in their old age. I mean, we've got a healthcare system for them. We have a retirement pension program basically for them, them, but they've been badly out of balance for a long time. And it is this huge burden that we've been putting on the shoulders of young Americans for, for a long time. And so these are, these are actually at kind of a crisis point. And it's been a decade since we had something that looked like the political will to deal with those. And we all have to give Paul Ryan, the former speaker, credit for that because he staked his entire political career on shining a light on this. And you had the Simpson Bowles Commission during the Obama years, which was actually, I thought, a very good federal commission, where, where it looked like we were making some headway on these issues. And then things change for a whole bunch of reasons. And we're back to kind of kicking the can down the road. And that's what we should probably be focused on. I really don't know that the quality of America's schools are going to change for better or worse a whole lot if the Department of Education exists or not. But I do know that the future wages and opportunities for America's young people are going to be skewed in the wrong direction if we don't take care of some of these bigger, these bigger issues. So we have a dynamism problem. I mean, it doesn't feel like that living in Austin, Texas. This is one of those dynamic parts of the country. But across the country, we should have more people making, building and creating good things. And that's, that's the best way to get higher paying jobs. It's the best way to get more job satisfaction for those who have jobs. It's the best way to create upward mobility, prospects for more people because people tend to job hop their way up. And when you have a dynamic turning economy with a lot of new things starting, that's, that's kind of a recipe for success. And we are doing things from the cost of housing, which is mostly a local and sometimes state issue, to the cost of higher education, which we've talked about, to these future debt burdens, which have very real effects on the economy as a whole. All of these disproportionately affect the future well being of America's young people. So we've been taking care of older Americans for a long time when you start thinking about younger ones. And I don't think the Department of Education has a whole lot of lot to, to do with that. So that's, that's what I would really hope that, that this next administration would actually start talking about more and focusing on. And, and Trump has never shown any interest in these issues. In fact, the opposite. I think he's, he's wanted to promise older people that we're not going to touch Social Security, we're not going to touch Medicare, it's all going to be fine. Nobody really knows how long we can get away with this. I mean, we do know, kind of like when the Social Security trust fund runs out of money, but like, like when, you know, it's. It's hard to know because we are the United States. Like, what, what it means to be running the kinds of deficits that we are and the kind of debt we're amassing because we're a different country than every other country in the world. And that gives us kind of a false sense of confidence about the future sometimes, I think, and I worry about that. So that's what I wish we would be talking about, rather than whether to shut down the Department of Education or kind of chip around the edges of certain budgetary issues, but to go right where the big problems are.

It's interesting. We just had Scott Galloway on the podcast and he's been really talking about that a lot.

It's a big issue of his.

Yeah, yeah. Which is interesting because he has in his Twitter bio or has historically a product of big government. And so he, you know, and I have a ton of respect for Scott. I don't always agree with him on everything at all, but I like talking to people I don't agree with all the time. And so he simultaneously seems to think that we need a bigger government while also thinking that we are robbing from the youth to give to the old, which is his sort of tagline. Now, do you think that this administrator, I mean, we have this Department of Doge, Right. And we have, you know, Elon and Vivek and all this enthusiasm coming in to the government and this idea about cutting efficiency or cutting inefficiency and adding in more efficacy. Do you think, like, we can we tackle efficiency in government without tackling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

Yeah, I mean, you can, you can, you can tackle efficiency in government by just trying to undo unhelpful regulations that are drag on the economy or that are not necessary. And so you have the Social Security, you have the Medicare issue, which need to be dealt with legislatively. They can also be done just by the formula. The formula, it's very. These complex formulas for the way the programs are administered, but they really do need to be overhauled by law, I think. But you can do a lot to undo regulations that make it harder to build things, that make it harder to bring a product to market and all those kinds of Things that Elon Musk is talking about. Al Gore was supposed to be the reinventing government vice president back in the 90s. We've gone throughout the past generation a number of efforts and promises to actually streamline, simplify, deregulate the federal government. And it's hard to point to something that's been all that successful. So they are not going to be able to wave a wand, I think, you know, I'm a fan of picking your fights very carefully and saying, which parts of the economy do we think are unnecessarily regulated or inhibiting innovation or blocking entrance from the marketplace or favoring incumbents and making it harder for the little guy. There's plenty of areas is whether it's the EPA or whether it's. It's labor or whether it's a whole range of different regulations which affect product commercialization, those sorts of things. I think you should pick those areas that you think are kind of most ripe for disruption from a regulatory reform vantage point and just go after them, these broad ones which, and the Trump administration tried to do this, did this last time, there's talk of doing it again. Like, for every new regulation, we take two off the books. Well, that sounds great, but you can implement one very costly regulation and then eliminate two that really aren't having that much of an effect on things. And so that strikes me as kind of a blunt instrument and wouldn't be that effective in the long run in terms of if you really want impact measured as increased gdp, increased wages, increase innovation, you should pick your fights more carefully than that. So that's what I'm hopeful they'll do. And right now, I think they have a general idea in terms of the specifics. They're going to have to tell us what they're. What they're looking at. But I would, I would encourage them to focus, you know, on five or six major areas that they want to, to, to kind of free up, to liberate, basically, and go after those instead of some kind of just general formula that can be kind of gamed, which is what I think the, you know, cut to regulations for everyone that can kind of be gained.

Yeah, yeah. I think that is. That is often the problem is it sounds so much easier than it. Than it is. I mean, having spent three minutes talking to a few regulators multiple times, it's an awful, awful job.

Oh, it's terrible.

You know, I kind of had a chuckle from the people who were like, yeah, Elon Musk only gets a job for 18 months in the government. I'm like, yeah, that sounds nice. As opposed to four years, you know? You think he wants to be doing that for four years? I surely wouldn't. No. So it's. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I want to close out here with really just the last idea of. You've been in policy related to education. You've been in policy related, like, broadly to the federal government, with cities, now with talking about civil service. Where do you think most people who are not involved with politics at all, where should they be going to get information to stay up to date and relevant and learn without getting inundated and overwhelmed with the amount of information out there? You guys have a new newsletter?

We have a new newsletter, yeah. And we are going to be launching our new online magazine in about a month called Civitas Outlook. We have a new. Our website's being completely overhauled. It'll be ready in about three or four weeks.

Well, what's the URL?

Civitas Utex.

That rolls off the tongue.

That's really cool.

You could tell.

You guys are from sad.

At least showed us.

That's the. Yeah, that'll change. Right now, that's the university website, and the website's kind of a placeholder, but.

You could just probably Google Civitas.

If you give Google Civitas Institute, University of Texas, you'll find it.

Yeah, you'll find it.

And we'll have Civitas Outlook. Richard Reince, the founding editor of Law and Liberty, is our editor now, and he's lining up a group great bunch of content. And so we'll be publishing a lot of articles about what's going on in the world in economic policy, political liberty, what's. What's happening in the courts and why we should care. So that's, that's going to be a big part of what we do. And I'd encourage people to sign up for our newsletter, which you can find on our site now. And, and you'll be able to start receiving those articles in about a month's time.

And you could sound smart to all your friends.

That's right. You can cite all the smart studies, cite the studies, drop some, drop some, some highfalutin sound and academic names and, but do say Civitas Institute as much as you possibly can. If you have a large following, please include that in your tweets and, and, and, and push people our way. So I'm excited about what, what we're building there. There's other, you know, there's other places where you can get a wide range of, of Good information.

Always read everything that comes out from them related to the economy, business policy.

Yeah, I mean, so I, I, I'm a huge fan of the Economist. The magazine. Yeah. So I mean I read the economists regularly just because I love their global perspective and I love what they do. And that is one of the, my ongoing critiques of American media. We've become much more insular. I mean, you would think in, you know, now that we're a full generation into the Internet era, we'd all be more globally aware. It's really hard to find news about what's going on around the world. I mean even the top papers, they front load everything now with what's going on in American politics or whatever. You've got to click on the world tab at the New York Times or whatever, scroll down and figure out what's going on around the world. I still love watching the BBC from my, my UK days for that reason. I'll take you around the world and you know, and, and you learn about what's going on and you have a hard time hearing about that. So the Economist is great that way. I'm a big fan of our friends at the Dispatch. I think that they, they produce some really great newsletters about what's going on. And they, they're very clear. They come from a center right point of view, but they're very, they dispassionately report the news and they just do really good reporting. It's very comprehensive and they have individual newsletters which are helpful. Scott Lincecomb was just here at UT giving a talk. He writes their weekly newsletter on trade issues, economic policy, more, more generally, which I find very useful. They've got political analysis which gives you a good peek inside what's, what's going on in Washington. So they're, they're a great new, you know, fairly new five year old organization that I find is, is really worthwhile. And I, I mean I just, I work my way around the op ed pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. I'm an Atlantic subscriber. I mean I read kind of all, all these sorts of things to just get a sense of what, what people are, are thinking.

Arthur, essays in the Atlantic are beautiful.

They're great.

Yeah, not so much, much, you know, economics or, or business.

Yeah, no, just about well being and, and how to live your best life. He's, he's, he's been great that, that way. But no, I hope, I hope as the Civitas Institute starts standing up, we're going to be publishing a lot of papers on policy and stuff. I think it's, it's meant to convert academic research into accessible, digestible policy briefs and then articles on Civitas Outlook that you're a thousand worlds long, that you can, can read in, you know, under 10 minutes or, or, you know, 10 minutes or less Blessed. And will hopefully be informative for people. But I encourage everyone to read kind of broadly. Don't get stuck on that one author, that one site. You need multiple perspectives and I'm always inherently suspicious of where a writer's trying to take me. Anyway, that's just my nature. So I'm always trying to figure out what the presuppositions are, where they're leading me, even ones that I know and like. It's like I want to see kind of the counter view and I'm sort of dispositionally wired that way, which I guess has made me kind of a decent generalist over the years on policy issues. But I would encourage more people to do that.

I like to steal Tim Ferriss's question sometimes, which is like, what is the book that you've gifted the most? So not like recency bias, what's the most recent book that you've read or loved, but like, what's a book you keep coming back to or you give to others?

It's a great question. It's so funny because it kind of depends who, who the other person is. I'll have a few, I'll have a few more than three books.

Yeah.

No, no, I won't, I won't, I won't go go crazy there. I. Well, I'll answer it with just one. One book. One book that I come back to over the years is G.K. chesterton's orthodoxy. And it doesn't have anything to do with policy. It's his wide ranging, kind of defense and apologetic for his journey into eventually Roman Catholic of them. And I'm not Catholic, but it's this, it's one of the most quotable books. There's something on every page, this, these astute observations. But it's this great tour of the sort of the fairy tale quality of the world and the advantage that you get from never losing the ability to see the world as a magical and beautiful place. Here's a line in there that says it's like a two year old, you know, or a five year old would be excited if you said you opened the door and there's a dragon behind it. A two year old gets excited when you just told them you opened the door. You know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, that, that sort of childlike wonder with like things that are to us now just pedestrian and basic. There was a time when they were exciting and, and it's just really, it's not a long book, but sometimes I, I, I tell people when I read it the first time, it was like I read it twice because I'd read a page and I'd be like, what? Then I'd read the page again and flip it over and Chesterton gets quoted a lot. And you don't, you don't even have to follow his journey of faith to appreciate kind of the rich richness of his insights. But that one, I read that one early in my career when I've met people over time who seem sort of stuck or they, you know, or dealing with kind of the doldrums of life. I find it's just an encouraging read because it, it really kind of reminds you that we live in this wonderful world that's magical. There's a lot we just don't understand. And that's, that's kind of the fun of it, you know, and that's, you know, I like listening to science podcasts because I'm not a scientist and I love hearing people talk about, you know, certain breakdowns in Einstein four dimensional space time right now because it's like we don't know what the, where we're going with this. And it's like I, it should freak me out, but I kind of think it's great that there's still so much about the universe that we don't know. And that's one book that I found to be a really good read in that regard.

That's beautiful. I want to close out with, you know, the world maybe seems a little bit dark for a lot of people today. There's a lot of people that are concerned about what's happening. You know, there's a lot of mistrust we've talked about. What have you seen lately that's made you incredibly optimistic about where we're going?

Over the last five, six, seven years, I found that if you dig down like in a survey, sorry to give you a wonky survey based answer, but the survey is kind of where it's going to come from. Something that has confirmed my experience of people that I just know out there, from my friends in the, in the heartland, where I'm from and across the country, is that there's an amazing amount of optimism and resilience among working class Americans, especially black and Hispanic Americans, about their future. People that if you just listen to media narratives are especially for people who are obsessed with oppressor oppressors, oppressed dialectics. They're in the oppressed category. And you know, we were finding in our survey research that like working class black and Hispanics were more bullish on the American dream before the pandemic than working class whites were. And that working class whites were actually more optimistic about their future than everyone who was obsessing about the working class in the Trump era were thinking about. And I found that, you know, I just found that in my, my, my life right when my contractor and his crew comes over to do some work in my house. I mean, there's some of the greatest people, people that, that I've met, incredibly optimistic about their personal prospects, growing their business, being really proud of their work, raising their kids in a country they're really proud to call home, especially when like, they or their parents weren't born here. And, and that, that to me is, is kind of the, the, the real source of optimism is that the media narrative is controlled by people who think the country's going to hell in a handbasket on both sides. Now the American dream is dead, we're on the precipice, the apocalypse is about ready to start. Mostly highly educated people with relatively high incomes are the ones saying that. And even though the working class, you know, like the, again, the Trump narrative is that the working class are economically alienated, frustrated. No, they're pissed off about inflation. You know, groceries cost a lot more than they used to. It cost more to just do everything. They're upset about that. They want change. But when they think about their five year prospects, when you ask these questions and surveys, they generally are pretty optimistic about where they're going. They, they, they have a belief in the future. Future. And that's good for their kids, it's good for the communities that they live in. And it helps when you, when you just realize that that's actually what's going on around the country. It can kind of bring your blood pressure down a little bit.

I love that we'll put that survey in the show notes. I think I know the one that you're talking about. It was showing like 60 to 90% optimism levels between like blacks, Hispanics and working class Americans.

Yeah.

Of all backgrounds.

Right.

And then it was like 20 or 30% optimism by white middle class Americans, something like that.

But for a long time it's been pretty consistent. If you were progressive and you have advanced degrees and a high income. You think America's terrible, right? I mean, just in the survey, like you, you think the American dream is dead, America's done the totally wrong track, best days behind us, that kind of thing. Progressive pessimism about America has been pretty well established, but that really is, has taken off on the right as well. And it did during the Trump years. And we, we did a survey right on the eve of the 2020 election after four years of winning, right. The, you know, when, from, from 2016 to 2020, when Trump had been president. And then we asked these right track, wrong track questions. But also, do you believe America's best days are ahead of us or behind us? You know, do you believe the American dream is achievable or not? And it was true among highly educated Trump voters. Like, if you had a college degree and you earned over $100,000 a year and you're Trump voter, you are much more likely to say America Spanished than a working class Trump voter who was like, actually, I think my life's going to be better in five years. And, and working class black and Hispanic Americans also much more positive about the American. We found that in that exact survey. And so it's kind of like the, the more highly educated and the higher your income is, the more pessimistic you are. I'm not exactly sure what's driving that. You know, I, I do think time spent reading the news. You know, know, people with higher incomes and higher education do spend more minutes a day consuming news or, or on social media. And so when the narrative is negative, you're drinking that in all the time that has an effect on you. But that's actually worth remembering that, you know, the people that control the media narrative and the people that have the biggest following on social media or whatever, they're not necessarily reflecting the entire country. And some political campaigns have made really bad gambles on even policy ideas by spending too much time listening to that crowd rather than what normal Americans are actually trying to tell them. So I, you know, I, I, I think we should all just be aware of that. And, and if we fall into that demographic kind of question our own assumptions sometime, if I, if I'm freaking out or I'm feeling overly pessimistic, do I, should I, should I be, you know, you know, may, maybe there's, maybe I'm kind of overreacting a little bit. And I, I tend to think there's been a lot of overreaction lately among the people that tend to Control the narrative.

It's so true. There was. There was a really interesting conversation I was listening to the other day, and it was between two. Two entrepreneurs basically saying, you know, the other one asked, how's your business in your industry doing? And he was like, well, this industry is really tough, man. I mean, it's like, super tough over here. This industry is really, you know, I don't know. I wouldn't do it again in this one. And they were asking him. I was like, oh, really tough over here, Whatever. And I had watched this phenomenon play out so many times that, you know, I asked one of the person people that was asking that question because he has a podcast, so he had had tons of interview. And I said, hey, when was the last time you talked to somebody who was a business owner in a particular sector and you asked them, how hard is your sector to work in? How hard is this industry? And would you do a business in this industry again? How many of them say, oh, this industry is actually super easy. Anybody should come in here and do this? And I would totally choose the same game again. And the answer is zero. So this isn't survey data. This is just Cody data. But it is. And so. So I think a lot of times for young people, when they listen to people like me or maybe you, and we go, listen, small business is hard. And, you know, yeah, God, I was in the franchise world. God, you want to start a franchise? You shouldn't. But it's like the data actually said, we made millions of dollars. Was it hard to do it? Yes. Is it ever not hard to make millions? Probably not. Is my industry inherently more difficult than yours? I doubt it. It's just that I have a bias. And so now I talk you out of a thing. Thing that you might have been perfectly capable of doing, too. So that makes a ton of sense for me. Yeah, it does. All right, Ryan Streeter. Not on Twitter, but at the Civitas Institute.

That's right. Thanks for having.

So let's recover it again.