The World's Leading Social Problem with Michael Strong

Let's make sure they're totally focused for 2 hours a day on these apps that optimize their learning with both humans and AI and well-designed apps to crank it up. And what's exciting about this is I think in 20 years, 20% of students or so in the US will be in some kind of personalized high-agency learning environment.

It's hard to give a short introduction to today's guest. He's one of those rare people about whom you can say, make him one of your five, you know, in terms of influences. If you know him, to know him is to receive a gift, a gift of mentorship. His online school, The Socratic Experience, rescued my oldest son from a distressing, indeed depressing experience of public high school. Our guest is also, for me, the source of one of Underthrow's recurring mantras: criticize by creating. But he doesn't just repeat that mantra. He lives by it. Michael Strong, welcome.

Thank you, Max. It's an absolute joy to spend time with you again. It's been too long. And Max and I have known each other for at least 20 years at this point. So good to be here.

I'm feeling old now that you're over 30, but you know. Well, let's, let's jump right in with some great conversation because when two old friends catch up, you can't replace that conversation. And I want to start in what we might call your sweet spot or your strike zone, and that's education. But first, I want to start on a critical note, if you don't mind. You've referred to higher education as the world's leading social problem. Why would you say something like that?

Well, thanks. It's always fun to dive in the deep end right away. So, um, you know, I care about making the world a better place. As you know, um, I created Freedom Lights Our World with John Mackey 20 years ago because we both came from the left and wanted to make the world a better place. And Having studied economics, I realized a couple of things. One is that global prosperity is the result of economic freedom, property rights, rule of law, and economic freedom. That simple recipe leads to prosperity whenever and where it's tried. Hong Kong, Singapore being the rock stars, but on and on. And when you realize most of academia is hostile to free markets, most of academia is frankly anti-capitalist, even decades. You know, back when the Berlin Wall fell, I thought, now they'll get it. Decades later, they're still anti-capitalist. And so I see academia as directly responsible for the ongoing poverty of, you know, call it 7 billion people. So 7 billion people unnecessarily miserable because of the ideologues, the anti-capitalist ideologues in academia. That's a problem. Going further, I think all of positive psychology, all of normal human nature, certainly Western civilization implies that if you are positive, optimistic, can-do attitude, get shit done, you're going to have most likely amazing life, be an empowered, agentic human being. Meanwhile, another theme in academia is victimization all the time. There are 1,000 different ways to be a victim. And so not only at a system level are they hostile to the only economic system that brings prosperity, but at a personal level, they're damaging generation after generation of young human being in order to have that person think of themselves as a victim. And you and I can go on and on about how deeply damaging the victimhood narrative has been, again, for generations now. So we could indict academia on other charges, but let's just start with, uh, you know, 7, 8 billion unnecessarily poor. And, you know, in the developed world, this victimization narrative, narrative that actually undermines the well-being of the least well-off in our society.

Yeah, it's, it's not merely that it's, it's a victimhood narrative that, that is propagated in higher education. It's also the case that, that it's taken hold. And so as young people start to, to develop and self-reflect or exercise what one might call an internal locus of control, they tend to lack that internal locus of control and blame external forces for everything under the sun. And this becomes almost a pathology in society. When you couple that with sort of the ideological indoctrination that goes on with higher education that's against entrepreneurial markets, as you say, and against the institutions that enable those, you really start to get a cancer in society.

Yeah. No. And again, the irony of it is they claim to do it on behalf of the poor, the disenfranchised, whatever the word of the week is this week, but they're actually damaging them the most. And so, and the irony is there's been abundant evidence on our side for centuries. You know, in the 19th century, they were pretty clear about these things in the Anglo-American world. And despite abundant evidence on our side, these people have ruined generations.

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Oh, well, again, the fact that it's been going on for so long means the damage has gone down. I think that for a long time in, you know, I have huge respect for the can-do attitude of 19th century American culture. And I think into the 20th century, that was pretty prevalent. But as you know, in the '60s, the Herbert Marcuse sort of thing where we have— we should suppress ideas that we think— or the left said they should repress ideas they think are wrong, uh, and it was righteous to do so. That has gotten into the point where, you know, woke is the prevalent term, but in the last decade, two decades, the kind of woke victimhood narrative has overwhelmingly influenced public education. So yeah, the cancer has gotten deeper and deeper, at least within public education, and sadly many prestigious private schools.

The Deutsche slash— oh, what's the Italian Marxist's name? The long march through the institutions. Yeah, that has—

that has— Gramsci.

Thank you. That has been truly a successful march, if you like to use that terminology. And I think we must admit that what we are seeing now is a kind of an almost finally the antibodies of the body politic or, or the soul of the republic are starting to come out. And this immune response is creating a kind of counterpower against this long march through the institutions. So we're starting to see, you know, some of it is, is a little, you know, smacks of authoritarianism from the top down in the Trump administration as they start to withhold funding and, and so on. And of course, I, I would prefer that higher education not be subsidized to any degree, particularly, you know, Ivy League schools with billion-dollar endowments. But never mind that. There is a rolling back and there's a sense in which people are now waking up to the fact that these indoctrination factories are here. And that we're paying for them both with our tax dollars and our tuition. So it seems to me, and this might be a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation at the moment, but perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps it's apt. This response to the counter is turning violent, and this violence can be expressed not just in, you know, murderous assassination, which we've just gone through, but also in tearing down property, setting things afire, rioting, and so on. And this seems to be increasingly justified and justifiable in the minds of the youth. Do you connect that to the ideological, um, pathological aspects of the academy as well, or do you think these are distinct? Phenomena.

So as you know, Max, um, I am constitutionally optimistic. So given the harsh negative reality you just dumped in there, I want to start with a positive note and then we'll back into the negative side, of which it is a horrific— it's truly horrific. But on the positive side, I think you're right that, um, the woke overplayed their hand. You know, the Marxists were insane, communism collapsed, we thought maybe things would get better, you know, for a late point in the late '90s you know, early 20th century, maybe there was hope that, you know, our good libertarian movement would have some more power. And then the woke left went crazy. But the positive side I want to bring up is that for, you know, 100 years, it was always assumed that young people would be on the left. You know, all, you know, young— if you're not a Marxist when you're 20, you don't have a heart. When you're still a Marxist when you're 40, you don't have a brain, that kind of thing. But in recent years, young men have gone dramatically to the right. And again, I'm, I'm not big on Trump. You know, his violations of rule of law and, you know, constitutional principles are severely problematic. That said, the woke left is so problematic. I see these young men in dramatic numbers shifting to the right. And part of it, I think, is if you're a teenage boy and you're told that you are sexist, racist, no matter how good a heart you are, And I've known really wonderful teenage boys who the school system and then the university system would constantly drone on about how they were sexist, racist, basically evil people with no appreciation of their individuality, their heart, their soul, their efforts. And so I think that that played a role in shifting them away, alienating them in a big way from the left. And as a consequence, on the optimistic side, while there is You know, there's a generation of people who took jokes won't Kool-Aid in college. In some cases, they became anti-antifa violent. And that's a huge cancerous poison. Yeah, it's very, very scary. At the same time, the fact that large numbers of young men have rejected that establishment and again are rejecting university, I see these young men as the hope for the future. You know, we get them aligned with classical liberal principles and entrepreneurial action. And this generation of young men and, you know, some young women, but the young men are leading this one. That's, that's kind of my positive spin on the really horrific reality that you appropriately bring up.

Yeah. And these are, you know, more and more of them can be— can criticize by creating, as, as you like to say. And I, and I do, too. There is, there is a disconcerting, let's call it subgroup among these young men who they— there are many different avatars for this, what I would call masculinity movement. Okay. Where it's a sort of a turning away from— it's— I've characterized it elsewhere as if the Republicans are the daddy party and the Democrats are the mommy party. Then you get the tyrannical father that is the unhealthy variant of that archetype and the devouring mother, which is the unhealthy archetype for the feminine. And there is some tyrannical father avatars out there who are pulling young men in, for example, like the Andrew Tates and some of the, some of the sort of manosphere figures that are not really giving out healthy messages and not communicating in a way that you would want your young man to hear to become a person of integrity. You know, I see you as a kind of person that I love the idea that you were able, at least in some limited fashion, to mentor my son. And that level of mentorship is they're frequently getting from, from these online avatars that want to distinguish themselves by being harsh or vulgar or otherwise, you know, misogynist to a degree that is, that is unhealthy for society and for young men who are developing. But I do agree that there is enough of the healthy masculine, where they're turning away from this sort of poisonous, devouring mother social justice fundamentalism. And I, you know, probably get in trouble for characterizing that as feminine, unhealthy feminine. But never, never you mind. We can come back to that another day. In terms of younger folks, though, there's a— there's also a pathology that's distinct from this ideological stuff. And This is in primary and secondary education, and you have expertise in this as well, as we've said. What is it that is— what is creating some of the ill effects in government schools, in our sort of public educational institutions for primary and secondary education? And why are those effects happening? What's— what is it about the government schools that creates those?

You know, I would just again go way back. Now, this time I'll start negative in order to end up very positive. First, you and I are libertarians. I think government schooling is a disaster, has been a disaster. I think in the 19th century they were able to sell people on, hey, we— universal reading, writing, math are good. Reading, writing, arithmetic. So school in the 19th century, the common school movement in the 19th century started out with a couple of hours a day. Couple of months a year, couple of years of education, just reading, writing, math basics. And, you know, that was a camel's nose under the tent. There was a plausible rationale for that. You know, I expect you would agree we could have done it privately, but okay, reading, writing, math. But then gradually the school day became longer, the school year became longer, and more years of education were required. Um, in my belief, and then also localism, it used to be one-room schoolhouse, very locally controlled, so even it was In some sense, government was basically a community school. In the 20th century, things became dramatically more bureaucratic. So we went from 200,000 school districts in 1920 to just 20,000 school districts in 1970. So government basically controlled education and then layers of federal control on top of that by the late 20th century. Public choice theory 101, government control leads to disaster. In particular, I think that whatever grounds there were for teaching elementary children reading, writing, math, the academic school was never a good fit for high school students or what we call high school students. We would call them young adults. You know, in every society in history at puberty, 12, 13, you have a rite of passage. You go off, you know, in indigenous tribes, you go off and hunt with the men, gather with women, or in early US, Ben Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, all these people started working at 13. And it used to be normal for teenagers, what we now call teenagers, to be responsible adults in the world. The name teenager, the term teenager and adolescent are 20th century inventions. This is a whole category of human being that didn't exist before. And then it was only in the 1930s, um, that a majority of students began taking high school. And then only by the 1950s that a majority began graduating from high school. So the whole high school phenomenon is extremely recent by historical historical standards. It's not an accident that the whole notion of teenage rebellion became a trope in the '50s and '60s and so forth. In the 19th century, you're out working. There's no teenage rebellion kind of thing. And so I think enforcing these incredibly powerful, active young people into 30 students in a room, passive all day long, was a recipe for disaster. Teenage suicide— there's a lot of attention to the fact that teenage suicide has gone up in recent years, probably accelerated by social media. What people people don't realize is teenage suicide is up 300% since the 1950s. And that was by 1990, it was up about 300% already. So the big— the biggest increase in teenage suicide was not due to cell phones. It's due to public school, I would say, taking the life out of these kids, literally. So when we ask why things are awful, well, it was a bad idea from the get-go to force all these energetic young people into cages for the best years of their life. Quick riff on the cages: famous, um, rat cage experiment where they got rats addicted to cocaine in cages. They let them out in a park, rat park. The rats go out in the park, they don't care about the cocaine anymore. Caging people is just not a good idea. And so what do we get? You combine that with, uh, the, the almost impossibility for moral formation. I think one of the things that people don't realize is school does not form morals. Pop culture is basically forming the morals. So if you don't have parents really form morals, we're no longer a very religious society, and school is basically relativistic or, you know, worse, then you have Andrew Tate and porn and social media slop and just stupid TikTok videos all day, you know, gaming, first-person shooter gaming and whatnot. The souls of our children are being formed by crap. Schools bore the crap out of them. Parents are lost. I could go on, but no, that's where we get it dark. Just to spin back to the positive side, it's sort of—

it's almost like a nexus. It's almost like a, uh, not one phenomenon, um, multiple factors that go into this, this, uh, I guess adolescent pathology. Or so you have this almost ping-ponging between a digital prison and by evening, and then by day they're being warehoused in this excessively standardized 5-by-5 chairs, sit still, sit up and pay attention, that sort of stuff. And they— and in some contexts, there's almost like this pressure to perform to push the lever to get the pellet in terms of the education outcomes. So all of that adds up with adolescent mental health problems. Is that— is that more or less what you mean?

All true. Yeah, I know. And I want to add layers. Another layer is of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. And my read on that is all cultures around the world were basically virtue cultures until the 20th century. That is, whether you're talking about the Cherokee or Papua New Guinea or Catholics in the Middle Ages, whatever it was, young people were raised with a standard of excellence. There was a common culture, common norms, common rituals, and the young men, they had a template for how to behave as young men. What does it mean to go out and hunt your first deer or to go out and sell your first gadget or whatever it is, even go to work on a factory, whatever it is, this is what it meant to be an adult. And in many ways, the background, you're a philosopher as well, the relativism. So just as we entered the 20th century and we have, they're caged in public schools and the entertainment slop is overwhelming them. We get cultural relativism at the same time. Our elites, and there's another indictment of academia, they no longer believe in a norm of excellence. They're no longer transmitting an aspirational way to behave. The world. Instead, you know, this goes back to, you know, the Marxists. They're undermining, undermining all norms of decency where they aggressively attack bourgeois morality. And so, yeah, it's a perfect storm in so many ways. I think the positive thing is once parents realize it doesn't have to be this way, and this is why I'm big on homeschooling, unschooling, alternative schooling, microschooling, Private schooling, religious schooling, military schooling. As soon as parents realize, no, I could put my child in an environment where they do care about my child's soul and spirit and intention and excellence and role models and heroes and the narratives we tell them and all of these things. Again, let a thousand schools bloom. I see, thanks to educational scholarship accounts, ESAs, a renaissance in the United States because I see thousands and then millions of parents pouring out of the public schools, and finally relearning how to raise our children. I like to talk of the, the dark century from 1950 to 2050 when most students were in public high schools. And if we can get most schools— students out of public high schools by 2050, we'll no longer be destroying the souls of generations of teenagers.

And we'll get to return to a condition of experimentation over standardization. Because it's really in those feedback loops, that discovery process of, of education and interaction, that where the good stuff is. I hesitate to use this metaphor because it— because plants are so passive. But if you think of it as being like a greenhouse or a garden, there are different, different flowers, different plants have different needs. More or less sunlight, more or less food, water, and so on. And standardization tends to be this amount of water, this amount of sunlight, and so on, with, with such regularity that it assumes that every child is an orchid. If you'll, if you, if you'll let me beat the metaphor up. But what you're saying is we need, we need a thousand experiments, a thousand different approaches for the particular developmental paths of different unique kids. And I think that's wonderful. Now, you have a different— you in particular have a style of teaching that I think is really interesting and people— and it goes back, I think, to this idea of virtue, but it also goes back to Socrates, who tried to understand what virtue was all about. We call, you call it Socratic practice or Socratic style of teaching, and you have been an innovator in this space. So what I want to do is play a clip of you engaging a young woman in Socratic pedagogical practice. Let's watch.

How was the first chapter of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for you?

It was good. It was, uh, I had to read it, I had to read the same section a couple times to kind of understand what it meant, but there was a couple things that I like actually understood and could describe, I think, but not the whole thing.

Got it. No problem. I remember certainly when I first went to college and was reading difficult material, sometimes I would have to read it 3 times to make sense of it, and even then not completely. Sense. So what struck out? What themes did you find most interesting in that first chapter of The Selfish Gene?

Uh, well, there was two that I distinctly remember and understood. The first one was right in the beginning where he— I'm paraphrasing, but he said something like, um, a species isn't really intelligent if it doesn't understand evolution. So that means that humans weren't actually intelligent until Charles Darwin discovered evolution— figured out evolution, which I thought was interesting because it depends on what you define intelligent as, the species. And then the second theme was him defining selfishness and altruism. And I meant to look up altruism, I just haven't yet. But what I've been getting from the book, or at least when he was giving examples Or he was giving examples in like wildlife. So an altruistic relationship would be when you're risking your, your life for another or for another member of your species. Whereas selfishness, you'd be— I mean, selfish and not risking your life for anything.

Got it. So, so how old is she? She is 13. I began having Socratic dialogues with her and recording them on YouTube when she was 4. So there are 9 years of Socratic dialogues almost weekly with her and I at YouTube. She has written 3 books. She is taking Harvard CS50, Harvard's introduction to computer science. And yeah, she'll meet with me on the weekend to— we were discussing The Odyssey, the Fitzpatrick translation. Now we're trying Richard Dawkins. I'm going to switch over to Judith Rich Harris. So at 13, she's ready for Real intellectual dialogue and real books.

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What's underthrow? If overthrow is violent, underthrow is peaceful yet powerful. Real change doesn't start in Washington. Casting your vote with millions is like crying a teardrop into the ocean. Instead, we build consent-based communities that make traditional power structures obsolete. Left, right, or center, it doesn't matter. What matters is creating options for opting out and opting in. We build parallel systems in people thrive, then just leave the old systems behind. It's about choosing communities, not imposing them. So support the show, feed my kids, read the newsletter, and discover why most subversive acts amount to building a better civilization together. Visit underthrow.org. So do kids like Alana learn and develop better under your theory of schooling than traditional schooling, or do you think that there are some kids for whom traditional schooling is more appropriate?

Well, I'll go ahead and be harsh. As a learner, I went to good public schools back in the 1970s, and I would say my good public school experiences were in the bottom 1% of my learning experiences. As an adult, I learned so much so quickly in so many ways. The thought of sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher talk at me and doing exercises out of a textbook, I couldn't imagine a worse way to learn. You know, there may be, you know, 75% of high school students are unhappy at school. Two-thirds are not engaged in learning. You know, 30% bump in teen suicides during high school. Maybe those 25% who are happy are doing okay at high school. So I can't claim it's bad for all, but I'm a big advocate, as you know, of kind of personalized high-agency schooling, Acton Alpha, Montessori, Socratic Experience, Prinda, Premer, all kinds of, there's a wealth of new models. I'm excited about that. Just to dig into the Socratic piece. So there was a famous essay in the rationalist community by Eric Kole, neuroscientist, Why We Don't Create Einsteins Anymore. He talked about aristocratic tutoring, and of course tutoring is great. By aristocratic, he means not remedial, but high-end, great tutors tutoring your kid. Of course, that's great. But there was another essay by the person who did research, and this was research on what created geniuses in the past. There was another essay created by the man who researched Eric Hohl's essay, and it's The Lives of Hendrik Carlsen, The Lives of Exceptional Children. And in addition to the aristocratic tutoring, he highlights immersion in an intellectual milieu. You know, when John Stuart Mill was growing up, his dad, James Mill, would have all these famous smart people hanging out talking philosophy. So was it the tutoring in Greek and Latin that made John Stuart Mill a genius? And/or was it the, hey, every dinner table conversation is absolutely amazing all the time? Probably both. The other thing that Hendrik Carlsen emphasizes is actually freedom to explore. He's concerned, as am I, that if you don't give your child any freedom to explore, if you're completely, you know, either public school or we'll pick on the Tiger Moms, controlling what they're learning and what they're doing 24/7, they don't have this kind of exploration attitude towards life. And I think, you know, entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, it requires some freedom. You need to have freedom to explore. So I'm with, kind of the Carlson version of with children, we want to give them freedom to explore. Yes, we want to nail their skills with tutoring or apps or whatever, but we also want to engage them in intellectual dialogue. I see my one-on-one dialogues with Alana, and of course her parents have been modeling their home conversations on that, as providing an intellectual milieu. It's not quite, you know, James Mill with the world's greatest philosophers coming over the house, but Immersing your child in intellectual dialogue and intellectual exploration from a young age. Super powerful, powerful recipe.

Yeah. And it strikes me that there is a little bit of a mirroring there as well, where by diffusion, I guess you could say, the, the mentee, the person who's being mentored or guided or taught, is picking up some of these patterns of experimentation on the part of— I like to call them, and I guess you would too, you, you certainly typify this— an educational entrepreneur. One of the features of an entrepreneur is that they have to be creative, they have to be innovative, they have to do something that allows them to draw in people, customers if you like, to compete with other styles of learning. So What are some of the— so if you have standardization across the board in the mode and manner, not just in the mode and manner of teaching, but also in the hoped-for outcomes. In other words, I can pass a certain standardized test. I can do these basic things, but it tends to put the curriculum, the curricula in tiny little boxes. And you check those boxes. It's almost like filling out the bubble sheets that we did when I, when, when I was in school becomes the manner of the sum of education for a student. It's like, how many boxes is— how many boxes can we check for them? But in order to be competitive, an educational entrepreneur has to come up with alternatives, has to experiment with different approaches, What's, what's one more, what's one more way that, that people are doing that now that you're finding to be successful apart from Socratic practice and, and, and facilitating autodidacticism or self-learning?

Yeah, well, you know, the big famous case that's getting a lot of media is Alpha Schools. Joe Lamont is a billionaire, founded Trilogy in the 1990s. He said he's going to put more than $1 billion behind Alpha School, which is a spinoff of Acton, which is incredible to have that level of resources to create innovative alternative education is incredible. They famously have something called 2-Hour Learning, rebranded as Time Back, where basically for 2 hours a day, the kids do apps mostly in reading, writing, math, mostly really reading and math. And they talk about the AI. Most of what the AI is doing is actually tracking attention, and then they have human coaches and mentors, plus an incentive system to get the kids focused. As an educator, I know the number one kids aren't learning is they're not focused. Again, two-thirds of kids in high school aren't even engaged in learning. So one of the reasons school is so ineffective is most kids are just tuned out. So Alpha is all in, in terms of let's make sure they're totally focused for 2 hours a day on these apps that optimize their learning, with both humans and AI and well-designed apps to crank it up. And what's exciting about this is they're doing variants. The core Alpha School has projects and life skills in the afternoon, but they have a sports academy, the way athletics outside the 2 hours. They have an esports academy doing that. They have a Montessori version or Montessori outside the 2 hours. You know, the whole idea is to just nail the core skills, reading, writing, maths, and they're using a test score metric and trying to optimize the test score. They say their kids learn twice as fast as regular kids in schools. Frankly, I think that's easy to do because most kids learn so little in schools, but it's really smart marketing. And then, you know, I think they're doing a good job and I think they're opening the door for all of the rest of the models where, you know, if Alpha was charging less for their 2-hour learning, I might use it. We use Math Academy, the same math app they use, and it's much less expensive. But it's still— they're knocking the— knocking the doors open so that Again, with ESAs and the boom in alternative schools, I think in 20 years, 20% of students or so in the US will be in some kind of personalized high-agency learning environment. Wonderful.

That's fabulous. One of the things I would— we probably don't have enough time, but one of the things that I want to think about in terms of these competitive forces in education is how these innovations diffuse among young people, particularly the least advantaged in society. And I know there are some models that are sort of franchise models like Thales Academy out of the Southeast in North Carolina, particularly Bob Luddy's educational efforts as an educational entrepreneur. He's discovered that there are some tried and true techniques, and they might not be exactly what they might be more rote. They might be less imaginative or creative, but they tend to work in and the parents tend to be happy. What's also interesting about them is that they give people who, besides elites, and let's just say anybody who can afford private school is an elite. They give them opportunities for access for the least advantaged. They have, I think, 20% of their students are on scholarship of some form, which means they pay what they can. And new models like this are also starting to fold in kids from disadvantaged, financially disadvantaged families. That's also really cool. And because a lot of people just want to hang on to this idea of government schools because they feel like if this were a completely market phenomenon, people would have no access to education. And I think, I think models like Thales belie that, that notion.

Totally agree. And of course, the joke is, what if the government wasn't involved in food? How would we possibly eat?

Well, exactly. Yeah.

You know, 7-Eleven, gourmet restaurants, vegan restaurants, Whole Foods, Safeway, you know, grow it yourself, yada yada yada. And of course, nonetheless, Mamdani wants to have government grocery stores in New York.

Of course.

Of course. And just college-educated people are his— young people are his main constituency, which shows— that's another indictment. You know, we probably have a 1,000-page indictment of universities. But the fact that the college-educated are voting for Mendonia is insane.

But anyway, rent freezes, rent freezes, that really works well.

There we go.

When you have price controls, you know, nobody has an investment to build more housing units because they know that they're not going to be able to profit from it because of the price freezes. It's just the return of, of just bad ideas and bad economics is— it's stunning. And that's what the mixed economy gives us. But yeah, that's perhaps a good—

yeah, sorry, the positive. So yes, most people think in terms of public schools, but already in both Arizona and Florida, fewer than 50% of students attend zoned public schools at this point. Also the case in New Orleans, DC, Gary, Indiana, Detroit. So we're seeing, and I think we'll see a tipping point. You know, most people follow the herd, you know, the technology adoption cycle. On the alternative education, we've already passed the early adopters, but simply in terms of moving away from the zone public school in Arizona and Florida, it's already a minority still there. So basically from there on out, it's a cleanup process. So again, more than half the students in the US will have access to educational scholarship accounts the next few years. We already have two states where more than half are out of zone public schools. I predict, yeah, the public schools will continue to lose market share from here on out. It'll take 40, 50 years, but it's a cleanup process at this point.

Beautiful, beautiful. That is most promising. And it may mean that when we start to see the fruits of that, really, I'll be an old man, but that, that's okay. I'd rather look on it and see it happen. Than have it not happen at all. And there's something that I want to extrapolate from, from this that's kind of a segue, but I think it's an interesting one. And that is going back to the beginning of what you said about the institutions that give rise to prosperity. Okay. It's the institutions that give rise to creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation without limiting those for the entrepreneurs. The providers, people who are here to serve us better, right? And in the education space, when people can serve us better, they can experiment, they can find ways to teach kids and how— or have kids learn or facilitate their learning. That is beautiful and abundant. It can happen with the right institutions. And that is despite the fact of standardization and the existence of the government schools that continue to sort of pump resources out of the private sector. But that makes me want to shift gears to, to this notion writ large. In a way, the notion is writ large, but the experimentation is perhaps smaller. You have coined the term, if I recall, zoning for prosperity. In the developing world, in the poorest parts of the world. What do you mean by that and why on earth should that work?

Well, great question. So, you know, when I created Freedom Lights Our World with John Mackey, our approach was entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. Microentrepreneurship was cool, tech entrepreneurship was cool, social entrepreneurship was cool. You know, when I first met you, we were kind of just getting this started. And then I started looking around and I met Mark Fraser in DC while I was in Arlington working at IHS. And Mark Fraser had been in the free zone industry, special economic zone industry, and he pointed out that poor countries were poor because of bad law and governance. Not only should we have special economic zones with reduced laws and regulations, but we should actually have, I mean, reduced taxes and regulations. We should also have zones with higher quality rule of law and regulatory freedom. So we should actually have a legal system inside a zone that improve the quality of the rule of law and the free enterprise system within that zone. By the way, shout out to you for interviewing Bob Haywood. Bob Haywood, former executive director of the World Economic Processing Zones Association. You know, he's right there with Milton Friedman as probably among the people who have brought more people out of poverty in the 20th century than anyone else. And you're one of the very few people to have called attention to him. But yeah, the zone movement has kind of come out of nowhere. In 2004, the Dubai International Financial Center, the rulers of Dubai realized that Sharia law was not great for finance. Whereas if you look at common law, New York, London, Chicago, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore all run common law. And you can think of it as an operating system. So they created the Dubai International Financial Center, hired common law judges to adjudicate common law business decisions in the zone. Now, 20 years later, Dubai is a top 10 global financial center. So this whole notion of let's create zones with higher quality law and governance is a big win. Prospera in Roatán, Honduras is one. There's another one on the Honduran mainland. The Honduran government is Marxist and is trying to kill these. My wife is trying to open up additional zones in Africa, but we're part of a movement. Actually, on the optimistic about young people, I've seen dozens, I'd like to say hundreds, maybe not yet hundreds of bright young people come into this movement because they see that both it's creating prosperity— what's more exciting than that for the global poor— plus careers. And I think this is going to become one of the biggest industries in the 21st century, because if you think of most of the world's landmass as zoned for poverty, terrible law and governance— Africa is the most regulated region in the world. Poor countries are poor because of this crap. And so So if you could, if we could flip millions of acres and bring millions of people into these zones with Hong Kong, Singapore, or better law and governance, boom. How much more exciting is, can you get than that? And a lot of people are gonna become wealthy doing this. So win-win-win-win.

This is such a strange thing for people to imagine, by the way, is that you can be a service provider, an entrepreneur, who delivers governance services. And in fact, the episode before yours just dropped today with Gabe Delgado, who is one of the co-founders of Prospera. And I really hope that that gets legs because I think it's really interesting for— just like creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation, these three words in that order I got from you. And I always use them together. I want to, I want to honor my mentors because creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation is what drives this. This is— these are the products of human minds and human efforts that create the good things in the world that we enjoy sustainably. Right. It is not redistribution. It is not— it is not any other force. It is not really even investment. At the end of the day, it has to be those three things embodied by someone who, for lack of a better way to put it, gets stuff done. You in the entrepreneurship space, Gabe, in the, in the governance services space, and perhaps soon your wife. Let me give you an opportunity to brag on your amazing wife, and hopefully we can get her on the show soon.

Absolutely. So Magat Wade, Senegalese entrepreneur, charismatic, beautiful, dynamic. She gets standing ovations when she speaks. She can go to UC Berkeley with the leftists and get leftist students standing up applauding her because she, going back to the bleeding heart libertarian, she talks about how sadly, I think the left doesn't care about Africa anymore. There are people dying at sea trying to get to Europe in Africa. There are people going through Libya and becoming enslaved. As she says, people, Black people are sold for $300 in Libyan slave markets today. How much media does that get? CNN once every 5 years might do an article. But for her, it's a living reality. She has towns, we've got a factory in Senegal where young people leave because they can't get a job. So she, I would say, is very much The moral high ground is entrepreneurial job creation and the creation therefore of free market legal systems to allow entrepreneurial job creation. Because if we don't do this, African people are dying unnecessarily. Really, because of her, I'm in touch with Senegal almost daily, and it's normal there for people to die. I mean, in the US, you and I might have somebody die occasionally. It's very sad. You go to the funeral. They're, oh, so-and-so dropped dead last week. Why? Nobody knows. It's amazing how routine death is in this society. And we don't even think about this. And so Magat's coming from a place not of feeling sorry for them, but she experienced coming to the West and creating a successful entrepreneurial career. Skin to Skin, her current product line, is sold at Whole Foods Markets. A previous one was as well. She had another product line at Nordstrom's. She sees that Africans, when they have access to the legal environment— the US is far from perfect, but it's way better than Africa. When Africans have access to a legal environment that allows them to create prosperity, innovation, entrepreneurship, voilà. And she brings a moral passion to this like no one else. And she's bringing that moral passion to the creation of new cities in Africa. Imagine 1, 2— if 20 years from now we could have 5 or 10 Singapore, better quality cities, just use Singapore as the gold standard of economic freedom today. Amazing. Millions of Africans come out of poverty eventually, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. China saw some 700 million people see a 10x increase in urban wages in the last 30 years. And people don't even realize You know, oh, should we donate a few dollars to Africa? No, let's have a 10x increase in wages in the next 30 years. Come on.

Yeah, it's— it takes me back to this conversation we were having earlier about higher education and the narratives that happened. I mean, one of the most— one of the most horrible narratives goes back through the 20th century, which is this idea, not— not just from the Frankfurt School, the notions of Frantz Fanon and settler colonialism, this sort of thing, and decentering whiteness and decolonizing the world. One of the things that spread throughout Africa during the 20th century was academic Marxism, which paradoxically was a white European phenomenon to start. Uh, if— I mean, I think that's undeniable. And yet so many of those institutions, sort of Marxist socialist institutions, took root in Africa to the point that one of the things that your wife has taught me is that African countries have the most regulations and barriers to entry for entrepreneurs than any other places on Earth.

Huge.

Huge, and that, that's a, that, that's a terrible, terrible problem. So someone like her who had this entrepreneurial zeal, essentially she had to grow up and leave Senegal in order to become the entrepreneur that she could in order to return to Senegal to attempt to start a little venture there in, in her home country. Do you think that that's changing? Do you think that they've had enough of the failures of Marxism in Africa and of the regulatory state that it brings with it?

Well, um, again, I'll do an optimistic thing. I think what Africa is going for it is it's not nearly as Marxist as Latin America. What's weird about Latin America, whether you're talking Venezuela, Honduras, Cuba, is still old-fashioned. You know, you, you hear the things people say and it's like it's still 1980 or something. You know, there's this still crazy level of Marxism that exists in Latin America and a lot of intellectuals complain about US Marxists. But I think Latin American intellectual Marxists are— yeah, they're still back in 1980, whereas Africa, they're a tiny, tiny bit of Marxist intellectuals, but they have no influence. Nobody cares about them. As Magath says, Africans just want to be rich. They're tired of being poor. And so I would say it's way less ideological than Latin America. And at the same time, they haven't yet found a path. And so one of the reasons she's passionate about a zone strategy is it is so hard to change all the laws of a nation state. And not only do I have literally hundreds of thousands, probably millions of regulations. So if the legislature, you get one through the legislature, okay, what does that do? Not much. Whereas zone, one of the strategies we're using is a, blanket elimination of all the regulations on the land. So basically eliminate all existing regulations on a piece of land and that way you can have a fresh start. And so we see a zone strategy is just much more promising even in countries, there are countries where we talk to the leaders, at least they sort of talk the talk, not all of them. Francophone West Africa is still very leftist, Anglophone Africa, again, you and I could go into a riff on France versus Britain, but Anglophone Africa is much more pro-market than Francophone. And there are Anglophone African countries that are kind of sort of getting it in their own fuzzy way. And I think there, if we go the right way with the zone strategy, there's reason to be optimistic about free market zones in Anglophone Africa in the coming decades.

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Well, I'll not be original in this case and go with criticize by creating. I would say it's so much more satisfying. There is an epidemic of depression among young people, and I think there's a strong case to be made that a lot of it is because they're addicted to politics and especially addicted to a left-wing woke version of politics, which alienates almost everybody. But people on the right are alienated by politics. It's all hatred. You and I agreed on this. Politics is a hate fest. And so if you want to indulge yourself in the hate fest, okay, not a good way to lead your life. One of the reasons I focused on entrepreneurial solutions, whether it's in education or in, you know, new zones or in anything else we do, is you wanna take initiative and do things. And it's hard to be an entrepreneur, but you can also join a company, be part of a startup team. You can be an intrapreneur at a company, you can be a service provider. There are various ways in which you don't want to have, you wanna be in charge of your life. You wanna be able to make a difference by means of your own actions and not be dependent on this or that side of the civil war winning. And again, there are times and situations where we may have to sadly participate in politics, but as much as possible, this goes back to being a voluntary world. If we can go more towards a voluntary world where everybody is opting in, and you write beautifully on this, Max, I should share more of your articles because listen to Max. We need a voluntary world where people can take initiative to make their own lives better and lives of others around them better. And ultimately, I see this playing out as in a voluntary world, all of us would wake up all day every day and we would make a living by adding value to the lives of others. That's, you know, uh, free enterprise 101. And I think for you and I on this side of the fence, it's so obvious, it's such a dramatically better world. But most people are stuck in the endless civil war, and it's destroying the young people of this country. It's causing the assassinations such as those Charlie Kirk. And if we can nudge people in the direction of a more voluntary world, individually they'll be happier, community-wise they'll be happier, globally, globally will be happier. So criticize by creating to create peaceful, prosperous flourishing for all of humanity.

Michael Strong, thank you so much.

Thank you. Good to see you, Max.