Q&A Part 2| David Theroux

and so forth, you have to have a cultural shift. You have to have a cultural shift where people say, no, we won't accept that. That's not acceptable morally or economically, and we are saying that we're gonna take a stand that this is the way it should be. We want the law to reflect these values, not— we're not gonna hand that authority over to you unilaterally. So that's the power of it, okay? And so politics is downstream of culture. That's the key point, all right? So we're a 501 foundation, a nonprofit. We can't advocate bills and do state initiatives. Tim has had a number that he's done. He had the 5-state initiative which didn't get approved for the ballot. Before that, he did one on school choice. And those were very admirable efforts. They didn't win, but they also educated a certain number of people. So the key is that What we're in the business of doing is to change the culture and to connect with people on issues that they most care about and show them the way out. And to do that in targeted ways with academics and journalists and opinion makers and what have you. And to do that in huge scales like LoveGov. So as of about a week ago, we had 1.8 million combined views of LoveGov. There are 80 million millennials, right? 97.4% of the viewers of Love Gov are millennials. We know that because you can target market people and you can track who watches it very specifically. Something we couldn't have done 5 years ago or 10 years ago. It would have been inconceivable. So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but I think that's the best way to look at it.

How do you How do you feel about certain things where it's like private companies like Facebook or Google carrying huge amounts of our own private data that effectively are gathered in ways that we are not declared, like not clearly declared or buried in privacy policies or things like that versus government systems?

Well, there are 2 parts of it. One is that if you are, when you apply for a credit card or any sort of information that you are turning over to somebody, that's a contract. You are agreeing to that and the contract should stipulate what the terms are. Can they share it? I mean, for example, we as an institute have— we are supported by private donations. And so we have a policy of not sharing the names of people who are donors. We think it's— unless they give us the right to do that. So that's part of something called the Donors' Bill of Rights. So we have that on our website so people can trust that we are going to protect their information. Other firms may not promise that. In the case of Google— I mean, of Facebook and others, they're confronted with another problem. And the other problem is that under the Homeland Security Acts, Patriot Act and so forth, they're obligated to share it. Verizon has no choice. That's why in the video series, in the 5th episode, when Gov has this mail visitor, he's from the cell phone company, all right? And the implication is that it was Verizon or some company like that. So Verizon is obligated to share the information, and most tech companies are obligated to have backdoors in their software programs, like Microsoft and others, so the government can access that information today. Now there are people who want to create ways to have crypto locks and so forth, which is something that is being pursued. And I imagine it's going to be pretty hard to oversee that or to overrule that globally, but that's part of the battle. But there are people who want to control everything, all the information about everything you do. As Gov said, he doesn't even have to open the envelope. Essentially, he can get all the emails and just from certain aspects of the emails, the words that are in the emails, he can put together pretty sophisticated, essentially, background information on the choices you make, who you are, what your voting habits are, what your lifestyle is like, and so on. And people who are interested in socialism, essentially central planning, They need that information because they believe in the folly that with it they can somehow achieve their ends. Last question.

Yeah.

How does the independent institute generate income or sustain itself? Is it primarily through book sales, private donations, and who are some of your biggest private donors?

Well, we— as you can tell from the video, we started out with no money. And it was bootstrapped up. It's a lot easier to create a so-called think tank. I hate that term because it's so pejorative. It's the idea that there are people in this tank and they're looking down at everybody and telling them what they should know. But anyway, that's what we're called. Anyway, the idea is that we had to build a number of sort of customers who were members and supporters. There are people who support us because they care about healthcare or they care about housing or they care about war and peace or civil liberties or something. There are others who just want to be able to get our new book or get the independent review or get our op-eds that we send them or something. There are services that we provide and they get a tax deduction for it. We take no government money. We do no contract work. We're not a consulting firm. We're not for hire. So the idea is that we do work that is independent, hence the name, and all of the work that we do, all the things that are said in LoveGov as far as the information on the app is backed up by peer-reviewed work. Does anybody not know what peer review means? Don't be afraid if you don't. Peer review is just the standard in scholarship that you invite a group of scholars in that field to critically analyze what you do to check for errors. So we're somewhat unusual in the so-called think tank world that everything we do goes through peer review. All of our books, the journal, all the articles that this is based on, and so on. And so we are an organization that's completely private and independent, is the idea. And we— the idea is to reinforce its independence so there's no big donors who can threaten us by threatening to pull out and we have to go with what they want because We don't have that. We have a broad diversification of support, and we like it that way. All right, thank you.

Thank you.