#AIS: Joe Lonsdale on the problem with higher education

Episode Summary

Episode Title: Joe Lonsdale on the problem with higher education - Joe Lonsdale discussed issues he sees in society like homelessness, job training programs, infrastructure projects, and higher education. He believes many of these areas are broken because of a lack of accountability, transparency, and proper incentives. - Lonsdale gave the example of Austin's approach to homelessness, where the city brought in homeless camps downtown in order to get more funding, even though it led to spikes in deaths, trafficking, and drugs. He sees a similar dynamic with housing-first strategies around the country. - Lonsdale argued that dogma has taken over universities, replacing the pursuit of truth. He stated that modern campuses no longer foster debate, humility, and respect for different views. Instead, there is an intolerance for dissenting opinions. - To address this, Lonsdale and others are starting a new university in Austin that will aim to recapture the spirit of open inquiry and civil debate. It will involve top professors as well as innovators and entrepreneurs. - Lonsdale believes the new university can compete with top institutions and attract talented students by filling the gap left by ideological conformity on campuses today. He has already raised $100 million for the nonprofit university that plans to open in 2024.

Episode Show Notes

This talk was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami and included slides. To watch on YouTube, check out our All-In Summit playlist: https://bit.ly/aisytplaylist

0:00 Joe Lonsdale speaks about the problem with higher education and the importance of debate/truth-seeking

10:13 Bestie Q&A with Joe: Why Americans feel victimized, what happened in 1971, getting off the gold standard, school choice, starting UATX

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Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_05: Alright, next up, Joe Lonsdale. We go, Joe Lonsdale's gonna come up, he's gonna tee it up for about five or ten minutes in a solo dolo. He told me he's burning the house down. SPEAKER_02: Well hello Miami, it's good to be here from Austin for a day. We're the second best tech city here, it's not too bad. How many people actually live in Miami? I'm curious, there's a crowd, I'm giving you over that. So everyone's flown in town like me, that's pretty cool. Well, you know, I'm generally an American optimist, but I want to talk about a lot of stuff that's broken right now that we know how to fix, but we aren't. And, you know, talking to these guys, especially hearing from Elon and everyone today, it's just so exciting what our civilization is going towards, what it could be doing. But if you talk to a lot of our smartest friends, you look at guys like Dalia or Bridge Bar and others, they see America in decline. They see decadence, they see decay. And I think there's a lot of important questions we're facing right now, like why did these happen to a civilization? Why, when there's so many exciting things going on that we know can make a really great future for our kids and grandkids and for humanity, why is this stuff breaking? And I want to tell you a little story, I have a policy group in Austin and we follow the homeless population there. And we're going along with a middle-aged Mexican gentleman who had just lost his job and he went into the homeless center, he's really struggling, and he says, you know, I really want to try to find a job, I want some job training. And the person working there, she says, you know, sir, you deserve a home. And he said, yeah, that's great, but can I get some training? And she said, you don't need to worry about that, you need to worry about getting a home for people just like you and what you deserve. And I want to back up about the situation in Austin, because we're seeing this all over the country right now. You know, in 2018, the mayor of Austin went to San Francisco and LA and he was asking him for advice on what to do for homelessness. There wasn't really homelessness downtown. It's funny, this is funny to me too, but there's actually a reason he was asking him for advice and it's a special interest thing where there's actually hundreds of millions of funding that goes to these groups in SF and LA that work on this, into all of their friends, into all the people with their politics. And it's a huge money spigot for politicians, they're very powerful in those other cities, and Austin, they didn't have that money spigot and he wanted it. And you know what they told him, I heard this from both sides, he said, you know, you have to show people that capitalism doesn't work, you've got to put it in their faces, and then you'll get funding. And he went back to Austin and he brought all the camps downtown, homeless deaths spiked, homeless trafficking spiked, sex trafficking spiked, drugs spiked, but the funding went way up for him and his friends. They got massive new funding, you know, unaccountable sources of money for these people. And then of course they start deploying the answers, which is the Housing First strategy. And by the way, this is not just like a right versus left thing, I think Housing First was first deployed under W. Bush, so this is a general strategy. You guys probably know in LA they spent $800,000 per new home trying to solve this problem. There's 7,000 nonprofits right now, you know, funded by HUD around our country with the same philosophy. And the philosophy is no pay for performance, no transparency, no accountability, just build the homes. And you know, when I first heard about this a decade ago, I thought, wow, that makes sense, there's 5,000 homeless people, let's build 5,000 homes. It turns out that there's still about a couple percent of our society that really don't have a home, but they're living kind of on the edge, on people's couches, with other family, with friends. So the actual demand for homes, it turns out maybe it's about 6 million, 10 million, it's effectively infinite. There's infinite demand for homes in our society. And who do you think gets these homes when we build them? So this guy, we were following, you know, a few hundred people from my philanthropy group, and our team goes back in with him. And he gets in line, and he's been leaving between a camp that they helped him set up in downtown, and a relative's house, but he's saying he's living outside in a camp. And he goes back, and he's just missed getting a home, and he's frustrated, and they're explaining the points to him, and he says, wait a second, so you're saying that if I was on drugs, I'd qualify for a home. And they say, well, we don't like to say it that way, but that's true. And he says, you're saying if I committed a crime, I'd qualify for a home. And they're like, well, yeah, but that's, yeah, we don't like to say it that way, but that's true, that would have given you enough points to qualify for a home. And what happens here, if you try to bait this system, there's, you know, 7,000 of these groups around the country, you're screamed at as a racist, you're screamed at with ad hominem attacks. There's three things. One, there's not the intellectual humility to see that there may be other answers that may be correct. Two, there's no respect for the dignity of everyone in this conversation. If you disagree, you are a bad person. And three, there's no passion for the truth. These people are not trying to pursue the truth. These people already have the truth, and they're giving it to you as a dogma. And this is true of pretty much every of these broken areas in our society, and there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them right now. There's, like, you know, we have 50 trading programs that we spend a lot of money on the federal government. They're not accountable. They don't tend to work. They're very broken. There's no transparency. There's no competition. There's no debate. You're either for it or against it. And you're a bad person if you're against it. There's these vocational schools around the country. Texas vocational schools were really underperforming seven years ago. And, you know, what we did is we ended up actually changing them so that the schools were only going to be funded based on the salaries of the students coming out. If you tie it to graduation rates, it doesn't work because they can graduate everyone. But we tied to the salaries coming out. We got the salaries coming out to go up 117 percent just by putting in that accountability. But most of the country doesn't do that. Most of the country, there's vocational schools. People go, very low graduation rates. They fail. We're not going to go into the K to 12 issues you guys know about. But one fact most people don't know is the education inequality in this country is far greater than the wealth inequality. Far greater. So there's, I mean, you know, and you guys probably see there's infant formula production thing, which is a crisis right now. There's really basic policy mistakes around that. The way we run our prisons, our probation and parole, there's all sorts of ways to run them much better. We're not doing it, though. I'll give you one other example because Elon was speaking today. Austin infrastructure I'm very excited about is a boring company. And, you know, in Austin we passed a $6 billion, $7 billion plan to build a really small amount of infrastructure. It's already ballooning cost of $12 billion. For less than half the original money, for $3 billion, you could do over 100 times as many tunnels in terms of what they're building right now. And you could do with 100 more stations. So basically for a tiny fraction of the cost, and again I go and talk to the city and talk to the guys. There's no intellectual humility. We don't respect your dignity. Elon's a bad guy. We don't like Elon, whatever, because they're some kind of extreme version. And they're not interested in the truth. They're really not. They're just interested in what they're going to do their way. And so you kind of come back to this. What's going on in our society? Where is this coming from? And, you know, say what causes decadence, decay, and decline. I think the more important question is what actually works. Like why is our society functional? And I think you have to take it back to the enlightenment. If you look at the exponential growth that's happened, that's created the wealth that all of us enjoy, it really happened over the last few centuries, kind of post enlightenment. And you had a society that really cared about pursuit of the truth, really cared about competition of ideas. And you need the virtues for this to work. The classical virtues that we talk about in our civilization, justice, wisdom, temperance, courage. You need the courage to actually fight for the truth. And so a long time ago you tended to have religious dogma, which could be some form of virtue signaling, some form of basically keeping out outsiders. And then you had, separately, debate and substance. And debate and substance generally lost to religious dogma. And what was unique about the enlightenment, what was unique about our university system, which we created, was the liberal universities were a place to have debates where substance could actually win against dogma and against people who disagree. And you actually had to disagree civilly and you actually had to pursue truth. You had to have the intellectual humility to know that you don't have all the answers. You had to respect the dignity of people who were debating and you had to fight for passion for the truth. And what's happened instead is that most of our universities have been conquered by dogma and by religion. They no longer have these things. So once again we have the idea of heretics and blasphemy. We don't use those words. But that's what we're facing right now. If you disagree with people, you're a heretic and you're committing blasphemy. If you speak against all sorts of these things, you're not supposed to speak against. If you say that DEI is actually causing problems. If you say that here's why ESG is wrong, it's blasphemous. This isn't your stuff. You're not allowed to attack these days. You're in trouble. You're told not to speak against it again or else you're fired. This has been written about in lots of corporations right now. This happens to all sorts of people. And this is happening first and foremost on our campus. What's happened is this zero sum historically tolerant and tolerant virtue signaling religion has completely taken over and is silencing people. Our founders were quite fond of heretics. I don't know if people realize that. But that was kind of the equivalent debate 300 years ago to this woke religion. Benjamin Franklin said I think all heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of courage or they would venture their heresy. They cannot afford to be deficient in other virtues due to the numerous enemies they provoke. And so I think thinking what's going on here, all of us first of all need to go back and think about where do we not have enough humility to try to learn more. Where are we not respecting people who disagree and actually engaging them and debating them as opposed to calling them names and running them off. And frankly I think we should also remember it's actually really good to be offended. It's the opposite of safe spaces. There's this weird cultural thing with the millennial generation. I guess I'm barely part of it unfortunately where you're basically supposed to protect people from being offended. You're supposed to protect them from blasphemy. I think it has to be the opposite if our civilization is not going to decline. I think we actually have to go out of our way to learn that when we're offended we have to be stronger. It doesn't mean you're somehow elevated as a victim if you're offended. That's your problem if you're offended and you just stop and think about it and we need to use that to advance our civilization again. So that's my save for today. Jason wanted me to add a bunch more blasphemy but I'm going to hold off on that. SPEAKER_05: I think you did enough. Let's chop it up. Get in here. Let's talk about why people feel like they're victims. SPEAKER_04: What do you think in our country makes certain people feel that they've been victimized? What are the valid reasons people might feel that they have gotten a raw deal in America? SPEAKER_02: I think all of our ancestors have gone through this. I'm Jewish and Irish. When my ancestors came over there were signs saying no dogs are Irish allowed. My grandfather was only promoted to a certain level at Abbott because he was a Jew. He actually didn't realize they hired a Jew and they laughed and said oops that was a mistake. You can only get to this level. I think there has been some pretty horrible things everywhere in the world frankly. Not just America. I think everywhere you look there's always been groups that have been treated pretty badly. I'm Irish as well. Irish need not apply. We had a pretty horrific famine. SPEAKER_02: It's obviously a lot easier to be Irish than it is to be someone who is black in America. Or Jewish in the Holocaust. SPEAKER_04: So you would agree different people's experiences are on a spectrum of the suffering, correct? 100%. And so people who have suffered more deserve a little more empathy and perhaps a little bit more consideration. SPEAKER_04: They deserve more empathy but it doesn't mean you should embrace philosophies that are wrong or harmful. SPEAKER_02: If you look at the, obviously there's a lot of truth and positive parts of the BLM movement the last couple of years but it's actually led to thousands more deaths in the black community because of the things that it was pushing. Because of the bad ideas. We got another one of these things? How many more of these do we got to do? This is like way more work than I thought I was signing up for. Way more work. SPEAKER_02: Someone get this man a drink. We should have had cocktails. SPEAKER_06: I never agreed to be in the conference business when we started doing this pod. SPEAKER_01: Jake, I respect you for what you've been able to do but this is way too much work. You guys said you wanted to do a look at, all these fans are here. You're doing the Q&A tomorrow. Okay, sounds good. SPEAKER_04: I think, you know, Joe, candidly, I think that is where the argument breaks down a bit. People have had different experiences and I would disagree that people have to stop thinking like victims. I think sometimes we have to think very deeply about the suffering people have had especially when it's different than the suffering that you and I have had. SPEAKER_03: But that, so it's true. And I'm not virtue signaling here. I'm just countering the argument. SPEAKER_02: I think that's fully true. What I was really against is I gave ten examples of ways in which our society is broken and hurting poor people, hurting working class people. Like wasting money on things in dysfunctional ways. And all of that is happening because we're like going to this illiberal society where we're not able to actually like debate things logically and respect other people on the other side of the argument. It's all about demonizing people who disagree with us. And I think that's just really, really scary right now. Do you, there's a website, people have tweeted this, I think the website is called what the fuck happened in 1971 dot com. SPEAKER_06: Do you know what I'm talking about? Where, if you go to this website. I don't. So in 19, if you look back socioeconomically, there's a whole bunch of charts and graphs of everything from GDP to, you know, labor participation rates, etc. And there is a moment in 1971 where just trend lines break. And, you know, Dorsey tweeted this out a little while ago. A bunch of people talked about it. And everybody has tried to figure out what actually happened in 19, but there's a couple really good explanations I think, right? I think the two biggest ones by far is one is tech driven globalization. SPEAKER_02: And the other one is going off the gold currency which over financialized the economy. Yeah, so I think the gold currency one was important. I think the one that people don't talk about, whether you agree with it or not, I'd love to get your perspective is, SPEAKER_06: you know, the move to the great society had a whole bunch of things that I think were meant to do meaningful good. SPEAKER_02: And it broke down the family as well, which is a huge problem in America. And this is, yeah, so I mean we talk about things that make civilization prosper. I think you get the classical virtues and you get strong families. Which, by the way, for whatever reason, I still can't tell Beal and was strongly against, which I think is just horrible. So I think there's a problem in the white community as well, by the way. It's like almost half of kids are born out of wedlock right now. And if you statistically look at that, those kids just on average vastly underperform. This doesn't mean to say there aren't one-off cases and you should get divorced if it's the right thing to do. But it's like it's really bad for society as a whole statistically. You can't argue against that. And exactly, we've accidentally created the incentives towards divorce in the 1960s, which obviously wasn't intentional, but this is a huge problem. We're not supposed to talk about it. It's like a conservative thing, I guess. SPEAKER_06: And talk about the financialization and moving off the gold standard as well. How did that change socioeconomic dynamics in America? Well, basically, there's a lot more money around. And so I think it put more returns into finance. SPEAKER_02: So I benefit from this, as do you, as an investor. From making things. Yeah, I think it put more returns into finance because there's this explosion of credit and money relative to... So I think finance outperformed labor in terms of... It's an advantage for finance, which is not what you necessarily want. It also really, really helped accelerate tech-driven globalization, which probably was good for India and China and Southeast Asia and even Africa. But it basically forced workers in the US to compete against all these people directly. And so you had people paid like 15 times as much in the US as these other people. And then it just wasn't sustainable. So over time, these other people just out-competed over the last 50 years, which is really tough. You find it hard to find your tribe in Silicon Valley? SPEAKER_06: Oh yeah. Intellectually, has it become easier or harder, the same? You know, I've just given up on having even a tribe so much as like, let's work on this together. SPEAKER_02: Let's actually make prisons have lower recidivism and higher employment. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to put these transparency and accountability and incentives. And it's hard for anyone to really disagree with that unless you're running a prison's union. And so we're getting all these laws passed from probation and parole and that. We're getting all these laws passed for how to make the educational school work better. Yeah, and what annoys me, Chamath, is that I feel like as people who've succeeded, we all sort of have a duty to go and fix these problems. And almost no one else is working on them. That does annoy me. And then in terms of like, for example, I want to talk specifically because you mentioned higher ed. SPEAKER_06: But if you go a little bit before this, we have no real form of competition in the school system. Yes. You need some mechanism for good ideas to win and bad ideas to lose. SPEAKER_02: And the existing framework has been charter schools. But that's been attacked under every sort of way, shape, or form. SPEAKER_06: How does that problem get solved? How do we get kids… So the problem, if you just give everybody choice right now and you give them, say, funding, take the money where they want, SPEAKER_02: it basically defunds the public schools, which then hurts the poor kids the most. And so I understand why people are against total choice for everyone. It's just kind of more like policy detail. I think the way to get around that is you just give the poor kids choice. Because if you just give the poor kids choice, now it's very clear you're just doing it to help them. But even them being able to choose will put pressure and get rid of the hurt the bad schools and help the good schools. So you just need some mechanism. Let's do the mechanism through the poor kids because that helps them the most. That's my view of the discussion. It seems actually like a reasonable argument. It's going to be compromised, right? Because why shouldn't the… I mean, my kids have a choice where to go with my wife and I. Why shouldn't poor kids have that choice? So there's things that teachers usually are going to hate that. But at least it's a way to kind of maybe build support for it. And is there a way for unions to actually do the part of the job which is about protecting workers but disentangle some of the financial incentives to aggregate dues, participate actively? SPEAKER_06: You just got to change the power structure. Right now they're totally in charge. They don't want to give an inch. SPEAKER_02: I get it because every time they give an inch, they're going to lose more power later on. If they see that they're losing some battles, then they have to negotiate and they're going to be more reasonable. They're going to say, oh yeah, you're right, we're going to get rid of the bottom 20%. You got to get to a point where the power changes enough that they're willing to then work with you. But I mean the bigger thing I think is we actually need leaders who are courageous, who could speak up about problems. And in the midst of everyone yelling and screaming and saying you're not supposed to say anything, it's going to say actually I don't care what you're not supposed to say. This is my version of the truth and this is what's going to be the best in society. And what we're teaching at universities right now is the opposite of that. What we're teaching is Joe, just don't say that. Joe, why are you causing problems for yourself? Joe, you know you're not supposed to talk about these things. And I'm so sick of it because this is why all this stuff is broken is because no one is speaking up. You bought a college. SPEAKER_02: My friends Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson and I, along with a bunch of others, are starting a new university in Austin. Did you buy an existing university? SPEAKER_04: We got 500 acres in the water. It's really pretty. It's about 15 minutes from the Tesla, giant Tesla plant, about 30 minutes from downtown. SPEAKER_02: What will you teach? What will the majors be and what will be the approach? SPEAKER_04: You know the hypothesis, you know as entrepreneurs our job is to find these gaps in the world where something should exist but doesn't. SPEAKER_02: And it seems like for the first time in a few generations you could actually build a university that competes with the other very top universities and attracts the very most talented kids. One of my obnoxious views on this, which I think the stage might agree with because it's in our direction, is that you used to be the smartest people in the world. A lot of them became professors. And now you get a lot of the very smartest people becoming innovators, becoming builders. Like my smartest friends, I got to drop out of their PhDs from MIT and Stanford and Caltech, actually found more intellectual expression and satisfaction in the entrepreneurship world than they did there. And so therefore in order to compete you want not only the top professors but you want to involve a lot of top innovators. And we want to teach the history of thought in the free civilizations. We want to actually see how the alignment came about, what were the books, what were the debates that people were having when they founded the country. And kind of learn that core. And then we also want to have centers where, you know, keep it interdisciplinary. It was one of the key things in universities, this is again somewhat technical, but they're broken because you get these departments to get conquered by certain ideologies. So you get certain people to only allow people who think like them to be in those departments. You want to spread it out and keep it interdisciplinary. How much of this is because of tenure? SPEAKER_02: Tenure is a big problem. You want to have some protection. Tenure originally was a great thing, protecting you to say what you want. In practice now it's usually the other way around. And yeah, it's just not good. But yeah, there's a huge gap there. I think we can fix it. And my goal obviously is not to have everyone educated through one great university. It's to put pressure on other universities to change and to help build multiple new ones, which I think we need to do. And the school that you start, interdisciplinary by nature, which means that not necessarily known as for technical people, for mathematical people. SPEAKER_06: There'll be like a center of like political economy and history. There'll be a center of data science and innovation and, you know, etc. SPEAKER_02: There'll be centers, you know, arts and writing and stuff. So I think you want difference there, different skills. I think everyone should get the kind of core. Is this for profit or is it going to be... No, it's nonprofit. It's probably part of me wishes I made it for profit because I need to make money because it'd be easier to raise money for it. But we've raised about a hundred million dollars nonprofit for it. We have the land. So it's going to work. I put my name on it. So I'll pay for most of it. You raised a hundred million dollars for this? SPEAKER_04: Yeah. For the nonprofit. Yeah. And when do you plan on opening it? SPEAKER_04: Fall of 2024 is our goal for the first class. Be about the size of Caltech at first is the hope. SPEAKER_02: It's a pretty ambitious project. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Well, our country needs some more leaders right now who are courageous and know how to think. SPEAKER_04: How do you think you'll recruit the first class? How do you get... Yeah. You want to do much more active recruiting than most of our top colleges right now, especially because we won't be as known at first. SPEAKER_02: But I'll tell you what. We have a seminar this summer of 80 kids and we have 44,000 inquiries from kids about it. We have, you know, when we first... the first two weeks after the story was out on Twitter in November that we're doing this, we had 4,400 professors apply. Because these professors are fleeing. A lot of the professors, by the way, a lot of them on the moderate left, they're being attacked by the extremes for, again, talking and saying things you're not supposed to talk about and say. And so a lot of them are trying to flee to other environments. There's a huge demand for it right now. SPEAKER_04: It's super weird that college kids, yeah, are against having debates and discussions. It's gotten so much worse. I just find it so weird. That was one of the best parts of college. Explain this debate. I mean, I haven't been in college in 20 years. SPEAKER_06: So the last five years it's just gotten totally crazy. We had a woman, a professor, a really smart woman, definitely on the left, but she was applying from NYU Law School, asking us, are we going to do a new law school? SPEAKER_02: Because she can't stand that anymore. And we said, well, what's going on? She said, well, for example, we used the use of the Socratic method in my law school and I would ask tough questions from both sides of the kids. And now, in order not to trigger people, I have to write them an email a week ahead of time to make sure I can ask the question that I'm going to ask in class next week. So if you were going to ask… This is the train of lawyer. I mean, this is where we are at this point. SPEAKER_06: But that's NYU Law School? That's the policy of NYU? I think we've got a bigger cycle problem. SPEAKER_02: I don't know, but our universities have just gone crazy the last five years. Is that an isolated incident? SPEAKER_06: No, Yale has more administrators and students. These administrators are on the whole more likely to be neo-Marxists than to be Republicans. SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just like these things have gotten very extreme. What do you think, Sax? About? SPEAKER_01: About Joe. SPEAKER_06: Did you ever think it would get this bad when you were here at Stanford? No, about the university. SPEAKER_04: You lived at a time… I mean, the time at Stanford was a pretty bold time when you were there in terms of freedom of speech, in terms of debate, vibrancy. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what basically happened is all those radicals who were being inculcated and trained and brainwashed at Stanford that we were reacting to, what, 25, 30 years ago, they all graduated. And then they went off into society and took over all these institutions. And that's the problem we have today. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were talking about it earlier today, where if you actually look at polling, the biggest divide in America in terms of political and cultural beliefs is whether or not you have a college degree. So if you're basically a college graduate, you're a member of the professional class. If you're not a college graduate, you're a member of the working class. That is the biggest divide. And the members of the professional class, by and large, have very, very far left views on sociocultural issues. That's just a fact, whether you agree with it or not. And that is creating a huge amount of tension in our society because two-thirds of the country is working class, one-third is professional class, and in a democracy, the side that has the larger number should win. So the working class has the votes, but the professional class runs all the institutions. And this is the source, I think, of all of our political strife in America is that the people who are in charge of our institutions from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Fortune 500, Disney, Hollywood, and you go down the list, they have views that are fundamentally in tension and in conflict with the views of most of the country, the working class of the country. Now, if you're a member of that class, you may think it's a good thing. We're going to push our views onto the country, whether they like it or not, and we're going to convert them. That's what you call the elite class, right? SPEAKER_04: That's the elite. And that's what basically, like what I'm describing is not like a criticism. I think it's just like, I think it's just a factual critique of what's happening. SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I don't think it's partisan either. I mean, there are people who are Republicans or Democrats in both pools. SPEAKER_03: There are elites in both parties, and there are certainly working class people in both parties. SPEAKER_00: But what I would say is that the parties are now in the process of resorting around this sort of political and cultural divide. And historically, the Democrats were the party of the working class. They are now much more the party of the professional class. And they buy into the belief set of sort of the college educated, the, you know, those sort of, you call it the woke sensibility. And the Republicans are in the process of transforming into a working class sort of populist party. Yeah. And look, they are in both parties are outliers who don't quite fit in anymore. But that's the fundamental transformation that's happening. SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I mean, you guys fit into that. You're people in the Republican Party who don't fit in anymore. SPEAKER_02: I mean, I wouldn't even necessarily mind that dynamic you described so much if they weren't breaking everything and if they weren't not allowing conversations about how broken things are and the better ideas, right? It's a very strange, illiberal. Right. Well, so I think and I disconnected with what we were talking about with Glenn Greenwald and Taibbi is that, look, if you're part of the elite and you control all these institutions, all the cultural high ground, but the country is not with you. SPEAKER_00: And just in terms of the sheer numbers, you are going to use the tactics that people in power always use to suppress the greater numbers. That's where censorship comes from. The people who are running these institutions don't they want the debate to be over. They want the power to end the debate because they're not otherwise going to win that debate. SPEAKER_04: Well, we're very interested in seeing where you take it. And we appreciate you taking the time to share your views. Really, really. SPEAKER_06: Thanks. SPEAKER_00: Let your winners ride. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, queen of. Besties are. My dog, taking a nice driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this, like sexual tension, but they just need to release. What you're about to be. What you're being.