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

🚀 Main Street Over Wall Street is where the real deals get done. Join top investors, founders, and operators for three days of powerful connection, sharp strategy, and big opportunities — live in Austin, Nov 2–4. https://contrarianthinking.biz/msows-bigdeal Record your first video with Riverside - https://creators.riverside.fm/Codie - and use code CODIE for 15% off an individual plan. In this weeks episode Codie interviews Ryan Streeter, director of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas. They discuss the role of think tanks in shaping policy, the importance of war games in decision-making, and the current state of higher education. Streeter shares insights on the creation of the Civitas Institute, aimed at reclaiming the principles of a free society within academia, and the growing interest in multidisciplinary education that counters the political monoculture prevalent in many universities today. The conversation delves into the pressing issues surrounding student loan debt, the need for reform in university funding, and the commercialization of university research. It discusses the value of a university education, the role of MBAs, and the importance of building ethical organizations. The dialogue also emphasizes the need for students and parents to navigate college choices carefully in today's complex educational landscape. In this conversation, the speaker discusses various themes surrounding voter motivations, economic concerns, the reliability of polls, education policy, and the prevailing optimism among working-class Americans. The dialogue highlights the disconnect between elite narratives and the sentiments of ordinary citizens, particularly regarding public safety, economic issues, and the impact of media narratives on perceptions of the American dream. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of critically evaluating survey data and understanding the broader context of political discussions. Here are the studies Ryan and Codie mentioned: https://thedispatch.com/article/why-progressives-are-making-a-mess/ https://thedispatch.com/article/how-affluent-conservatives-fuel-the/ https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/ Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. Chapters Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Ryan Streeter and His Background 03:12 Understanding Think Tanks and Their Influence 06:11 The Role of War Games in Policy Making 08:52 Navigating Political Chaos and Administration Dynamics 12:09 The Creation of the Civitas Institute 14:57 Reforming Higher Education: The School of Civic Leadership 17:47 The Shift in University Applications and Student Interests 21:12 Addressing Political Monoculture in Academia 24:02 The Future of Higher Education and Institutional Accountability 33:59 The Crisis of Student Loan Debt 36:50 Reforming University Funding Models 41:35 Commercialization of University Research 44:55 The Value of a University Education 48:10 The Role of MBAs in Career Advancement 51:55 Building Ethical and Trustworthy Organizations 56:12 Navigating College Choices in Today's Landscape 01:08:03 Voter Motivations and Key Issues 01:11:47 The Impact of Economic Concerns 01:13:43 Understanding Polls and Surveys 01:18:01 Education Policy and Federal Oversight 01:22:23 Optimism Amidst Challenges 01:27:28 Navigating Information Overload MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ 📸 ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ 📽️ ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ 📸 ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ 📽️ ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: 🫂 ⁠⁠Our community⁠⁠ 📰 ⁠⁠Free newsletter⁠⁠ 🏦 ⁠⁠Biz buying course⁠⁠ 🏠 ⁠⁠Resibrands⁠⁠ 💰 ⁠⁠CT Capital⁠⁠ 🏙️ ⁠⁠Main St Hold Co⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Codie Sanchez?

  Hey, it's Codie 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, 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 DC. He worked for a president. He worked for a governor. He worked for a mayor.

• 0:45Codie Sanchez?

  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 Enterprise Institute, one of the 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, etc. 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,

• 1:26Codie Sanchez?

  created a study institute, understands polling and politicians better than almost anyone I know, and is going to 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 going to 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 what was your purview of seeing in through that lens to the center of power?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 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, when you work in a think tank, especially in Washington DC, 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 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 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 their writing or their podcasts and to influence the public debate.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  So to change the way that policymakers are thinking about tax policy, education policy, what to think about Israel right now, how do we resource the effort in Ukraine or not and all those things. And 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 work. And then some of them, 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 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.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  So people would say, well, they're free market people, but they are. But they're across a continuum as well in terms of, you know, some will favor a particular type of regulation while others oppose it. And sometimes, you know, AEI scholars have disagreed in public. And I've always liked that about the place. But 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 generally bring people that have some kind of academic training or some kind of expertise within policy and their goal is to influence the way that policymakers and the media think about those things.

• 4:00Codie Sanchez?

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

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 4:08Codie Sanchez?

  And...

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Far from the truth.

• 4:09Codie Sanchez?

  But I think, what's interesting, I think, is, you know, as a person outside of the spectrum, you forget that half of the policies are like these 17,000... ...page, you know, overwhelming pieces of paper to people who may only be in office for like one or two terms.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:28Codie Sanchez?

  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 like, please pull 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.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:46Codie Sanchez?

  They're pulling it from academic papers.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Codie Sanchez?

  Just like a scientist or a doctor might do the same thing.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:51Codie Sanchez?

  Before they prescribe something for a patient, right? Is that kind of how that works?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  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 20s, and then the more senior ones hopefully are older than that and have some expertise. Now, you have some longstanding 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 AI 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

• 5:37Speaker 01

  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 livestream 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 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.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, they, that's when think tanks can really shine, is it, 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, to figure out what the right policy is. And, and that, and then you, you need some experts to come in and, 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 ThinkTanks 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.

• 7:00Codie Sanchez?

  I love creating content, obviously. We post like 50 pieces of content across all my platforms each week. But if you've ever created content, you know the uphill battle it can be to ideate, write, produce, and film a video. And then you have to edit it all. So one of my favorite tools to use for this is Riverside. You've probably heard about it before. It's really revolutionized the podcast space by allowing creators all over the world to record 4K video, regardless of the internet speed. But they've just released an update that any creator is gonna love. So along with recording high-quality video and audio, they've added in editing software so you can edit any video content directly in Riverside. If your team is a little more bougie like mine and wants to record the video themselves, you can upload your own content to Riverside so you can use all of their amazing AI tools.

• 7:45Codie Sanchez?

  It can transcribe your video and add in customizable captions. It can analyze that transcript to cut out the dead space in the video. And my favorite part? They have this AI editor feature that will pull short-form clips from my content so we can squeeze all the juice out of what we create. Time is money, and Riverside has given me and my team back loads of time, AKA money. So I love them. And because I love you, I got you guys a deal. Try Riverside for yourself with the link in this episode's description. You can sign up for free using the link and discount code CODI at checkout for a discount on any paid plan. By the way, the first 1,000 people who click on this link and use the coupon code will get an exclusive 30% off with code CODI. Let's get back to the episode. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I remember one of the more interesting things we ever did

• 8:28Codie Sanchez?

  was we sat down at AI and you guys put us through a war game with China and Taiwan. And before that, I didn't realize that that's what happened when we sometimes explain things to policymakers, where even that might be what happens inside of the Pentagon. Can you explain what a war game is?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a way of...

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Creating a, in this case, a geopolitical sort of scenario and giving people the opportunity to understand that if you make one particular decision, you know, they invade, they don't, our response is this kind of air power, this kind of naval response. That means we're moving resources from some other part of the world, for instance, right? And so you actually start to realize what's involved in these decisions. 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, it 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 worked in the George W.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  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, and 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 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, or they scattered about and there wasn't a really great preset

• 10:16Speaker 01

  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 need because of this horrific event. And you can use that type of war game precedent to actually make decisions. So it's helpful in terms of guiding policy, but it's actually really interesting to participate in, as you saw.

• 10:37Codie Sanchez?

  Wait, so how does that work? So basically, you're an advisor to 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, you're like, here's all the like historical war games?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  I wish.

• 10:51Codie Sanchez?

  Option one.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  That's what I was hoping for. You know, I found that that war game, there wasn't an exact war game 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 situation of making policy kind of on the fly with imperfect information. 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 had 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.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  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, that's different than when you're preparing for a State of the Union address, maybe six months ahead of time, where you've got a lot of time to plan. So you're always looking for outside expertise. You never, 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, you, you find in those jobs that you really need those people. I was there during the run up to the, the financial crisis too. There's a housing crisis that preceded the financial crisis.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And that was the same thing where, 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 degree 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.

• 12:49Speaker 02

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• 13:16Speaker 03

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• 13:44Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's such a good point. I mean, my friend Tim Kennedy, do you know him?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 13:48Codie Sanchez?

  You should have him to Cibitas. But 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 in with Sabre Allies to go get people out of North Carolina. And he was talking about what it looked like, you know, 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 companies had 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?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, 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 10 a.m. 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

• 15:08Speaker 01

  cameras saying different things 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 sometimes, it sometimes just happens in sort of a chaotic way because of everything, everything that's going on. So, a smartly-run administration kind of prepares for that.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  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. We used to 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, 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.

• 16:05Codie Sanchez?

  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?

• 16:22Speaker 01

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

• 16:27Codie Sanchez?

  I didn't sound very good.

• 16:29Speaker 01

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

• 16:33Codie Sanchez?

  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 imagine they're not, but the thing is, we're preemptively losing. That's probably not a good idea.

• 16:54Speaker 01

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

• 16:57Codie Sanchez?

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

• 17:10Speaker 01

  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 that, like everybody, didn't really expect this to be resolved the evening of.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  It just depends on who you talk to. There's a lot of panic among Democrats. There's kind of a strange amount of optimism among people on the political right. Yeah, I think probably, when I say surprising, I think it's more people that have been Trump skeptics, Trump wary, 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 the administration elsewhere to get all kinds of other things done. They're broadly aligned with what he cares about.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  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 know, you go from one day where 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 Gaetz as 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 kind of just nervous expectation, and some people are kind of nervously optimistic, and others are nervously really, really worried right now. So like everything else over the last few months, all we can say is who really knows what's gonna, what it's gonna look like there come January? It's hard to say. And with John Thune becoming the Senate Majority Leader, that creates maybe a little

• 18:54Speaker 01

  bit of a break on the sort of MAGA elements in the Senate, because that was a hotly contested race, too. Is Trump gonna be able to get all of his people rubber stamped? Is he gonna run into opposition within his own party? And I think, given that, that vote, that's possible. So that'll create some, some dealing even within the GOP when it comes to appointments and decisions that are being made kind of early out of the gates.

• 19:18Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, what about, I mean, well, first of all, I have been watching Twitter like it's primetime. I mean, I can't ever remember watching every 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.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I think that's what, that's why they, that's what they want you to do, right? Yeah. I actually got off, I got off Twitter before it became Max. I mean, 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. 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 gonna, you know, I want to keep liking them, so I'm gonna stop watching them on Twitter. And I hung it up. And to be honest with you, I've not missed it. I mean, 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 that too. I mean, election nights on Twitter used to be really fun, you know, because just listening to everybody's hot takes. No.

• 20:20Codie Sanchez?

  Zero watching X.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  No, no, just watched the returns and stayed off of people's, you know, hot takes and, you know, all that stuff. Yeah, decided to sit it out. I felt a lot happier and better.

• 20:34Codie Sanchez?

  That's very mature of you.

• 20:36Speaker 01

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

• 20:41Codie Sanchez?

  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, it 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.

• 21:26Codie Sanchez?

  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?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Civitas Institute is a great new creation. It's created...

• 21:42Speaker 01

  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 is the lifeblood of that 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 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.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  So I've come from a think tank in Washington to build this organization into a similar type of thing at a university, which gives you access to all the research power of 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, a 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-granting college. And that's a, 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.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  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 of education. It's kind of, yeah, it's 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 Civic Honors and it combines these these great elements of of

• 23:55Speaker 01

  what you 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?

• 24:22Codie Sanchez?

  And why is it different?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:23Codie Sanchez?

  Because a lot of schools have economic departments. They have history departments.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:29Codie Sanchez?

  So at face level, people could be like, this exists already.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Already.

• 24:32Codie Sanchez?

  What is any different about it?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  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 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, 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 it's gonna, I think we'll attract a lot of students that want

• 25:17Speaker 01

  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 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, 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.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  There have been a couple of books written about this, or people have 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.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  You just sense it where on university campuses or people just say things to your face where they just assume they know what you, what do 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 important 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 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, 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 especially the questions of human agency.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  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, that run our country.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  So we can, 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 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 shot at doing it right.

• 28:41Codie Sanchez?

  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.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:50Codie Sanchez?

  The point is to find the truth, not to have group think.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:53Codie Sanchez?

  And so I've been really impressed at the roster that's coming over to you guys.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  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 ever. 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, you know, an institution, you know, at the Sympathize 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 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

• 29:42Speaker 01

  looking over my shoulder to see if, you know, 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 like 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

• 30:25Speaker 01

  the spring protests here where we've had people say, you know, what your building looks like. A true university environment. That's what I thought I was doing when I went to graduate school and 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 at large. And I think I got that number right. But the anecdotes that you see or the reporting that you might have seen in the New York

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Times or Wall Street Journal about people who you would think would be applying to the Ivies now applying to SEC, we're definitely seeing that as a true thing.

• 31:15Codie Sanchez?

  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.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean,

• 31:31Codie Sanchez?

  Has that ever happened before? Would this be the first?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  I mean, 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 things that people have gotten frustrated about over the last five, seven years, critical race theory, seeing society as a set of structural inequalities or imbalances 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 called the political correctness movement, you know. 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

• 32:14Speaker 01

  that that enterprise, it's gone through several iterations and this time, it's just, it's become more pervasive and it's made its way into corporate HR offices and it's made its way into K-12 education. It's become much more widespread in places where it hadn't 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, you are

• 32:57Speaker 01

  a university, you have trustees appointed by governors, you have state legislatures to 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, it's just less likely to happen here because you have these checks and balances. So people are figuring that out. And that's what they, 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, DC, sends her son to one of the elite schools in DC. I'll leave it nameless, but, but people who know Washington DC would definitely know it.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 34:25Speaker 02

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• 34:51Speaker 03

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• 35:19Codie Sanchez?

  One of my favorite CEOs used to say to me when I first came to the business that he'd eventually rub the MBA 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 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. 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.

• 36:02Codie Sanchez?

  Over 100 of our taxpayer funded in some way or another 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?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we need, we need reform. I mean, any time you have 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, you know, one of the really big problems is that, 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, right? And hiring a lot of personnel to, 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.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I think that's had a really upward push on the on the cost of education at schools. And so that, you know, when when 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 been doing. And now we're at this point where it's a real problem. I think in some ways, you know, 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 $55,000, $60,000 a year private college degree is actually not worth very much.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  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, you know, large employers out there. Like, I really just, I don't want some of the students from these places where the campus protest been going on. Just don't want to hire them. And that bodes well for the graduates of of 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.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  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. That's really cool. 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 a basically a foundation that a university runs over time. And so instead of paying this set amount, you're paying a percentage of your income. So if you're a school teacher. You're paying one rate if you're at Goldman Sachs, you're paying a different rate.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And it's a way of kind of just making it easier on the graduate over time to pay back the cost of their education.

• 39:17Codie Sanchez?

  And theoretically to incentivize the school to actually increase the ROI from college.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:22Codie Sanchez?

  Because they want people who have higher incomes that theoretically they make more money off of them, right?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  It's a good point.

• 39:28Codie Sanchez?

  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 gain that system too.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:36Codie Sanchez?

  But I think that's interesting.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:50Codie Sanchez?

  And in Indiana, the front of both of the chapters.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Mitch Daniels at Purdue kept tuition at the same rate. His entire decade he was there, never raised tuition once. And 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 no Mitch, and he's an absolutely amazing person and demonstrated that you can actually get costs under control. 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 they don't need anymore. And you're, and you're, you're refiguring out the way that they do food in the dorms. It's one thing after another that he was able to do to make it possible to not raise tuition.

• 40:33Codie Sanchez?

  While increasing the rank in, right?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. While increasing their rank in.

• 40:35Codie Sanchez?

  So Rankin's increased, costs went down.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:38Codie Sanchez?

  And then flatlined for a decade under.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  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 that are.

• 40:54Codie Sanchez?

  What does that mean, commercializing research? Where it get profitable?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, where, where, where an engineer or another, you know, 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 or the university's research foundation get 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 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.

• 41:38Codie Sanchez?

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

• 41:42Speaker 01

  It depends. Yeah, they all have they all have different different ways. Yeah. And 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 to work there. And so some of some people, you know, including at Purdue, tried to kind of get get ahead there. And I think at UT, we do a good job of this 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

• 42:27Speaker 01

  with their with their scholars 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 can be good for the be good for the world and also profitable for the the people that are involved in it.

• 42:41Codie Sanchez?

  Like, could 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?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, that would you would really have to ramp up the commercialization side because universities is big. Yeah. And they're yeah, and they're they're 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 it, 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 its revenue model based entirely on commercialization. But there are probably people Here in Austin, who might think of a way to do that.

• 43:28Codie Sanchez?

  That's true. Well, you know, the other thing that like just really ticks me off and blows my mind in two different ways is that, you know, there's a little graph that I have here that we can put up for you guys to see on YouTube, but you know, the cost of university has 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, you know, 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.

• 44:13Codie Sanchez?

  And so how do we fix that? Or do you think that the point of college is not to make us make more money?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  You know, it's a great question. There's a couple of questions in there and I think to step back and look at the broader issue.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  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. It's a, it's a, there's a certain methodology that they used to do that. So I think a place 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 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 twenties, and I have two kids who are,

• 45:14Speaker 01

  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 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 you need a universalized system. You've got other, you've got other competitive healthcare economies that just work better than, than, than ours does. And you, that, 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 earlier in their life

• 45:57Speaker 01

  to then this is your area of expertise, but to really be able to launch themselves much sooner. We, 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, to, to venture out. And we're, we're making, we have been making decisions over time that have kind of put us in a, on a path to that in, 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, and there's, 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

• 46:42Speaker 01

  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, so the big five personality traits is conscientiousness is probably, it's one of the top two or three predictors

• 47:27Speaker 01

  of lifetime earnings. And that's the ability to think ahead, to be organized, to be a good listener, to be ambitious, and to, 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 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 or what they do.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  That's 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 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 that's where the real value in a university education is in addition to the actual topical major that that you have. And I think the the most innovative higher education administrators in the country are the ones who are figuring that out right now.

• 48:48Codie Sanchez?

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

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I don't know. You tell me.

• 48:54Codie Sanchez?

  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. You know, people even to this day will say Codie Sanchez worked at Goldman Sachs in Georgetown, even though I wouldn't say those were at all my most my most formulative moments.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:11Codie Sanchez?

  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 it up a corporate ladder, get an MBA. But if you want to do a business, go do business. And I don't I'm not sure what I think about that yet.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I think it's it's one of those questions that probably has kind of a 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 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. And then that also conditions the way the faculty teach the courses, right?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  So I mean, law schools are this way, good MBA programs are this way, where 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, we've got a very good business school at UT, it's got the number one accounting program in the country. I mean, 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 and the way that it's preparing people for that.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  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 the top 15 MBA schools to all the rest of them, I think all the more that really is going to be the determinant as to whether or not it's worth going there in the first place.

• 51:41Codie Sanchez?

  That's a great point. Yeah, one of the things I liked is when you and Jay and Justin, 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... Like, it's great to hear theory from academics, but that practical application, or what you call integration, is probably the real key.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Codie Sanchez?

  Um, I think a lot of times people use this euphemism of, uh, 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, that's right. It's, oh, do I get to meet, you know, um, 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, because they put a hundred thousand dollars. I mean, I bet Deloitte puts a hundred thousand dollars into new hires in their specialty programs per year because they have massive training to do consulting, let's say. So I think that's really cool that you guys are doing that.

• 52:51Speaker 01

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

• 52:59Codie Sanchez?

  Is that like a grace? So they have to? Like, is it like?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be a part of it.

• 53:03Codie Sanchez?

  It was mandated for me.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be a part of the, the experience. And so they get this really well-rounded education and they'll have internships throughout the, the time. And I, um, for all, for a lot of the reasons we were talking about earlier in our conversation, I think there's a lot of, of employers that'll 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.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause I think, you know, a lot of people like, we want these sorts of graduates, you know? We, I don't necessarily need someone with just the, 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, will be.

• 53:38Codie Sanchez?

  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 and then sets it on his desk every day. And, you know, he asked if he could come in early because he has a larger dress. So he's like, I'd like to be here at like six 30 in the morning because I have a little bit longer of a drive. And, um, you know, finding people that are like ethically or morally aligned with not my beliefs. Like they don't, 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 in free thinking and contrasting opinions. And if they are, they'll, they'll work well here. And if not, they won't. So I don't wanna, I don't wanna get them anyway.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  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, uh, 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 geographic regions where you have more social capital measured even just by civic involuntary participation, you have higher levels of regional GDP. People, when people live 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,

• 55:02Speaker 01

  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 hardworking, 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 have, where you're like, you know, that person has some characteristics that made me nervous, but they're really, really good at this one thing that I need done.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  And you're like, you know, 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 the work because you don't trust this person anymore. And you're, you know, and so, and it's just, it's a real headache. And so I think this groundedness in a core set of principles that enable you to be that 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, it's absolutely essential.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  And when I've gone around the country and looked at effective vocational training, you know, 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, you'll see that a lot of times it's employer partnerships with a... A community college or a vocational school of some kind where part of the curriculum is this stuff, you know, like, you know, saying earlier, students benefit in a four year degree program because they have, they're just forced to do presentations and work together and plan and all those kinds of things. When you're, when you're like a commuter at a community college, that's less a part of your experience. But the effective programs

• 57:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:41Speaker 02

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• 58:35Codie Sanchez?

  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?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  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, send them our way. The, I think the

• 59:05Speaker 01

  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's just kind of reinforces. It's like, I would just be worried. And I have plenty of friends, I'm in that age where I've got people, you know, and my peers have kids in college. And it's amazing over the last few years, the number of complaints that I hear from people who sent their kids

• 59:49Speaker 01

  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 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 in the departments where they're going to go. Are they, do they, do they really have ideological diversity there? Or do they have people across different disciplines? And and can your, your, your, your child get in an education where it's very, it's well rounded? Where they're not just in a, in a certain narrow track? Or they, they can just kind of, you know, choose electives, kind of just patch together something that's

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  kind of meaningless over time? There's not just one thing to look at. There's, there's a bunch.

• 1:00:35Codie Sanchez?

  Coming at 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 they're in there. I think that was basically as crazy as it went.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think you, I think you want to be a little bit more careful now. And, and look at, and look at whether the university has embraced a statement of principles about those are 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, at that. It doesn't mean that even if they sign the statement that every department in every way is doing that, but at least there's a commitment there. And, and I think those are, those are, you know, pretty, pretty important indicators right now.

• 1:01:17Codie Sanchez?

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

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  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. 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 college. And, you know, that's this great elite institution. It's over 600 years old. It stands on its, this amazing set of traditions. But 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,

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  they really focus on instruction. They focus, you know, 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, you know. And does the student body have, you know, 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're not really, they haven't been weaponized in the same way that they have in a lot of American universities. 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

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  American problem. And when you have the president of France telling us not to import all these crazy ideas, the country that gave us Jacques Derrida and

• 1:02:58Codie Sanchez?

  And the little

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Michel Cucurella

• 1:03:00Codie Sanchez?

  God, help us.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:08Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, that gets my favorite. 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 that 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 counteropinions.

• 1:03:29Codie Sanchez?

  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.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Codie Sanchez?

  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. And from somebody who is very intelligent.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, this is very common. And I, just because of the nature of my professional work and trajectory, I've spent, 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's 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, your faculty or

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  in your, your institution. And you see this in newsrooms as well, just with, within the media. And if you spend a lot of time in Washington DC, 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, 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, and in the predictions that we We saw and then the shock at the outcome was because the people who are basically covering

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  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 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, like in the old days where you'd have, you know, just kind of 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,

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  from working-class backgrounds, from all over the country, that you've seen even within the media class, a kind of, 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 diversity in higher ed. I mean, you know, like, there's a lot of people that think differently from each other. And I just think that's just clearly not true. I mean, and any survey that we've seen of university faculty shows that's not true. And there've been similar surveys done of journalists as well. And we realize that they have political leanings

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  that are much more similar than they are different. And that becomes a problem. It 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 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 that's where just the ordinary, everyday Americans can sniff that out. I have them in my extended family and my friends back

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  home. And 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.

• 1:08:03Codie Sanchez?

  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 in outside of Dallas, Texas. And so, you

• 1:08:47Codie Sanchez?

  know, I think part of this and what's what's happening in the US is interesting because it's, I think it's showing a light on average Americans, which like, you know, they want to have a couple of 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 ever 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.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:35Codie Sanchez?

  We can find it.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Which is, yeah, I can send you the link.

• 1:09:37Codie Sanchez?

  Okay. We'll put it in the show notes.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, put it in the show notes, because 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 category they, were they swing voters in swing states, and what issues motivated them. And for all swing voters, inflation was a huge thing, and just the sense that the Biden administration and Kamala Harris as a candidate, you know, 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, the issue, the culture wars issue outranked the inflation issue for them. And we know now that like the Trump campaign spent like $250 million on that

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  one ad about transgender in prisons, when Kamala Harris was talking about supporting transgender surgery in prisons and all that. They found that that moved undecided voters in their testing, more than anything. So they just ran that thing like crazy.

• 1:10:32Codie Sanchez?

  Well, how about his one liner too, which was like, 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.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, and 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 months. If, you know, I found it hard to believe there were still undecided voters in this country, you know, a month ago or so, but I guess there were. And these issues really, really mattered for people. So I think, I think the reckoning on, I think the COVID era, school closures, public health experts dissembling before Americans are getting caught doing so. I think the, these gender issues that have, again, it's the amount of time they've taken up.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  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 I think the, 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, he's a 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 is Don and a few other

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  organizations, that, you know, from the, just the heated summer of 2020, the George Floyd pandemic summer, you know, when we've 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, 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 really bread and butter issues. And culture war issues that seemed to be on the national stage in bright lights were really not showing up at 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

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  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 this, they should have seen this coming because, you know, a lot of people, including myself, were writing about this. We're like, look, I mean, even in 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.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  And I think, you 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's still got a lot fewer votes than Joe Biden, and 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 study this more, I think the inflation will clearly just feeling like, like we have an administration that's not doing enough about the cost of living was a big thing. We know that's true.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  But these other issues of elevated importance, when most Americans, one of them ranked more like nine, 10, 11 on a survey, and you have the, this kind of progressive elite trying to get you to rank them one, two, three. People, people were just exhausted by that and were for a long time. And now, now we can see that more clearly.

• 1:14:37Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. This is a little bit off topic, but the, these, like, I was looking at a survey the other day. The survey said, um, I'm gonna mess up the exact number, I'll link it below. The survey says, at the, the, the highlight of the article is, um, women-owned businesses have a 35% higher ROI than male-owned businesses. And I was like, that's fascinating, really, that would be stark difference.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:15:04Codie Sanchez?

  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, um, you know, highly specified in the CPG space, which is dominated, uh, by women predominantly, lots of beauty products, so like, 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, how do we quickly ascertain, like, hey, that's not a reasonable piece of

• 1:15:48Codie Sanchez?

  data to use, or that's not a good study to be conducted? Are there a few, like, red flags we can look for?

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's a good question, because people are citing surveys all the time to make the point that they wanna make.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  You know, the, the, and you've seen this in the political polling, you've 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 and a margin of error is like 5 to 6%, then 52 to 48 doesn't really mean anything in that regard, right? And so, uh, that's not a four-point advantage, it could be the other way. So that's the, like, the, the, the main one. I, I tend to look for, um, uh, 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, pretty well? And so I think when, when you have these really small samples, large margins of error,

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  and not, 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 you should 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's another one. You know, when we started building the survey center at AEI, one of the things we wanted to do and did early on was a big national survey on a whole bunch of issues. But included within the questions we 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,

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  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

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  in terms of the average age of the participants. And 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 meme,

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  like, if you're on Instagram, then that means you're probably miserable. 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 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 a public health response or something 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 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.

• 1:18:54Codie Sanchez?

  What's fascinating is that's kind of how it goes. It's like turtles all the way down. There was another, there was another survey we were, 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 entrepreneur of a company makes like forty seven thousand dollars a year on average. And I thought, God, that's, that's not that high. Mm-hmm. Um, 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

• 1:19:34Codie Sanchez?

  done by like a one-off company I've never heard of, um, that did it in one year that was like two thousand nineteen. 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 the 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, um, you know, what, what, yeah, the, you're not gonna know about this because you're healthy and not on Twitter, but I did have this little goo, this little giggle about, you know who Nate Silver is, right? Sure. So he, he kind of famously did this tweet that said, you know, I ran eighty thousand four hundred and forty-four surveys, um, you know, polls for Kamala Harris versus Trump and in, and in every single one, uh, except X percent, those really, really tiny Kamala wins.

• 1:20:16Codie Sanchez?

  And so after the election comes out, it was, you know, the, the memes were incredible. They were like, you should have ran eighty one thousand four hundred and forty-five. And like, so it's just one after the other, but I think it goes to this point of like, who are you surveying? Are you surveying the same group of people eighty thousand times with the same methodology? Because then you're probably not going to get anything else. Yeah, right. In your own bubble. Okay, one thing I want to talk about, um, to sort of wrap us out here is, Trump has made a lot of comments this week on, uh, education. And one of the, the more intense ones was, um, 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 thirty seconds, he'll show it.

• 1:21:01Codie Sanchez?

  What do you think about that? Can that really happen?

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

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• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  This has been proposed before. It's when the Tea Party election of 2010, when Republicans overwhelmingly took the House of Representatives, and this was during the first Obama term. It was kind of a reaction to Obamacare, and, you know, all the kind of political devices, 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 budgets, right? It's in most states, it's like, it's the biggest part, or next to maybe your Medicaid population,

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  depending on which state you are. I mean, you know, what you spend on K-12 education is a huge part of your budget. 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, it's not like you would be defunding them in some 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.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  What Donald Trump's not talking about are the huge drivers of our debt and deficit. He refuses 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. 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

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  for a long time. And so, 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 it looked like we were making some headway on these issues. And then things changed 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. And but I do know that the future wages and opportunities for Americans, young people,

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  are going to be skewed in the wrong direction if we don't take care of some of 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 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 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

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  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. We need to start thinking about about younger ones. And I don't think the Department of Education has a whole lot to do with that. So that's what I would really hope that this next administration would actually start talking about more and focusing on. And Trump has never shown any interest in these issues. In fact, it's the opposite. I think 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, you know, it's hard to know because we are the United States, like what it means

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:26:47Codie Sanchez?

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

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Big issue of his, yeah.

• 1:26:56Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, which is interesting because he has in his Twitter bio, or has historically, a product of big government. And so, 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 administration, I mean, we have this Department of DoG, 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.

• 1:27:41Codie Sanchez?

  Do you think, like, can we tackle efficiency in government without tackling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, 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, these 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.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  We've gone through, you know, 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, whether it's the EPA, whether it's labor, or whether it's a whole range of different regulations which affect product commercialization, those sorts of things.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  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 in the Trump administration tried to do this last time, there's talk of doing it again, like for every new regulation, we take two off the books. Well, that's, that sounds great, but you can, 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, increased innovation, you should pick your fights more carefully than that. So that's what I'm hopeful they'll do. And I, right now, I think they have a general idea.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:30:20Codie Sanchez?

  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.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Oh, it's terrible.

• 1:30:34Codie Sanchez?

  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.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:30:47Codie Sanchez?

  So it's, yeah, interesting. Okay, I want to close out here with really just the last idea of you've been in a 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? Relevant and learn without getting inundated and overwhelmed with the amount of information out there?

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:22Codie Sanchez?

  You guys have a new newsletter?

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:31:38Codie Sanchez?

  Well, what's the URL?

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Civitas dot U Texas dot E D U.

• 1:31:43Codie Sanchez?

  That rolls off the tongue.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:31:45Codie Sanchez?

  You could tell you guys are.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  It's not, it's a university.

• 1:31:47Codie Sanchez?

  That at least shows.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:31:55Codie Sanchez?

  But you could just probably Google Civitas.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  If you give, Google Civitas Institute, University of Texas.

• 1:31:59Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you'll find it.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  And we'll have Civitas Outlook, Richard Ryan's the founding editor of Law and Liberty is our editor now. He's lining up a 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.

• 1:32:28Codie Sanchez?

  You could sound smart to all your friends.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:32:30Codie Sanchez?

  Cite all the studies.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Cite the studies, drop some, drop some, some highfalutin sounding academic names and, but do say "Sibithas Institute" as much as you possibly can. If you have a large following, please include that in your tweets and, and, and push people our way. So I'm excited about what, what we're building there. And there's other, you know, there's other places where you can get a wide range of, of good information.

• 1:32:55Codie Sanchez?

  Does anybody always read everything that comes out from them related to the economy, business policy?

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so I'm, I'm a huge fan of The Economist, the magazine. Yeah. So I mean, I read The Economist regularly just because I love their global perspective and I love, 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, 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 wherever, scroll down to figure out what's going on around, around the world. I still love watching the BBC from my, my UK days for that reason. They'll take you around the world and, you know, and you learn about what's going on and you have a hard time hearing about that. So The

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  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 Linsacome was just here at UT giving a talk. He writes their weekly newsletter on trade issues and 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

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. I'm an Atlantic subscriber. I mean, I read kind of all, all these sorts of things. You just get a sense of what, what people are, are thinking.

• 1:34:32Codie Sanchez?

  Arthur's nice essays in The Atlantic are beautiful.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  They're great, yeah.

• 1:34:36Codie Sanchez?

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

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, just about well being and how to live your best life. He's been great that way. But no, 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 meant to convert academic research into accessible, digestible policy briefs and then articles on Civitas Outlook that are a thousand words long that you can read in under 10 minutes or 10 minutes or less. And will hopefully be informative for people. But I encourage everyone to read broadly. Don't get stuck on that one author, that one site. You need multiple perspectives. And I'm just, 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

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  me, even ones that I don't 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.

• 1:35:37Codie Sanchez?

  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?

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:57Codie Sanchez?

  Allow you a few.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  I'll have a few.

• 1:35:59Codie Sanchez?

  No more than three.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I won't, I won't, I won't go crazy there. I, well, I'll answer it with just 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 Catholicism. And I'm not Catholic, but it's this, it's one of the most quotable books. There's something on every page, these astute observations, but it's this, it's this great tour of the, sort of the fairy tale quality of the world and that the advantage that you get from never losing the ability to see the world as a magical and beautiful place, you know?

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  That, he has a line in there that says, you know, it's like a two-year-old. You know, a five year old would be excited if you said you opened the door and there was a dragon behind it. A two year old gets excited when you just told them you opened the door. You know, it's like, it's like, you know, 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 it's just really, it's not a long book, but sometimes 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 Chas, I think it's quoted a lot. 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, when I've met people over time who seem sort of stuck or they, you

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  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, 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, and that was, that's one, that's one book that I found to be a really, a really good read in that regard.

• 1:38:10Codie Sanchez?

  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?

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Over the last five, six, seven years, I've found that if you dig down, like in a survey day, sorry to give you a wonky survey based answer, but this is kind of where it's going to come from. Something that has confirmed my experience with 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 oppressed dialectics, they're in the oppressed category.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  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 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 didn't, weren't born here.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  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 costs more to just do everything. They're upset about that. They want to change. But when they think about their five-year prospects, when you ask these questions in surveys, they generally are pretty optimistic about where they're going.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  They, they, they have a belief in the 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.

• 1:40:47Codie Sanchez?

  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 of all backgrounds, right? And then it was like. 20 or 30% optimism by white, middle past Americans.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:41:09Codie Sanchez?

  Something like that.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  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 think the American dream is dead. America's on the totally wrong track. Best days behind us, that kind of thing. Progressive pessimism about America's been pretty well established. But that really has taken off on the right as well. And it did during the Trump years. And we did a survey right on the eve of the 2020 election. After four years of winning, right? The, you know, when 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 earn over $100,000 a year and you're a Trump voter,

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  you are much more likely to say, America's finished than a working class Trump voter, who's 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 dream. 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 do think time spent reading the news, you know, people with higher incomes and higher education do spend more minutes a day consuming news 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, the people that have the biggest following on social media or whatever, they're not necessarily reflecting the entire country.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  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 think we should all just be aware of that. And if we fall into that demographic, kind of question our own assumptions sometime. If I'm freaking out or I'm feeling overly pessimistic, do I, should I, should I be, you know? You know, 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.

• 1:43:09Codie Sanchez?

  It's so true. There was a, there was a really interesting conversation I was listening to the other day. And it was between two entrepreneurs basically saying,

• 1:43:20Codie Sanchez?

  You know, the other one asked, "How's your business and your industry doing?" And he was like, "Well, this industry's really tough, man. I mean, it's like, super tough over here. This industry's really, you know, I don't know, I wouldn't do it again in this one." And they were asking, and 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 done tons of interviews. 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 like, would you do a business in this industry again?'" How many of them say, "Oh, this industry's actually like, super easy. Anybody should come in here and do this." And I would totally choose the same game, again. And the answer's like, zero. So this isn't

• 1:44:03Codie Sanchez?

  survey data, this is just Cody data, but like, it is, and 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. Like, 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 that you might have been perfectly capable of doing too. So that makes a ton of sense for me.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:44:39Codie Sanchez?

  All right. Ryan Streeter, not on Twitter, but at the Sibotas Institute.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  That's right. Thanks for having me.

• 1:44:44Codie Sanchez?

  So let's recover it again.