Rent Control, Socialism, and the Fight to Save New York City | Reihan Salam

Reihan Salam is the President of the Manhattan Institute. In this conversation, we break down what's driving New York City's affordability crisis — from decades of rent control and restrictive zoning to a failing public education system. We also discuss the burnout crisis in law enforcement, immigration and assimilation, the rise of the DSA and socialism among young Americans, and how AI, bitcoin, and capitalism can restore opportunity and rebuild the American dream. ===================== Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ===================== Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp ===================== 0:00 - Intro1:30 - NYC affordability crisis & rent control12:10 - Failing government services & public education23:03 - Police, fire & law enforcement struggles29:36 - Immigration, assimilation & the welfare state38:30 - Rise of the DSA & socialism among young Americans49:42 - AI, bitcoin & the future of capitalism58:17 - Manhattan Institute's mission & building a better future

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

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• 0:55Speaker 02

  If you want to destroy a city, you know, the only thing more effective than carpet bombing is rent control. You saw rent control for decades degrading the value of multifamily buildings all over New York City to the point where the owners were so desperate that some of them did things that were pretty unethical. There were people who were burning down their apartment buildings in the hope that they could get an insurance settlement out of it. It was completely crazy.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a very important conversation with Reihan Salam. He's the president of the Manhattan Institute, and he's here to talk about what is going on in New York City as an example of what's going on in the broader country of the United States. In this conversation, we talk about the economics, the affordability for the everyday citizen that's living in this city. We then talk about some of the political topics that people are very interested in. What's going on around immigration? What's going around on public safety? How should we think about government spending? What about public schools, police departments, fire departments, and many other organizations that affect everyday citizens' lives? I wanted to have this conversation because I think it's very important for investors and business owners alike to understand not only what's happening in a local community, but to understand maybe the broader forces. What's going well? What's not going well? What are potential areas of support?

• 2:05Speaker 03

  And what are potential areas that you should be worried about? All of that can be unpacked by analyzing what's going on in New York City, what's working and what's not working. Because I think that there's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of controversy around all of these different groups and the different policies. But ultimately, I wanted to have a data-driven conversation. That's what the Manhattan Institute does. So I'm excited for you guys to listen to this conversation with Reihan Salam. All right, Rob, and I want to start with talking about affordability in New York City. And I think of New York City as like the microcosm of the broader nation. And there's nine-ish million people who live in these five boroughs. Affordability is probably the worst here than it is anywhere else in the country. And you get this huge disparity. You have Wall Street on one end, and these guys are just printing cash. And then you literally have people who are complaining

• 2:48Speaker 03

  about not being able to afford rent, gas, groceries, and kind of everyday life. Why is affordability so bad in New York City?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Think about this. Back in the 90s, there were a lot of people with a very simple idea. Their idea was, why don't we bring Walmart to New York City? You know, you're, you know, you lived in New York for a long time. You know the city. I know the city. If you go to the outer boroughs, you got a lot of strip malls. You know, you know, it's not like, you know, the suburbs way, way out. But you do have, you have parking lots. You know, you kind of have these places where you could have a Walmart. There was a systematic effort to prevent Walmart from coming to the city. There was a systematic effort to prevent big-box retail from coming to the city. And, you know, why was that? Well, you know, is it non-union? Okay, even if you, okay, well, we'll make it union. Okay, you know, give us the, give us the, in an industrial zone. Let us do this. Let us do this simple thing.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  If you are a big-box retailer that's coming to New York City, there's this sense that the only way you can do it is by being connected. I've got to know someone. I've got to talk to someone. I've got to work with organized labor. I've got to work with a politician. So that's like a vague, you know, that winds up being this kind of extra tax on top of you. Housing is the biggest thing. Everyone knows it. There are a lot of young people who would kill to live in New York City. If it were 10% cheaper, we would have a ton of people who would be clamoring to live here. But basically, over decades, we built up the system that makes it extremely difficult to build. And, you know, part of it, I mean, there's so many different places to go here.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  So you had, before the 60s, you know, you had zoning laws that said you could basically put up a six-story apartment building anywhere in New York City. Then in 1961, they decided the city's not going to grow anymore. So let's cramp down the zoning. Let's compete with the suburbs. Let's do that. And the city was flattening its back. The city was dying. Middle-class people were leaving forever. Then in the 80s and 90s, when the city started coming back, they didn't actually adjust. They didn't course correct to do that. So that's one thing. We literally cannot build enough. Then another thing that happened is rent control and rent stabilization. You know, you impose these stringent controls where you say, you know, you can't raise rents,

• 5:11Speaker 02

  and that that means that it's not a very good place to put your capital. Because you could put your capital in any number of places. Why would you do it there? We actually made this a lot better. In the 90s, we kind of started to fix the problem a bit. We didn't get rid of rent stabilization. We didn't get rid of those regulations. We softened them. We eased them up. We created vacancy de-control. You know, we said, let's moderate this so that people can actually make investments. When a unit becomes empty, let's allow the landlord to fix up the unit so they can bring it up to code. In 2019, you had a bunch of politicians who had the brilliant idea, let's stop that. They basically said, if a unit becomes vacant,

• 5:56Speaker 02

  you are not allowed to raise the rent enough to make it worth your while to fix it up. You made it much harder to evict people, including problematic tenants. You did all of these things. So you went from a situation where New York City was really expensive to where we're in this extremely intense emergency. But if you look at any number of those issues, it's a situation where someone thought they were solving a problem, and they actually made the problem worse.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Take rent control as an example, right? It's got to be one of the dumbest policies that we put in place. And from my perspective, I understand the empathy as to why it sounds like a good idea.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  In New York City, I don't know if you know the number, but I think it's like something like a third of all apartments in New York City are rent-controlled, right? I mean, some big number, whatever, maybe 20%, 40%, whatever. Some big number of apartments are rent-controlled, which means that you need to raise the rents enough on the other ones to pay for the rent-controlled ones. And then you go and you look at, there's a guy on X who is, he owns a number of different properties, and he's a multifamily, I'll call him an investor operator because not only does he put his capital in, operates. He is my, my source for what's going on in this world. He's like, my friends are handing back the keys on building after building after building.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  And it kind of makes me think, like, maybe the rent control, maybe the famous quote, you know, they're making more than 10%. They're making double-digit percentage return on their capital.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Is all of this less about actually helping the homeowner? And it's more about just get the assets out of the hands of the current owners and basically make them so dilapidated, so, you know, invaluable that they can be scooped up by the socialist class or, you know, whoever their buddies are?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  This is a really interesting question. So in a way, you saw rent control for decades degrading the value of multifamily buildings all over New York City to the point where the owners were so desperate that some of them did things that were pretty unethical. There were people who were burning down their apartment buildings in the hope that they could get an insurance settlement out of it. It was completely crazy. It was, you know, there was a Swedish economist who said that if you want to destroy a city, you know, the only thing more effective than carpet bombing is rent control. You know, it's just to really destroy the value of buildings. So, you know, we kind of went through this. And what happened is the city wound up taking over a bunch of properties

• 8:33Speaker 02

  because these were buildings that could not pay their property taxes. So the city took them over, and, you know, the city can't handle its own public housing. There are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living in public housing that is totally substandard and even dangerous. So then you have these other buildings. Then they started handing them back to private landlords. Oftentimes immigrants, often those people were scrappy, wanted to build wealth, and that actually proved a big success story. Now, as you're suggesting, there is a group of people, they're more ideological than practical, who are saying that we just don't like private ownership. They literally use the language of decomodification. That means that we do not believe that housing is so important that it shouldn't be something where money changes hands.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  This should be something that we give to you because you deserve it, you know, something like that. So, but...

• 9:24Speaker 03

  I mean, how insane does that sound?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Well, look, but what you understand and I understand is that actually, it takes work to do that. You know, you have to wake up in the morning, and you actually have to, you know, you have to sweep out the trash. You have to take out the trash. You have to make sure that, you know, you don't have vermin. You know, you have to do hard work. You have to paint a building. You have to, you have to deal with problematic tenants. It actually is really hard work. So there is a group of people who think we can solve this problem by having social housing, by having government ownership, or by having nonprofits. Now, you might think, okay, okay, you put a nonprofit there. But do the fundamental laws of economics go away? Do you no longer have to employ people to actually, you know, take the plunger and, you know, kind of fix the stopped-up toilet or whatever else? No, of course not.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  You still have to do those things. So then where does the money come from? If you're not able to charge a rent that is adequate to carry the costs of the building, it has to be subsidies.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Those subsidies have to come from government. That money has to come from taxpayers ultimately. So this is the fundamental problem. They, the folks who are advocating for moving these buildings from private hands into public hands or nonprofit hands, they're not confronting the fact that we fundamentally made this untenable as a business for a lot of reasons. You know, and then there's also the tax treatment, there's the cost of insurance, you know, you name it. And that is what we're running into right now. The 2019 rent law that I was telling you about, that was a law that was really advanced by people who are young people. These were people who in many cases did not live through that process where they saw the Bronx burning.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  They did not live through the process where they saw what happened to these buildings, how they saw them deteriorate over time. And those people who pressed for that law are the people around Zoran Mamdani, the current mayor of New York City. See a Weaver, one of his chief advisors, a very dear, close friend of his. She was a leading tenant organizer who came up with this idea. Let's fundamentally change the terms of the debate. Let's fight capitalism by fighting landlords. Because in New York City, hey, everyone hates their landlord. And by the way, that is a class war that a lot of people felt like they could win. Why? Because even if you're making half a million dollars, hey, if you have a landlord and you don't like paying more rent, that's kind of the way they've tried to do this. They've tried to find the perfect enemy.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  But their perfect enemy is oftentimes someone who is, someone who's just trying to do a really hard job.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  When you think of that person, I usually look at it as they don't own hundreds of million dollars of real estate. I mean, they own one or two buildings, whatever. If they have to do such a hard job and they only can make 11, 12%, there's a lot way, you know, much easier ways to make 11 or 12%.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  And so I think that kind of get lost, gets lost on this.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  And if you're lucky, by the way, because actually that is oftentimes exaggerated. You know, oftentimes when you're looking at rent stabilized buildings, you know, you're blending together a lot of different buildings. There are some buildings where I have some rent stabilized units in the building and I have some market rate units. So then I could kind of make it work roughly. But if I'm in one of these areas where they're all rent stabilized buildings, you know, you are barely keeping your head above water. Then the narrative is, well, it's not our fault that you took out a big loan and you were a speculator and you were looking to make money. But the thing is that ultimately you're going to need private capital to make this work, no matter who the owner is, one way or another.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  So there's a deep lack of realism about how these things work.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  I just think of off the top of my head, what are the things that the New York City government is involved in? Subway? Taxi system, kind of indirectly? If you look at housing, public housing? If you look at DMV, you know, all these different components?

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Public education is the big one.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Public education is another one, right? I mean, we can go through those. Do they get an A on any of this?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  There are a lot of good, decent, hardworking people working for New York City. And I have to tell you, the people who are most frustrated are oftentimes those people who are in the system.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Who understand how money is spent, how money is wasted. They understand what they're up against. The school system is incredible. So New York City spends over $120 billion. And the school system, we're spending $43,000 per pupil in the New York City public schools. If I were to tell you to establish Pompliano Academy and you had $43,000 per kid to work with, you could probably do a pretty decent job. You know, and granted, you're a smart guy, you know, kind of, you're a special person. But there are a lot of people who could really do something very, very impressive with those resources. And there's complexity here, there are capital budgets, there's a lot going on, I understand that.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  There are kids with special needs, a lot of complexity. But the thing is that when you look at educational performance in our schools, it's pretty lackluster. And that's not because it's intrinsic. You know, when Mayor Bloomberg was in office, and he wasn't perfect, but when he was in office, student achievement was improving steadily. We were making very big gains. We were making big gains in terms of high school completion and much else. But you basically have a group of people now, in my opinion, who are not really thinking about achievement. They're not really thinking about, you know, are we setting up these students for success? They're thinking about the machine and they're thinking about feeding the machine. You know, we have a bunch of employees in the system.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  And even though you have schools that have fewer than 150 pupils now, because by the way, a lot of families with young kids are leaving the city. Even though you have these schools, they keep the school going. They keep it with you got your principal and your assistant principal and you have all of your bodies. And then it makes you wonder, is this about delivering a service? Or is this about you and me as taxpayers actually working for the people who are meant to be public servants? And again, I want to underscore, a lot of great, hardworking people are busting their butts. You know, they're taking out the trash, they're keeping the streets safe, they're teaching, they're doing, you know, a lot of really good people.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  But there's this incredible machine that's built up over time, that's a machine to extract. You extract and extract from the private economy. And then you lose sight of what is the purpose of having an effective government in the first place?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  It is always interesting to me because when you go and you look at across the country, I guess, New York City is the microcosm of the country. Student numbers have pretty much stayed flat. Administrators has exploded. Why do we need more administrators? Shouldn't we get more teachers? Right? Shouldn't we get different class sizes? Like, it's just very different. And so if we go and we look at, take public education.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  To me, it would feel like if we created an incentive based system where we actually said to teachers and/or administrators, if you do a good job, you're going to get paid more money, we probably would get better outcomes. Pretty simple, right? The government, one, doesn't think that way. Two, would, corruption would immediately infiltrate in some form or fashion. But just that one simple thing of let's compensate these people based on whether they're successful or not, would revolutionize the outcomes of these school districts compared to what we do, which is basically the opposite, which says, even if you do a bad job, don't worry, you can't get fired and you're always going to get paid.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  100%. If you look at many other urban school systems, they've placed a much higher emphasis on choice, much higher emphasis on charter schools. And in New York City, we have a ton of students. We have over 100,000 who are enrolled in charter schools. It's a system that works decently well. Not every charter school is great, but there are some that are outstanding. We have some charter schools in New York City that are the best school systems in the United States. And these are systems that could absolutely grow. But in New York City and New York State, the political classes said, we are not going

• 17:54Speaker 02

  to give those operators that are crushing it, we are not going to give them more charters, we are not going to allow them to open more schools, we're going to constrain them.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Why?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Good question. You know, my suspicion is that the reason is that if those systems were allowed to grow further, then they would gain more market share. Now, the thing is, from a tax based perspective, you know, for you and me as people who care about the city and its health, actually, that would be great. Because if you have other options for families where they feel like, well, now I can stay in the city, I can keep paying my income taxes, my sales taxes, my property taxes, you know it, because I feel like I'll have a decent option. But they're not thinking in those terms, they're thinking, how do I protect this workforce? How do I protect that class of administrators that you're talking about? And then from the perspective of the teacher, you know, the system that you're describing

• 18:47Speaker 02

  is a system where, let's say we did have, you know, we have a big district public school system, but then we have some charter networks that are allowed to grow freely. What happens in that world? You have different systems competing for teachers. And then in the public school system, it's unionized, you have step in lane pay scale systems where it's basically based on seniority, or whether or not you have a master's degree that may or may not be worth anything. Then you have other systems that are saying, hey, I'm going to compensate you for being excellent. Or, think about it this way, teachers get really good in the first five years. You start out, you're green, you get a lot better with the next five years. You don't necessarily get that much better between year 10 and year 20.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  But the way a step in lane pay scale works is that you hit your peak earnings way, way later. And a lot of those young and hungry people who want to become teachers, they leave the profession. So there are all these ways which you had rival systems, they could compete for great teachers, they could compete to offer better perks, you know, who knows? In New York City right now, our school system is offering fewer hours of instruction than our charter schools. We're offering fewer hours of instruction than other public school systems around the country. I know this because I'm a public school parent and I love my public school and I'm grateful for my public school. But we get 120 hours less than the national average. Now, 120 hours might not sound like a lot, but let's say you've got 1,100 hours in the

• 20:14Speaker 02

  school year, okay? Over K through 12, that's over a year of instruction. So literally, we're paying 43,000 per pupil. We're getting less instruction. You are getting a lot of administrators, you're getting a lot of support personnel. And I'm sure those folks are good people, they're doing their best. But I've got to say, between you and me, part of me thinks, sounds like you're finding more people who are going to be paying union dues. Sounds like you're building your political army in some cases, rather than thinking about, well, why don't we give the principals some flexibility to figure out, how can they work? How can they take the resources allocated to them and figure out how to best to use them?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  The way that any entrepreneur would, the way that any business owner would.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Another idea I've always had is, you know, one, compensate the teachers for better outcomes. But if you went to every principal and you said, here's your budget.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Anything that you don't spend, you get half.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  So you get a million bucks, two million bucks, you know, whatever the budget is. And you say, for every dollar you save, as long as you continue to meet certain performance metrics in terms of the education test scores, whatever it is, every dollar you save, you get 50 cents. How much money you think these principals would find?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  You, well, you, well, but you know, first of all, you know, that would be unbelievably controversial, but let me tell you something that would be really interesting about that world. What if you then said, whatever surplus we have, we can do things like say to the parent, hey, we're going to give some voucher for enrichment, for summer school, we're going to give you kind of, you know, hey, because we've developed this surplus. What if you said, hey, you know, my kid doesn't want to take Spanish or French, my kid wants to do Mandarin, they're going to do it through some online program through the school. And by the way, you've saved us money because now we don't have to hire a Mandarin teacher. So you, the parent and family are able to participate in that. Maybe you could put

• 22:13Speaker 02

  that into a college savings account. But, you know, I think you're totally on to something here, which is that people are not treating those dollars like they're worth anything. And the other thing is that it's always an emergency. If I do not get more money next year, it's always a grave emergency. Because what incentive do you have to say it's not an emergency? You have no skin in the game otherwise. So how can we do something where we create a virtuous cycle where you're looking for efficiency, you're looking for productivity, you're looking for excellence? Because the families, they want excellence, right? You know, they're, they're not going to kind of want to do something just so they can, you know, get cash. I think there are all sorts of smart ways we can create better incentives in these systems.

• 22:53Speaker 03

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• 24:18Speaker 03

  that I've met that are former police officers and recently former because they got out before Mom Donnie came in. I know folks who, they're basically like, look, I gotta do my job, I gotta get paid for my family. But you give them a beer and let them talk for 20 minutes and they'll ramble on about how stupid stuff either at work at their local firehouse or police station is, you know, some sort of middle management layer or all the way up to, you know, Gracie Mansion. It just feels like, okay, all of that is what I consider the white collar aspect of those departments. Then you ask them, what do you do on a day to day? But to tell me your last day that you were working, what

• 25:01Speaker 03

  were some of the calls you went to as a police officer? God bless these people. I mean, you'll talk to a police officer, he'll be like, oh, I showed up, this guy had a knife and was, you know, yelling and screaming to people on the highway. Then I went over here, this crack addict was doing it. You're like, dude, this is insane. And so it almost feels like it's like a double whammy. You've got questions about, does my leadership actually want to support me, see me do well, or do they think that I'm the enemy? At the same time, all of these policies are leading to making my day to day actual job harder because I'm having to, I've arrested this guy 14 times, right?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Unbelievable. And it's demoralizing.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  By the way, I'm going to arrest him today, he's going to be here tomorrow. And I know that if I come here every day at two o'clock, the same guy's here doing the same shit, right? So like, it just feels like, again, I will never claim that somebody's intentionally being evil, et cetera. Some people probably are. But it does feel like you're going to see those numbers dwindle over time. And eventually you just get all of the good people who actually wanted to do those jobs, say, look, no mas, I just, this isn't for me, I'm going to go find something else to do.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  My core guiding principle is always, let's make government excellent at what only government can do. You and I both know there are some things, you know, when it comes to the armed forces, when it comes to law enforcement, the basics of whether or not you feel like you're living in a civilized society, you feel safe enough to raise your family, build a business, go about your life in whatever way you want, but you need the streets to be safe and orderly. And, you know, look, I'm very glad, you know, we're making progress when it comes to homicides and shootings, that's good news. But there's a disorder challenge, and there's also the challenge of making sure that we keep that

• 26:52Speaker 02

  up over time. And right now, there are a lot of folks in law enforcement who are burning the candle at both ends. They are working a huge amount of overtime, and they are in a spot where they're looking at the younger people coming up behind them, and they're thinking, wait a second, you know, if you go to the suburbs and you sign up to, you know, go into law enforcement, you're getting paid more, you know, you're getting respected more. You know, if you're an NYPD officer with some experience under your belt, I promise you, there are police departments in Texas and Florida and all over the country

• 27:30Speaker 02

  that want you there. So if you feel as though you are not respected, and also, you know, how do you deal with that burnout? You know, our police department right now is not where it needs to be in terms of size, in terms of number of officers, to really ensure that you don't have that burnout. And they're, in my opinion, they're not being compensated adequately to ensure that we're getting really strong people. Now, the people who are joining, God bless them, these are good, decent people. But, you know, if you're not compensating enough at the front end, there are people who will do it out of love and respect. But sometimes you have to weaken your standards. And what happens is that the officers who

• 28:14Speaker 02

  joined when the department was stronger and was respected, they start looking to the exits because they're thinking, well, I'm here right now, and we have this knowledge base, and we have this experience that we need right now. Well, what's going to happen a few years down the road? I think that that kind of experience, that kind of know-how, the way that I think about it is always this. You know, in a lot of places historically, in a lot of places around the country, you have police officers who do not rush in. They are reluctant to put themselves in danger. They don't do it because they don't know if, you know, the, the, the kind of, you know, officials, you know, the city is going to have their back. That's a huge thing. If you believe that not only does the city

• 28:59Speaker 02

  government have your back, but also the city has your back, that is very different than you are willing to do those things. And you're not doing it for the money. You're willing to have that service ethic. But I think that that demoralization really creeps in. And I think that's something that is unfortunately going on right now.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Do you feel like the citizens are demoralized?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  There sure as heck are a lot of citizens who are demoralized right now. Every time you see disorder, every time you see graffiti, every time you see a broken window, every time you see trash, you know, building up on the street, that's something that makes you think, well, wait a second, you know, how much am I paying in taxes? Wait a second, New York City employs over 300,000 people. And just, that is a big thing. And certainly you see them more in some, it's incredible.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  300,000 people?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's incredible. It's a huge number.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  It's a big city, right?

• 29:52Speaker 02

  It's a big city. We've got, you know, eight and a half million people. There are a lot of people. And, you know, look, those people, a lot of them are doing absolutely essential work. My view, though, is that actually, if you're working for the city, you know, let's say you're working in the Parks Department, something like that, it's, it's not the same as being in law enforcement. You're not putting your life in danger in the same way. But there's that same feeling of esprit de corps. Do you have great leaders? You know, do you have people who really care about value for money? Do you care, you know, that really matters and it can make you feel that the job is meaningful or not? So that demoralization can apply to citizens, it can apply to workers, too.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  What about immigration, right? Nick Shirley, Joe Sweeney, there's a bunch of these guys who have been all over, whether it is fraud associated with this, whether it is Canal Street, which, I mean, Canal Street is like a circus at this point. And I get that people will say, oh, it's always been like this, whatever. You could pull up photos, you could do all kinds of stuff. Have there been people there for a long time? Yes. Has it been to this degree? And I think this, you know, kind of crazy? I don't think so at all. But you can walk through New York City and the various neighborhoods. And there are certain neighborhoods that are absolutely overrun with illegal immigrants. There is graffiti all over the walls.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  It is kind of the broken window theory taken to reality. Right? There's other areas. It's like the most amazing place in the entire world and people are walking around. And you almost feel like this is like two different countries, right? In terms of, and sometimes they can be blocks away.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  And so when you think about that, New York kind of has this weird relationship, right? You know, my great grandparents, my grandparents, they came here at different times from Italy. They're immigrants.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  I wouldn't be here without them doing that. At the same time, if I went and talked to 99% of legal immigrants, they're the ones who are the most against illegal immigration, right? They're the ones who waited in line or, you know, did the things that they were sort of whatever. So it's like this very weird dynamic of like, it's a city built by lots of people coming from lots of different places and ended up creating this magical place. But also I think a lot of those same people are sitting there saying, wait a second, this feels like something is broken and, uh, you know, it's not broken for the better.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  There's so much going on here. If you look at New York City's revival through the eighties, nineties, two thousands, a huge part of that story is immigration. And a huge part of the story is that you had some neighborhoods that were left for dead, that experienced huge amounts of middle-class flight, but also working-class flight. Anyone who could leave did leave. Then, you know, you had the folks who were left. You had, um, the urban poor, hardcore, isolated urban poor. Then what happened is you got a bunch of immigrants who came in, who were, in many cases, were themselves very poor. But these were people who picked up stakes, moved from one place to another, and they were coming here to work.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  And those numbers, they rushed into these neighborhoods that were dead or dying, and they infused new life into them. And part of what happened, you know, people talk about gentrification, but the funny thing is the biggest neighborhood change you saw in a lot of New York neighborhoods in that era was not gentrification of someone who, you know, whatever, went to a fancy college and then moved to the city on their, with their parents' money, paying the rent. It was actually immigrants were coming and they, because of their economic activity, actually helped a lot of those people who were already living there in those neighborhoods. They helped make those neighborhoods safer. They made a huge difference. But here's the important thing. Assimilation, you know, what does the word assimilation even mean?

• 33:46Speaker 02

  It, it means becoming more like the people around you. That is a two-way street. It's the immigrants becoming more like the natives. And it's sometimes the natives becoming more like the immigrants if you've got enough of them coming in, right? So let me put it to you this way. If you were an immigrant who came to New York City when you knew that if you jumped the turnstile, you're going to get turned out on your, you know, you're going to suffer the consequences for that. Okay? Or simply put, if you just see everyone else paying the fare when they get on the subway, you assimilate to that norm. Then if you're an immigrant who comes into a city where, you know, I, I look at, you know, a bunch of teenagers who are jumping, I look at like a, you know, 25-year-old, you know, kind of,

• 34:31Speaker 02

  I, I see young women, you know, jumping the turnstile. What do I think? What do I take away from that? This applies in many different dimensions, too. If you were an immigrant who came to New York City in 1925 or 1975, there was a difference. You know, there was more of a welfare state in 1975, but there wasn't enough of one where you felt like you could take that for granted and you were automatically going to access a million different benefits. One big way our society has changed is that there's this idea that, hey, we don't, we don't want to stigmatize, that's the word, we don't want to stigmatize collecting benefits. Therefore, not only are we going to allow you to collect benefits, we are going to come to you.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  We are literally going to fund community organizers who are going to come, knock on your door and kind of talk to you about whether or not you, you know, should you really have to pay rent? You know, I mean, you know, tell me, let me tell you about the whole retinue of services you should access. Then you have crazy programs like the CD PAP program. It's this, um, program, um, is a home health aid program, consumer-directed, um, you know, kind of personal assistance, where the idea is, you know, a lot of people, you know, you might have an elderly relative, something like that, who needs help, who's sick, who needs someone to kind of look after them because they literally physically can't move. And hey, it could be a lot more expensive to put them in a nursing home. So you created programs where you're paying home health aides.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  That, by the way, is one of the biggest, fastest-growing jobs in New York City. But you created this program where you said, oh, well, we're going to let the consumer choose how to spend that money. Oh, well, what I'm going to do is going to take that money, going to hire my daughter or my son to do it, or my cousin to do it. Well, who's going to check to make sure that actually that person is really providing personal care? Or are they just accessing city money? This is just one example, but it's a kind of situation where the idea is you create this entitlement mindset.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  So take this idea, right? The home health aides, I am not an expert by any means, but I have heard quite a bit about these. And not only is it one of the fastest-growing jobs in, in New York City, but also there are a lot of folks, whenever, you know, Shirley or somebody puts out one of these videos, they're like, come check the home health aides. Like this is a fraud, you know, uh, kind of a fountain of youth, if you will, right? It's just there is money pouring all over the place. What's the solution? Do we just get rid of the program? And we just say, okay, this is gone. We're done with this, you know, nonsense? Or is that so difficult to do that it's just like not even an option at this point?

• 37:08Speaker 02

  It's a really tough question. And one reason it's such a tough question is that New York State, you know, our whole economy is now built around the Medicaid program. New York State, you may have heard, spends $268 billion. And a huge amount of that money. So part of that is the money that is coming out of the pocket of New York State taxpayers. But part of the way it works is that New York State spends money on Medicaid. And for every dollar New York State spends, you get a dollar from the federal government. It's free money. So what's happened is you spend more and more money

• 37:52Speaker 02

  to get more and more borrowed federal dollars. And then that employs people, some of whom are hard-working guys. You know, if you're thinking about the person at a hospital, the orderly who's, you know, cleaning up the floors, uh, you know, that person is supported by Medicaid. But then you also have some people where, I mean, is that a real job? Is it not a real job? Is there any accountability? So, you know, yes, I do believe that you need some tighter accountability in these programs, but part of it's just downstream of the fact of like, how are you getting the money? Because in a way, the whole thing is this, it's, I, it's circular. If so many of your quote-unquote "private sector" jobs are subsidized by Medicaid dollars, think about upstate New York.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Upstate New York used to have an incredibly dynamic, healthy manufacturing economy, tourism economy. Now you've got a lot of places in upstate New York that are supported by a state university or a state prison or a state hospital system, where those hospitals are spending more and more money, even though they have fewer and fewer patients. So then the whole economy, the people who are left, they might not literally know their money is coming from the government. They're not literally a public employee, but it's indirectly coming from those public employees. So you have this dynamic that is totally extractive. And then people who are job creators, people who are investors, people want to grow a business, they just find this is not a hospitable environment for me

• 39:21Speaker 02

  because this isn't an extraction environment. So I think that that's where we are right now.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Let's talk about, um, the DSA. I hear this term thrown around and, um, it feels like it's thrown around by people who are very well-informed. And it's thrown around in the term of, here's the new cool kids on the block.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  It's thrown around by people who are very, you know, well-versed in this. And it's like, oh my God, here comes the biggest threat that America has faced in a long time.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Right? But then it's also thrown around by people who have no clue what they're talking about on both sides of, hey, I see the cool kids at the, at the, you know, club. I never talked to them before. I have no clue what they stand for, but you know, the cool kids are up there, they're popping bottles and that, that's cool. And then you got other people who were, you know, my neighbor's brother, sister told me, you know, they're the biggest threat in America. And so it seems like they're the talk of the town. And people are trying to figure out, good, bad, threat, not a threat, helpful, good intentions, bad intentions, who are these people? Like, just give me maybe like the DSA 101 from your view.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  This is an organization that has changed a lot. It was established way back in 1982 and it was just a talking shop. For a few people who were socialists, they were anti-communists at the time, a lot of them. They were passionate supporters of Israel back then, when it first started. And it was an organization that was kind of bumping along, was almost dead. And then that organization really came back to life in the 2010s. This is an organization that got a huge amount of new energy from Occupy Wall Street. You know, if you remember from way back in the day, 2011, 2012. Then you had Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. You had a huge number of young people coming into this organization.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  And these young people were people who were millennials a lot of the time. They are millennials who, you know, are people who had seen the Iraq War. They saw the financial crisis. They saw these experiences and they came to these very radical, left-wing ideas, oftentimes through college and graduate school, that's where they got exposed to them. And what they found in the DSA was a community. You know, these were a lot of people who didn't necessarily have that feeling of community. Where am I? Where do I belong? I'm not going to a synagogue or a mosque or a church. You know, where do I find that tight-knit community? And they found it here with a group of people who had this vision for transforming American society.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  And they also had an enemy. You know, you have an enemy. You know, you, you know, maybe you feel like your life hasn't gone exactly the way you wanted it to. You feel frustrated, you feel angry. One way that I think about this is that, um,

• 42:06Speaker 02

  You know, if you grew up at the 90th percentile in America, you know, you're, you're right at the top of the income spectrum. The chances that you, the kid of someone who grew up in that household, beating that is only 20%. If your family was the 90th percentile, there's only a 20% chance you're at the 91st or 95th or 99th percentile yourself. So that means that 80% of kids who grew up in pretty affluent, comfortable families, they've experienced downward mobility rather than upward mobility. Now, a lot of those people who went to great colleges, you know, selective schools, you know, kind of you name it, they learned from, you know, they learned about sociology and what have you, they already were drawn to these ideas.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  And it's not just from their professors, they learned from each other, they're in this community of people who are looking for something, searching for something. So New York City, we were talking about immigration, how much it matters. The thing about New York City is that, you know, in the 80s and 90s of the newcomers coming to New York City, replacing all those middle-class people leaving the city, two-thirds of them were immigrants and one-third were college-educated professionals. That wound up flipping to the point where it was about two-thirds college-educated professionals and one-third immigrants. Very interesting. So then another thing that happened is that New York City's white population, you know,

• 43:29Speaker 02

  back in 1990, the white population was, you know, call it about 30, 35% of the population. Today, New York City's white population is about the same as that. It's not that much lower than it was back then, but it's a different group of people. Back then, it was someone who was a third or fourth generation Irish or Italian or Jewish guy living in Bensonhurst or Gravesend or, you know, you name it. Today, that population is very different. It consists of these people who, I don't want to say they're all genderifiers or they're all transplants, but a lot of them are. And a lot of them are people who are too young to remember New York City before Giuliani or before Bloomberg, or they're just people who lived in other places.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  They only know New York City as a place where there's wealth, where there's dynamism, where there's safety. They don't know what it took to actually get from a much more challenging place to this place. So then for them, you know, they come in here, they have these really dramatic radical ideas, they have a community, they have a lot of skills that they've learned as digital natives to change our politics. And they run up against a political establishment that is not ready for people who are not just the usual time servers, they're not the usual people who are just kind of hanging around City Hall. These are people who are disciplined, organized, highly capable and highly radical.

• 44:54Speaker 03

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• 46:24Speaker 03

  Like, again, it goes back to this idea of, you know, the road to hell is paved with, you know, good intentions. But do you actually think that they believe the things they are proposing are possible solutions? Or is the goal to destroy the system? And it's a nuanced difference.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  But destroying the system out of spite, anger, whatever, is different than helping the people.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  This is a very old debate. When you're looking at socialism, when you're looking at the Marxist tradition, all the way back to the late 19th century and early 1900s, there was this big debate, you know, between people who said, look, our goal, we're revolutionaries, we want to heighten the contradictions, we're not here to make capitalism work, we know it's going to fail, that's what Karl Marx predicted, it's going to break, and then we're here to basically be ready for when it fails, when it blows up. Then there were even back then, some people saying that, well, actually, it doesn't look like this is all blowing up completely. It looks like some working-class, middle-class people are getting better off over time. How can we make the system better? How can we make it more humane? How can we make it more decent?

• 47:35Speaker 02

  So there was always that revolutionaries versus reformists kind of dynamic that was there. Now, the beauty of socialism as a brand right now is actually that socialism can mean anything. It can mean anything. Socialism can mean, oh, I went to Denmark once and it was pretty nice, and, you know, the subways were really clean and beautiful, and, you know, that was amazing. I mean, I would love to, you know, I would love for America to be more like that. Then there are other people who think socialism means, you know, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela or something like that. And I think that what the DSA has done so successfully and what this larger socialist movement has done so successfully is blur those things. You know, because there are a lot of people who, you know, they're not the super hardcore

• 48:19Speaker 02

  radicals who are thinking that my ultimate mission is to bring down capitalism, they're thinking that socialism is a brand. For me as a young person, I'm not a young person, I'm talking about somebody else, but you know, for me as a young person, all of these other things have been discredited in my eyes. The establishment is discredited. So if the establishment hates socialism, I guess I'm for it. See what I mean? So part of that is actually just that dynamic. And then, well, what does it mean? Oh, it just means, you know, more free stuff, or I don't have to pay higher rent, or, you know, that sounds good to me. But then there are people on the inside who are the deep thinkers, who are thinking more deeply about the United States as an imperialist power. They believe that the United States and what it represents, and that capitalism is a deeply

• 49:03Speaker 02

  noxious and inhumane and destructive force, and they want to build a movement that can transcend it. They want to sharpen class antagonism because they see building that wider politics, that wider coalition, and building that anger is a tool for affecting that change. Is that true of every single person? Absolutely not. I think there are some people who are just totally kind of normal people who, again, want America to be a little bit more like Denmark. But the funny thing that's happening right now is that for better, for worse, I think for worse, but that's just my opinion, a lot of people in the mainstream Democratic Party, let's say, have already moved in that direction. You know, you, if you're in New York City, you know, you go to any number of Democratic

• 49:45Speaker 02

  members of Congress, they say they want Medicare for all, or Medicare for most, or Medicare for all who want it, or whatever. They've already moved way to the left of where Bill Clinton was. So then what's the difference? And the difference to some degree is branding, the difference to some degree is aggression. You know, the difference is to some degree being transgressive and more radical. So, you know, I, I wouldn't say that your cousin, you know, your nephew who calls himself a socialist, I'm not necessarily saying that person wants to burn it all down, but I will tell you, there are very smart, sophisticated people who really do believe that the United States has been a noxious, dangerous, even evil force in the world, and that part of

• 50:29Speaker 02

  what they want to do is remake this country in a direction that's radically at odds with what you and I would think of as core American values.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  So about artificial intelligence and Bitcoin, maybe as examples, right? It's technology that I think the optimists, the people who are building this stuff, they believe that it can be deflationary, help make things more affordable, it can return sovereignty to individuals, it can create intelligence that then is used by everyone to become more productive and create more wealth. You know, all of these pitches from the optimists seem to be very much critiques from the people who do not like this stuff. And so where do you think this kind of innovative technology like AI, Bitcoin, et cetera, kind of fits into, you know, this political landscape?

• 51:11Speaker 02

  It is profoundly important for a lot of reasons. One reason is that right now, we're still discerning the shape of these technologies and how they're going to remake things, how they're going to remake our economy. And you know, there's a lot of scare stories, there's a lot of pessimism, and there are a lot of people who already had a pre-cooked, pre-existing agenda where they're using this and they're using the anxiety and dread around these new technologies as a vehicle to drive forward their pre-existing agenda. There are people who always believed in, you know, unconditional basic income, they always believed in dramatically expanding the welfare state, they always believed in expropriating private property and all these other things.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  And then, hey, look, I have another reason to call for those things. I hate these tech bros, I hate these crypto bros, I kind of hate these guys, and you know, this is a reason to do that. My frustration, something that's very much on my mind, is that I don't see these as right versus left battles. I see these as narratives for winning the rising generation. And I see this narrative that is ripe for the taking, that I see a big part of what you do as being a part of.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Bullshitting on the internet?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  No, no, but how do you tell a story about how you, as an individual, can become a powerful person? You did not need to be born on third base to make something of yourself. One of my running jokes is this idea that...

• 52:46Speaker 02

  The real hero is not Mark Zuckerberg. It's Mark Zuckerberg's dad. Because Mark Zuckerberg's dad was a dentist in Dobbs Ferry. And Mark Zuckerberg's dad made it possible for Mark Zuckerberg to do great things. To go to a great school, to own a computer when he was a kid, all that other stuff. There are not enough people right now who want to be Mark Zuckerberg's dad. Who want to patiently build wealth. Who want to learn for themselves. They want to have, they kind of claim their agency. And they're thinking that, well, what I need to do to do that is that I need to build a life. And there are many different components to building a life. Part of that is building wealth. And that actually is not a small, that actually matters. Because to build wealth, you need to activate your creativity.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  You need to activate your ability to be useful to other people. To serve other people. And then another thing that you have to do is find a great spouse. Yeah, I mean, I think that sounds, but no one is there to tell people this right now. I talk to a bunch of young people all the time. I met these high school graduates recently. It was fascinating talking to them. Are you thinking about building a family, building a life? How do you think about your family and how you relate to it? So I almost think of this as a battle between that vision of the world where wealth compounds. And when I say wealth, I don't mean financial wealth. I really believe that, you know, when you have an, if you're the kind of family where

• 54:09Speaker 02

  you have 25 people who gather around a Thanksgiving table, that is wealth. That is incredible wealth. And by the way, actually, leading a great life in terms of, you know, building a great business, that's where it comes from. I really believe that, and a big part of the radicalism that I'm seeing right now is focused on anti-Israel sentiment. And frankly, I think of it as antisemitism. You know, again, is this true of every single person? No, I don't think everyone is in antisemitism. But what I do see is this resentment. And there's resentment of what people see as power and wealth and achievement. And they feel like this is something, something unfair has happened, something wrong has happened. Yes, for some people, it's like, you know, I believe that Israel has gone too far, et

• 54:54Speaker 02

  cetera. But the obsessive fixation on this kind of foreign, international issue is just very interesting to me. And I see it as, you know, there are a lot of people who feel like they're alone. They feel like they're bereft. They are not part of something larger than themselves. And so if you see something else, you see wealth, success, achievement, you think there's got to be a conspiracy theory. That, I think, is this thing that's very broken in people. And with technology, and when you're looking at financial innovation, there is so much opportunity that's there. But you need to have the right mindset. And the mindset is patience. And the mindset is actually, you know, building the relationships that allow you to capitalize

• 55:39Speaker 02

  on those opportunities.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  It's fascinating to me because I recently went to the White House. I've been there a couple of times. And I went in the Oval Office for the first time. And I had my wife with me. And my wife is an immigrant from Bulgaria. Her parents came over when she was, you know, nine, 10 years old. And as we were standing there, it hit me. You know, my grandmother came here when she was probably about the same age as my wife. Spoke no English, you know, and figured it out. And on my other family's side, my great-great-grandfather came here in the late 1800s. And Italians weren't exactly the most accepted, you know, group in New York City. As you look at this, and you say, what, in different cases, one generation, two generations,

• 56:23Speaker 03

  three generations, right, whatever it is, depending on how you count it, you can go from nobody knows who you are, being discriminated against, et cetera, all these difficulties, to you're probably standing in one of the most powerful rooms in the world. And that's not possible in America.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  You say something really beautiful on social media. You know, you just talk about waking up every morning and getting after it. And, you know, it's just something where, you know, some people, you know, maybe people think it's silly, but I think about that a lot. I think about every moment you have. You know, we talked about public schools and, you know, you get maybe 1,100, you know, plus hours of instruction a year. Every one of those hours is precious. Every one of those hours compounds. You know, I think about the people you spend time with, the energy that you're around. And, you know, if you're in a room full of people where you believe that the way for you to be a virtuous and noble person is to build a coalition to take things away from other people, to expropriate other people.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  If you believe the thing that you want to do is commune with other people in your anger and resentment, that is going to become you more and more deeply. Those relationships that you form through that, your vision of the world, your political vision, or your economic, or whatever. Versus this mindset of, let me be around other people who want to build themselves. Let me be around people who want to see me succeed because they see that we're going to grow together, we're going to do this together, we're going to accomplish things together. That, to me, is the beautiful thing about capitalism. You know, is it, you know, but fundamentally, to me, it's about unlocking human creativity and capacity and doing it in ways that no government can plan for.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  It's going to come from nowhere. You know, who would have believed, you know, 20, 30 years ago? You know, think about the things that you've accomplished. Was that written in the stars? Was that obvious? You know, you were always, I'm sure, a charismatic, energetic guy who brought energy to a room. But, you know, who would have thought that you were going to be in the Oval Office like that? I, I'm obsessed with, I love it when I'm doubted. I love it, you know, that's great.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  I love it. It's the best. It's the best. And also, right now, we're in a political moment where the things that you and I believe, you know, feel like they're on the back foot. But I just ultimately believe that, you know, it's a very powerful, resentment is a powerful drug. It's incredibly powerful drug. Envy is a powerful drug. But an even more powerful drug is the thing that you get from getting reps and building something patiently over time. And that's what I think you and I have. And again, this is not a right or left thing. This is just about your vision for what it means to build a great society that works, that unlocks human potential. That's what I think you and I are trying to build. And we need to get smart about how to tell that story and how to build a movement around

• 59:14Speaker 02

  it.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Talk about the Manhattan Institute and what you guys do.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Manhattan Institute is a nonprofit organization, we're a research and advocacy group. We study the nitty-gritty, the basics of what does it mean to build a safe city? What does it mean to build a great school system? What does it mean to have a good tax code that actually gets the best out of people? We want to, you know, raise enough money to actually pay for the things we need, but we also don't want to punish initiative and enterprise. We try to figure out those questions in a very basic, ground-level kind of way. And then another component, what we do is we try to make sense of the world. We have investigative reporters who are trying to understand, are there government agencies that are committing fraud, that are wasting taxpayer dollars? Where do the ideas that are shaping our world, where are they coming from?

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Who are the people advancing those ideas? So we do a mix of really classic, making government work better kind of work. And we also do work that is more kind of cultural, intellectual in character. I work with some of the most incredible people. I work with people in their 80s. I work with people in their 20s. I work with people, refugees from Venezuela and the former Soviet Union. I work with people from Haiti. I work with people from the Bronx. I work with people who are seventh-generation Americans. I work with Mayflower. I work with so many people, but they all have in common this incredible energy to make this country great, make this country live up to its promise. And I think another thing that everyone shares in common is, we've been talking about resentment

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  and envy, they all feel a deep sense of gratitude. It's exactly what you bring to everything you do. But they bring the sense that, wow, I get to live here. Wow, I get to be free. I get to speak my mind. I get to create things. How amazing is that? And we're going to fail? We will have failed definitively if we do not have a rising generation. If I don't have people who are 20, 30 years younger than me, who get that, and who get that fire lit under them because they believe that too, then we failed. So that's what we do.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is, it's an incredible mission. But also, I think the way you guys do it, right, is, it's very data-driven. It is very pragmatic and kind of rational. And just look, we get the craziness of politics, but actually, let's just talk about these facts here.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  And I think, from what I've seen, you're happy to debate whether the facts are correct or not, or people have different views on them, or whatever. But it's almost this like research-first approach that not a lot of organizations really take that I think is pretty unique about your guys' work.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  I love, I don't care how you vote. I don't care where you're from. I don't care what you look like. I don't care what your starting point is. We can find somewhere we can work together and that we can build together. That I firmly believe. You know, a mentor of mine once said that you got to remember, you know, there, you've got friends, you have future friends, and you have a very tiny number of enemies. You know, you have a tiny, those enemies, you got to keep your eye on them, you got to, you know, you got to know what they're up to. But the big thing is the future friends. And that's a really important thing. How do you talk to people? How do you treat people? I don't always get that right. You know, we don't always get that right. But I think that that's incredibly important for us because I think ultimately, our ideas,

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  I believe that our ideas, if you embrace them, will actually make you a stronger, more capable person. Our ideas are going to make government more capable, more effective, and unlocking human potential. So I really do believe that. And what I'm against are ideas that poison you. I'm against ideas that treat you as though you are a victim. I'm against ideas that make you think that I actually am not capable. I'm not the author of my own fate. I can actually change my life. I can actually do better than how I'm doing right now. You and I both know there are a lot of people peddling that message out there right now. By the way, it's lucrative to peddle that message right now.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  There are a lot of people who are selling you that message who don't believe it themselves. They are self-actualizing by selling you hate. And I think that we're trying to do something different.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  I think you guys are doing a fantastic job. So I appreciate you coming and taking the time to come talk. And hopefully, more people go check out the work you guys are doing. And all I can say is, the advocacy and the publishing of these ideas, I think, it's a nice counterbalance to, you know, maybe some of the chaos that's out there. So I'm a fan and hope you guys continue.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  I really appreciate it. I love everything you're doing and proud to be on this program with you.