TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #558: Educating A Free Society with Chad Thevenot

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Marty sits down with Chad from UATX to discuss bringing the values of the Age of Enlightenment back to education. Chad on Twitter: https://x.com/chadthevenot UATX: https://www.uaustin.org/ 0:00 - Intro 1:28 - 6th and Congress is the center of the universe 4:09 - The story of UATX 10:26 - Unchained & Coinkite 12:20 - Problems with current education 21:15 - Curriculum for a free society 28:37 - Regulation and Trump regime 32:33 - Zaprite & SOTE 34:06 - Enlightenment values and free discussion 47:37 - Destroy institutions or reform them? 53:14 - Bitcoin endowment 57:25 - Austin’s strength 1:01:52 - Decentralized power 1:08:35 - We’re gonna win Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Coinkite https://coinkite.com/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

I think this is very much part of the human cycle. Like every 50 years or so, we kind of go through these moments. We saw that in the late 60s. People forget how volatile that was. The president was assassinated. A presidential candidate was assassinated. The leader of the civil rights movement was assassinated. Students were shot on campus at Kent State, all in the space of a few years.

Chad Thevenot, founding leader of the University of Austin, uncovers the dark truth behind today's college educations. Half the time, the students don't even know that's what they're getting. They think they're getting this kind of broad truth about the world, And what they're really getting is just like a narrow version of what one group believes. If you're interested in reforming universities, you have to ask yourself, what is the incentive of the university to change? And honestly, if you look at the incentives for universities to change, they're not good. It's weird knowing that you're probably living through a moment of history, not just where things are just kind of going along, but like we're seeing this kind of cataclysmic shift.

You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. You talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

chad thank you for coming over spending your friday afternoon with me this is perfect it's right across the street as you know caddy court there's a lot of synergies going on i think i think we need to uh foster this relationship between the commons unchained pleb lab now and uatx we're very excited to have you as neighbors yes look we're at six in congress right now the center of the universe literally right because you think about it the united United States is the most important country in the world, right? Texas is the most important state in the union. Austin is the heart of Texas.

And we are dead center downtown right now in Austin. It does feel that way. Parker Lewis, I think you may have met him before at ZapRite. I am a refugee from the Northeast, born in Philadelphia, college in Chicago, spent six years in new york post-covid the bitcoin industry shifted away from new york and san francisco and a lot of it settled here uh on six in congress and you can feel the energy parker is an austinite and made sure that when i moved down here i understood the history of texas the history of austin and the gravity that exists where we where we sit today exactly

this is a special place right now and it's not just bitcoin it's ideas broadly and it's more specifically what they would call liberal ideas not liberal in the current sort of progressive sort of view of that it's liberal in the sense of freedom liberty right and so the ideas of liberties we might call them broadly or what they still call liberalism in higher education the epicenter of those ideas has shifted over time um you know hundreds of years ago it was enlightenment in parts of europe and then you know different times in the united states it might have been san francisco or other parts today it's austin texas where the ideas of freedom the ideas of liberty have sort of taken root and are being renewed right here literally on this corner

and in this city yeah i mean speaking of your side of the corner at uat let's let's jump into the history of how this came to be because i didn't even mention this before we hit record but we were chit-chatting about trump winning the election and the vibe shift that is certainly happening uh and we've been talking about it in the bitcoin industry like the companies the individuals that have been working to bring their product to market or develop a bitcoin stash like the timing is perfect if you're building in the space i think what you're doing across the street the timing couldn't be more perfect either because it seems like you guys been laying groundwork for a few years now and are really about to take off yes i mean just look there's

no question we've been laying groundwork for a little over three years in fact it's almost what's today november 7th uh 7th or 8th yeah yeah so tomorrow is our third the third anniversary since we announced the university on november 8th 2021 so for three years we three years ago we talked about this idea of a new university committed to the fearless pursuit of truth which basically just means freedom of inquiry they free and open exploration of ideas that's the kind of thing a university ought to do but they weren't doing so we sort of doubled down on that principle and so we've been building it nobody thought you could build a university in three years we've done it we promised from the beginning we would have students start

in the fall of 2024 they started in September 2024 we have our first class so yes there's so much energy in austin it's the kind of place where you can get things done and culturally we're seeing a shift and we've seen it slowly over the last three years but we're seeing that sort of accelerate so separate from the politics of the moment beyond the politics there's been a slow sort of simmering shift in the culture and the culture is wanting i think to return to some common sense return to evidence and reason rather than just your kind of hysteria and a lot of that orbits around the university the kind of things that we're doing early on we were saying look let's just get back to the core principles right just merit you know um freedom

of inquiry what we call intellectual pluralism which is basically just the diversity of ideas in the classroom because if you're going to explore ideas it can't just if you've already figured it out then you're not exploring then it's it's just an orthodoxy it's a kind of church if you already know what the right idea is but if you don't know what the right idea is you're honestly exploring ideas you need a diversity of thought so anyways those are the kinds of things that i i see out in in the world i'm not interested in politics at all i've never been interested in politics so i don't follow it nearly as closely as most people but i follow what they i follow culture basically which is upstream of politics and that's very much what i see with the university

as being part of a cultural sort of shift it's what i see with bitcoin without a doubt people are rethinking you know what it means what currency means and um and bitcoin as an asset and so on and it's happening in like almost every space in my in my view in the country whether that's education or finance or higher education or whatever there's this sort of shift that we can do things better yeah and i was telling you that understanding that i studied economics at depaul university in chicago and there's like a two-pronged way to better understand bitcoin one studying economics at university at a typical university in the united states uh in the 21st century means you're inundated with keynesian neoliberal doctrine right and it's

it's taught as gospel this is the way the economy works and luckily for me um i was able to find bitcoin which pushed me into uh the exploration of austrian economics and an alternative view of of how the economy does and probably should work and that highlights it was like why am i not learning about any of these these concepts in my economics major and it that was like highlight number one number two funnily enough had to write a paper about student loan debt and really discovered how the introduction of easy money into the university system specifically created these perverse incentives where the universities know that the government and the culture more broadly are pushing people to go get your degrees and get a good job the government is giving out

loans to anybody who needs to get them and so they're able to increase their cost and implant an administrative layer that just feeds off the the money spigot that that student loan debt creates and then it leads to this situation where you're not actually forced to create an environment where people are exploring ideas and actually learning earnestly it's a it's almost like a factory good at that yeah exactly look i mean this this the ballooning cost of higher education is one of the problems that we're tackling so we have three core principles we were founded on one is the fearless pursuit of truth this idea of sort of freedom of inquiry and and intellectual pluralism the second is a new kind of curriculum which we can talk about but basically a curriculum

for the 21st century and the third is the the financial model so for example our tuition is half of what other elite institutions are charging and the core reason it's half is because we don't have any of the kind of legacy nonsense that a lot of other universities have so for example we don't have the bloated administration which is the number one cause of this increase in cost but or at least the number one sort of symptom, the cause is exactly what you're saying. It's these incentives, right? If we create an incentive,

if a third party comes in and says, well, I'm going to give you money to turn around and give the universities, the universities are like, great. You know, we'll take more money. And so I, you know, me, the student takes money from the government in the form of loans, and then I give it to the university,

and then the university just ratchets up the cost. So I go back and I say, I need more loans. and then all of a sudden surprise surprise right incentives are there for an increased increased costs that are going to be basically subsidized by the government and then you the student gets stuck in between with this debt so one of the things we're doing this semester or rather this year is we have full academic tuition for all of our students that means all the students at least graduate without having debt from their tuition they still have to pay their housing and their food, but that's pretty affordable. And so that's one

of the ways, like at least this year and this coming year, we've already committed to basically free tuition for the students. So for this episode of TFTC is brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Do you have an old IRA or 401k that isn't keeping up with Bitcoin? Rolled over into an Unchained Bitcoin IRA and take advantage of Bitcoin's long-term potential while enjoying tax-deferred growth. With Unchained, you hold real Bitcoin and keep control of your keys, reducing counterparty risks through their collaborative custody model while Unchain handles the tax forms. It's very important they handle the tax forms. Get started now with no setup fees and no account fee for the first year. Not only is this the only standard Bitcoin IRA

where you can control keys unlike other Bitcoin IRAs, you can take distributions directly in Bitcoin avoiding exchange fees. Set up a Roth or traditional Bitcoin IRA for no charge today at unchained.com slash TFTC and experience true ownership of your retirement savings. Go to unchained.com slash TFTC. This rip is also brought to you by good friends at CoinKite. CoinKite builds the best Bitcoin hardware in the world. There is no second best when it comes to Bitcoin hardware. If you're looking to secure and self-custody your Bitcoin, you can get the MK4 or the cold card queue. Cold card queue has a full keyboard, a QR scanner, NFC enabled, has a battery pack, put some AA batteries in there, create private public keys, off pair in

an air gap fashion. Private keys never have to touch an online device. They have their sats card, which is the best way to give Bitcoin. If you're looking to gift Bitcoin for a wedding, a birthday party, a communion, a bar mitzvah, whatever it may be, tap the card on the back of your phone. You get a address to send to. You send it to that address. It lives on the sats card. Again, there is no second best when it comes to Bitcoin hardware. The Bitcoin price seems to be going up. You want to take care of your security before Bitcoin goes to six figures. Make sure you get your Bitcoin off exchanges using CoinKite hardware, MK4, ColdCardQ. Go to CoinKite.com.

Use the code TFTC. We have a code now. TFTC for 5% off at checkout. Talking about the debt to it compounds, not only, you know, it compounds into it. You have the financial debt, which obviously compounds over time as you get your degree and you go to the workforce and find that the jobs that you were promised are not either there or as lucrative as as you thought they would be and then to the intellectual debt compounds as well because that factory mindset of education and indoctrination which is frankly what many

of the universities have turned into these indoctrination camps like really leaves individuals at a disservice in the long run because unless you have the cognizant ability to recognize that you're being indoctrinated and actively work to rewire your brain and seek out ideas outside of walls of the university you're you're probably running down a path of intellectual dishonesty for longer than you otherwise should so you have this financial debt compounding with this intellectual debt that builds up over time and um individually like it's a problem but if you add those individuals into a group into a whole nation generation of people it's it's pretty systemically uh adverse to the success of the nation yeah look there's no question if you're

not prepared for reality if you're just prepared for some fantasy version of the world that puts you at an extreme you know odd odd disposition you're going out into the world and you've only heard one point of view right and one version of the world the way the world ought to be under some particular vision as as opposed to the way the world is so the you know it's always struck me it's odd so like let's say i go to college and i'm protected from sort of all of these ideas right that might hurt my feelings or might challenge my my beliefs or my presumptions well as soon as i leave college i'm i'm in the grocery store aisle and i'm seeing magazines and i'm talking to people and i'm going to restaurants and i'm working jobs and i'm having

conversations none of that stuff is going to be catered to me i'm not going to be sheltered i'm I'm not going to be protected. Like that's the real world. I'm going to see ideas, see people experience things that are completely at odds with this narrow version that had been given in higher ed. You can immediately see how ill prepared I'm going to be. And this is why I think a lot of people shut down. They're just, they're not prepared for the fact that other people have different kinds of experiences, different kinds of ideas. The world doesn't exactly work exactly the way that people want to. So the one thing we ought to be teaching people is the one thing we're not, it's the opposite of what we're doing. We ought to be teaching people how to be

anti-fragile, how to be resilient, how to be agile in terms of being able to shift with different ideas, different trends, different changes in a highly dynamic world. And instead we're teaching them to basically be orthodox, sort of, you know, it's almost like this kind of secular orthodox view of the world and that's it. Like teaching people how, how you should know things, not how to think and develop the ability to come to your own conclusions yeah and you're right look you half the time the students don't even know that's what they're getting they think they're getting some version of the truth you know as and what they're really getting is what they think they're getting this kind of broad truth about the world and what they're really getting is just like a

narrow version of what one group believes yeah i mean obviously the infection of the woke mind virus into the university system has been a topic of recent years particularly post BLM but I mean I graduated college in 2013 and I vividly remember having to take it wasn't an elective it was a mandatory class on multiculturalism which basically taught that people with my complexion eye color and hair color were the reason that that everything is bad in the world and literally to pass the class had to acknowledge um acknowledge that that doctrine and yeah uh where was this depaul university in chicago um and even back then this was before it became apparent um socially that this was a thing like wokeness probably didn't accelerate until 2017 forward through through

covid yeah um in the sense that it was front and center in everyday life but the the seeds of that indoctrination were at least around when i was in college and what i was like um i was essentially like what the fuck like getting in debates in class like trying to defend like i'm a good person like i'm an individual and right it's uh look when when people are you know when people are called racist or misogynistic and stuff all the time and they they believe in their own heart that they're not then you know they're going to be at odds with that um the sad thing is is like it as a nation we spent decades trying to to have a sort of a reckoning you know around civil rights and around women's rights and so on and that was a good thing right and i saw a lot of

that i'm quite a bit older than you so i saw it throughout the 70s and the 80s and um and we made some progress and we and we also learned to to better understand each other and live with each other right and so we would experience each other's cultures and ideas and challenges and so what i saw personally was a lot of progress even as a southerner from louisiana you know i saw from some bad behavior to increasingly better behavior all the way up through college in the 1990s so in my view we were making progress it wasn't perfect but we were being exposed to other people and other ideas but it was part of an organic kind of evolutionary process a social evolution process it wasn't this idea that we're going to force you to take a course and then in

the process of that course we're going to demonize you that's going to make that's going to give you the opposite right people are going to they're going to reject that and just sort of say well hold on you know this whole thing's not about me and it's not about like and you don't even know me every person's experience is different of course and so in a sense it's anti-progress because it's it's it's this perversion of this idea of we're going to get to know each other better or we're going to be more tolerant by by being less tolerant so well wait hold on the whole idea was that we were going to integrate society right whether that's race class gender sexual identity whatever and and have more of this melting pot but as soon as you start making it sort

of like um you know the ministry of culture is going to come down and have exact dictates and it's going to cancel you if you don't go along with the agenda then you get this massive backlash which is what we're seeing today yeah and so it's it's good and the backlash is good in the sense that it's it's a backlash to some of the excesses of that it's bad in the sense that we still do have this fundamental challenge of living in a pluralistic society right and so it breaks my heart a little bit that that some of the progress we've been made that had been made i think for decades certainly from the 60s through maybe the 2000s we're now sort of we've lost some of that ground certainly lost some of that ground but the silver lining is it highlights that uh humanity as

a collective does still have this inherent immune system that sort of rejects at some point like obviously things have gotten bad but it has gotten to a point where people are throwing their hands up saying this is insane yeah something no exactly i i think it did reach a point of insanity and so then everyday people i mean a lot of people believe that it was insane but they felt like they couldn't say it because they didn't want to lose their friends or they didn't want to get canceled or whatever and now people i think feel very comfortable just sort of saying hey look this is this is crazy you know the fact that i you know i can't talk about the fact that i'm a holder bitcoin because that's somehow going to make me some conspiratorial republican or something and

that's crazy right like so i'm hoping we can get back to like the thanksgiving dinner we have thanksgiving coming up where you're sitting across from your family and friends and you have differences and you make fun of each other a little bit and you know you poke and you prod and you and then everybody gets along right yeah you don't have to agree you know it's not that it's about making each other agree with each other it's just understanding right it's like oh i you know my uncle believes this because he's had this kind of experience i don't get it but he does and i love him and that's fine yeah i mean coming from the northeast there's a lot of that uh in my family specifically but i love my family at the other day i prefer to talk about uh time spent

at the beach and the jokes and the practical jokes that we played on each other growing up but uh And I hope moving forward, we can get away from the political divisiveness and the focus of if you're meeting with family and friends, particularly, you're forced to talk about these political topics, which is not where society should be at all. You should be talking about ideas that are outside the political landscape, which gets to developing a curriculum, creating a new university, and basically trying to form a curriculum in an environment where you're actually battle testing these ideas. What does that process look like? How did it look like for you guys? Well, for us, we had a vision right out the gate on the kind of curriculum that we thought would be valuable for students. And so we have a two-sided coin, basically. on one side of that coin is what they would call the liberal arts or the classical liberal arts

and all the liberal arts is really is um it's how do you learn to live in a free and open society right it's this jeffersonian ideal of if we're going to be self-governing we have to learn how to be self-governing so it's philosophy and history and law and economics where we learn about the world particularly about the world in a liberal society a society that has a relative freedom and openness that's that's all it meant so it's living and how to live in that kind of world um so we we believe in that right so going all the way back to classics you know going all the way back to socrates and the bible or whatnot all the way forward to modern thinkers how does that tell us about how to about ourselves as people as humans what does it tell us about

human institutions like banking or higher ed or the criminal justice system and what does it tell us about societies right what are these perennial questions in these disciplines that inform us about the human experience it's that simple so we think that's necessary if you don't have that grounding and that depth and breadth about the human experience then you're you become like a technician like a like a you know like an automaton a cognitive machine right and so you have to have that grounding in the in the humanities literally call it the humanities and social sciences that grounding kind of pulls you into being a human and in the process it increases your empathy for other humans you can see that other humans either before us or or even now are wrestling

with the same kinds of questions right so that's half the curriculum the other half is oriented towards moving forward how do we take all this experience and all this learning about humanity and use it to make the world even better moving forward right so how do we solve problems how do we develop new policies new technologies new non-profits new art and music that makes the world better more beautiful more just and so that's what we call that the polaris project so players is the north star so it's half sort of liberal arts and half entrepreneurship and innovation like moving forward and they're not like two two separate things where it's bifurcated again they're two sides of the same coin it's very hard to be an ethical and principled entrepreneur

or leader if you're not grounded in a firm understanding of what's come before yeah i i completely agree with that i was actually the minor or i didn't minor in it but all my electives were taken uh in philosophy reading like plato socrates yeah um even and that's one thing that's been completely lost and that's i mean you don't have to go too hard into the woke mind virus but the uh the idea of it's a pretty popular idea these days is the fact that You had Marxist individuals sort of infiltrate the university system more broadly here in the United States and via concerted effort try to basically wash over that history

and that important knowledge that came before us. That's, again, going back to what I said earlier, the intellectual debt that accrues from that is pretty significant. I think the works of literature and art that have been produced throughout the years, particularly in philosophy and philosophers throughout time, have said very similar things in different ways. It's like these first principle beliefs about how the world works and how logic works are pretty consistent throughout time for a reason. And it's being able to have that base knowledge of logic, first principles, it allows you to continue progress.

And it feels like a lot of that ancient knowledge has been actively glossed over in the university system. A lot of universities, obviously, there's some that are better than others. exactly some are better than others for sure and some departments are better than others even within the same university so it's hard you can't paint it with a broad brush for sure but i think you can say look the general trend line has been to move away from some of these this liberal arts right some of this classical thinking and so on to just sort of practical you know knowledge because we're preparing people for their career well i think that's true in part

you're preparing people for some for some discipline to be an engineer or to be a doctor or to be a teacher but you're not just preparing people to be technicians within a field we ought to be preparing people to be better humans right so that for them for their own purposes their own transformation but also their contributions to free and open society right are they better neighbors are they better citizens of a free society are they better bosses that requires something much different than just figuring out how to you know put a widget in place that's where philosophy and history and stuff come in it teaches us about this all this rich understanding that people before us have come you know have developed it's like why wouldn't

we want that right we're dropped into this world kind of you know out of nowhere and we're figuring our way out in the world and wanting to make good decisions and there's all this history before us is there really nothing to learn from that history we're not better off as an individual if we don't you know it makes no sense of course we want to you know to it's to our personal advantage sit there and go what have people learned before me so i don't have to learn it myself right and so it to kind of discount all of that and just sort of say no it's just about how you tighten a screw tighter makes no sense yeah in fact that kind of knowledge that technical knowledge is easier than it's ever been because we live in an information economy right we can

go get that knowledge if i want to learn how to fix my dishwasher i can now like watch a youtube video for five minutes and i can solve a problem that might have taken me an engineering degree to get before right so that's not the problem the problem is figuring out how do we live you know productive healthy lives in a free society with other people who are trying to do the same thing who have differences and we have conflicting interests and so on the biggest challenge we face is literally just the day-to-day communications and personal interactions and our own emotions and our own you know stresses it's not you know we've got plenty of access to technical knowledge so it's just re-shifting the emphasis back to sort of say look with something

we don't want to lose everything that's come before and with this in mind how are you guys gauging success of the new university that you've created well it's important to remember we just have we just had our first trimester starting in you know two months ago um so to this point you know success has been hitting these milestones of launching university most importantly you know having our first class of students start in september which we did and that alone honestly is a bit of a miracle to launch a university is an insane insane thing um you the regulatory burdens are almost prohibitive the financial burden in terms of the resources necessary just extraordinary um so all for all of these reasons like it's very very difficult um so

hitting these milestones particularly starting with students this fall was a success now of course we're very much focused on how do we get better how do we grow some of that is of course continuing to recruit students being able to lower the acceptance rate meaning we're basically getting the best students we certainly have an excellent class this this year but I think we're going to have even stronger classes moving forward as we gain a reputation for being you know a strong institution it's fundraising of course because we have to have the resources to to do this at this point in you know in our infancy we're we're 100 philanthropy you know we don't have a revenue model yet we will in the next five years or so but we don't today so we have to raise money

and that money of course is a signal of whether we're doing a good job or whether people think we're doing a good job and so on accreditation is a hoop we have to jump through and that would represent a certain level of success in terms of you know being able to meet the standards that set before us from regulators um and we're like we're really well positioned for all of that and this institution even though it's only three years old is incredibly strong i mean we have just we have put on so much muscle in three years it's just incredible yeah and diving into the regulatory landscape as we were talking about it before with trump coming to office and many uh many people surmising that uh if he's going to implement this high terrorist low

income tax uh regime he's going to need to cut spending and he has spoken publicly or people around the campaign have spoken spoken publicly about uh cutting departments like the department of education and have they department of education been a hindrance to what you're trying to do no but i think it's a hindrance in part to innovation within higher education and as as well as k-12 like education broadly um so i think there are real problems there and i think it's getting in the way of bringing about the kind of choice and innovation that people really want um it's a one-size-fits-all approach when you have the federal government sort of dictating terms um do we need to abolish the department of education i have no idea do we need some

serious reform maybe all the way up to boss sure you know i think there needs to be a really radical look at what we're doing. So, you know, we're in, certainly we're in favor in having an environment that just allows more upstarts, right? Makes it a little easier for new universities to be started, new schools to be started, new kinds of curriculum, new kinds of technologies around education. All of that's a good thing, right? Competition is a good thing. It raises everyone up to a higher standard. So I'd like to see that. I certainly don't want to see more regulation, We don't want more requirements, some of which are just either political, so it's not good, these kind of political litmus tests that you were talking about with your class, or they're just unnecessary bureaucracy that just stifled the process of innovation. And that's true of almost any department, but certainly the Department of Education has its own problems.

This rip was also brought to you by good friends at ZapRite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. Invest in the future of your business. Create a redundant rail by accepting Bitcoin as payment using ZapRite and reduce risk for your business. I've done this for my business here at TFTC. We use ZapRite. It allows you to easily create invoices, payment links, or connect e-commerce stores. Connect your wallets or custodial accounts and be set up in minutes.

We can also connect our bank accounts, our Stripe accounts, our Square accounts to accept fiat as well. The time is now, freaks. The fiat system is fragile. Invest in the infrastructure that de-risks the future. Invest in yourself. Bitcoin payments with ZapRite. Go to zaprite.com slash TFTC to get $40 off their annual subscription. Zaprite.com slash TFTC, $40 off. This rip was also brought to you by our good friends at Salt of the Earth. You got to be hydrating, freaks. And while you're hydrating, you've got to be getting your electrolytes. This is the best electrolytes mix that I've ever come into contact with. Pink Himalayan salt with calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, no sugar.

It tastes incredible. My favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade. Go to drinksote.com. That's drinksote.com. Use the code TFTC when you make your purchase, and you'll get 15% off. I'm telling you, get on it, freaks. You're going to love this stuff. move around a little bit here just as you're discussing this like you've thought about this

a lot like how like what's your background before uatx and like what was the the impetus that drove you to say all right we're going to do this yeah i mean um it's funny because you don't yeah my experience has been it's very very hard to sort of um plan out your career right and then end up where you are like you know there's no way when i was you know 30 years ago when i was starting my career that I thought that I'd be where I am today you know it's just radically different I went to business school at the University of Texas I went to Georgetown University for graduate school and cultural studies so I actually studied a lot of this critical theory and so on not so much as a sympathizer I was actually just interested in ideas and I'm

particularly interested in society and in culture I mentioned this early earlier culture is upstream from politics in my view and that's really important because we're having these fights around politics but in some ways we're having them 10 years or 20 years too late at that point by the time you have the fight in politics it's already done the cake's baked and so if you want to go upstream of politics you you have to think about culture and what are the cultural institutions well it's entertainment it's higher education right now it's things like blogs and so on that's upstream um and so that's what i spent my career doing is thinking about culture thinking about what they call social change and in particular

sort of how do societies change how do cultures change and how do they change for the best because there's of course there's bad social change right when all of a sudden you have you know nazis or communists or something and then there's good social change where people are there's more peace more prosperity and so on well where does that come from where does positive social change come from um so into looking at those questions i got obsessed with the idea of of liberalism again properly understood the way to understand liberalism as a in this proper sense is to look at the enlightenment right and the values that came out of the enlightenment which are things like pluralism the rule of law democracy the scientific method very basic things things that

we almost take for granted now private property private property absolutely uh free enterprise constitutional protections these are all things that came out of the enlightenment these are all what we would call liberal values and higher education united states is supposed to be a liberal institution about living in the society that has those values right if you look at institutions and you look at societies that have embraced these classical we'll call them classical liberal values so people aren't confused um it is absolutely clear that those societies across time and across geography have done better classical societies that adhere to liberal values they're not just doing a little bit better they're doing 10x 100x better and and now of course there's

all these memes around this where you can see like you can see satellite footage of north korea versus south korea that tells you everything this is also true i traveled to cyprus about 20 years ago cyprus is divided in half um and there's a more liberal again classical liberal enlightenment informed sort of south less so in the north including this the capital city which is divided in half you can climb up these ladders you can look over the wall i forget the name of the capital city and you're standing in the same city in the same country with the same people in the same geography and it's radically different and it's clearly better in the south than it is in the north that is not so you can't say oh it's

resources or it's people or it's it has to do with what values were let um were realized out in that society i saw a picture on x the other week of the the border of i believe it was monaco and france and the is that right is that's all right yeah i think that's right yeah and it was like stark difference like a monaco like way better than france likewise i mean i you see it here in the united states driving through the northeast corridor i had a wedding in new hampshire once and you drive through massachusetts to get to new hampshire and as soon as you cross the border into the free state the roads are materially better yeah you're driving on 95 in massachusetts And literally, once you cross the border, the road is well-maintained and much better.

It's insane to see. Exactly. And that's not people or geography. That's policy. And that policy, again, is informed by the kind of culture, the kinds of things that we support, the kinds of things that we value. Texas is great at this. Texas is not perfect, just like the U.S. is not perfect. But as a state, Texas, I think, has the right values and is doing a good job of seeing a lot of that through.

in the terms of the kinds of policies it has. But the culture is what really matters, right? And one amazing thing about Austin is how diverse and heterodox it is. It's a place where people come to do new things, whether that's art or technology or education or politics, where there's this kind of creative conflict, the good kind of conflict that you want,

where these ideas are converging and they're sort of conflicting and then new stuff is born out of it. And so it's an unbelievably creative environment. People kind of characterize Austin in the blue city and the red state, kind of, but if you walk around Austin, you see all kinds of different people. You can go to a restaurant and you're going to be sitting next to the person who's this crazy, sort of progressive with blue hair,

right next to the really uptight Republican guy, and they're getting along, or they're having lunch together. And you're like, well, what's going on here? It's because that's the sort of creative energy that's allowed to actually interact culturally and learn from each other and kind of bounce ideas off each other that you don't see when everybody in other states

kind of go off to their corner. And so it's one of the really, and that's true, in my view, that's true about every aspect of Austin, that there's these differences, but the differences are allowed to kind of come together. And you don't see that in other states. You see people sort of separating,

moving into different neighborhoods and different friend groups and so on. yeah i mean as somebody who's lived in three of the bluest cities in the country in philadelphia chicago and new york yeah uh whenever you're ready scoff to me because i live in austin and tech in texas they're like oh it's the libs capital i'm like compared to the other cities i lived in this is vastly superior and yes without a doubt but i lived in dc for many years and that was a city that was more uniform in its views and you had to kind of watch it what you would say i don't ever feel that way in austin i feel like i could talk to my conservative friends or my

progressive friends and be honest and i'm not going to get you know i'm not going to get shot down or canceled from it i mean we might have a passionate discussion and that's fine i mean that's how we challenge each other right that's growth yeah but um yeah you know i did in the dc area it got to a point where you couldn't even have a real conversation it was really a bummer Similarly in New York, Chicago really wasn't having those conversations as much at a younger age, but as they get older, particularly after you have kids, those conversations rear their heads. I mean, it's much easier to have them down here. So that's the microcosm for, you know, those kinds of conversations in the microcosm for the macro

situation in higher ed, right? In a sense, the research, the teaching, the mentoring can't really happen because it's stifled. People self-censor, people cancel each other. And so the very thing that higher ed exists to do, which is to sort of foster conversation, foster exploration, is the very thing that it's failing to do. And that's what was so frustrating and so depressing. And that's what fed energy into us starting the University of Austin. People would, you know, we get characterized, you know, the Wall Street Journal recently had an article about us where they you know they use anti-woke in the title and i'm like no you're not understanding this isn't about woke or anti-woke this is literally about whether

the core purpose of higher education this is about exploring ideas or having an orthodox view of ideas and how has the faculty how how are how what is their vibe like because i was mentioning as we were taking the elevator ride up john constable yeah brought him over from the uk he's pretty prolific in the world of of energy and in physics and i'm supposed to meet up with him at some point here in the next couple of weeks and just really interested to get his perspective on why uatx and like what are you feeling is there a sense of wow i feel like i'm actually able to go and have the relationship with students that i've been looking for yeah i mean like the faculty in some ways or what exactly what you'd hope they're all over the

place right different disciplines different sort of political sentiments different personalities um i mean look the first thing we hired for with faculty was their their merit their abilities right um and particularly right at this stage their ability to teach because that's what we're starting with we're we're a full-blown university teaching and research but we're starting with these students come in and it's undergrad and so we need great teachers so they're great teachers they have that in common we also look for for faculty who ideally demonstrate some level of courage right because it's the fearless pursuit of truth pursuing truth in this environment like openly exploring ideas i mean really doing it requires some courage particularly in this

environment where you know if you say things you get shut down and so on um so we we needed to know that they had the courage to kind of to live out this principle of the fearless pursuit of truth so they have that they have some of those stories um about you know how they felt in the classroom and people think it's just conservatives it's not i mean your your your mainstream sort of leftist center professor was feeling shut down from people even further left than they are And we saw this in Australia with the oceanographer who, at one point, said climate change is killing the Great Barrier Reef. And then he went back and did research a decade later, and the reef's becoming revived. And he came and just brought, like, hey, I think I was wrong.

Yeah. The Great Barrier Reef is recovering, and he got fired. Right. Exactly. Every one of those instances of that happening is a chilling effect for scientists, for researchers, for teachers. That's why it's so important. And it's look, even if it's not completely prolific in one area, if people know about it, right. It's kind of like going down the highway and you know that there's you've heard that there's like one or two cops on the next stretch of 50 miles.

That's all you need to know. Right. Just just the just the possibility that you're going to get the ticket is enough to sort of quash what you're doing. So it doesn't even have to exist everywhere. It just has to exist enough to make you afraid. and so then that's why the professors start to self-censor that's why the students start to self-censor so that's why there has to be this really kind of radical commitment to the fearless pursuit of truth because you can't even have one instance where you're shutting somebody down for political reasons because it has this ripple effect and that manifests at uatx like outside the classroom as well because i know you guys are working on curating talks and discussions yeah forums as well correct yeah and we've already done a lot of that and we do and we still do a lot

of that so there's a lot of public sort of facing stuff both events and speakers and whatnot but also content that we put online and we're fairly prolific yeah and has the work that you've done going out with the ambitious goal of starting university getting through the red tape getting it across the line has it inspired others is that your hope yeah it was always our hope to do two things. One was to start a new university and, you know, committed to the fearless pursuit of truth and have students start by the fall of 24. And we did that. The parallel goal was by doing that, that it would inspire other institutions and, you know, people around those institutions to, you know, to think about things differently and think about what the

possibilities are, basically to inspire them towards a better way forward to be a light in darkness right and we you know we see this so much but some of it's also very private when we have university presidents reaching out to us consistently and saying look this is great i won't i can't say it publicly but it's great keep going you know it's helping the kinds of conversations i'm having with with our faculty or with our board or whatever we get that from boards of trustees we get it from major donors of other institutions they're all i mean 100 percent calling us up and saying this is great we encourage it this is helping change the conversation in higher ed some of them don't feel like they can be public about that but they definitely want us

to succeed and and they've asked us about starting new institutions we've been offered institutions in other cities that are on their way out and they've asked us you know can can we save their institution that's what i was gonna make justin um moon out there he he was screaming at me as we We were running into the studio. We've had this conversation a lot. There's a part of the public, or maybe not the public, but there's a group of people who want to tear down institutions like the Ivy Leagues, and they think it's gotten way overblown,

way too indoctrinated, and we've had this back and forth. Like, do you tear it down, or do you try and reinvigorate the institution? Are these institutions worth saving, I guess, is another way to frame it. And do they need something like a UATX as an external signal of competition? Yes. We are forced to reinvigorate and preserve this institution in the long run. Yes. Look, higher education is absolutely worth saving,

but it also must be renewed, right? In a sense, it's a renewal. It's a coming back to its original purpose and with a new sort of relevance, a new commitment, a new vibrancy so it's not about throwing it out and burning it down but it is about look taking a sober look at what is its core purpose recommitting to that and then making that real through your policies your practice the kind of culture you're building the people you hire all of that so there needs to be a very robust sort of renewal and an institution like uatx can and i think should

be part of that you know providing some some guidance providing some lessons learned providing some inspiration it's very much part of what we want to do we'd love to see dozens if not hundreds of other institutions out there competing with us in a sense to try to you know to try to do things better i think that's how you get there i think you need competition i think you need some outside forces i don't think the answer is is this sort of marginal reforms that they've been trying with the universities like let's start off let's have this little project off to the side you know these projects off to the side that they kind of bolt on um to universities don't succeed because they're overwhelmed by the the incentives within the university right they're completely overwhelmed

by it i mean if you're interested in reforming universities you have to ask yourself a single question to start which is what is the incentive of the university to change and honestly if you look at the incentives for universities change they're not good there's not a lot of incentive right so you have a big problem if you're if you're somebody who wants to sort of see higher ed be reformed you have to answer that question about what are the incentives and if you don't have a good answer to that question you know you got a problem and that's very much again i think where we were three years ago that doesn't mean burn it down that just means like we need a more radical sort of fix. We need a more fundamental kind of answer.

Actually, the one thing I can think of is taking away the student loans, where it's like, hey, you don't get this free money spigot anymore. You've got to actually compete. Exactly. I mean, at least those kinds of things should be looked at. Because when it comes through sort of a more radical shift, and you want things like accountability, you want transparency. I mean, things like accountability and transparency put the light of day on institutions, whatever they are, businesses, higher ed. And that's the kind of thing that gives people a view into what's happening and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're doing what? Oh, I'm not going to give you my money or I'm not going to have my kids go to the school or, you know, whatever. So in some ways, there needs to be much stronger governance.

There's the governance within higher education, the kind of oversight that we've had. It's been appalling. And the thing is, these are really good people. So I'm not trying to knock these people individually. A lot of the people that are in these kind of governing board type of roles are very successful business people, very smart and so on. But they've let the administrators and so on just run amok. The first thing I would like to see is the boards of trustees

and the major donors and sort of the people that are basically have governing oversight of these institutions start to hold people accountable to their own values, to their own what they're saying that they stand for if they stand for merit then they stand for merit what does that look like if they stand for institutional neutrality what does that look like let's make it real let's don't just talk about it uh we've got to move past this kind of i don't know laissez-faire almost sort of governance of higher ed and keep pretending like it's going to be okay to like a much more elon musk-esque kind of aggressive go in and clean things out a bit and

hold some people accountable it's like if you're not going to do the job of maintaining this institutions values its core values then you can't be the president yeah this is our ultimate goal are you working to achieve that here's some kpis and benchmarks we want to see you hit if you don't hit them exactly and i mean that's true for any institution so that's not some radical departure that's true for businesses or whatever we don't see that much in higher ed you saw a little bit accountability last winter you know when claudian gay you know um showed this kind of cowardice during her testimony before Congress. And so she got held accountable, and so did the woman from Columbia,

or it was Penn, I can't remember now. And that sent a signal, again, that sent a good signal to other institutions that were like, oh, we've got to start paying attention. So that was helpful. But again, there are something like 4,000 institutions of higher ed, and some of these institutions have these enormous endowments and these huge base of alumni and the huge base of local, state, and federal support, all of those things create incentives for the status quo, not for change.

I mean, speaking of endowments, that is a good segue in terms of, I mean, that's mentioning I work at a fund, 1031. We interact with a lot of endowments to raise money and to help steward their capital. And having done that for the last three years now, getting to understand the ultimate goals of these endowments and how they can achieve their ability to fund what they want to go do, whether that's subsidize schooling for individuals, build new facilities, whatever, you've got to get creative of how you actually establish and then grow and maintain that endowment into the future. and very happy to see that uatx launch and you guys have an endowment with bitcoin at the core of it and yeah so what were the the thought what was the thought thought process and decision process that went into making that ultimate decision well so some level of endowment is good right you you you need and i think want to as a university to create um endowed funds for things

like scholarships right so you have that money in perpetuity to be able to offer scholarships to students in need or for merit you want things like endowed chairs if you want to be able to attract top-notch intellectuals and scholars it's very helpful if there's money in the bank where you're drawing five percent roughly a year to pay for that chair and so they that individual in the university knows their stability right so that's a good version of the endowment so the idea was was just that like any kind of um you know investment strategy we want to diversify our risk we want to diversify our portfolio why aren't people doing that with bitcoin right as a long-term asset if you look at how bitcoin was performed over the last five years you could at least have

a plausible hope that it's going to perform well moving forward maybe it doesn't but you know you'd have it and you'd have some reason to believe that it will so you put it in your portfolio and so that's what we're doing you know we view it as a as a long-term asset that we think is going to do well we want that in the portfolio we want to so that's the practical part the more ideological part if you will or philosophical part is that we believe what it stands for you know in our mind it stands for free free speech you know free expression well that's what we're all about you know that's our dna so you know we're like we're like spiritually we're like we're this close to bitcoin right in the bitcoin community we get it right we get what it means to kind of um want um

a way out of the madness of an institution and towards some freedom and and control and so um yeah there's there's that kind of community connection and we're seeing this like so many of our supporters our students they're they're all interested in bitcoin yeah well it was this This, your personal journey to Bitcoin, were you, did you understand Bitcoin before you made the decision? Or was it something you came to understand as? I mean, you know, I have some Bitcoin.

I've had it for a number of years, but it was more like, you know, it was a whim, whatever, a few years ago. And that was the end of it. I never got into it personally in terms of really understanding it until more recently. And I blame Joe Kelly for this.

You know, he was telling me more about it and I was listening and Jonathan was talking with me as well and then and then I was like wow this really is important I need to pay more attention because there's I'm a really curious person so everything interests me which is kind of a problem in the sense that I could all of a sudden I can deep dive into you know literature or music or whatever and just go deep for a year or two so I hadn't been paying attention really honestly to Bitcoin at least not that much but I have a lot of friends and the university of course has a lot of friends that were interested so I was constantly kind

of getting at least um being immersed in that community and then somebody like joe you know had to basically explain it to me and then i was like oh right wow this is so much more powerful so much more diverse in its impact than just just being currency or just being an asset and i think it's very serendipitous maybe that's the word maybe there's another word fortuitous that we're catty corner to each other because i think yeah what's happening in this office We're almost at the same height, too. You can literally see into our offices from here practically. It is an incredible feeling knowing that everybody out in this room right next to us down the hall at Unchained,

in the middle of the floor at Pleb Lab, all working on these. Because that's the other thing, too. Bitcoin is so new still, even 16 years in. There's many things that need to get built, many ideas of what can be built. and it's truly an exploration of ideas in this building and i think it is a bit poetic that we are catty-cornered to each other as you guys are embarking on exploring a new realm of higher education yeah well all i can do is agree yeah i feel it too it's um it kind of comes full circle to the beginning of the conversation about sort of the magic of what's happening in austin

And particularly on this corner at six in Congress and these days, I, you know, I walk down the sidewalk and almost I bump into people or doing these amazing things. And then I wonder about the people I'm not, I don't even know that are walking past me and like, is this person going to be the next person that cures blindness? Or is this going to be the next person that, you know, um, figures out some, some new way to do the federal reserve, you know, like you, you don't know, you don't even know who you're walking by. And, like, right down the street, we have the Mothership, a bastion of free speech in the world of comedy is right down the street from us.

No, it's incredible. And then you've got the full spectrum of not just innovators, but intellectuals, everything from academics, you know, at UT as well as University of Austin and elsewhere. But you've also got, you know, the podcasters and, you know, so the Joe Rogans, and then you've got the Elon Musk. And you've got, I mean, you know, think about the amount of firepower in Austin. I mean, Austin's punching so far above its weight, intellectually at least, that it's extraordinary. I mean, it's hard to even kind of put it into, to really quantify it, but you can feel it. You know, you can feel like, well, how are so many of the most important people in the country in terms of changing the direction of the country, pushing things forward?

Wow, there's an awful lot of them are in Austin. Why? You know, what is that? They're not in St. Louis, right? They're not in, you know, I mean, I'm sure those are fine cities, but like, why is it Austin? Silver lining of COVID. I'm trying to figure out a phrase. I mean, it drove a lot of people here. It drove me here. I think that was like Texas generally putting the flag down saying we're going to be relatively free to the rest of the country. Yeah, I agree. Look, I think it was a transformative moment for the country. I mean, if you look at the internal migration, it was the largest internal migration, as I understand it, in the history of the United States, except for what they call the Great Migration in the early part of the 20th century with African-Americans going out of the south to the north because of Jim Crow and so on. So that was a huge period of internal migration.

But the largest since then has been this migration immediately after COVID. well again if the first question you like that you know that economists ask is you know why why is this happening okay well where are they migrating to for example they're migrating to texas florida tennessee what do those three states have in common yeah no income tax that's not the only reason i'm just saying they don't they don't right what was their covid policy all relatively free right same thing with utah for example um and so it doesn't take you don't have to dig too hard to start seeing oh there's something different happening in the places where people are moving to relative to where they're moving from and you can start to say oh common sense you know tells us

that this probably matters it probably matters that they have more favorable tax policy more favorable regulation more sane approach to covet and so on sorry about that so i thought i'd turn that off um so yeah no it's been this incredible this incredible um shift because of covid um i mean it's tragic in the sense that it kind of is so disruptive but of course like any kind of disruption it can reshuffle the deck in some good ways i think a lot of good ways obviously what's going on here in austin i think it's working on a fractal too um we have this reassertion of autonomous state rights which really shine through during covid which i think is incredibly beneficial to long-term health and quality of life of americans overall because

it really reignited that interstate competition that the founders basically set out yeah when they founded the country and crafted the constitution and i think that's only going accelerate from here and yeah we're like what you're doing at uatx is um like just like a fractal movement of that like you're doing at the university level and that's obviously near and dear to our heart in the bitcoin community because bitcoin is this distributed system and our core one of our core beliefs one of my core beliefs as a bitcoiner is that this distributed robust system is is what we should be building on top of and you need whether it's a robust monetary system or robust republic of states with their own individual ways of doing things or robust

distributed university system with a plethora of different models and ideas this is how systems should organize is in this distributed fashion exactly and that's been the magic of the constitution for example is that distribution of power across the branches and so on between the states and the federal government i mean the the first thing that somebody who cares about a free and open and prosperity the first thing you should really have i think is a general intellectual um kind of habit is skepticism not not cynicism but skepticism right skeptic and particularly skepticism about centralization of power wherever it might be whether that's corporate power the federal reserve the federal government whatever it's the nature of power is

as it gets more centralized it gets more corrupt so when you distribute it out you maintain that kind of competition of ideas of businesses of you know doing things better and so we always want some level of that distribution once we lose that distribution that's the problem right when the federal government gets too much power or the federal reserve gets too much power or the late the local schools get too much power things start to go south and so if you care if look whatever your politics are if you care if you genuinely care about you know peace and prosperity and justice and moving that you have to at least say oh we have to be careful right and it's not just whether it's concentrated under trump we don't want to concentrate under anyone i don't want

to concentrate it under mother theresa you know it's not it's not so much who's in office it's like how much power does that person have once they're in office right if you're worried about power don't just worry about whether you know trump has power versus obama or vice versa worry about whether the office of the president has too much power or worry about whether congress has too much power um and so as we see it get redistributed to the states or decentralized through things like bitcoin those are positive movements that creates more competition more accountability more transparency those are the things that that's the sanitation of daylight onto all of these kinds of institutions yeah completely agree and i'm extremely optimistic i was i mean i'm a child

of 9-11 great financial crisis um covid i'm a child of it but lived through it and uh that is for most of my life i've been hyper worried and pessimistic about the centralizing power that has existed throughout most of my life and maybe i'm naive maybe a bit gullible but it does seem like if you squint you look at what bitcoin's doing what uatx is doing what the trump administration is promising you can squint and see light at the end of the tunnel that maybe we are moving back towards sanity and distributed systems that that lead to competition and overall quality of life peace and prosperity yeah i think we're starting to see the pendulum swing back towards sanity rather than this kind of nihilism and and gaslighting and so on right i think people

have just had enough um and so the trick is not to have it swing too far the other direction where all of a sudden it's like it gets corrupted in a different way yeah um and so you know friends of freedom friends of um of sanity have to maintain their principles in terms of it can't this is why I'm not a big friend of politics because politics ultimately becomes about tribalism and what tribe I belong to and what tribe I'm loyal to where what we really need to do is be committed to a certain set of ideas and decentralization is one of those ideas um and so it doesn't really matter like who's in in my view who's in control or what the party is it's like it matters what ideas are going to be implemented I'm optimistic right now I think we're swinging in the right

direction and I think we have some people who can do some really positive things but we also have to maintain vigilance and sort of say do those things don't do a bunch of other stupid things that is a poetic that you said that because literally the episode we just recorded that was the whole topic is as this trump administration comes in how do we stay vigilant and hold the new administration accountable exactly promises it can't just be hope i mean hope's great thing and i and again i have some i definitely have some hope coming out of this i think there's there's the possibility of some really positive things but there has to be the vigilance to say no you know we have to do those things and we also have to not do the dumb things

that that humans are inclined to do right um retribution i'm not talking about justice but actual retribution is a terrible idea terrible that would that would spoil the entire thing so there are things like that that we just have to be vigilant about and and if you care about ideas and you care about society and how ideas manifest out rather than your political tribalism then you have to sort of hold yourself accountable and your own party and your own people in a sense accountable. And that's the, that's the, that's the downside, right? The downside is people get too comfortable and then they start to make the

same mistakes that their opponents were making. Yeah. You have to have the intellectual vigor and competence to hold yourself accountable. Yeah. So I kind of welcome that. I welcome for the university, I welcome people holding us accountable to our own commitments, to our own constitution, to our own ideals. I welcome that for the Trump administration. I welcome it for any kind of new for the Bitcoiners, you know, that,

that there's always sort of transparency and accountability and so on to keep it true to its principles because otherwise it runs the risk of getting corrupted over time. I think we're going to win optimistic. Yeah. The, the optimism and the potential, I think the potential, I think there's many people opening their eyes with the, whether it's Bitcoin, AI what we're seeing with SpaceX all the booming companies here in Austin like the potential is palpable and that's what makes me extremely optimistic it feels like for the first time

in a while there's this concerted effort to go realize that potential and I think what you're doing what we're doing we're going to look back in a decade and be like I'm glad we were doing this because it was the right time i was telling my wife like last night i was like you know it's weird knowing that you're probably living through a moment of history not just where things are just kind of going along but like we're seeing this kind of cataclysmic shift right or this transformative kind of shift and and again that's not just that's not the election i'm talking about it's it's really it's the culture and it's entrepreneurship and it's but it's shifting a lot um of course it shifted during covid because of what we talked about earlier but

now it's shifting back in this in some other directions and the way it's shifting culturally i think is largely positive i think this is a time where people really can be more hopeful more optimistic if they can move past the tribalism of politics and literally just look at what's happening in the world and try in terms of what's possible i think there's some good reasons to be optimistic. Like you said, you know, the Bitcoin kind of phenomenon, the university and some of the reforms and innovations there, technology, you know, despite all the problems in the world, there's so much opportunity to do things better. And we have people actually going out there and trying to do those things better. With all of the cataclysm of the last few years,

people were losing hope and people were sort of acting like it's the end of the world. and I just don't think that's true and I think this is very much part of the human cycle like every 50 years or so we kind of go through these moments and we saw that we saw that in the late 60s people forget how volatile that was

I mean presidential candidate the president was assassinated a presidential candidate was assassinated the head of the leader of the civil rights movement was assassinated students were shot on campus at Kent State all in the space of a few years I mean, it's unbelievably, you know, um, dynamic and dangerous, uh, polarized, and yet we made it

through, right. We can make it through the current moment. And I think we've started to see that we are making it through the current moment. Um, and that people are stepping up in different ways, whether that's education, finance, politics, whatever, to try to start doing, you know, to kind of emerge out of this morass into sanity and to hope into something positive. so like I so I agree with you I for the first time

I'm starting to feel more hopeful about what the you know the kind of the kind of country we can have and the kind of community we can have

yeah people keep working keep building keep going after we like to say a lot on this show we're gonna win I think

I think we're gonna win yeah I'm again I'm an optimist yeah Chad this has been incredible

thank you yeah for taking some time it was a pleasure to come across on a Friday afternoon I need to get over there and check it out

I've not been everybody should come and visit uatx and see it for yourself i gotta when's the next event you guys are having tonight five in about an hour oh shit exactly you gotta you gotta drop by i gotta there's a huge event tonight an open house so it's mostly for students and parents i don't think you probably have young kids that are 18 year olds yet no not yet but um but it's open everyone to come drop by and just see what we're building right and talk to the faculty talk to the staff see the campus you know kick the tires awesome well i'm sure you have to go prepare for that so I won't take up any more of your time.

I appreciate it. Thank you. Peace and love, freaks. Okay.