All Episodes
Previous Next
June 30, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser
01:11:11
Eric S. Deems | Is College Worth It & Why Is Everyone So Broke? | OAP #20
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
One another.
In this world there's room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The way of life can be free and beautiful.
But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in.
Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery.
We need humanity.
More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities, life will be violent, and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together.
The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all.
Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world.
Millions of despairing men, women, and little children.
Victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair.
The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.
And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers, don't give yourselves to brutes.
Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel, who drill you, tire chew, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder.
Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts.
You don't hate, only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers, don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.
In the 17th chapter of St. Luca, it is written the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness.
You, the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.
Let us all unite, let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security by the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie, they do not fulfill that promise, they never will.
Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.
Now let us fight to fulfill that promise.
Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.
Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
What's up?
How are you?
I'm doing great.
How are you doing, man?
Doing very well.
It's good to see you.
It's good to see you too.
It's been too long.
You look good.
Thank you.
You know who you always kind of remind me of?
Uh Philip Philip Seymour Hoffman.
You know, I've gotten that a couple times.
I I'll take that as a compliment.
Very specific, um Philip Seymour Hoffman, by the way.
Um you are the most like Philip Seymour Hoffman from A Talented Mr. Ripley.
Okay.
I haven't, but I'm gonna add it to my list here.
It's got Matt Damon in it, Jude Law.
Everybody you'd ever want to know about.
You started a podcast.
How's that going?
I'm having fun.
It's um you know, it's like uh it's a workout, right?
It's a continual movement.
Much like uh any muscle you want to grow, you just gotta keep making it happen.
So even when you don't want to consistency is the key.
I'm excited to see you have yours.
Yeah, it's been fun.
Um I just decided to do it.
I just kinda got just sat up with all the political stuff going on, and felt like the only thing I knew how to do was complain.
So I hate that everything has become political.
I agree.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately because I used to be interested in all sorts of things.
Right.
Right.
I I saw somebody post something on um social media, I don't remember which one earlier today, and it said, Yeah, this was from eight years ago before um my feed was nothing but people's political acts.
This is a picture of my mom forcing me to take a picture with somebody that I told her was cute, their their waiter.
And I thought, yeah, that's what social media feeds used to look like.
Not anymore.
I know it's brutal.
I can't even I can't even spend any time on Facebook anymore.
It's it's just too overwhelming.
And I'm I'm I was a big Facebook guy.
I mean, my whole business is built on Facebook advertising, and I just can't well the the biggest demographic of folks who listen to my show come are the users of Facebook.
Um now we're trending younger now, younger, I mean 30s to 40s, but when I came right out of the gate, um it was mostly about 40 percent were over 55.
Yeah, my demographic's older too.
And 75% are male.
So uh give the audience what they want, you know.
Now, do you do a do you do a video portion of your podcast too, or are you just doing the audio?
I don't.
I've just been doing audio.
I am I probably need to get sophisticated like you and and set it up and go down that path.
But right now I've just been recording my uh producer JB.
He comes in, sets it up.
We were in a mastermind together, which is how this whole thing started.
And he said, Eric, I heard a couple of your first episodes.
Why haven't you done more?
And I said, His name's Jake.
I said, Jake, I can't uh I'm just overwhelmed at the idea of everything behind the curtain.
I just want to be on stage performing.
Just let me go out there and and do what I want to do.
And he said, Well, you know, I moved to town to be a songwriter, so I know how to do all the technical stuff.
I have all the equipment.
Will you let me produce it for you?
Yeah, absolutely.
So he was showing up uh once a week, right here, sets everything up, and away we go.
So that's how we record the show, uh, usually on Friday mornings.
We do the the weekend review first and then uh record ahead of time for the Tuesday show, which is more of um the what I call Midwestern pragmatism, the things I grew up with, you know, where I grew up with two neighbors.
I didn't know that one neighbor was black, I didn't know the other neighbor was a lesbian, but one neighbor was black, the other neighbor was a lesbian, but I knew them as Louis and Regina Right.
Well, the the point being that's not how we defined him.
We defined him as our neighbor, you know, and um they were great people.
Uh I I have lost touch with Regina.
Lou passed away a few years ago, but um he was so proud of his, he had a son who was an NFL referee, and so we would go over at his house on Sundays and watch his son referee.
Wow.
So it's kind of fun how that that works.
But yeah, um, and in a town that was 97.2% white and only 6,000 people.
Um, you know, it's kind of hard to uh a lot of the buckets that you're being forced in just don't apply.
And then I begin to think, well, this is the majority of America.
And so that's kind of how the the podcast has morphed into kind of those conversations.
But JB, if it wasn't for him, uh these Dulcet tones wouldn't be on the airwaves.
Yeah, it drives me nuts when people refer to the Midwest as flyover states.
And don't get me wrong, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Illinois.
There were 2,000 people in the top.
That's right.
Yeah, I graduated with a class of 80 uh from high school.
Yeah, I was 82, class of 82.
Nice.
I was very proud that I um um by one position I ranked in the top half of my class.
So I put on my my application to Bellbot that I graduated in the top half of my class.
That's great.
That's great.
Um, yeah, I I don't think I I actually think it's um when I hear the white privilege nonsense and all this kind of you know stuff that's I mean just polluting the airwaves, you know, systemic racism and all that stuff.
Yeah, it existed at one point in our history, but it doesn't exist today.
And when you start Scratching your head and asking why why do we keep seeing more and more of this?
Well, think of where the narrative from where the narrative is coming.
It's coming from major cities.
It's coming from really urban environments.
Um, and so I think it's the big cities versus the rest of us.
That's actually where I think the breakdown is.
And the rest of us is most America, and they're sitting back saying, you know what?
When everybody's making money, the problems go away.
So and we're too busy to watch cable news every night, anyway.
You look at those numbers, it's not even one percent of the U.S. population tuning in to any one of those stations.
So that tells me that um the narrative that's taken over the country has been uh hijacked by just a handful of people in elite circles in certain uh media markets, right?
So yeah, I uh I totally agree.
And uh, you know, as long as big tech censorship is uh under control, I think the future of media is what we're doing right now.
Um, not necessarily you or me specifically, but I think that people are turning to influencers rather than brand name media conglomerates uh for information, and it's happening on both the left and the right.
And it started to kind of happen, I think you know, maybe 10-20 years ago.
You started to kind of see it a little bit, where people would be like, Oh, I really like Larry King.
They wouldn't say I really like CNN, right?
Right, and you know, you started to see this like shift away from what network do you watch to who do you watch on that network, right?
And my wife today, she's like, Oh, I love Tucker, but she doesn't like Fox, but she loves Tucker, you know.
And so I think that we're we're moving to an influencer um platform.
Well, my only concern is that we might wind up in a spot where we're only listening to people that we agree with, and those people the opposition is not communicating back and forth.
So I've been trying so hard to have people that I disagree with come on the podcast, and yeah, none of them want to do it, and maybe it's because I I'm inflammatory in my tweets or whatever, but I don't want to be like you know, rude or in some sort of debate or you know, try to get a bunch of clicks with some sort of you know crazy behavior.
I just actually want to have the conversation.
Yeah, no, that's yeah, a couple of things there.
Um, I agree with what you're saying.
The cable news kind of the deterioration of cable news began when you had to have breaking news every 15 minutes, and finally people are realizing, you know, unless you're you know, um like I used to keep the the news on.
I remember growing up, you know, if I was around, I would just have a cable news network on because I like to be informed and know what's going on.
Um sometimes it would be C-Span.
Uh now I've kind of reverted back to C-Span, right?
Um you're getting it from the source.
That's right.
And the good thing about um kind of the democratization of media is you're at least going to know where people stand.
And and so when you you tune in for Tucker or you tune in for Rachel Maddow or whoever it is, wherever they are, um, as everybody can have a platform, right?
Anybody could do what we're doing right now if they have you know a webcam and an internet connection.
So a couple of things are gonna happen.
There you're gonna have a whole lot more voices out there.
That's a good thing, but it's gonna be a lot harder for folks who want to break in and be kind of a media star.
That that's probably gonna be a whole lot uh more difficult.
Um, but I think it's actually going to be better for the conversation because people won't have to pretend like they're riding the fence or pretend like they're objective.
Um, because it just hasn't been for so long.
And you know, you hear folks say journalism is dead.
Well, what version of journalism?
Because if you're not adapting, you're dying.
And yeah, so yeah, tread and water is the same as drowning.
That's right.
That's right.
That's you know, I I think one of the main um changes that happened in journalism is that I don't think that these major media networks are investing the money like they used to in the investigative reporting, right?
Because that's right.
There used to be a really good case for subscribing to the New York Times as like a citizen, because yeah, you're funding someone going over to Syria with you know a Kevin vest on and capturing the story, but they're not even doing that anymore.
So you might as well just be doing what we're doing, right?
That's right.
Well, they had they used to have reporters.
Right.
And you you and they used to have to get sources, and this is to my point of um the deterioration with the 15-minute news cycle.
Um you don't have time to go corroborate with primary and secondary sources because somebody else may tweet it out first.
And you know, what do they say?
Uh a half-truth or a lie gets around the world uh six times before the truth has had a chance to put a shoes on, something like that, you know.
And that's just it, you know.
So I actually don't I actually do not have Twitter or Facebook on my phone.
I have to get onto um my desktop to do that.
I stole that from Tim Ferris.
Uh I follow what he puts out, and he recently did that.
I guess he did it a while ago, but he recently talked about it in his five bullet Friday email.
You know, that's a pretty good deal.
Yeah, because I found myself just pulling out my phone and refreshing my email and then going to social media just out of habit.
You know, I'm trying I'm sitting on the couch at night watching television, um, watching a show, maybe my wife and I are connecting and bonding over, or somewhere else, and I've turned this um this time of connection into a distraction.
You know, this idea of watching two screens at once, which apparently is a big thing, a big hurdle that movie houses are trying to overcome.
Yeah, well, I think COVID's the first one they gotta be.
That's right.
Well, COVID's good COVID still exists, the pandemic is over.
Um, I just wish some of these tyrannical authoritarian power hungry uh leaders would um would realize that.
But we'll see what happens in your former uh stomping grounds of California, Gavin is being recalled.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't wait for us to recall them just so just so we can forget them.
That's right.
But I'm yeah, I'm in Austin now, so I don't have to worry about it.
Um, if it's not if it wasn't for Florida and Texas leading the way, uh we'd be in a whole lot of trouble.
DeSantis is doing a great job.
Yeah, and I um I don't know, I can't I just can't believe if you would have asked me 18 months ago if if the government would have been able to go in and tell us not to go to church, I would have been like, no way, maybe in a hundred years.
Right, it just happened.
And it doesn't seem like I mean there was some litigation, but like no big deal.
Everybody is like, all right, like I just couldn't believe the complacency.
Well, that's the other thing.
Our uh our legal system is the best in the world, uh up to this point, right?
It's we're a great experiment here, and we have the best thing going so far.
Uh in the legal system, unfortunately, takes time.
And so that's I think eventually it will get caught up and will show that there was so much overreach, and um governors and unelected bureaucrats are gonna get their hands slapped.
I mean, the CDC is already getting its hands slapped, you know.
You're not allowed to make these kinds of mandates and restrictions and force them on people.
You know, you have no authority to do that.
I think we're gonna see more and more of that.
So that'll be nice precedent for the future.
Um and so hindsight, it'll be nice to say, well, at least we endured and got through that so that it won't happen again.
But unfortunately, um we had to go through it.
Yeah, I just uh there I don't know.
I I what can I what could I possibly say that hasn't already been said about it?
I just um it seems very peculiar to me that as soon as we see seem to be close to getting out of it and moving on, there's always like one more story, right?
Right now, the Delta variant.
It's emerged of like none of the other variants killed any of my ex-girlfriends.
Like, is this one gonna be the one that does it?
It's fear fear porn.
That's all it is.
Um there are states.
If you travel to a place that it was a lockdown state versus a free state, uh there they're still taking this very seriously.
Uh there are places where they I mean the masks are still on and the distancing and all that, even though the science is already in and all that stuff is pretty much BS.
Um really alarming.
Folks want to be told what to do.
Have you been following the um Ivermectum story at all with uh Brett Weinstein?
Uh I don't know that one, but I know that um the country of India is uh thinking of bringing charges against uh I just read a headline before getting on here.
I I think so about the them trying to shield away from ivermectum because uh and then that killing people dying because of that.
Yeah, basically if if Donald Trump said something, it was immediately terrible.
Um the the big bad orange man, you know.
Yeah, I know, and there that that was a that was a tragedy in and of itself.
But um I are you familiar with who Brett Weinstein is?
You might know Eric and his brother.
Um they've both been guests on Joe Rogan's podcast, they're both sort of thought leaders.
Um Brett Weinstein is was made famous.
He was a professor of I believe abolitionary biology at Evergreen University, and a number of years ago, Evergreen University had like a solidarity day on campus where nobody who was white was supposed to go to campus, it was just supposed to be for like minorities, and he refused to stay home as like a Jewish man and an intellectual.
He's like, I'm not that's racist, I'm going to work.
And he went viral basically defending himself, uh not physically but verbally defending himself in front of a mob of students basically screaming at him for being on campus, you know, calling it.
Yeah, I remember this.
Yeah, so that's that's that's that's um uh Brett.
And Brett has a podcast called the Dark Horse Podcast.
And uh as an evolutionary biologist, he is somewhat of an expert uh in a tangent and relevant way to um the whole COVID crisis.
Uh he's not a virologist per se, but he's familiar with genetics and variants and determining whether or not something may be manufactured or naturally occurring, right?
And um uh he has uh he did an episode with Dr. I believe his name is Dr. Pierre Corey.
Um, but I could be butchering that.
Um and they sat for like three hours and laid out all the evidence that ivermectum works as a preventative measure for COVID and as a treatment for COVID if you catch COVID early enough.
And they basically, and this is just my understanding, so I could be getting this wrong, but they basically implied uh or made the case that it appears the uh pharmaceutical companies and the government intentionally wanted to shut down any knowledge or awareness of the efficacy efficacy of ivermectum for two reasons.
The first being that you can't get emergency use privileges for a vaccine if there is an effective treatment on the market, and the second being that the drug is uh a very old, cheap, wily made drug, and uh the pharmaceutical can't make any money off of it because yeah, it's not it's it's uh public domain or whatever.
So um uh uh they have since been banned or or demonetized from YouTube and uh censored in their videos been taken down, and it's just really bizarre because I never would have thought anything of it, but then YouTube takes it down, and all of a sudden I'm like, wait, maybe there's something to this, like it makes it seem all the more probable that that's the case when you see like big tent big tech censorships specifically target that one video, and maybe they'll take this one down too.
I don't know, I don't care, but yeah, um it's just alarming.
Yeah, the big tech oligarchs, they're the ones really in control, need rein.
Yeah, I think the uh who was it on the Supreme?
Was it Clarence Thomas that uh suggested that big tech should be viewed as a utility?
Um yeah, I don't know, I don't know which justice It was that said that, or um, which leader it was that said that, but um I have mixed few.
I can't, yeah.
Yeah, I know, right?
Because it's it's an interesting one.
Um, and what what is it, the section 230 or something like that?
Yeah, um it's a tough one because we're really in unprecedented moments here.
So I well, and I think um the challenge is the first amendment, right?
So you know, you have consumers that are saying, hey, this violates my first amendment right, but not really because it's not the government oppressing your speech, it's a private business.
That's right.
And then at the same token, it's like the private businesses are like, look, it's our first amendment right as a private business to determine what we want or do not want on our platform.
Uh which gets hairy for a couple of reasons.
The first one is well, if you're determining what is or is not on your platform, then you're not a platform anymore.
You're a publisher because you're editing, and then 230 may not apply to you, right?
And then um, if you go beyond that and you look at all the federal government contracts that these major tech companies have, international government contracts that they have, constant explicit pressure from specific leaders on Twitter, like threatening antitrust uh lawsuits.
I mean, it's you can't really say that they're private businesses.
I mean, they're they're they're obviously behaving uh in a reactionary way to the government because they're afraid of increased regulation.
So I I'm not sure that it's actually a private business.
Right.
Well, it's a tailspin, you know.
So what do you do?
So you you you go and you buy a radio station, and that's the solution.
Just buy a radio station and and just put your voice out all by yourself, you know.
I just let them come back.
I thought about doing that.
I thought about doing that.
That's that's expensive too, though.
I think you can only uh you can only um emit uh radio signal, like is it like 200 yards from your home or something because it violates FAA regulations or something?
I looked into it, bro.
All right, well good.
There you go.
So what are you doing these days, man?
Last I talked to you, you were in a um uh healthcare kind of startup, uh tech space.
So health tech, you know, we put that on the shelf.
That was a um it would have been great.
Had we started that thing a year before COVID, had we had it in a year earlier, I guess is what I shouldn't have said.
Um because we launched it summer of 19, and you know, we were getting LOIs and uh getting some early stage investment, and that was very good.
Uh fast forward, the pandemic hits, um, literally the week of St. Patrick's Day 2020.
Um, I have several major meetings to finish up finish inking the deals that we had agreed to.
And this would have put this technology, which was essentially a communication platform for seniors, so they could um have a tablet that was in their living space in the senior living facility, and it would communicate with the other sensors and the AI that was in their living area, you know, a sensor in the floor, sensor in the bed to know if somebody's fallen if they'd gotten up, that kind of thing.
Um voice activated.
So it would connect not only with those things, but also connect to social media so that this person, so grandma, grandpa could be connected with their family, as well as the health team and their caregivers and that kind of thing.
So uh especially for smaller groups uh that had maybe three to twenty locations uh senior living facilities.
This was a great a great solution for them.
And so that week when everything shut down, um it was kind of an interesting interesting moment.
My found co-founder and I, Tim and I, we were like, Well, what's gonna happen here?
You know, we everything has been canceled because in fact, one of the facilities we were talking with, they had one of the first outbreaks of COVID.
And so I'm my contact inside was like, dude, this is nuts.
We have people from the CDC that have just moved in essentially, they're trying to figure out what's going on.
It's gonna be a while before we can talk about this.
We gotta survival's the motivator now.
I said I understand got pushed basically a year.
That's right.
And so because of that, uh the big boys, uh, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, um, they were able to step right in, and they already, You know, our solution was compatible with Google Home, um, Nest, as well as Facebook Portal and those things.
Uh, I think there may still be a solution at some point.
It'll be um a different version.
We've continued to iterate.
We still have kind of weekly meetings to to talk about that.
We've merf uh morphed that into some consulting.
So it's not over yet, it's just it's not going to be the solution that we initially had.
So we're waiting to see kind of what a what is a post uh pandemic um senior facility need, and how can we take all of the data?
Because we had so much data gathered from healthcare providers and seniors, folks in the field, uh folks in corporate health care that were great resources for us.
So, how can we continue to use that data to create the solution that's needed?
So uh, if anything, all the trends that were already in place were sped up.
That's what I think COVID that's gonna be the greatest gift from COVID is the the speeding up of of trends for technology and healthcare.
So uh that's that's still there, but real estate is my first love, so I'm still chasing and doing a lot of real estate on the commercial side.
Uh yeah, how's that?
Look across the commercial business in Nashville, um, given the context of the pandemic.
It's great.
I mean, it's good.
That's I'm fine.
Yeah, oh I mean, I mean, just look at what's happening.
You've got all of these announcements coming down.
Uh Amazon is increasing their presence.
Um, Oracle announces you know, a new campus here, uh, mocked after uh the campus they have in Austin.
And the banks don't have anywhere else to put the money.
That's right.
That's right.
Just got flushed with cash.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, the federal government is giving them so much money, so you know that it's which that's a whole nother issue for us to talk about.
But um then also the General Motors plant, the former Saturn plant, they've turned they're converting that into a battery facility.
So when you think of all those for big movers, uh, I think the Cadillac, the the new uh all electric catalog, I think that's it.
You see all those kind of things happening, and well, if they move if you know Amazon brings 5,000 jobs or another 2500 jobs, well, how many additional ancillary jobs are gonna come because they need to be close to Amazon?
So it's the exponential network effect that's going to happen.
So real estate is still uh booming from that perspective.
What's interesting, and I think the the jury's still out on this is how do you um the tightrope of remote versus in-person working environments?
Uh innovation and collaboration are done best when you're in person.
And Jamie Diamond has come out and said, if you're at Chase, sorry, but we're coming back together to make this happen.
You don't have to come back, you know, 40 hours a week per se.
Right.
But not every not every job requires innovation.
I mean, that's it's just technical, right?
That's right.
We all like I think it's something with our generation.
They like raised all of us to be leaders, they raised all of us to be creative, you know, all these sort of values that were just kind of blanketed on our whole generation.
It's like, you know what?
Some people just crunch numbers, and you can do that at home.
We need I cringe when I hear graduation speeches, and you all are leaders.
No, you're actually not.
And you're setting up the vast majority of you suck.
It's a net numbers thing.
Sorry.
Um but I think that's gonna be interesting.
And that'll that will dictate um the office market here and how how much was overbuilt, how much is still needed.
You know, if a conversion are you seeing commercial buildings being converted for residential?
I think the older stuff, I think the owners that that own the older product, they're thinking, do we really need to turn this C product into um B plus A minus, or is there a different play here?
And I think the different play, what's the property Tax variation on that.
That's a good question.
Is there a higher property tax for commercial property than residential?
I bet you there is.
So there would be something there.
That's something to figure out.
The other thing to figure out is what property tax where they're gonna land.
We have a mayor here in Nashville that um you know they just increased property taxes by 34%.
John Cooper.
Oh, Jim, right?
It's Jim.
They're brothers.
Yeah, yeah.
I gonna are you in District Five?
Yes.
Yeah.
You gotta vote for Robbie Starbuck, man.
I have seen him.
He's running, yeah.
He's my boy.
I love him.
I had him on the show a couple days ago.
Oh, very good.
No, I follow him, and I think he's great.
Um Jim Cooper.
District five's a tough tough district.
Well, they're they're brothers and their dad was a governor, and so it's just part of that um political entitlement that is just it's polluting our political system all over the place from ever at every level.
But yeah.
What are your thoughts on Jim Cooper?
Well, I think he tries to be a Republican, but um on in talking points, but when you look at his voting record, he's not.
He's pretty leftist.
So he's a nice guy, you know.
We're in rotary together.
So uh he shows up, he's he's in town um all the time.
Uh pre-COVID, uh I'm assuming he's still here, you know, now, but uh he also has one of the best internship programs.
Uh I've I know friends who have interned for him in DC, and he's one of the members that actually spends time and actually is involved in the curriculum for you learning what's actually happening.
So I I think he's a decent man.
I think he really enjoys his job, but um what have you done for us lately, you know?
That that's a question.
I looked it up earlier today.
There hasn't been a Republican elected to represent District Five since 1875.
Interesting.
So I think part of the problem is that he's never felt threatened.
And I think that's right.
You know, you know, and I don't think he's just intentionally coasting, but I think that's just kind of what happens when you know you have job security after you know 20 years of being in any situation.
Well, and Megan Barry thinks uh that it's her throne to assist as well.
So um she's gonna come after after what she did with the cop and the money.
Right.
You know, that's her that that's her ability to come back and prove that she's reformed.
She's she's the only Democrat that I ever voted for.
And I voted for to prove to prove to myself that I like was open-minded.
I was like, you know what?
She's got a good brand.
It's gonna be fine if it's a city level position.
She's nice, she's sharp.
And I thought, you know, I'm gonna be I'm gonna prove to myself that I'm not just some like right-wing you stubborn dude.
I'm gonna vote for it.
And then within 12 months, she slept with her security guard and uh laundered city money in order to pull it off.
Right.
In the cemetery of all places.
Well, in the cemetery?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, that's where they were going.
They were there were uh um security cam footage uh for a business across from the cemetery that would video them coming in about seven in the morning and then leaving about 715, 720.
Oh, it's uh you know, the morning pick me up.
Nothing like nothing like go to the cemetery to start your day or it's just so wrong on so many levels, and you know who I feel most sorry for?
All of the liberal women who really just worshiped and praised her as their the feminist who's here to bring us through.
And then they worked hard on the campaign.
They didn't not only did they I mean they were knocking and walking like crazy, man.
And then she was just another one of the guys, you know.
So what do you do?
People are people, you know, it is what it is, but I'm glad she's out of the way, and I wish she would have had a little bit more remorse.
I that was the big problem I had.
I think she was at record store day, um spinning a record.
I mean, literally two months later, and the the record was I don't think it was as overt as smooth criminal, but it was something like that.
It was and she's spinning and she posted on her social media, and I call her out on it And say, where's your remorse?
You could have at least you know gone away for six months and said you found Jesus and come back.
And um I was blocked.
So I have been blocked from her.
So I can't see any of her social media.
How tragic.
You're probably not missing much.
I mean, they at a certain point they start to kind of pair at each other, I think.
And on the right too, you know.
It's like it's trick trickle-down ideology, as I call it.
Well, and that the the other's just it.
You know, um the vote the electorate, they're really tired of all the political nonsense too.
They want to know why gasoline has gone up.
They want to know why uh inflation has gone up four percent, and people like Jim Cooper is who they're sending to Washington to not put us into more debt, but to actually solve problems.
So I think the next couple of years are going to be pretty interesting for a reckoning.
Um, and I think also the redistricting is gonna play uh a big piece of that.
And I think the Republicans are gonna win handily in 22, and I think the 2023 redistricting is going to only further help Republicans for 24.
So do you think that you think they'll be able to leverage the power that they gained in 22 to uh redistrict favorably?
Oh absolutely, yeah.
So in a state that isn't there, why isn't there like a set way that the districting happens so that we don't have to have this debate every single time that redistricting meetings?
Oh, because we love gerrymandering because it happens on both sides, you know.
Yeah, I know, but that it's just sucks on both sides, so it's not good on both sides at all.
We said disagree with it.
Yeah, but it's kind of like it's like Senate rules, you know.
As soon, you know, we're gonna do it now, but uh or we won't do it because you wouldn't do it.
And then here we are, you know.
Right, with the Supreme Court nomination, that was the big one that happened.
Exactly.
Uh and then you know, all it goes back to Mitch McConnell keeps pointing to Harry Reed and how he was changing things.
So, folks, I'm just doing what your boss did, you know.
So um, but on the redistricting, you think of a place like Texas where you're getting two additional seats, I believe you're getting two seats.
I think it's two.
Um I think what what will happen, and I think at least two-thirds of the state's legislatures are Republican, and they're the the state legislatures are the one that draw that they draw the lines.
So I think what you can do is um is it Sheila Jackson Lee who's in Houston?
Uh I should not.
Yeah, a far far left is she's really full of herself, if if that's who I'm thinking of.
But um they're gonna draw that district in such a way that um they're gonna draw Democrat district in such a way that maybe it's not as Democrat as it once was, and they're just gonna I think they can leverage two into three or four net gain for Republicans, maybe more.
I mean, obviously not for the Senate because each state just gets two right.
That's right.
So yeah, and the house isn't really as I mean, it's still very important, but the Senate's really where it's at, it seems like.
You know, yeah, they're supposed to be the um the cooler heads that prevail, right?
Right.
Well, it's a lot harder to win a Senate race.
You have to convince half a state.
That's right.
And Texas was concerned because of Beto, you know.
Here's this he's running for governor.
Oh, how interesting.
Yeah, so he's probably gonna get tons of money nationally, and it's gonna be another face I have to see every single day until he loses.
That's right.
What a guy.
Um, what is it?
I'm not a violent person, but I mean, I would like I I would never do this, so this is not an incitement or a threat.
Okay, but I would really love to just smack him in the mouth.
Like whatever whenever I see him, and I don't have this reaction with like every Democrat, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever.
When I see him for some reason, I and I think it might have been like the the famous, heck yeah, I'm gonna take your AR-15.
It was like as soon as he said that, I was like, I'm gonna smack you in the face.
Yeah, he just yeah, that's right.
All had no cattle, right?
Is that how that saying goes in uh in Texas?
I don't know, man.
I'm from Illinois.
We had the same, we had the same exact upbringing.
Yeah, you know the Nashville was moving to the big city, dude.
It was.
Uh it was huge, you know.
We finally made it.
There, There's a skyline.
Um that isn't a chilly place.
Yeah.
Are you still living in the same house you were at when um when I was in town?
Yeah.
I love I like that little house.
It's pretty neat.
Yeah.
So we're having having fun seeing what the future holds.
What's going on at Belmont University now that um Dr. Fisher's retired?
Dr. Fisher's retired.
Greg Jones is in.
Um I've I've not had pleasure of meeting him yet, but um I think he's pretty good at you know, so far, I like what I hear.
Um he has everybody he's okay with folks calling him Greg.
He's personable.
Um he walks around without a tie on, you know, willing to get to know folks.
So far, I mean, we're only a month in, not even.
Um, but so far I like what I'm hearing, and a lot of the feedback I'm getting from students, faculty, board members, they really like uh what he's bringing to the table too.
So I'm I think Dr. Fisher served a really good purpose for building Belmont to where it is, and I think Greg Jones is gonna have the ability to let Belmont fill out and and get comfortable in the identity of okay, we're now a big player, and Greg Jones also has a lot of experience raising big money and Belmont's endowment.
While it's the strongest it's ever been, it needs to get stronger if we're gonna if we believe where the trends are for higher education.
Yeah.
Well, I think I agree with you.
I think Fisher was a um a wartime president.
You know, he came on in 2000 and it was the university was really in a vulnerable position.
And he he turned it around and and made it something for someone else to take care of.
That's right.
Yeah.
Not without shuffled feathers along the way.
But took some arrows uh and and shot some arrows.
I mean, that's that's what happens in a war.
Speaking of, how does how I've been curious to know if you're in to I'm not really in touch with Belmont at all, but how is Belmont fared during as you know, a small private Christian school during all this critical race theory um bullshit that's going on nationwide.
Is has it just dodged the bullet?
I mean, the student affairs department when I was there was atrocious, and I think they cleaned that out.
So maybe it's better.
That's a good question.
Um, the leadership from the top down, they're not going to allow that kind of pollution to happen.
Um from their perspective.
Now it is a college, so you want that kind of discord, you want discourse to happen and you want uh differing opinions to be present.
And so I don't I don't think they're shying away from it, but I haven't heard a whole lot about it, to be quite honest with you.
Um that's something to think about, actually.
I may need to reach out to some folks just see what's going on, but I don't hasn't made any headlines.
Well, it's not a very diverse campus yet, either, too.
So you know it's not like minorities that would be you know taking those issues as personally.
That's right.
And when you look at the university, I mean that's probably a good place to start.
Look at the makeup of the university.
I think it may be 60 40 female male at this point.
Yeah, yeah.
That was like one of the main reasons why I went.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's great for that, you know.
Um and it's growing, and it's a lot of the growth has happened too in the graduate programs.
Um really big headline kind of things.
So um I'm not sure how that plays to the other things.
I know they did the Bridges to Belmont program that Milton Johnson helped launch, which was to find um folks from the Edge Hill neighborhoods.
So to find three black kids every year to go to Belmont and be in all the pictures.
Well, I think I know you're still connected.
I don't want to make you uncomfortable, but I'm totally liberated to say whatever I think.
Well, that's a sin it's a cynical spin, but you know, much truth lies in jest, right?
Um I'm not mad about it.
You know, I'm fine, whatever.
I went and spoke to a group of maybe it was 25 high school students from the Edge Hill neighborhood that were in a summer program.
This was a couple of years back, a summer program that was to prepare them for college life, um, Belmont or otherwise.
And so that all kind of stemmed from the um them putting the the academic, and not the academic, the athletic fields uh at the Rose Park uh elementary school, if you recall.
And so we've got to be good neighbors, you know.
Now you look around, and when I went to Belmont, there were uh girlfriends of mine who were being held at gunpoint in 12 South, and their house was being broken into now.
That house that they lived in was purchased for 350 grand and two million dollar houses were built in its place.
So the neighborhood is completely changed as well.
Yeah.
So I I think there are I think there are a lot of good intentions that aren't necessarily thought through, and I think that's everywhere.
But it's like, well, if we really want to solve problems, what's the actual what's the problem?
You know, instead of the effects of the problem, let's let's dive a little deeper.
Because solutions are always found closest to the problem.
And I think a lot of times um Belmont in any organization wasn't getting close enough to the problem to create the real solution.
But it made for headlines and and it made folks look good.
So I have a theory about why we've seen I don't want to use the word decline because it's not a perfect word, it's not exactly the right word.
Um, but I'm gonna use it just as a placeholder because it's close.
Uh, but why we've seen the a decline in minority communities since the 70s in terms of um nuclear family status, um, household income, uh crime, things of that nature.
And I think that all of our problems today uh with the racial tension that we have with the poverty, um, with the income gap, I think they all go back to inflation.
As I think what was happening was I think these minority communities in the 60s and the early 70s were um they were struggling, but they were getting by uh, you know, sort of paycheck to paycheck.
And when we went off the gold standard and inflation skyrocketed in the 70s, um I think that that put them over the edge where they had to start taking extra jobs, maybe they weren't home as often, and then you start seeing kids aren't looked after as as much because mom and dad are both working now.
And I and I think that you know there's not there's never any one cause uh, but I think that inflation may have had a very significant impact on what we're seeing today in terms of all the tension that's going on.
And I think I think it's uh it's a ripple effect from from some of those decisions that were made.
That's an interesting thought.
I've never thought of that now.
Um I've always needed clicked for me.
Yeah, I've always thought about the social programs that were put in place the decade before, you know, and and how those um, you know, became replacements in the yeah, you look at you look at footage and interviews from the 60s, 70s, the civil rights movement, they're protesting in suits.
I mean, they look great.
That's right.
They're sharp, they're incredibly well spoken, right?
Like these communities, right?
And um, you know, the to just put put the images and the interviews from then and juxtaposed to what you see now in terms of the writing over George Floyd and all that stuff that we saw this past year, it's like a completely different society, right?
And it's only really one or two generations apart.
And I the only explanation I could come up with is like why is it that this entire community is you know, like they're staying married, they're having kids after they're married, they're you know, they're working, they're they're poor, but they're not desperate.
And why is it this entire community within it one generation seems to have been totally crippled?
And inflation was really the only thing I could think of as like a cause.
The other piece is when I see the folks out there, you know, taken to the streets for the cause the biggest difference that I see is these aren't you know in the 60s the conversations and the movement was Led by leaders of the faith community.
And so it was this idea of we're part of something bigger than ourselves.
We're here to create something that's fair for everyone.
Fast forward to today, it's it goes back to that critical race undertone, critical race theory undertone, which is we're just going to abolish everything because everything is inherently wrong.
And any institution in society is if it exists, by definition, it's racist.
When everything's racist, nothing is racist.
And so we just attack everything, and now it's just a big power grab.
So the goal now is to just grab as much power as possible to topple the system instead of no, we're having a righteous cause, and we're going to be part of this community because we're all in this thing together.
That's kind of that's the biggest difference.
But the econom I mean economics, when everybody like I said earlier, when everybody's making money, uh problems go away, the economics are huge because you also think of the systemic racism that did exist prior to um us getting off the gold standard.
I mean, you have black families that couldn't even get loans to purchase homes.
I mean, this stuff was terrible, right?
So it's like how there were improvements.
In fact, black wealth and white wealth were on par with one another during the 50s and into the 60s, and so you you begin to scratch your head about that and and try to figure it out.
But because maybe it was their first generation at the table, whenever the inflation hit, um, there was far less to go back on.
That's an interesting thought.
I'm gonna have to think more about that.
Yeah, I need to I need to look into it more in terms of the numbers too.
But I mean, if you're getting by paycheck to paycheck, and then within a very short period of time, we're talking 36 months, you know, there's 10% inflation.
And we saw a double digit inflation in the 70s, and your income's not going up.
So that could put you over the edge.
And if it happened on a massive, it would affect the the most vulnerable first, the poorest first, right?
And and everybody that had enough money to have assets or or wealth in the market, you know, they they would just appreciate what the inflation and kind of write it out.
Um paycheck to paycheck people really got hit.
But one thing that I think is interesting when you look at the civil rights movement versus what's going on now, is that there was this entire theme during this the original civil rights movement that the system of America was good, and the leaders in America were not fulfilling the promises made in the system by the constitution, yeah.
And now it's inverted, where all the politicians think that they're good and that the system's broken, right?
And and that's one thing I really Jordan Peterson kind of mentioned that it's it's like like you can't really say that there's systemic racism in the United States because of all of the things that the system has done over the last 200, 300 years to eliminate racism.
Like it was a net, in my opinion, it was inevitable the day that the Constitution was ratified.
It was inevitable that slavery would become illegal in this country eventually.
Because you just it's it was there was too much of a discrepancy between the principles of that document and this country and the culture behind it and the actual behavior that was going on in terms of slavery.
It was inevitable that that was going to come around.
And it was inevitable that the civil rights movement was eventually gonna happen, and there were bad actors along the way that got there were the Jim Crow people, and there were the you know, there was the KKK, there was some terrible shit that happened.
Don't get me wrong, but that was the Democrats.
That wasn't the system.
That was yeah, that was the people, you know, uh basically violating the ideal that the system upholds.
And so that's one of the things that really pisses me off about you know, seeing statues getting torn down of Abraham Lincoln, and it's like you know, well, there's no logic in the system isn't the problem, yeah.
Yeah, there's no logic.
Why do you think that is though?
That like all of a sudden we have a generation that's totally antagonistic toward the the system.
Do you think it has to do with just our our leaders blowing it with like things like Vietnam and just ugliness?
Well, um maybe I think of the millennials when millennial, you know, the millennial group, pretty big group, but they're now the largest group in the workforce, so they're pretty relevant.
Um boomers waited Longer than anybody was expecting, and some of them are still not retiring.
Gen Xers are getting skipped over because the boomers are staying too long.
And the millennials don't want to wait long enough.
They don't want to be in a job for six years before getting a promotion.
I'll just go create my own company, you know.
So there's that fact, yeah, exactly.
There's that faction that's happening.
But to continue with the economic discussion, um millennials were told they had to go to college in order to be in it, become an adult.
Uh when our parents graduated high school, they were adults, and then the question was, you know, do you go in and work in a vocation?
Do you go to college?
What does that look like?
I'm a first to go to college.
I'm the first to go to college in my family.
So I come from a whole line of folks who graduated high school and adulthood was there, ready or not, and it's time to provide, you know.
And I think a lot of America is that way.
Well, the millennials, you need to go to college, it's the finishing school now for adulthood.
And so you graduate, and now you're crippled with student loan debt.
Most people are crippled with student loan debt.
I think it's criminal what colleges can charge.
And you look at the the trend, it's unbelievable.
How that is gone's healthcare.
The more the government pays, the higher the prices go.
Yeah, and you look at folks that went to college in the 60s and 70s, um, even into the 80s, and some went to college for free.
Uh, you know, City College of New York for free.
Uh well, you used to be able to work part-time and pay your own way.
That's right.
When it was $300 a semester, yeah, there's no way you could pay for college now and working at a bar.
That's right.
That's right.
So inflation, to your point, um, has affected our generation.
And so when we graduated college, I was working in DC and I wanted to stay in DC, but I couldn't stay in DC on 26 grand a year when I had to pay a thousand dollars in a month in rent and twelve hundred dollars a month in student loans.
It was it just couldn't happen.
So I had to look around to where can I make money?
Survival's the motivator, and real estate.
There were people that uh I didn't think were very smart making a whole lot of money.
So I thought I'd fit in pretty well, you know.
But I was having to survive instead of going and buying a house and going and buying a car.
And we have an economy that is driven by consumerism, but our group wasn't we were not out buying, we weren't getting married, we weren't having kids.
That's all being delayed by a decade or so, so that we can have our career, you know, whatever that needs to be, and I think there's a lot of disappointment.
So fast forward a few years, and now okay, now's the time.
We've we've been out for a few years, maybe here we're gonna do something, and then the housing crisis happens.
They're like, wait a minute, you did what?
And we're saying this to the generations older than us.
You've screwed us over now that we can't even get a mortgage.
Great.
So we've delayed it that much more.
Um I think folks are just we're we're over it, we're tired, you know.
Yeah, I think that's kind of I think that's where we find ourselves with this generation.
I want to see you.
Um, you know, Eric, you went to Belmont, it's a good school, it's an expensive school, it's got a good reputation.
Very while you were while you were at Belmont, you um uh similar to me, you basically killed it.
You you did awesome.
You ran for student body president, you got elected, you were hyper-involved.
You maximized the opportunities that that university provided beyond the minimum in order to go through the system, right?
And how do you do you feel like it was a waste of time?
Do you ever have that thought?
Yeah, I I ask myself that a lot, um, or have over the last decade, it's been 10 years now since I graduated.
Um I I always come to know uh because in oh no, because the relationships that I made while I was there, and And the reason I say no is because I was an active participant in determining what my outcome was going to be.
You know, I did I just didn't sit and allow the syllabi to tell me how I was going to spend my time.
You know, if if you were if your name was on a building and you were still alive, we were going to know each other.
Right.
And in Nashville, the same way.
So I think that's just a product of my upbringing and product of my personality and being that kind of person.
Have I used a college degree?
Uh, you know, things from statistics to to do that.
I I don't know.
Um, like I said, I think the four-year undergrad experience is a finishing school for adulthood now.
Yeah.
So you can't, you know, so that's where I think it was valuable.
Could I have gotten that from say Ohio State from or you know, to use another private school, an SMU or whatnot?
Yes.
Um, so I don't look back with regret.
I I think uh I look back and think, okay, I'm glad I went to college, one.
Um, I'm glad it was Belmont on the timeline that it was.
Belmont was going through a lot of growth.
I was able to be an engaged as a student because there was so much growth happening, and we had university leaders that were open to student leaders being active participants, so all of that kind of played into enriching my experience.
But I also know of other folks that you know would have done it differently if they had chance to do it over.
Yeah, and I I think for me, I was really, really lucky that my parents were in a position to just pay for my school.
Yeah.
And I think that I would have a much different feeling about it if I was paying student debt every month.
Yep.
You know, uh it's one of those things where you know, I think college is an amazing thing.
I think it's an outstanding experience, especially if you're the of the disposition that you can max maximize um your outcome.
Uh, but it is way overpriced.
100%.
And and I don't, I mean, there are cheaper schools, you can go to state schools, you can go to less expensive schools, but even so, it's super overpriced, and there is no guarantee of a job, even if you study something very versatile like business administration, you're not guaranteed you're not gonna get a job unless you hustle, right?
That's right.
You know, you really only the degree, in my opinion, only matters if you want to be a lawyer or a doctor, and then everything else is just how you hustle while you're in school and after, you know.
Uh, an advertising business.
My my bachelor's degree was in audio engineering with a minor in philosophy.
Yeah, I never took an advertising class in my life, but right, right.
But um, I I totally value the experience I had, and there were you know, one or two classes that probably made the whole thing worth it.
Um, and I look back and think that's right.
And I keep in touch with some of my professors, I keep in touch.
I have a core group of friends.
I mean, that's that was my first kind of my oldest Nashville friends came from my time at Belmont, and still having those folks in my life.
That that's great, you know.
So I think you're on to something, and I think the trends again are being sped up.
COVID did this.
Do we really need to send I mean people were suing universities because wait, showing up to a Zoom call is not the same thing.
I don't think I'm gonna continue to pay the tuition you thought I was gonna pay.
Right.
And I think our generation as well, back to my point on the millennials.
Hey, I don't know if you've seen this, there are a lot of millennials retiring because what they've realized is uh the life that they thought they were pursuing and setting themselves up for they don't want.
Yeah, and a year of a pandemic is like, wait a minute, why was I waking up and get leaving my family, leaving the people I love to go work with a group of people that maybe I don't necessarily like or I tolerate to do something that isn't fulfilling, so that I maybe one day could I'm out.
Yeah, I I'll just work remotely and do something that I enjoy and retire today.
I think it goes back to the whole dichotomy between freedom and safety.
Uh you know, In my opinion, there's sort of two kinds of people in the world.
There's people that would prefer freedom, and there's people that would prefer safety.
And there's a little bit of an inverse correlation, though.
I would argue you can't have one without the other.
Right.
Especially not uh safety without freedom.
Um, I just totally lost my train of thought, and it was gonna be an outstanding point.
Well, we're talking about safety or freedom, safety or freedom from folks uh that are retiring.
So in our in our group, they're yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's chasing freedom.
So yeah, and I think that the reason people kind of get hung up on these um these the jobs that are that sort of a drudge uh is because they take comfort in the security of it, right?
So people settle.
They say, you know what, I'm willing to be 70% as happy as I could be in order to make sure that I'm not 100% as unhappy as I possibly could be if I fail at doing anything else.
And I think um I think it goes back to courage to just like you don't especially if you're young and you don't have a family, and you don't really need you can find a way to put food on the table and you can find a place to live bare minimum.
I mean there are morons that do it, and yeah, I think to I think to myself, like we have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years before that, to survive.
We are the cream of the crop of all of humanity, right?
Despite how um fucked up our culture is right now, and you will figure out a way to survive because it's wired in you, and your DNA knows how to stay away from a tiger, how to build shelter.
You might not think it does, but it's there and there's nothing it's hardwired.
You are a survivor, and you just have to believe that in order to take the lead.
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe it's sort of a romantic feeling, but I I you know I like Tim Ferris's view.
He he he he um many retirements every couple of years.
Yeah, well, we say I I think this is not a a novel or uh you know, this isn't original for me, but um I think a lot of times folks have to create controversy because they have it so easy.
It's such a soft world that we're living in because survival, I mean even the folks of the poorest among us are still they still have a a phone.
You go into any place where somebody's getting paid minimum wage, they'll pull out a thousand dollar phone out of their pocket.
And so that's something to think about.
Um we take for granted how great capitalism has enabled um the largest growth of of wealth for the most amount of people.
And so while folks are sitting around in comfort, well, they may not call it comfort, you know.
They're there is something to be said about having to manufacture come up with a reason of why they're oppressed.
Yeah, and I I think um there might be a little bit of generational envy going on.
I don't know if you ever get this feeling, but it's like if you watch you know Saving Private Ryan or something, you're like, man, if only I could have fought at Normandy, you know, like there's a party here.
You know, obviously it's terrible, and like nobody would want to do that.
But my point is I think our our generation really wishes that we had a Vietnam to stand up against, uh Nazi Germany to stand up against.
Uh what's our defining moment?
Right.
And we haven't really had real problems other than internal domestic corruption.
And I think that people got a little antsy and weird and maybe feeling unfulfilled.
And I think that you know, a lot of these 22-year-olds that you see throwing Molotov cocktails in the name of BLM, like it's a manifestation of wishing that they it's a manifestation of them psychologically needing to feel as if they're fighting for something important.
They need a cause.
Yeah, cause, yeah.
That's right.
I don't know.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
So we need to give them a better cause, and the better cause would be to make college affordable, you know, quit paying all these university presidents multiple millions of dollars a year.
Just little dig at bobs.
No, uh, you know, if you can get it, get it.
But uh, you know.
Well, I think I think the I think the solutions are kind of clear.
I just think that it's so politically painful to do them.
Like, yeah.
Look, obviously, all the government programs that pay for tuition have driven up the cost of tuition.
And no politician is ever going to withdraw those programs because they would get massacred by the mob for you know not caring about minorities that were you know using the buttons like the programs cause the problem, and so I'm worried that um no leadership is going to be talented enough or courageous enough to do what needs to be done to solve these problems, and that it's just gonna have to kind of fall on its ass.
Yep, that's right.
And the the other piece of that is uh even Biden comes out saying we're gonna cancel all student loan debt, and then oh just kidding, big and switch.
We can't do it because too much is depending on all those payments.
We would take out a complete infrastructure.
Um did he ever say that he was gonna do it?
Did he actually say he was gonna do it?
I don't I'm pretty sure he did.
I thought that Elizabeth, I know Elizabeth Warren.
I'm not saying he didn't, but warrant did it.
Yeah, I know that's been a narrative from the left, but I I just can't remember specifically whether or not Biden said it.
He was pretty good.
I think he I think he said something about it in one of the democratic debates, you know.
One of the I recall watching something where people were doing the kind of the flip-flop, you know, where here's what he's saying now, and here's what he said then.
Yeah.
Well, what they could do is they could just make it legal for you to declare bankruptcy on your student debt, and they wouldn't even have to cancel it.
They could just let it wash out that way.
Yeah, I think that would be I think the problem was uh initially that there were kids going to Harvard on full debt, and then the day they graduated, they were declaring bankruptcy, and then seven years later they were 27 years old and it wasn't on their credit report anymore.
They had no debt with a Harvard degree, you know.
That was what was happening, and so they had to put a stop at it.
It was pretty good strategy.
Smart.
Yeah.
Leave it to the Harvard grab.
I know, right?
But I don't want to keep you from your family.
I know that it's uh it's late.
Um, thank you so much for coming on.
Why can't people find you?
Very good to catch up.
Um anywhere podcasts are streamed, you can find the Eric Dean Show or on the socials at Eric Dean Show.
Awesome, man.
Well, it's really good to see you.
You look great.
Uh, haven't met your wife say hi to her for me.
I um I'll do it.
I I hope you guys are doing as as awesome as you sound.
And um, let's let's not let it go so long before we're uh in touch again.
Yes, likewise that sounds good.
Okay, man.
Take care.
All right, see you, Chase.
Bye.
See ya.
I started this podcast because it occurred to me that there was a concerted effort to shame America and what it means to be American.
When I asked myself, what can I do about this?
It's really hard because I'm not a political action committee, I don't have tremendous amount of followers.
I certainly didn't when I started.
I am one American.
One American podcast reinforces the values and ideals of America, it reinforces Americanism by having conversations with key influencers of all sorts of different backgrounds, beliefs, but with one thing in common the belief in America and that America is inherently good.
▲
Export Selection