My Chat with Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_710)
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Summary
Marissa Streit, CEO of Prager University, joins me to talk about why she left her job as a school administrator to become a visiting professor at Northwood University in Michigan. She also talks about how she got her start as a journalist and how she ended up at Prager.
Transcript
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With great excitement, I introduce you to Northwood University, a truly exceptional institution in
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American higher education. Since 1959, this private, accredited university has been a vibrant
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bastion of free thought and enterprise, standing out among the thousands of other schools in the
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U.S. Known as America's free enterprise university, Northwood is dedicated to nurturing the next
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generation of leaders who drive global, social, and economic progress. At the heart of Northwood
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lies the Northwood idea, a philosophy that celebrates individual freedom, responsibility,
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and the importance of moral law and free enterprise. This entrepreneurial spirit is evident in that
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one-third of Northwood alumni own businesses. Northwood is more than an institution. It's a
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movement that empowers students to think critically and champion liberty. It is a rare gem in today's
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academic world. If you're passionate about supporting a university that values intellectual
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growth and free enterprise, or to learn more about its academic programs, visit northwood.edu.
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Hi everybody, this is Gadsad for The Sad Truth. I have another unbelievable female honey badger with
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me today. Marissa Streit, CEO of Prager University. How are you doing?
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I wanted to read because I'm getting old. I might forget something. So you've been the CEO for many
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years now, since 2011, as you've said, and you'll recount the story on air in a second. You were right
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there in the kitchen when Dennis Prager and Alan Estrin started this whole thing, and you were involved
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from the start. You have a master's degree in education and non-profit management. You worked
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as a school administrator, and you were a director of a philanthropic institute, and you host two shows
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on PragerU, both of which I was fortunate enough to be on, one of which is not out yet, so we could
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talk about when that one is coming out. I'm looking forward to it. Real talk with Marissa Streit and
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stories of us. So excited to have you, Marissa.
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I'm excited to be here. You're my favorite professor, by the way. If every professor was like
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you, our universities would be exactly what they should be.
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Oh my God, you're so sweet. I don't know if you heard, by the way, speaking of that lovely, those kind
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words from you. I think you and I off air when I came to visit PragerU a month ago, were talking about
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possible moves that I might be making, and I'm happy to discuss it publicly now because it's publicly
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available. I took a leave of absence from my university, and I'm going to a university for
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one year at least, and I think they apparently share your views about me being a worthy professor
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because unfortunately not all universities consider me worthy of being there in our woke ecosystem that
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we live in. Well, the universities may not accept you, but the parents and the students want you,
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right? It was just like the sign of our times. Wait, so can you disclose where you're going?
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I could. So it started, it was an incredible thing. I was actually in California on doing some shows,
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including two of yours, PragerU, and I receive an email from a president of a university,
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Northwood University, which is a small university in Michigan, and the president says, look,
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we're big admirers of what you do, all of your, not only your scientific work, but your, you know,
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your clear thinking, your free thinking. We'd love to, you know, make you an offer. Because I was in
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California and I couldn't go down to visit the school, I said, look, I don't feel comfortable
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quitting my, you know, tenured position right off the bat, so why don't I come for a
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one-year visiting professorship. And so my home university was kind enough to grant me a leave
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of absence. And so I'll be spending one year as the official title is visiting professor and global
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ambassador at Northwood University. So it's kind of not unlike how Hillsdale College has been able to
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etch a unique niche for itself because of some of the political philosophy that it has,
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pedagogically speaking. I think Northwood is trying to do something quite similar.
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Well, professor, welcome to the United States of America. Congratulations to you
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and congratulations to us for having one more normal professor in the United States,
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one million more to go. Thank you. So how did you, so you were a school administrator,
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you know, you come from a background where one can think, you know, you could have been
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parasitized by all of those bad ideas. How is it that you're able to navigate in that ecosystem
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and come out unscathed and help, you know, make PragerU what it is today?
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Wow. You know, I think the way to develop discernment, sadly, requires building calluses
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and having some adversity in childhood. And I wish it wasn't the case because, you know,
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I have three kids under the age of 11 and I don't want them to experience adversity, right? What parent
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wants to see their child suffer. But I also realize that when you have some adversity in your
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childhood, you develop some skills that allow you to have discernment where you can tell right for
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wrong and also not bow to the mob, right? Because so many people come out with parasitic ideas,
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as you call them, or these maladaptive ideas, because the mob expects them to think these
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things. So you go against your own common sense and you comply, even though you know deep inside of
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you that is wrong. But if you grow up with some calluses, then you're not really afraid of what
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people are going to say about you because you realize that there is a bigger picture and ultimately
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the truth must persevere. And so for me, I had a complicated childhood. My parents divorced at a
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very young age. They were previously married prior. And so I had stepsisters from both sides. It was all
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women. So imagine three sisters from one side, two sisters from another side. My mother was an
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immigrant from Morocco. And so English was a second language to her. And when she went through the
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challenging divorce here in the United States, it was so hard for her that she ended up moving to
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Israel and raising me there for a few years, which also as an American living in the Middle East
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certainly gave me some calluses as well. It was just integrating into a new society where I was
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different. But I always looked at it as a blessing because when you live outside of the United States
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as an American, you just realize what a blessing the United States of America is. And when you are
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labeled as different, oftentimes you associate even more so with your origins. And so I felt incredibly
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American when living in the Middle East. And all of those experiences, I think, gave me those calluses
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to not care so much what people think about me. So when I went to grad school and when I got my
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master's in education and I thought differently. And, you know, Professor, I remember arguing with my
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professor. You might not find that shocking. But I remember arguing with my professors of education
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when they were pushing John Dewey down our throats or when they were saying that, you know,
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a child centered classroom should mean that a child basically does whatever they want, where with
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almost no guidance. And I remember going back to my professor and saying, I mean, this just sounds
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bonkers. It sounds chaotic, like chaos. How do you run a classroom? I'm going into the classroom the
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following day. I'm like, OK, kids, do whatever you want. What do you want to do? You be my boss. I'm like,
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no, no, I can't run an eighth grade class like that. And so I remember having those arguments with my
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professors back then. And I don't know, it just became part of my character to just not comply
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And so you're in the educational ecosystem for a while. How does the link to start PragerU and
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become its CEO in 2011 happen? Tell us about the genesis of that story.
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Yeah. So at PragerU, Dennis Prager, Alan Estrin, who is the producer of the Dennis Prager show,
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and I sat down and basically we said, education got us into this mess. Education will get us out.
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There is so much indoctrination that is effectively Marxist in the United States of America, that if we
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don't educate the public about what is true and what is false, we will lose America. And so actually,
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coming out of the world of education has been very helpful to me, both as CEO and running a
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business, because I think that being an educator is so helpful in running a company. You kind of
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understand how to communicate and how a mind works. But it was also helpful to me in seeing what was
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missing, that gap that was missing in America and why people have these nonsensical ideas. To me,
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it's very clear, well, why are Americans laced with nonsensical ideas? Well, it's because it's what
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we taught them from kindergarten through 12th grade. And so, you know, parents are just so shocked to see
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these college students behaving so poorly and believing in things that are so strange, where
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they can't tell the difference between a male or a female or right from wrong, right? People are so
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shocked, where I'm not shocked. I'm actually, I mean, I'm saddened, but I'm not shocked, because I know
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that this is what our kids have been learning from kindergarten. So when we decided to come up with
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PragerU, we realized that there is a mind virus that is inserted into a child's brain starting in
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kindergarten. And the way to inoculate them against these terrible ideas is through true education
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that does teach discernment, that does teach personal responsibility, perseverance, all of these things
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that we're not teaching in class. And that's why we decided to create PragerU. But we knew, we knew that
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the education establishment will never let us in. We're very keenly aware of the teacher's unions, which
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is a behemoth in the United States. I call them the biggest bully in schools. And we know about the
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Department of Education. And so when we came up with this idea of lifting America out of education
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poverty, we realized that if we went to the institutions directly, they would reject us,
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because they are doing what they're set to do, which is to dumb down the population. So instead,
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we decided to kind of look at the model the way Uber and taxis looked at the model. Remember when
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when Uber came out, everybody was in shock. Everybody said, what? Nobody would go into a stranger's car.
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Why would you do that? Why would you use your phone to communicate with another entity and trust them and
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go into their car? But now, how often do you take a taxi out of the airport versus an Uber?
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Probably Uber, right? And so we looked at Uber and taxi. And we basically said, let's transform
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education. Let's disrupt the market. And instead of going through the institutions that people have
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been taught to look at forever, let's create new institutions that don't go through the old school
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guard, but actually provide the service directly to the customer. And we grabbed those same phones that
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Uber inventors came up with. And we directly started reaching our market without asking the education
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institutions for permission. And the experiment grew over the last 13 years. We started, we went on
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YouTube, we went on Instagram, we went on Twitter, we went, we went everywhere. We created our own
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OTT channels. And, you know, fast forward, 13 years later, we eclipsed 2 billion annual views.
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Wow. Amazing. Do you worry? And I think I saw in one of the bios where you sort of decided that you're
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not going down, you weren't going to go down the credentializing route. Do you think, I mean,
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knowledge is knowledge, irrespective of whether you get an imprimatur or not. So in that sense,
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you're obviously, you know, catering very successfully to the minds that you're trying
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to inoculate against these bad ideas. But do you think that there is some obstacle for people to
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consume the material? Because at the end of my consuming all that knowledge, I'm not getting
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that paper that otherwise I need as an imprimatur when I go out into the marketplace?
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You know, God, my hope is that PragerU doesn't just educate the public about history and political
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science and how to find happiness. My hope is that we educate the public that these institutions
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should not tower over us. And the reason I have no interest in getting credentialed by these
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institutions is because if we pursue these credentials, then we're still giving them that
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power. I have learned more from you, professor, than any of my degrees. And I have not received a
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piece of paper while learning from you. And so what is more significant? A piece of paper,
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which by the way, comes from an institution that is likely not even teaching for jobs that exist
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anymore in the United States, right? Like who even needs that anymore? And so us not getting
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credentialed is a bigger message, which is we don't need these pieces of paper that are useless and
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are expensive. I mean, you know, how many families I know go practically bankrupt to send their kids
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to a four year institution with a degree and absolute nonsense. We don't need that. And so that
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is our message is not only that we can teach what isn't taught. Our message is that these credentials
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are bogus, right? Unless you're getting a medical degree, maybe, but even they have been
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parasitized. They've been parasitized. That's a good word.
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So you and I offline, I think prior to Real Talk, I think it was just before then, we were chatting
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about, it speaks to the conversation about, you know, you're not educating people for actually the
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types of jobs that are necessary. And you had told me offline, I hope you don't mind me saying it,
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and you could decide whether you want to, you know, expand on it here or not. You were talking about
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how when you're choosing MBAs to come work at PragerU, you actually look for certain skills that
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are not necessarily those that you would typically associate with getting an MBA. And I thought that
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was a very valuable conversation. Can you tell us a bit about that?
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Yeah. I mean, I hope that you don't have too many MBA listeners that are now going to get upset with
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me, but if they haven't figured out that I'm a troublemaker, at the very least, get people to think
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differently. Yeah. I have a, I have an issue with MBA or is it because look, every person is
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different, right? You can go and get an MBA and still be an incredible employee, right? An incredible
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thinker. But in general, my issue with MBA schools is that they, they don't follow what I call the
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Leonardo da Vinci model. Right. And so to me, the, the, the, this concept of the jack of all trades,
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master of none is ridiculous because my best employees are ones that are able to wear multiple
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hats. And the reason they're my best employees is because they sit on the edge of, of their
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expertise, right next to an edge of another expertise. And therefore they can innovate and
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they can synthesize and they can troubleshoot. And many MBAs train students to go work for corporate
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America where you're a cog in the system and you're not necessarily an innovator and you're not
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tuned into the most recent research and the most recent, um, technologies that are available. You
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are, you're really passing through these books and org charts and boxes and how to basically scale a
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giant company. And maybe some giant companies need that, but if you're a smaller company and you have
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that innovator spirit, I have felt that in general, these MBAs are not trained to do that. They're
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really also trained to comply. They're trained to comply with ideas that have been made available
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to them by other people. And I would love to see MBA schools that push people not to comply, but to
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innovate and to break the rules, right? Breaking the rules is how we make progress. So that is my
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criticism of, of MBA schools is putting people in boxes and org charts. Yeah. As, as we had discussed
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offline during that conversation, I, I wholeheartedly supported your Leonardo da Vinci, uh, reference as
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you know, but maybe some of our viewers may not. Uh, when I play the game of which 10 people would
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you want to invite historical people? Would you want to invite to your dinner party? The number one
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person on my list is Leonardo da Vinci for exactly the reasons that you mentioned, right? He's a,
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he's a great anatomist and a painter and a, and a sculptor and a, uh, uh, you know, a scientist and
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a futurist, right? I mean, he's, he's doing designs of helicopters and machine guns 500 years before
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anyone had come up with that idea. And so being that true polymath is so important. Now, more than
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just in MBA schools, academics are trained to precisely be hyper specialists. Now, to some extent
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that makes sense in that there are some fields that are so profoundly specialized that you really
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do have to go in your stay in your lane kind of silo in order to be able to advance the, the core
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knowledge in that field. But the truly breakthrough ideas always happen at the intersection of
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disciplines. And so when my own doctoral students ask me, so what should I do? Should I be a hyper
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specialist or should I be a generalist? Uh, I tell them that regrettably universities reward the hyper
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specialists, but life is too short. And if you want to make truly big breakthroughs, then you, you have
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to operate, as you said, in synthetic world, you synthesize things, right? Consilience. So I couldn't
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agree with you more. Do you think that this is something that we'll be able to convince universities
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to teach that kind of broad thinking, or are we so stuck in our stay in your lane mindset that this
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is precisely why we have Breaker U because we can't break the existing models? Right. So how do we
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embrace resumes that are all over the place? Right. Which is what, what, uh, what an MBA school will tell
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you not to do. You know, I, I actually think that AI is going to force us to do that because with machine
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learning, the hyper specialized types of jobs will be conquered through machines and this ability to
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have instinct and develop, um, a more macro view of, of any sort of job is going to become more and more,
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uh, a need in the market because that is the great differentiator. I hope between AI and, and humans,
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where we can add in some of the EQ factor, the emotional factors, the, um, the synthesis of real
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life experience, as well as, I guess, expertise. And so I think those who are able to do that are
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going to be going to have an edge over AI. And I think the market's going to force us to do it now.
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So will the university be able to where, will the universities be able to keep up with that and,
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and teach students how to do that? That I don't know because it, these systems are such behemoths.
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Even now we're seeing that they're teaching students things that are completely irrelevant
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to the job market today. And so to expect them to make a further leap into that, I don't know,
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but I think that given how much learning we can do online through podcasts and, um, YouTube and,
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and PragerU, I think that more people are going to start walking away from the universities,
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realizing that they could probably get more out of the internet than, than these colleges. And,
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and hopefully those pieces of paper that people are paying so much money for are going to become
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more and more irrelevant. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I get most, um, enriched by,
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I mean, when I receive, you know, letters from fans to your point is it's, it's not when the Stanford
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professor writes to me to say, Oh, I love this paper that you wrote. It's the trucker who says,
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Oh, I, you know, I always listen to your podcast when I'm doing my whatever Kansas city to whatever
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route. And it has made me excited to go back and learn in whichever form that that person chooses.
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Because if I'm able to cater to the trucker and to the corrections officer and to the military guy,
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then I know that my message is resonating. Uh, because ultimately as a professor, I mean,
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I'm tasked with doing two things. Number one, of course, creating new knowledge, but number two,
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which we often forget is to disseminate new knowledge. Now, typically the academic world
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has viewed the only acceptable place to disseminate new knowledge is through peer reviewed journals,
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which of course is necessary because you need to make sure that the quality control is there.
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And so we need to have peer review. That's great. But there is no point in doing all of this
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exciting research that hopefully people should learn about. If I can't go on PragerU or Joe Rogan
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and share that those exciting ideas with millions of people. Now, when I first started telling that
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story to my academic colleagues, they would look down on me in a very snooty kind of smarmy way,
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right? You know, what are you doing being on podcasts? That's so unprofessorial today. I think
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they're starting to come around in your interaction with academics, however many you've had. Are you seeing
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that shift where academia used to truly consider itself part of the anointed ones in the ivory tower
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and they're now coming down to talk to the great unwashed? Or do you think we're still as elitist as
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ever in academia? Well, isn't that funny? Because these elitists are the same people who say, well,
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universal education for all, give education for everybody, you know, forgive the loans, right? Like
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loan forgiveness, let's educate everybody, right? That's what they say. But then when professors
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like you want to make your research available to everybody, they mock you, right? And so, I mean,
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like talk about discernment, some light bulb should go on where people should just say, well,
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wait a second, which one is it? You know, Mr. Elitist. I would definitely say that there has been a
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shift. I don't think the shift again comes from these institutions. I remember when we started,
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this is a great story. I remember when we started PragerU and we decided to make these short videos,
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five-minute videos, stories of us. We wanted to take people's research and really cook it down to
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the nugget that one could digest while waiting to buy their coffee or in the line for at the market.
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You can watch a quick five-minute video and instantly get smarter about something. And PragerU is a
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nonprofit. And so we're funded by donations. People need to believe that we are doing good for
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society for them to give us a contribution so we can do our work. And so we pitched this idea to a
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bunch of donors. And we said, you know, we want to take the great work of whatever professor and we
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want to turn it into a five-minute video. And they mocked us. They mocked us. People would say, well,
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how could you take something so deep, so brilliant? You know, economics is so brilliant. It's so deep.
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It's so important. You can't cook it down to only five minutes. Like, how dare you? How dare you rob
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it of its density, right? And 10 years later, I remember Alan Estrin and I, I looked at Alan Estrin
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because we were really lauded by a bunch of people. People were saying, wow, this is incredible.
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You reached, you know, 60 million views on what is the Electoral College, explaining what the
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Electoral College is in the United States, right? And so we had the classroom at a size that very few
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people have, right? And so everybody got excited about it. I looked at Alan Estrin and I said,
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this is our, what is it? Do you remember the movie Pretty Woman where she walks back
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into a store in Rodeo Drive with a bunch of bags? Oh, yes. You should have spoken to me. You should
00:25:32.300
have paid attention to me. She's like, big mistake. Exactly. Huge. You shouldn't have looked down on me
00:25:39.700
because I've got the money. Exactly. Don't you look down at me, right? And so that is the point that we
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make at PragerU. Don't you look down at Americans. Don't you look down. People are busy. They're hard
00:25:51.900
working, but they want to get the knowledge. And just because they're not willing to pay thousands
00:25:56.940
of dollars for, again, a useless piece of paper, it doesn't mean that they don't want to get educated.
00:26:02.240
And why should they not have access to professors like you, given that we have the internet? And why
00:26:07.500
should the educational elitist prevent you from reaching millions of people? Don't we want the public
00:26:15.160
to be more educated? Yeah, beautiful. So, I mean, one of the things I talk about in the last book on
00:26:22.120
happiness, where I talk about, you know, pathways to happiness, you know, choose the right spouse,
00:26:27.820
choose the right profession. And in the in the section on choosing the right profession, I talk
00:26:32.260
about, you know, any job that allows you to instantiate your creativity impulse is one that's
00:26:37.520
going to inherently make you happy, whether I'm a chef or an architect or a standup comic or a
00:26:42.880
professor or a PragerU content creator, I'm creating something that didn't exist until I came
00:26:49.340
along and instantiated my creativity impulse. And so in your case, as the CEO of this big content
00:26:55.960
creating machine, I mean, it should it probably is not very difficult for you to wake up every morning
00:27:02.180
with a great sense of existential glee, because you are immersed all day long. And okay, what's the
00:27:08.360
next big story we're going to tell, right? I mean, so one of my there's this concept of work,
00:27:15.980
a working genius that Pat Lencioni wrote a book about people's, I guess, traits and what they
00:27:21.700
enjoy to do. And so I I'm an innovator, I love innovating. I mean, I love breaking rules, and I
00:27:27.200
love innovating. And so when you talk about every morning waking up and feeling like there's something
00:27:32.460
more that we can do here at PragerU, that certainly happens. Obviously, I have to restrain myself and
00:27:38.100
remember that we have budgets, and we have team members, and we stay focused. But really, you know,
00:27:43.480
Professor, that's how PragerU Kids started. For the first 10 years, we made content to undo the damage
00:27:49.180
of what's happening in the universities. And we are mostly focused on higher level content
00:27:55.740
dissemination. And two years ago, almost three years ago, when the lockdowns happened, where parents
00:28:02.600
kept writing in saying, we're we are watching what our kids are learning in schools, or what they're not
00:28:07.820
learning in schools, how do we make sure that they get those intellectual nuggets, those, you know,
00:28:13.680
mind vitamins to prevent them from having a parasitic mind, we then innovated and created PragerU Kids.
00:28:21.000
And so, you know, we try to have kind of a balance between what more needs to be done, what can we
00:28:26.840
afford to do, and what is needed, what is needed of us. So sometimes I have to restrain myself as
00:28:34.500
well, right? And since we do need the, we do need the people around us to remind us what's within our
00:28:40.020
capacity. Well, I could tell you this, and I'm not, believe me, I'm not just giving you a cheap
00:28:45.000
compliment, because you're the CEO of PragerU. So in the few occasions that I've been lucky enough to be
00:28:50.420
invited by you guys to do several shows, I've done a couple of the five minute ones. And then,
00:28:54.840
as I said, I've done a couple of your shows recently, and so on. I can really feel that
00:28:59.740
every single person who's there is really happy to be there, right? Now, it could be that they're
00:29:06.060
just faking it because you're around and you're the big boss. But I didn't get that sense. I got
00:29:10.700
the sense that everybody felt that there's this kind of common mission, everybody's smiley,
00:29:15.700
everybody's on board, everybody, not to imply that everybody should be ideologically in an
00:29:20.560
echo chamber, but you got the sense that we know what we're doing, we're fortunate to be here.
00:29:25.860
And whether you're the camera person or the booker or the CEO, you're happy to be there.
00:29:33.540
So I'll share something. I don't think I've ever shared this publicly, but I'll share it with you.
00:29:38.440
So one of the things that I tell new staff members when they join PragerU, and this is probably the
00:29:44.220
most important thing I believe I ever say to them. Usually, I meet with them within the first
00:29:48.820
two months of joining. We have about 150 employees. So usually, it's a group of 10, 15 new staff
00:29:56.580
members. And the first thing I say is, welcome to PragerU. I'm so glad that you're here. And I'm
00:30:03.720
sure that you're here for many different reasons. You probably share our values. You've joined our
00:30:08.680
mission. But there is diversity of thought here. I mean, there are people who have different
00:30:13.340
religions. There are people who are atheists. There are people who come from different places
00:30:16.780
around the world. You know, this really is e pluribus unum for many one. And I do say to them,
00:30:22.860
I don't care about your last name. I don't care about your genitalia. I don't care about the color
00:30:27.340
of your skin. What I care about is that you work hard and think critically. That's how you advance
00:30:32.100
at PragerU. That's the first thing I say. And then I say to them, let me warn you, this is our prenup.
00:30:37.640
There will be a moment at PragerU where you're going to feel like you're in the pit of despair.
00:30:42.160
You're going to ask yourself, why am I here? This is so unfair. My boss is unfair to me.
00:30:51.460
My colleague is unfair to me. I am being treated unfairly. Unfair, unfair, unfair, unfair. Because
00:30:59.100
honestly, the parasitic mind, this idea that you can become a victim, nobody is inoculated against that.
00:31:06.340
Not if you're on the left and not if you're on the right. We are all susceptible to that kind of
00:31:13.400
thought. And so it will happen to employees who come to PragerU that they will feel like
00:31:19.600
they're very unhappy and they're mistreated or they're pushed too hard. And so I remind this during
00:31:25.120
the honeymoon phase. I remind them that. I say, right now, you're so excited to be here, but I
00:31:29.720
guarantee you that you're going to hit the pit of despair because we're going to push you really hard
00:31:34.000
and it's going to hurt and you're going to suffer. And so let me say this. Take your mind when you're
00:31:39.600
in that moment. Go back to this conversation that we're having right now. And I want to tell you
00:31:45.280
that if you are not pushed and if you don't feel like you reach pit of despair in your career at
00:31:50.460
one point or another, it means that nobody pushed you. It means that you didn't push you. It means
00:31:55.740
that nobody believed that you could do more than what you think that you could do. And so when you're in
00:32:02.160
that moment, pull yourself out of it, shake it off and nobody emerges from hell empty handed, just get
00:32:09.460
stronger, get out of that victim mindset and get stronger and land on your feet. Because once you do
00:32:15.960
that, you will look back and you will realize that it's the best career gift you've ever been given. And
00:32:22.240
so when you say, Professor, that people walk around all happy here at PragerU, they don't. They have
00:32:28.060
moments. They have moments, especially if they're direct reports to me, they will have moments where
00:32:33.120
they're like, what the hell does she want me to do? Right. But, but they do look back and they realize
00:32:40.080
that if somebody pushes them, it means that somebody believes in them. And that if somebody believes in
00:32:44.740
them, they will be able to do even more. And so I, maybe it's the prenup that I sign with our staff,
00:32:51.900
uh, the stuff that they don't learn in an MBA school. Well, I'll tell you a great story that,
00:32:57.120
that builds on what you just said about sort of making your employees face these important
00:33:01.820
stressors. I actually tell that story in the, in the happiness book. So when I was passing what we,
00:33:08.160
we call it Cornell, the A exam, the A exam is, uh, just before you go all but dissertation. So you're,
00:33:14.880
you have to do two things in the A exam. You have to defend your doctoral dissertation proposal.
00:33:20.200
So this is what I plan to do my PhD on. This is the importance of this problem. This is how
00:33:25.200
it will contribute to knowledge, blah, blah, blah. And then there's what's called the open general
00:33:29.500
comprehensive exam. So all of the doctoral committee members. So let's say I've got a,
00:33:33.660
a psychology committee member, a, a statistics committee member. They can ask me a question
00:33:38.820
on anything about anything. So, I mean, in the grand scheme of exams, it can't get by definition
00:33:46.160
worse than that. But I had always had a beautiful relationship with my doctoral student, uh, my
00:33:51.160
doctoral committee members. Uh, you know, I was top, top student at Cornell, so I had nothing to worry
00:33:56.220
about. So I walk in the day of the exam to, to present my doctoral dissertation. And as I finished
00:34:03.360
my presentation, the first person to ask a question is my doctoral supervisor, who is a very well-known
00:34:10.720
cognitive psychologist. And so he asks a question and then I answer it. And so he, he kind of takes
00:34:16.820
a deep breath and says it with very, very strong authority. I'm going to ask the question one more
00:34:23.080
time, hoping that maybe this time you'll understand it. Now I'd never seen him speak like this to me.
00:34:30.840
So for the next, for the, so that set the tone for how they would grill me during that meeting.
00:34:37.360
Then at the end of the exam, they asked me to step outside while they deliberate. And now that
00:34:42.620
deliberation, it's either you're kicked out of the program or you go on to, to finally complete your
00:34:48.760
PhD. And so I, as I'm walking out, I asked the doctoral supervisor, his name is Jay Russo.
00:34:55.040
He recently retired at Cornell. I said to him, uh, where should I stand? He goes, well, stand
00:34:59.980
far enough from the door so that you can't hear what we're saying. Again, very, very nasty. So I
00:35:06.040
leave and I'm like, my, my head is spinning, right? I'm a super cool guy. I know my stuff.
00:35:10.540
What just happened there? Why were they so nasty? Right. I walk. So then they come out. I walk back
00:35:16.980
in completely different demeanor. They're very, very friendly, very smiley. So I turned to my supervisor
00:35:23.520
and, and he goes, you know, congratulations, whatever. So I look at him and I think I might've even said,
00:35:29.180
what the fuck Jay, he goes, all just some good old fashioned, uh, Ivy league butt kicking to, to see
00:35:37.520
if we can make a man out of you. So that whole thing was, look, you're going to have to go out
00:35:43.080
on campus visits for professorships, you know, at Harvard and university of Rochester and all the
00:35:49.540
top. And they're not going to all be fuzzy, warm stuff. They're going to be testing every single
00:35:55.600
syllable that you say, if we're just going to hug you and say how pretty you are. It's, I mean,
00:36:00.580
I'm paraphrasing what he said. So it's exactly your story, which is, and today I tell that story
00:36:07.280
with great gratitude for them having beaten the shit out of me because what you go through right
00:36:13.960
now. Exactly. So maybe I would have, I don't think I would have wilted into a dainty flower,
00:36:20.260
but it certainly helped that, that I had the good old fashioned, not everybody receives a
00:36:25.300
participation trophy. All right, moving on. Uh, I mean, one of the things that, uh, you know,
00:36:31.800
when I was an MBA student, I remember studying is leadership. And I remember I had a professor
00:36:36.360
who actually moved from McGill university where I did my MBA to a university in Southern California.
00:36:42.240
Uh, and I think he's still there. His name is Jay Conger. And he was the big leadership expert
00:36:48.000
in MBA in business school. And he argued that leadership can be learned. And even as an MBA
00:36:54.700
student, I, I was a bit suspicious of that. It struck me as though much of who you are as a leader
00:37:00.820
is something innate. My feeling is Marissa is who Marissa is when she puts on her leadership hat
00:37:06.980
because it's an inextricable mix of her personhood, not because she took seminar ABC. So what are your
00:37:13.800
thoughts on that? Is leadership nurture or nature? I mean, I know it's a bit of both,
00:37:18.820
but where would you put the balance more? Yeah. I mean, I think that when you say,
00:37:23.280
could leadership be learned, leadership is learned every single day. It's the school of life. I mean,
00:37:30.000
there's, I think when you're, when you're a CEO, uh, or a parent, uh, which is the CEO of your house,
00:37:37.500
you realize how much you learn because when you're dealing with humans and humanity,
00:37:41.620
uh, you just learn so much. So I think that it, as you said, it's a combination of portion of it is
00:37:48.040
I always had that kind of natural instinct to be a bit of a troublemaker, uh, and to think a little
00:37:53.500
differently. And I think that when you are able to think a little differently, you're able to lead
00:37:58.040
because people will follow you if you're not running with the herd, but you're running a little
00:38:02.880
against the herd. And if you're running against the herd in the correct way, then more people will
00:38:07.560
follow you. And so I always had a little bit of that in me, but I would say that I, I am constantly
00:38:14.660
learning constantly. I'm following people like you. I'm reading, reading books. I'm, I'm reading
00:38:21.400
the audience that is following us. I'm reading the staff that works with me. And so I am constantly
00:38:27.420
learning. And I think that the leader I am today is not the same leader I was 10 years ago.
00:38:33.700
Right. And so if everything was innate and I was just born with all these skillsets, then I would
00:38:38.020
have been the same, the same type of leader 10 years ago. But you know, everything is another
00:38:43.060
step. And sometimes I'll go through something really hard right now and not realize again,
00:38:48.420
this pit of despair, why am I going through this? And then three, four years later, I'll go through
00:38:53.020
something way harder. But because I went through something prior, I learned how to handle that next
00:38:59.240
phase of my leadership. So I, I think it's a combination. It certainly humbles you. That's
00:39:04.980
for sure. Uh, I think that, you know, when you, when you start and you're younger and you're leading
00:39:09.580
people, you think that you're going to read books and know what to do. And then you deal with real life
00:39:14.940
and just everything just requires my favorite word, constant discernment. There's no formula.
00:39:22.320
Yeah. Beautiful. Uh, okay. So I want to do a bit of current events and then I might ask you one or
00:39:27.080
two, uh, you know, more personal questions at the end. I mean, not, nothing too intrusive.
00:39:31.500
Don't worry about it. No worries. But, uh, let's talk about some of the current events. Uh, I can't
00:39:37.060
remember if when I came to PragerU last month, whether Kamala had been coronated as Empress of the
00:39:44.680
world or not, but, uh, in any case, I can't remember the exact temporal sequencing. What are your
00:39:50.480
thoughts? Are you feeling a bit less optimistic about Trump's chances? Give us the breakdown.
00:39:56.520
Yeah. So, uh, optimistic, pessimistic, I don't know. Depends on the day, right? It's like the,
00:40:02.900
you know, sadly after president Trump was shot, I felt, and he, you know, stood up with, you know,
00:40:08.880
his arm up and it was, it was an optimistic moment. First of all, thank God he, nothing happened to him
00:40:15.840
that was, you know, significant and, and pulled him out of the chances of leaving the, leading the
00:40:21.140
United States. But the other part of it is that, um, it felt like he could win maybe. And, um, you
00:40:29.980
know, Kamala coming in, I, I, I really don't know. And I don't know that it matters optimism or
00:40:35.360
pessimism. And by the way, I'm speaking on behalf of myself, not PragerU. People have different
00:40:39.120
opinions here about what they hope would happen. But I personally, uh, I'm, I'm concerned about
00:40:45.540
Kamala being a nominee who is running on this identity politics, gender stuff. I find that to
00:40:53.280
be as a woman, um, and as a mom of two girls to be very, very troubling because we should not vote
00:41:01.100
for anybody because of their genitalia. We should vote for people based on their capacity and their
00:41:07.000
merit. Cause at the end of the day, when the leader of the United States of America is negotiating
00:41:12.980
with other countries around the world or making decisions for our own country, it has nothing to
00:41:18.580
do with their gender and everything to do with their capacity and capability. And so it worries me,
00:41:25.740
especially as CEO of a company, I don't want to be looked at as if I received my position because of
00:41:32.080
my gender or genitalia. I know when I want to be looked at with respect based on the hard work and
00:41:38.260
critical thinking that I put into the company. And I want to teach my daughters that it's the same
00:41:42.900
case that if they work hard and think critically and have a little bit of luck in life and just do
00:41:47.640
the right thing, they will ascend and be able to do great things. I don't want them marching and saying
00:41:53.100
vote for me because I'm a woman select me because I'm a woman, make a space for me on a board because
00:41:59.620
I'm a woman. I think that's demeaning and it's the exact opposite of equality. And so, you know,
00:42:06.380
personally, I find it really troubling to see that women are voting for women just because they're
00:42:12.500
women. Imagine men only voted for men just because they're men. I'm like, can you imagine somebody
00:42:19.080
said that? I'm only going to vote for a man because he's a man. But why are women allowed to say I'm
00:42:24.180
only going to vote for a woman because she's a woman? I just think it's absolutely ridiculous.
00:42:28.520
I mean, not just the identity politics stuff that you just mentioned, which is contrary to the
00:42:33.780
foundational ethos of individual dignity and so on. But even her, you know, the price control stuff,
00:42:40.160
I did a clip where I broke that down, you know, not to pull rank as a business school professor,
00:42:45.760
but I mean, it's kind of if you've taken economics 101 or taken macroeconomics at the MBA, you know
00:42:52.700
what the downstream effects of price controls are, right? But and so pretty much anything that she
00:42:59.380
espouses to the extent that she, you know, she ever enunciates a coherent sentence is contrary to the
00:43:05.900
most foundational values that define what the United States is. And yet I speak to people where
00:43:12.340
I challenge them. Why are you voting for her? And to your point, Marissa, it's always the positive
00:43:17.840
vibe stuff. It's, you know, how exciting is it that it's a first woman? How exciting is it that
00:43:23.840
she's a person of color? By the way, I think I'm a lot darker now than she's ever been, if only
00:43:29.900
because I was in my natural glow in Southern California. But to your point, I don't want to be
00:43:34.840
judged based on how nice my skin skin tone is. So is there I mean, I'm the guy who wrote the
00:43:42.560
parasitic mind. And yet I feel great despair at not being able to break through this unbelievable
00:43:49.120
obstacle that the electorate is exhibiting, whereby it's all based on the affective system
00:43:55.800
feelings rather than the cognitive system, right? I've never had anyone tell me here are the seven
00:44:02.820
cognitive reasons why I think Kamala Harris is going to be a great president. It's always positive
00:44:09.640
vibe, joy, excitement, first woman, first black, and so on. Can we, do you have any inoculation
00:44:16.820
against people invoking their affective system rather than cognitive system?
00:44:22.240
I don't know how to fix it, but I know why the problem has occurred. And that is, this is what we
00:44:27.520
teach our kids in schools. We teach them multiculturalism. We teach them emotion, emotion,
00:44:32.900
emotion, SEL, social, emotional learning. We don't teach them critical thinking. We don't teach them
00:44:38.600
that merit matters. We don't teach them that hard work actually yields results. We don't teach them
00:44:44.060
that the harder they work, the luckier they get. We teach them all of the opposite of that. And so
00:44:49.200
how is it a surprise to us, professor, that when they grow up, all they care about is the emotional,
00:44:57.740
mushy, feel-good, multiculturalism elements of a prospective leader, right? That's what we taught
00:45:07.740
them matters. And so how do we go back on what we teach them? That's your question, right? Like we taught
00:45:13.860
them all these things and we signal to them that these things really matter because we've gone
00:45:20.320
bankrupt on paying for these schools to teach them these things, right? It was like put every single
00:45:27.000
dollar that we add into a bank account to pay for them to go to these institutions that we have
00:45:33.020
idolized, right? The universities in the United States of America, especially the Jewish community,
00:45:38.160
by the way, ironically, they idolize these universities. And so is it a great surprise
00:45:44.300
to us that now these kids are growing up and they're looking at people like Kamala Harris only
00:45:49.580
through the lens of multiculturalism and victim bingo? This is what we taught them. That's what
00:45:56.680
matters, right? So how do you undo this? I don't know that you can undo it in four years or four
00:46:04.000
months. I think it's going to take a while to, first of all, go after the institutions that have
00:46:09.480
paralyzed our children's brains. And can we win? I think it is very possible that people inside of
00:46:17.840
them do have discernment because at the end of the day, humans need to survive. We can't constantly
00:46:24.540
make maladaptive decisions, right? Ultimately, I would argue, and I would ask you the same question,
00:46:30.740
would a survival instinct start kicking in soon when we realize that we're constantly making
00:46:36.340
maladaptive decisions? Because it is maladaptive to choose a leader for us that is based on the
00:46:42.660
color of their skin or their gender. Really, what should be adaptive is to choose a leader for us
00:46:47.800
who would be good. But would that happen too late? That I don't know. How long does it take to undo
00:46:55.120
the brainwashing? Yeah. So I agree that the parasitic indoctrination makes it easy to channel
00:47:05.200
you into an emotion-based process. But I think that even if, so this is going to be a pessimistic
00:47:12.640
statement that I'm going to make. Even if there weren't a single parasitic idea pathogen that is
00:47:18.720
being taught in the universities, I think you still face the problem of most people triggering their
00:47:24.540
affective system more than the cognitive system. And let me explain why. So when you're navigating
00:47:30.540
through the world, you have computational complexity, right? It takes a lot for me to
00:47:35.720
process all of the information that's coming at me. Now, my emotions serve as a fastly deployable
00:47:43.820
strategy, right? Because my emotions don't require, most people regrettably are cognitive misers,
00:47:49.500
which is a fancy way of saying they're intellectually lazy, right? So it takes a lot of effort for me to
00:47:54.440
sit down and create a multi-attribute model of all of the attributes that define Kamala Harris versus
00:48:01.600
Donald Trump, weigh them, give weights to each one. How do they, that takes a lot of effort, right?
00:48:07.740
It's much quicker for me to just deploy my affective system that allows me to quickly converge to a
00:48:15.320
decision and move on with my day. So there is a very well-known academic psychologist by the name
00:48:21.140
of Gerd Gigerenzer. He's a, he recently retired. He was a professor of, you know, psychology of
00:48:26.820
decision-making at Max Planck Institute in Germany. So he coined the term fast and frugal heuristics,
00:48:33.240
right? A heuristic is a shortcut. A fast and frugal heuristic is one that is frugal in that it doesn't
00:48:39.120
take much cognitive effort. And it's fast, it is quickly deployed. So I argue that our emotional
00:48:45.360
system is a fast and frugal mechanism, right? I just need to see her saying some bullshit platitudes
00:48:52.100
while smiling. I feel good. I'm voting for her. Donald Trump is cantankerous. He looks nasty. He
00:48:59.360
looks like he's brash. Therefore he's an asshole. That's good enough for me. Let's move on. So I think
00:49:06.020
regrettably, it's a default design of the architecture of the human mind to fall prey to emotions. And
00:49:13.520
politicians know that. That's why when it comes to election season, they're all holding babies. Why
00:49:19.680
are they holding babies? Because that image is a very, very quick way to tap into my emotions. What
00:49:25.460
do you think of that? Well, and also add some educational and early childhood development stuff
00:49:30.380
into this. And so number one is kids are conditioned and not just kids, grownups included are conditioned
00:49:36.380
to just read the headlines, especially with social media, right? That's all they do. They just read the
00:49:41.460
headlines. They don't want to do the work, which is basically what you're saying. But I'll add an
00:49:45.440
education component to this. Do you know that 69% of eighth graders in the United States of America
00:49:51.260
cannot pass a basic literacy test? Wow. Now, let me explain what eighth grade literacy test means. It does
00:49:57.840
not mean that they cannot form a word. So they're able to have phonemic awareness, right? They can
00:50:07.180
actually read the words. Eighth grade tests for actual understanding and comprehension. And that
00:50:14.740
is what's missing in the United States. Almost 70% of eighth graders do not understand what they are
00:50:22.920
reading. And so you're taking the next step and you're expecting them to have discernment and the
00:50:29.620
ability to critically think about what they're reading. But when I'm telling you that 70% of them
00:50:34.820
do not comprehend what it is that they're reading. And so they can say the words, but it's not
00:50:40.720
computing in their brain. It should not be a huge surprise to you that when they go on social media
00:50:46.220
or they're seeing an image of a politician holding a baby, they don't have the wheels turning to be able
00:50:52.900
to say, wait a second, something doesn't make sense here, right? And again, I keep talking about how
00:50:58.700
all of this has been laid out for many, many years. The warning signs have started in early childhood
00:51:06.720
when we started dumbing down young Americans. So when they do get to a voting age, when they do get
00:51:13.340
into an age where they need to have discernment and some light bulb should go on, when some parasitic
00:51:19.140
mind virus is making it through the population, they're just, they're tone deaf to it. They don't get it.
00:51:25.500
Amazing. Okay. Personal question next. This is one that I started sort of finishing every show with
00:51:35.680
because in the, one of the last chapters in the happiness book, I talk about how to live a life
00:51:40.940
that allows you to protect yourself from regret because regret is such a difficult emotion. Oh, I
00:51:47.140
should have, I didn't, right? So I want to set it up for you and then ask you what your biggest source
00:51:53.100
of regret and you're still a young woman. So hopefully you have a long life ahead, but so there are two
00:51:58.300
sources of regret. Actually, the, the, the, the psychologist who, who developed this, uh, theory
00:52:03.860
empirically is one of my former, uh, doctoral, uh, professors at Cornell. His name is Thomas Gilovich. So he
00:52:10.700
argued, although he certainly wasn't the first one to, to, to have this insight that there are two sources of
00:52:15.200
regret, Marissa. There's regret due to action and regret due to inaction. So regret due to action. I, I regret that I
00:52:22.140
cheated on my wife and now my marriage is ended regret due to inaction. I regret that I became a
00:52:29.520
pediatrician. I only did it because my mom and dad are pediatricians and I really wanted to be an
00:52:34.620
artist. Now, when you ask people over the longterm, what is their biggest looming regret? Overwhelmingly,
00:52:41.800
their biggest regret is one of inaction road, not taken. So having set that up for you, if I put you on
00:52:48.580
the spot now and say, you know, you've been a very successful, uh, person so far, but undoubtedly you
00:52:53.940
have some regrets, what would be your most looming regret thus far in your life? So when I am listening
00:53:01.860
to you, and obviously I read your book, the first image that comes to my mind is a pillar of salt.
00:53:08.340
Do you know why? So, so I, I, I grew up reading, uh, the Bible, the Torah, and one of the stories in the
00:53:18.200
Torah is about, uh, Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed by God. And, um, the families who
00:53:26.880
were saved, specifically Lot, Lot's wife, they were all told to not look back. And Lot's wife
00:53:34.240
looked back and she turned into a pillar of salt. And that story resonated me with me for the rest of
00:53:42.420
my life. Cause I always said, don't be Lot's wife. Don't look back. If you look back, you will turn
00:53:48.680
into a pillar of salt. And by the way, I use that when I was younger and I was dating because I would
00:53:53.580
date a guy and be like, Oh, maybe I shouldn't go back to him. I should not go back to him. I'm like,
00:53:57.560
you can, you can take this example from, from, uh, childhood all the way through adulthood. And so
00:54:04.120
I, I think that that story had such a big impact on me that I, I, I just didn't look back. You know,
00:54:10.640
I, I try to make decisions and be happy with the decisions I make. I believe that my decisions are
00:54:16.920
probably a combination of maybe some divine intervention, maybe my ability to have
00:54:22.020
discernment, but mostly my conviction that looking back and marinating over the past was not good for
00:54:29.260
me. I didn't want to turn into a pillar of salt. And so I, I, in some ways I want to say, I wish I
00:54:33.920
could give you professor an answer, but on the other hand, I'm kind of happy that I don't have an answer
00:54:37.800
for you of any regret, because I feel like if I would look back, I might turn into a pillar of
00:54:42.840
salt or just be really unhappy and miserable and, uh, and live in the past rather than the future.
00:54:48.480
I love your answer in terms of, you know, rooting it within a biblical narrative, but
00:54:53.840
if I not push back, but to maybe add a little bit to what you're saying. So in, in, in the way you
00:55:00.700
framed your, your, your answer, it's looking back. Now, interestingly, there is an element of regret
00:55:07.780
that is anticipatory, meaning looking forward. And the example that I give in the book, I mean,
00:55:13.620
I give a few examples, but, uh, uh, Jeff Bezos uses, I mean, he may not use my language, but used
00:55:20.140
what's called an anticipatory regret framework when he decided whether to leave his high paying secure
00:55:28.340
job and start Amazon. And there, what he argued is if I am sitting when I'm 80 years old on the
00:55:35.820
proverbial, uh, porch, looking back at my life, will I regret not having done it? So in that case,
00:55:43.860
he wasn't looking back, he was looking forward and anticipating. And it turns out that, so, so in a
00:55:50.540
sense, regret is not just in the way you framed it, an absolutely useless emotion. If you use it to
00:55:57.720
anticipate future feelings, it might actually a beneficial one. Does that make sense?
00:56:02.400
It makes sense. Kind of, how do we reach for a moonshot of some sort, I guess.
00:56:07.440
Exactly right. Okay. Last question. And then I'll let you go. Uh, what are some upcoming projects
00:56:13.620
that have not yet been advertised or promoted that you might want to use this platform to promote?
00:56:21.380
So some of our kids content is now in schools across America. And so we have another state that
00:56:26.700
is partnering with us where we can provide additional content into public schools and private
00:56:32.240
schools. So I'm very excited. We're going to announce that. Also next week, I'm speaking at
00:56:36.840
the March for Kids in Washington, DC. It's a big passion of mine. I think that a society that attacks
00:56:41.780
children, uh, and prevents them from having literacy, as I talked about earlier, uh, is a society in
00:56:47.880
decline. And so I'm going to be speaking at this March for Kids and, um, super excited about that
00:56:52.660
moment and getting together with a lot of great people there. And into the fall, we're releasing
00:56:58.640
a documentary about the increase of crime in crime in the United States of America. And given that
00:57:04.540
you're going to be moving to Michigan, I feel like you might want to watch that, uh, documentary just
00:57:09.480
to protect yourself and, uh, get yourself all ready. Um, so there's always a lot of exciting things
00:57:15.640
happening here at FragerU. And, you know, I'm excited to welcome you into the U S it'll be fun to have
00:57:20.320
you. Uh, not that close, but not too far either. Thank you so much. Okay. Stay on the line so we
00:57:25.640
could say goodbye officially offline. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And of course,
00:57:30.240
you're always welcome whenever you'd like. Cheers. Thank you.