The Radical Moderate’s Guide to Life w/ Dr. Lauren Hall | The 1600

24:54There's millions and millions of them, as we know, from the recent election. I can guarantee you that they have very complex and in some cases, decent reasons for voting for him. So just completely dismissing them as though you think you understand them is actually that is the problem. That's what's driving toxic polarization. And that's what's making it possible for us to solve any of the policy problems that we're confronted with. No. And as a card carrying member of the of the media, you're absolutely right about the, you know, the negativity bias over my career. I've seen it a million times.

25:26People are always saying like, oh, why isn't the news? you know, why doesn't the news cover more like good stories or stories of, you know, people, people coming together and, you know, and there's millions of those are stories. You see them every day. I'll tell you why, because nobody clicks on them and nobody watches them. Right. So you can say you want that, but when push comes to shove, you actually want to click on the story about, you know, the reflecting pool or the American state fair that Trump has somehow managed to screw up or whatever, stuff like that. That's the stuff that actually has salience to, to, to actual news consumers.

25:53Um, all of that is to say, yeah, we're all just, you know, of lying to ourselves and et cetera. Okay, talk to me a little bit about the principles of radical moderation, which you, in one of your recent pieces I read, you lay these out as sort of like a bullet list. Can you just sort of run through that? Yeah, so there's a couple of things that I think that sort of make up the framework for radical moderation. The first is thinking in four dimensions. So you mentioned one, for example, that your viewpoint after you became a parent changed dramatically. And that's the one that we often don't pay attention to, which is the actual fourth dimension of time.

26:29My position, my political positions from when I was 20 to now 46 are completely different, right? And it would be weird if they weren't, right? But we often think about political positions as sort of stagnant or just static, like, well, I'm a liberal Democrat or I'm a conservative Republican as though those are static identities that don't change over time. They change in really complex ways. So when I think about sort of, again, the political landscape, I try to, the four-dimensional framework is supposed to help people think about these issues in all four dimensions. So there's sort of length, which is individual idiosyncratic sort of preferences and values and goals.

27:06The second dimension is breadth. So like, who are the social networks that people rely on? What, you know, what churches are they members of? What kinds of institutions are failing them and what are helping them, right? The third one is probably the most under underrated. And this is one that I have to sort of beat into my students in a loving way, which is trade offs. Right. There's no there's no political position that doesn't carry trade offs. There's no free lunch. You've got to really think about life lesson. It's just a life lesson. Right. Right. Yeah. So like what are the costs and benefits of this and who bears the costs and who who gets the benefits?

27:43Right. So that's a really critical piece. And then the fourth dimension is this time dimension, which there's there's historical time, there's generational time, there's developmental time. And so I think we miss a lot of that when we think about these, again, when we think about sort of this left-right continuum. One example of this that I use a lot is, you know, the sort of Black Lives Matter versus Blue Lives Matter debate. Like, what a dumb debate when it comes, like, I mean, that's a perfect example of this binary left-right line. When you actually look at the research, there's a lot of interventions and a lot of policy reform that makes both police officers and members of black communities safer.

28:19This is not a zero-sum choice, right? But when we frame it like that, yeah, it is absolutely zero-sum. Like, you either have to choose between police officer safety or the safety of black Americans. That's false, but we're creating that kind of dynamic. So the second piece of it is that once you actually look at the, once you actually map the landscape, what you find is deep pluralism. So and what I mean by that is just it's not just like DEI diversity and it's not just viewpoint diversity like we're seeing on the right pushing into universities. We're talking deep pluralism. People are deeply diverse across a range of perspectives and goals and values.

28:57And so this is where I get sort of I mentioned this earlier. You know, I get sort of irritated by progressives who assume that like the other side, quote unquote, will eventually disappear. No, diverse political views are going to be with us forever. We have to figure out how to have conversations about them. We have to figure out how to have conversations with people who differ from us. And we're getting worse at it, not better, which is frustrating. And then the, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. No, no, go ahead. Okay. Yeah. And then the third piece is just this, the actual practice of radical moderation, which there's sort of an individual level, which is, you know, toleration, complexity, humility, being willing to be wrong.

29:36I mean, this is, you know, when I look at, and I'll admit that when I first, when social media first became sort of the norm, I remember, you know, as an academic, I'm used to being right. I'm used to debating my positions. I was one of those folks who got on social media. I was like, well, actually, right. And now I'm much more cautious about it because I've been, I've been proven wrong a number of time. So I think humility and curiosity are critical sort of virtues for people within this system. But then there's a number of institutional level things that we should also be thinking about. And that's where I'm I'm very worried right now in terms of the health of our institutions.

30:11We are we're not in good shape. I want to ask you about that. But, you know, it's just making me think. Do you have kids? Yeah, I've got three daughters. OK. OK. So I have one. So you beat me by two there. But I'm just thinking that by, by, because so many of these things you're talking about, you learn from, by having children, right? This idea that, you know, time is actually the currency of life and that, you know, you have to make the most of time, because time starts to move much faster when you have a kid, this idea of trade-offs, this idea of humility, this idea of human beings being these just like balls of contradictions who one day are one thing and the next day are another.

30:52And I just wonder, you know, so, so many of the, um, you know, the sort of like progressive left, especially the young progressive left don't have kids for, you know, whatever reason, some of them are just too young to have started families. Yeah. I just wonder how much of it has to do with that. Right. I mean, when you don't have kids, you're just, you're so in your head, you, you think that you're so right. And that's why, that's why parenthood is such a blessing in so many ways, because it's like, it just slapped you across the face immediately. I was like, no, actually, you're, you know, you're not the master of your own domain anymore.

31:25Yes. Well, this idea. So this is the other thing that I think we've really lost track of is that there's there's this enormous tendency in the modern world to to control other people. I'm an Adam Smith scholar. He has this great he says, you know, one of the problems with sort of the he calls it the man of systems, but he really means sort of like people with like authoritarian impulses. They wanna move people around like they're chess pieces. And both progressives and people on the right are trying to do that, right? They're trying, they're using immigrants as chess pieces, right, and so they're like, they're using people for their own kinds of ends.

31:58And you can't do that, right? Like you don't know enough about other people's goals and values to do that effectively. It's also just harmful on a bunch of different ways. But I think parenting is what teaches you that humility, like straight off, you know, out of the gate. Like my first and second daughter could not be more different. It certainly had nothing to do with my parenting. They just came out completely different. Right. And so I have to parent them differently. And, and it's not, I have to like sort of back off and say, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to listen. I'm going to follow my gut in some ways, but I'm also going to adapt because, you know, you don't get, you don't.

32:32It's different than kid two. Yeah. Different from kid three. Right. Yep. Yeah. Well, we could talk about parenting all day. In fact, I have had podcasts where we just talk about parenting all day. Maybe we'll bring you back for one of those. But I want to ask you, I want to talk about Gaza for a minute, because I think that, you know, if you're if you're a young progressive and you're listening to this, you might be saying to yourself, look, there are some issues on which you just cannot moderate. Right. Because they are litmus tests for for, you know, what a political party should be. And I think, you know, back in back in my day, that was opposition to to the war in Iraq.

33:07I think more recently it was, you know, maybe climate change. Maybe it was even, you know, police reform after George Floyd. Now it's pretty obvious that Gaza has become that issue for the base of the party, or at least a big faction of it. And I think a lot of these progressives would argue, as I said, you just can't moderate on this, right? This is a moral issue. It's not even really about Palestine. It's about, you know, how much brutality, how much dehumanization can you take before you stand up and say, no, not in my name, right? Not with my money. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah.

33:40So, you know, I, again, I come back to this, this complexity, which I think people often think is, is sort of a, uh, avoiding the topic, um, which it is, it is to a certain degree, right? I'm not a scholar of the Middle East. I certainly have feelings on what's happening in Gaza. I do think it's an absolute humanitarian crisis. It's a human rights, uh, disaster, on a number of levels. But what got us here is decades and decades of failed policy and decades and decades of just not working in a sort of cohesive, coherent way to try to sort of solve this problem. And also, you know, empowering various kinds of political actors who should not have been empowered.

34:21Now, that being said, I think one of the things that I do get worried about, and this is where I think the, I think progressives will, I think they'll just disagree with me, which is fine. We can all disagree. The danger that I see with using Gaza as your primary point is that Gaza doesn't affect the vast majority of Americans. It is absolutely a deep human rights violations, but there's deep human rights violations all over the world, right? And so the United States obviously cannot be everything to everyone. And the bigger danger is that when you start using a specific political issue as your purity test, you actually erode the coalitions that you need to get the actual changes that you want on a range of other problems, right?

35:06So if I walk into a room and I say, you know, I'm an associate dean. If I walk into a room with our department chairs and say, all right, guys, before we get to any of the work that we need to get done for student retention and success, we all need to agree on Gaza before we even get started. I think everyone would recognize that that's an insane way to operate because even though Gaza is deeply political, you know, it's politically and personally meaningful to everyone in that room in different ways, it's not relevant to the question of student success in our specific institution other than the very small number of students who come from the Middle East, right?

35:43So, but we do that in a number of ways. There's a town that I actually, the town I grew up in, a number of their town halls had just fallen into chaos in recent days because of, because of wrangling over Gaza. This is a small town in Western New York. Gaza should not, like people should be arguing about zoning problems. They should be arguing about building housing. They should be arguing about living, you know, living costs. So I, you know, it's not that I don't think it matters, but I think it becomes a real distraction and it triggers this tribalism that then that then leads us toward this affective polarization and affective polarization is just a fancy way of saying we are now polarized in ways that make us think that we are enemies so now the democratic party sees the republican party as an enemy and the republican party sees the democratic party as an enemy so what what i would what i would really hope that we can do is to take to have conversations about what's happening in gaza Drilled down.

36:44I mean, what so the radically moderate approach would be, let's figure out how to like, let's talk about this in a way that can reduce it to the aspects of the situation that we can actually agree on. So what are the things that we can all agree are are absolutely off the table, right? Like targeting hospitals, right? Targeting civilians, right? These kinds of things. Now, even within that framework, there's a lot there's going to be disagreement because we don't have accurate information about what's going on on the ground. And again, that that brings us back to this problem of humility. Yes, by design.

37:19Right. We have to recognize that we don't have enough information. It doesn't mean that we don't have enough information to have a political stance, but we don't have enough information to bring that political stance into every other political and social conversation that we have. And it's we certainly don't have enough information and and it's not relevant enough for the vast majority of our policy debates in the United States to be the central issue. And I think people see that as like a moral capitulation, but it's not because, again, this comes back to the question of tradeoffs. If you want to be a purist on Gaza, great.

37:53But in order to do that, you have to agree to lose on almost every other policy thing that you care about because you're going to destroy the coalitions that you need to create affordable housing, to deal with the homelessness crisis, to create some kind of humane approach to the border. If you're OK with that, I guess that's OK. But that's a weird stance to take. Well, this is this is my worry about. Look, I mean, you know, having having five new DSA members in Congress is like whatever. You know, there's there's a lot of wacky people in Congress on both sides or always have been like that's why the House is, you know, the reflection of the country.

38:29But what worries me about it is that it's you know, if we get to a place where the Democratic primary in 2028 has to, you know, has to have a platform that is centered around something like the issue in Palestine. it's just not that you cannot win a national election like that. That's that's what worries me. If it's if we're pushing the party so far to the left with these socialist insurgent candidates like, OK, great. Like you you've established a sort of like litmus test. But if if your job is to win election, if your job is to move the country in a way that you want to move it, you have to win elections first.

39:05Yeah. Right. Like that's the that's the thing. That's the means to an end. That's just what frustrates me. And the thing that I've always sort of respected about Republicans and the GOP coalition is they don't have these litmus tests the way that liberals do, whether it's on abortion or, right? I mean, Trump is the president. I remember in 2012, not even, like 2010, the biggest issue in the country was the federal debt, right? This was the thing that, you know, that all of a sudden we all decided to care about, right? Because Republicans were using it as a casual against Obama. Right. Trump is like tripled the federal debt.

39:40Nobody cares. The Republicans don't care. Right. So they're much more they're just much more, you know, fluid on this stuff as as again, as a means to an end. Right. Because they understand that winning elections is what matters. Yeah. I mean, I actually think they're they're flexible to a fault. I mean, a lot of the institutions that they are destroying are institutions that have traditionally been institutions that conservatives have defended. So I think it's deeply ironic that they're undermining the entire future of the conservative movement. But yes, you're absolutely right that I think they are much more Republicans, I think are much more concerned with being effective than sort of right in some existential sense.

40:20Whereas Democrats are much more concerned with being sort of like morally right than they are with being effective. But I think they're missing the fact that like in order to do the good that you want to do in the world, you have to be effective. You have to get into office. You've got to be able to elect people. Yeah. So, I mean, some choice, you know, we talked about the binary, right? The black and white thinking, this false binary idea. Some choices are a binary, right? You either, you know, either you evade her on or you don't, right? You either fire somebody or you don't, you pass a law or you don't pass a law.

40:52So where do you draw the line between this idea of like, this is a false binary that's been weaponized. And this is a real binary that, you know, this idea of radical moderation is just actually dodging. Yeah. So where I think, I mean, absolutely. So when you come down to it, most choices are binary in the sense of like, do I get into my car to go to work or do I sit in my living room? Like that's obviously, um, now, but the decision framework to get there should be non-binary. And that's what I think we have lost. So the question about whether to go to war with Iran. That should be a deeply four-dimensional analysis.

41:25That should look at what are the... It was not. It was not, right? So it should, you know, we should be looking at, like, what are the trade-offs? Well, if anyone had asked the third dimension question, what are the trade-offs, we would not be in Iran right now. So I think, you know, this is just, it's, I think it's obvious to us because I think we tend to think about this in these kinds of questions in more complex ways. But part of what we are now doing is we are thinking about the process itself in a binary way, right? What does my team say about this? What does my tribe say about this? Like, what's the correct democratic approach to this problem versus the correct, quote unquote, Republican?

42:04You know, what would Trump say, right? So if your decision framework is a binary one, like what is the democratic party or like what does my particular progressive progressive democratic, you know, cohort think is the right approach here. You get group think, you get really dangerous blind spots, you get the inability to actually think clearly about trade-offs because you need diverse and pluralistic perspectives to think about trade-offs in a meaningful way. So really that is where I think we're missing it right now. I think we're thinking about the framework as though the decision framework itself is this right-left framework.

42:39It doesn't mean that you don't eventually come to some kind of binary choice. But the other the other piece that I get really frustrated with is that the solutions that we come up with are almost never found on that binary line. So, I mean, I love, for example, the Problem Solvers Caucus and some of the work that they're doing in terms of bipartisan solution finding. You know, they're actually trying to move off this left right binary. And they recognize that if you come to a sort of policy solution for integration, it's not going to give the Republicans everything that they want. It's not going to give the Democrats everything that they want.

43:12And it's probably actually going to have a mix of some populism, some libertarianism, some conservative. Like, it's going to be a mixed bag because you are appealing to multiple constituencies and there's lots of stakeholders and it's complicated. Right. But we're not doing that. Right. Right. And I mean, immigration is a great example. It's like that's the that's the reason why we can never actually get real immigration reform, because if you can't sell it as a win, if you're as the party in power, then what's, you know, like what's even the point, I guess. I mean, look, we saw this with this affordable housing bill, you know, with this is something that Congress actually made a new law.

43:49Right. They did. bipartisan law. And a bipartisan law that addresses the number one issue in the country, which is affordability as pertains to housing, which is like the number one place where affordable ability, affordability crisis lives. They did it without any new spending. It's not like a silver bullet. It basically is just like, you know, it's going to it's going to cut a bunch of red tape. They passed that the Senate in the House passed that. And then Trump just says, I'm going to hold an hostage for this other completely, you know, random thing that has no chance of passing the SAVE Act.

44:19So it's just like how it's so frustrating because it's like you get these little murmurs of like, oh, my God, look, these are legislators actually working towards a a problem that we all understand to be a problem. And maybe they're just, you know, touching it at the edges. And but they're doing something. And then you have Trump just being like, no, nobody cares. Yeah. Yeah. And that is why I think he's he's sort of uniquely concerning because he's so unpredictable, right? And he does tend to think in black and white. Like he's, Trump is a fundamentally tribal person. He only cares about himself.

44:50He doesn't care about the Republican Party, obviously, right? Or he would have signed that bill. Right, right. Yeah. No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off there, Lauren, but I want to ask you actually, I want to take a little detour and ask you about your maternity care advocacy, which I'm very interested in. So this idea of sort of deregulating midwifery and birth policy. Why is this issue something that you've directly lobbied for when you have otherwise expressed sort of like skepticism about government intervention generally, if that's fair? Yeah, yeah. So we're both in New York. When I first got pregnant with my first daughter, so this was about 13 years ago, I knew I wanted a birth center birth because there's a lot of evidence that it's the best, it's the sort of safest for both mothers.

45:39Meaning a non-hospital. A non-hospital, yeah, an out-of-hospital birth center birth. But I wanted, I didn't want a home birth for a variety of reasons. Home births are actually very safe, but it wasn't something I was comfortable with. But I was comfortable with the middle ground of a birth center with trained midwives. So I looked around, and it turns out that there aren't two birth centers in all of New York State. And I thought to myself, that cannot be accurate, right? Like, what is happening? So I started asking around, and the first response that I got from midwives was interesting. They said, well, it's just not a profitable model.

46:11And so I said, oh, okay, maybe it's a market failure. That could absolutely be the case. Well, it turns out lots of other states have birth centers, and they have lots more birth centers than New York does. So I thought to myself, it can't be a market failure if lots of other states are doing this in some way. So I dug in, and it turns out, and the book was original. So the book that came out of this work is The Medicalization of Birth and Death, and that's with Johns Hopkins. And the policy chapter was supposed to be just one chapter in the book. And then it ate the book. It just became the entire book.

46:43And so what I what I found when I started digging in is that, well, New York State has a certificate of need process. And when you look at the costs of going through the certificate of need process to open a small outpatient, a small private outpatient clinic that handles low risk births, the costs are upwards of something like five hundred thousand dollars. That's before you buy equipment. That's before you rent the building. That's before you hire people. And so I was working with some midwives in both upstate New York and in the Bronx who are working on trying to start a birth center. And they actually found a consultant.

47:21So the regulations are so complex. This is where our comment earlier about the deep state becomes very accurate, right? You can hire a consultant, a private consultant to help walk you through the regulatory process. Uh, he gave this group, uh, a nonprofit discount rate. So it only costs them$40 ,000 a year to hire this guy, to help them walk them through the regulatory process. That's crazy, right? So, so if you're a hospital, right, you, you pay this guy, I don't know, $200 ,000 a year or something to walk you through the certificate of new process. But if you're a, if you're a midwife, in this case, the women that I was working with were, were both midwives and doulas.

47:57Uh, they had multiple, most of them had second jobs. You don't have$40 ,000 lying around to even start the process, let alone the additional$200 ,000,$300 ,000 that you need to get through the rest of the process. So New York is a great example of the deep state. We were working with two New York State legislators, a Republican and a Democrat, who are working not on the certificate of need question because they didn't think there was any way that they could solve that problem. It was just such like so we have the Public Health and Health Planning Commission, which is an unelected commission that basically strangles health care innovation in New York state.

48:38And so these two these two legislators were like, yeah, we can't do anything about that. Talk about the deep state. But we can we can confront this one really minor part of the law that prevents certified professional midwives from practicing. So that's what they were kind of focusing on. So it was fascinating to me as a political scientist. Right. I'm a political theorist, so I do more pie in the sky stuff sort of most of the time. But to actually get into the trenches with people who are trying to open a small business in New York state was horrifying and and extremely eye opening. So so essentially what you know, what I found was that we have a big part of the or a big problem with our health care policy is not.

49:18And this is another good example of that false binary. It's not whether we have single payer healthcare or a purely capitalist system, right? It's let's get rid of all of the sort of unnecessary tangle of like random unelected boards that make these completely arbitrary decisions about who can provide medical care. And this doesn't mean you don't care about licensing physicians and things like that. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is we actually create a system of health care that violates a lot of the of what the medical establishment argues is good health care. It's just crazy.

49:53No, it's such a good that's I'm glad I asked you about it because it's such a good example. And like if you're a Democrat listening to this, this is something that everybody in the party should be rallying against. Like killing, you know, killing a birthing center in the crib. That's a bad metaphor. But under, you know, it's for what purpose? Right. And we see it everywhere. You see it in daycare. Right. You have to have, you know, daycares are overregulated, overlicensed. But you have to have, you know, I think in New York you have to have a some sort of degree to be to basically like watch children as a daycare provider, which, you know, that's what part of the reason why child care is so expensive.

50:30of. So anyway, I mean, I know that this sort of, you know, quote unquote, abundance movement, this is one of their big things is to sort of like cut this red tape, loosen these restrictions. Although, you know, if it's if if the fight for the heart of the Democratic Party right now is between the abundance movement and, you know, the socialists, the socialists are winning. So I don't know what we're going to do. Well, and it's so frustrating because, you know, again, one of the things that I found so heartening about the maternity care conversations that I was having is that it was an area that both the right and the left could agree on.

50:59Right. Because it turns out that whether you're a Republican woman or a Democratic woman, you want options in birth care like that's in maternity care. You want high quality maternity care. And so but what what frustrates me so much about our political moment is that we can't even have those conversations because we can't recognize the similarity. We can't recognize the opportunities for coalition building that exist. No, you're completely right. You're just frustrating me now. I get now I'm deeply frustrated at baseline. I want to ask you a little bit about just because you you work in higher education and you're you know, you're in the trenches up at RIT every day.

51:40Yeah. What is what have you noticed about your students? And, you know, we hear so much about, you know, this generation being so politically active, but also just so politically radical. radical. Do you see that in them? Or is it something as somebody who always see, you know, has seen over the years, you know, kids filtering through, like, they're all kind of the same? Like, are they, are these kids the same as they were 10 years ago? So I think, you know, one of the things that, that is worth noting is that a lot of the radicalism is, is pretty confined to the elite institutions. If you go to regional universities, if you go to RIT is a STEM school, our students don't have time for radicalism like they're they're engineers they're you know busting their butts to get through in five years because that's the standard that's the standard amount of time we do what I have noticed is that you know this generation is they're very worried about hurting other people's feelings they're very worried about so we talked earlier about the sort of expansive notion of harm it's been very hard to get students to have conversations about any kind of controversial topic, even if you frame it really carefully, because they do not want to offend other people.

52:48They do not want other people to dislike them. They're worried about, you know, again, hurting people's feelings. So that has been a real problem, like as a political scientist who teaches, you know, American politics. It's so fascinating to me because that was the best part of college for me at least. Fighting with your idiot classmates is the best. That's why you go. It's also at the point, right? Like higher education as an institution should be about ideas, about contestation, right? About pitting ideas against each other and actually thinking through all the different sort of ways that we need to be thinking about these problems.

53:23And I found that it's really, really hard to get students to have those conversations. So that's actually more concerning to me than like the political extremism, because I don't think that's actually the problem. I think that is the problem at Ivy's. There's huge echo chambers at Ivy's. There's huge echo chambers at the elite institutions. I don't see that as much in, for example, the regional university where I work at. But I do think the problem, there's a couple things that I do think are serious problems. One is there's a real lack of independent thinking. Students have a really hard time.

53:54There's sort of been a loss of critical thinking skills. And then this broader, they're just really uncomfortable with conflict. And that doesn't bode well for like the workplace as well as politics when they get out. That's really scary. I don't. Yeah, that really. I mean, I just I worry about them because if you call it the whole the whole point of college is to, you know, get in the arena, fight it out, learn, learn something new. All right. Lauren, before I let you go, I want to I want to ask you sort of like a. I don't know, I guess devil's advocate kind of question, right? So as you pointed out, we are sort of two elites here, right?

54:30I'm coming from my perch here at the World Trade Center and in the lamestream media. You are coming from maybe not Harvard, but a excellent, you know, elite higher education institution. Does this conversation we're having, you know, is it like a luxury conversation, right? Like we don't need, you and I don't need politics to resolve quickly, right? This framework is just, does it hold up for somebody who their healthcare, their citizenship status, their safety is on the line right now, today, because of decisions that are being made in Washington? You know, do you understand what I'm trying? I'm not articulating it very well, but do you understand what I'm trying to say?

55:11Like, is this, is radical moderation or just another form of elitism? Yeah, well, so yes and no. One of the things that I've been working on is, again, trying to make sure that the work that I do is actionable, that people can take it out into their community, that they can actually sort of do actionable things with the work that I do. It's one of the reasons I started the Substack because I've written two academic books. I've written tons of articles. Those are very much luxury goods in a lot of ways. You know, like, I don't know, like 20 people might read the average article. I have, I go to a couple of conferences, right?

55:47It's important work, but it's not really the most important work. So the sub stack, I think, is part of my attempt to try to move out of the ivory tower and actually have these conversations that can actually help people live better lives, at least in terms of protecting their relationships and friendships and things like that. I'm also working with a couple of colleagues, Seth Cullen, who runs Optimistic Labs, on some civic innovation work. So we're actually trying to move some of this work into the public sphere so that we actually are working to solve some of the problems that people are facing in their daily lives.

56:23But I think in general, this is why people are losing trust in the media, they're losing trust in higher education. The conversations that we are having that are often dismissive of the vast majority of American voters and focused on sort of symbolic or much more sort of high level concerns. You know, again, if you're a voter in urban Rochester who's deeply worried about safety as well as cost of living, yeah, this conversation is going to be sort of what, you know, what the hell. But that's why I think we actually, I mean, this is I think what kills me about our current level of polarization and political dysfunction is that you and I are not the people being left behind by this.

57:06It's the people who desperately need elites to be finding solutions. So the problem that we have, and I'll just, I'll say this one more time for the folks in the back, when we try to blame American voters, you know, and I see people doing this all the time, people blaming Trump voters for Trump winning. Trump is not a voter failure. He is an elite failure. He's a failure of the Democratic party. He's a failure of the Republican party. And he's a failure of all of the elite institutions that let things get so bad. So I I have much more sympathy with the average Trump voter than I do with, you know, any of the people who have let things go off the rails.

57:41No, absolutely. And again, you know, say what you will about Barack Obama was a failure of him, too, because you write Trump would not have happened had it not been for the failures of the Obama administration. But again, I know that's a topic for another day, Dr. Hall. We'll link to your substack in the description, but just tell people where they can find your work if they're interested. Wonderful, yeah. So I have a website, laurenkhall.com. It's pretty updated. You can also find my substack, The Radical Moderate's Guide to Life. And I also have a podcast with my wonderful co-host, Laura Forkham, called We Made This Political.

58:16So you should check out all three of those places, and you can find everything in one of them. Yeah. That's great. If you need a if you need a guest for the podcast, I my summer is looking pretty wide open. We would love to have you on, Carlo. No, this was a great conversation. And I I didn't mean to end it on sort of like a sour note. I think what you're doing is actually extraordinarily important. You're doing Yeoman's work. And it's just, you know, I think it's important for people to hear from from classical liberals in the sort of, you know, elite space who understand the problem and who can correctly diagnose it as a problem of the institution.

58:52and the elites and not of the voters, as you just said. Dr. Lauren Hall of the great IRT, the great RIT up in beautiful Rochester, New York. Dr. Hall, thank you again and enjoy the summer. Thanks, Carla. This was fun.