Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.

We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you today.

The president of Saint John's College, Jay Walter Sterling, stops by to talk to us about why the classics.

Matter even more than ever.

But first we have Volts newsletter David Roberts to talk about climate change and what it all means.

David Roberts, I always want to call you, doctor Volts.

Welcome back, Hello, Good to be back.

Is it a bad time to write about climate Not really.

It's sort of like, you know how they're always seeing like the media liked it when Trump came back, even though it's horrible for the country, it's good for them.

It's a little bit of that going on right now.

There is no shortage of things to write about, no shortage of things going on, good and bad.

I'd love something good since we're all so fucking depressed.

Though I did just eat four pieces of chocolate to drink five die Cokes, so I'm actually feeling pretty good.

But give us something to not want to die over.

Well, the things that have been going on for the last decade are still going on.

Basically, solar and wind are getting cheaper and cheaper, batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper.

Business models are updating to help spread those things.

You know, Electrification is proceeding like crazy.

China is producing so much cheap solar panels that they're decarbonizing their neighbors, Pakistan and what Vietnam, Africa Now they're starting to import solar panels.

So all the rest of the world, like literally the rest of the world is going forward.

It's going to be going before we are.

We are literally getting off a train that has just now sort of reached a speed that it's unstoppable.

It's unstoppable freight train towards clean electrification, and right at this juncture, we're basically hopping off the train trying to kill our domestic solar and wind industries and trying to double down on fossil fuels.

So no good news from within the US, as you're very aware, but lots of good news elsewhere.

So let's talk about this because this has along been the thesis of my long suffering spouse, which is solar and wind is going to be so cheap that it's irresistible.

Well, it already is.

I mean, I forget the exact figure that the IEA came out with, but something like eighty to ninety percent of the new power generation being built in the world is solar and wind like it already is irresistible.

It already is the cheapest thing.

And batteries now are getting just as cheap, and that is solving a lot of the you know problems of variability.

You know, it comes and goes with the weather.

Batteries are smoothing that out.

Demand response is smoothing that out, So that is already happening.

That's why most of the new power generation that is going into effect in the world is clean.

So building coal plants or building fossil fuel plants or build a drill, baby drill or coal, they're just much more expensive, right.

I mean, we're going to do it here because Trump wants to help those industries.

But that's why our electricity is going up here.

Right, Well, there are a couple of things going on with the electricity prices going up that is not generation.

The actual costs of generation are going down, mainly because all of the solar and wind is coming onl what's going up, what's pushing prices up is mostly what's called T and D transmission and distribution.

It is getting the power to us.

Those are where costs are going up and up because we have not maintained our transmission system.

We haven't built enough new transmission.

All our distribution systems, the local systems are very old and aging and very analog.

So there's a lot of just updating of the system side.

That the the infrastructure side of things, that's where a lot of costs And there are a lot of other things pushing costs up here and there, like wildfire costs in California or in Georgia they built this giant nuclear.

Plant that they're paying off.

You know, there are a lot of different and in Virginia it's data centers.

There's a lot of different things going on.

They all point to the need to build a more robust electricity system basically.

But data centers, we are just having to pay for Google using more electricity.

Yeah.

Well, there's a lot of people working right now.

There's a lot of thinking going on.

I mean, one of the sort of hot topics in Maya area of the world right now is how because these data centers need to hook up to the grid.

If you build a data center and you're waiting to hook up to the grid, you are literally wasting millions of dollars a day in opportunity costs.

So these people desperately want to hook up to the grid, but there's no room for them on the grid.

So how can we get them to pay for the reforms that would make room on the grid?

Right?

How can we get them to pay for grid upgrades rather than us paying for them?

How can we get a little money out of them to pay to upgrade our grid?

And the amount of money molly that is going into AI and data centers, you would need like two or three percent of that money and you could transform the US electricity system just a little bit of money from that world.

You could make a much more robust and resilient electricity grid.

And there's lots of people thinking about how to work that.

So, you know, the data center comes to the utility says I want to hook up.

The utility says, well, we don't have any room, and the data center says, well, okay, I'll go pay to put solar and storage systems on residential houses.

I'll go pay to replace electrical resistance heating with heat pumps, etcetera, etcetera.

I'll go pay to do all that stuff, you give me credit for it, then let me on the grid.

So then the actual rate payers get something out of it, utility gets something out of it, and the data center gets something out of it.

There's lots of people trying to figure out how that works.

Is that going to happen.

It's hard for me to imagine that something where we don't get fucked as a consumers.

The thing is like data centers have bungled like these companies in terms of their PR and their public approach are so incompetent.

They have made enemies of everyone.

Everyone hates data centers, so they desperately need some good PR.

And this is good PR for them.

If they could pay for ordinary people to become more resilient and have more reliable power, then at least they could get a little reputational benefit back.

They need a PR win.

So I think they're kind of over the barrel here.

And it's kind of the same with utilities.

Everybody hates utilities too, you know.

And if the utility is seen to just let this data center come and hook up, and then everybody else's costs go up.

Then everybody hates the utility too, so they also have.

An incentive to get some money out of a data center to pay for this thing.

So everybody sort of right now everyone hates everyone.

So everybody needs to figure out how to get some a pr win out of this.

And one way to do that would be to sort of like get something out of the data centers in exchange for letting them hook up.

But let's talk about this thing you wrote about governors.

You can salvage sustainable transport, but you need to do a quick.

There are provisions, I mean these are somewhat obscure wonky, but there are provisions in federal transportation dollars that give governors the power to shift those funds from highways to non highway spending.

And all those funds, as.

You know, are about to get either cut off or become much more capricious.

Let's say, so the money that governors have got sitting in their funds right now is probably like all that they can rely on, especially for non highway stuff.

They so a lot of governors just don't know they have this power.

So the whole point of that pology is flag for them, Like you can still transfer a bunch of money into transit, public transportation, bike paths, et cetera.

You can still do that with the money you've got now, and you better do it because nobody's, at least at the federal level, nobody's going to be paying for that stuff for much longer.

So the rest of the world has gotten on the green energy train, right because it's cheaper.

You think that means we will eventually, I mean, we're going to have to write.

Well, no, I mean one of the more fascinating things to think about in my world is what they call the mid transition.

Like you can imagine when the transition's done and everybody's self sufficient with renewable energy, a lot of good things in that world, right, being self sufficient for energy rather than importing fossil fuels from elsewhere.

It's a really fundamental change for a lot of countries, and it's going to, I think, bring good things.

But the road from here to there, So as oil demand declines, who is selling those last barrels of oil?

Who is buying those last barrels of oil?

What I sort of foresee in the next decade or two.

Is the the rest of the world sprinting ahead with electrification and basically a shrinking cabal of fossil fuel states clinging to fossil fuels for as long as they can, and that could go on for decades.

That could go on for a long time until China has basically left us behind because they what China understands that we don't understand.

I really want to make this point to everybody who will listen.

If you want AI dominance, which everybody in the government says they do, everybody says I don't.

Let's just grant the premise if you want AI dominance, you can't get that with just models and ideas.

You need to own the physical substrate that makes it possible, and that is electric motors, batteries, magnets, things that you produce like if you want AI dominance, you also need to dominate or at least have a foot in the supply chain.

And we have let China eat our lunch on this.

They own the electrifica technologies, they own the electrification supply chain.

So even if we achieve something in AI, we're still going to be buying all our AI equipment from China, who can cut it off anytime they feel like it.

Right, So, like, even if you.

Don't care about climate at all, even if you don't care about pollution at all, electrification is a national security imperative, even if you only care about AI.

Right, we're kind of coming into this in the most fucked up wid possible right most things.

I'm not sure exactly where you're referring to, but I.

Agree to get into wind and solar, Like, we'll be set up in the worst way possible for this.

Yes, yeah, it It depends obviously depends on what happens in the next few years.

And I don't know, you don't know, and nobody knows what's gonna happen in next few years.

I mean, maybe Dems.

Will take power, and like you know, if you listen to the Dems talking about their new energy plans, most of it is just putting IRA back into place.

Like we like IRA.

The Inflation Reduction Act was a great bill designed to accelerate primarily you know, these industries.

So it wouldn't be that hard just to put those tax credits back into place.

You can imagine that happening, and then we wouldn't have lost too much time.

You know, you can imagine things going a lot of different ways, to say the least in coming years.

So it's not lost yet.

What about the sort of temperature damage, like the hydrocarbons, microplastics in our brains, Like what about the irreversible stuff?

Yes, this is true for climate.

Every bit of it is practically speaking irreversible.

And it's bad and it's still happening.

And like you know, Trump won and it's just like he won by like point zero zero zero one percent, and everybody across the nation, just everybody on our side decided, well, I guess we suck now and we lose, and everybody hates us, and we should stop talking about trands stuff.

We should toop talking about climate.

We should stop talking about all the things we care about and try to sound.

Like muted versions of them.

This is, of course, it's like always the way the democratic establishment regards to any loss.

So climate has completely dropped out of democratic discourse.

Like no one talks about it anymore, no one, you know, everybody's just decided to ignore it.

But it is still out there and it is still happening, and it is still bad, and I think people are still underestimating how bad it's gonna get, because there are all these you know, what are they called?

They call tipping points out there.

There's all these thresholds that you might pass where things start reinforcing themselves and become effectively unstoppable.

Where are those tipping points?

We don't know.

We're just enough fog of uncertainty about it and barreling forward.

So, yes, the imperative to reduce carbon emissions is just as important as ever.

But I will say I just talked to Senator Brian Schuttz about this.

His point was just, yes, it's true climate is still a problem and still important.

But if you have a message that says the stuff that's going to solve climate change is cheaper, right, you should use that message, you know what I mean?

Like you should like exploit that message if you've got it, if it's true, and it is, then why not lean into that, right?

So, I mean, the point is just that the need to decarbonize, like you could take climate out of that picture entirely, and the need to electrify, to clean, to do clean electrification would still be just as imperative as ever.

You can justify it based on AI.

You can justify it based on international economic competitiveness.

You can justify it based on particulate air pollution.

I mean, you don't even need to bring climate into it at all.

The reasons for clean electrification are.

It's overdetermined, as they say, right, there.

Are so many reasons to go to solar.

And when I'll add one other thing, Trump is busy giving a bunch of other countries additional reasons to do that by going to them, putting them over the barrel, twisting their arms, and forcing them to buy our liquid natural gas exports.

Right, He's been doing this to countries.

He's been saying, we won't give you any aid.

We'll do this and that too.

You will punish you with tariffs if you don't buy our liquid natural gas.

Now, short term, that.

Might get a little bit more of our LNG sold, But long term, what do you think those countries are taking from that?

We do not want this to happen again.

We do not want to be over the barrel like this.

We need energy self sufficiency.

We need to stop importing.

He's just going to accelerate all this progress by being a dickhead like he is.

Yeah, Like, is there any where you feel there's really exciting climate legislation going on, Climate science advance is going on.

I haven't really tuned into the science a lot recently.

I sort of like most of my professional work now is pivoted away from climate as such, to decarbonization, to the solutions, because like, what you need to know about climate we already know.

Like if you're a scientist, I guess the details are interesting, but like we get it, you know, like get we get what we need to do, let's just do it.

Doing it is to me the fun part, the interesting part.

And do you feel optimistic about the decarbonization It sounds like you.

Do on some timescale.

I think all this stuff is inevitable for a lot of other reasons, but that timescale matters a lot.

Those We're in a very crucial decade, so every day matters a lot, So no one, At no point do I feel sanguine about anything.

But it is just the case that clean technology is better.

It is just the case that lighting poisonous gases and fluids on fire to create controlled explosions is an insane way to do things.

If you don't have to.

Do it that way, if there's you know, there's if there's a different way to do it.

You're gonna do it a different way.

And that is just happening, no matter what anybody says about anything in politics, it's just happening.

Like those farmers in Pakistan are not asking anyone's permission.

The government of Pakistan had nothing to do with that.

It's just farmers in Pakistan buying solar panels because they can get a little bit of energy and self sufficiency.

Nobody has to tell them to do it.

They don't care about climate change.

It's all just cheaper power.

You know, that's gonna like it's inexorable.

So interesting, also terrifying.

It's terrifying to be in this decade ruled by these people is just very not ideal Moni.

It's not great.

And like seeing Ira, seeing the policy program that Democrats put in place playing out for four more years would have been so transformative.

It just like for a lot of reasons, it had barely gotten underway.

It was like barely visible yet it was just starting, so it's easy to kind of cut it off without anybody caring much.

But like four more years we would have made so much progress.

It is tragic, you know, like you can't dwell on it forever, but it is tragic.

Hw oh David, thank you for coming on.

We have exciting news over at our YouTube channel.

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And help us spread the word.

Jay Walter Sterling is a president of Saint John's College.

Welcome to Fast Politics.

Walter.

Thanks so much, Molly.

It's great to be here with you.

We're going to talk about the remarkable college you are the president of, and it is a college called Saint John's College.

I would love you to explain to us what Saint John's College.

Is happy to do.

So I'm here on the Santa Fe campus of Saint John's College, where I'm the president.

We have our sister campus in Annapolis, Maryland, and we are often known.

As the Great Books College.

Our Annapolis campus is over three hundred years old.

Our Santa Fe campus is sixty years old.

But really we date our identity from the introduction of a program in the nineteen thirties that was intended to be a kind of great renewal of liberal education, of the ideal of an undergraduate education being broad and deep and anchored in you could say, the classics, the great books, from classical antiquity to the present.

People who know a little bit about us probably think of our students correctly as reading Homer and Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Chaucer, and that that list winds up sometime in the twentieth century.

And that's right as far as it goes.

But our students also do a great deal of math and natural science.

They all study music.

It's an extraordinary multidisciplinary program, but without traditional electives majors departments.

Our faculty teach throughout the interdisciplinary program.

They're called tutors, and this goes very deep for us.

They sit at the table with the students, they don't lecture from elector, and all classes are small, student driven, and every student will learn ancient Greek up to a point and translate a tragedy of Sophocles or something comparable to that.

And every student will work through Einstein's nineteen oh five paper on special relativity equation by equation.

It's an extraordinarily to borrow a phrase from Milton.

A complete and generous education and one that I believe is needed now more than ever.

And I'm sure we'll get into that.

My father in law went to Saint John's and was a person who became very successful and believes that the education changed his brain.

And I have a child who goes to Saint John's now so and is almost done with his four years there.

So I wonder if you could talk about what it was that got these schools started in the nineteen thirties.

I think that it was a reaction to several things.

I'll frame it as a reaction to three things that to me feel very relevant today.

So one was a view that undergraduate education was being overdetermined by the model of the research universities, So the idea that universities were going to drive knowledge creation in the sciences, the way that that was rolling back in to the undergraduate experience in the form of narrow, more specialized majors and disciplinary commitments and divisions in what could maybe should be thought of as a more holistic kind of educational experience.

Related to that, the pre professionalization of the undergraduate experience, so a kind of loss of the ideal that some people might view as a luxury or something like that.

Again, we can get into that, I think it's quite the opposite.

But the ideal of your undergraduate experience being first about becoming a free and full human being and secondarily about career preparation, that that was being flipped and this was a reaction to that.

And then the third thing that I think matters a great deal, This program was put in in the nineteen thirties by educational philosophers that were involved at Columbia and the University of Chicago and other places in comparable efforts over a decade or two in which they saw liberal democracy threatened by the rise of totalitarianisms of the left and the right.

And I think it represented a reassertion that we needed something like this might sound like an old fashioned phrase, but something like a liberally educated citizenry if democracy is going to survive.

And all of those questions seemed to me to have their current and contemporary analogues.

But those were the things on the minds of the folks who crafted this experiment.

And again there are related experiments that were happening in other places, but Saint John's went all in on it, and the whole college became defined by that kind of reassertion of those values and building those into the educational program that we have.

I want to talk about the nineteen thirties in totalitarianism, was this thinking that education could protect democracy and if so, how so.

There's a lot in there.

But I would start from the idea that those folks, if you read their writings as I do, and they're sort of carried forward by the leadership of our college, the view that there's something about modern mass society, modern technology, modern communications, that's going to make it harder for individuals to own their own freedom, thinking, be able to judge for themselves, sort of assert themselves.

And their agency.

You know, you might think of arguments that are made by Hannah rant in the Origins of totalitarianism, arguments made by Alexis to Toakville and democracy in America that suggests that modern democracy is going to be vulnerable to things that all modern mass societies are going to be vulnerable to.

How are you going to strengthen citizens to own their freedom, own their agency and so on?

And these folks, again, all these things are worthy of a great deal of debate, but they believe, I believe that one way or another, what was once called the liberal education is a way to equip yourself to think for yourself, to understand the ways in which you can be might be are being manipulated, To understand why you believe what you believe.

Take ownership of it, maybe change your opinions, maybe keep them, but develop a kind of free relationship to your own thinking, your own capacity to reason and judge, to evaluate the arguments and the rhetoric coming at you when they thought correctly that the modern world was going to put more and more pressure and constraint on that individual freedom of the intellect, freedom of the soul, however you want to think about them.

I've seen a lot of universities lately, and I've spent a lot of time around academics, and one of the things that I you know, especially in the American economy as it is right now, college is so expensive and the question of like what are these people being prepared for feels very important right now.

So I'd love you to talk about how reading great books makes you more prepared for life.

And I know it's not just reading great books.

From what I understand, the curriculum is you're reworking through history to remake a lot of the discoveries that we've seen over history.

And I wonder if you could talk about what that does for going into the world.

Right And you know, one of the phrases that's out there that we would embrace is that it's, you know, much more about teaching you how to think than about what to think.

And what you just described, you know, we do it with philosophy, we do it math and science.

I'll just give one example that captures a little bit of what our students do.

You can learn the Pythagorean theorem a lot of different ways students learned in high school, and geometry and algebra, A square plus B squared equals C squared.

Our students are going to work through book one of Euclid's elements from the axioms to they're going to go much further than this, but to proposition forty seven, which is the geometric proof of that.

And in a sense, they'll all have an Aha moment no matter how they learned it in high school, that they were given something like a calculator or a black box that they just took apart and rebuilt for themselves.

And this program's kind of designed to do that through engagement with the classics across all all disciplines.

And I think that's very empowering in a lot of different ways.

But just to pan back to the more general question, I think you could have argued it in the thirties, you can argue it today.

I think many people are arguing that this is more true now than ever, that the way in which technology and science advanced, the way in which the economy and industries are increasingly disrupted and changing and evolving, that that diminishes the value of the technical skills that get you your first job and puts more of a premium on the deeper skills.

And we give a long, long list, and there's not one canonical list, but the kind of critical thinking, critical reasoning, synthesis, analysis, the ability to connect things across disciplines and across disparate areas, communication.

With other human beings.

And I would lean on this very hard in the environment we're in right now, the screen saturated environment, the automated and AI driven environment, the ability to connect, listen, to learn from, empathize with, and engage with other human beings.

That all of those things have as high a value as they've ever had, and maybe higher as we see the effects of technological disruption in the workplace.

So there's an argument there that the liberal arts have long made that there's a kind of illusion that if you choose a liberal arts education, you're doing something impractical because you're actually getting those deeper skills that are going to take you farther.

But look, I don't get defensive about this.

Higher adds on under a lot of pressure from a lot of different angles, affordability and the question of whether people are going to get their return on investment and whether this high stakes bet they're going to place is the right bet to get them well launched economically and in their career.

You know, bring it on, I say, bring on that argument.

Bring on, and a lot of educators want to hear me say this.

But bring on the political pressure and the political accountability.

I mean, we're not given a free pass as educators.

We have to make a case to society, to everybody.

We're accountable to them.

And I don't embrace the hand ringing that's going on.

I mean, I like the things that I'm seeing in terms of the pressures on higher ed I think there are a lot of negative consequences to them, But no time for hand ringing.

We're doing something wonderful every day on our campuses.

We should take joy in it, pride and it optimism, and we should believe that we can convince skeptics and certainly convince good faith inquirers of the.

Value of what we do.

But you know, just let me invoke a couple of names.

There's nobody who's more future oriented and technology oriented than you've all.

Noah Harari, the kind of futurist historian.

If you read his chapter on education in twenty one Lessons for the twenty first Century, very explicitly, he's saying that what's coming points back to the values that have undergirded the tradition of liberal education in the liberal arts.

And I think you hear that from many different quarters.

We like to quote as Recline right now because he called out Saint John's College this summer in a podcast where they were talking about AI and the effect on young minds, and he said, look, all of society is going to get people prepared for AI related jobs.

We need to education to be about what it means to be human in the age of AI, so that we can go out there and engage in a free way, in an equipped way, for these disruptions that are coming.

And so it goes deeper than career preparation, but it converges with career preparation.

And I think that the narrowly skeptical argument is putting so much pressure on colleges to show how they're going to get that student their first great job, and without giving up on the importance of career, we have to pan back a little bit and say, we're trying to prepare students for a full life of career, citizenship and flourishing in their private and public lives.

And this kind of education, it gives you those skills, gives you that context and gets you out of the narrow boxes that so much of the forward momentum of the trends in higher education are putting students in gives you more than that, gives you something broader and deeper.

You see, with a lot of colleges, people have specializations, even like they applied to certain schools.

Right Like, if you want to go to University of Michigan, you apply to this school or that school.

Why does a school with no major get a student in a better place?

Right?

And it's fair in one way to describe it as no major.

You could also describe it as a fixed interdisciplinary major or a multiple major of various sorts.

For a long time, we've described it as a double major, equivalent to a double major in philosophy and the history of math and science double minor and classics and comparative literature.

That's reasonable, But you could describe it other ways, and we'll probably change that description at some point.

You know, what's missing are all the range of pre professional tracks.

We do a tremendous amount outside of the four corners of the fixed curriculum to prepare our students to launch in medicine, in law, in business.

We have internship programs, internship partnerships.

We fund summer study in more technical areas beyond our program that students might want to engage, and we fund study abroad in the summers.

We have a lot of curricular programming and career preparatory work that we invite our students to take advantage of, and most do.

And I can talk for a long time about that, as you might imagine I do with prospective parents.

We've already won the battle with you, Molly, so I don't have to give you the Heartzell.

I'm a parent of two high school students right now, and I care a great deal about my son's getting preparation for career in their college experience, and I hope they'll go to college despite the increasing broad skepticism about that.

But of course they're free to make other choices outside of that as well.

But again, I don't want to brush away any of those concerns.

We do a lot, but I think what you see in the curriculum itself is the development of the kinds of skills and faculties.

And I won't belabor what I said before, but the kinds of skills and faculties of mind, heart imagination that you're going to need in whatever direction you go in, and especially if you want to rise, right, I mean, there's all kinds of evidence that again, if we're not talking about your first job, we're talking about rising, that depends much more on communication skills well established, right than it does on narrowly technical skills, even in technical disciplines.

And we could say more about that, so you know, for me, just to invoke the image that I often do, I say, look our students, what are they doing?

Almost all the time in class.

They're sitting around a table, real faces, real voices, a living conversation across different points of view, a shared inquiry where they're trying to be self critical and learn from others points of view.

And they're usually doing it with a tangible, unhackable book in front of them that they're spending hours with that deepens their attention rather than fragments it.

And just to invoke again another category deep literacy, right, this is an idea that's been around for a while.

I think it's going to become more and more important in the post AI world.

That became more important really defined itself in the post social media world.

But as society moves towards a kind of postliterate state, in a deep way, the value of being able to sit and read Tony morrison novel or Homer's Iliot or Newton's Pring Kippie or Einstein's nineteen oh five paper or countless other things, to sit read, go deeply into those texts, and then be able to reason from and about them critically, not reverentially.

I can't tell you how important I think that is for everyone, and how thin those experiences have gotten for so many students K through sixteen and so, you know, again, let me pause there.

But it's those deeper abilities that this kind of education develops that apply to so many areas.

And there are plenty of doors open for our students, candidly as there are for philosophy majors and English majors and so on, some of the derided disciplines elsewhere.

But our students also do a great deal of stem, math, science and so on, so they're you know, they're Swiss army knives of the mind.

They're odysseuses of the mind that can really journey anywhere effectively.

I think that's what makes it so powerful for them.

What are the things that Saint John's kids go on to do the most?

So many go into education.

That's not the way they think about it.

But if you just put it all together, K through twelve Higher ed, we're always ranked very high in terms of the number percentage of our graduates that go on to ourn PhDs and all disciplines, especially humanities and social sciences.

We're overweighted in jds and lawyers that again use those degrees for everything, as you know lawyers do.

But this education is incredibly powerful for taking that step great preparation.

Many physicians we don't have pre med but again, the way we do science and the kind of blend, the rejection of a deep divide between humanities and humanism and the sciences is actually wonderful preparation for physicians.

And many see that, and many people in medicine see that, and we produce our commencement speaker last year was one of our very successful in and when they talk about how this education is a bridge to that, it's very, very natural for them.

Our standard answer is eric graduate's going to do everything, all kinds of things, and there's truth to that.

We're famous for our Johnny winemakers.

I can talk about them a lot to you know, entrepreneurs, people that go into business, all kinds of disciplines.

I do believe we lean more towards the things I just named than consultants, engineers, computer scientists.

We produce some of all of those, but if you're highly motivated in those directions, you've most likely made another kind of choice with your undergraduate education.

Walter, thank you for coming on.

Oh it's been a great pleasure.

Molly.

Can I say one more thing we've talked about Saint John's.

I love Saint John's College, but all the values that we've talked about, For me, it matters much much more that many many other institutions and educators embrace more, not less, of the things that we've talked about.

So I often finish by saying, we don't need a thousand more Saint John's colleges.

It's not the kind of thing most students will choose.

Many will, and I think more will in the next generation.

But we need a thousand other institutions to claw back a little bit of what our students do do all the time.

And I think a lot of educators are waking up to that in response to what's going on around us with politics and technology and so on.

And so may it be so that you see more of those tangible, unhackable books, that you see more classes where students are seated in a circle around the table, and so on and so forth.

And I'm happy that Saint John's can be a leader and a beacon in that movement, but I do think it's a movement and a need that goes way way beyond our two campuses.

Agreed.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, thanks for the time.

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