I mean, this is completely unique, one of a kind, first of its own school.

Yes.

Well, the world's first virtual reality school.

And it was definitely not a straight line to get there as I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs have that same, you know, winding place.

You think you're starting this and you end up starting that, you know, with the same intention.

I mean, really, I started my journey to school choice because one of my children, I have three boys, was in a traditional public school, A-rated school, and it just wasn't working for him.

And after many meetings and crying and gnashing of teeth, they recommended he be put on medication.

it

So, I mean, what kind of conversations are you having with your children? Because you have three young guys or young boys that are in high school or?

I have one going into high school, one just started college, and the other graduated from college.

So I've got every level of students.

But my high school son, I actually gave him a project to work on in Claude.

And it was challenging him to start a business.

using claude to learn how to use the tool how to use it to come up with a business plan and then based on that business plan how can he use that to actually make additional income on the internet and he went so far so fast learning it and i actually got to meet one of the founders of anthropic which makes that tool And I said to my son, why don't you tell him what you've learned? And I had really not asked him that question before.

But the way he answered it was like, I learned that this tool is something that can solve a lot of problems and allow me to do things faster and make a lot of money.

What is the status? What can people listening understand and what should they know about where we are with actually abolishing the Department of

So when Byron's governor and you have four years or eight years of your own platform, what do you actually want to accomplish?

Oh, more of a lot of what I've done over the last fifteen years.

Education freedom has been my passion.

It's what I've dedicated my life and my second career to, and I look forward to, God willing, having an even bigger platform from which to do that.

Now, we've accomplished a lot in Florida that I wanted to do fifteen years ago.

I was looking at old videos of proposals I made to the Constitutional Revision Commission to expand school choice, and we're way past that with universal school choice in Florida.

There's more that we can do to make sure that families have access to the schools that they now can pay for with these funds.

What do you, what do you think about that?

How much do you guys hear? And are you surprised that more candidates aren't embracing talking about the harms of social media and what they will do as a candidate for whatever level office to address it?

Well, this is a touchy subject because it crosses over between big tech and hampering down on the power of big tech, especially in the influence of children and parents' rights.

Because parents don't necessarily want the government deciding what their kids can and cannot do with technology.

which is really democratizing a lot of what only big tech or only big companies have been able to access.

And so this crossover is an area where candidates are having a little bit of trouble.

Parents, and I'm involved, as you know, in a lot of parents' rights groups, parents are saying, we don't want the government deciding this because if the government changes hands, then that means that someone who doesn't align with my values is deciding what my kids can and cannot see.

They want power in their hands to do so.

That's a win.

Nobody is an F. Everybody's a C. I mean, what's going on here, Erica?

Well, it [laughs], it's really unfortunate, and it's going to catch up at some point, right? The real world revolves around results, and we saw that when, during the pandemic, all of these institutions went- did away with standardized testing and then found out that when you do that, you get students in your institution that are unprepared for college-level work.

So they had to go backwards and add back those standardized tests because we have such a grade inflation epidemic across the country that these kids are coming in with A, uh, grade point averages who are not ready for college-level work.

So we have a, a redefining now of what success looks like in our high schools because colleges need students who are ready to go into their freshman year of college, and that's not been happening.

We have to tell kids the truth.

We have to tell parents the truth about where they are.

The problem is that schools are not preparing our students well enough.

But is it a fair comment, Erica, to say that the decline of public education in America can be charted with the creation of the Department of Education at the federal level?

Yeah.

So yeah, so all of that's coming back.

However, it also reminds us of why homeschooling, for example, has doubled since COVID.

There was just a recent study out, um, touting, you know, homeschooling becoming more mainstream.

Nearly 7% of the students in America are now homeschooled, and more and more it's becoming not, you know, something weird that people do but something that parents are actively exploring when they're looking for school choice options.

I know I talk to fa- families all the time who are exploring not homeschooling in the traditional sense but schooling at home now that there are so many resources out there, micro schools, online schools, hybrids, pods.

And the school choice environment expansion of education scholarship accounts across the country have really empowered parents to come up with what's best for their children and for their family.

Yeah.

the president has also promised to do it i think he had an executive order i couldn't tell you where he is in that process whether that executive order was effective or not whether it was a challenge in court can you help me on that

yeah so the president did sign an executive order it was one of his very early ones in fact i have a copy of it in my office to dismantle the federal department of education calling on congress to do their part but saying whatever the administration can do within the power of the presidency to do that.

And Secretary McMahon has taken that in full stride.

I mean, she has done an incredible job at record pace.

She has over 10 interagency agreements, first of all, pushing off responsibilities into areas that make more sense.

For example, the student loan portfolio is now being handled by Treasury.

Why should the Federal Department of Education be the largest bank and lending institution in the country? Never made sense.

Is there even any evidence that having a theater degree or an art degree gets you a leg up in the theater or in creating art? Has anyone ever looked into this? Because I think it's mostly bullshit, personally.

So, I mean, what kind of conversations are you having with your children? Because you have three young guys or young boys that are in high school or?

I have one going into high school, one just started college, and the other graduated from college.

So I've got every level of students.

But my high school son, I actually gave him a project to work on in Claude.

And it was challenging him to start a business.

using claude to learn how to use the tool how to use it to come up with a business plan and then based on that business plan how can he use that to actually make additional income on the internet and he went so far so fast learning it and i actually got to meet one of the founders of anthropic which makes that tool And I said to my son, why don't you tell him what you've learned? And I had really not asked him that question before.

But the way he answered it was like, I learned that this tool is something that can solve a lot of problems and allow me to do things faster and make a lot of money.

What is the status? What can people listening understand and what should they know about where we are with actually abolishing the Department of

It could be about anything at all.

The most important five-year prediction I have is about education freedom.

You know, we've been working to build this education freedom economy, as I call it, this parallel economy where parents get the money from the state or now from perhaps the federal tax credit, and they can spend that money on new, innovative school models, maybe their existing private schools.

But there are a lot more options coming online and have been since COVID.

Micro schools, hybrid schools-

Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives.

Well, if you're a parent, you can improve by taking full control and responsibility for your children and their education.

I tell parents all the time, "I, I don't care what the situation is, uh, or how much money you make, or where you live, if you feel that your child is not getting the very best education experience possible, if they don't love learning, you can take control of that, whether it means homeschooling, online schooling, a private school, or some other combination of it." You as a parent know what's best for your kids, and you should take full control of that and feel confident.

Why do you think they're not getting the memo? Is that where the lobbyist money is for the liberals? Why are the kids not the priority?

Well, the investment that the left has made over all these years has been in the union, and the union has decided their mission is to indoctrinate kids with left-wing ideology.

So that has been the entire investment that they've made.

It's coming up with ways to indoctrinate children and not teach them the basic fundamentals of reading, writing, and mathematics.

And so it's very difficult to turn that ship, and they've been successful.

Unfortunately, conservatives were asleep at the wheel for a long time, but parents got involved, especially during COVID, and said, "No more." Now we have the people behind us.

We now have the power behind us in a lot of cases.

Um-

It's interesting how the Democrats as a party have to carve a seat up for a, uh, a constituency they claim is important, but for Republicans, we don't seem to have that problem.

Oh, that's exactly right.

It's the DEI in the voting, right? And, and putting these gerrymandered districts together because white Democrats don't want Black Democrats running against them in their own districts, so they wanna set them aside where they're only representing other Black voters, not crossing over to white Democrat voters.

It's actually the most racist thing to say you can only represent people that match your skin color.

Um, so Black Democrats should be offended by being put in, in that corner, if you will, to only represent people of their skin color and not a wider population.

I'm glad that the Supreme Court made this decision, because we should not have Black districts and white districts, no matter which party that you're talking about happens to be Democrats.

Um, we've got to get away from that level of identity politics and focus on issues.

What is it that you think we're, we're not talking enough about?

But number two, if you rin- increase taxes on them, we wind up paying the difference, not them

themYou know, something just happened where the, uh, 30 Democrat senators filed a bill to repeal the federal tax credit scholarship, the huge win that we had with President Trump and the one big beautiful bill that's gonna provide school choice to families using private funds across this country.

And what I posted on my X page is all of these senators that sent their children to private school, or they themselves benefited from private school, but they want to deprive other families in this country, especially those that are disadvantaged and don't have that capability, of being able to do the same thing.

If this was professional sports and we went from first to 40th and we spent the most money, wouldn't there be some kind of a reckoning for the front office?

Absolutely, and there is a reckoning.

Thanks to President Trump and Secretary McMahon, the Department of Education has been cut significantly.

In her first week after being sworn in, she cut half the staff.

She signed over 10 interagency agreements pushing off the responsibilities of the Department of Education into other areas of the government where they better belong.

wow.

And we graduated college, got married, and had a baby within 18 months of each other.

So we were young.

But we thought we knew everything, and we were ready to go.

I also tell people it's better to be blissful and just do it, and we loved it.

We had a wonderful time as young parents.

But we thought, being in finance, we just need to buy a house in a neighborhood where the schools have A grades, and we've done our job.

How do you adopt that into a government-like setting while still maintaining privacy, standards, integrity? Right.

Yeah.

They're the ones who know their students best and love them the most, and that's why it's so important that organizations like ours are empowering parents, letting them know what they can actually do to affect change, not only in the system overall, but for their individual family, how they can access school choice options, uh, what they can do to select the program that's right for their children.

Hopefully, if they're in a school choice state, but if they're not, how to get active at school board meetings and become their own activist on behalf of their children and the children in their community.

Are Democrats just talking down to people? Like, what do I do with this?

They are, but they sound so ridiculous now that they're being so explicit about it, right? They used to try to maneuver around these types of issues.

Now they're just going straight on to say that you shouldn't have to have an ID to vote when it has now become an 80/20 issue.

People value, uh, elections where they know their vote is counted.

And you suppose this is going to end anytime soon.

Unfortunately, getting rid of the Federal Department of Education is not going to impact the bureaucracy on the ground and closest to the people.

We're just getting rid of one layer of many layers of bureaucracy.

The real solution is to restore accountability by breaking the monopoly.

You've heard me talk about this.

We don't want to get rid of public schools.

We have to get rid of public school monopolies to give parents more options.

And it's been going on for 60 years in this country, hasn't it, Eric?

So did we just get to this place where people don't feel shame anymore? Like, what do you attribute it to?

Well, you're absolutely right.

It ca- they care about their power, they care about getting back at Donald Trump and, in their minds, getting reelected by their Democrat base.

And it does affect education.

For example, Head Start programs that depend on, uh, recurring government funds are being shut down as we speak, as Chuck Schumer is telling the country it's getting better every day for Democrats.

Well, certainly not for those families who depend on these Head Start programs and other educational programs that are funded by the federal government.

Uh, so yes, it is completely in the hands of Democrats, no matter what they try to say.

Are the Democrats projecting too much?

What are you finding is surging the most, I suppose?

Well, homeschool is the fastest growing way of schooling in our country by far.

It's not even close.

We've doubled the number of homeschoolers in the country since COVID.

Not only that, though, polls show that we have about 7% of our families homeschooling right now.

That number would be 14%.

It would be double if money were no object.

Tell us about it.

So tell me, where do you think we're going right now as we're heading back to school? Are you encouraged with the possibility that we have under this Trump administration with the future of public education, even private education option might look like?

Well, absolutely.

And parents should be excited for their kids to go back to school because across the country, thanks to President Trump and Secretary McMahon, their young girls, their daughters are going to be safe from young men being in their private spaces or in their sports and athletics.

Very exciting change.

They can also be assured in many cases that federal funds will not be used for DEI programming, CRT and other divisive content.

As well as, thanks to the recent Mahmoud decision by the Supreme Court, as parents find, and if they do find across the country that there are objectionable curriculum materials in their child's classroom, they have a right to opt out of those lessons.

Thanks to that Supreme Court decision.

How long will it take for the states to sort of be able to put forward their specific educational agendas? But also, what risks does that involve now with other states, maybe blue states like California, to kind of double down on the indoctrination, actually make it even worse?

But you guys recently made an announcement that you'd like to spend a little bit more time in Florida, so tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, we're very fortunate that Donald Trump came out and gave him the Run Byron Run tweet with a full endorsement of Byron for Governor of Florida.

So just a few days later, about a month ago now, my husband announced that he would be running for governor.

Now we've been in Florida since we were in college.

We met at Florida State University, which is in Tallahassee, our state capital, started dating, got married, built a life, built a family.

We spent 20 years in financial services before ever getting involved in politics.

It was not in our plans at all, but we had been serving the community in different ways and just had been encouraged to get more involved in public service.

So before I let you go, tell me, what do we expect to see out of you in this new role at the America First Policy Institute, and what do we expect to see on the national scale when it comes to education before you guys dive into this major campaign?