Right.

It always was striking to me because part of a yearly or semester-long ritual was during one exam, I would almost always ask the standard essay question, how does it explain how a bill becomes a law? And these were college students, so already, you know, higher than average education, that sort of thing.

And they'd heard me talk about it in class.

Presumably, they were awake for part of it, at least, and had read about it.

And still, I would read through these answers and say, like, my God, if this is...

And it would blow my mind.

There's so much that they missed.

So I think that's a big piece of social media that we often just don't see, that it lets us create these very isolated information silos.

And that's something, whether you disagree on how to get there, you can at least agree on the goal to build some damn roads, right? So there's gotta be something, and I'm really rooting for the Problem Solvers Caucus to be the loudest caucus in the entire Congress.

Well, I, I think part of the problem is, as we talked about, that the sort of structural incentives work against moderates in a lot of ways getting elected in the first place.

But then there's another factor that I think often is unappreciated, especially to people who aren't, well, I guess old like me and have been around for forever.

But, but this idea that there's a...

Congress is a lot more competitive, and when you get more competition, there's actually less incentive to compromise.

And what I mean is that, for instance, prior to the mid-1990s, there really wasn't a high probability that control of one or both chambers would switch much.

I mean, Democrats controlled the Senate for all but 10 years from the early '30s until the mid-'90s, and they controlled the House for all but four years during that same period.

Our future, you know, uh, s- senators, our future president, perhaps, is coming from that crop of, of, uh, state legislators and local legislators.