 Maybe having a Senate full of morons isn't quite as bad that everything's just at a standstill because They can't think any deeper than just what partisan hackery And that's why nothing no legislation ever seems to actually get passed Except some tiny little pieces that of course are usually bad, but then it's all just about spending what extra trillion dollars spending Can we do this month? It is certainly different in that way, but it's always hard to say if things are actually getting worse or not in the short term Okay, I have now I think I've developed a very strong opinion on this And I think this is a bad thing and I think it's because Again while there is I think a consequence of having sort of true ideological believers when they believe the wrong ideology in these positions You know a true believer is harder to manipulate Than an empty vessel and and you did very much You know you often look like the last name of the Senate, but you some you matter a lot more, right? You have families of statewide politics and since these were far harder elections to run on a statewide basis, right? You still you see sort of the family names and and so these are people that that tended to to come up within You know back when universities were actually, you know institutions of a higher learning, right? You know you kind of get that natural elite aspect a little bit again not perfect, but you know more average than than other political positions in that just because of the high barriers of entry But I think it's precisely the fact that you have senators that are increasingly like representatives with with your election cycles that these are the people the most manipulated by the bureaucracy, right? These are the people most manipulated by Congressional staffers and these are the ones that are not that are isolated from the democratic mechanism And while I understand as we have discussed in a podcast in the past that there there are downfalls to that democratic mechanism I think as long as they exist symbolically there is very much a You know that that that that non-elected political class Is is detrimental and the less intellect we have in the Senate the harder It is for the people that are actually in those chairs making that final decision into vote You know, you know having a lower quality leads to a lot more of the monopolization within kind of the non-elected sphere It increases their power at the expense of the rest and so I I've now become you know, I'd much rather have You know people with bad ideas that they firmly believe in then this given the quality of the swamp You know have have them kind of going along with the games Whereas, you know, there are situations, you know, just as the counter example to that though There are examples where the swamp might be better than your average intellect and so that there are certain situations where if you've got like a You know all the rights of Interest groups and kind of alignment there where the swamp is actually trying to push like good policy. I think there's some State-level kind of swampy actor echo systems where like you have a very strong good think tank that actually can kind of You know in that case having them blindly listen to them that'd be a good Senate, right? Like that'd be a senator better than better than average But given just how awful DC is I think we're we're there's a negative Consequence to an increasingly shallow intellectual group. Yeah, I think at the state local level It's more of a crapshoot as to whether you're dealing with a good mixture of people who maybe have an ideological viewpoint That isn't totally horrible, but in Washington it tends to be Generally reliably bad