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That's a great way to help us out. Share the show with friends, because it's a great show. Starving the Beast, the battle to disrupt and reform America's public universities examines the ongoing power struggle on college campuses and in state legislatures across the nation as political and market-oriented forces push to disrupt and reform America's historic public universities. With us is the director of Starving the Beast, Steve Mims. Hello, Steve. Hi. One of the things I enjoy about the show is I can act on impulse. I was reading Salon last night, 10 hours ago. I read this rave review about Starving the Beast, which is playing at IFC in Manhattan and opens in Los Angeles next week, and I said, wow, I have to interview the director. I just clicked, went to the website, contact David Feldman show, wants to interview you, boom, here you are. Life doesn't get any better than that. No, it sure doesn't. The only problem is I haven't seen the documentary, because I found out about it fewer than 12 hours ago. But it sounds like it's fantastic. You and the rest of the nation haven't seen it. I have my finger on the pulse of it. The finger on the pulse of the people who are not there. Let me tell you why I wanted you in here and wanted to meet you and why I think this documentary is important, even though I haven't seen it. One of my wives went to Berkeley in the 80s. It was a fortune back then, but it really cost nothing. One of my daughters went to Berkeley recently graduated, and it cost a fortune, a real fortune. The price of going to Berkeley ballooned. One of my other children went to another college, and before he graduated broke down and cried describing the debt that his friends had incurred. It just sounded like college kids are now the victim of loan sharks. What's going on? You teach at the University of Texas at Austin, right? You're a teacher, and a filmmaker. You've made lots and lots of films, and you teach filmmaking, and you saw something happening in Austin at the universities that just disgusted you? Well, we're always looking for projects to work on, and my partner and I, a guy named Bill Benoski who's in the film business, reading in the newspaper about what was happening at UT Austin and at Texas A&M, and the fact that there was even news about this was shocking. Basically, what was happening is the governor at that time, Rick Perry. From Dancing with the Stars? Soon to be a famous dancer. He had appointed regents who was like a governing board for these universities at both those schools. He appointed them with a mission to remake those schools from the inside out, which technically is against the law. You're not, you're supposed to, these boards are made up of people who are established, successful, benign, you know, people who look after the funds and the buildings and whatever. But he put people in there with an agenda to change things, and that agenda involved everything from tenure for faculty people, and then research, which these are A&M and UT Austin are flagship research universities. They're competitive as is University of Wisconsin, UNC Chapel Hill. These are very high level public universities. They're really exceptional, and so they do a lot of research, so it's about research and about governance, and basically changing the whole nature of these schools from the inside out by putting people on these boards who would change them that way. In those controversial, there were protests on both campuses. There was a big move to have the president of UT Austin flyer to get him Bill Powers. One of the board regents came under investigation by the House and was going to be impeached. The Texas House, right? And so that was news, and we're going like, well, what's this about? So we started shooting interviews and covering what was happening with the Texas House. And as we did that, and we did our research and we met people, they said, hey, this is happening in a lot of places. And so we found out about what was happening at the University of Wisconsin, where Scott Walker had... Governor Scott Walker. Governor Scott Walker. Anti-union. Oh, yeah, and had moved and successfully changed the way tenure works up there, so that they're not going to be competitive in the future. Well, that would be other places in off the tenure. And then we found out... College dropout also? Yes. Scott Walker. Yeah. And then we found out about what was happening at LSU, and it turned out the guy from Wisconsin was... What was one of our contacts is a roommate for the guy who's the president of LSU right now. It's again, King Alexander. And I sent an email to James Carville, like you were talking about earlier. I sent him an email. He called me back immediately because Carville's your grad of LSU. He's very upset about this. He teaches there, doesn't he? I think it's too late, actually. Oh, sorry. So he got back with me and he... I knew that he was going to do a commencement address at LSU and we went and filmed it. And it was quite amazing. I mean, it's really... It's the side of Carville that people aren't familiar with. He's really just on fire about this issue. We wound up doing a long interview with him later. So he's in the film. He's been a big supporter of the film. And so, again, that's how we got into it. And then it just sort of spread. And then it became organically a movie that has recurring characters at all these campuses. Think tanks are involved in terms of providing ideas and logic that legislatures can use. And Grover Norquist. Halleck? I don't think so. Okay. Grover Norquist, Ralph Nader's friend, believe it or not, who believes in making government so small, you can drown it in the bathtub. The overarching theme from what I've read of your documentary is that there has been a concerted effort for the past 35 years to destroy public universities, to, in a sense, privatize them and either turn them over to corporations and at the same time put young Americans into a permanent cycle of debt. Well, I would say it's not literally a campaign to do that. I think this is a process that yielded the results we now see. So when you read about this in the media now, it's all about extremely high tuition and student debt. But it took 35 years to get to this point. Like to make a problem that's this bad. And so initially, that shift happened when states got taxes and then they hit their budgets came around and then they had to cut budgets. And they continually did this over a 35 year period. So that, for instance, in UT Austin in 1980, the state paid about 60% of the budget for the university came directly from the state. Now it's 12%. So what happened to that amount that's not there anymore, that guy shifted over onto the students and also get shifted over onto the universities, all these universities, they're never not fundraising. They're always looking for money. But they'd had to strategically come up with a way to survive and to thrive as in a glacier like pattern that this money has gone away. So now it's become a giant issue because people are rightfully outraged about it. So I would say it's less of a conspiratorial thing, more of an outcome. And it really is the outcome of the Gerva Norquist pledge. You know, so all these all these politicians sign a pledge that say they will never raise taxes under any circumstances, even in an act of war, they will never raise taxes. The money comes from somewhere else. And they will always be in favor of cutting taxes. So that cycle has delivered us where we are. And as somebody said to watch the movie, you can make this movie about most public institutions, because they've all suffered in this way. So that now we're at a place where the way to change it would be to have politicians renege on this pledge that they made. And kind of, you know, we don't have an agenda with the movie, but we can watch the movie and go like, well, there might be political space for someone who's subscribed to that to say like, wait a second, this is worth rethinking. And so the film is like an illustration of the competition between two big philosophies. The original philosophy of a public higher ed was that this goes all the way back to Jefferson into Lincoln with the Morrill Act, which is an act that was signed in 1862, that provided federal land to be used for financing of these schools all over the country, even states that didn't have a lot of land were given land elsewhere. That was with Lincoln with Lincoln. It wasn't his legislation, but he signed it. The only reason it ever got to be law is because the South had seceded from the union at the time. Had they still been and we would never probably had that they fought against that even at that time. So and Jefferson, Jefferson William Jefferson had the first arguably there's a little bit of the debate about this, but argue with the first public university UVA, which he set up because a lot of young men were going off to Harvard and learning about abolitionism. So they needed their own college in Virginia to remind people that African Americans were not humans. The positive side of it you can say is like they really saw a need to, and this is also borne out by what happened with the Morrill Act, they saw a need to populate the country with people who are going to build this place out. From where it was in Lincoln 62 and from where it was previously for Jefferson. Let me ask you some quick questions and try to understand a documentary that I haven't seen yet. Like most of the nation. Yeah, I'm flying by the seat of my pants. What made America great is our public education. The turn of the 19th century into the 20th century, the growth of high schools and public education planted the seeds for the great middle class. Public schools in New York saved Jews. You know, while Hitler was wiping out European Jews and the intellectual tradition it was carried on by city college and the public schools in New York City. That's where it had not been for free public education. Most of Jewish intellectual tradition would be wiped out today. The growth of public universities after World War II was significant and continued up into the 60s with Johnson creating community colleges and a growth there that I suspect conservatives, anti-intellectuals, Republicans felt threatened by. So does your movie discuss the fear that Republicans have of educated people? Well, indirectly it does. We are very liking it. This is part of what, and the movie is funny, believe it or not. Well, you've got, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but Governor Perry is an ignoramus. Oops. And Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is an ignoramus. Right. Dropped out of college. Is a tool of the Koch brothers. He's been caught. They made phony phone calls to his office pretending to be the Koch brother. He's a fool. He's an idiot. Right. Republicans benefit from stupidity to whip Donald Trump. So they don't want people being smart and they want our kids in a permanent cycle of debt because then they're fungible. You can do anything you, you can tell them anything you want and they will do anything they want because they're stupid and in debt. And was that the plan from the beginning? Well, I'll get back to this. I don't think that it's a plan. I think that is a benefit, maybe that some people see in this or what's happened that what I was about to say earlier, like if you, the original philosophy about public education was to build up the country, it's delivered us where we are. The people who now want to reinvent this have a market-based ideology. And so this, and it's ideology that flows from think tanks and from foundations that are funded by the Koch brothers, funded by, they're not transparent in terms of where their money comes from, but they're in D.C. mostly and the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute in Austin. We have our own branch of it. It's called the Texas Public Policy Foundation and that you'll see in the film. They're all linked. There's a, they're national think tanks and then they're state-based think tanks and the state-based think tanks are all part of something called the state policy network and they're, they all communicate with each other. And they're in the tank for big business and, and the Koch brothers. They, you know, they provide the philosophical underpinnings and in some cases the literal legislation that goes to the states. That's Alec. Yes. And so they're all, you know, oriented that way and that's what they do. I don't know if you read Jane Mayer's book. Dark Money. Dark Money. No, but I can talk about it. Yes. A great cocktail party. It's beautiful. Like that's, it's an amazing book and she lays out the, the, how, if you have a lot of money like the Koch brothers, you can open an account and call it a foundation. Right. And then all the tax, so you put up a chunk of money in there, the money, the interest that, that foundation earns, the money's not taxed and the interest if you spend it is not taxed. And so what they do is they create their own foundation, then they create another entity to suck up the money from that foundation. So they'll make the Kato Institute or a think tank. And so what happens though, they have a pile of money making money, tax free, that money then goes to a think tank. They have their people who write policy papers to influence legislation. And then finally, they'll come up with a political action committee like American, what's it called? It's the Astro turf. Oh, yeah, Dick armies, Dick armies thing. And so that's their Americans for prosperity, American for prosperity. Yes. And so like, that's how the money flows. And that's how the ideology works. So it's like you, you have, you have a pile of money that makes money that that pays for the think tank that then, then they can be acted upon in terms of legislation. And then a grassroots political action committee, they can follow up on that. Anyway, so this is all and that's how our public universities are now operating in that the money is not in the endowments. The money is in the transactions. You make money by moving that money around money, moving around, you always skim one or 2% off that and you make money. So if I'm the chancellor of a university, I start building. The more I build, the more my friends get taken care of. And if they get taken care of, they return the favor by giving me speaking fees or it's this that everybody's helping one another, just moving money back and forth, you take $1, $1 and just keep moving it around from friend to friend. That dollar turns into a million dollars. It's true. It's it's the it's an economic thought about the power, you know, when it's how they justify fiscal stimulus that $1 spent to build a bridge gets transferred from the contractor to the subcontractor to the guy who builds the bridge, the guy who sells the bridge builders some coffee to the coffee that $1 in three years becomes a million dollars in assets. And that's it. And that's exactly what our public universities do just by building and growing has nothing to do with educating our kids, though, does it? No, and I have to say, like in our films, 95 minutes long, we really don't get into that at all. We're dealing with the struggles at the schools that we profile in the film in terms of how they're able to fund themselves and how they're able to protect themselves from these different facets of an agenda to change them that, you know, we let people speak for themselves in the film, but that are considered the uniquely in public higher education, a detriment to those institutions. The David Feldman show will continue in just a moment. I just want to ask you all to subscribe to the David Feldman show on iTunes. And while you're over there, give us a good review. It helps a lot. Don't forget to follow David Feldman on Twitter and Facebook and now back to the show. How much of this is like the privatization of social security, where you have these craven cretins on Wall Street who make nothing, do nothing, sons of rich people who just need a job, unoriginal, uncreative. They see a pile of cash sitting in social security and they go, oh, yeah, let's privatize this cash and collect a transaction fee. Let's steal this money. I think that there is some of that. The first thing is the belief that this is a bloated and efficient system and it doesn't deserve, they should be a lot more efficient, teach a lot more people who should be cheaper and we need to reduce the support even more. So that's the first step priority is to get the money out of the system in terms of tax money, because really it's a very libertarian idea here at play that if they had to do it over from 1862, they would have said the government has no business in education, period. And so now they're even offended by like now my tax money is used to underwrite professors and classes that offend me. They're underwriting ideas that I don't agree with and this is my tax money. Why are you doing this? And you need to teach people, prepare them for careers where they're going to have a job, they're going to make money, it's very practical. And so I think that's the first thing, but there is an element. Well, there is a libertarian argument that the Constitution really doesn't provide for education and that the Department of Education is unconstitutional. The same way the First Amendment says there should be no state religion, the libertarians believe that there should be no official state educational doctrine and should be left up to the cities and the states to arrive at their own truths. The problem with that is most people are morons and you need to know what the truth is and you need educated people, certified credited people and the libertarians when you scratch underneath the surface are racists who like to smoke dope. I mean the origins of the Cato Institute and libertarian ideology is eugenics and white racism under the guise of intellectualism. Yeah, you know it was the old man Koch who was one of the co-founders of the John Burt society and that was patently racist. And you have a whole generation of people, just a little bit off the topic, but I think that's my show, it's called off the top. Yeah, a whole generation of people who are sions of great wealth, who were at the knee of people who are the right age to have been indoctrinated by, if they were less circumspect now, they would actually just call themselves John Burt society people who just don't believe that this country is a mess because of the way that we basically wasted resources on people that aren't worth those resources. Right, what is its projection? It's the governor of Texas, the former governor of Texas, what's his name? I always read Rick Perry from Dancing with the Stars. He is as dumb as a bag of rocks. He is a stupid, he's a tool of oil lobbyists. Scott Walker is just a complete idiot and they project, because they're stupid, because they're not curious, because they don't read, they project their own vacuity onto others. That's a psychological condition. If I'm stupid, everybody else must be stupid. What do we need public education for? It's a waste of time. I'm not curious. This has to be frozen. Who would be interested in our history? It's a scam, we have to shut it down. We don't need philosophers, we need more electricians and plumbers, because I'm stupid so everybody else must be as stupid as I am. Luckily in our film, we let those guys speak for themselves, and so I have to really avoid being drawn into a blatant mockery of those guys. But you can read about what they do, and you can see them in comparison to other people in our film, and it speaks for itself. I would disagree with you a little bit about Perry. I don't think he's stupid. Ignorant. I think he's actually smart. I think that history will prove, in our film, Carvel says history is relentless, and history is going to prove in the case of both Perry and Scott Walker, where they're really coming from and what they wanted. But I think they're both not dumb, and yeah, you see the movie, you'll see what I'm talking about. They're dumb as in they know who's buttering their bread. Yeah, they're politicians. Is the chef still buttering Rick Perry's bread? I don't know what you mean by that. Wasn't there a rumor about Rick Perry's chef? I don't, I have no, I don't know that then. Okay, Google, if you're listening, Google Rick Perry and his chef, his male chef, which is, we're talking with Steve Mims. He is the director of the new documentary Starving the Beast. It's playing at the IFC here in Manhattan, and it opens next week at, in Los Angeles. Right. I would assume the limelays, right? You know, I don't, I don't remember the name of the theater, I'm sure. And you teach narrative filmmaking? Yes, I do. And how long have you been teaching? Since the Eisenhower administration. Sure, I'm kidding. Okay. It seems like that. The, yeah, it was Truman, I go by the, no, I've been teaching there since about 1989. Since 89. Yeah. And documentaries have exploded because of, why, what is this? Well, our film is a great example. And that is, I own my own year. Oh, I, I teach, I also do client work. I do ads, I do short films for people. Music videos. Music videos, a lot of stuff. And so, luckily the technology, I mean, if you know what you're doing, if you have access to the technology, you can get on a story and just hang with it with very little funding or no funding. And that's essentially how we started, we started like covering different events and doing interviews until we were satisfied that we actually had something. And so if you see things like making a murderer, like that would never happen shooting 16 millimeter film. Why? Because it's too expensive. Because you just go out and shoot for a couple of years and go like, well, this is not a movie. But in that case, they shot for 10 years. In this case, we shot for over three years. And it's digital. You know, I added on a Mac. It's like this to go here. Like it's, it's how the world has changed. So if you're able to kind of develop a project on the side, you can see if it is something. And then that's exactly what happened. It also happened in the a documentary I did previous to this one about the death penalty. It's a film called Incendiary about Cameron Todd Willingham. And my partner and I in that film, we were on that story off and on because it's like it involved a lot of hearings and kind of like making a murderer. We would only have to commit a couple of days, maybe per month or every other month. And then over time, like follow the story as it unfolded. And we who was, who was this gentleman? My partner and that's again, Joe Bailey. And Willingham? Oh, Willingham. I'm sorry. Cameron Todd Willingham was a guy in Texas who was convicted of arson. And they claim that he intentionally murdered his two daughters. Was this on front line? There's a front line version of this. And so they claimed he did that he was, they tried to have a change of venue for a child that didn't happen. It was in a small town. He was not well, like he was not a mild citizen to blame it. No, he's white white guy. And so they convicted him, he went to prison and then was on death row for 12 years. And while he was in there and his family had no resources, they were completely poor. They finally found an expert to look at his face. And the guy found that there was no evidence that he did it. All the scientific evidence that had been acquired was based on old wives tales, based on, well, it turns out that people who did arson investigation for years and years were people who had been firefighters or policemen who went with an old hand and they would say, like, you see that that means this happened or whatever. Well, all that turns out not to be true. And it was during the time the guy was in prison, Willingham, that was becoming known that all this old evidence was fraudulent. So by the time he was executed, they had found an expert who wrote to Rick Perry and to the Attorney General, who's now the governor, Greg Abbott, and said, hey, I'm bad. Oh, sorry. Yeah, the, uh, yeah, the, uh, I have a joke for you. See if it works. I need them as you can tell. Yeah. Yeah. How do you make a Manhattan? How? First you have to buy some beads. It's an old joke. But yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so one happened was it's big in Holland. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it may be too soon for them. Yeah. But the, uh, so they had the, uh, now what's my turn? Yeah, me too. They, uh, I'm, I'm trying to think of a top or for your Manhattan joke. So we were, uh, Rick Perry and old wives tales with arson. Right. Right. So anyway, they, so they wrote him a letter. They asked for a state of execution and it was denied. Uh, well, the mistake they made was writing to Rick Perry. Yeah. They should have called him. Yeah. The man's an idiot. So the guy was on death row for 12 years. They executed him. And, uh, then thanks to the, uh, Innocence project in Berry Shack, they reopened this thing a few years after that. And, uh, it became a giant scandal because they looked at all the forensic stuff and said, like, it doesn't count. Um, and this is at a time that Rick Perry was trying to run for governor again. So, you know, those guys cannot be seen to, um, do anything but support the death penalty. You know, that's like it's, it's just part of their, they have to adhere to that. And because of something Scalia had said years ago, where he said, like, if you show me one person that was wrongfully executed, uh, then essentially that would make the face for ending the death penalty. Well, this guy, William, was wrongfully executed. Uh, and so it became a giant, uh, scandal. And that's what our film was about. And is it, is it settled law that he was wrongfully executed by, here's the way that scientists like to edit the, uh, and legally, if you tried to bring that case today with the evidence they had, it would be thrown out. It would never go to trial. But you, the people who executed him admit that he was wrong. Oh, they'll never admit that. Yeah. Yeah, they don't admit that. And as a matter of fact, um, so we covered, believe it or not, Texas is progressive in this area. Texas has a forensic science commission. Here's the thing. I'm okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. And, and, and, and they actually do like look at like labs that are bad in Texas in here constantly. Like, uh, you constantly read all the time about how they're trying to get these labs improved. And so their commission that they had looked into the Swillingham thing, it took months. And they finally wrote a report and report said that there was evidence that the, that the guy was wrongfully executed because he, the evidence that was used at trial was invalid. Well, the attorney general at the time Abbott basically wrote an opinion that said that in this particular case, the forensic science commission did not have the authority to even look into the case. This is after they looked into it for years. And that was to provide people think cover for Perry to be able to say, well, we still don't have any evidence on this. The thing that I just find so infuriating about this, I mean, it's, it's, my head is about to explode because it's a metaphor for everything that's wrong with the professional class in our country and Texas. It's capital punishment. People like Rick Perry and George W. Bush are for the death penalty because there's right and there's wrong and there are no gray areas. Right. And then when they are presented with the facts, you are wrong. They ask for gray areas. They ask for nuance and their murderers because of their, because of their insistence on seeing things black or white. They make this huge mistake and then they ask for forgiveness in gray areas or they work the refs, you know, right. And they should be in prison. You know, George Bush should be in prison. Barbara Bush, the mother's vagina should be locked, you know, sewn shut. Barbara Bush, first lady, Barbara Bush, her vagina should be on trial at the Hague. I know you don't want to hear that. You didn't sign up for that. You came on to promote. I think you're with this mad man called you in. All I wanted to do is promote starving the beast. Let me speak for Americans that nobody asked for that. I'm sorry. I'm just so angry at professionals, lawyers, accountants, appraisers, doctors, people who take your money, make mistakes, then circle the wagons and insist they didn't make a mistake. Well, that's our culture. It certainly reflects a lack of political will, you know, like if your, if your first priority is always to be reelected, then that means that you're unwilling to ever take a stand. Like it's ever like intellectually have an epiphany and go like, oh, geez, I don't know what's wrong with this and say it. Yeah, that's all I have to do. And if there is that even that little modicum of courage, what people find usually is they're rewarded for that. Because if we go like, well, this guy has been an ideologue, but in this case he looked at it, said I made a mistake. I was wrong. It's historic. And Rick Perry could have arguably benefited from that. But the idea that you would not, the idea that you'd be so attached to your job that you'd never offer to resign or never offer to take a position is really unbelievable. So what do we do? I mean, I think it's an American problem. You know, you look at homelessness in America, which just upsets me to no end, because I'm a comedian and comedians are like one step away from just being crazy enough to end up homeless. You know, homelessness is a mental illness. So I look at the homeless and I go, that could be me, but for the grace of Robert Smyker. It could be all of us really. Yeah. So when you ask about the homeless in America, or if you say, hey, 20% of American children live in poverty here in America, why is that? Well, it's a very complicated issue. It's very complicated. It's very complicated. Well, why? Well, it's very complicated. Then you go to Europe. 20% of kids in Germany, Italy, France don't live in poverty. There are homeless, but not to the extent it's not so complicated. It's not a complicated problem. I think in America, we've institutionalized greed, incompetence, carelessness, and sloth, where they've just said, that's just the system. That's the way it is. You know, that's the way the world works. No, that's the way America is working now, since Reagan. Anyway, sorry. That's right. I'm really sorry. Yeah, I love Harry Scherer's thinking about Santa Monica, the home of the homeless. What's your next project? Well, I'm really tied up with this. And why aren't you angry? You seem so, I don't know, how do you? Well, I mean, I've had to live with this thing for three and a half years, so I'm way past anger. Right. Like I'm in some other, the next step of like a denial about it. And I'm trying to, you know, when I were in a project, I tried to not assume that I know everything about it. And I went a lot on this. And we've met, the best thing about a film like this, is we traveled the whole country, we met great people. Like there's a guy in the film, Gene Nickel, who runs the Southern Poverty Center, which was shut down in North Carolina, as what people say is political retribution for his columns he wrote about the North Carolina legislature. And now we know, like everybody knows, even since we were editing the film, the whole world is kind of familiar with what's going on in North Carolina in terms of the legislature and what they're up to. And anyway, Gene Nickel met him. It's like a very righteous guy, very smart. In meeting Carville, meeting people from Wisconsin, it's like, you're just really brilliant, brilliant people. And so that's, it's ultimately a positive experience, even though the, you know, the film is a little depressing, you know, it's, it's, it doesn't prescribe a solution, although I think there is a, there's a hint at what could possibly happen to make this better to, to get us out of the, or at least to turn the tide on this to make it better. Do you think it's possible that Hillary will declare a jubilee on student debt? I have no idea. Yeah. I mean, in the review of your documentary in Salon, they talk about Bernie Sanders asking, maybe it's in your documentary where he asks kids, how many of you are in debt and they all raise their hand and some of those people are 100,000, $150,000 in debt. They're starting, here's a diploma, congratulations, you're $150,000 in debt. Well, if you're a lawyer, $150,000 in debt, you're not going to go work for the Southern Poverty Law Center. You're going to go to Wall Street and sell debt. You're going to perpetuate debt to get rid of your own debt. Right. Yeah. It's, it's rough. It's really rough. But the answer, we all have that clip from Sanders in there. Sanders is actually in the film talking about the Koch brothers. And it's a speech you made on the floor of the Senate. It's terrific. So, you know, it's the feel bad movie of the year. That's fantastic. But it's worth it. Steve Mims is the director of Starving the Beast. It is playing in Manhattan. It opens in Los Angeles next week. And it'll be available, I am sure, on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes. Eventually, yeah. Yeah. But right now, we have, there are, we're focusing on our theatrical run, which is really in many, many cities right now through like the first weekend on tour. Great. Thanks for coming by, I appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.