Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Michael Gibson. Michael is the co-founder and general partner of the 1517 fund,

and before that he was the vice president for grants at the Teal Foundation and a principal at Teal Capital.

His new book out this month is called Paper Belt on Fire,

How Renegade Investors sparked a revolt against the university. It's a terrific new book.

And Michael, always good to see you and thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Brian.

All right, so to start, I'm going to read a quote from your book. This book is our story, you write.

And on an unlikely account of how two outsiders, a charter school principal and a defrocked philosopher,

are now fortunate to preside over one of the most successful early stage funds in the business.

I do not write as a disinterested outsider, but as a crazed

participant gone berserk. Now, the book is an excellent read, and as Arnold Kling recently described

it, it's part memoir, part manifesto about education. So why don't, you know, why don't we begin

just by giving us the journey

that you chronicle in the book? What is the arc of the book's narrative? So when I was first

approached about writing a book and sent it out to all the big publishing houses, some of the

original pushback was interesting

is that some of these editors were saying,

why do you wanna tell a story?

Maybe you should be presenting more like a policy argument.

So with the issue of higher education,

I think we can all agree that the debt situation

...