One American - Chase Geiser - Benjamin Boyce | What Happened To Bret Weinstein At Evergreen State College?

July 14, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser

01:27:40

Benjamin Boyce | What Happened To Bret Weinstein At Evergreen State College? | OAP #31

Chase Geiser is joined by Benjamin Boyce. Benjamin Boyce is graduate of Evergreen State University. He is an author and made THE documentary on what happened at Evergreen State University as a result of Social Justice and Critical Race Theory: https://www.youtube.com/c/BenjaminABoyce Episode Links: Chase's Twitter: twitter.com/realchasegeiser Benjamin's Twitter: twitter.com/benjaminaboyce

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	There we go.
	Um my name is Benjamin Boyce.
	I run a YouTube channel and a podcast uh derivative uh that extracts the audio from my long form content, which is uh principally in this day and age.
	Uh uh being uh what I'm producing right now is a lot of interviews and stuff.
	Uh I'm known, I guess I'm known, I'm kind of known for a long-form documentary I did about my alma mater, which is uh the Evergreen State College and Olympia, Washington, which is a very uh well it was an experimental school,
	and they experimented with social justice at the school and took social justice to a certain particular end game uh that is pretty phenomenal uh in its uh the dramatis of the persona that it produced uh in 2017.
	Uh that event also birthed the public uh knowledge of a uh man named Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Hyang, who also run a podcast or a YouTube channel with a podcast reviv called Dark Horse Podcast, and they are a couple of uh evolutionary biologists.
	I am not a biologist, I am but a lowly poet, uh, which yes is cringy, and I embraced that cringe.
	Very cool.
	Well, um I did have a chance to begin the Evergreen Evergreen um sort of docuseries that you made, and um uh I will say that from what I watched of the first video in the series, uh great work, very impressed.
	I'm familiar with the story because I've been a fan of um uh both Weinstein brothers for a long time.
	Now isn't I always mix it up?
	Isn't Weinstein or Weinstein?
	Fine wine.
	Okay, fine wine.
	It makes sense because Einstein, right?
	You wouldn't say Einstein, but you never know.
	Yeah, he has a joke about that that he refuses to say because he doesn't want people to think that he's too big for his bridges.
	So um what was it like when did you graduate from Evergreen?
	In 2017.
	In 2017, okay.
	And what was it?
	What was it like when you were there?
	I guess probably very similar to how it is now.
	No, um, since 2017, the college has gone from just under 4,000 students to just over 1,000 students due to the handling of the events by the recently uh resigned uh president who was president at the time,
	George Bridges, and he is just taken his leave and his administration is completely botched uh the entire reputation of the Evergreen State College, even though they have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into suppressing dissident voices such as myself and propping up a narrative about what Evergreen does.
	Wow.
	So 75% drop in enrollment.
	That's unbelievable.
	So so the Evergreen story didn't just find um the reaches of the sort like an alt-right intellectual dark web community of um uh enthusiasts.
	It this is a story that um was big enough that it actually had an impact on general market.
	People would go consider Evergreen and they would Google it and they would see this, or they would visit and they would hear about it and it just turned them off.
	Over time the Evergreen State College uh employed some SEO firms or search engine optimization uh firms that were able to suppress uh most of my work, which thoroughly detailed it because I had access to internal documents,
	uh hundreds of hours, or thousands of pages of internal emails and dozens of hours of internal video that showed that the protest was actually uh inculcated and gestated by the professoriate and by the administration.
	They put those ideas into the students' heads uh that then uh they they popped like a great uh zit of justice and kind of exploded outward.
	Uh but yeah, that that um their reputation was drastically, even though they've tried to change it, their reputation was drastically negatively impacted.
	And especially now with college being any any given university now will get you a social justice degree.
	Uh Actually, it's probably mandatory that 80% of colleges right now will put you as a student through some sort of social justice training and equity, diversity, inclusion, what they call it.
	I experienced that in 2013, even.
	Okay, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, it's been a long time coming, but if you wanted, if you're gonna have to do that stuff anyways, you might as well avoid the place that did it so horrendously.
	So they're not gonna be able to.
	Yeah, and just for the sake of anybody who may not like have a clue what happened, can you just kind of briefly obviously it's a complex story that required hours of you know interviews and documents?
	So I know that it's not something to be reduced, but just in a couple of minutes, can you kind of say what happened, particularly to Brett?
	Um from the Brett Weinstein angle, he and a couple other professors decided to stand up vocally against this push toward equity, which is still not defined, and even the Washington state government has implemented equity as basically this operating principle for the entire government, and they still refuse to define that term.
	Uh so I who knows what that actually means.
	But if math is racist, it's impossible to define the term.
	Yeah, I mean, well, probably definitions at this point are a form of white supremacy.
	So uh and I I'm only partially joking um because the documents that you read if you dive into what's commonly called R uh CRT right now on critical race theory, which is a broad term, uh, which is a big discussion.
	It's very uh that that's a big mess.
	But um the college wanted to implement equity, and they wanted to make that the basis of hiring and uh employment and uh when you're hired and it like a condition for tenure, and they were basing it all on very, very faulty data.
	They did a bunch of statistical analyses of the college and they cherry-picked and uh bent the data to make it mean what it wanted to mean.
	But basically, they wanted to make the college explicitly um anti-anti-black, or they they began to become more and more race racial in their viewing of students and also just identitarian, where they uh over the course of my time there from 2013 to 2017,
	the college became increasingly more based in identity and identity was the means by which you transacted uh over uh for more and more and more of the college experience.
	And uh that identity basically was that you would break everybody up into different categories of identity, and then every category of identity had a spectrum from oppressed to oppressor, uh just like imp implicit.
	So a white heterosexual male who identifies with his own sex is conceived of as the paragon of the oppressor and must defer constantly to every uh subsequent identity.
	And then if you're a white woman who identifies with her sex and you spoke English fluently, then you were the second one in the totem pole, and it went down from there.
	And uh, you know, with which made it the case, and this is the odd thing if you look at the footage, and this sounds really, really weird, but it the way that it worked out is that disabled trans black people of color or disabled trans people of color were at the top of the totem pole by the time you got to the evergreen right.
	The more marginalized you are, the more privileged you become.
	So it really doesn't solve the problem, it just inverts it.
	Oh, it inverts it with extreme prejudice, actually.
	Yeah.
	Uh so there's there's no there's no pushback, there's no questioning.
	Uh there's no way to uh hold anybody accountable because everybody's already held accountable uh by basis of their immutable characteristics.
	So Brett Weinstein and a couple of other professors saw that that was what was going on, and they spoke up against that.
	And Brett was particularly targeted by the student newspaper.
	Some of his emails were printed, and he was made an example of uh somebody who is implicitly racist and white supremacist, even though he's Jewish and his ancestors were swept up in the c Holocaust.
	Uh, but by the time you get to the evergreen protests, he's being called a Nazi constantly.
	He's being called a Nazi constantly, um, and a white supremacist and stuff like that.
	So it doesn't even matter.
	Um, but he um made a letter about this thing called the day of absence, and the day of absence was a day every year at the college where uh traditionally students of color, which term I still have a problem with, but this is how they think of things.
	So these students of color would absent themselves from campus for a day and then go and they do these workshops off campus and have some solidarity, and that was supposed to show that the campus really relied on that identity, those identities were really a part of the campus,
	and to absent themselves would is kind of like this show of how important they were to the campus, and then there was a day of presence where everybody came back onto the campus the day after the day of absence, and a little bit different than banning all white people from campus.
	And then in 20 uh 16, 2017, this guy named Donald Trump got elected president, and that sent the entire uh school into this absolute frenzy of uh they I think they assumed that uh at any day the concentration camps were going to be set up and people were going to be hauled off uh and oppressed uh on campus.
	So anyway, so the campus overreacted.
	Well, I think they overreacted, but they reacted very strongly.
	Um the uh administration and the teachers and some of the students decided to invert the day of absence and invite the white students to leave campus um to get training in anti-racism and to get training in how privileged they were and get training in how to suppress their white supremacy or how was there an off-campus training that was offered?
	Yeah, yeah.
	There was uh uh there were events on campus for the students of color that were meant to center the students of color, and on those events that was about how white people are oppressing us and how Asians are basically white supremacists and Jewish people are white supremacists too.
	So even the so-called minorities were put in a totem pole based on certain did you attend?
	Um, I every year that thing was so cringy, and I just I had such a hard time swallowing their identitarianism that I just kind of ignored it and just kind of internalized my own disgust with it.
	And I I made a couple of uh web posts and I wrote a couple of emails and I spoke to a couple of my supervisors about the increasingly unhingedness behavior of the students and the teachers um over the course of those years, especially from 2015 to 2017.
	But you know, day of absence came and went, it wasn't that big of a deal.
	Now, once Fox News got a hold of that, that Fox News and Tucker Carlson made that a day of white uh racism or kicking white people off campus or forcing white people off campus.
	It wasn't necessarily the case that white people were forced off campus, but it was the case that students were required to segregate themselves.
	And I know of at least one class that the white students were uh, in order to get credit for their class, they had to go and meet in the woods and learn about their privilege under a tarp in the pouring rain, uh, you know, for some sort of anti-racist thing.
	So there was explicit discrimination, and just by basic discrimination, judging people and telling people how to act based on their race.
	So that day came and went, but then came and went, but then in the middle of May of 2017, a Facebook argument uh got started between a uh student of color and another student of color, but because one student of color had light skin privilege,
	so that white skin privilege just kind of translated into light skin privilege somehow, and then anybody who's the darker shade could just claim that they were oppressed and have authority to to say what's oppressive and not.
	And this light-skinned American Indian Puerto Rican uh young man just made a joke mocking another young man who's black, and uh that start sparked this huge argument that spilled over into campus, and then the campus police were involved, and a bunch of lies were published on to social media about black students being taken out of their beds at night and detained against their will to give a statement about something or another, which wasn't actually the case.
	It was all voluntary and they weren't detained at all.
	It was all voluntary to give a statement about this altercation that happened between a black student and another student of color that just had less melanin in the skin.
	And that event uh was used by the main protesters to say that this institution that was teaching the students that all institutions are inherently racist was in fact itself just as racist as any other uh institution of the West.
	And so they decided to protest that.
	And because Brett Weinstein, they had some emails of Brett Weinstein in their planning of a week-long Schmorgis board or um broadside of protests, they decided to start with Brett Weinstein and they ta made a tactical error because Brett Weinstein tried to reason with them.
	And they filmed their behavior and his behavior, streamed it onto the internet, made all these claims about this racist professor who was obviously just trying to get them to understand that racism is a problem, but this isn't the way to solve it.
	There's other ways to do it.
	And he was accused of using white logic.
	Uh to because he because he advocated for debate over dialectic.
	Yeah, he yeah, those one of the things.
	No, no, he wanted dialectic, not debate.
	Um that was that's right.
	That's right.
	Forgive me.
	Dialectic is when I try to understand you, you try to understand me, debate is right, and debate's what we try to commit.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So uh that kind of sparked up, and because Brett Weinstein was adjacent to some high profile um independent thinkers such as Sam Harris and his brother uh Eric Weinstein, and then their entire collective, uh uh uh Jordan Peterson and and God's sad and etc.
	The all that footage just kind of was replicated on the internet, and then YouTube had its own magic to work because there's this huge uh contingent of YouTube at that particular point of time that was in this is kind of loosey goosey kind of YouTube history, but there was this kind of this ongoing war, um, post-atheism versus Christianity.
	There was this kind of uh there was this thing called Gamergate that happened, and that started.
	I've had Ian on I've had uh yeah, Ian Miles Chung.
	He's uh he's I had him on the podcast a few times.
	He's uh he's a great guy.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I've tried to have him on, but like uh his he's in Myanmar or something like that.
	So he lives in Malaysia, I think.
	Malaysia, yeah.
	I think so, yeah.
	So there was this uh there was this big kind of um cohort of young content creators that were very decidedly anti-feminist, anti-social justice activist, and they got a hold of this evergreen footage,
	which is the most cringiest, just seriously the most cringiest set of footage uh that is extolling uh the end game of these social justice ideas, uh and just uh how unhinged the people who adhere to them can be.
	And so the YouTube made a whole bunch of hay out of that.
	And I was watching things happen around me, I was watching things happen on the internet, and I noticed that there were people even just down the street from the college who were making these videos and trying to explain what was happening at Evergreen from an insider view or closer view.
	I'm like, well, you guys don't really see this.
	I've been on camera filming all of these training sessions, so I'm gonna try to put this stuff out.
	And I started to publish all that material and I kind of started a YouTube channel that got a lot of attention.
	So I've just been running with it ever since.
	Uh so uh what are your thoughts on um what are my the censorship that's occurred with uh I uh Ivermectum story, and you don't have to discuss it if you don't feel comfortable discussing it.
	But I know that I don't I'm I'm not I just I don't I don't know.
	That's that's beyond my pay grade.
	Well, I I I mean from uh I mean from a censorship standpoint, not from a medical standpoint.
	I'm not really interested in discussing the efficacy of treatment or the uh or anything like that.
	Um, but just from a standpoint of hey, let's just say hypothetic let's just say hypothetically an influential thinker was was promoting a medicine that was um uh not an act not actually a cure for HIV.
	You know, is that is that grounds for censorship, or do we do we let that conversation before let's uh rephrase that to uh public intellectual just asking questions around something that looks to be suppressed or looks to be created by a certain pharmaceutical company That has a lot of uh possibility of making a lot of money doing vaccines, and if there's uh something other than a vaccine available, then they can't like push a vaccine to market.
	So there's a lot of questions, insofar as Brett Weinstein has been asking questions, and you we can have it.
	I don't know all the ins and outs and how uh I it just seems like I feel bad for him, he's always in trouble, and it it seems like he's just really trying to be an intellectually uh sound person with integrity.
	Well, some of us maybe I'm in a fan.
	Some of us have a preternatural ability to start asking the the wrong the right sort of wrong questions.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right.
	And and Brett possesses an ability to figure out the vector of uh of dialectic and zero in on things that are really uncomfortable for the powers that be.
	Now, whether or not Ivermectin's good or not, but in so far as I know, Brett Weinstein's channel was fully demonetized, I think both of his channels.
	I'm not sure.
	I'm not familiar with the latest update.
	I know the originally the video was just taken down and there were issues strike.
	And then I believe the entire channel was demonetized but not deplatformed.
	However, I am not confident if that if that actually happened.
	I don't I can't remember.
	But as far as I know, uh he's still able to live stream and do stuff like that on YouTube uh based on I think I watched one live stream with him yesterday or a day before.
	Yeah, he's dual posting now with Odyssey, O D Y S E E or O D D Y S E E. One of those two things.
	I think it's one D that's one D that's uh based on some sort of blockchain technology, uh, which I still don't understand.
	Um but uh it's all about there's there's a need for new platforms.
	Even Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is uh putting his eggs into a um censorious sort of internet protocol that would uh save us from uh centralized authority.
	But if uh my you know, this has been going on for a long time, and it's replicated not just with the vaccine and ivermectin, but also just the way in which uh the 2020 presidential election was held and what was allowed to be said and what was not allowed to be said on YouTube,
	and uh whenever somebody mentions something, they were always given like some sort of uh some sort of notice was put on their channel about the facts, and and it's very uh clear that there are vested interests that would rather control information than let it be free.
	And that isn't shouldn't be surprising to us because it has only been 20 years where the internet has been you know free and it was only going to it was only going to be the wild west for so long because of the legacy media uh and the powers that be don't know how to control the masses and they need to control the masses in order to maintain power without censorship.
	So we'll see how that continues to develop.
	Yeah, so I I'm interested to see how it plays out as well.
	I it's such a complicated issue because if you're an advocate for free speech, then you sort of need to advocate for the f the freedom of you know private companies to do what they want on their own platforms or with their own stuff.
	But in the same sense, if these private companies really have they really are the new public square, then you know, where does freedom of speech come into protect protect the individuals who are on the on the square rather than the individuals who own the square?
	Yeah, are they the road or are they the restaurant?
	Right.
	Right.
	So I don't know what the solution is.
	Hopefully, smarter people than I can come to the bottom of it.
	But one thing I did want to ask you about, because with the whole CRT thing, I can understand why we're seeing it in corporations just from a logistics standpoint, because if you're a major corporation and you're you're worried about liability issues in terms of wrongful termination of uh people of color or anything like that,
	then it makes sense that you would do these sort of CRT trainings at your um at your corporation so that in the event that you're sued in civil court by a former employee or or or something of that nature, you can say, listen, and this is what our corporation does to mitigate and you know to fight for equity, and you can you can make a case for yourself in defense and this.
	So I understand sort of why corporations may do it.
	Um but what I fail to understand is why Evergreen made the decision to go so hardcore with it, Given the outcome that they've seen of a 70 uh 75% drop in enrollment.
	Well, they were well, that that's a good question because they decided to implement social justice, and then when it blew up in their face, they decided to not look at what they did wrong at all because they can't afford to say, well, maybe our ideas are wrong.
	They couldn't do that.
	That would be the intellectually honest thing to do.
	And at that point, they can't be intellectually honest because from my perspective, the way that we saw equity and all those ideas being implemented in the Evergreen State College, it seemed to be the case that Evergreen was supposed to be the flagship for rolling out equity across the entire state because it happened at Evergreen First,
	and the presidents connected to the legislature, the dem very strongly Democrat legislature, and the executive branch of our government, which is a Democrat Democrat governor, James uh Jay Inslee.
	And Jay Inslee has always been saying equity is the thing, you know.
	Uh the him and Bridges say the same thing that the civil rights movement was great, but there's these glaring instances of injustice.
	We need to stamp out racism, and we need to we need to make everything equal and as equal as possible.
	And equity is our path to implementing on a statistical level, just this complete leveling of the playing field.
	Uh and by leveling, I I think it evergreen shows us that it completely destroys any sort of height by tearing everybody down or setting everybody up who isn't a position of power to tear everybody else down.
	It's purely zero sum and and destructive ideology.
	In practice, that's my perspective, and I am uh biased with that.
	But yeah, but you've actually looked into a which and there's something to be said for that.
	You know, that the other thing is.
	I don't think it's healthy on a personal level.
	It it um it's not psychologically healthy on a small group level, it it doesn't create good bonds, it doesn't create good individuals, it doesn't create good in inter individual relationships, and then it starts to take over every institution and denigrates the the stated purpose of any institution,
	whether it's a knitting club or a school or some corporation that produces widgets, all of those things schooling, knitting, and widgets need to be put into you know, secondary to this push towards social justice.
	Social justice needs to be the first and foremost thing because we have to solve this problem, and so it starts to divert more and more resources from the purpose of any given institution or club into this substitute kind of practice.
	And what we saw at the Evergreen State College when they started to implement this stuff is that the classrooms became more and more like group therapy sessions without anybody qualified to deal with actual therapeutic matters.
	We started to talk more and more about our identities and our oppressions and our traumas, and that was just what we were basking in all the time, and less and less were we learning the skills and even skills themselves were deemed inappropriate in the realm of social justice.
	Just for example, the writing center uh taught the writing center aides, and I was gonna try to be a you know a writing tutor, uh, but I I didn't I didn't pass the ideological litmus test of uh adhering to their anti-oppression framework.
	But even the right and bring yourself to fake it.
	Uh I could have faked it, but it I just thought that if people want to be activists, they still need to learn how to communicate.
	And so we should teach them how to communicate, and then they can decide whatever to do with that.
	But no, we have to teach them to be activists first and foremost.
	But even in the writing center, correcting someone's grammar was a microaggression.
	So you couldn't actually even help somebody to communicate better.
	And so what you have across across the left coast of America.
	Someone use poor grammar or is it cultural appropriation?
	Logic, there's an inverse.
	Well, the thing is that it's only inverted and only it's never inverted.
	Only it's only in one way.
	But what you have is a bunch of people going to college to try to figure out how to run a business or be a good worker, they don't get the skills that they need.
	They have to go back And hire tutors to learn the things that the college are refusing to tell them because the college just wants to coddle them and give them this kind of this leg up in the world by giving them these degrees so that they can make a job, but because the degrees don't uh hold up to a standard of learning anymore,
	the degrees become worthless, and then you have a workforce that needs to figure out another way to get skills, or you have uh entire industries just lacking people that have the skills that then outsource the mid the mid-level jobs or the white-collar jobs just get outsourced more and more to foreign nationals come over.
	And so you have the uh we have the in the blue-collar jobs being exported off uh offshore, right?
	Which is displacing the blue-collar people, over overly represented by people of color and the marginalized people are um more affected by the exporting of our jobs.
	And then the white-collar sector is uh no longer being accessible by the blue collar people because the way to get into there, which is college, is no longer performing what college needs to do because it's now being the social justice institution.
	So you have this a bunch of companies now are going to start, you know, hiring people overseas to do all this stuff, and we're just gonna have a bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger populace of people who are only taught to overthrow the world, are not taught to understand it, and aren't even taught to articulate or to argue their points about how the world should be changed, and then they don't have anything else to do.
	They can't do anything and they don't have anything else to do.
	It's a recipe for disaster, it's an absolute recipe for disaster.
	And the fact that our education system from kindergarten to you know the post-grad rule uh post-grad level are it's entirely, at least in Washington State, everybody has to do yearly trainings in this stuff, and all these teachers that are being pumped out by places such as Evergreen are teaching this stuff, and then all the public servants are teaching this stuff and adhering to this stuff.
	We are headed towards a huge bubble, a huge bubble.
	And I'm sad to see Washington and Oregon specifically, because it's so beautiful out here, succumb to this stuff, but it might take these blue states failing tremendously in order for this stuff to get flushed out of our system.
	I don't think it's going to destroy the United States, but it is definitely not going to help us in the long run.
	So do you think that it's the students that are um radicalizing the universities, or do you think that universities are radicalizing the students?
	Well, there's a certain psychology for you know 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds rebellious by nature.
	It's really good, you know, strike out, challenge your parents, challenge the system, challenge the man.
	So there's already that psychology and that energy to innovate and energy to break the rules and to you know try something new.
	So there's that energy, but it's being capitalized upon by these critical theories or these uh various different studies departments, which basically teach one thing in a bunch of different skins, but it's the same conflict theory rubric that there's the oppressed class and the oppressor class, and we need to invert that hierarchy.
	We need to invert it at every level of understanding, of knowledge production, as they call it, and of interpersonal discourse.
	And then eventually we should have a uh Hollywood, Netflix and Amazon and Disney, etc., they're all implementing this um they're very explicitly implementing a racialization of content and representation and making sure that the white man is less and less the hero and more and more the bad guy in order to give room for these people, these other identities that haven't been there.
	So there it's just constant subversion of archetypes with this one constant, one constant theme, one constant theme that there's the oppressor and the oppressed, and these are based on identities which are based on social constructs or systems of oppression, and we're going to recreate that in order to break it in order to recreate in order to break it.
	So everything that goes under the name of studies and the humanities side of college writ large is largely taken over by this very singular narrow viewpoint that is uh explicitly Radicalizing, explicitly activist and agitationary, and it's uh agitationary.
	Like it.
	Yeah.
	So I have two things that I want to ask you.
	First thing is just kind of a short thing, and the second thing I want to ask you is um what originally attracted you to Evergreen, because I think one of the tragedies of what's going on now in terms of just the general political climate in the United States is that so many great minds are preoccupied with um with the politics and the social climate that we're not working on the things that we inherently should work on, right?
	So for example, um uh I'll use I'll just use Eric Weinstein as an example.
	So uh Eric's really good about still staying focused on the things that he's passionate about, so this isn't a perfect example.
	But it's unfortunate that somebody like Eric Weinstein, who is a brilliant mathematician, brilliant physicist, brilliant scientific thinker, has to spend so much time making the case for freedom of speech.
	Like he should he should be able to just do physics all day if he wants or math or whatever he wants, you know.
	And I'm happy that he's that he's making the case, and I think he's great at it, but I think that's one of the the intellectual capital that's wasted because of all this this contention uh uh happening in the country, I think is is astronomical, and I don't think people really talk much about that.
	Yeah, the amount of amount of energy that we're pouring into this one, these really bad ideas they're really bad.
	And so we have to constantly say, these are bad ideas, these are bad ideas.
	No, no, no.
	Men and women are physically different.
	If you put men in women's sports, you are basically making them exclusionary of females because there's no way that a woman's gonna compete.
	Uh woman is anywhere between I don't know, 20 and 50% less capable in any given area of a male.
	But we have to argue that physically, physically.
	Right, right.
	Just to be very hyper-specific.
	So we can't.
	Well, it's also reaction time too.
	Reaction time was I guess that's a physical property, but reaction time men are men are actually women are quicker with sounds and and men are quish quicker visually to that holds true in my house.
	My wife, she always hears something.
	Did you hear that?
	No.
	What?
	She tells.
	But um there's this other kind of this other thing.
	So yeah, there's a lot of uh tension that we're putting into these ideas and overturning these ideas, but it's also there's this other thing about it where it's the sexiest thing to talk about.
	It's just it the train wreck is what we want to look at.
	That's where the crowd is, that's where the attention is.
	So if you put yourself into that conversation, you're gonna get more people listening to you.
	If you put yourself in a purely mathematical conversation, who's gonna listen to you?
	Right?
	Maybe the future, you know.
	If if you spent 20 years creating the next Ulysses, uh maybe a thousand people will read it before you die, but you could just run out right now and claim that CRT is the devil, or claim that the white man is the devil, and just scream that at the top of your lungs, and everybody's gonna grab g gather around you and start arguing with or against you.
	You can completely create your identity, either opposing or supporting these ideas.
	So yeah, it's uh it's a waste of of time, it's a waste of brain power, but it's also kind of the audience's fault for paying attention to this and not tithing our attention to more substantial matters.
	Well, and I'm and I'm not necessarily saying that it's a waste of time generally speaking.
	I think it's an incredibly important conversation.
	I'm having the conversation right now, right?
	Uh, I just I just think it's a shame that there I feel bad for intellectuals who are actually passionate about completely unrelated subjects.
	Yeah.
	Not being able to live, you know, a life in a core in those in those fields, in those industries, right?
	So if you're a journalist or if you're just somebody like me who's trying, you know, trying to push a podcast, uh, then it makes sense that you would look into it or or or spend time on it.
	I just I I just feel um I I guess I have a level of empathy for for others.
	Because you know, there was a time, for example, in my life where I wanted to be a musician.
	I I think like half of all men when they're 14 years old want to be a rock star.
	And Uh yeah, and the point exactly in the in the um I'm still here, but the point um uh that I'm trying to make is uh you know I've I've sort of forgotten as I've as I've gotten older what it is like to be interested in something um apolitical just because the conversation and our culture is so universally uh revolving around politics,
	and I wonder if I if I'd be a novelist or or what I would be doing if if if um I wasn't so distracted and and enticed is a better word, uh enticed by the the political conversation going on.
	Well, how did you get into this?
	Uh well I um I own an advertising business, uh specializes in social media advertising for small businesses.
	And I um just I've always been interested in politics.
	I was um I was a big um fan of the fountain head in high school.
	Uh that kind of set me on a on a certain path.
	Um I'm not like you know, I'm not like a card-carrying objectivist in the Ayn Rand sense of the term, but I am uh certainly influenced by politics.
	Uh and you know, throughout the past six years as podcasting has really taken off.
	I've been one of the fans that follows the Michael Malises and the Weinstein brothers and Joe Rogan uh and Jordan Peterson, and I just sort of one by one these independent thinkers.
	I I don't really know what to call them, because I don't want to call them right wing because they're not right wing.
	I don't want to call them intellectual dark web, but you know, just these independent influencers, I guess, is is the closest term I can I can come up with.
	Um started stacking up in my list of content consumption, and I got to the point where it's funny because you know, you start to feel like you're friends with these people almost like, oh man, I wish that I was there because I would love to be part of this conversation.
	And um after everything that happened with January 6th and the most recent election, I um uh in really the last four years, just how the media the culture's been and the media's been, I just decided that you know what, I'm just gonna pull the trigger and see if I can see if I can do this.
	Um what do you what are you doing?
	I I created this podcast and basically I noticed that in the conservative space, and I would say that I'm in the conservative space, although I don't I don't call myself a Republican, but I always vote for Republicans, so most Republicans would say I'm a Republican.
	Um in this conservative space, I found that we we have like a lot of talking heads that like the Ben Shapiro's, for example, that talk at the camera, they've got their shtick, they're great at it, and there weren't enough people creating content that's conversation-based with like a back and forth.
	Um and so I wanted to sort of see if I could fill that void just to make what's traditionally been a conservative monologue sort of a conservative conservative dialogue and have these conversations.
	And part of it's um purely selfish.
	This is not something that I'm doing out of like any sense of altruism.
	It's not even something I'm doing out of the way.
	Well, you are conservative after all.
	Right.
	It's not something I'm necessarily even doing out of any sort of um effort to like change the political climate, although that would be nice.
	Uh the primary reason I'm doing it, I think, is because I really want to hang out with the people that I listen to.
	Okay.
	And if I were to like message you, for example, and say, or, you know, or George Papadopoulos or uh Ron Coleman, and I was just a guy with 75 followers on Twitter, you know, I might get a polite response, but um, you know, you're not gonna get on the phone with me for an hour and a half.
	So I made a podcast and I was like, fuck it.
	I'm gonna build my influence so I can actually hang out with the people I like to listen to.
	Could could you help me with something?
	Yeah, yeah.
	What is what is a conservative?
	What is conservativism?
	What is it?
	That is a great question.
	Other than not liberal or not woke.
	I know what it's not, but I don't I still try to get grapple with what it is.
	So I don't um I don't claim to know the answer, but I do know what I do know what I think that it is.
	Okay.
	So when I use the term conservative or conservatism, I simply mean conserving the values and systems um uh in place that um protect the individual rights that I deem sacred.
	So for example, I can I aim to conserve the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, right?
	And policies that align with that.
	I'm conservative in that sense, but I'm not conservative in the sense that you know I don't think that gay people should be able to get married.
	Like I don't believe that at all.
	I think I'm totally pro whatever.
	So I'm not like an evangelical conservative, but I'm definitely sort of like a free market capitalist.
	I'm not a libertarian because I do believe that the state plays a role, but I'm uh you know I'm not an anarchist, but I I um I I am a conservative in the sense that I do believe that certain things should need to be protected from a progressive political faction that aims to erode them for the sake of um acquiring and keeping power.
	Okay.
	Is that is that a bullshit answer?
	You can totally be critical.
	But that's the best I can do.
	It's the best I can do.
	It's a lot to go with.
	Where have conservatives been where do they mess up?
	How are they?
	I think they mess up.
	I think they'd be they get dogmatic.
	And I think also um dogmatic in the in the moral sense.
	I think that um conservatives are often distracted by trying to convince people that their way of life is superior, or that we need to legislate certain behaviors.
	Um I think that conservatives um mess up in that they are unfairly critical of um uh uh legitimate, genuine and authentic academics, right?
	So there's this sort of culture in in conservative in conservative groups or circles of you know just anybody who went to college has sort of been indoctrinated, or just because somebody went to college, like for example, when I was um uh I had a serious girlfriend when I was in college, and uh her dad was a very successful um electrical contractor.
	He owned his own company, uh he was electrician, basically, but he started a company that made lots and lots of money with other electricians and everything.
	And um, you know, he was a he was one of my favorite guys I've ever met, so I'm not bashing him, but he would jokingly refer to me as college boy whenever I went to visit, you know, like oh college boy, you know, and it he he he was being friendly, but it it's just that that's indicative of a of a zeitgeist in in that sort of uh that culture of just sort of uh um not trusting of urban, yeah, anti-intellectual kind of thing.
	I think that conservatives make that mistake too.
	Um and I also think that it's a I think that conservatives uh it's a gerontocracy.
	There's a certain level of out-of-touchness that's going on, and um I'm really as I get older, I'm 30 now, but as I get older, I'm very intentional about see uh perceiving younger generations favorably because I don't want to be the crotchety 50-year-old that's like these kids, these kids today don't know what they're doing, you know what I mean?
	And there's gonna be some of that, but I don't know.
	You still have 20 years for that to kick in.
	So I know good.
	But starts early, man.
	What do you think that could where do you think conservative script?
	I don't even know what your political affiliation has been.
	And frankly, I don't I don't really care.
	I mean, I'm interested, but I don't care from like a any other point than just I don't know.
	I'm I'm usually on the uh opposite side of center from whoever's deciding on what I am.
	Um usually like kind of a Lib Tard from the position of a conservative and a neocon from the position of a liberal.
	Uh that's just how I come off.
	And I guess that's a good branding to do.
	I it's true centrism.
	Um, but do you mind if I ask who you voted for in 2016?
	16.
	Or excuse me.
	Yeah, and I want to hear 2020.
	Okay, okay.
	The Green Party shitting with Johnson.
	I was in I'm in Thurston.
	There was no possible there's no outcome other than Hillary catching the state.
	Right, right.
	Um What about 2020?
	Well and you don't have to say if you don't want.
	Well, the thing is you will be a chicken if you if you don't say.
	Yeah, right.
	Well, if if you if you if you can remain ambiguous, ambiguous with uh your uh actual political stance, you get to interact with people from a variety of political stances other than fundamentalists who you drives them up the wall.
	Uh and I mean fundamentalists from the left and the right, anybody who's really like this is the way that the world works, and either you're with it or you're against us, those are the people that don't like ambiguity or nuance, but there's people on the fringes of the fundamentalists who are willing to be open to people who aren't for the other team.
	But they're still caught up in that us versus them thing, but they're willing to you know kind of just open up just a little bit uh to that.
	So I like to keep my decisions.
	Sure.
	You can keep it anonymous.
	I don't know.
	It doesn't really matter.
	Well, I am curious.
	What do you think of when – what do you think – well, if you're a cat person, you definitely didn't vote for Trump.
	What do you think of conservative – like when you hear the word conservative, what does it make you think?
	And where do you think that quote-unquote conservatives fall short?
	Well, there needs to be an intellectual tradition for conservatives.
	Yes.
	You know, the – well, conservatives messed up by pushing us into the Iraq war.
	They screwed us over so hard.
	They screwed themselves over so hard.
	Do you think that was conservative or bipartisan?
	There were a lot of them votes for that.
	Well, it was George Bush.
	It was George Bush.
	He lied.
	He was leading the – Yeah.
	He lied to you so you could all – They all voted for it, the Democrats and the Republicans.
	Everybody, even the New York Times was arguing – it was just – it was total crazy madness, which is the other question.
	It's that, okay, we're fighting between left and right, so-called left, so-called right, but really there's this managerial elite that has overtaken our government.
	I call it the political class.
	The political class, the deep state, whatever you want to call it.
	They're the ones who call the shots, even with – the Trump presidencies actually, once people get their heads out of their butts about him, and he probably gave them plenty reasons to shove their sensory organs, especially their brains, up their own asses and not be able to think critically
	about what he's doing but he showed so much about what's going on in our government he showed the collusion of the media and the deep state and even wasn't there even instances where the the generals of the army were just refusing to give him information because they didn't want him changing their minds or what the the the executive branch is no longer in control of the military.
	the military is in control of the executive branch.
	And that was also very explicit in the Obama era where he came in.
	And as soon as he got into power, he was just kind of the, the beautiful.
	Guantanamo Bay is still open.
	Yeah.
	You know, and Snowden talked about that too in depth.
	And I, and I have a, I have a number of close friends that are, I have a number of friends, one close friend that is in the intelligence community, top secret clearance type guy.
	And I asked him about this in 2013, 2012, maybe, you know, before Trump.
	And he's like, listen, the intelligence community won't tell politicians anything unless they specifically ask or have what's called need to know.
	So if you don't know what questions to ask, you're not going to get information proactively given to you by the intelligence community.
	So if you're sitting in the oval office and you don't have a clue about what you should be asking about, because all these operations that are occurring, all this money that's being spent is, is so deep out of view that you don't even know it's swimming under you, right?
	Then, then you're never going to know.
	And, and, you know, I understand why from a national security point, we have to be incredibly careful about the information that we disclose or allow public.
	But at the same token, if you have a, an incredibly well-funded organization that has secrets and nobody that, no, no, uh, fourth party that, that it is accountable to, then that seems to me to be a very, very dangerous, uh, power political climate.
	Like you see, the fall of Rome that makes sense they had inflation they had a you know a dictatorship they had a split empire there was a lot of betrayal that makes sense but Rome did not have like this you know 10% 15% 20% of national budget organization that like didn't have to tell the Caesar anything like it's so I I think that we're sort of entering new territory as as a as a species where we have civilizations that operate with these organizational structures that have zero accountability and incredible funding.
	Like whenever the FBI gets caught doing something wrong they conduct an internal investigation like how the hell does that make sense?
	You think Jeffrey Epstein should have been responsible for the investigation into Epstein Island like why would it be any different for the FBI?
	Yeah yeah yeah yeah that that entire and then it makes me wonder well that CIA came out with that those woke videos right do you remember that they had oh yeah recently yeah it was a couple months ago or a few weeks do you think it's a psyop I think that well one it's just this entire equity, diversity, and inclusion stuff, which is explicitly racist and explicitly divisive of the individual.
	It's it's the recipe for the balkanization on the individual level.
	It's brave new world, 1984 levels of separating people from the truth from themselves and from each other.
	And so the and I don't know if it's a psy-op, this diversity, equity, and inclusion stuff, but it is evolutionarily developed to cause organizations to take up more and more mind share over the individual and to co-opt human emotion and morality and shape the shape the individuals that make it up into mirror images of this.
	And so this diversity, equity, inclusion stuff, because it reduces people to what an organization sees, which is a bunch of just different category boxes.
	Like it's basically that's how an organization looks at a human being.
	It's like all these, you know, how much income do you have?
	Like what's your where are you from?
	Like what are your ancestry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And the stuff is being used.
	There's a bunch of useful idiots that are pushing this stuff, thinking that they're going to, you know, at least in education, they think that the the stuff is good, um, and that it's just and it's going to end up somehow causing some sort of utopian existence,
	but with that whole apparatus of the federal government adopting that and co-opting that, and then taking the moral high ground, you know, the CIA that is known for torturing people, is now putting out propaganda about how virtuous they are because they have a non-binary gender queer uh Latin khs uh female per person that like like that fills out the forms that gets the people tortured, right?
	Let's see.
	Is that a laptop?
	I think you're supposed to put in that sound from the dial-up modem in there.
	I I think that's how you exactly I remember that.
	Yeah.
	I think the first website I ever went to was Disney.com.
	Oh wow.
	Okay.
	Just to see what's up.
	You know, I was a kid.
	I was born in 90, so yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, yeah, 90.
	Crazy days.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That was uh, yeah.
	You're just a young whippersnapper coming up because I guess I guess grab all my attention market share.
	So I mean there's a lot of weirdness.
	What's your question?
	Well, I wanted to ask you um what originally attract initially attracted you to um Evergreen and what it was like when you went.
	So I don't want to just trash on them.
	You know, I want to kind of know, I want to hear the sunny side of the story too.
	Well, oh, where it is it.
	Um I went there because I had written about uh 16 novels that blew up in my face, and I just didn't want to go to college when I was in the when I was in the 90s and I was in my 20s.
	Uh I just I had this very strong uh distaste for formal education.
	And so I just wrote upon I'm still here.
	Uh okay.
	I just wrote on my own and uh worked in uh cafes and worked in preschools for a number of years, and then I got really, really burnt out of working in preschool.
	Uh I just couldn't be a part-time dad anymore.
	So what'd you mean about blown up in your face?
	Like they they took off or or you were criticized?
	What what do you mean?
	Oh no, no, no, I never published them because I'd get to the last quarter of the book, and it would just become incredibly increasingly chaotic.
	Uh the structure that I was trying to create within fiction, um, and the way that my mind works and the scatter-brainedness or the kind of um my imagination's like a television that switches channels, not too often, but too often, not too too often, but it it switches channels.
	So I had to figure out a l uh I had to write a number of different books to figure out how to switch the channel and to have each story that I'm switching to actually have its entire story written out so that I know what's going on when we step from one channel to the other, and then I have to figure out how to get people's attention to pay attention to something that's abruptly breaking their attention or breaking out of its own attention.
	All it Just the way that my brain was set up and the way that I thought that I could be in the world as a writer, um, I I kept on failing at.
	So I went to Evergreen because I was burnt out and I wanted to get some legitimacy.
	I I was thirsting for legitimacy as a thinker.
	I wanted to be an intellectual.
	I had been trying to be an intellectual and so I went to Evergreen to be an intellectual.
	It was uh up the road from me.
	It was very, very cheap because I was very, very poor and it's a state school.
	And they had a big emphasis on independent learning.
	So I could go there and I could really immerse myself in topics and kind of figure out, do master's level work on a shoestring budget with the maximum amount of freedom.
	And just kind of just take a four year break from the workforce to really concentrate on being an intellectual, really dive into intellectualism as a pursuit in and of itself and figure out, you know, how does language work?
	How do stories work?
	How does, how do you theories about narrative work?
	work how do how do we put together stories and break them apart and what do stories do.
	You know just I cra crafted a course in what I considered the narrative arts where I studied literature but I also created literature.
	So narrative as a practice and narrative as a pursuit.
	And then narrative as something that operates individually and operates in relationships.
	We are always telling like a marriage is a novel.
	You know, we kind of create a story and we're always revising the story that we're telling each other of each other in our heads.
	And then any group that's going to do any sort of activity in the world will eventually need some form of narrative or some sort of view of the world in which they are actants.
	So there's the agent and the arena and so that that narrative structure as far as I'm concerned is the most human form of knowing that we have because it takes all these ideas and all these phenomena and it relates it to a character doing something in the world and then having some sort of reaction and action.
	So the narrative structure is a way of encoding into knowledge human experience at qua human experience.
	So I went to Evergreen to do that and I very quickly realized that there were people from I I was 36 and there were people who were 19 there and the 19 year olds were 19.
	Some of them were really brilliant but a lot of them just kind of stumbled out of high school into this really cheap uh institution right and they took a lot of naps and they didn't do their homework and they just didn't even either have the wherewithal to think at a collegiate level or didn't weren't inclined necessarily to do that.
	A lot of them but there were a lot of cool people that I met while I was there.
	And so I just spent four years four and a half years just writing and reading and writing and reading and writing and reading and so by the time that I was done at the Evergreen State College I I finished what I wanted to do insofar as writing is something that I wanted to do in the last four months that I was there I realized that I didn't need to write anymore.
	I'd written everything all I needed to do was rewrite but I I was done writing and I didn't know what to do with my life.
	I went to Evergreen you know as a college to kind of get to the next level with my craft but I kind of put it behind me.
	Like, I figured out what I want to do, but it's not enough.
	I need to do something else.
	Did you go back to the novels?
	Since I left Evergreen?
	Yeah.
	Have you finished them?
	I am now publishing them a chapter at a time on a Substack channel.
	I want to check those out.
	I didn't mean to cut you off.
	I just wanted to know.
	I wanted to know how the plot turned out in that aspect or respect.
	yeah no I'm publishing the last as a serial book and there's I just published the 10th chapter it's called alias to dream dot substack dot com that's A L L A L I A S T O D R E A M alias to Dream um and there's a few uh free chapters I'm not Making it all free because uh I have to I have to gate it somehow.
	So it's gated, but there's a couple of free chapters.
	And then when I when I'm done with the 24 chapters of the last novel, then I'll publish that and then I'll go on to the uh the first novel, which is the second novel, which is the yeah because it's are they tied together?
	Is it a big series or is are they all just completely independent works?
	No, they um they it starts at the beginning of time and it ends at the end of time.
	And every version, every the way that I conceive of genre, I develop this sense of genre as different this is a technical term as far as I'm concerned, but different viscosities of narrative.
	Um and by that I mean the how dense the narrative is um from mythology to um postmodern literature or metafiction.
	There's the spectrum of ways of engaging with narrative.
	So in mythos, you have these very primary characters, and you can think of them as a child's drawing.
	It's very chunky, it's very bright, there's not a lot of nuance, but it's very uh powerful, it's very in your face, it's very iconic.
	And then you go from that very rudimentary way of making sense of the world through various different evolutions of nuance and of uh yeah, basically just forms of nuance, where you go from the mythology to the fairy tale, which is less serious,
	more playful, but also starts to incorporate things from normal life, and then you get the romance, you get the the heroic epic, which is talking about the archetypes that are kind of demigods, and then you have the modern novel, which is more of the internal uh sense of self,
	which is kind of uh kind of an evolution from the picturesque, which is a cycle of selves, but then you have the modern novel, which is more about the the interpersonal psychological development, and then you have the genre fictions such as science fiction and horror and fantasy, which are kind of versions of the uh kind of versions of speculative fiction or fantasy fiction with the kind of a novel center where you have a character,
	you have internal thoughts, you have kind of a mature way of relating to the characters, and then you have the metafiction, which is uh fiction about fiction and and that entire postmodern um oh classical postmodern uh literature that you saw a lot of in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and then kind of fell off because the problem with metafiction is that it tends to eat itself and destroy everything in its path.
	Um, but I've been an example of like a metafiction book that maybe somebody's heard of because I I'm not I'm trying to think wrap my head around an example of that.
	Um well, a good example would be well to to jump into film and a lot of Kaufman stuff, like who's John uh being John Malkovich, which is the oh yeah, yeah.
	Bing John Malkovich with um John Krusak.
	Yeah, and John Malkovich too and drama, okay.
	Yeah, being John Malkovich, I think is um that that's very meta and it's very like de deconstructing or adaptation, which is another Kaufman film who has Nicolas Cage.
	You have the story reflecting on the story, and the authors there mediating the story being told by the story, and and there's that blurring of the line, and um within metafiction, you have David Foster Wallace, is probably the paragon of the postmodern fiction with infinite jest being uh one-third of the book's footnotes,
	and those footnotes are that have footnotes within footnotes, and it's just a constant commentary on all the different things that are going on and all these different segues going on, and then you also have uh more technical sort of postmodernism, which is basically critical theory or hermenetics or semiotics, all that stuff.
	Everything that we're dealing now with that goes under the name of critical theory is an offshoot of literary studies, which is just looking at the world as a series of texts and then problematizing the stories by reading into the story or reading into the story, reading into life, reading into phenomena, a very particular narrative pattern, which happens to boil down into a kind of a Marxist-ish power game.
	Everything's power, and we have to upset the power.
	Can I share um an incredibly controversial idea that I've had for years that I've never spoken to anyone really about?
	Oh, yeah.
	Open up.
	So are you freaking are you um familiar with the story 12 Years of Slave?
	It's an autobiography, and then it was the movie.
	Oh, I love that movie.
	That movie is incredibly powerful.
	Yes, right.
	Emotionally uh wrecked.
	I went with th two of my buddies both named Matt, and we were all crying by the end, and we were college kids, and not not particularly sensitive to 19th century issues, okay, just generally, because we were college kids and whatever, right?
	But we went and we're like crying by the end.
	Anyway, yeah.
	I really want someone to remake that movie with the exact same script.
	Okay.
	No changes.
	Scene for scene, identical.
	The only difference is I want all the white people to be black and I want all the black people to be white.
	Yeah.
	And I think that would be just like so fascinating.
	Because you know, obviously it would be an outrage, but at the same time, the point is this is what humans did to other human beings.
	Like it it just it totally dissociates the identity politics from it if you were to do that.
	And I just think it would be a fascinating move for somebody to make that movie.
	That is precisely what started the Evergreen protest.
	Somebody wanted a black class, and somebody parodied that by switching the races from black to white.
	It was just a stupid little Facebook joke.
	And that was seen as a uh primary just violation of everything sacred.
	The I go I go in and out of racial discourse on American channel because it it really exhausts me.
	And there's a lot of complexity, there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of trauma, but there's also a lot of grift.
	There's a whole lot of grift, and there's a whole bunch of money riding on a certain narrative.
	Um and the narrative that the African Americans, uh descendant of slaves, are superior to everybody else in their oppression in America.
	Um it's very it's very dangerous, and you can see how as America becomes more diverse and more immigrants and the Latina uh Latino community gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
	The mind share that that particular narrative has over the collective consciousness, will inflate so much and then it's gonna collapse.
	And the people who are going to be most hurt by that is the African American community that put that was forced into that narrative of themselves of uh of being oppressed.
	And I see a lot of what happened at Evergreen as people um denigrating, losing control, losing control of their own dignity in the pursuit of dignity and losing any sense of justice in the pursuit of justice.
	And uh in that particular narrative, I don't know how I go.
	We were talking about 12 years of slave.
	So it's a it's a sacred narrative.
	The African American descendant of slaves, it's a sacred narrative.
	It sweeps up every white person, even if your parents came here 20 years ago.
	If you land on these shows 20 years ago, you were a part of that story.
	It sweeps up everybody.
	Um it's like Schindler's list.
	I mean, I have nothing I in the sense that I've not I don't have any, I wasn't around during the time period.
	I'm no none of those races or nationalities.
	And when you watch it, you just see uh you see an injustice, you see, and you see the hero heroism, and it's a huge it's a human story.
	And you know, I think part of the and maybe I'm off base on this, so correct me if you if you have a different perspective, but when I look, and maybe this is my white privilege coming through, okay.
	So bear with me.
	But when I look at history, when I look at historically what what's happened with the black community with slavery, like okay, yeah, that's obviously really racism, okay.
	And with the civil rights movement, like wow, they couldn't use the same water fountain, like, yeah, that's obviously real racism to me, right?
	It's a it's it was a much it was an overt racism, it was explicit, right?
	It wasn't like in the it wasn't this mysterious thing that you wonder whether or not it even exists.
	And uh I I think everybody agrees that that form of racism A existed and B was you know horrible.
	And I I think part of the problem with what's going on now is that you know there I don't know, there may or may not be systemic racism.
	I don't know if it's because our systems are racist or if it's because our systems were racist and then there's just a ripple effect for a few generations after the fact, right?
	That makes sense too.
	I don't know.
	There may or may not be, but if we always exaggerate what that is, or change the definition of what that is, or what racism is, then we're never gonna get to the bottom of it because it's got it's it's gotten to the point where when you call like if you were to call somebody a racist in 1999, they would have they would have been incredibly concerned about what they said or incredibly infuriated about having been called a racist.
	But if you call some if you call me a racist now on Twitter, I'm like, ah fuck you.
	Like no, I'm not.
	Like I know I'm not, but it's just not taken seriously because it's been watered down and diluted.
	Yeah, well, uh, to quote Ibram Kendi, who's in this book.
	Yeah, he's he's a paragon of th intellectual.
	Like we get the profits we deserve.
	What does that say about that?
	That we have Kendi as our prophet.
	It's just amazing.
	Him and D'Angelo is just amazing.
	Such pulses.
	We have pre-profits too.
	They have a big profit motive.
	That's for sure.
	But um he says that you know, the only the only correction for past injustice is present injustice.
	Well, the only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination, and the only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination.
	That's on page 17 of his how to be an anti-racist book.
	So there's always discrimination.
	He needs that to happen.
	The stuff that is being defended against by the people who don't want people uh complaining about CRT.
	It's explicitly racist.
	It wants to put white children into a constant state of deconstructing their own personality.
	Wants to put every other race into a constant state of of deconstructing their own personality, it destabilizes the community.
	Um and furthermore, it it doesn't do anything for anybody.
	There was a second point, but it's explicitly racist, and it just it reinvents the wheel, it reinvents that racism wheel.
	And do you think he actually believes that, or do you think he is just on a on a roll selling books and teaching courses?
	He there it it doesn't matter, like you vote Republican, you're basically a Republican.
	He has tens of millions of dollars to promote this stuff.
	He basically has to believe in it.
	He he gives zero debate.
	Him and D'Angelo, zero debate.
	They're constantly challenged or invited to a debate.
	They constantly just don't do it because there's no reason for them to show that their ideas are wrong, and to actually have them talking to somebody who's critical of them will show huge gaps in their thinking.
	And so they kind of just don't engage.
	So you watch it on Twitter, you watch these other intellectuals like um McWarter or uh Glenn Lowry, John McWarter, Glenn Lowry, they they go after Kendi, you know, and that they call him out on all this crap.
	Um it doesn't matter what he believes or not, he he's not even that smart.
	He he struggles to make sense in a lot of his writing.
	Uh which I find hilarious that this is the guy that we're set setting up as the modern day Martin Luther G. I'm not I'm not convinced he even wrote his books, to be honest with you.
	That kind of thing could have easily been ghostwritten.
	Who knows?
	You know, these days.
	That's one of the that's one of the travesties I think of writing and thinking in general today is um is is the the reliance on ghostwriters um in it I wish there was a way to see through that.
	Like if you know, maybe that was my disclaimer.
	I should have hired a ghost writer instead of been one all that time.
	No, I can't write worth the damn.
	I can't write worth the damn.
	I don't believe that's true.
	I can I can just tell.
	I can tell by the way you frame your thoughts that you you're a good writer.
	You're just hypercritical of yourself.
	Uh I I'm not easy on the writer.
	Uh I'm not easy on the reader, and I'm I'm even harder on myself.
	So you're gonna if you're reading my stuff, you're gonna have to actually pay attention to it.
	Just use a pseudonym then.
	Be nice to your imaginary self.
	Well, no, well, that's it's it's meta fiction.
	So there's like four different meat versions of me talking to each other across the 20 years that it took me to write this.
	Like every four years, like I had to reinvent myself, and so the writing style changes, and his position on what he thinks reality is changes over the course of of time.
	So it's an intergenerational dialogue in a sense.
	Well, a good plan today is better than a perfect plan next week, so just publish shit, dude.
	Oh, I'm it's coming out, it's eking out.
	What about you?
	What what do you do besides this?
	And make tons of money off of uh small little businesses.
	I um uh I work, I like to read though I don't read as much as uh I used to or sh or would like to.
	Um I spend time with my wife and my my baby girl.
	Uh huh.
	She was born in January, so she's just six months old.
	Oh wow, amazing.
	She's a long time.
	are you guys getting sleep now?
	Yeah, she's not too bad.
	She sleeps through the night now, and uh really early on, she started only waking up once, so we've been really lucky.
	She's a very chill baby.
	Nice.
	What about you?
	You said you mentioned that you were you'd been a single dad at one point.
	How old's your how old are your kids?
	No, no, no, no.
	I was a preschool teacher.
	So I've had like I've had like probably 120 uh children part time over the course of my 15 years in that industry.
	So no, I don't have I don't have any children.
	You said you're in Austin?
	Yes, sir.
	Is it is it as messed up as Portland or it just wants to be?
	Um, so Austin had a had uh a homeless problem that was pretty um aesthetically atrocious, though.
	If you look at the numbers, it's not actually that bad.
	So let me let me sh let me tell you what I mean.
	So yeah, in LA County, for example, there's like an average of 60,000 homeless people a night.
	And in Austin, I think that number was closer to 3,000.
	So from a number standpoint, you know, not too bad.
	But from a um uh uh aesthetic standpoint, it was really bad because the city council basically said you can camp out on any public property or public sidewalk in the city, um, and you can't be removed.
	So you would see all three thousand of them within like the same four to six blocks, and it seemed like huge, right?
	And so what they did this year was um there were enough signatures on a petition to get that specific issues issue on a ballot, and the city uh with over 60% of the vote said no, we gotta we gotta reverse the law and make it what it was so that they can't camp in the city and so now it's cleaned up.
	Oh wow, okay.
	Yeah, that's cool.
	That was bipartisan support.
	Um, you know, because they weren't really they weren't even they weren't solving the homeless problem.
	No, they were just making it um uh more burdensome on on kind of the city as a whole.
	Yeah, and you know, so I do feel bad for anyone who's homeless, but it's not like they've been unhoused, they're still just as homeless as they were before, and now the city feels safer.
	I mean, you know, people didn't want to walk by themselves at night because they're strung out people all over, and you know, it's just they needed to do something.
	Olympia where I am at has a is not treating it correctly.
	They keep on doing uh now they're doing tiny homes to kind of try to contain it, but at least they're innovating there's a lot of mental illness and drug abuse in that community, and to house it all together is just it's a it's toxic.
	It's a toxic problem.
	So at least they're kind of slowly moving them out of the middle of town, which is where they like to be.
	What do you think the what do you think the cause of the problem actually is?
	The cause of the problem.
	Yeah, homelessness.
	What just the problem?
	What's causing homelessness?
	Oh, homelessness.
	Yeah, yeah.
	What's the what well what's the cause of the human condition, bro?
	Well, I mean, uh I had a very fascinating interview with a um card-carrying radical feminist, and uh she I asked her what the purpose of feminism was for her, and she said to liberate women from the patriarchy.
	I'm like, okay, well, what does that look like?
	And she said, to begin with zero rape.
	I'm like Oh my god.
	Okay, well, how do we do that?
	She's like, it doesn't matter, men need to stop raping.
	Universal castration.
	That's what I said.
	Okay, like either we do like some sort of implant or we castrate men.
	How do we do it?
	She's like, Why do men never listen to me when I say that you're you're trying to back away from the point?
	Men need to just stop raping.
	Men need to stop raping.
	And I'm like, okay, well, how do we solve violence?
	How do we solve the problem of evil?
	She's like, no, it's rape.
	We're just talking about just ending rape.
	Um it was it was just such a fascinating interview because I it was just trying to understand this perspective that wouldn't allow any budging.
	So when we're well, and and what is what is ending rape have to do with feminism necessarily?
	I mean, doesn't society as a whole, whether or not you're a feminist, go kind of agree, except for the rapists that rape is a problem.
	I don't well see this is the problem.
	So the feminists see me trying to figure out how to end rape by saying, Well, problem of evil, and then they twisted it into me like being pro rape because I wasn't saying that rape needed to end.
	I'm like, well, how do we end it?
	Like, no, you just need to end it.
	Like, okay.
	So whenever we talk about something like I'm doing my part, man.
	I'm doing my part.
	I haven't raped anybody in the last day.
	I swear.
	Like, and that's as far as my memory goes on this.
	So you won me over.
	I'll never do it.
	So terrible.
	I don't I the problem with me as a as a polit as a civic entity or as a political entity is that I don't understand anything.
	I don't understand I don't understand how to solve homelessness or rape or end racism.
	I know that ending racism is a fool's errand because racism is just people having a basic uh preference for one race over the other.
	It basically comes down to ignorance and stereotypes.
	And in order to end that to get to zero racism, you have to enact incredible measures with incredibly uh the the law of diminishing returns happens in every social justice activist sphere.
	There will be a point where you can't actually make any more progress without regressing from a liberal society where people can make up their own minds on things and decide who they want to bake cakes for, if they want to live in a house or not.
	Like so homelessness, there's a mental health crisis, and there's a drug abuse crisis or whatever we want to call crisis.
	I think even that's a wrong move.
	But there's mental health and drug addiction, and people some people just don't want to work, some people don't want to live inside of the house.
	Some people they don't want the bohemian lifestyle.
	Yeah, well, uh ultra bohemian lifestyle.
	Some people want to just freeload.
	Yeah, and that's just how it's always always been.
	And the more liberal your society is aka San Francisco, uh, Portland, Seattle, and Olympia, the more liberal and progressive we get, the more we're just going to be taken advantage of as a society, because that unless you unless you say no and you enact some sort of uh penalty on people who want to live that way, that problem itself won't be dealt with by acceptance of the problem or by humanized overly humanizing.
	Well, I think that there's even like this trick of the liberal progressive imagination where you start to humanize the subject so much, you become so empathetic towards the subject that yeah, you're humanizing them, but you're turning them into babies.
	You're not calling them to be at it at a higher standard.
	Now, some people can't mentally, you know, because of mental issues or because of drug use, can't actually live as an adult and be responsible members of society.
	So you're gonna have to figure out ways to deal with that.
	And I know that the police aren't necessarily there to do that, and they've done a lot of they shouldered a lot of that burn in, and then you have a lot of uh non-government organizations that kind of deal with that mess.
	But you have to there's there's got to be some sort of balance um between empathy and and demanding of when I think about these problems, um, I think about a class I took at college that I think it was just called leadership, and it was um it was we read some book, I can't even remember the name of it.
	But the one takeaway I had from this this book, which was written by some Harvard professor in way too long, was the difference between formal and informal authority.
	And one of the problems that I have with the Democrats today, and I think the Republicans are guilty of this too, but one of the so I guess one of the problems I have with the political class today is that they try to use formal authority to solve problems that only informal authority can solve.
	And so what I mean by that is with formal authority, you have somebody who's actually CEO by title or actually elected to a position, somebody that is formally an authority, right?
	And then with informal authority, you have somebody like MLK, right?
	Who just because of the nature of who he is and what he said became a leader, but wasn't exactly like appointed at you know, he wasn't like the president of the civil rights movement, he was just an informal authority that rose up, right?
	And I I think with the the race problems that we have and the other more cultural problems that we have, we try to legislate away the way people think when what we really need is is cultural leaders to influence away the the bad thoughts that we have.
	So I could be off base on this, but it doesn't seem to me that you can legislate someone's mind to change.
	No, you can't.
	But coming full circle, Evergreen and what you're talking about about the uh loss of uh so much brain power dealing with these issues.
	The thing that I came out of my Evergreen experience with is that I'm all of a sudden I go to this activist college and now I'm an activist, which is the last thing I ever wanted to do.
	I never wanted to be an activist.
	It's a waste of fucking air.
	Like I'd rather be a freaking poet than an activist in this society.
	And by poet, I don't even mean like a rap star or anything like that, just like putting words onto a paper in a like a extremely effete and beautiful fashion.
	Um, but they turn me into an activist, and my activism is against the activist class.
	There is the corruption of the informal authority.
	There are in issue after issue.
	The trans debate is one that I've spent two and a half years now investigating.
	You have these informal authorities that come along and say that they're claiming to represent black people, trans people, women, right?
	Right.
	Feminism has this problem too.
	And that's why I have so many dialogues with feminists and try to figure out well, are you how is any group going to represent the entire sex of humanity?
	How do you pretend to do that?
	How do you pretend to represent all trans people?
	How do you pretend to represent all black people?
	Well, you have to say that there's uh African American people and then the rest of the black people.
	Um in the vein of the Martin Luther King Juniors and the glorious Steinems and all these previous cultural leaders and influencers, you have the entire academic structure of the humanities is geared to producing that informal authority now.
	And it's all about, and then it's corrupted by social media, it's corrupted by the attention span of Americans, it's corrupted by human beings' attention span to always look and pay attention to the most ostentatious and egregious uh person in the room.
	Um, so that it's incumbent upon us to produce informal authorities that can do that work that you're talking about.
	And my activism.
	I guess what I'm trying to say though is that their formal authority, though it's creating informal authorities in their space, isn't actually solving any racism problems.
	Like, yeah, there's this incredible infrastructure at like an academic level and at a corporate level that's developing of this like CRT, you know, uh uh the populace or influence, rather.
	But but like I guess I guess I guess it's that that in and of itself is an example of formal authority actually changing minds and ideas and behaviors.
	But it's it's just funny to me, and then it's not actually solving the racism problem because you know, it doesn't seem to me that there's any less racism than there than there was before.
	Not that there was a tremendous amount before, but it seems to me that if there's any if there's any increase in racism, it might be as a uh a response to the CRT stuff going on rather than it's gonna it's gonna happen because they're just they're gonna push it and they're gonna push it, and in five years, you're gonna have to go and very carefully vet your child's teacher and the superintendent of the school because they are erecting uh incredibly racist structure within our institution.
	And there's gonna be a blowback.
	There's gonna be a blowback.
	This I think partly this DEI stuff is a way for the institutions to humanize themselves while being completely dehumanizing in the process, and for the elite um and the managerial class to be able to vet who is who can get in the gate, who can get in the door.
	If you can go by these certain things and and do all these different obeisances, you're a part of that class.
	It's kind of a sign and it's a signifier.
	But the actual true thing that it does is exacerbate race relations and exacerbate class relations.
	And what you're gonna have is the lower class blacks and lower class whites becoming increasingly more agitated towards each other because they're pitted against each other by the upper class blacks and the upper class whites who are playing this game.
	And then then there's this middle class uh kind of uh DEI kind of grift where there's billions and billions of dollars being made by so-called people of color by just promoting and tr doing all these trainings and stuff like that.
	So they're they're they're getting out, uh they're getting a lot of salary.
	Uh the the for a while, the second highest paid person at the Evergreen State College after the protests, She was making $150,000 a year.
	Uh, half of what the president was making was the diversity person that they hired, right?
	And all she did, the only thing she did was set up two events.
	All she did for her three years there, she got pregnant, so she took a bunch of time off.
	She set up two events which were just promoting the same behavior that the Evergreen protesters participated in, which is you gotta rise up and overtake the structures, right?
	So all she did was create two events that that under signed everything that caused Evergreen to be under power.
	But uh that just goes to say that that colleges and etc.
	All these institutions have this huge class of people that do nothing but grift off of this racism stuff, while the real racism is going to fester in the lower classes.
	Um fester and fester and fester.
	If we don't stop it somehow.
	So where can people find you if they want to follow your work?
	If they want to follow me, if they find me, um, I'm on Twitter at Benjamin A. Boyce.
	Uh that's where I put my sentences.
	I'm proud of my sentences.
	And uh I'm on uh YouTube as Benjamin A. Boyce, and my podcast is voice of reason, and that's on every uh podcast application that you can find, or it should be.
	Well, it's been awesome to um have you on the show, and I really appreciate you uh taking the time to sit with me and um uh talk about all these issues, uh, and taking a risk and coming on with a stranger and hanging out and talking about uh incredibly sensitive ideas and uh such a risky such a you're such a risky man, Chase.
	Thanks for high risk, man.
	Yeah, it was a real pleasure.
	Let's stay in touch, and uh hopefully we can do this again sometime.
	All right, sweet.
	Uh, enjoy your wife and child in Austin.
	Thank you, sir.
	Come visit us.
	You always have a place to stay here.
	I will.
	Okay, cool.
	All right, take you.
	Take care, man.
	All right.
	We choose to go to the moon and this decay and do the other thing.
	Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
	Mr. Gorbach tear down this wall.
	A date which will live in.

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