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PBD Podcast Episode 220. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Sam Sorbo, Destiny and Adam Sosnick.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
0:00 - Start
7:39 - Destiny on paying taxes
13:08 - Are trolls good for society?
27:28 - Who has thicker skin, democrats or republicans?
42:28 - Is college worth it?
57:21 - Should every parent homeschool?
1:51:02 - Why do schools ‘parent children’?
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet taved?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hated.
Howdy, running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Okay, so today's the last podcast of the year, but at the same time, it's going to be very, I think we can use weird, strange, awesome.
I have a feeling it's going to be a very, very good podcast.
Yeah.
It was arranged last minute because of flight challenges yesterday with our buddy coming in from LA, Southwest.
He had some issues.
When I asked, Rob, Rob gave me a look.
I'm like, yep, he had flight issues.
But we have Sam Sorbo, which is great to have you here.
Thank you.
On the podcast.
And we had your husband, Kevin, here on.
Hercules.
Yeah.
Hercules.
Hercules.
Just call me Hercules.
Wow.
Hercules are.
Hercule Moore.
Hercules.
Okay, I'll take it.
So we have Sam here.
She's got some strong opinions, and we'll learn a little bit about her, and then we'll get into that as well.
And then we also have Destiny, Stephen, or should I say Stephen, aka Destiny.
Yeah, that works.
Here's with us as well.
He's been known as some say he's the Ben Shapiro of the progressives.
Very opinionated.
Is that what they say?
Strong, witty, fast, likes debates.
He has opinions for everything he says, which is great.
And Destiny, why don't you tell everybody about your hair today?
There's a special reasoning for your hair today.
There is.
I would like to say, though, I consider Ben Shapiro to be the destiny of the writer.
Well played.
I did a charity event like fucking three years ago, I think, and I told them I'd dye my hair blue.
And I didn't think they'd hit the goal and they did.
So I finally dyed my hair like, I think a month ago in Georgia.
How do you like it?
It's a lot of work.
Really?
What's the charity?
I don't even remember.
It was like three years ago.
But we were doing a fundraiser, and one of the goals was like, if you raise like so much money, then I promise I'll dye my hair blue.
And then we, yeah.
Usually when you do these types of bets or charitable type fundraisers, it's within a fiscal year.
They're hitting you back three years later.
Hey, by the way.
Respect for them funding.
I know you don't even remember what your degree did.
Well, I did it.
The problem is that now if I want to get rid of it, I think I have to shave it all off.
So I might wait for the bottom part to grow out a little bit more.
Hasn't yet?
The black?
The bottom?
The brown.
Yeah, it's a little bit, but we'll see.
Because the problem with the blue is it fades and then it turns like a swamp color, right?
Well, it hasn't done that yet.
Oh, okay.
So what we're trying to do here is get rid of the swamp.
So look, what we want to do today, our audience likes a good banter debate respectfully, but going back and forth.
If you don't mind taking a quick second and just kind of giving your background, Sam.
I mean, obviously, I have your intro.
I have your whole background here, but if you don't mind with the audience so they know who you are and what you've done in the past.
Sure.
I came out of film.
I did go to Duke University, which studied biomedical engineering.
And of course, Harvard is the Duke of the North, if we're going to be playing that game.
But I left school to pursue acting.
I did modeling for many years also.
And so I'm also a filmmaker.
I had three children, and I realized that the school wasn't getting the job done.
And so I pulled my kids out of school and I started homeschooling them.
And I'd love to say that I never looked back.
I did.
I put them back in school for about six weeks once.
And that was an enormous mistake.
And so now I advocate for just full sale taking your children out of school because school is not education.
Well, we'll definitely talk about that.
And I know you got a book on that, which we'll get to as well.
Destiny, if you don't mind taking a moment, share with the audience your background.
Well, geez, I went to the prestigious University of Nebraska at Omaha.
I did music for three years and then dropped out because I was working too much.
I do politics online.
People would call me progressive.
I'm either very far left if you're a conservative or I'm not far left enough if you're like a super progressive.
I guess I'm like a modern kind of like Bill Maher where there's like a lot of progressive values that I believe in, but some people take it way too far.
And that's kind of where I'm at right now.
Listen, share some of them with us.
Like yesterday we had Kyle Kalinsky here, and I'm sure you know who Kyle is.
We had a good time with them.
Not a Kyle guy?
You don't like that?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
Okay.
So tell us what you stand for.
What are some of the things you stand for?
I think broadly speaking, the things that I talk about are the importance of the establishments that are around us, the institutions that exist, why they're important, why they're worth protecting.
I try to show that you can be critical of them without thinking that all of them have to be toppled and overturned.
That we can, for instance, like criticize things like the FDA without saying that COVID vaccines are causing our hearts to explode.
Or we can be critical of, yeah, basically just holding institutions accountable without saying we have to topple the whole system.
I think that the political paradigm in the country right now is very much like populist versus anti-populist.
And I'm very much like an institutional anti-populist kind of guy.
Can you also share how you came about your philosophies today?
Because I do know there's a range of you went through the Iran phase, you went through the Ron Paul phase, you went through the conservative phase.
Kind of give a little bit about the background.
Yeah, I guess speedrunning it.
I grew up, is Neocon a slur for Republicans?
Do they not like that?
They do not like that.
Okay.
Well, I grew up a Bush Republican, I guess.
That's how you grew up.
Well, Nebraska.
I was going to say, you're sort of conservative.
You're about conserving the institutions without toppling them.
That's kind of conservative.
Sure, if we want to call that conservative now, but then conservatives aren't conservatives because they seem like they want to destroy everything.
Fair enough.
Yeah, I grew up, my mom is Cuban.
So Cubans are very conservative.
I grew up in a very conservative household.
Both my parents were Air Force.
I also went to Catholic school, so I grew up very religious, very Catholic.
Around 1617, 1516, I kind of became atheist.
Had my little Ayn Rand phase, our little Atlas shrugged anthem.
And then from there, I was a big Ron Paul fan in 2008.
I got into Stremi around 2010.
And then from there, I've kind of slowly become more left as I've earned more money and I've seen how unfair the world was prior to that.
As you've earned more money, you've gone further left.
A lot of times you go further right when you start making more money.
Leave me alone.
Let me do my thing.
Capitalism, entrepreneurship.
Why would you go further left as you started making more money?
I think the largest thing I saw was viewing life through the lens of my kid seemed really unfair to the other children around him.
You have a kid.
Yeah, 11 years old.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
So like my ability to just buy a house in the best school district, send my kid to wherever he needs to go to school, make sure that he has all the things that he needs.
Like these are all things that I love him to death, but he hasn't earned any of these, right?
You know, from birth, you know, he hasn't worked yet.
He doesn't do his chores all the time, you know.
But like the fact that I can provide so much for him and gave him such a head start compared to other people.
You know, when I see this guy go to kindergarten for a screen and they all got their own like laptops and iPads assigned to them, like Jesus.
And then you've got kids in, you've got, you've got schools in Omaha that can barely afford computers for like their computer room.
Starting to see things through that lens.
And then also comparing like the things in my life post-becoming wealthy to pre-becoming wealthy.
Like every interaction with a police officer before becoming wealthy is like the end of your fucking life because like a speeding ticket is setting you back like two months.
If you pop a wheel or you break a wheel, you pop a tire.
Anybody that drives in Omaha knows that Interstate 80, all these potholes will like destroy your life.
Seeing how easy like everything became in life after earning money is like, I don't know.
It just, it kind of changed my perspective on a lot of things.
So why'd you move to Florida?
Originally, I moved from Omaha to California about four years ago.
I lived in California for about three years.
I had kind of friends there.
And then I've got more friends in Miami.
So eventually I moved from California to Miami to join those friends here.
Why save that taxes, Dobbin?
If you really want to give the money back, it shouldn't seem a better idea to live in California or New York where you pay more taxes.
I don't really care much about taxes.
There are certain social programs that I would want funded, and if you have to raise taxes to fund those, that's fine.
But I don't think there's anything intrinsically good about paying taxes or not paying taxes.
It's just a matter of whether or not the programs that you want are getting funded, I guess.
So you don't see anything intrinsically good, whether you pay taxes or you don't pay taxes.
Not really.
So unpack that.
What do you mean?
I feel like.
Sorry, let me know if I'm rambling too much.
But oftentimes people will get attached to processes instead of outcomes.
Right.
So a really good example might be housing people, right?
We want houses for more people.
But people will look at a process, like we'll say, rent control, and that becomes inextrably tied to the outcome.
If you support rent control, you support housing people.
If you're opposed to rent control, you're opposed to housing people.
But sometimes that process is not like a good process.
So it's hard for people to back away from it because in their mind, they're like, you have to support this thing.
It's like, well, it's not even getting us to our end goal.
And I view taxation the same way.
Taxation is like a tool.
It's not good or bad to pay taxes or not pay taxes.
It's just like a tool that we use to fund the government.
And then the real fight should be what do we want the government to be doing?
And then assuming that we've got like these services, you know, conservatives tend to want less.
Liberals or left-leaning people tend to want more.
Considering the services that we've got provided by the government, we raise enough money in taxes to fund those services.
That's how I view it.
So what do you think we're wasting money?
What do you think we should be investing more money?
Like, where do you think taxes should go to?
Where are we wasting it?
Where are we wasting it?
Man, I don't know.
There's probably a ton of different areas.
I imagine that everybody's wasting money everywhere.
I feel like everybody always does that.
I'm going to go line by line.
And then when they get in office, they're like, no, fuck that.
In terms of where we should invest, I'm big in like preventative stuff or like investing for the future.
So I think big investments in education, I think are important.
I don't know if you like that one.
And then investments in like things where we know we can save money.
So that move to expand the IRS, I thought that was a good one because it's a way to raise money for the federal government.
Investments in things like providing contraception to people.
But expanding the IRS is a way to raise money for the government?
Yeah.
My understanding is that the IRS knows that there's a lot of money out there, but they don't have the agents to work all the files.
So expanding the IRS is one of the few ways where the government can increase its expenditure on some government employees, but raise more money for the government.
But you did see that that was going to cost the little guy more because it's the little guys that they go after more.
Like expanding their, right?
Right now they're devoting their resources more towards the big guys because they know that that's got the value added right there.
They expand their agency, then they can go after the little guys, the guys that get taken out by a pothole.
No.
When you're a little guy, taxes are like the last thing that you're worried about, in my personal opinion, generally speaking.
Well, if you look at any, I mean, you can look at all the advertising for, hey, if you're in debt and you owe the IRS, we will help you.
The advertising says there are a lot of people who need to avail themselves of that service.
Sure.
And also HNR Black will charge you $200 to fill out like your W-2s.
I mean, people can advertise for certain things.
I'm just saying that I don't think that the IRS is like targeting poor people.
No, I don't think that's true.
I know some people were worried because there are certain apps like Venmo and Cash App that might have been flying under the radar.
I don't think they issue, I don't know if they issue 1089ks like PayPal does, but maybe for things like that.
But for the most part, expanding the IRS should help them go after the money that they know is other.
I don't think they're targeting poorer people.
If you want to talk about targeting poor people, I do agree that that's not a good thing.
However, I'm pretty sure it was conservatives that pushed for if you get the earned income tax credit, the ATC, I believe that there is a mandatory 10% audit on those people as a contingency to make sure that they're not scamming the government or something with their taxes.
So I would agree that that's a waste of money in terms of where the IRS is focusing on just because of that mandatory audit rate.
But aside from that, I don't think expanding the IRS is them just going after little guys because I don't think you raise very much money doing that.
If you earn 30 or 40,000 a year, I don't even know what the average federal tax liability is for somebody like that.
It's probably pretty low.
Very low.
If not, very low.
It might be nothing, yeah.
Below 10% for sure.
I suppose it depends on how you define the little guy.
That's how we define a little guy.
Before I got into streaming, I did carpet cleaning, which sucked balls.
So for me, little guy is like 24, 30,000 a year.
That's a little guy for me.
If you guys are thinking like 80, 90, 100,000 a year is little guy.
Do you know what percentage of America makes more than 100 grand?
I want to say 3%.
Close.
What is it?
Do you know what it is?
I don't know.
You know the number?
20%.
15%.
Is it 15%?
15% makes more than 650.
Hold on.
Is that 15% of earners or 15% of households?
That's a good caveat right there.
I think it is earners.
Okay.
I was going to say, I looked up at one point.
Like, what do you need to be like the top 1% earner?
And I think it's like 300K.
It's like 450.
I don't know.
Maybe something in that regard.
All right.
15% of this country making over 15% of workers.
That sounds like a lot to me.
There's a lot of wealth in this nation.
Or it's just not a lot of money anymore, as it used to be.
And where maybe $100,000 is not a lot of money today used to be a big deal in the 80s and the 90s.
But, Destiny, question for you.
How much of what you're doing is you're toying and trolling with people where you're just kind of like a way of getting under people's skins to get attention and get eyeballs and then constantly changing and evolving where you're not letting your audience guess who you are or put you in a box because that is a method of building a brand for yourself.
How much of it is that versus how much of it is I'm just changing and I'm sharing what my opinions are today?
I'm pretty authentic.
I don't know if this is true, but I might have more broadcasted content than like any other person alive right now.
So like my whole like journey, because I started, I was one of the, I think I was the first person to quit their job and do streaming full-time in 2010.
And I've been streaming probably seven hours a day on average for probably the last like 12 years.
So I mean, like, you can see all of my growth.
I don't think I could fake a character or be like a provocateur for that extended period of time.
So yeah, I would say there's a lot of like natural evolution of my political beliefs over time.
Got it.
But like when you do, I've seen, you've seen the thing where he says, like, I believe Joe Biden is doing a great job or one of the greatest presidents.
Yeah, that only sounds like a Republican.
Okay.
Right, exactly.
Well, Joe Biden is doing a great job.
Well, yeah, well, let's discuss that.
Well, you know, like, I actually generally do believe that you're authentic.
We've done an interview before.
We've done a two-hour.
The only thing I won't own all the time is I can get a little wild on Twitter, okay?
That's fine.
Being wild on Twitter is actually encouraged these days.
I'm bringing that up because I think a part of what Tate does is trolling and to get under people's skins.
And I think he does a great job at it.
I think Jake Paul does the same thing.
I think Shapiro does the same thing.
I think a part of what we do is the same thing.
You use the word provocateur.
I think that's a very appropriate word.
The word we use today is, you know, you hear the word troll more like you saw what he did to Greta yesterday.
Did you guys see the back and forth yesterday?
With Greta.
Did you see what happened with him and Greta yesterday on Twitter?
I'm sure you saw that.
Okay, Tate and Greta, if you want to just click on that.
So yesterday.
Yeah.
So yesterday, if you want to get close to that.
So Greta says, no, go up a little bit so you don't show what she says first.
Oh, no, no, no, go down.
Just read that part.
Yeah.
So Andrew Tate says, hey, Greta, I have 33 cars.
My Bugatti is a 16 8 liter quad turbo.
My two Ferrari A12, you know, have 6.5 liter V12.
This is just a star.
Please provide your email address so I can send you a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.
Okay.
And the picture at the bottom is the picture of him and the Bugatti.
Now look at what Greta does, which is actually pretty impressive how she responds back.
She says, please do enlighten me.
Email me at smalldickandgetalife.com.
And then he responds back and it goes back and forth, back and forth.
And then he does a video and he gets like 30 million views.
So there's a model and a madness to this game.
I just wonder if that's a part of where you're going, where you're able to do that versus, no, I'm just talking shit, having a good time learning.
I don't know if you can do that model anymore.
So the provocateur one.
So here's the issue.
When people talk about trolling, trolling had a distinctly unique definition like 15 years ago on the internet.
When you troll somebody.
You're acting in a way that you know is stupid.
And everybody else that knows the troll is happening knows that it's stupid.
And you do it to get a rise out of somebody, right?
You act like an idiot to get a rise out of somebody.
The problem is today trolling just means like, I don't want to say harassing somebody, but like insulting somebody or attacking somebody.
That's like trolling or whatever.
But the beliefs are oftentimes real.
Or even if the people themselves don't have the belief, their fan base has it.
I would say the internet has changed substantially over the past like 20 years and that 15, 20 years ago, it was really funny to talk about like finding people, killing them online, saying a bunch of crazy stuff because like everybody knew it was a joke and it was just like a bunch of kids and weird old guys or whatever on the internet.
It was just like fun and funny.
Nowadays it's a lot different because you've got people writing manifestos and going to like Buffalo or Christchurch in New Zealand and like shooting up and killing people based on shit they've read online.
So the landscape has changed a lot such that it's hard to go online and be like, oh, I'm just going to troll and sell these things because there's probably a sizable portion of your audience that's going to end up unironically believing those things.
Was it Voltaire that said that like any group that gets its laugh by pretending to be idiots will eventually find themselves in good company?
That kind of thing.
No, no, I tend to disagree with the idea that trolls were just idiots.
I think there are a couple different kinds of trolls, but there are people out there who are genuinely, genuinely like disgruntled and upset with what somebody was doing.
And so they took issue with it and they became a troll and they ended up trolling those people.
And then your second point is, you know, that there's been, certainly there's been a clampdown on what people are allowed to do in terms of trolling other people.
And Andrew Tate's a perfect example.
They just said, hey, enough of that.
And he was, to me, almost an archetypal troll, like, because he just trolled the world.
Like, you know, I have 33 cars.
Come at me, whatever.
And this is a great example of it.
So they might want to shut that down and they've tried to shut him down.
I don't, how did he get back on Twitter?
I mean, obviously, Elon Musk.
Yeah, but he's still not back on Instagram and some of the other platforms.
Also, what about, I mean, I think you're talking about like changing the landscape politically or ideologically.
Like if you look at the success that Babylon B has had over the last handful of people.
Yeah, I mean, they're trolling.
They're trolling, doing the same thing that Onion has done for decades.
Just took it to a whole different level, though.
But so the thing, and right now, this is like, I'm autistically quibbling over definitions.
So it doesn't really matter.
This is how we use troll now.
It's fine.
But like trolling in the past would be like, I go to a church and I pretend to be religious and I start like speaking in tongues.
That would be like the Borat approach to trolling.
I mean, that's the greatest troll in the history of the world.
That's a great example of a troll, right?
But the problem is what, I shouldn't say problem.
Also, I'm not trying to say anything should be banned order.
I'm not trying to say we need to ban the server.
But when people troll today, they're not actually trolling.
What they're doing is extremely indicative of the underlying belief.
So like the Andrew Tate stuff, and again, I understand definition change over time.
So we can call it trolling, but there was nothing like, there wasn't much of a joke to what Andrew Tate was saying.
Like a lot of people genuinely feel like, fuck off government.
Like, I want to drive my cars.
Same thing with Borat.
The reason that Borat resonated is there are a lot of people who felt the same way that he did.
That's why it resonated.
I mean, resonance is the way something becomes popular.
He became popular because it resonated.
He didn't become popular because everybody thought this guy's an idiot.
And so I'm going to watch more of his idiocy.
They thought it was funny because it resonated, but that's what humor is.
Well, it's almost like playing a character to expose the idiocy of whoever.
And he does a great job of trolling typically the right.
I mean, he'll do it to Bernie Sanders and the left as well.
Did you see that the last, this isn't Borat, but this is Sasha Baron's Cohen's latest escapade, I don't know, two years ago?
What was it like Saving America, United States of America?
What was the whole thing?
I don't know if you can pull it up, Sasha Baron Cohen.
Yeah, Showtime.
He did it.
It was a whole thing, something about America.
Who is America?
He pretended to be like an Israeli.
He pretended to be an Israeli Mossad gunfighter, and he would go and basically convince NRA-type members that five-year-olds should be shooting guns.
Or he went in like a boxing ring with a Republican congressman, and he convinced him to drop his pants and attack people with his anus.
Stuff that you're like, you can't make this up.
He got people to do.
And obviously, the greatest troll he ever did is Pat's favorite thing in the history of the world when he got OJ on and pretended that his girlfriend didn't know who OJ was and just was like, ha, you remember OJ?
Like, like the trolling of this man is so over the top amazing.
So the weird thing is, because there's a resonance with trolls, I struggle with Sasha Baron Cohen.
Like personally, I struggle.
Struggle.
Some of it's funny, and some of it just makes me really uncomfortable.
It just makes me uncomfortable.
But that's the point.
Right.
He wants to make you uncomfortable.
That's true.
And so, but I'm the type of person who's like, okay, I don't need that.
I don't need that discomfort level in my life.
So like that last thing that you're talking about that he did, I didn't watch it, even though I heard funny things about it.
And some of the things sounded pretty funny.
Yeah.
Like overall.
And it's the same thing.
It's like the, the, who were the guys who, who played all the pranks and did dangerous things?
The jerk.
Jerky boys.
Jerky boys.
It's the best thing in the history.
I know.
And, but that to me, that's the thing.
She's talking about jackass.
She's not the best.
Oh, jackass guys?
Yeah.
Of course.
You're going 80s.
Yeah, I'm going 80s.
But I think Destiny brought up a very good point.
I think Destiny brought up a really good point: is that whether it's left or right, Babylon B, Onion, Borat, who gives a shit?
I think trolls making fun of people, just joking around.
I think that's part of America.
I think it's healthy.
Humorous, satire, it's healthy because if you can't laugh at it, then you're the one who has the problem.
Here's where I was going with this, though.
That's all fun and games.
This is what Elon Musk kind of is abiding by.
Free speech.
I don't care if you're left, right?
I don't care if I offend you.
All good.
As long as it doesn't incite violence.
Like you brought up school shooters and manifestos in Buffalo.
And that's, I think, where the constant slippery slope is constantly trying to be identified: is like, what's trolling?
What's satire?
And what's like, no, we have a problem here that we must address.
And that's the problem with online.
Now, everybody can say some shit, which is fine, but where do you draw the line on this type of stuff?
I don't even care about the indirect incitement to violence.
People call it stochastic terrorism, is when you're slowly pushing people.
I'm not even necessarily worried about that.
And I don't know if there should be rules or legislation or anything.
I just wish that people would be more honest.
Like, it's never just jokes, right?
Like, the jokes are typically like they resemble some underlying thing that people did rule in comedy.
Like, for the recent Sasha Baron Cohen stuff, that thing you're talking about, that was funny because you were like left-leaning and you like to shit on conservatives.
That's why it was funny because you got to say their ridiculous positions on guns and blah, If you watch that with a conservative friend, some of them might not find that funny, right?
Like Sam didn't.
Well, I don't know if it's because she didn't watch it or not.
I didn't watch it.
But I'm saying like some people, some conservatives might not find that funny.
They might be like, oh, well, I don't, you know, I'm not sure.
Yeah, I just don't get it.
I don't know.
I mean, just like how all conservatives don't find late-night TV funny anymore, SNL funny, because it's like You can only watch so many fucking Trump impersonations before you're like, okay, let's find something else to laugh at.
Yeah, but the whole thing with comedy is misdirection.
A little bit.
And if you already know where the joke is going, like if you watch Jimmy Kimmel and he brings up Trump, it's never going to be like, and then Trump won the lottery and it was great.
It was like, and Trump just fell flat on his face and he has a toupee.
Sure.
That's the whole thing with misdirections.
Here's how this whole thing went into 30 minutes.
I asked, is Destiny doing this to troll people?
Get under people's skins?
And then we turned it into a big-ass topic.
So let's go on to...
I think it's a good question.
Is that a bad thing?
Yeah.
No.
No, I don't.
What I'm saying is I think it's a good thing.
I think it's good that he's doing this.
I think that is a business model today.
No, don't do that.
I don't.
Well, I think a part of that.
It's possible to know what it is.
I think a part of whether you know it or not, a part of you is doing it.
Whether you're aware of it or not, a part of it is considered trolling and getting under people's skins.
It is a business model.
Trump did it, okay?
Oh, yeah.
Connor does it.
Jake does it.
Dana White does it.
You can go to a list of people that can do it.
I'm not strategic enough to figure that out.
However, my views on education have gotten so extreme that I'm probably trolling at this point.
So why don't we get into that?
Let's go into education.
Before we move on, can I just ask you a question?
Because I must admit, I'm sitting next to one of the bigger, best trolls I know.
All right.
Because as serious as Pat is, he knows when to poke.
Can I give you an example?
Sure.
Like when we had our friend Congressman Joe Walsh here.
Yeah.
I think that's fair to say you were trolling him a little bit.
I don't know.
But you're not.
Yeah, exactly.
No, I don't.
I'm not.
I think that is a very necessary skill set.
We're not knocking trolling.
I think it is what the best marketers do to get a message out there.
Yeah.
I think I agree with you.
The only thing I would say to be careful of is because I do agree that I can be provocative, but there are some people that are provocative for the sake of being provocative, and they don't necessarily believe what they say.
So that's like the only difference.
So if you say, oh, you're a bit of a troll, to some extent I would agree.
I can be very aggressive, very provocative, but I'm never just like hanging stuff out.
You know what I don't believe?
You know what?
What I kind of like about today's evolution a talent goes through.
When you're talking about 2010, you started doing stream and all that stuff.
The audience has grown with you for 12 years.
Like you're talking about seven hours a day, whatever, et cetera, et cetera.
So people are also seeing where 30 years ago, we didn't know when somebody was evolving.
You just kind of saw the product.
Boom, here's who I am.
Like, okay.
Movies together.
Here's who I'm in.
You have to stay in the box.
Versus today, you don't have to stay in the box.
Today you can kind of maneuver a little bit and say, look, now I like this, now I like this.
And then finally, eventually, so many things, you eventually go like, yeah, this is pretty much my philosophy for me.
We're living in a soundbite environment now.
And Andrew Tate just said this, right?
He said, you know, they take little snippets of what I said.
I said it in a long form video.
It was part of an evolved train of thought.
And that was like the sound bite that was, yeah, okay, trolling maybe or a little bit provocative to like wake you up.
And in fact, I think that trolling is a necessary part of all of this.
I don't like the word trolling because really what you're doing is you're trying to poke holes to see if it's actually of substance, to see if it's true.
So you don't think that's good to do?
I think it's excellent to do.
I think it must be done.
And the people who want to shut down, those are the people whose arguments won't stand.
Yeah.
I think anytime you're making fun of powerful people, that's a good thing.
I think we need to, we need to, the challenge is.
And the reverse is true.
Yeah.
The powerful people who want to shut you down, that's because they're insecure.
Yeah, but I think the world wants to see what becomes a problem is when SNL only targets one side.
That's when it's kind of like.
So if you do both sides, I'm all in.
You do one side, that's the part where some people are like, if Sasha Baron Cohen did that same thing to both sides of the aisle, I guarantee everybody would go watch it.
But when he does it only to one side, some people are like, Yeah, you know what?
I don't want to see it because you're not doing the hypocrisy on the other side.
See, and I feel like the left has a thin skin.
Everybody's got a thin skin.
That's the reality.
There are a lot of people that think they don't have a thin skin as soon as their side starts getting.
I think that's a left-hander skin these days.
The original Barrett did make fun of left-leaning people.
There was that whole conversation with like the feminists and everything.
Yeah, sure.
They were definitely, yeah.
Well, can I give you one who I thought was one of the greatest trolls ever, and it's now as vanilla as it gets is Stephen Colbert.
When Stephen Colbert did the Colbert show and he portrayed a conservative, right-leaning Trump guy, even in the midst of the Iraq war in Afghanistan, it's like, of course, we got to get in there.
They've got weapons of mass destruction.
He's like, you know, they didn't.
He's like, you can't tell me any different.
Like, the way that he was able to troll, and this kind of goes back to my comment about misdirection, you know, where Stephen Colbert stands these days.
So anytime he does a joke, you know where it's ending.
And I think that's sort of the problem the left has these days: is that we already know where you're going, buddy.
And that's the whole premise with comedy and trolling and sarcasm is that that's what I respect about Andrew Schultz and what we talked about with him.
Bill Burr.
Bill Burr as well.
It's like he'll go any direction.
So you got to stay in the arm.
You know, like, for example, you know, this whole thing you're talking about, the left or the right, who can handle it, who can't take it?
One of the greatest roasts of all time is Trump's roast.
I don't know if you saw when they roasted Trump and then, you know, what Snoop said about Trump.
He says, this won't be the first time you got rid of a black man in his house or you kicked that.
I don't know if you remember that line what he said.
First time you had to do it.
And guess what?
He's sitting there.
He's being trolled by everybody.
And guess who's sitting right in front of Trump?
His daughter.
And his daughter's laughing at the jokes they're saying about his father, about her father, which was kind of great to see.
I mean, that show, if you a lot of times they say he's got thin skin.
I mean, some of it can be credible.
But if you got thin skin, I don't see a lot of left sitting there being roasted by people in the media space.
The Republicans like.
Hold on.
Didn't Trump literally axe the White House correspondent?
No, no, I'm talking about who can handle it, levers the right.
I'm pretty sure that's what you're doing.
I totally get that.
But the first iterative.
The first person you think about when you say he can't handle it.
The first person everybody goes to is who?
Trump.
Because he's got thin skin.
Everybody's like, oh, he's got thin skin.
If you got thin skin, the last thing a thin-skinned person would do is the following.
I'll give you a judgment on this here.
You can kind of, let's have some banter on this one.
So, for example, yesterday, Kyle came on the podcast.
One of my favorite podcasts of the year.
Okay.
Not because we agreed, but it was interesting to see where he was at.
And we had a good conversation.
I'm sitting right here, though.
I mean, I'm sitting right here.
This will be the second most interesting.
You're so funny.
Thank you for that.
But we had a good conversation.
And by the way, I enjoyed Antonio Brown.
And Antoni Brown was full-on disrespectful when he was here.
He just kind of disrespected the whole audience, us, and it ended up being a very good podcast.
But tell me what place Trump wouldn't go to on media where they would trash him.
Where would he not go to?
Would he not go to CNN?
Would he not go to MSNBC?
Would he not go to Jimmy Fallon?
Would he not go to Jimmy Kimmel?
Would he not go to Courtney?
He went everywhere, right?
Now, let me flip this on you.
How many times have you seen Obama, Clinton, Hillary, any of those guys go on Fox ever?
How many times?
The answer is never, except for once.
Well, that's true.
Do they do that?
Let me make my point to you.
Let me make my point to you.
The point I'm trying to make to you is the following.
As much as we can say, you know, whatever we want to say about guys like Trump or anybody else, if you're willing to go in the den and know they're going to trash you, know they're looking for their moment, agree or disagree, man.
That's the last thing you can say is that's a thin thin-skinned person won't even go in there.
So there's a bit of an argument for that, but go ahead.
Also, Bernie will do the same thing.
I think that's why I respect Bernie as well.
I don't know if that has to do with Trump being thin-skinned or not.
And I think you can make an argument for him being thin-skinned, and that's exactly why he ran to these platforms to air his grievances.
But I think, didn't Trump have a pretty unique relationship with the media?
Like, for instance, so you asked me that question, like Trump went everywhere, which was true.
So I'm trying to think, okay, well, the Democrats then, like, they don't go on Fox News.
That's true.
But did they go on media much at all when they were in office?
Like, was Obama making regular appearances on NSNBC or Fox News?
He was making his rounds and going talking to people that gave softball questions all the time.
He would do lately.
Was this during campaigning or was this like when he was in office?
Either way, when he was in office, and by the way, I've watched every single one of Obama's interviews on late night, or he would go on any of this stuff.
I liked watching him, but the challenge was when he went on any shows, it was like, so what's your favorite song?
And it's like, what do you mean, what's your favorite song?
Versus Trump would go on is, why are you hiding everything?
And by the way, so who would be thin-skinned?
So here's a question for you.
Perfect thing to be thinking about.
We'll invite guests to the podcast.
Okay.
Somebody will email us and say, send us a list of questions.
Did you do that?
No, I'll just talk about it.
I have, though.
Got you, Jessica.
You got you.
You got your little fucking syllabus over here telling me to show up and fucking business attire at 11 o'clock at night.
I don't need a single fucking person.
I go, hey, I go, hey, do me a favor.
Do the best of your ability to look your best.
He's like, I got sweatpants, blue, or gray.
Oh, we don't care about that.
That's all he got.
But here's the point.
The point is the following.
The point is the following.
Here's the point.
We'll invite somebody to the podcast and they'll say, send us a list of questions.
Okay.
And send us a list of topics.
And then we'll invite somebody to the podcast and they'll say, ask me whatever you want to ask me.
To me, the person that says, send me the list of questions has got thin skin and is worried about getting caught.
Versus to me, the guy's like, ask me anything.
Trump doesn't say what questions are going to be asked me.
He just says, he knows they're going to ask him whatever they're going to be asking him.
Versus the left, hey, send me the questions.
Matter of fact, send me the debate questions to know what kind of questions.
Can you edit this question this way for me, Hillary, so I can be a little bit more.
And then writers, can you?
The John of Brazil got called out for supplying the questions.
But that is the ultimate thin-skinned community if we want to kind of go there.
And by the way, you know, you can make that argument, but Trump trumps the one thing about Trump.
He likes to go into that.
He likes going to the list.
I was just going to say that.
I think you can be two things at once.
I think Trump can be argumentative, not afraid of debate, go into the lion's den and be ready for a fight, a brawl, but he can also be thin-skinned.
Meaning, like you can be both.
That's a good point.
Thin-skinned does not necessarily mean afraid to fight.
And I think we have to define our terms, right?
So thin-skin, you get insulted.
But that doesn't mean that you're not going to show up.
And defend yourself.
But there are plenty of people who won't show up.
They just won't show up because they don't have the argument.
That is not Trump's problem.
He will show up.
That's right.
Largely because he is thin-skinned.
When you show up and you just say with random shit every time, I don't know if it's as impressive, but I.
I didn't hear that.
Well, when you show up and just say random shit every time, because it feels like that's what Trump's MO kind of was.
Got him elected.
Got him elected.
You got him elected.
That is true.
He got called out on all the random, quote, random stuff.
You know what it is like?
It's kind of like this.
It's kind of like the Republican who goes to a hardcore left school and makes it out.
Okay.
When you make it out, you've been destroyed by everybody on the left in that school that your arguments have to be better.
Yeah, but he didn't have any arguments for anything.
No, no, what I'm saying to you is, no, for him to go to the opposing side, I think that's a, you're developing muscle when you do that.
I think that's what hurt their people.
That's what hurt their feelings because they loved him.
Oh, he decided to do it.
Before he declared for president.
I think the part about Trump that is his challenge, here's the challenge he's got.
My opinion, I could be wrong, but I think he wants to fight everybody.
And 99% of people are now worth fighting.
And it's just kind of like, what'd you say?
What'd you say?
Like, you know, you go to the club with the one friend and he just, what'd you look at me for?
He's that guy.
So worst guy hanging out.
Let go of him.
What he just tried to do to do that.
Jesse's trying to fight too much.
99% of the fights at the club.
Listen, people are going to bump into you at the club.
Yes.
What'd you do?
It's like, dude, it's a tight spot.
People don't bump into each other.
Just kind of walk through.
You almost have to tell him, when we make it to the bar, which is only 20 yards away, about nine people are going to bump into you.
They're not trying to fight you.
They're going to bump into you.
It's okay.
I think that's his defense.
I think he loves power for what you just said.
I just say, I say this all the time.
I go, at this point in my life, because I went to Florida State, you're talking about steroids, keg parties, and fights and hot chicks.
That's Florida State for you.
Free tip out there.
And I would say this.
That's college.
That's college.
That's Florida State.
You guys all know out there.
But I say this.
I go, if I'm going to fight somebody at this point in my life, I'm going to know them.
We're going to have a past.
We're going to have a relationship.
They're going to do something that screwed me over when I told them not to.
Like, to Pat's point, I'm not fighting the random dude who bumped into me in the bathroom line.
And I think to use that metaphor, that's what Trump is doing.
It's okay to fight Nancy Pelosi.
It's okay to fight Chuck Schumer.
But to fight, that's fine too.
Every single person.
But to fight every single comment on Twitter and defend yourself is just like, dude.
I think the big issue with that too, and I saw flashes of this during the 2016 primaries.
And everybody on the left, probably a lot of people on the right, were waiting for Trump to switch up because there were a couple primaries that he lost where he came on stage and he was actually really gracious.
He was like, Ted Cruz ran a great campaign here.
You know, you guys won here and that was good.
And I was like, oh, okay, cool.
So he does have a bit of like.
I don't remember any of those.
He did it a couple times.
Because every time it happened, I was like, okay, if this guy wins presidency, at the very least, it's not fucking possible.
Yeah, he's going to be like, there's a word I'm looking for, a showman or something.
He's going to be a good sport about it and everything's going to be okay.
But man, it wasn't.
And Trump sold himself as a businessman.
He acts the least like a businessman I've ever heard in my entire fucking life, right?
If you're a supervisor and your employees fuck up and your manager comes to you, you never blame your employees.
It's your responsibility.
It's your shift.
If you're a manager and the store owner comes to you, you never blame your supervisors.
That's your store, right?
If you're a store manager and the CEO of the company comes to you, or if Congress goes to the CEO, you're like, oh, my employee.
Right.
You own it.
That's why you get to know that.
That's such a good point.
You say it's on me.
Exactly.
And Trump was the master of passing the buck.
Now, if he wanted to blame the deep state on the Democrat side, even at that, I don't think he should do it because you're the president and it's your job to work through it.
And that's what you've sold us on.
You talked about corporate inversions in Ireland and you talked about bringing people together and things.
And you said you were going to do that and he didn't.
But the problem is he attacked all of his friends too, right?
He attacked sessions.
He attacked his attorney general.
He attacked his heads, every nominated head.
He's got people in his past cabinet.
He's got every single person.
Like if you were on Trump's friends list, you were like two weeks away from being on his burn list.
And it was like, Jesus, like, can you not hold a single fucking friend at any place?
It's like he loves the drama.
It's like the chick who loves drama and you're like, I just, I just want to have a nice dinner, but she's on her phone.
What he's saying is essentially, speaking of drama, the reason that Biden got elected.
I'm not trying to troll you or trigger you.
But the reason Biden got elected, at least so we thought, was like, can we just calm the temperatures of the drama and the nonsense?
Nobody was like, Biden is the best guy ever.
He's been in politics now for years.
No.
Even the people that voted for him.
It was just like, enough with the Trump and the trolling.
And that's what got him elected.
Listen, years ago, they would say there would never be a president from New York, you know, New York City, because what New York DNA is like, right?
Chris Christio, he's too much.
He's too much.
He had one of those town hall meetings.
I don't know if you remember like 15 years ago or 12 years ago and he put this lady in her place and he's like, oh, video went viral.
Like, yeah, but that would never work in Alabama.
That would never work in Iowa.
And that's just not a model.
So if you know George Steinburner, if you know New York, if you know Gotti, if you know the people that came out of New York, the athletes, the politicians, the business people, that's New York.
It's very normal of a New York.
So anybody that lives outside of New York is not used to that.
George Steinburner fired the head coach, not the head coach, his skipper.
What do you want to call him?
Yeah, the head coach.
The head coach.
General manager.
Not the general manager.
Yeah, the manager.
He fired and rehired the guy three times.
He did it once on national television.
He's like, you're fired.
And he's like, what are you talking about?
You're fired.
It's like, you can't fire me like this.
And then brought him back and fired him again.
It's a little bit of a New York DNA that the rest of the world is just not used to.
I will say.
And he tried to bring that to politics.
Well, I mean, it obviously worked in some areas and it didn't work in some areas.
It was Billy Martin as the coach.
Yeah, Billy Martin backed up.
I will say this.
What people have to give Trump credit for, whether you like him or not, a New York billionaire goes into the deep South in Alabama and he's like, I'm just like you guys.
I'm just an everyday guy.
I'm a gun-totin 2A guy.
And these guys, whether you're in Madison, Wisconsin, or, you know, Biloxi, Mississippi, or Alabama, or West Virginia, coal-mining country, you're like, that's my guy, honk-honk with the horn.
It's like, that says more about Republicans than it does about the people.
Well, that too.
I don't know if that was the brand.
It was more about how he was able to market that.
That wasn't his brand, though.
He didn't come and say, I'm like you.
No, he said.
No, he says, I understand you, the common man.
I'm for you.
I love the point.
I'm for you.
I'm for you.
I love the poorly educated.
And by the way, I know how you can succeed.
And due deference, everyone is poorly educated at this point.
Yeah, because our education system.
So let's talk about that.
Let's talk about this.
So, current education system.
What do you think about the current education system that we have?
That's a really broad question.
Well, you said you like opinions, so go for it.
Give us a question.
I don't have a strong opinion on things I don't know anything about.
You want to talk about like colleges?
You want to talk about K-12?
Go through both.
You know, yesterday, Kyle had a lot of strong opinions on, you know, we should forgive all the college debt, all that stuff.
But I'm talking more the format, like our educational system, K through 12, and he can go into college as well.
I read a quote a long time ago.
I don't remember who it was from, but somebody, the quote that I read was that if you were to pull somebody out of the 18th century and you were to transport them into today, the only thing they would recognize would be the schools.
That like we have a way of educating people and we've done it for like hundreds of years.
And we're going to be able to get a school completely false.
Okay.
Well, we didn't have schools in the 1700s.
Nobody got educated anywhere in the 1700s.
We didn't have schools in the 1700s.
We didn't have schools.
You're saying that they would recognize the schools.
There were no schools in England or whatever.
People weren't like that.
Colleges, but not schools.
Okay, colleges.
I'm sorry.
But not schools.
So they wouldn't recognize the school system.
Okay.
Can we, what is our terms?
Does college not count a school?
Or?
Okay.
When you say schools, you mean K through 12.
We call college colleges.
Okay, well, I don't mean that, but maybe for the purpose of this conversation, we can mean that.
Okay.
College is a separate thing from school.
I feel like there are a couple of, if we're talking about like classes, I feel like there are a few basic classes that like every student should be required to take that we don't.
So things like a basic home met class.
I think a basic psych and a basic philosophy course I think would be really important.
Like just a couple of the things that help us like exist in the world and like file our taxes and be like a little bit critical of like the things we watch.
And then I know that largely speaking, I know that we've got troubles in schools that throwing more money, at least in some places, doesn't seem to help.
But I think schools are hard because sometimes that's like the last stop of like a whole bunch of problems prior to that.
Right.
If you've got a kid coming from like a single parent family who's not getting much sleep, whose household is in like a really fucked up area, at that point, how much can a particular like K through 12 school actually do for the child?
I'm not entirely sure.
Past that, if we're talking about colleges, I think colleges are pretty okay in the United States.
We have our really good schools that people all around the world come to get educated in.
I think that people opt too much for out-of-state schools.
You've got people talking about, I've got, you know, 200,000 in debt.
And it's like, oh, okay, cool.
Are you a doctor?
And they're like, no, I'm like a mechanical engineer, but I did like seven years of like out-of-state, you know, plus tuition and board and everything.
And it's like, why the fuck did you do that?
But yeah, I think largely speaking, I think that like the college stuff is okay.
I'm not a big fan of student loan forgiveness.
Why not?
Coming from like a working poor background before I got into streaming, I feel like the middle class asks for a lot of tax breaks sometimes.
And when I look at like really working poor people, I'm like, damn, these people are fucked.
Okay.
And you want to have your student loan debt forgiven when you're going to go on to become some of the like the top tier earners in all of society.
I think if you look at the, I know that the cost of education has grown, but the average amount of time to pay back a degree based on getting a degree, I think is about the same as it always has been.
20 years to pay back your debt.
That's the average.
I think I thought it was 15, but it might be 20.
I guess anyway.
Maybe for, you know, go-getters like you, you can do it in 15.
But on average, I think it's 19, 20 years.
Maybe, yeah.
But the people that earn college degrees go on to become the highest earners in society.
So if we're going to target stimulus towards any part of the economy, I'd rather go towards people that are like working poor and not towards people that are like engineers that just want to get rid of like a $500, $600 a month student loan debt payment.
You're saying targeting stimulus?
Or anything?
Rather than spend the money to pay off people's debt that they chose to incur themselves in order to get ahead in this life, that they're going to be rewarded for it.
Well, there are limits to it.
And that's how it goes.
By the way, the whole Biden $10,000 student loan didn't pass, correct?
It didn't happen.
It got passed.
It got struck down.
I think it's in the stalled in the Supreme Court, I want to say.
I think it's in the news.
The point is, nobody got the $10,000 or $20,000.
I know the race was open, and I know people were putting in applications.
I don't know if anybody's gotten it yet.
Don't get me started on these sites.
They're crashing.
On the websites.
But there were limitations.
I think if you made over $150,000 a year, you did not qualify.
And then people with Pell Grants were qualified for up to $20,000.
If you were going to do it, I think it was probably the best way to do it.
And it's maybe a good way to get young people to vote, even though they don't otherwise.
You even point this out.
I'll say this.
College prep and career readiness is a Ponzi scheme.
They got your kid for 12 years.
They've already convinced you.
And they've got 12 years to convince the kid you need to go to college because if you don't go to college, you're screwed.
And so you got to go to college.
And what is that?
That's just, you got to pay a lot of money to a school somewhere so that you have a college degree.
And nowhere in school do they say why you have to go to college.
It's just so that you can earn the money.
But it's not like, let's make a plan for you.
If you go to this school, it will cost you $80,000 total over four years, and then you have this potential of this earning.
No, you can go for basket weaving and get $200,000 in debt or whatever, and you completely unemployable.
And so, my point is, the whole thing is at this point, it's just a Ponzi scheme.
It might be based on data that came from 50 years ago, but at this point, you know, we got to wake up and smell the coffee.
Kids don't necessarily have to go to college.
And you went to school, you graduated.
No, I failed.
Okay.
I had to work too much.
Yeah, right.
So you're a dropout.
Wait, Zuckerberg.
Not everybody can do what I do, though.
I got ready to go.
No, but Zuckerberg's a dropout.
Gates is a dropout.
No, no, Hold on, hold on.
Dropped out of Harvard.
People like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg quit school because they were too busy working on projects.
If you're a guy that's failing, like remedial algebra, and you quit school, you're not going to become the next gate to Zuckerberg.
But bear with me.
What I'm saying is you do not have to have a college degree to succeed in life.
And so setting up a child and saying you have to have a college degree in order to succeed is a false paradigm.
It's just false.
There are a lot of people who succeed.
In fact, most of my friends, I don't know, did you graduate?
Okay.
Most of my friends who are entrepreneurs, who are self-starters, who are successful in life, did not go to college and did not graduate or did go to college for a short term and figured it out and didn't graduate.
And so my point is, it's a Ponzi scheme.
Now they're all in debt and now they're all saying, hey, government, bail me out.
I think you're doing a disservice to college.
Hear me out.
Because there's parts of what you're saying that I agree with and there's parts of what you're saying that I just think is not the best portrayal.
The only other person I've ever met that actually to defend college on a show.
Yeah, well, because there's different strokes for different folks.
When you say that college is a Ponzi scheme, it depends on the, this is why I think the decisions you're making when you're 17 and 18 are the most important decisions in your life.
Like, where am I going to school?
You really have to do the ROI on college because it's been proven that a high school completely unprepared to make those decisions.
Totally agree.
Youth is wasted on the young.
That's true.
But it's been proven that if you look at the math, that if a high school degree, you'll earn a million dollars over your lifetime.
A million.
A million degree.
Two million dollars.
Exactly.
Two million dollars, what you will earn on a college degree.
Okay.
And then as you get a PhD or master's, you can earn lifetime earnings on average three, four, five million.
Now, for every Bill Gates that drops out, Mark Zuckerberg that drops out or PBD that is go to college, there's hundreds and thousands of people that are just average people.
So that's why I totally agree with you on this.
Here's the problem that I think that's lacking in America: there is a need for technical schools, right?
These vocational schools.
But the problem is, if you're going to go to high school, right?
You're going to go K through 12 and you're taking all these classes, algebra, biology, math, this, the other.
And they say, hey, by the way, after high school, you should go become a plumber.
What 18-year-old kid is going to be like, I've been in school this whole time and now you want me to go back to being a plumber?
And what they don't understand is some plumbers will make $100,000 a year and you might only make $40,000 a year with your liberal arts degree.
New York.
Well, okay.
So you're making my point for me.
No, but the point is this, is that very few people are going to go through school for 18 years or 12 years and then be like, all right, let me go be a plumber or a sewage guy or a garbage man.
But even though the ROI on that is greater than sometimes a college.
Only because of the whole college prep and career readiness Ponzi scheme.
That's the only reason that.
But why is it a Ponzi scheme?
If you get a degree, you get because it's like a pyramid scheme.
It's like you pay in on the bottom, and then as more people pay in, you will get more money on the outcome.
Yeah, but you don't get that.
Except that for a lot of people, they don't get the indoctrination of that you have to go to some out-of-state school and send 50 grand a year.
If you're okay with going to community college and taking basic classes and paying your way, you can get out of the way.
That's not a Ponzi scheme.
A Ponzi scheme relies for you to get the money at the top from new people coming in at the bottom.
That's right.
But if you go and get a degree in nuclear engineering, you're not getting money from the school.
You go out in the job market and you get paid in the job market.
That's not a Ponzi scheme.
Well, it is because when the government comes in and bails out everybody's student loans and all of that, then it's all of a piece.
Well, okay, one, that has to be a lot of fun.
It's like a whole feeder thing.
Yeah, but that doesn't happen yet.
And two, if school, how many Ponzi schemes could you kill immediately and like every single person that is like graduated would still be making money?
That's not a Ponzi scheme.
But okay, so my point is that it's a setup, okay?
Because there are plenty of kids who really shouldn't be going to college.
They're much better served not going to college.
And there are plenty of kids in college who are being disserved by being taught things that simply aren't true about themselves and about life in general.
That's a different story.
So for me, I think what you guys are saying is everybody here has a point and everybody here is making a good counterargument to the other person.
This is what I would say.
To say all of it, like I want doctors to go to college.
Like STEM is, I don't know, I don't, I don't think you're saying that.
I think STEM, you need to go to school for STEM.
I'm not going to have somebody working like that's heart that's never gone to school and hasn't gone and done additional things you need to be a heart surgeon.
Yeah.
And I'm not saying that nobody should go to college.
Right.
You're saying what I'm saying is that the rule shouldn't be simply applied.
I think the part I have a challenge with is the following area.
The part I have a challenge with is the fact that, you know, for every one conservative professor, there's 13 liberal.
That's the problem.
For every, like, for example, the one thing you got to give so much credit to the left is they understood if you want to control the way people think, go control universities.
Okay.
Yeah.
You got to do that.
But by the way, Republicans were lazy on it.
That's true.
They have one school, which is what?
Hillsdale?
And maybe you got a couple other Christian schools that you got, you know, Bible schools that you got.
What else do the Republican?
Even Duke nowadays is what?
Is on the left.
Duke is not the Duke of 30 years ago.
So with the Republicans, rather than taking the money that they had and creating some real universities, they just said, nah, I'm going to go out there and just do my business stuff.
That's what I'm going to be doing.
I'm not going to go out.
You need a pen?
Yeah.
Can you give them a pen if you don't mind?
Yeah, thank you.
So I think that part is a mistake of the right.
You know, like right now, the left is losing their minds because Elon Musk bought Twitter.
Why?
Because they've been controlling media for how long now?
God knows how long.
That's strategically a good move on them.
So Elon comes in.
He starts exposing everything and they're like, yeah, Twitter files don't even talk about it on mainstream media.
They're scared shitless.
That's how you compete.
You compete that way.
Yeah, we've lost the competition because they've now, they've indoctrinated all of the teachers K through 12.
So our schools are gone.
That's a lazy side of Republicans.
Do you think, but it doesn't matter because it's the kids now that aren't that.
And you think that we have a chance to fight for the Second Amendment?
The Second Amendment is gone because all of the kids today that are going to zero tolerance schools are learning that guns are bad.
Yeah.
Full stop.
Okay, so then the question for me becomes: if as a capitalist and a person myself, that I'm fiscally conservative, as a capitalist, I like to say, what are you doing about it, Pat?
That's my MO in my family life.
What am I doing about it?
Okay.
Perfect.
If that's what Republicans stand for, what are you doing about it?
Personal responsibility, then damn it, Republicans.
Take some personal responsibility and ask yourself: how many universities have you started?
How many schools have you started?
How much time have you put into it?
Why don't you take your top 40, 50 richest billionaire Republicans and say, set aside, you really want to do this?
I'm going to give 100% of my money away to what?
Bullshit charities?
No, why don't you stop spending your children?
Why don't you send your money to these institutions just because you graduated from the school?
Because they're not united and they're lazy.
Get together and say, here's $50 billion over the next 20 years to build some incredible campuses and universities to compete against the Harvards and the Yales and the Berkeleys and all this other stuff.
How about we go do that?
And they're not doing that.
I totally agree with that.
And I will add, save the children now.
Save the children now.
Do not put your children in school.
Public schools.
Any school.
You say not even college.
School, school.
School.
That's K-12 right now.
K-12.
Right.
Okay.
Can we agree that education is at least a quest for knowledge?
Sure.
Education should be a quest for knowledge.
Fundamentally, yeah.
What's the first thing you learn to do in school if you want to ask?
Sit down and shut up.
Don't be listening.
Raise your hand.
Raise your hand to ask a question.
You need permission to ask.
You can't just ask questions.
You need permission first.
You have to draw attention to yourself.
This is an embodied lesson.
You're embodying this lesson of don't ask.
Okay.
And we said that education is a quest for knowledge.
That begins with what?
A question.
The first thing you learn in school is don't question.
By the way, we're living in a whole era right now of don't question.
I agree.
No questions are allowed.
Oh, watch this.
Can I ask you a question?
Yes, ask me a question and don't raise your hand.
Ma'am, can I please?
Well, I think that the format of school, which has consistently been there for 100 plus years now, was based on the factory workers, Industrial Revolution, get in line, fall in line, stay in line, that whole thing.
But I want to hone in on what you do.
You're a major advocate on homeschooling.
So I'm sure you can go on for days the pros of it.
But my question is: what are the pros and cons of homeschooling?
I have a lot of friends that are doing homeschooling right now.
Pat's kids are in private school.
I went to public school my whole life.
And then at the end of high school, I went to private school.
I've done it all.
The last thing that I ever wanted to do in my life was be home with my parents and learn from my parents.
Like homeschooling was not an option for me.
So what are the pros and cons that you're seeing from being a homeschool?
So let me say this.
My relationship with my teenagers is amazing.
Okay.
You want a good relationship with your children?
Do not send them away from you for eight hours a day.
Do not do that.
No.
Zero do that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Or just with my parents.
No, I'm in the deadline.
You guys can't comment because your waters were tainted when you were sent to school.
Okay.
The school got between you and your parents.
The school presented.
I don't know about all that.
That's why I prevented it.
There's a parent when I was 19.
I was homeless for a month and I thought, man, this dog budget is.
It's not as bad as living with mom and child.
You can't say because I'm with him on that.
You can't say because you don't have the experience of not having the school come between you and your parents.
The thing that when you drop your child off at school, you are tacitly telling the child, I abdicate my responsibility.
I cannot be responsible.
The school is responsible.
The school has authority.
My authority is now challenged inside my own home, inside my own home.
The moment that the school disagrees with whatever, you lose.
Well, that's part of life.
That's part of life.
No, it's not.
I disagree.
You're wrong.
My teenagers have never rebelled.
Your teenagers have to follow a different set of rules depending on what environment they're in.
If they go to a friend's house, that friend's house might have a different set of rules that they have to play.
Not if they challenge my rules.
Let's say that I don't know if this is the case for you, but if your house, let's say you guys wear shoes in your house because you do that and you don't care.
And if they go to another friend's house and then their house, the rule is no shoes in the house, they can't challenge.
I mean, they could challenge that parent's authority, but it wouldn't.
They could respect, right?
The rules of responsibility.
You're going to make it that broad, but I say the same for school.
You respect what your teacher tells you.
My point is the teacher sets up this conundrum inside the child.
So daddy is authority, except that now the teacher is the authority.
And daddy told me that the teacher's the authority.
So now I trust the teacher.
And by the way, as we know, and I don't know what private school, but we know in public schools, there's a lot of challenge to parental rights and parental authority.
And that sets up a huge conundrum for the child.
That's child abuse.
Can you just go back to my initial question?
Because obviously you're going to be an advocate of homeschooling.
We're not trying to sway your opinion.
I don't say homeschooling anymore because school is child abuse.
The whole idea of the school.
Well, you've got a whole far-right directive on this.
But let's go back to the question: what's the pros and cons of home education?
Okay.
Yeah.
So what are the pros and cons?
Give me like maybe the top three pros and maybe some cons, if you would.
The founders of the nation.
Geniuses, right?
Sure.
Geniuses.
They created this.
This is the greatest leap in prosperity of the world.
Forefathers were total G, 100%.
Never went to school.
Top G is one might say.
Top G's.
Never went to school.
Yes.
What, what does it mean?
Well, as you said, there were no schools back then.
Hold on.
I just want to quick fact check for the audience.
So if people start looking up Benjamin Franklin, George, all these people, none of these people were educated in any institution outside the home.
There were no tutors brought in outside.
There were no teachers anywhere.
They didn't go to any sort of class.
But that's not the question.
The question is, did they go to school?
They didn't go to school.
Okay, but K through 12.
But were they educated by their parents at home, like a homeschooler would do today?
Perhaps.
Well, you're the one making the claim.
Is that true that they were educated at the school?
Well, I'm saying we didn't have schools, so they didn't go to school.
But go on with your point.
Fair enough.
We're going for pros and cons of homeschooling.
I'm trying to get this answer.
So my point is the freedom model, right, created this.
Got it.
Benjamin Franklin, do you know what he did?
He did a lot of stuff.
Everything.
Yeah, of course.
Okay.
But what our system does is it pigeonholes the child and it says you need to do this or you need to do that.
You need to choose.
You can't do both.
It also says don't try.
That's one of the paradigms in school because failure is bad.
Okay.
Failure is bad.
What's the key to entrepreneurship?
Try, try, try again.
You fail.
Yeah, of course.
You fail and you get back up and you try again.
But the school paradigm is failure's bad.
That red F on a white sheet of paper, that's bad.
So don't try.
That's the subtext.
That's the underlying message.
Or one might say, don't try to don't fail.
Yeah, how do you get A's if you don't try?
But keep going.
Okay.
Keep going.
Okay.
Well, I'm looking for pros and cons here.
So the pros are the family relationship.
Sure.
That's a huge pro.
The freedom that the child has to pursue his innate giftings, right?
And so there's a lot of freedom built in.
There's a lot less time spent on, quote, education.
And let's just talk about academics for a little bit because the school focused very much on academics.
So we believe that education is academic, right?
I mean, when you define education, how do you define education?
That's a very broad word.
Well, your child goes to school to what end?
Learning, learning.
Well, I mean, they go to school to learn things, but generally to prepare them to exist in the world.
It's probably a functioning unit of the education.
But one of the criticisms that you had of school is it doesn't prepare them because it doesn't teach home ec.
It doesn't teach.
I didn't say it didn't prepare them, period.
It prepares you for the future job, hopefully, that you hold.
And it kind of rounds you out the first time you learn other things.
Do you know that school today, that the jobs that the schools are preparing children for are going to be gone in the next 15 years?
That if it likely is a school, I think if you go to school, jobs that are being created, that will be created in the next 15 years, the schools aren't preparing children for them.
That might be true.
But who do you think is going to happen?
How many, besides you, do you two have kids?
Who's got four?
I got zero.
If you had kids, would you send them to college or no?
Well, that's not the question.
Would I send them to school?
No, no, I'm holding school.
Would you send your kids to college?
Depending on what they want to do, depends on what they want to do.
Just so you know, for me, it's more around STEM.
Like my kids.
College is a tool.
So let me give you an idea about what my thoughts are on this.
I don't think homeschooling is for everybody.
I do think more people should consider homeschooling.
Right now, we have about 3.7 million homeschool students in America.
It's a bigger number than I thought, by the way.
I'm looking at the data right now.
Almost doubled because of COVID.
Yeah, and I'm not surprised.
I think it's one event.
COVID also probably encouraged parents to say, you know what, I kind of don't want to put my kids in school.
I don't like what they're doing.
So it was a bad thing.
Rightfully so.
No problem.
I'm for the average person that doesn't want to do homeschool.
Like my wife doesn't want to do homeschooling.
We've talked about it.
She doesn't want to do it.
She's like, no, I'd much better have the kids go to school.
So they go to a private Christian school and we're happy about it.
My concern is the values and principles being forced down kids' throats today when you're talking to them.
And that is a to do that too early makes me a little bit uncomfortable.
Didn't you just recently say you had a conversation?
I feel like you had a conversation about LGBT with your kids recently or something that you kind of worked on.
I just wanted to not just to like what's being taught in the schools, but the exposure to the culture that comes from the other children.
Sure.
Absolutely.
So all of that is like this nefariousness from the culture that's feeding in to the kids who are in school today.
Yeah.
But we used to say that education was the three R's, right?
The three Rs.
It's academics.
And that was the big thing is like take the Bible out of the school.
It's the three R's.
Reading, recess, and arithmetic.
Yeah, reading, right?
It's not even three R's.
Like we know that it's a lie and yet we sort of like laugh and move on.
But it's not.
Education is the whole doctrine.
Education should be focused on the whole child and how to manage that child into adulthood.
You're raising the parents of your grandchildren.
You're not raising children.
You're raising the parents of your grandchildren.
So keep your eye on the prize.
What do you want for them from their lives?
And the school teaches college prep and career readiness.
That's the whole focus of the schools is to get those kids into college.
College prep and career readiness makes the value of the child his earning.
If there's one thing I will say, it's I don't trust in the public educational system.
I don't.
If a person can make money, if the person can make money, enough money, like you know how people just sell the dream on, hey, go make money so you can buy a Ferrari or Lambo or if you can go make money to get your kids out of public school, to put them in a private school that's teaching the values and principles that align with you, go make your money for that.
That'll be better worth of your money being spent than going and buying a fancy car or a dream house.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of what's going on in public schools.
So some want to do homeschooling and some can take the alternative and put them in a good private school.
I fully agree with Pat.
And again, I've been to public, private, but I do want to get this question answered because there's a lot of people considering homeschooling and that's great.
Ben Franklin, everything, the household.
But are you willing?
Are you willing to at least acknowledge that there are some cons and what are the cons?
Sure.
So, well, first of all, so we call it homeschooling.
But the problem is that means we're taking the school paradigm and adopting it in our homes.
And I think that that's basically the Trojan horse, right?
We're allowing the school paradigm to invade our homes.
And the school paradigm is not a learning paradigm.
It's a don't ask, don't try, don't think paradigm.
So it's the anti-learning paradigm.
That's why I bristle at the word homeschooling.
And that's why his wife doesn't want a homeschool because she doesn't like school.
She didn't have a good time in school.
So why don't you?
But she just doesn't want to spend her entire day teaching four kids.
Well, because she believes that it takes the entire day because we've been brainwashed by the system to think that school takes the entire day.
But the only reason it takes the entire day is because parents were working and they said, hey, give us your children while you're working and we'll keep them for the full day.
But school doesn't take education, doesn't take the entire day.
So what are the considerations?
So it's a completely different paradigm.
So what are the cons?
The cons of homeschooling is trying to replicate the school at home.
That's a disaster.
And in fact, the parents who choose the K through 12, which is like the public school curriculum, they choose to do that at home.
They have the highest recidivism rate and they put their kids back in school because they can't do it.
Because it's a setup, okay?
You went to school for 12 years and you were taught you can't.
He does.
I don't know how to die.
It feels like he can't.
Can't do anything.
Can't do anything that can't vibes with that.
Exactly.
How much social interaction do your kids have with all their peers?
So my son is an extreme extrovert.
He's got two and a half million followers on TikTok.
I'm talking about in real life.
He has so many friends.
It's being real life, Sam.
Real life friends.
No, how much interaction?
I went to a conference, and I sat next to a young guy and had some nice interactions with him.
He ran all the AV stuff for the conference.
I go home.
I'm telling my son about this conference.
He goes, Yeah, I know.
You were sitting next to Josiah.
He's a friend of mine.
That he met online.
No, that he met in person.
But I'm asking with you.
Forget about your famous TikTok son.
You have how many kids?
Three.
Three.
I'm asking how much social interaction they have with other kids.
A lot.
And I have to ask you why you're asking that.
Okay.
My fear is that they're probably, I'm not saying your kids, if you're doing homeschooling and you're hanging out with mommy and daddy every day, my fear is that you're not interacting with your peers.
One of the things that I fear.
What?
What do you mean?
Because you got to get out there and be a part of the world.
My fear is that I don't have kids, but I have a nephew that I basically helped raise.
He's a 10-year-old kid who goes to a great public school in Miami.
That's hard to believe, I guess.
For him, is that he's being bullied or he's learning how to bully.
But I don't operate in fear.
I operate in reality.
He's not being bullied.
If anything, he's doing the bullying.
You're operating in fight.
Yeah, exactly.
I can.
But my fear would be that I'm home with mom and dad every single day.
I have like some sort of mommy Oedipus complex going on.
And I don't have any interaction with any kids my age.
I'm not on a sports team.
I don't interact with a complete bull.
No, has he even made a TikTok account yet?
You've created this whole false paradigm.
Because I'll tell you.
That homeschool is being home at the time.
Let me tell you some of my best memories of school.
And anyone out there who's watching this, it isn't in class raising your hand.
It's in between halls, recess, talking to a hot chick over there, understanding social dynamics, socializing.
What are we doing during recess?
Oh, those kids are smoking cigarettes.
Holy shit.
I don't want to smoke.
Let me go over here.
Those are the gangs.
Let me not go over there.
I'm on a sports team right now.
Cool.
There's my best friend.
Hey, buddy, good to see you.
That is what school is.
My kids did.
And they get none of that at home school.
They absolutely do not get none of that at homeschool.
You're sending me a chance to get to the school.
They get to see you in between periods.
What do they get to see?
That's a specific question.
They have much more social interaction than they would in school.
And you'd be swearing?
Well, my kids all did sports.
They all went to piano.
Wait, wait, what kind of sports?
How do you do sports on the school?
You actually participate with schools.
You just participate with the school sports schools.
They just let you send kids to play school.
Or the non-school sports leagues.
Gotcha.
They, by the way, they went shopping with me, so they had plenty of interaction with people, real people, adults in the stores, for instance.
Got it.
They went to events with me.
So they had plenty of my kids all grew up on film sets.
So they had plenty of interaction with people of all stripes on film sets.
So the idea that somehow they're just home, you're painting me as if I grew up or I raised my kids in some backwater in Georgia and prevented them from seeing people.
And that's just a fault.
There's some homeschools in Georgia right now that are very offended.
Yeah, okay.
What about the kids who go to school who can't talk to anybody because they're extreme introverts and the schools actually like kill them because they are so burdened by all of the interaction.
Like you can't just paint one picture and say, ooi.
I totally agree with you.
You made a very clear case of why you should do homeschooling.
That's great.
But I think it'd be unfair to acknowledge that there are certain situations where they're not the best approach.
Like for instance, Destiny and myself, if my mom or my dad was trying to be my homeschool teacher, I would flunk out of school and I would skip class, if you know what I mean, every single day.
Because they brought the school paradigm into the home.
I enjoyed school.
I enjoyed interacting with others.
That has helped me become a salesperson, an entrepreneur, and understanding networking and social dynamics.
That actually worked out well for me.
So what I'm saying is like not every kid should just go to homeschool, period.
End of story.
There's pros and cons to everything.
Listen, if you're religious, you go to CCD.
There are after-school clubs you can send your kids to.
There's plenty of socialization.
Like Christian education for kids.
Like if you wanted to send her to a private school, but you homeschool them instead, you send them those things.
Sunday school.
There are lots of co-ops and other kinds of paradigms for kids to have.
Maybe your bad relationship with your parents is because you were conditioned at such an early age to spend so much time away from them when you went to the school.
To be clear, I love my mom.
If she's watching, I love you.
Well, you sound like you couldn't be schooled by her.
So maybe that's because the school got between you and your mom at an early age.
Yeah, listen, I think it is an argument that's being made, and I think more people ought to consider homeschooling, but I don't think it's for everybody.
Here's some statistics to look at: 3.7 homeschool students in the U.S., state with the most homeschoolers are Carolina, Florida, Georgia.
Top three reasons for homeschooling is concerned about school environment.
Top reason, homeschool students outperform institutional school students academically.
Interesting.
The highest homeschooling rate is amongst students with a grade equivalent of six to eight.
48% of homeschooling households have three or more children.
The average cost of homeschooling is $700 to $1,800 per student per year.
Wow.
It's a big savings.
One in three homeschooling households has an annual income over $100,000, and homeschooling saves $56 billion of taxpayer money annually.
Go a little lower to show which state has the most.
It was interesting to see who was number one.
Keep going down.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
You'll see Carolina.
Yeah, Carolina's number one with 10.4%.
Keep going right there.
Okay.
10.6% of all the students in Carolina are homeschooling.
Did you know that?
It is by far pervasive.
Why is that?
Yeah, Florida's 4.6% is Georgia, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Nebraska.
It's infective.
Infectious.
I think when you meet children who have been home educated, they're a cut above.
They are more adult because they haven't been coddled.
The schools tend to coddle children and infantilize them and make them feel like they can't.
And so children who grow up in a homeschool environment, they do chores at home.
They have a responsibility to the family that's more cemented, right?
They're more locus-focused or whatever.
And so I think that, and they're more conscientious.
They tend to be more conscientious with their work because there's the paradigm between them and the parent, not a teacher that changes every year or every semester or whatever.
My son in second grade had two teachers and they just alternated days.
And I was like, that's not a great paradigm for a kid to go back and forth between a different teacher every day.
So There's so much to recommend it and there's so little to recommend against it.
And the socialization argument is this cropped up, this sort of straw man argument that they've built up as a way of sort of saying, hey, but school is good for this.
And I'm like, no, the idea is school is supposed to educate the child.
So we're talking education.
You want to bring in socialization?
I'm like, I don't care because every choice is a binary choice.
Okay.
And the reason that we know that is because you have your priorities.
So if you prioritize the education of your child, then education is first.
And socialization is, well, I'll get that figured out once I get education handled.
Okay.
So there is absolutely no argument you can make for socialization that would say the child should be in school.
When I lose the education argument, the argument's done.
Let's say I fully agree with you.
By the way, you're making a great case.
I'm not being argumentative, but no coals.
Troll me, baby.
Troll me.
Let's go.
Let's troll you right now.
I think there are rules and I think there are exceptions.
I think what you are doing is exceptionally the exception.
Because even like, let's take out North Carolina, which is the complete anomaly here, 10% of kids.
So I don't know what happened to North Carolina.
But every other state, you're talking about 2% to 5% of children.
So there's 90 to 95% of kids that are never ever going to be homeschooled.
Whose parents don't have enough confidence in themselves, having gone K through 12, having graduated high school, do not have enough confidence in themselves to even teach their children the third grade.
Because they were indoctrinated at an early age with the school system.
It's the only thing they know.
So their whole life is a binary, like my kid either goes to school or he's a loser.
How could a parent like that be in a state of mind to even begin to homeschool their kid?
I don't know if you're trolling me with that comment, right?
I disagree with almost everything you said.
Sorry, I'm just fine.
What do you wholeheartedly disagree with Sam on?
And you have an 11-year-old, so you could speak to this.
Exactly, but he's making a really great case.
Yeah, but I think they're insane cases.
I don't agree with anything almost.
Like even the numbers on here.
I'm fine with that.
You're still making the case and you're being highly effective.
Even the numbers over here were crazy.
That $600 to $1,500 a year.
I'm guessing that's only spent on curriculum, like on books and stuff.
Yeah, but there's something in economics we learned called opportunity costs and having a parent stay at home for the entire day, that's $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year in lost income if they were working a job.
On the other hand, but you would say that parent would insist that their child go to a private school.
That could be 20 grand, 30 grand.
I don't know.
I mean, if you're going to a really expensive private school, it could be that.
No, that's what school is called.
That was our choice.
I mean, I've looked at the way.
I want to send my kid to the high school that I went to, which was a private high school.
And I think that's $15,000 a year right now.
But I understand costs are going to change in different areas.
I think the socialization argument is a valid one.
I think there's a lot of stuff that's being hidden in terms of what you're advocating for in terms of homeschooling.
So for instance, you keep saying this that eight hours a day is too much.
What do you think is the, one, what is like the ideal amount of time a day it should take for instruction?
And then two, what are the things that you want to cut out?
I'm curious.
By the way, before you answer that, I think it would be great since we're on this topic.
Before we move on, Rob, are you able to do a poll from our audience if they're an advocate of homeschooling or if they're spending?
I would like to get maybe some numbers from the audience.
Call it home learning.
Would you please?
Yeah, please do not call it homeschooling.
Do not instantiate a paradigm.
That dichotomy, that false dichotomy of homeschooling.
You was asking a good question.
You can do a poll without having to stop them.
Go ahead.
Ask the question you asked.
Yeah, two questions would be one is what do you want to cut from instruction?
Because it sounded like you were saying eight hours is way too much.
You could do it in way less.
And then two, what is the daily amount of instruction you think you need?
Like how many hours a day or 30 minutes?
How long do you think you need to spend it?
Okay.
So I home educated my, and I actually homeschooled.
So I'm culpable here, right?
Home educated.
But no, I homeschooled.
I schooled them, okay?
Because I bought on, I bought into the whole paradigm and I thought school was education.
So for several years, I homeschooled my children until I figured out that the freedom model is a much better model and the school model is a failed paradigm, right?
Because I felt inadequate.
I went to Duke University.
I speak five languages.
I felt completely inadequate to educate my own children.
Just to refocus, I want to know how long you think the unstructured span, what do you want to get to?
So I spent roughly three hours at the kitchen table with my young children every day, all three of them, three hours.
The rest of the day, they pursued instruction the rest of the day.
A few more hours during the day, they pursued instruction, but they didn't need direct instruction from me.
They didn't even need me for those three hours.
I just chose to be at the kitchen table available to them, getting my work done because I work full time.
I wrote a book and I also did three hours of radio every day.
So I was also working.
And then one day a week, we had a, let's see, when they were very young, we didn't do, we didn't do the co-op.
Then we started doing the co-op.
And when my son entered seventh grade, actually before then, when they were fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, we did a full day of co-op.
So that was from nine o'clock in the morning until three o'clock in the afternoon.
Okay.
And I spent the day with them there.
Did what do you, you said, how old do your three children know about, if you mind saying?
21, 18, and 17.
Gotcha.
Did any of them or are any of them going to college?
No, not yet.
Do you know what?
So the 21-year-old does TikTok?
He does TikTok and he does social media for people and he's an actor.
And do you know what the two younger ones want to do?
So my second seems to like engineering, but he's questioning whether college is the way to get to the cutting edge of engineering.
So he's exploring his options right now.
So what is your metric for success for homeschooling your children?
Their happiness.
That can't be the answer.
No?
No.
If I let my kid run around for eight hours a day until he's 18, he's very happy.
No.
But that can't be the answer for.
Education should be the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness.
So as long as I've equipped them to pursue truth, beauty, and goodness, then I know that they are well graduated.
Okay, so my mind is completely business wired.
So I'm thinking like KPIs, like key performance indicators.
So if I educated my child from K through 12 in my home, one marker for success for me, I would think that if he performs well on like the ACT or the SAT, okay, I've done a good job educating him.
Or if he goes to college and he's very successful, or if he maybe gets a good job, like a traditional job.
Now, if they do non-traditional work, that's cool, but I don't know how much of a bearing that is on like how well I educated him.
Right.
So like I could probably set my kid up to be decently successful on YouTube just because I am if we started doing videos together.
But I don't know if that's like, if that's showing that like I educated him well or I'm just like kind of letting him piggyback off my career.
So I'm curious in terms of like, how do you mark that you were successful or that your children had a positive experience doing the home learning thing as compared to a contemporary, as compared to somebody else of the same age?
So to me, a marker of success is that my child can teach himself and is not afraid to learn.
So my children will teach themselves anything that they need to know and they're not afraid to go try to figure out how to how to learn it.
But if I ask them, what does like that?
The other thing is that they're all entrepreneurial spirits and so they understand how business works because that I think is something that we ought to be teaching our children how business works.
In fact, my son is a lot brighter than I am with regards to that.
I think that's one of the most powerful things that you said is the entrepreneurial free thinking spirit.
Well, because that is not taught in the world.
No, that's no, but that's not powerful, though, right?
Let's say that I, so Your metric is the academic metric.
Well, let's say I'm standing in a room with 100 parents, okay?
And every single parent here, what is, is it 2,400 is the max SAT score today?
I don't even know.
Is it 24?
I can't remember.
I thought it was 16.
But they raised it.
I thought it was 16 or maybe 1,600.
They raised it.
Let's say that SATs.
Let's say I'm standing in a room, SATs.
And every parent here is telling me that, like, oh, my kid got $1,700 on the SAT, right?
Very quickly, I can kind of ascertain like the academic capabilities and the math skills, the English skills, the reading skills of these kids.
Let's say that you stand in a room with 100 parents, and I know both of you know this because you guys have probably hired people and talked to people before.
Somebody comes up to you and they say, oh, I'm an entrepreneur.
I don't know what the fuck that means.
I'm going to need to see some work.
I'm going to need to see a portfolio.
I need to see some, like, just because you're an entrepreneur, that might just mean that you run a channel and you like do drop shipping and you make 400 bucks a month doing that deal with your mom, right?
But if you tell me, like, oh, I graduated from Duke or I graduated from, you know, even like a decent state school with an engineering degree, okay, cool.
I immediately have some idea that at the very least, you can show up and get a degree in engineering.
That says something, right?
So, but it's superficial because it's absolutely not superficial.
I'm saying you're an entrepreneur is a good person.
Yeah, but if you, if you also, sure, but if you score 1600 on the SAT, it doesn't mean that you can have an original thought.
To me, having an original thought is more brilliant than scoring 1,600 on the SAT.
That's true, but I feel like the goal, this happens, everybody does this.
There are problems.
This goes back to one of the first things I said on the show in terms of me defending institutions.
I wish that we were better at criticizing things without throwing the whole thing out.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that school, K through 12, or colleges are a perfect institution.
I think there's a lot of wasted time.
I'm very progressive, but I think that the ideological leanings of the school are fucking insane, right?
That 13 to 1 is barely even a real number because you know that one conservative is not like a gun-toting magnet.
That's like a liberal conservative, right?
That's a guy that would have voted for Clinton, right?
The one conservative, right?
So there are definitely problems with the school.
I just don't like the idea, like, okay, there are some problems.
I'm going to throw all of it out.
We're going to ignore all the pros, and we're going to get so ideologically invested in our particular solution that we can't even name a single son because I still don't know a con from the homeschooling thing.
And I can think of three off the top of my head.
My sister was homeschooled for her entire life.
I know tons of cons off the top of the house.
What are the cons?
One is that you have a parent that's stuck in the household.
Two is that you have to go out of your way to find extracurricular groups to sign up for.
The parent in the household is not a con to me.
Well, you're not.
Well, that's because you guys had a lot of money.
For parents where both parents need to work, that's unfortunately for a lot of people, it's not an option.
Right.
So one is.
It's not a con to homeschooling.
It's a barrier, but it's not a con.
The con is that it's a job that you don't get paid for.
You're a slave to your kid, which is kind of okay.
It's part of like being a parent to some extent, but a lot of parents.
I reject that characterization.
Okay, well, for the people that can't afford to have a single person, a parent, staying in the household until the child is 18.
Go down the list.
Yeah, that's one.
The second one is you have to go out of your way to find extracurricular activities.
It could be CCD.
It could be church stuff.
It could be whatever.
Thankfully, my parents were religious.
I say, thankfully, I'm an atheist now, but so they had an easy community to kind of do enroll their kids in the Catholic class, or my sister, in class, whatever.
And then three is support can be difficult.
At least back when they did it 15, 20 years ago, I hold on.
That's changed a lot.
Sure, it's probably changed a lot, but it could be like if you've got questions about like a certain curriculum or which books are the best or whatever, it could be hard to find that support online.
Whereas if you've got issues with schools, there's a whole infrastructure built out.
And then four is not as big a deal, but things related to special education requirements can be really, really complicated in the home if you're not ready to be like a full-time caretaker or meet like the individual needs of a child.
Maybe your child has a speech impediment and you know how to train them.
You'd have to take them to a speech pathologist instead of relying on school, right?
Maybe they're asking for career guidance and you don't know the answer.
Your child's like, oh, I want to be a mechanical engineer when I grow up.
And it's like, okay, well, I got my degree in writing.
I have no idea like what guidance I can be.
So those are like four off the top of my head that are like challenges.
I went to high school and I had my drama class because I really liked drama and I really wanted to be an actress.
And everybody at the high school, literally, like everybody at the high school said, you can't be an actress because nobody ever succeeds.
And frankly, the gal who taught acting, pretty girl, had spent a bunch of time in New York, clearly had not succeeded because she was teaching high school drama in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
So of course her paradigm was nobody succeeds because she didn't succeed.
So just because your parent doesn't know how to get you somewhere doesn't mean that the school does.
And in fact, there are plenty of people in schools that dissuade children, like I was dissuaded, from pursuing acting, which is why I ended up at Duke University and then had debt because I was studying something that I eventually didn't do.
But the other thing that I want to, I just have to say, we live in a culture right now that believes in the school model because why?
We all went to school, so we were all brainwashed into the school model.
So your very definition of education is, well, you have to perform well on a test.
That is not the true definition of education.
And the idea that it's a terrible burden to have to be enslaved to your child, I will say this.
We also live in a culture that our schools have taught us that sacrifice is the ultimate evil, that you should never sacrifice anything because you can have it all.
And that's a lie from the pit of hell.
And the fact is that sacrifice is the highest good.
And the only reason that our culture has survived and that this nation has been created is because they understood that the free exchange, the free sacrifice of self for something greater than is the greatest good that we can have.
And it's the basis of our economy.
It's the basis of capitalism.
It's the basis of growth.
And frankly, it's the basis of family.
So when you have a family, you learn that you sacrifice for your family because in the sacrifice, your true value comes out.
And then you build your value.
That's great.
But when you say sacrifice, that implies a con.
That's all I was saying.
If you can't afford to say that.
Because the definition that we have been given from our schools, it's a sacrifice is evil.
Sacrifice is sacrificing.
Sacrifice by definition.
If there's no con involved, then it's not a sacrifice.
No, that's wrong.
That would be like me giving my wife a $500 certificate to some fucking restaurant and be like, look, I sacrificed for you.
Get the fuck off my back.
That's not a sacrifice.
That doesn't mean anything.
I didn't give up anything up to do that, right?
Sacrifice by definition implies that you're giving something up.
If you've got plenty of money and you can sacrifice.
But it's not a con you, we're playing exotic language games to say that there are no cons involved in sacrifice.
A sacrifice by definition is a pro on one side and a con on the other.
Then you can't call it a con.
It's in the game.
You have to sacrifice to go to the gym.
You can't call it a con.
You have to sacrifice to go to the gym.
Is there a con to going to the gym?
There is a sacrifice to everything.
So you can't call it a concept.
I'm going to keep asking this question.
Is there a con to going to the gym?
Is it painful?
Do you spend time doing it?
Okay.
There are cons to it, but there are pros too.
You're healthier.
You look at it.
So you can't just call it a con.
It's disingenuous to say sacrifice is a con.
You would say there are pros and cons.
That's what we were saying before.
That was Adam's initial question, I think, two hours ago, was what are the pros and what are the cons?
Just because something might be on the net good, there's still going to be cons involved.
Sure.
Sure.
Okay.
Net good.
Sure.
Also, I think it's important to note, you mentioned having this a really bad drama teacher.
All of us have had bad teachers, I imagine, right?
All of us have probably also had hopefully at least one.
We've had good teachers and bad teachers.
Yes.
Exceptionally amazing teachers.
Right, but we tend to glorify the school and say, but school is net good.
And my view is school is net bad.
Okay, but the people who don't go to school, I think that different people will say, well, there was a net positive and there was a net negative.
I think that's, this is the whole fundamental question I was asking.
What are the pros and cons?
Because I don't think that there are all pros of doing homeschooling.
I also don't think there's all cons of going to actual school.
Right.
And of course, my viewpoint is net Good for schools next year.
Net bad for school.
How old is your youngest kid?
17.
17.
Okay.
I think you guys should just swap lives per day, and your kid should go to homeschooling with Sam and your kid to go to home learning.
And it wish Patrick.
Do you want to take it from here?
Try it because it is the most amazing people who don't understand.
Here's what people who send their children to school don't understand.
They fundamentally can't understand the sacrifice that they are making.
I mean, you say that, but then on the other hand, too, I was a lot more lukewarm to the idea until Adam started asking you about the socialization stuff.
I feel like there's a lot of socialization that you're undercounting for your children.
When he asked you, like, what kind of friends do my kids have?
And your first answer is, well, he's a two million follower kind of TikTok.
In my opinion, that's actually one of the fundamental driving forces in our society today that is destroying children.
Yeah, he doesn't believe in TikTok.
My point is.
You might not believe in it, but it's 2 million followers.
I think you're just mad that he has more followers on TikTok than you.
All night is my accounts keep getting banned.
Exactly, bro.
You're getting depressed because you went to school and you hung out with the wrong person.
Let me clarify that my point with that is he's an extreme extrovert.
He has a ton of friends everywhere.
Like he goes, he goes.
Listen, here's the, let's transition to a different topic.
Here's what I will say on just listening to you guys going back and forth.
You know, what you think the world of homeschooling is, you don't have full context on it, right?
We're totally agree.
Okay.
What she thinks of everything else as being very evil may not be as realistic to you and I because we're like, yeah, I mean, like the biggest thing for me is the reason why I like conversations like this is because I learned through debate.
That's how I learn.
I learned through people debate.
Sometimes if it's at the house, they're only hearing from one personality, one teacher.
There isn't enough debate.
Maybe that's one thing that is a high value in our family.
I love debate.
I love exchange.
I love disagreements because it's getting your brain to work.
It's like a muscle working here.
If you don't have that, there's no debate.
So it's not getting us to learn.
So we read good books, right?
I mean, yeah, we read plenty of books in our family, and I still like to have the debates.
Now, on the flip side of it, let me tell you what does concern me.
This whole like sex, sex change stuff that they're talking about right now is transgender, right?
Hey, you know, what's wrong with it?
You should let them do it.
They should let them go through it.
You know, what's wrong with a kid wanting to do that?
And hey, if the parent agrees and approves to, they should let them do it.
Some of that stuff for me is the brain's not yet been fully shaped to make tough decisions like that in your life.
That should come later on.
To me, to make some of those things introduced to kids like, hey, now we got 7 billion different pronouns to go to school.
And my kids got to come and say, hey, one of my classmates today said they have a pronoun.
They want to be called this.
What is that?
That.
I don't want to have those conversations with you.
I just don't.
And the public school has made the mistake of allowing that to be normal.
And they're taking a hit for it.
By the way, states have also made a mistake.
California is losing people to other states.
So is New York.
So is other people.
And a lot of people in Florida, no matter what they say about DeSantis, love him or hate him.
His philosophies took him from barely winning the governorship by 34,000 votes to winning by 1.5 million votes.
He's speaking to parents who have similar fears to the ones that you have.
So power to him.
You are not alone here, you know, on you talking about the issues that you're talking about.
Anyways, let's transition to your favorite president of all time.
Oh, wait, before you move on, can I just say the pronoun debate is really funny because all the pronouns they're talking about are third person.
Yeah.
Which means they're way too concerned with how I talk about them to somebody else because none of the pronouns are you or me.
Do you see what I'm saying?
You have to be a little bit of a grandiose.
He, him, they.
It's all third person.
So it's only, so if you're telling me your pronouns, you're way too concerned with what I'm saying about you behind your back.
By the way, you know where I learned about third person and pronouns and adjectives?
School.
School.
School was a great place to learn about that kind of thing.
You know, who could have taught you?
You.
Your mom.
If your mom loved you.
My mom could not teach a class.
When you've got an I can't kid, you know, what are you going to do with it?
Yeah.
So there's one thing that I want to say on that.
And obviously, every parent is different.
Everybody tries to do what they can.
This is just, and it's hard to get data on this.
These are just feelings that I have.
When parents talk about how upset they are that teachers are introducing certain material into the classroom, actually, let me back up one sec.
Let me use a other example so I can get you on my side first.
Okay.
Did you see all the clips that came out with teachers that were really upset about kids like bullying other kids because of shit they'd seen from Andrew Tate?
No.
Oh, shit.
You didn't see that?
I think it was like a month or two ago.
I feel like one of these stories went really big.
And I feel like it was one of the driving things that got Tate deplatformed.
I think it was a mom or a teacher was saying like, all these kids are harassing other kids in class now because of shit they've seen from Andrew Tate.
And the first thing I thought when I saw that.
This story right here, teacher claims 11-year-old boys are telling girls they are fat.
Yeah, I feel like this story was a huge driver.
Yeah, August 16th.
It was literally right when he got canceled.
Was one of the big drivers that got him pushed off was people who were starting to see it show up in schools.
The first thing that I thought when I saw that was, wow, that's pretty horrible.
But then the second thought immediately after was like, hold on, we always fucking bully people in school.
The only difference is, is that now we have a microscope on everything.
We can see everything that our kids are doing, right?
And it's like, oh my God, calling people fat.
Dude, the shit we used to say in school is going to be banned on fucking Twitter on every, well, I already am banned on Twitter.
The meanest people in the world are eighth grade kids.
By far, eighth grade kids are the meanest people in the world.
I'm sure it was real.
Was that real or was that just a hit piece on?
No, I'm sure it was real because that's okay.
Sorry.
So when I see this, I think like this has probably always been going on.
When parents get really upset about things that teachers are saying to kids, my personal feeling is, is I feel like I feel like the goal should be your kid gets exposed to a lot of stuff.
And hopefully he's comfortable enough to bring it up to you in a, in a house setting, a home setting, to say like, hey, dad, mom, I saw this at school today.
I got questions about this.
And then you kind of like answer the questions and you hopefully push them in the direction that you feel is personally correct.
So if you personally don't feel like trans people are real, or if you think it's all a bunch of bullshit, then you know you talk to your kids and say, hey, some people have this belief.
It's like a religion or whatever.
Like you kind of respect these other beliefs.
We personally don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
I don't think you should.
But like you guide them in that direction.
The thing that I don't like when parents do this thing where they crack down really hard on the teachers is I feel like parents delude themselves into thinking that their children are going to school and they're not being exposed to a whole bunch of fucking insane shit.
And I feel like even if the teachers aren't saying it, at least when I went to school, there's always like a couple kids bringing crazy shit to class.
They're seeing wild shit today on social media, whether it's TikTok or fucking kids talking to them in Roblox or on their Switch in Fortnite or whatever.
And the worry that I have for some parents is they think that as long as teachers aren't saying crazy things, my kid is going to school and he's not learning a single bad thing ever.
And then he comes home.
Fair enough.
I'm only, I'm 34 today, but I remember even my parents, like sometimes when I talk to adults, I'm not saying you guys are like this, but I talk to adults and I'm like, damn, like you're only like 40.
Do you really forget what it was like to be in school, that like the first time you saw porn with some weird kid that like printed out like boobs and showed it to you between class or some, like you learn like the wildest things between between classes and I?
Yeah, I would, just I would hope that parents that are like cracking down so much on teachers aren't deluding themselves into thinking that like my kid's not being exposed to any of this and then they never talk to them at all about it.
I don't think.
I don't think that's the issue.
I mean, I remember being exposed to porn, I don't.
It was probably one of the greatest days of my life.
Amazing, this is fantastic.
It was LA Express in high school.
There's that troll, You know, my mom, first time she got the stuff, I used to hide in a good place until she figured it out, but I still had a good place.
She could never figure out.
But anyways, that's a different story.
My friends, I can kid.
I grew up around drugs.
I grew up around gangs.
I grew up on all of that.
My parents got divorced twice, so it's not like I wasn't around.
I was the kid that parents said stay away from that kid.
And I joined the army.
I'm a one-point AGPA kid.
I'm the 880 SAT score.
That's this guy.
So it's not like it's the other way around.
I went to SATs.
I couldn't wait to leave the place.
I'm like, you want me to sit here for how many hours?
You're out of your freaking mind.
You want me to sit here for this long?
No, I'm out.
I'm good at math.
I could give a shit about writing.
So I scored very high on math and then I left.
No, I understand, like, you know, can you keep your kids away from drugs?
I used to live in Plano.
And Plano back in the 90s or 2000s had a reputation of heroin.
A lot of kids died from heroin at Plano High School.
It had a very bad reputation.
So the first time we moved to Plano, Texas, hey, did you know Plano is a rich community?
Oh, that's awesome.
Did you know kids died from heroin in Plano?
You don't hear that in every community.
It's like, well, there is influence for other kids to be exposed to heroin, and then kids are dying.
The part that to me is very weird, when people make stupid things real, meaning, you know, 2.2 is four.
Well, it could be five.
It could be this.
No, no, you don't, don't confuse my kid.
It's only four.
There's only one answer to it, right?
With what we want to do.
You know, you may not be a boy.
You may have a female.
You may want to be a woman.
And don't let your mom and dad convince you otherwise.
Yeah, don't put that in my 13-year-old kid's head.
You're confusing the shit out of them.
Don't do that.
I don't need you to do that to my kid.
That's the areas that I have a problem with.
I don't have a problem with, you know, hey, dad, they said rich people are greedy.
Okay, let's hash it out.
Let's talk about it.
Hey, dad, they said, you know, black people are this.
White people are that.
This person is this.
One of my classmates pregnant.
We just had a case.
I'm talking to one of my, in a Christian school, 13-year-old girl, had a kid, got an abortion.
And the girls are talking about at a Christian school.
I went to an all-boys school, but if you're in one of the all-girls school, you got pregnant, they kicked you out of the school.
But the point is, like, they kept it amongst the girls.
Okay.
And it hasn't gone to the top to be able to, because this just happened.
I don't know what's going to end up happening, but they're being exposed to it.
So these kids are kids that their parents have money.
So guess what?
Hey, you want to try ecstasy?
You want to try coping?
I'm not worried about that stuff.
They're going to be exposed to it.
None of that stuff.
I'm uncomfortable with manipulation.
I'm uncomfortable with making the questioning of where a kid naturally should go to to say, well, you know, maybe you are this.
Maybe you are that.
That's my concern.
Too early.
Later on, it is what it is.
You know, you do that too early.
I have a challenge with that.
Once I went into the Army Destiny at 18 years old, you know what I saw?
By that time, I'd seen everything.
It wasn't like anything was new to me.
Okay.
But I feel like some of the schooling right now with what they're teaching makes me very, very uncomfortable.
That's the reason why I took my kids out.
And we thought about homeschooling for maybe half a second.
And then we said, no, we're not going to be doing homeschooling.
Do you think there is a way to teach any LGBT stuff without it being something that would be contradictory to what parents would want?
Or did you always?
At what age?
Probably middle school, sixth, seventh grade.
No, no, way too early.
Do you think that, so let me be more clear.
There is a way to teach people about like gay people or bisexual people at that age, or do you think it's totally just impossible?
You know why, though?
Because, you know, like this goes back to a conversation I had with Gadsaud years ago, two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, where one of my friends, you know, he strayed his entire life.
And then one of the things about gay converters, they're very good recruiters.
Okay, so this one, we used to go to this club in Nashville.
It was a gay club.
Great club.
Okay.
Best club in town.
It's called like a studio 54 of Nashville, Tennessee.
Sick, underground, awesome music, you know, energy was amazing.
It's where you wanted to go if you're straight because it was an easier game to have.
Now, everybody would ask me, hey, but David, I know where you go on the weekends.
Can you tell me about this secret spot?
I said, no, man, I can't take you.
Let me trust you a little bit and I take you.
This one of my friends, I took him.
We took him to the club.
And this one guy who's aggressively gay and he comes and asks the tough questions.
He comes to one of my guys who's been straight his entire life, 19 years.
And he says, so you ever been with a man?
No, I'm straight.
He says, how do you know you're straight?
If you've never been with a man, he got stuck.
So you didn't know what to say.
I'm like, dude, answer back because you're straight.
He says, so we get in the car.
It's a 45-minute drive back from Nashville, Tennessee to Clarksville.
You know what he talked about the entire time?
Maybe he's right.
How do I know?
Maybe I am.
I said, bro, what's happening?
Do you think?
Okay, I got a question.
Do you know what ends up happening with this guy?
What?
He ends up.
No, no.
Yes.
No.
He ends up just to say, to find out.
And then he comes out.
He says, oh, I guess I'm not.
No, I said, how do you apply this?
I guess I'm not.
You needed to do that.
He was straight his entire life, but he thought he ended up not what?
He ended up hooking up.
But is he gay now?
He's straight.
But he had that one moment to kind of go through it for himself.
Did Kevin tell you his story with Versace?
No.
So he goes to the Versace thing, and they're at dinner.
And it's just the two of them at this point.
I know about the story.
I don't know if you shared it on this podcast.
So Versace kind of groomed him a little bit through parties and stuff.
And then eventually they end up at dinner together.
And they're sitting.
This is your husband, by the way.
Yes, my husband back in his life.
And Johnny Versace in my life.
Back in his modeling days.
And my husband was hot.
Okay.
And Johnny puts his hand under the table on Kevin's thigh.
And Kevin says, Johnny, all my life.
No, and he says, Kevin, in this life, you have to, and I don't swear.
So F the cow and the sheep and the dog and the cat.
You have to try everything.
Similar to your gay converter.
That's a bestiality, though, but okay.
That's a bit of a difference there.
And the dog, the cat, the cow.
Don't argue, but that was his language.
So Kevin did.
Kevin hooked up with Versace.
And he goes, Kevin goes, Johnny, all my life, I've been on this road and you're on this road.
And Johnny goes, I build a bridge.
No, it was not the best night of his life.
Well, what do you mean?
What happened exactly?
Well, it sounds like they didn't build the bridge.
Nothing.
It was not the best night of Johnny's life is what I meant to say.
Gianni.
Gianni.
Well, you know, they say that, you know, you build a thousand bridges in your life.
You know, you fuck one goat.
You're no longer a bridge builder.
Now you're a goat fucker.
That's right.
So it sounds like.
Do you think there's any worry that?
So I understand your story of your friend, but like, let's say that was like one of the worst case scenarios.
Like he hooked up with a guy.
Okay.
What about on the other side when you get these guys that are like 35 years old?
They've got like two kids.
Their marriage is almost completely sexless.
They're kind of miserable.
And then they realize like, fuck, I'm gay.
And then you've got these people that like have these whole lives that they're about to upend because they weren't even exposed to the idea.
And now all of a sudden they finally realize when they're like 35, 36, they've already got like a family and they're like, fuck me.
And then their whole lives fall apart.
Yeah, I don't, I don't know about that.
I think sometimes when a person had a call with a guy yesterday, this guy who runs a business does $7 million a year.
Okay.
And they just had a kid 10 months ago.
And he says, my wife wants to have a divorce with me.
I said, your wife wants to have a divorce with you.
He said, yeah.
So how long have you guys been together?
We've been together for 10 years.
I said, 10 years.
Yeah.
Married five years.
Okay.
So I said, how often are you guys having sex right now?
He's like, we're not.
I said, why not?
We're just not.
I said, how many times were you guys having sex when you first started dating?
Oh, all the freaking time.
I said, so have you gotten your testosterone check down?
What do you mean you're not having sex?
I said, one of the best things in a relationship, you want to have your relationship work.
You got to have sex twice a week, every week, and have a dinner, go have dinner together so you can kind of have that conversation together.
It's not healthy to not have sex together.
If you have issues, you need to lose 40 pounds, lose your 40 pounds, move your body, get a training, increase your testosterone, but it's not good for you not to be having sex.
Okay.
When you're in that moment, you don't think that highly of yourself as a man.
You're looking at anything that will accept you because you're no longer getting the attention.
You could be confused to make a decision that's not healthy for you.
Hence, maybe you're talking about the 35-year-old guy that thinks he's now gay after all.
You really think you could just, your sexuality is that fluid that you could be straight and maybe you're a little bit more?
I think a lot of people, when they're down, they can be taken advantage of.
Listen, what is the biggest mortgage?
What is the biggest real estate product that they reverse mortgage?
Who do they rip off the most in target people?
Old people.
Why?
Because they're what?
They're easily taken advantage of.
They're in a weak position.
So to me, when somebody is in a moment like that and their marriage and their relationship with their down, they're a very easy target.
Very easy target.
Or when they're a child in school and the authority is telling them something.
But by the way, let me say this to you.
If he chooses to do that, listen, man, you're 35 years old.
That's right.
Do what you got to do.
I can't do nothing about you at that point at 35 years old.
My biggest concern is my job is till 18.
If I raise you and protect you and challenge you and help you become a leader by 18, after 18, you do what you want to do.
It's going to hurt me, but you need to make the decision now.
And kids are going to make some decisions that's going to hurt their parents.
My mother never wanted me to join the U.S. Army.
We left Iran, so I wouldn't join the Iranian army.
She went to Iran to go sell her house, sell her father's house.
I call her from South Carolina.
I never told her I joined the Army.
I called her and said, Hey, I just want to call you in time.
I got 30 seconds because I'm in boot camp.
Just want to tell you, I love you.
I'm in South Carolina.
I joined the Army.
What did you do?
I joined the Army.
I got to go because the guy behind me is waiting.
We've got 75 people waiting to make a call.
I got 30 seconds.
Wait, wait, wait.
Mom, I got to go click next.
Okay.
Kids are going to make some decisions that I'm not going to be happy about.
The ones that I want to protect is any form of manipulation where a kid says, maybe he's right.
Maybe he's this.
Maybe he's that.
That's my problem.
You do that 35.
Do what you got to do.
Gotcha.
Do you think, I'm just curious, do you think like all gay people are like manipulated to being gay or do you think anybody can just like be gay?
Or I lean more towards upbringing.
I lean more towards not a father figure.
I lean more towards confusion.
I lean more towards insecurities.
I lean more towards somebody gave you attention that nobody else does.
See, you're an ugly kid.
You're not good looking.
You're going to blossom later on in life.
Some people that were 12, 13 years old were not good looking kids.
They're going to be good looking at 30 years old.
Some were very attractive and then they're going to end up being fat.
Life is a very weird dynamic on how it works.
But if you're ugly and you're not the best looking kid and you're being bullied and somebody from your own side who is gay, and let's just say they themselves are coming onto you and trying to tell you how amazing you are, maybe it's a form of getting love.
That's confusion to me, but that doesn't mean you're gay.
It just means somebody finally has given you attention that you are looking for and you're seeking.
I think this is a very technical topic and my opinion on this would probably offend a lot of people.
Sure.
Can I say, can I, so, so, because you draw the line at manipulation of children, which I think is healthy.
I think we have to protect our children from all kinds of manipulation.
And so then you have to figure out, are the teacher?
And by the way, I don't criticize teachers by and large.
I mean, there are some bad teachers out there, but by and large, I think teachers are wonderful people who are trying to get something done inside a failed institution, really.
There's so much manipulation that happens in school.
How do you prevent your children who are in school from being manipulated in whatever way?
Well, I mean, first of all, you have to make it comfortable to have the tough conversations without judging them because they'll never bring it up to you again.
If you have an environment where your kids cannot come and talk to you openly about issues and you snap at them, that'll be the last time they'll ever bring that issue up to you again.
So you got to make sure that happens in one time, too.
If you break your trust like that, I agree with you.
So I think that's on the parent.
I think if the parent doesn't create an like, we have a rule out the house.
You tell me the truth.
You're not getting control.
You're not getting papa.
You're not getting nothing.
You just got to tell the truth.
So, hey, did you do that?
Yeah, I punched them in the face.
Okay, cool.
All right.
Sounds good.
Let's talk about it.
Why'd you do that?
Okay.
Hey, did you really take that idea?
Did you open up such and such as gift and without their permission?
Yes.
This was an issue that happened two nights ago.
Great.
So you got to create an environment where they can feel you have created trust with them that they can talk to you about issues.
Right.
Because if you don't have that, they're going to go through it.
They're just not going to talk to you.
They're going to talk to somebody else.
And I think it's a mistake a lot of parents and leaders make with their kids.
But yeah, that's what I would say.
Yeah, well said.
So you're communicating at home.
You're mitigating for whatever's happening.
Yeah, we watched, you know, we watched a movie where, you know, the topic of LGBTQ came up and my son was a little bit confused.
He's nine years old.
We came home and we talked about it.
Right.
And we sat down and I told them the history of what I told them.
I said, here's what happened with this.
Here's what happened with that.
These are the roles that father figures play.
If a father is not really involved, the family's not involved, or God is not involved, or you don't have a certain set of values and principles.
We could be confused to do stupid things.
We all can be guilty of that, but you're living in an environment that this is what you know and here's what to read this and look at the history of this and here's what happened with AIDS and here's how AIDS got started and this is how many people are killed and this just you kind of go through the history of it and then let them make a decision for themselves.
And I think that a lot of parents sort of abdicate that because then it gets into this murky territory and people operate under a lot of fear.
So a lot of parents back away from those conversations.
They don't know how to have those conversations.
That's why that's how they convinced us that they should be teaching sex in school as opposed to leaving the parents to have the sex conversations with the kids.
And then the parents say, okay, now I don't have to have the sex conversations with the kids.
And I really commend you for bringing that up.
I talk to my kids about sex.
I talked to my boys about sex at five and six years old.
I talked to them about errors.
Oh, absolutely.
Jennifer can tell you that.
Birds and the bees start playing with themselves and shit and you have to have a conversation pretty early.
And I hate boomer parents.
Dude, my parents didn't tell me a fucking thing about anything.
Mine too.
Right.
Yeah.
Not a single fucking thing.
No, I don't think that's healthy.
By the way, I don't think, I think maybe they got away with it back then.
I don't think you can get away with it today at all.
Because you get exposed to someone who's not.
I know my mother had huge conversations with my older sisters, and then I sort of got the brunt of them, but sort of, you know, secondhand in a sense.
Yeah.
You know what she did say that made me think about?
I want to kind of get your thoughts on this with the whole thing with kids, where you're saying, well, what are the three cons?
And she wasn't given really the cons.
What I would say, homeschooling today is different than homeschooling 30 years ago.
Here's why.
30 years ago, if you're homeschooled, you're sheltered from the real world, okay?
30 years ago.
But if you're homeschooled today, but your kid still has access to this, you can't be sheltered.
If this kid has got 2.7 million followers on TikTok, it's mathematically impossible to be sheltered because 2.7 million followers on TikTok, that means you're also going through the videos and you're seeing shit that you disagree with because we know what TikTok is doing.
So a form of sheltering to me without social media today, a full-on shelter to me if you raise your kids would be if you said no phones, no TV, no movies, no Netflix, no nothing.
That's a full-on shelter.
But if kids do have an Obama shelter.
Yeah.
But if kids do have access to this, I don't think it's the homeschooling of 30 years ago.
What are your thoughts?
So this is a phenomenon.
You can see this most easily like on maybe dating apps that I think people have gotten into this mindset that having the most choice over everything is the ultimate freedom.
That let's say I want to pick like an ideal dating partner, okay?
No Republicans, nobody from a small town, nobody that doesn't like this TV show.
Like people will axe out so many things and they don't realize that if they just met that person in real life and like spent some time like chatting with them, hang out with them, you'd be really surprised at the wide gamut of people that you could associate with and engage with and even have like fulfilling friendships or relationships with.
One of the things that I like about school is school is one of the last places where you are forced to be together with a whole group of strangers and you have to adapt and socialize in that situation.
And outside of school, it's very rare that those types of environments will exist anymore.
Maybe work, depending on your work environment.
Yeah, but even work isn't all the same age.
Sure, yeah.
So that, so that's one of the reasons why I like school, that like you got a bunch of kids saying a bunch of crazy shit.
Some of them, you know, you wouldn't expect your kid to get along with, some of them you hope he'd get along with.
But it's one of those few areas where you're forced to socialize with a wide variety of different people.
And I think that that's a pro to child development, I would say.
And I think it's a con for younger kids because you don't know what your kid is being exposed to at early ages.
So at a certain point, I think it's healthy for maybe a conversation to happen about human sexuality, but not at age five with a stranger.
Yeah, potentially.
But I think so there's age limits.
So it used to be that we used to really protect children.
Actually, before we started protecting children, we didn't protect children.
They got married at the age of seven and that was like totally copacetic and society said that was okay.
Then we said, hey, you know, kids really aren't of the age of consent until they're 18 and we should protect children.
And now we're entering into a whole era where, no, no, it's all, we're going to put it back all on the table and children are sexual beings from birth.
I mean, they did studies on infants with sexuality and it's crazy what they've gotten away with.
And those are the people who developed the sex ed curriculum in our schools.
And so now it's like totally cool to talk to kindergartners about sexuality and gender non-conforming things and LGBTQ.
I should want to hear what he has to say.
Yeah, before we first of all, I fully believe that the age limits to sexuality are way, way, way lower than a lot of parents think.
I don't know.
Again, this goes to the age thing.
I'll talk to some parents in like 30s or 40s that will say just, dude, I remember this one, but the most outlandishly stupid shit.
Like my 17-year-old, you know, he's got another friend and sometimes he goes over to their house and I think they study or whatever.
And sometimes he comes back at like 10 or 11 at night.
And it's like, well, do you know what they're doing the whole time?
And it's like, they're fucking, right?
They're obviously fucking.
But like people can't even comprehend at like, yeah, at like 15, 16, 13 years old?
No, not my child.
No way.
And it's like, like, how old are you?
You really forgot everything?
Like, no shot.
You think they wait until they're 18 to be sexually active?
Or even what you said.
I'm happy you said that because it sounds weird to talk about it as parents, but like your kids get sexual.
They start playing with themselves at fucking six months old when their boys will start reaching down every time you change their diaper and they try to grab their dick and shit.
And it's important to have those conversations early.
I think parents put it off way too long.
I've heard, obviously I'm not a first-hand experience, but I've heard horror stories of how many women have their first periods without their parents ever telling them that it's coming.
That's like child abuse.
That's fucking insane to me that your daughter, your little girl, can just start bleeding in a classroom thinking she's fucking dying.
And then mom's like, oh, haha, you've had your first period.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so I feel like parents are sometimes kind of bad at gauging the age limits because for some reason they put the blinders on when it comes to their own kid.
I'm like, my angel would never do that.
So it's like, what did you do?
And then just real quick, I just want to hit the TikTok thing.
I think that the TikTok sheltering is a little bit different.
And I think we have to be really careful about this.
Social media is very good at showing you what you want to see.
And it feeds you that information of what you want to see.
And it gets you scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
Classroom environments are a bit different because you're going to be confronted with people that you might not necessarily like.
So I think that they're, even though it doesn't seem like it, I think that a child that spends all day on TikTok connected to 50 million people can actually end up way more sheltered than a child in a classroom with 15 other people.
Just because on TikTok, you're seeing a custom-tailored machine learning-fed algorithm that is giving you exactly what you want to see the entire time.
Whereas in school, there might be like a bunch of weird kids that you do or don't get along with saying.
Yeah, but his point was simply that they're less sheltered because of social media today than they were 15 years ago.
Not that they're less sheltered.
It's just you're seeing a potent ideas today.
Yeah, it just depends on what kids are 30 years ago.
That they're more exposed today than they were by sheltering.
I just have two questions for the panel, just so I can get some clear directive.
Yeah, not the one with kids.
At what age do you guys think it is appropriate to have that sex conversation with your kids?
Just very clear.
You said five, six years old?
I was five, six years old.
Yeah, at what age?
You know, what sex?
Birds and the bees.
Birds and the bees, five, six years old.
Okay.
All right.
And then here's my question for you, just to kind of give you a binary choice.
And by the way, depending on the child.
Sure.
It entirely depends on the child.
Some children don't want to have that conversation.
Okay, we won't have that conversation.
If there's curiosity, then you feed the curiosity and you force them to have a conversation.
If you're not going to talk to them about it, if you're not going to talk to them, their fucking friends at school are going to talk to them about it.
They're going to just beat them to the punch.
Binary choice for you.
Would you think it's more important to home teach your kids K through six and then send them to school, you know, middle school and high school?
Or is it more important for them to go to like a public school K through six and then homeschool them for middle and high school?
Do you understand the question I'm saying?
I do.
What's more important if you can only pick one?
I think K through six.
To do what?
To keep them home.
Keep them home until they're 12 years old and then send them out to the real world.
Yeah.
Versus then release them to the wild and then bring them back.
Exactly.
That makes sense.
Okay.
Yeah.
Just wanted to clarify.
Because hopefully by the age of 12, they understand that they don't need school.
Yeah, they don't want them hanging out with you.
Because you want your children to learn how to teach themselves.
Once they learn how to teach themselves, they won't take crap from people.
Got it.
Good.
Thank you.
Did that help you out?
Yeah.
Are you convinced now about homeschooling and stuff you're going to do with your kids?
I think it is.
It might seem like I'm giving you a hard time.
I'm not.
I'm genuinely curious as to what are the pros and cons.
I think these are conversations that everyone should have with their wife and their spouse and their husband.
And I think this is something we should do.
By the way, did we get results on that poll, Rob?
Yes, it was 51% would not home educate, and then 49% would home educate.
They can contact me at samsorbo.com and I have tools for them.
Not to go deep down this rabbit hole, but if only 10% of people max are sending their kids to school, I think it's just, I don't know if it's a sample size 50-50 here.
Well, for the 49% that is interested in homeschooling, Sam's got a book called The Playbook for Home Learning.
Would you mind taking 30 seconds and telling us about the book?
Yeah, I'm training parents that they don't need the schools.
And that's this, this is a training manual for parents to show them what we mean by home learning.
Your children are autodidacts.
They teach themselves.
And all you need to do really is give them the tools, equip them so that they can teach themselves and then show them what they really want to learn and figure out what their interests are.
Fantastic.
I feel like Destiny's coming out with a book of the importance of going to school.
So that'll be coming out soon.
Summer of 25.
If you do home learning right, it could probably be way better than normal school.
But if you go to a really good school, I mean, I'm sure it can be an incredibly life-enriching experience as well.
It just depends on how you engage with it.
There you go.
Okay, so let's put the link below to the home learning book as well as Destiny's YouTube channel that it can go learn more about what Destiny's got going on as well.
And Sam.
So guys, thank you so much for coming out.
It's the last show of the year.
I don't know if we want to have a holding of the hands, Kumbayam.
Listen, what do you got planned for New Year's?
We're going to be partying hardcore at the house till 12.10 when the kids go to sleep.
It's so funny when you have kids and they live with you.
The schedule changes dramatically.
Then I'm sure you're going to be up till 6 in the morning.
