Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Schooling vs Education with Brett Veinotte
Aired: 2020-02-06
Duration: 01:36:25


=== Iowa Debacle and Political Momentum (14:51) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:06]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:08]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:10]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:14]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:19]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:24]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:28]  Here's your host.
[00:00:30]  James Smith.
[00:00:31]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:33]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:36]  We have a great show for you guys today.
[00:00:39]  Very excited about it.
[00:00:40]  Just a couple points of business before I get into it.
[00:00:44]  We are, as some of you know, we're going to be in Boston doing me and Robbie the Fire will be doing a live stand-up show in Boston on Friday.
[00:00:51]  So that will mess with our normal streaming time, but we're going to record an episode at some point.
[00:00:58]  It'll come out on Saturday, but there won't be a show streaming Friday at 6 p.m. as normal because we will be up in Boston.
[00:01:05]  And thanks, everybody who bought tickets to that show.
[00:01:08]  We sold it out.
[00:01:09]  Looking forward to meeting some of you good people.
[00:01:12]  Of course, there's a lot of craziness in the world going on.
[00:01:14]  I have a fantastic guest on today's show who I'm thrilled to have on, Brett Vinot from the School Sucks Project, one of the best podcasts out there.
[00:01:25]  I absolutely love it.
[00:01:26]  I just did it recently.
[00:01:27]  So, Brett, thank you very much for coming on the show.
[00:01:30]  Great to see you again.
[00:01:32]  Yeah, thanks for having me, Dave.
[00:01:33]  Great to talk to you again.
[00:01:34]  Oh, yeah, absolutely, man.
[00:01:36]  There's been a lot of craziness going on the last couple of days.
[00:01:39]  I figured we would start by talking about a little bit of that.
[00:01:43]  But just for anybody who's not familiar with what you do, tell them a little bit about the School Sucks project and how you got into this and what the mission is, what it's all about.
[00:01:55]  Absolutely.
[00:01:56]  I would say first and foremost, a kind of public school liberation advocate for the people who want it.
[00:02:02]  You know, like I'm not looking to reform the system.
[00:02:05]  I'm not advocating any political solutions on my show.
[00:02:08]  I've been doing the podcast since 2009.
[00:02:12]  So we were one.
[00:02:13]  At this point, I think I can say, Dave, we were one of the original like libertarian podcasts and the only one that was entirely devoted to the issue of school versus education.
[00:02:24]  And I got into it, you know, primarily just out of frustration with my own work.
[00:02:28]  I had been a teacher.
[00:02:28]  I had been a college consultant.
[00:02:30]  I ran a tutoring business in New Hampshire.
[00:02:33]  I was a very failed student.
[00:02:34]  You know, I got reports from the school regularly indicating this.
[00:02:38]  I limped into the 13th grade and, you know, my attitude about learning just happened to change there with the right exposure to the right subjects at the right time.
[00:02:49]  And, you know, graduated, went on to grad school, became a history teacher.
[00:02:53]  And that was how my career began.
[00:02:56]  And it was just, I don't know if it was like a part like lazy attitude or a part defiant attitude, but I just kept finding problems everywhere I went and moving laterally sometimes or changing jobs entirely looking for the perfect role in education.
[00:03:14]  And I didn't find it until I started podcasting.
[00:03:17]  So happy ending so far.
[00:03:18]  Yeah, I would say so.
[00:03:20]  So the first time I ever heard of you was a video that is to this day one of I think my favorite videos that I've ever seen in my life that was up.
[00:03:33]  I believe it's on your channel.
[00:03:36]  I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the title of it.
[00:03:38]  It's something like, Is This American History?
[00:03:41]  It's the thing where you compare Nazi Germany, the rise of the Nazis, and go through the Prussian school and how school came to be.
[00:03:49]  And it's just incredible.
[00:03:50]  What's the title of it?
[00:03:52]  It's called The American Way.
[00:03:54]  And then the subtitle is Our Connection to Nazi Germany.
[00:03:57]  fact, I got so much incredulity in the comments about that that I went on to produce, I think, like a five or six hour series expanding the contents of that video.
[00:04:11]  And I've done more videos about that subject, you know, in the years that followed.
[00:04:17]  And the basics of it are that our school system was delivered into this country in the middle of the 1800s from the very, very militaristic, anti-individualistic land of Prussia, which 100 years later, you know, those people were schooled in military obedience and nationalism, and they became very memorable.
[00:04:42]  You know, they wound up making their mark on world history by the middle of the 1900s.
[00:04:47]  But that system was brought here 100 years earlier.
[00:04:50]  And, you know, that's the connection that I was trying to make.
[00:04:53]  It was kind of a warning, like this is where it could go.
[00:04:55]  Not that I'm the only person who's ever made that warning or drawn those parallels, but that's what that video was all about.
[00:05:01]  Well, it was the first time I was introduced to that history.
[00:05:04]  Like I didn't know that.
[00:05:06]  And I thought I knew a pretty good amount about like the rise of the Nazis and the Second World War and things like that.
[00:05:13]  And it really is one of those things that if you don't, you know, there's lots of different elements to understanding the rise of the Nazis.
[00:05:19]  Of course, there's World War I and the Treaty of Versailles and all the things that happened to the German people and all the different groups and communism, the threat of communism and all these different things.
[00:05:29]  But if you don't understand the school aspect and the Prussian kind of success in indoctrinating young would-be soldiers, you're not going to understand the full picture.
[00:05:41]  And by the way, the video, if you haven't watched it, you got to go.
[00:05:44]  It's got like a few hundred thousand views, but then I've seen it shared by a ton of other people and that those will have like 100,000 views on it.
[00:05:50]  So it's probably been viewed by a ton of people.
[00:05:52]  It's also just really, it's got the, what's the beat to that exhibit paparazzi song?
[00:05:59]  Such a great beat behind it.
[00:06:01]  Yeah, I forgot about that.
[00:06:02]  Yes, that is exhibit.
[00:06:03]  And then, and it really adds a lot to it.
[00:06:05]  Sick beat, by the way, sick beat behind it.
[00:06:07]  But just one of my, still to this day, one of my favorite videos that I've ever seen.
[00:06:11]  So that was the first time I got introduced to you.
[00:06:13]  And then I think I heard you on the Tom Woods show and started listening after that.
[00:06:17]  And just I highly recommend go check it out.
[00:06:20]  One of the best podcasts out there, the School Sucks podcast.
[00:06:23]  It's what schoolsucksproject.com.
[00:06:25]  Is that it?
[00:06:26]  SchoolSucksProject.com is our website.
[00:06:28]  Yep.
[00:06:28]  Very good.
[00:06:29]  Okay.
[00:06:30]  So, and of course, and we're going to talk more about this.
[00:06:33]  And, you know, of course, all of the things, if you're looking at anything about modern politics, it's hard to completely divorce it from the fact that the government runs the schools.
[00:06:47]  There's always...
[00:06:50]  Yeah, I mean, this has a big influence.
[00:06:52]  And it was something, because I knew you were coming on today.
[00:06:54]  It's something I've been thinking about over the last couple days.
[00:06:57]  But holy moly, there's a few things in the news that have just been wild.
[00:07:01]  And the first thing I would mention is what happened in Iowa, which is still happening in Iowa.
[00:07:07]  So my last podcast I did was on the night of the caucus, or there was a Republican caucus too.
[00:07:13]  So on the night of the caucus, and I was like, well, we'll see who wins tomorrow.
[00:07:21]  I was pretty confident that we would know who won by the next day, but we do not.
[00:07:26]  It does seem in a lot of ways like this little caucus was a microcosm of everything that's going on in American politics right now, where it's just a naked cluster fuck.
[00:07:40]  And you can't hide this from anybody anymore.
[00:07:46]  What's the cluster fuck?
[00:07:48]  Well, that they can't even like hold a caucus in a small state and come away with an answer that they can't resolve this in a way where any camp can feel like, okay, I can kind of trust this process, at least to some degree.
[00:08:05]  Right.
[00:08:05]  Yeah.
[00:08:06]  And I think that I'm only getting caught up on what happened in Iowa, but I've enjoyed watching this scramble for a while as it relates to Trump.
[00:08:15]  You know, like it seemed like before he came along, what I was paying attention to, like in academia, social media, in the regular media, in the, you know, the Bureau of Comedy, like when Obama was president, all those shows like The Daily Show and John Oliver.
[00:08:32]  But especially like in the social justice contention of the left, they've been scrambling to find the examples of the fears they're always trying to point people to, like racism, sexism, xenophobia.
[00:08:44]  And, you know, all of those nebulous enemies got a face in 2016.
[00:08:49]  And I just feel like it's been absolute chaos for them in everything they do, you know, since that happened, right?
[00:08:57]  It's just this total panic mode, this like cry for help performance art.
[00:09:04]  And so when I heard that this Iowa thing was also a mess, it just seems like par for the course, even though I don't know all the details at this point, it just seems like par for the course.
[00:09:13]  Yeah, well, one of the things that I couldn't help think about.
[00:09:19]  Brian, are you hearing like a hearing an echo all of a sudden?
[00:09:25]  No?
[00:09:25]  Okay.
[00:09:26]  So anyway, one of the things that I couldn't help think about while this whole thing in Iowa was going down is what happened with Ron Paul in Iowa in 2012.
[00:09:36]  And I was a big Ron Paul supporter.
[00:09:38]  I believe you were as well.
[00:09:41]  Yeah.
[00:09:41]  Yeah.
[00:09:42]  So Ron Paul basically, he was polling right around first place.
[00:09:47]  It was like very close.
[00:09:48]  But the night of they gave it to Rick Santorum.
[00:09:52]  And it was like, ah, damn it, this was our huge opportunity.
[00:09:56]  It was a big blow for Ron Paul supporters that we didn't get that.
[00:09:58]  Because what Iowa's always been about, it's not so much that you rack up so many delegates or that it's that it's the first one.
[00:10:05]  You get the first news, you know, release, you get that victory speech, and you get kind of like the momentum going into the next primaries.
[00:10:15]  And what that's kind of the big thing.
[00:10:17]  So Rick Santorum got that.
[00:10:18]  And then like a month later, they go, oh, by the way, Ron Paul got the most delegates.
[00:10:24]  So actually, technically speaking, he kind of won, but it didn't really matter by that point because you didn't get the momentum.
[00:10:30]  You didn't get the press conference.
[00:10:31]  And you didn't get like all that, the stuff that you're supposed to get.
[00:10:34]  So this time, what they've actually done is they've said, well, it looks like Mayor Pete is going to get the most delegates.
[00:10:43]  And even though Bernie Sanders has won the closest you could call to a popular vote in a caucus, he's being denied this kind of the momentum and all of this energy.
[00:10:54]  So to all the Bernie Sanders supporters who claim this is a rigged game against them, and they've got a strong argument for that, they are now just, I mean, they've seen proof that this is funny business because not only was Bernie Sanders denied kind of like the victory night, it's very shady what happened.
[00:11:15]  Now, I don't know that there's foul play involved, but I'll just tell you, technically, this is what happened, okay?
[00:11:20]  They, for the first time that I can remember in my life, they said, we're not announcing the winner because we've noticed inconsistencies.
[00:11:27]  They said there's inconsistencies with an app.
[00:11:29]  The DNC in Iowa did not tell us what the inconsistencies were or what the issues were with what's going on here.
[00:11:36]  That was never made clear.
[00:11:37]  Then they said the next day at 5 p.m., they would release the results.
[00:11:41]  They released only 62% of the results in certain districts.
[00:11:47]  They did not explain why they were releasing that.
[00:11:50]  They did not explain why they stopped and still, as of right now, have not released all of the results.
[00:11:55]  And they just left it with Mayor Pete having a slight edge over Bernie Sanders.
[00:12:00]  And so this whole thing is just, it's very bizarre and strange and hard to explain.
[00:12:07]  But anyway, that's what I can gather from it so far.
[00:12:10]  You like generally, do you like the Bernie phenomenon since 2016?
[00:12:15]  Yes.
[00:12:16]  And obviously, I don't like socialism.
[00:12:20]  And I think pretty much all of Bernie Sanders' economic policies are, you know, about as bad as anyone in mainstream American politics, anything that they're proposing.
[00:12:31]  However, I like the idea of a civil war within the Democratic Party.
[00:12:35]  I like the idea of the party collapsing in on itself.
[00:12:38]  And most of all, I like the corruption of the party being exposed.
[00:12:43]  So I like the idea that people know that the DNC was working for Hillary Clinton and they're not the kind of neutral organization they claim to be.
[00:12:54]  I think there's all that.
[00:12:56]  I agree with all of that for sure.
[00:12:57]  But I like it for the same reasons that I like the Trump phenomenon, for I like the rise of sweet young Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
[00:13:06]  It's a bunch of people at once, I think, trying to express, like on a mass scale, that they understand something is wrong.
[00:13:14]  They just don't know what to do about it yet.
[00:13:16]  They don't know which way to go, but it's happening across the political spectrum.
[00:13:20]  So we witnessed it, you know, from our point of view in 2008 and 2012.
[00:13:24]  But like you were saying, for one reason or another and numbers and, you know, messing around with the system, that was another reason, it didn't get the traction that it needed.
[00:13:34]  But now this discontent, even though it's not directed, I think, in good places on either side of the spectrum is actually gaining momentum.
[00:13:44]  And, you know, well, I would like society to hold together.
[00:13:47]  It is exciting.
[00:13:49]  Yeah.
[00:13:49]  No, I agree with you, right?
[00:13:50]  Like, I don't want to see society spin out.
[00:13:52]  I don't want to see violence or chaos, but there is something that is exciting.
[00:13:58]  And if you have this big, powerful, corrupt, you know, institution, it's kind of exciting to see it being chipped away at and more and more of the corruption being exposed.
[00:14:11]  I mean, the thing that I just found so entertaining about the Iowa debacle is that we've been told, you know, for about three years now, maybe, I guess, four years now, that the big threat we have to be concerned with is, you know, democracy being undermined.
[00:14:27]  And I think it has something to do with the way people are schooled, that democracy is just a good unto itself.
[00:14:33]  And you never really have to justify why majority rule is somehow moral or a good way to run society or anything like that.
[00:14:42]  And then you're seeing these videos come out of where they're flipping coins because they're tied in the number of delegates at one precinct.

=== Heshy Sox: Affordable Fashion Socks (02:19) ===

[00:14:52]  So they flip a coin to see who wins.
[00:14:55]  This is not a joke.
[00:14:56]  There were three different videos of coins being flipped.
[00:14:58]  By the way, each one, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, ended up winning.
[00:15:02]  And it's just like, well, it's so funny that we're so concerned with the system being undermined.
[00:15:06]  And then you see the system itself and you're like, this is just, it's a shit show.
[00:15:10]  All right, let's take a quick break.
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[00:16:30]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:16:32]  You ever read a book?
[00:16:33]  Have you ever heard of the book Thinking Fast and Slow?
[00:16:35]  Just a quick education tie into all this, actually.
[00:16:38]  No.
[00:16:39]  Daniel Ketterman.
[00:16:40]  And he uses this, like, this heuristic for what's obviously like a far more complicated way of thinking and decision making, but he calls it system one and system two.
[00:16:51]  And he says that, you know, this is sort of the cognitive design of all people is that they have this system one, which is like the fight or flight, like the biological response for survival, which is very much about like quick decision making.
[00:17:05]  And system two is like the more deliberative critical thinking, like patience, that kind of a thing.

=== School Systems and Voting Habits (14:41) ===

[00:17:11]  And so what I think we've witnessed in the last few years is, you know, the system one response to all of these things.
[00:17:20]  I think Trump used it beautifully, right?
[00:17:23]  And very much making things emotional, making things reactive, using like both sides are still using the victim mentality, pointing people to those outside the tribe.
[00:17:34]  And I'm excited to see all of this maybe eventually get to system two, if it ever will.
[00:17:40]  And people start actually taking these impulses that they have and channeling it towards something more rational.
[00:17:46]  But I'm not going to hold my breath, but it would be exciting if that happened.
[00:17:48]  Yeah, that would that would be really, really great.
[00:17:52]  But like you said, I, you know, I agree.
[00:17:54]  I'm also not holding my breath.
[00:17:55]  At least in the meantime, it certainly is entertaining, if nothing else.
[00:17:59]  Now, the other thing that I find very interesting, which I'm, I'm, you know, I'm wondering where this goes, but the big story in all of this craziness in Iowa, where people are like, oh my God, so there's like these five big stories.
[00:18:11]  You know, it's like, okay, the voting app messed up and we don't have results.
[00:18:15]  And then the story is Mayor Pete is overperforming and Bernie Sanders and him are in this lock.
[00:18:22]  And then, by the way, the state of the union is the next day and all of these things.
[00:18:25]  But the story that seems to have been somewhat effectively buried, which is a really big story, is that Joe Biden tanked.
[00:18:34]  He was polling tide for first place.
[00:18:37]  And it looks like he might come in fifth, maybe fourth.
[00:18:40]  But it's really, he just had a terrible showing in Iowa, which is, you know, kind of like an older voting demographic.
[00:18:49]  It seemed like something Joe Biden should do reasonably well in.
[00:18:53]  And that, you know, I think is a major theme in what's going on in politics today, that it seems harder and harder for the establishment to get over these old guard establishment politicians who they really like, whether it's Hillary Clinton or, you know, people even like Jeb Bush.
[00:19:12]  He's from the family that they like or, you know, and Joe Biden might be the next one in this, the next one of these kind of establishment guys to fall.
[00:19:22]  And I do, you know, like I agree with you.
[00:19:25]  I'm not holding my breath.
[00:19:27]  But if we want to, you know, replace the status quo with something better, well, the first step in that is, you know, kind of taking out the status quo in one way or another.
[00:19:38]  And I find that to be like a, that gives me a little bit of hope that at least maybe these same corporatist shills are going to have a tough time convincing people of their right to rule.
[00:19:51]  Maybe, maybe that's true.
[00:19:53]  But I think when you look at the candidate pool from the Democratic side, it shows like a real lack of self-reflection, right?
[00:20:03]  Like to look at your mistakes and actually learn from them.
[00:20:07]  And I think when Trump won in 2016, I thought the whole left response was really embodied well by the British guy on HBO, John Oliver, right?
[00:20:18]  And he does this show about Trump getting elected.
[00:20:21]  And his response is to blame the year 2016 as cursed and say, fuck you, 2016, and then blow it up in a football stadium as a ceremony at the end of the show.
[00:20:32]  And I just thought, wow, I mean, that is some lengths to go to to avoid asking yourself, what could we have done differently?
[00:20:39]  What mistakes have we made?
[00:20:40]  How do we, you know, plan more strategically for the future?
[00:20:46]  None of that has happened.
[00:20:47]  And I think that that shows up in lots of different ways and lots of different behaviors.
[00:20:52]  But in this political one, yeah, I mean, the fact that Joe Biden is even in there is at all.
[00:21:00]  Where are the celebs, right?
[00:21:02]  Like, didn't they, why, why don't they just copy this?
[00:21:05]  I mean, Trump copied everything he did from the left, right?
[00:21:09]  Like, it's most of it's like right out of rules for radicals.
[00:21:12]  Yeah.
[00:21:13]  So where's where, why can't they take the cue and say, look, let's find a charismatic, polarizing celebrity and put them up?
[00:21:21]  I think that absolutely would have been their best chance.
[00:21:24]  So, yeah, I mean, Joe Biden is a delight in a lot of ways.
[00:21:27]  He's fun to watch.
[00:21:29]  But yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that he finished fifth after watching him perform and how much of a bubble he's in, right?
[00:21:37]  How protected he is from reality.
[00:21:39]  Can't even deal with like tough questions when asked.
[00:21:41]  Yeah.
[00:21:42]  Oh, yeah.
[00:21:42]  He's, we've played several videos on the show of him snapping at voters, at reporters for asking what are objectively fair questions.
[00:21:50]  I mean, not even like something like, you know, like, I get it if someone says something really, you know, like inappropriate to you, but asking completely like questions about his climate change policy or questions about, you know, his son's dealing with Ukrainian companies like that.
[00:22:05]  You know, you got to be prepared for this.
[00:22:06]  And by the way, you're going up against Trump.
[00:22:08]  So if you win, you know, you're going to deal with all of this stuff.
[00:22:12]  But yeah, he really, he, like you said, very insulated in his own bubble.
[00:22:18]  Let me ask you the same question you asked me.
[00:22:21]  With Bernie Sanders, I mean, you did allude to the fact that there's something, you know, positive about the dynamic.
[00:22:28]  Does it, as is the case with many libertarians, does it like kind of scare you, the fact that Bernie Sanders, you know, like Elizabeth Warren, AOC, these kind of very openly socialist or more so than traditionally in America, at least in the last, you know, 50 years.
[00:22:48]  Does it worry you that we could be moving in that type of a direction?
[00:22:53]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:22:55]  And I mean, just from like studying what's happening in higher ed, and that's, you know, it's one of the reasons why I think school history is so important as well is like, you know, there's a lot of people who are making a big deal about the things that are being taught in higher education, especially around social issues and economics, like what we're talking about right now.
[00:23:13]  And I think people fail to understand when they dismiss it as like, oh, yeah, it's less than 5% of people.
[00:23:18]  And maybe it is.
[00:23:19]  But it was, you know, a few buildings at Columbia University 120 years ago that dramatically shaped public education for the entire 20th century.
[00:23:27]  And that affected all of us and nobody was paying attention to them.
[00:23:30]  So I definitely think it's worth something that's paying attention to.
[00:23:33]  And as far as your question goes, like you have to kind of like step out of the social phenomenon of it and go, oh, yeah, I like that even though people don't know what they're doing, they're at least doing something.
[00:23:42]  They're at least starting to like flex their muscles of discontent with the status quo or, you know, the establishment left or the establishment right, what it had been before Trump.
[00:23:52]  But then, yeah, if you shift into like, what are the consequences of this for the future, like actually economically, it's terrifying.
[00:23:58]  And I think that there's a lot of momentum for that.
[00:24:01]  And it's, you know, down past higher education into high schools, into middle schools.
[00:24:06]  Kids are really comfortable with these ideas.
[00:24:11]  I mean, you're obviously more susceptible to believing this stuff if you've never made a dollar and you don't have any responsibilities, of course.
[00:24:17]  But yeah, I think the push is stronger and stronger than it's ever been before.
[00:24:22]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:24:23]  And it really is like it's pretty, you know, it's hard to even fathom that after the 20th century, you know, if there was like one lesson, you would think that this whole socialism ideology would have been just so soundly defeated.
[00:24:42]  And of course, I do think the best, you know, explanation for why it's still alive is what you always focus on, which is the indoctrination and the fact that people are basically taught from a very, very young age.
[00:24:57]  I mean, even the stuff that you don't even think about as being so, you know, it's like how a bill becomes a law is what like second graders are taught.
[00:25:06]  And it's like this noble process that you're supposed to be, you know, accepting.
[00:25:10]  Well, this is, this is the will of the group.
[00:25:12]  And this is, you know, it's always couched in the language of volunteerism.
[00:25:15]  Like this is your representative democracy.
[00:25:18]  It's really you who did this.
[00:25:20]  And it is definitely, definitely creepy to see how this is all playing out.
[00:25:27]  Well, also, too, if you think about like the school environment, which is just the perfect garden for those kinds of ideas to eventually grow.
[00:25:34]  Like I, you know, I was in public school between 1983 and 1995.
[00:25:40]  And I don't remember any like overt political or economic messaging, but the subtleties that are there and like, you know, the whole environment, which is like you're trapped there.
[00:25:50]  You have to ask permission to speak.
[00:25:52]  You have to ask permission to use the bathroom.
[00:25:55]  So obviously like your orientation toward or your respect for freedom or privacy or individuality, like all those things are compromised.
[00:26:02]  And I think a lot of people walk away from that experience with an angst where they'd be willing to go to college and buy into a kind of a victim mentality, right?
[00:26:13]  Or ingratitude or even resentment.
[00:26:17]  And you're looking for a place to point that.
[00:26:19]  So like when these economic ideas come along for most people later in high school or in college, they're like, oh, yeah, the world is a terribly unjust place between the haves and the have-nots.
[00:26:28]  And people are victimized and capitalism is to blame.
[00:26:31]  Sure.
[00:26:31]  What the fuck do I know?
[00:26:33]  So yeah, I think it's the whole school environment primes people, you know, with numerous other factors to buy into those ideas in their early 20s.
[00:26:42]  And then, you know, hopefully they work and change their mind as a result of having a job.
[00:26:48]  Yeah, there's no question that there is something really authoritarian, top down, and really something about the school model really just encourages obedience.
[00:27:05]  And everybody kind of knows that who's been through school.
[00:27:07]  There's not like it's not the most creative or even the most intelligent students who necessarily get rewarded, but it is the ones who can memorize and regurgitate and please the ruler or the teacher in this case.
[00:27:22]  Like that's kind of who shines.
[00:27:24]  And there's something just in that, that even if you're not, you know, expressly telling students this overt political message, it's obviously being ingrained in them that you kind of like follow the leader, memorize, regurgitate.
[00:27:39]  You stay in your row of desks while the one leader up here is talking to you.
[00:27:43]  And that is like, I mean, that's the best kind of microcosm of statism that I could think of.
[00:27:50]  Yeah, that conditioning definitely exists.
[00:27:52]  And teachers are stuck in that too.
[00:27:53]  You know, I know that from experience.
[00:27:55]  Like I worked in a really high stress environment.
[00:27:57]  I was in a boarding school for a while.
[00:27:59]  Even like the day school that I worked at, a lot of the kids had like emotional problems, behavior problems.
[00:28:04]  And yeah, you get into a pattern.
[00:28:07]  I mean, it's a lazy pattern and it's really high burnout work, but your favorite kids become the ones that you can ignore.
[00:28:15]  And I think all teachers deal with stress to that, you know, maybe not to that level, but to some level.
[00:28:22]  And they get caught in that as well.
[00:28:24]  Like, oh, you're a good kid because you don't require my effort.
[00:28:28]  You don't produce headaches because there are, you know, so many like things coming down from the top on teachers as well that obviously that's going to be transferred to the students that way.
[00:28:37]  Right, right, for sure.
[00:28:38]  Do you find it, you know, one of the things you talk about that you talk about in that video that I mentioned was that even in the original Prussian model of school, that it was always kind of sold as, well, we're doing this for, you know, for moral reasons.
[00:28:56]  We want to grant every child an education and all of this.
[00:28:59]  But all you have to do is really scratch the surface a little bit and see that in fact, this was, you know, and even as Horace Mann himself said, they knew that the Prussian model was, you know, directed toward authoritarianism and that they were trying to, you know, encourage their citizenry.
[00:29:13]  They wanted to get them young and encourage them to be obedient to the state.
[00:29:18]  And then I wonder when you see so many of these, you know, the democratic platforms on school, which I think just particularly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but I think all of them talk about it to some degree.
[00:29:35]  It's always kind of like, well, we want to make it, you know, it's now they're going after like government daycare, get your kids before preschool, free, universal pre-K, universal kindergarten if they don't have that already.
[00:29:51]  Now they want to wipe away college debt so that everybody is pushed into school after high school.
[00:29:58]  And when I say pushed in, I just mean, you know, incentivized to go in, right?
[00:30:02]  Like if there's no, if it doesn't cost anything, why would so many people who go to community college go to community college?
[00:30:09]  Well, just go to a four-year college.
[00:30:10]  You can go there.
[00:30:11]  It doesn't cost anything.
[00:30:12]  And it's always presented with these kind of, you know, these noble values.
[00:30:16]  Well, we just want everyone to get a really good education and we just want to take care of people and we want people who have less of a, you know, a good start in life to be able to, you know, have an equal opportunity or whatever.
[00:30:28]  But if you're woke to the history of school and what's kind of going on here at all, it seems pretty freaking creepy.
[00:30:36]  And I must say, I wonder what the true motives are because people do, people do lie and people do have sinister motives at times.
[00:30:45]  And I wonder how, you know, is it a coincidence that the people who are all about socialism also want more government indoctrination of our children?
[00:30:55]  No, I think that's exactly what it's about.
[00:30:57]  And that's what it's always been about, regardless of a person's economic motivations, right?
[00:31:02]  People who wanted state school or government-run school or compulsory school wanted to manage society.
[00:31:09]  And I think that starting with the Prussian system, I mean, before that, any desire to do this was religiously motivated.
[00:31:15]  The Puritans wanted to force people to school, you know, in colonial New England.
[00:31:20]  But, you know, the first modern schooling, I think, really starts with the Prussians and their goal was to scientifically manage society.
[00:31:28]  The further back in time you go, the more naked the true intentions will be.
[00:31:33]  Like the Prussians were pretty bold about it.
[00:31:36]  I mean, Prussia, to become Nazi Germany 100 years after they hand off their school system to the Americans and maybe like 130 years after they implement the system themselves, they had been primed for this for lots of like political and historical reasons for a thousand years.

=== Prussian Education Legacy Explained (07:58) ===

[00:31:53]  And that's a long story.
[00:31:55]  But they didn't paint over too much of what they were doing.
[00:31:58]  And neither did Horace Mann.
[00:32:00]  The people who tried to reform the system at the beginning of the 20th century, like the progressives who were kind of led, at least ceremoniously led by John Dewey, who's like a really important school reform figure, they used a lot of Dewey's kind of lofty ideas about democracy and progressivism and a free society.
[00:32:19]  And they kind of hid behind that.
[00:32:21]  They used Dewey as a bit of a Trojan horse to cram in things like eugenics.
[00:32:26]  And, you know, I think a lot of the time, if you just take the conspiratorial mindset out of it, which is hard to do and less fun to do for me, believe me, I love the conspiratorial mindset.
[00:32:40]  I think they are just rational actors who live in a bubble and view themselves as responsible people taking the next step that society will allow them to take through their ignorance.
[00:32:54]  That has always been the story.
[00:32:56]  It's from the beginning of the Prussian system in America, it's the story of increasing leverage of scientific managers.
[00:33:03]  And as far as the people are concerned, it's the story of the boiled frog.
[00:33:06]  So just, by the way, for anybody who's not familiar with what you're alluding to when you say take in the Prussian model, this is Horace Mann, who's known as the godfather of education in America.
[00:33:18]  He was explicit about this, that this is what he was doing.
[00:33:20]  So can you just like tell that story briefly for people listening?
[00:33:25]  Sure.
[00:33:25]  First of all, I want to tell your audience, like no matter how much Riddling I snort, there's no way I could get through the whole story in two hours, right?
[00:33:33]  Like it is a long story.
[00:33:35]  It has lots of twists and turns.
[00:33:36]  So if I start to ramble, Dave, please just let me know and I'll try to try to shorten it.
[00:33:42]  But like Prussia was, you know, a central European kingdom.
[00:33:47]  It was the forerunner.
[00:33:49]  There were a lot of territorial overlap with what became Nazi Germany, was a very authoritarian and militaristic society long before they had school.
[00:33:58]  In fact, they were such a military state that it made like compulsory school finally enforceable because the people were so docile.
[00:34:09]  They didn't want to get bayoneted by their soldiers that they were compliant.
[00:34:14]  They were compliant people.
[00:34:15]  So it worked there.
[00:34:16]  But it had been a dream of states to put in some kind of mandatory schooling or training for a long time.
[00:34:23]  So they had a really successful 18th century and they expanded their territory quite a bit.
[00:34:30]  And as territories expand in Europe at this time, eventually you bump into somebody else trying to expand their territories.
[00:34:36]  And the guy they bumped into was Napoleon and that sucked for them.
[00:34:40]  So they had to retreat.
[00:34:42]  And that was like a real pause for their aristocracy and their intellectual class.
[00:34:50]  And there was this philosopher named Johann Gottlieb Vichta who at the beginning of the 1800s gave this speech called the Address to a German Nation.
[00:34:57]  And he said, you know, it's time we get serious.
[00:34:59]  It's time because I think they saw what laid ahead and the challenges, not just from Napoleon, but from other expanding states at that time and said, you know, we need to follow Napoleon's lead and really get our people to embrace nationalism.
[00:35:16]  And also, you know, I mean, he didn't use these words exactly, but obedience to the state and this idea of, you know, subsumption to the state, subsumption to the collective.
[00:35:26]  And whether we're talking about in Prussia or the implementation of this system in America a couple decades later, this is such an important event because it is the transfer, right?
[00:35:37]  From a family and community-based approach to education to an industrial and collectivist approach.
[00:35:43]  But there, like I said, the further back in time you go, the more naked the intentions are.
[00:35:48]  The setup of the school at that time, which is probably the first or second decade of the 1800s, obedient soldiers for the military, obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms, well-subordinated civil servants, well-subordinated clerks, people who thought alike on most issues, and national uniformity in thought and deed.
[00:36:12]  And so they were going to inflict that on most of their population while training a smaller percentage of their population how to manage those people.
[00:36:21]  So for how to do this, just so nothing I'm going to say after this is like shocking or surprising, they looked to things like animal husbandry and equestrian training for cues on how they should treat children once they trap them in these schools.
[00:36:36]  And then they set up a three-tiered system that, you know, has a sort of analog in the United States.
[00:36:44]  The top half of 1% went to something called Akademienschulin, where they learned classical education and basically how to become the ruling class.
[00:36:54]  Less than 10% of their population attended something called the Rialschulin, which literally means real school, where they learned like how to be professionals and how to be managers of the entire rest of the population, 90 plus percent, who went to something called the Vakschulin, people's school.
[00:37:14]  And they learned obedience, cooperation, a kind of mythologized history of the Prussian state.
[00:37:22]  And kind of, I guess what I would call like a functional literacy, because this actually becomes a theme that extends like all the way into the 1960s in the United States.
[00:37:31]  Like functional literacy is good.
[00:37:34]  It's good.
[00:37:34]  Like if you give somebody an instruction manual, they can figure out what to do with some kind of task.
[00:37:39]  But reading is also kind of a dangerous window to the world.
[00:37:43]  And we don't want people to have that.
[00:37:46]  So it was actually the Prussians who were the first to use this sort of symbolic way of teaching people to read.
[00:37:52]  If you've ever heard of like sight words or the look-se method of reading, which is like some words like the, there's not really, you don't sound that out.
[00:38:01]  You just eventually identify it.
[00:38:03]  So kids would be given pictures and they would associate a word with a picture instead of sounding words out phonetically, which, like I said, carried on to the United States, but obviously limited people's ability to build vocabulary through sounding out words and then figuring out their meaning.
[00:38:21]  So it's putting these.
[00:38:22]  It's building in a ceiling to how effective a reader you're going to ultimately be.
[00:38:27]  Like you'll be able to get through basics, but you're never going to kind of, there is this limit there.
[00:38:32]  By the way, I just have to say, and I want you to keep going on this rant, but it's really amazing just as you say this, the unbelievable similarities to just the way schooling is in 2020 in America, or at least in my childhood.
[00:38:45]  I mean, I think about the public school system in New York when I grew up.
[00:38:49]  And this is exactly what it was.
[00:38:50]  There were like these like three schools that were like the really good schools that you have to like test into to get into these really good schools.
[00:38:57]  It was like Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science and like a few of them that the smart kids go to.
[00:39:04]  Then there's all the other schools where kids are like barely literate.
[00:39:07]  And then there's the like the ones kind of a little bit higher, not quite the good ones, where like the managerial class that you were talking about.
[00:39:14]  Really, it's really fascinating when you think about it.
[00:39:16]  I'm sorry.
[00:39:17]  Anyway, keep going because I love this.
[00:39:19]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:20]  Okay, so back to the part about reading.
[00:39:22]  Like, this was actually, this is one of the things that John Dewey gets criticized by a lot of like conservative education critics for long after he died was like implementing this or promoting this look-se method of reading where kids are not learning to sound out words and they're limiting their vocabulary.
[00:39:39]  And from the studies that I saw, a kid who learned phonics by fourth grade would have a vocabulary, like a functional vocabulary, 12 times what a look-se learner would have.

=== Ridge Wallet and Reading Methods (02:16) ===

[00:39:51]  So that's really significant, but it also relates to that system one, system two thing that I was talking about a little bit.
[00:39:58]  The less a person knows, right?
[00:40:01]  The less ideas they have in their head, that also that window to the world idea, the more like stimulus response they're going to be.
[00:40:11]  So there's this great quote that I think Stephen Covey, like who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he attributes it to this Holocaust survivor named Victor Frankl, but I don't think Victor Frankl ever said it.
[00:40:22]  And the quote is paraphrased as like, between stimulus and response, there is a space.
[00:40:28]  And in that space lies your ability to choose your response.
[00:40:32]  And in that choice lies your freedom.
[00:40:33]  That's a great quote.
[00:40:35]  In fact, I don't know if you can see me on video.
[00:40:37]  Somebody made me a painting of that in my wall in the back corner there.
[00:40:41]  But anyway, I'll post it on my Twitter when you guys all follow me on Twitter.
[00:40:45]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is the Ridge Wallet.
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=== Perverse Incentives in Schools (12:03) ===

[00:42:08]  So if you think about that, that space between stimulus and response grows by the amount of knowledge, life experience, introspection that you have.
[00:42:17]  And if you don't have a lot of things to like put in your mind because you don't have the skills to put them there, that space is very narrow.
[00:42:24]  So you're more programmable.
[00:42:26]  You're more like the animals they husbanded and the horses that they trained, which is, you know, like I said, what they base their school system on.
[00:42:33]  So you are more primal, you're more stimulus response, you're more predictable, and you're easier to manage.
[00:42:39]  So that is actually one of the functions of giving people a functional literacy over like a complete like classical education understanding of the world around them.
[00:42:49]  So you asked about Horace Mann, and he looks at this system.
[00:42:57]  At the time, like I think maybe like the 1840s, there were a bunch of countries that were very, very interested in Prussia.
[00:43:04]  And Prussia had been cool in the United States for a long time.
[00:43:08]  Like around the time the country was being founded, Ben Franklin was talking about Prussia and saying, oh, look what you can accomplish with like social discipline.
[00:43:17]  So like looking to Prussia as an admirable place or a place worth emulating in the United States, that was nothing new.
[00:43:25]  But people from England, people from France and people from America like Horace Mann were visiting and they were looking at the society and they were kind of looking at the schools.
[00:43:36]  Horace Mann never actually like saw the schools in session.
[00:43:39]  He never actually talked to any students.
[00:43:41]  But in 1844, he wrote this report.
[00:43:43]  He would write these annual reports to like the Massachusetts Education Board.
[00:43:47]  And the seventh one was after he came back from talking to schoolmasters and touring empty buildings.
[00:43:54]  He goes, this is amazing.
[00:43:56]  You know, these people tell me that they can like predict social, economic, political outcomes by, you know, the outputs of their schooling.
[00:44:04]  It's so efficient.
[00:44:05]  It's so predictable.
[00:44:06]  We should bring it here.
[00:44:07]  And when that happened, I mean, this is something that is so responsible for changing the character of America from its founding, from the Declaration of Independence, because it's transferring, you know, the power from the servant.
[00:44:21]  If you think about how the U.S. government was set up to be responsive to the people, and you can certainly dig into all the problems with that, but it's transferring the power of the servant to the it's making the servant the master, essentially, with this power, right?
[00:44:37]  Because we're talking about democracy earlier in our political segment.
[00:44:41]  Democracy is outstanding as long as you control the thoughts, actions, and emotions of the people who are allowed to participate in the democratic process.
[00:44:52]  That's been going on in this country for at least 170 years.
[00:44:56]  So, you know, other people go over, they look at this, and Mann is the biggest zealot about this system.
[00:45:09]  And he writes this report, and they say they'll try it in Massachusetts.
[00:45:13]  So that's what happened.
[00:45:14]  And he was criticized at the time.
[00:45:16]  People are like, this guy is crazy.
[00:45:17]  One of the things that Mann was known for, he was very, very religious, but he was also a phrenologist.
[00:45:21]  You know what phrenology is?
[00:45:23]  What is it?
[00:45:24]  I know I know the word, but I'm not.
[00:45:26]  Oh, is that the brain size or the measuring like the head bumps?
[00:45:32]  Okay, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:33]  Right.
[00:45:33]  So you feel, you tell all kinds of things about a person's personality by feeling the bumps on their head.
[00:45:38]  So he was real into that.
[00:45:39]  In fact, his previous report to this education board in Massachusetts was about phrenology.
[00:45:44]  So a group of Boston schoolmasters look at the seventh annual report.
[00:45:47]  They go, this guy's an idiot.
[00:45:48]  He's a phrenologist.
[00:45:51]  He wants to have this like non-book pedagogy.
[00:45:55]  You know, he has this crazy method that they're using, like this symbolic-based way of reading.
[00:46:00]  We don't want this in our schools.
[00:46:02]  But unfortunately, it was the wrong time for criticism of it because slavery was about to end.
[00:46:09]  The Industrial Revolution was about to begin.
[00:46:11]  And this was, you know, this was a scientific, rational choice for America to bring a system like this here.
[00:46:17]  And, you know, that's what happened.
[00:46:19]  So like you were kind of saying before about the, you know, if you're willing to turn off the conspiratorial part of your brain, which I, you know, I'm with you.
[00:46:27]  I enjoy that.
[00:46:28]  But sometimes it is more like accurate to even just forget about that stuff.
[00:46:33]  So many of the problems, I think, with the state in general are the perverse incentives.
[00:46:38]  And I think that's part of the reason why these ideas just catch on like wildfire, because it's, you know, it's almost like if I were, you know, let's say like you raise a certain amount of money, you know, doing the school sucks project and you're trying to figure out how to allocate, you know, like the like the resources, like what we should spend on the equipment for the show or what we should spend on more research or whatever.
[00:47:05]  And you know, then like what you're going to spend as, you know, just to pay your bills and things like that.
[00:47:09]  And if there's like two experts and one of them comes to you and says, like, well, I've run the numbers and I think, you know, you should pay yourself $20,000 a year.
[00:47:17]  And then another expert comes and says, I think you should pay yourself $100,000 a year.
[00:47:21]  You're kind of just incentivized to go, okay, I like this second expert.
[00:47:25]  And now I've got an expert telling me I can have $100,000 a year.
[00:47:29]  That kind of sounds nice.
[00:47:30]  And I think that you see this all the time with the government.
[00:47:34]  Whether, you know, people will be like, they'll be like, well, why did all these, you know, why do all these governments fall in love with Keynes when, you know, Hayek was making better arguments than him?
[00:47:43]  And it's like, well, Keynes is arguing that here's a justification for you taking a lot more power.
[00:47:48]  And all of these, you know, it's the same reason why they love Rawls so much.
[00:47:52]  All of these guys who aren't making very impressive arguments, but they're an intellectual who's giving you an excuse to amass a lot more power.
[00:48:01]  And it seems like this was just like the perfect excuse for the government to, in the name, you know, with a justified, you know, cover say, oh man, we are going to amass power in a way that will, you know, obviously would be in our the state's interest.
[00:48:21]  It seems to me like that's, that's part of the reason why this idea of government schools just took off.
[00:48:26]  It is absolutely the golden egg laying goose, right?
[00:48:30]  I mean, what I identified as sort of the three implicit lessons of school very early on in doing my show were obedience, conformity, and those two things together, like obedience, which is just absolving yourself of personal responsibility or decision making, conformity, absolving yourself of, you know, individual identity is obviously going to produce a kind of apathy, right?
[00:48:55]  That makes people very pliable.
[00:48:57]  And, you know, you know what, you know what really changed me?
[00:49:01]  You know what really got me away from the conspiratorial mindset on this is Thaddeus Russell's book.
[00:49:06]  Have you read A Renegade History of the United States?
[00:49:08]  Yeah, I love it.
[00:49:09]  Okay.
[00:49:10]  Yeah, me too.
[00:49:11]  It's a fantastic book.
[00:49:12]  And, you know, in it, he's telling these stories, and I'm kind of cartoonifying them for our conversation here because I don't exactly remember.
[00:49:20]  But like a group of Irish immigrants are working on some kind of infrastructure project, but instead of actually like building the bridge, they just drink all day and throw bottles at each other.
[00:49:31]  And then when the person in charge of this public works project won't pay them, they blow up the bridge.
[00:49:38]  Okay.
[00:49:38]  So if that's like pre-public school infrastructure, I'm sympathetic, right?
[00:49:43]  I'm sympathetic to the responsible people trying to hold American society together.
[00:49:49]  And I think to humanize them a little bit more, because like you said, like, yeah, it's fun to wander into the conspiracy stuff when you ascribe too much wickedness to it or make it sound too far-fetched, it becomes very, very easy to dismiss as conspiracy theory.
[00:50:07]  Like, oh, this is like a John Birch society thing or something like that.
[00:50:11]  So I always try to step into the shoes at the various stages of doing this and understand why the people were trying to do it.
[00:50:19]  And the easiest time to do that is in like the last quarter of the 1800s and the first quarter of the 1900s.
[00:50:26]  When American society, for people who were fans of the established order, who were comfortable with the country as it was, that landscape must have been absolutely terrifying.
[00:50:40]  So if you're the Rockefellers or the Carnegies and you're saying, what are we going to do?
[00:50:46]  Like that to me, I'm completely sympathetic to that mindset, even if I'm horrified by the results.
[00:50:52]  Like I understand why this happened.
[00:50:55]  And when those kinds of people are desperate to maintain order in society and like in a kind of industrial harmony and they say, who can help us do this?
[00:51:05]  And they turn to academia and they're willing to throw money at it.
[00:51:09]  Obviously, even if the academics who are more progressive, like they don't seem like they'd be allies, right?
[00:51:14]  Like industrialists and progressives.
[00:51:17]  But if there's money, you know, changing hands and, you know, the Rockefellers are bankrolling the teachers college at Columbia University, that's going to be a mutually beneficial relationship.
[00:51:30]  And that was a lot of what happened in not at the beginning of school, but in the early days of school.
[00:51:35]  So there's lots of examples of what you're talking about.
[00:51:37]  Yeah.
[00:51:37]  Yeah.
[00:51:37]  And that's, you know, I mean, it's funny because that alignment.
[00:51:42]  And by the way, if you haven't read, it's a very thick book, but Murray Rothbard's The Progressive Era, which the Mises Institute just put out, I think, last year or the year before, is just great at going through a lot of these different dynamics in the progressive era.
[00:51:58]  But it was always this kind of weird, what might seem like an unlikely alliance between big business and the progressives.
[00:52:08]  And even though they were, you know, it's almost like a WWF wrestling type thing where they're, you know, they're foes in front of the camera.
[00:52:17]  But behind the scenes, they're always kind of working together because there's always these like perverse incentives and these beneficial relationships.
[00:52:24]  And that still goes on today.
[00:52:26]  I still see a lot of people on like the populist right who are shocked by this, but where it's like, you know, the woke capitalism thing where these big companies are in bed with the progressives of today, even though you would think they're against capitalism and against these guys, but it works out in their favor.
[00:52:43]  The big businessmen get a lot of benefits out of big government.
[00:52:47]  And obviously, like there's lots of benefits that you can get from working with big business.
[00:52:52]  They have a lot of money.
[00:52:54]  And right, you see this, you see this right away where the robber barons who are made out to, you know, in mainstream history, it's kind of like, well, they exploited people through their capitalist enterprises.
[00:53:09]  But if you look back at it, all of their capitalist enterprises pretty much just lifted up poor people in this country.
[00:53:15]  But it was when they started getting into, you know, like buying off antitrust legislation to squash their competitors when they get into donating all of this money to school.
[00:53:25]  It's really their charitable undertakings.
[00:53:28]  And they're, you know, of course, donating to political campaigns is really where, you know, in a weird way, these people do deserve to be villainized, but for different reasons.
[00:53:41]  Sure.
[00:53:42]  You know, in a lot of the things that we say, we kind of run into this rhetorical problem of we could certainly be interpreted as being anti-state in a lot of our political positions.
[00:53:54]  So when we express this to other people or we're trying to be persuasive, we often become allied with corporations, right?
[00:54:02]  I'm sure you've had this happen, right?
[00:54:03]  Like, oh, you're an apologist for all these corporate interests if you're against the state, because people kind of have that dichotomy.

=== Charter Schools and Common Core (10:14) ===

[00:54:11]  And I think school history is really the best representation of the nexus that exists between the two.
[00:54:18]  A lot of it is philanthropy from industrialists, but all of that philanthropy has, you know, calculated economic purpose to it.
[00:54:26]  And what they were able to achieve, and I know Rothbard talks about this in that book, is that harmony.
[00:54:33]  You know, I mean, one of the things why Prussia was such a marvel for so many of these people into the 20th century, and the Prussians actually set up like a system of higher education where you could go and you could earn this degree called the PhD, right?
[00:54:48]  So Americans would go over there to get this PhD from Prussia and the prestige it had attached to it was it came from this, you were educated in this utopia, this magical place that had found like perfect harmony between government, the academy and industry, right?
[00:55:09]  So that was like, that was their perfect world.
[00:55:12]  That's what they were trying to create in that era in the United States.
[00:55:16]  Yeah.
[00:55:17]  And I mean, man, they sure were successful with it.
[00:55:21]  I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's easy to kind of like talk about, you know, how horrific we think the results have been.
[00:55:28]  But I've run up against this many times throughout the history of doing this show and just since I've been a libertarian for the last 12, 13 years or whatever it's been, where you almost have to at least to some degree admire your enemy.
[00:55:41]  Like, God damn, they are good.
[00:55:43]  I mean, imagine your goal was to get the state in charge of indoctrinating the youth and then convincing everybody that this is what education was.
[00:55:53]  Not just that school was part of education, but that it was education and that this was the noblest of things to do.
[00:56:00]  And now look at the results and you'd be like, wow, that was a success.
[00:56:05]  Right.
[00:56:06]  Absolutely.
[00:56:07]  And, you know, I think that with every, like once this precedent was set, whether it would really happen, I mean, the making people go to school, like the system started being imported here like 170 years ago, but making people go to school was a very gradual process.
[00:56:26]  I think that the first, Massachusetts was the first state that ever had a compulsory attendance law.
[00:56:31]  And that was like the middle of the 1800s, 1850.
[00:56:35]  And like any government program, from there, they're like, okay, we're going to make a statewide law, but people will have to go to school for like 10 to 12 weeks.
[00:56:46]  And then it was like, all right, well, it's going to be 16 weeks, but it's going to be for all kids nine to 12 instead of all kids 10 to 12.
[00:56:53]  And, you know, then more people come in, the periods get longer and they say, you know, boy, this really needs some supervision.
[00:57:00]  And it just expands and expands and expands.
[00:57:01]  And then in the 20th century, child labor laws end at the beginning.
[00:57:05]  So what are you going to do with all these other kids now?
[00:57:09]  And I think by like 1918, so like, you know, heart of the progressive era, maybe like all 48 states, I think, all 48 states that existed at that time had compulsory attendance laws.
[00:57:24]  But it was, I mean, so the whole process took 70 years to do that.
[00:57:28]  But the precedent was set back to what you were saying in the beginning, right?
[00:57:32]  And collectivism just gets ratcheted up at every stage.
[00:57:35]  And at every turn of the screw, the system becomes more accepted, right?
[00:57:41]  As educated.
[00:57:41]  Like people were horrified when they first heard about this, but the system becomes more accepted and it becomes harder and harder to imagine society without it.
[00:57:52]  And all that it does becomes fine.
[00:57:55]  And once it becomes fine, for most people, unfortunately, it becomes invisible.
[00:58:00]  Like I remember when they were rolling out Common Core and I said, I guarantee in eight years, people will be saying, how would we ever live without it?
[00:58:07]  Right.
[00:58:07]  Like everybody was up in arms about Common Core.
[00:58:10]  I said, in eight years, it will be like public school wouldn't even work without this.
[00:58:14]  And that's always been the case, just one more turn of the screw.
[00:58:18]  Yeah.
[00:58:18]  And it seems like that's kind of like the, and that's almost like the role of conservatism Inc. is they like feign a little bit of like, we're against this.
[00:58:27]  And then five years later, they just accept it.
[00:58:29]  And it's like, no, of course we would never roll that back.
[00:58:31]  That was always, you know, a great conservative achievement.
[00:58:34]  Like that, it always just becomes now it's just accepted into the and you know, you can, of course, test this at the fact that, you know, Michael Malice talks about this all the time, but the idea that, you know, like in the say like early 70s, you might have found some conservatives who were still talking about rolling back social security and medic or Medicare and, you know, the great society.
[00:58:57]  But nowadays, you would never accept that.
[00:58:59]  In the 40s, you would have some conservatives talking about rolling back Social Security or the or the New Deal.
[00:59:04]  It's called the Green New Deal, the original New Deal.
[00:59:07]  And nowadays, that's just obviously a given that, you know, anything that, you know, the great FDR did.
[00:59:12]  And of course, Reagan, the Republican hero, is like, I'm an FDR guy, you know, like that was his hero.
[00:59:18]  So whatever was accepted one generation ago just becomes like a given.
[00:59:24]  And like you said, with Common Core, even less than a generation later, it is quite a system.
[00:59:30]  Yeah, I think Michael has this synopsis, like this numerical synopsis that I've heard him use a couple of times for one of the, this is the big theme of the, or a big theme in the new right, where like when you talk about the progressive wing of the left and the, you know, the preservationist, the conservative, the negotiation begins and the conservatives said, is say, you know, you get zero and the progressives say, we want 10.
[00:59:51]  And the conservatives say, okay, five.
[00:59:53]  Then the next negotiation starts at five and they want 15.
[00:59:56]  So they get to 10.
[00:59:57]  And that, I mean, that was the story all throughout the 20th century.
[01:00:01]  And if I feel like I'm pretty close to what I've heard him say on that, but that idea certainly holds, right?
[01:00:07]  That they conserved ultimately nothing.
[01:00:10]  Yeah.
[01:00:11]  No, I mean, it's, it's certainly if you look at it from the perspective of government growth or even just of preserving of culture.
[01:00:20]  I mean, it's, it's always a one-way street.
[01:00:22]  The screw gets tightened.
[01:00:24]  It might pause for a little bit, but it never really seems to get loosened, at least in any meaningful way.
[01:00:30]  So I was curious what, you know, because I was watching the state of the union the other day, and Donald Trump did have one little bit where he talked about education.
[01:00:41]  And he really, he stood up pretty hard for school choice and vouchers and charter schools and that type of thing.
[01:00:50]  Of course, this was very much demonized in the Democrat responses to the state of the union.
[01:00:59]  And none of the Democrats were clapping much for this.
[01:01:01]  But do you, you know, there's a lot of libertarians over the years have kind of championed charter schools and that type of thing.
[01:01:09]  Do you do you get behind that or do you see that as something that's not really going to be an effective solution?
[01:01:16]  I'm behind it, but whether it's ultimately going to be an effective solution, I mean, it's not, it's certainly not a panacea.
[01:01:23]  I think we would both agree with that.
[01:01:25]  I like that it's happening just like I like that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are happening because it means that people are starting to like start a conversation and look for solutions, even if they don't have enough information, right?
[01:01:38]  They don't know anything about passion-driven or purpose-driven educations.
[01:01:42]  They know what the school model has been, and they're just trying to tweak it in some new way that they see as solving a lot of the problems they've identified, but they're not willing to like strike the root of the whole system yet.
[01:01:54]  But I mean, the scrambling to find something different, I think is a good sign.
[01:01:59]  The reason why I don't think it's much of a solution, and I support it, and I used to be way much more of a purist on this, like 10 years ago, when I was totally like new libertarian, completely out of touch with realities of the world, I was like, no, everyone has to be unschooled.
[01:02:16]  And now I understand like how far-fetched that is.
[01:02:20]  And I also realize there's problems with the sentence, everybody has to be unschooled, advocating for educational freedom.
[01:02:27]  But Yeah, I think ultimately, if enough money transfers into the hands of these sort of semi-private, I mean, they're still like in the public domain, that teachers unions will see this as a cash cow, right?
[01:02:43]  And they'll say, well, if public money is going to go into the hands of unaccountable semi-private institutions, they must have the same oversight and unionization that the public schools enjoy.
[01:02:56]  So all those teachers should be unionized.
[01:02:58]  And I think what you would actually have, because you're using this voucher system, which is like a return on property tax.
[01:03:04]  So it's so-called public money, which means that what it threatens to do, I think, is have all of these private schools fall under the regulatory apparatus of the public system.
[01:03:14]  And I don't think that would be good.
[01:03:16]  So yeah, I like that it's happening.
[01:03:19]  But, you know, charter school has the same amount of precision as a term as like school, right?
[01:03:27]  School could be the shittiest place you ever imagined in Prussia in 1820, or it could be a trade school that's going to change your life.
[01:03:34]  They're both called school.
[01:03:36]  And charter school is no more specific than that.
[01:03:40]  Like some charter schools are great.
[01:03:42]  You know, there's magnet schools.
[01:03:43]  There's people who are really committed to these ideas.
[01:03:46]  There's people who are bringing like, you know, revolutionary educational philosophies into charter schools.
[01:03:51]  But then there's charter schools that show up in strip malls, like as flyby night operations or that TM Landry in Louisiana, a couple of years ago, this was a big scandal.
[01:04:02]  They said they could get all these kids into Ivy League schools and they were cooking their books in all kinds of ways to do it.
[01:04:07]  I mean, they were forging tests for kids to get admissions to schools that they weren't like intellectually equipped to go to.
[01:04:14]  So like charter schools, they have to be evaluated like one by one to really make an informed decision about, you know, whether they're helpful for the kids who are there or not.

=== Praxis: Alternative Learning Paths (07:59) ===

[01:04:25]  Yeah.
[01:04:26]  Okay.
[01:04:26]  Yeah.
[01:04:26]  Well, I agree with all of that.
[01:04:28]  All right.
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[01:05:54]  All right, let's get back into it.
[01:05:56]  Do you see, you know, you've been at this for a while now.
[01:06:00]  Like you said, you were kind of one of the first prominent libertarian podcasts and really kind of the one that specializes in this area, in this very, very, you know, crucial area.
[01:06:12]  I mean, if you're, if you're a libertarian, to any degree libertarian, like from someone like me who's like an anarcho-capitalist, even to somebody who just is like, well, I, you know, the most like milquetoast, you know, well, I, I believe in more freedom and less government intervention, you got to recognize that the fact that the government has control of schooling the kids is going to lead toward a pro-government bias.
[01:06:37]  I mean, that's everybody should see this as a very important issue.
[01:06:42]  And I got to say, since having a child, I see it as that much more of an important issue.
[01:06:46]  Like, I enjoyed seeing that sad look on Kamala Harris's face as she's sitting there watching the State of the Union, knowing she's out of the race for president.
[01:06:57]  This fucking woman who was bragging about arresting parents for truancy.
[01:07:02]  I mean, like, that's, you know, like in the same way that libertarians go, and quite correctly, will say, well, you know, if there's property tax, you don't really own property because if you basically the government is saying, if you don't, you know, pay me the fucking rent or whatever you want to call it, I take your property away.
[01:07:19]  Well, then you're basically renting from the government.
[01:07:22]  You don't really own it.
[01:07:23]  Well, in the same sense, if the government is saying, if you don't send me your kids, I'm going to take your kids away from you.
[01:07:30]  You know, who really owns your children there?
[01:07:33]  And there's few things that I would speak of in such radical language, but somebody telling me they're going to take my kid away from me is like, well, I may have to die for that.
[01:07:42]  Like, that's not going to be, that's not just like, you know, I'll grit my teeth and pay my taxes every year, but your kid is a little bit different.
[01:07:50]  Anyway, the question I was trying to get to, what do you, do you see anything like a silver lining in all of this?
[01:07:58]  There's the stuff that you're doing.
[01:07:59]  You mentioned Thaddeus Russell before.
[01:08:00]  He's got the renegade university stuff.
[01:08:03]  The internet exists now.
[01:08:04]  What do you think could potentially be a solution?
[01:08:07]  You know, what's the case for optimism?
[01:08:12]  Okay, well, they're obviously numerous, right?
[01:08:15]  The number of people who've taken to homeschooling and unschooling, I think, is great.
[01:08:20]  The more people realize the importance, and this is happening, and there's never been more resources leading people to this discovery, which is the move back from family and community-based or to back to family and community-based education from this industrial collectivist education.
[01:08:39]  And, you know, I was a freestater.
[01:08:42]  I told you that when we talked before.
[01:08:43]  And on the seacoast in New Hampshire, a lot of the people who gravitated to that area, they were very entrepreneurial.
[01:08:48]  They were very family focused.
[01:08:50]  And they were able to set up a community that had all kinds of support for parents, had all kinds of opportunities for kids to interact with each other around common interests.
[01:09:00]  Eventually, they were able to start a learning center there.
[01:09:04]  It was called Big Fish.
[01:09:05]  And, you know, so now it's offloading some of the responsibility from parents where kids can actually go to a place that they know is supportive of their educational mission as parents.
[01:09:17]  Parents work together to take some of that load away.
[01:09:20]  And I think that would be like a really important thing is that it's never been easier to come together around common educational interests, right?
[01:09:28]  For parents, which I think is always the biggest obstacle.
[01:09:32]  But people are so well networked and there's so much parental support and consciousness about things like deschooling, which is like most of us went to school.
[01:09:43]  So if we have kids, we still might have leftovers from, you know, just internalized from that experience.
[01:09:51]  And being conscious about that and talking to other people who are struggling through the same process is really, really important.
[01:09:57]  So, you know, the rise of unschooling, the rise of community learning centers, the resurgence in like apprenticeship programs, the one that I promote all the time on my show is called Praxis.
[01:10:08]  Have you ever heard of Praxis?
[01:10:11]  Okay, so Praxis was, you know, founded by Isaac Morehouse, who's been a guest on my show.
[01:10:18]  And I just think about this as an overpass, right?
[01:10:20]  Like if the school system in college is kind of like a rotary that you have a very hard time getting out of with traffic, Praxis to me seems like an overpass.
[01:10:30]  Praxis is basically a professional training program where they pair you up with a company.
[01:10:35]  So it's a mutually beneficial relationship.
[01:10:37]  The company pays you.
[01:10:39]  It's a cash positive endeavor in that the company will pay you more than the program costs.
[01:10:44]  And I think you're done with the entire thing in like 18 months, right?
[01:10:48]  So you're not languishing in school for years and years and years, maybe getting something that's useful.
[01:10:54]  If you complete the program successfully, last I knew the company you apprentice with will hire you at something around, you know, 50 grand once you complete the program.
[01:11:04]  And that is the model.
[01:11:05]  And I've said this on my show before, as much as I love all those guys, as much as I love Praxis, I hope they have a lot of competition for that.
[01:11:13]  Because that is, I mean, higher education or whatever we want to call it, there's probably a name that's more accurate than that, has become such a drag on so many young people from my generation, from the next generation at this point.
[01:11:30]  And the tune about it is not changing that much as far as what kids are being told to do in school.
[01:11:36]  Like the 13th grade, I mean, there are schools where in like middle school and early in high school, kids are being told that their graduation year is whatever year they finish high school plus four, right?
[01:11:47]  So you don't graduate until you get your college degree.
[01:11:51]  And what that's like inculcating into kids is you're a failure if you don't do this, if you think about other options.
[01:11:57]  So now like if you don't finish high school, you'll work at McDonald's has been extended to you have to go all the way through college if you want to be successful in this educational experience.
[01:12:07]  So I see that as a real problem that the story hasn't changed as far as like, you know, I mean, there's always been trade schools and vocational programs, but most kids who are like, you know, at a certain level in school or pursuing, you know, a certain course of study academically, they're being told that they have to go to college or they're a failure.

=== Market Decisions on Student Debt (13:29) ===

[01:12:25]  And that's like the most important thing, I think, that needs to change.
[01:12:29]  Yeah, no, I love that stuff.
[01:12:31]  And I agree with you.
[01:12:32]  And all of this stuff, I mean, Praxis is incredible.
[01:12:35]  I love the homeschooling movement.
[01:12:37]  I mean, the Ron Paul homeschool curriculum and things like that, I just think are like wonderful.
[01:12:41]  And it might be, which is often the case for libertarians, is that our best shot at victory is the fact that the state often, you know, is unsustainable and overplays its hand.
[01:12:55]  And, you know, I mean, I've been saying for years on the podcast where, you know, you go like, okay, so the, you know, college or the higher education, whatever, we will come up with a better term for the higher indoctrination system.
[01:13:10]  You have more and more people going.
[01:13:12]  You have the prices going up and up and up, outpacing, you know, the price of inflation by two, three, four times, you know, more and more people going, the price going up and up, the degree becoming more and more, you know, less and less valuable.
[01:13:28]  You're like, okay, this does seem somewhat unsustainable.
[01:13:31]  And I remember, do you ever watch the, what was the fucking movie?
[01:13:36]  The movie that with Steve Carell about the, about the housing crash.
[01:13:42]  God damn it.
[01:13:43]  I can't remember the name of the movie.
[01:13:45]  Something about betting.
[01:13:47]  The big short.
[01:13:48]  The big short.
[01:13:49]  There we go.
[01:13:49]  The big short.
[01:13:50]  Thank you.
[01:13:51]  And so in the big short, there's this one point where he's going around like on the ground to see whether or not he thinks there's a housing bubble.
[01:13:59]  And he meets a stripper who's got like three houses or something like that.
[01:14:03]  And he's like, there's a bubble.
[01:14:04]  There's definitely a bubble.
[01:14:05]  And I remember being at my brother's graduation.
[01:14:08]  This is like a few years ago.
[01:14:10]  My much younger brother graduated college and they were reading the majors that people were graduating.
[01:14:17]  And I mean, I can't tell you how many people.
[01:14:19]  It was just like everything was like gender studies, gender studies, environmental studies, gender studies.
[01:14:26]  Like the things that used to seem like goofy degrees were now like the reasonable ones.
[01:14:32]  Like you'd be like, gender studies, gender studies, environmental studies, sociology.
[01:14:36]  And you'd be like, thank God there's a sociology degree.
[01:14:39]  And I remember seeing that and being like, like I had that Steve Carell moment.
[01:14:43]  I was like, oh, this is absolutely a bubble.
[01:14:46]  Like there is no way 20, 30 years from now, there are this many jobs for a gender studies major out there.
[01:14:53]  I mean, this has to collapse.
[01:14:56]  It's the biggest, right?
[01:14:57]  I think it's twice the size of the housing bubble in terms of debt.
[01:15:00]  Outstanding.
[01:15:01]  Okay.
[01:15:02]  And, you know, Austrian economists, I've heard some debate as to whether or not this even fits into, you know, the definition of bubble, right?
[01:15:14]  Like in the tech bubble, there were assets to take when it burst.
[01:15:17]  In the housing bubble, there were assets to take when it burst.
[01:15:20]  So like there was a way, there was a way out other than bailouts.
[01:15:25]  But now, you know, you have a bubble twice the size.
[01:15:28]  I think it's close to $2 trillion.
[01:15:29]  And I think it's much higher than people actually think it is or what's been reported.
[01:15:35]  When this bursts, there's nothing to take from anybody, which is, you know, an incredible statement about higher education in itself, but this is uncollateralized.
[01:15:45]  So I don't know what that means, but it's definitely like the rules that apply to the two previous bubbles we've lived through don't apply to this one.
[01:15:53]  And that's a little bit scary.
[01:15:55]  Yeah, it is.
[01:15:55]  I mean, it's, it's, what, what do you take?
[01:15:58]  Not even, and even in something that you couldn't like monetize, it's not even as if you had someone like, um, you know, who's got like an engineering degree or something like that.
[01:16:08]  And it's like, okay, there's really nothing there, but they at least have this knowledge base or something.
[01:16:13]  You're talking about a gender studies major.
[01:16:15]  I mean, I don't mean to be insulting if anybody listening has one of those, although not too many of those guys listen to this podcast.
[01:16:22]  But you're like, what, what could there's nothing to be liquidated?
[01:16:26]  You literally, you have been convinced of the most hyper weirdo left wing propaganda.
[01:16:35]  Like you come out just believing something about how there's no such thing as gender.
[01:16:40]  Nobody in real life even buys the information that you've been taught.
[01:16:44]  And this can't possibly be put toward any type of economic productivity.
[01:16:48]  It really is.
[01:16:50]  It's astounding.
[01:16:52]  You've literally been rendered less valuable to the world by that experience, right?
[01:16:57]  By that so-called education, you are now more useless in the actual world because you're entitled.
[01:17:04]  You've internalized, even more so, internalized a victim mentality.
[01:17:08]  And we see people going out into the work world with this mindset.
[01:17:12]  And sometimes they manage to destroy a whole company with this shit, you know?
[01:17:17]  And I think, I know this is a controversial position for libertarians, but I think this is completely predatory as far as like assigning this debt to these kids because they haven't been given the education to properly make that decision at 17 years old.
[01:17:31]  And obviously, the loans are given out very easily because there's no reliable markers for a person's credit worthiness at that point.
[01:17:40]  And obviously, you have the politics of promoting opportunity is the same thing with the housing bubble.
[01:17:46]  It's like trying to put people in houses.
[01:17:47]  I was telling this story recently.
[01:17:49]  When I started teaching, I worked at this boarding school.
[01:17:52]  It was really like high-burnout environment.
[01:17:54]  So the people who ran the school were like trying to trap people like me, who was like 24, 25 years old, energetic in that town.
[01:18:02]  So the director of the school, he says to me, he goes, go buy a house.
[01:18:06]  Go buy a house in this town.
[01:18:08]  I said, I make $32,000 a year.
[01:18:10]  This was like 2005, maybe.
[01:18:12]  He's like, anybody can buy a house.
[01:18:15]  And he was right.
[01:18:15]  Strippers can buy three, right?
[01:18:18]  So that was, what was the point of that?
[01:18:23]  Why were we talking about that?
[01:18:24]  There was going that the kids have been victimized, basically, and that they've been, you said it's a controversial point for a libertarian, but that they.
[01:18:34]  So you see something that makes no economic sense, just like before school to go to the housing bubble, where the politics of opportunity and equity and fairness, all these things, like let's get everybody in a house and that'll feel good.
[01:18:46]  Same thing with education.
[01:18:48]  People knew it made no sense.
[01:18:49]  An entire industry rose up against, you know, to bet against what was happening in the housing market.
[01:18:55]  And they did okay, as covered in the big short.
[01:18:59]  So there's no way to do that in education, but a lot of people are going to get screwed.
[01:19:03]  But it's based on the same problem, right?
[01:19:06]  This politics of, you know, airily promoting opportunity for everybody just to feel good and the results are going to be, you know, pretty stupid.
[01:19:18]  But I know the argument is like, well, you know, they signed the paper, so they're responsible.
[01:19:24]  But I think there needs to be a more nuanced way of thinking about that.
[01:19:27]  I think that's a heuristic that's not really getting into the reality of this situation.
[01:19:33]  Oh, I completely agree with you on that.
[01:19:36]  And by the way, just to add on to your point that all those people, you know, the industry betting against the housing market, I mean, people, the whole credit default swap industry would have been a lot more successful if the government hadn't come in and bailed out the banks and hadn't come in and propped up the housing market after that.
[01:19:52]  I mean, you would have stood to make a lot more money betting against the housing market if they had just let the thing crash.
[01:19:58]  But you're absolutely right.
[01:19:59]  I mean, look, I know libertarians, the funny thing is that it's not so controversial if you're pointing out, say, loans from like the IMF to some third world country to point out that it's like, this is not really a legitimate loan.
[01:20:17]  I mean, this is like trapping third world countries into this system and it's completely unfair.
[01:20:23]  And libertarians are rightfully against that.
[01:20:25]  And I agree with you.
[01:20:27]  I mean, look, this whole college scam has been, it's an open conspiracy between big banks, government officials, and colleges.
[01:20:37]  And they're screwing over 17, 18 year olds with that.
[01:20:41]  It at least warrants a more nuanced conversation, as you say.
[01:20:45]  Now, I also, I'm a little skeptical about the plans to wipe away student debt just because of how unfair it is to the people who did the right thing or people who paid back their student loans.
[01:20:58]  And I hate rewarding the people who were less fiscally responsible and punishing the ones who were responsible.
[01:21:05]  But I certainly agree with you.
[01:21:07]  I mean, look, Murray Rothbard always said that his position on government debt was that we should be pro-default, default and walk away from it.
[01:21:16]  And, you know, there's like that's, you know, it's like I think about the debt that the Soviet Union owed after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
[01:21:26]  And you're like, well, what are you going to say?
[01:21:28]  That the, what, the Russian citizens own that?
[01:21:31]  I mean, they just stood up and overthrew the most oppressive government in European history.
[01:21:37]  You're going to tell me they owe the money that other people were lending to the government that was oppressing them?
[01:21:43]  It's, you know, these situations are.
[01:21:46]  they're somewhat complicated, but I certainly think if nothing else, libertarians should have some degree of sympathy for these kids who were clearly preyed upon.
[01:21:58]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:21:59]  And 15% of people in that situation are taking Rothbard's advice right now, by the way.
[01:22:04]  At least 15%.
[01:22:05]  It might be higher.
[01:22:06]  And the consequences of that are significant, right?
[01:22:10]  It means maybe not being able to buy a house, not being able to have a new car, interfering with quality of life things in a major, major way for a lot of these people.
[01:22:21]  So yeah, like I said, I would like people to take it one step further.
[01:22:25]  I liked what you said in a recent episode of your show where you were talking about the response to some of the entertainment at the Super Bowl and conservatives took to Twitter to complain about it.
[01:22:34]  And libertarians said, well, the NFL can do whatever it wants.
[01:22:38]  And that was basically the gist of it, right?
[01:22:41]  This was your last show.
[01:22:42]  Yeah.
[01:22:43]  And, you know, I was saying like this whole let the market decide thing, it really frustrates me because in terms of education at all levels, this is really like the most overlooked issue in the libertarian discussion is schooling versus education.
[01:23:00]  I really wish it got more attention.
[01:23:02]  And I appreciate the attention it got here today.
[01:23:05]  But I used to argue with Jeffrey Tucker about this all the time when he'd come on the show and try to tell me how great Burger King was, right?
[01:23:11]  Like it's not, I would say it's not great, right?
[01:23:14]  This is not, you know, being an intelligent actor in the market requires critical thinking skills, decision-making skills.
[01:23:22]  It requires self-knowledge.
[01:23:24]  So if people aren't getting those things, the market decisions are not some kind of God, right?
[01:23:31]  I think people need to pay more attention to the way that people are schooled could disrupt the arrival or slow the arrival of the world that we actually want, right?
[01:23:42]  The market can't decide if it's filled with people making bad decisions, right?
[01:23:47]  Or uninformed decisions.
[01:23:49]  So, but we want the market to decide.
[01:23:51]  We want the market to decide, which is why I think this is such an important industry or issue that people acting in the market are better decision makers because they have better critical thinking skills and more self-knowledge, which are two things that school is never going to deliver.
[01:24:07]  Well, right.
[01:24:08]  And what bothers me so much about that argument, and I've seen this from a lot of different libertarians, but it's like when you say let the market decide, it's like, that's what I'm doing.
[01:24:19]  I'm obviously not advocating any type of government law or any type of force or violence against people.
[01:24:26]  I'm participating in the market and trying my best to help the market decide.
[01:24:31]  I mean, if everybody, if we were just a free market of libertarians who all said, well, let the market decide, then I guess it's like, what?
[01:24:37]  Like only the non-libertarians get to enforce their will on anyone else?
[01:24:41]  And of course, people, like, it's like, yes, I agree.
[01:24:44]  The market should decide.
[01:24:45]  But also sometimes when things are wrong or, you know, at least from our perspective or anyone's perspective, you're participating in the market as well.
[01:24:55]  And you have a right to kind of insert your voice into that conversation.
[01:25:00]  So it's just, you know, that to me is just, I don't know, it seems like a fairly obvious point that I'm surprised is even controversial.
[01:25:09]  And I'll tell you this, that, you know, I, and this is somewhere where I'm sure I have my own shortcomings and I've failed at times because I am so just disgusted and appalled by the social justice warrior movement, the radical kind of political correct crap that comes out of college campuses.
[01:25:33]  But I think I could do a little bit better and probably many of us could at empathizing with some of these kids because quite often the people who are out there, like the craziest social justice warriors you know, are people who are, first of all, a lot of times they have some legit mental health issues.

=== Yale Propaganda and Black Students (07:46) ===

[01:25:55]  And also these are people who have really been propagandized.
[01:25:59]  And I'm not sure the blame should fall squarely on their shoulders.
[01:26:04]  Well, also, like shining the spotlight on those people fails to recognize the larger problems in the system, right?
[01:26:13]  It's like a, it's a distraction because it's the most entertaining thing.
[01:26:18]  But like, let's look at a specific example.
[01:26:22]  Remember at Yale University, maybe like five or six years ago, where the kids were flipping, this was, this was like the opening salvo in the social justice war, as far as I was concerned.
[01:26:31]  Kids at Yale University corner a professor in a courtyard and they start yelling at him and telling him that he doesn't belong there.
[01:26:39]  And what the story was behind it is his wife had written a sort of, you know, not even like to the entire student body, but just like an interfaculty email saying like, hey, I don't think we should be getting so worked up about what kids are for Halloween.
[01:26:55]  Like it's Halloween.
[01:26:57]  Let's not go crazy about this.
[01:26:58]  And the students demanded that, you know, that woman and her husband, who were both faculty at the school, pack their shit up and leave.
[01:27:07]  Now, on the surface, that looks ridiculous.
[01:27:10]  But if you think about, you know, what higher education has done and has tried to be just in this bubble of what is often called racial liberalism, right?
[01:27:22]  So like the progressives that we talked about earlier in the conversation, they were all for eugenics and sterilization and controlling black people in every single way they could until they saw those ideas in practice at the end of World War II.
[01:27:35]  And they said, oh, shit, maybe we should like try to be more like their parents or something, you know, instead of like sterilization and eugenics and promoting like certain practices and breeding.
[01:27:46]  And that became a project in higher education starting in the 1960s.
[01:27:50]  So it's like, we, the white saviors, let's import all these people into our institutions, you know, even if they come from completely alien environments.
[01:27:59]  And, you know, we'll put them on display to show how tolerant and enlightened we are.
[01:28:05]  Now, they never say out this, all this out loud because if they did, they'd realize they're fucking stupid, right?
[01:28:09]  But that has been a project in higher education for like 50 years at this point.
[01:28:15]  But those kids come to these places and they're in a completely alien world.
[01:28:21]  And so like maybe for them, and not to mention all the indoctrination that they are getting there, like you said, they come there and they expect the school and the people who work at the school to play kind of like a larger role in their life because they're just there as college policy to be ornamental, to enrich the experience of white students, right?
[01:28:44]  That's what racial liberalism is all about.
[01:28:46]  And they pay a price for that emotionally.
[01:28:49]  And I think that's what you saw at Yale University, but the way it played in conservative media is like, look at these people flipping out about Halloween costumes.
[01:28:58]  It was so much more than that, but making it about that spectacle erased every like deeper problem In play in that situation in higher education.
[01:29:10]  Not just what was being taught, but also like the culture, right?
[01:29:13]  And the policy of the schools themselves.
[01:29:16]  And because they don't have this capacity for self-reflection, because they live in this bubble, they will never look and say, holy shit, because their whole identity is wrapped up in this.
[01:29:27]  So they won't say, wow, you know, the things we tried to do to help black people shit really hurt black people.
[01:29:34]  That day's never coming for them.
[01:29:36]  Right.
[01:29:36]  So that was, you know, I reacted when I first saw that Yale drama the same way everybody else did.
[01:29:45]  And the more I learned about it, the more I thought about it, Thaddeus Russell was also really helpful with that.
[01:29:48]  We talked, we did a three-part series on academic conformism and covered all this.
[01:29:54]  But yeah, it's giving people a spectacle so they never actually understand the depth and the breadth of the problems with these institutions.
[01:30:04]  Dude, that is such a fucking good point, man.
[01:30:07]  Like, God damn, that is such a good point.
[01:30:09]  And it's so, you know, and I got to say, I'm almost a little disappointed myself because I do fall into it.
[01:30:15]  I fall into it as much as anybody.
[01:30:16]  And it's easy.
[01:30:17]  I do too.
[01:30:18]  You know, I don't know what it is exactly about it.
[01:30:21]  It's so easy to just get trapped into this situation where, number one, it's like these kids, they just have all of these qualities that provoke.
[01:30:31]  So they're entitled and they are snot-nosed kids.
[01:30:34]  They're making the stupidest arguments ever.
[01:30:37]  So it's just easy to own them.
[01:30:39]  You know, it's easy to watch one of these videos of like Ben Shapiro arguing with a 19-year-old who says there's 72 genders and you're like, oh, he dunked on her.
[01:30:49]  And yeah, that's great.
[01:30:50]  But the problem is, and this is what I guess libertarians really got to focus on, is that what this is, maybe I'm turning back on the conspiratorial part of my mind, but whether or not it's a conspiracy, in effect, it works this way because it distracts you from what the actual conversation should be about.
[01:31:08]  And as always, the state gets to kind of be invisible while we fight this culture war.
[01:31:14]  Like I talk about this all the time with the Charlottesville thing that got such a big, you know, became such a big skeptical, where it's like, well, there's these two groups and there's Antifa and then there's the white nationalists and they have this clash and you're supposed to say, you know, like this group is terrible and this group are the good guys or Donald Trump made the huge mistake of saying, you know, something about both sides.
[01:31:35]  And even if that was taken out of context, you can't even say anything about both sides.
[01:31:39]  And then like you look at it and you're like, well, actually, there's three sides.
[01:31:42]  There were three sides there.
[01:31:44]  There was Antifa, there were the white nationalists, and there were the cops.
[01:31:48]  Okay, that is the third group there.
[01:31:50]  And the cops who are charged, not only charged with security, but who maintain a monopoly on security, led the white nationalists into this group of Antifa and made it a shit show that it didn't have to be.
[01:32:04]  And that gets like not a fraction of the attention that the other groups get.
[01:32:08]  And, you know, it's like, I'll tell you what I was thinking about as you're saying this, like you give them a distraction.
[01:32:14]  It's, I'm thinking about the state of the union yesterday, where what everybody's talking about is like Donald Trump snubbed Nancy Pelosi at the beginning and didn't shake her hand.
[01:32:24]  And then at the end of the State of the Union, Nancy Pelosi stood up and ripped up Donald Trump's speech.
[01:32:30]  And that's, and it's easy to get sucked into that.
[01:32:32]  It's like, that's what everyone's talking about.
[01:32:35]  Oh, look at this.
[01:32:36]  It's like, like, first off, it's just the most childish shit you could imagine.
[01:32:41]  But then you sit there and you're like, okay, so Nancy Pelosi stood up and ripped up Donald Trump's speech.
[01:32:47]  Oh my God, the resistance.
[01:32:49]  This woman approved the biggest military budget in human history.
[01:32:54]  She's signed off on the president having all of these new spying powers.
[01:32:58]  There's not one inch of executive power that she's actually stood up and challenged him on, but she rips a speech.
[01:33:04]  So now we can all look at this distraction as wow, look at the battle between these two guys.
[01:33:09]  And it's like, yeah, none of this is actually what matters.
[01:33:12]  Like, if you actually wanted to be the resistance against Donald Trump, you know, there's a million different ways she could hold him accountable or limit his power.
[01:33:21]  She doesn't do any of it.
[01:33:22]  But it's very easy to fall for this distraction because there's something so it's like they play on our human tendencies of just being like, oh, look, she ripped up the speech on TV.
[01:33:32]  Oh, look at this snowflake with purple hair calling this guy, you know, a racist for saying kids can wear Halloween costumes.
[01:33:39]  It's very tempting.
[01:33:40]  Yeah.
[01:33:41]  Yeah.

=== Berkeley Tensions and Authority (02:43) ===

[01:33:42]  So the generalization between these stories is kind of like there's all of this discord on the service, surface, but there's kind of this nice harmony behind the scenes.
[01:33:52]  Is that it?
[01:33:53]  Yeah, I think so.
[01:33:54]  Yeah.
[01:33:54]  I think Berkeley, you know, Berkeley was a great example of that too.
[01:33:57]  You look at Berkeley then and now, Berkeley was the birth of the free speech movement in the 1960s.
[01:34:02]  And that wasn't a totally unified political movement, but I think people were more pointed in who they saw as the enemy, right?
[01:34:11]  That was sort of the original like raging against the machine, at least in the modern era.
[01:34:16]  And they pointed a lot of it at their college, right?
[01:34:18]  At that, that like this is authority, but it was directed towards all of these, you know, actions of the state, the war in Vietnam, segregation laws.
[01:34:29]  It had lots of different, lots of tension in that place.
[01:34:33]  But you look at Berkeley in 2017, remember the battle of Berkeley with like Lauren Southern versus all of the antifa people and you know, throwing bottles with P, like that's the, that happened at the same place.
[01:34:45]  And I think that's like one of the great tricks of the establishment where in 1967, you have this unity, you have this direction for all of this anger.
[01:34:53]  And then in there in 2017, what is that?
[01:34:56]  50 years later, you have a war.
[01:34:58]  Like, like the establishment says, yo, shouldn't you guys be fighting each other or something?
[01:35:03]  Like, wouldn't that be better?
[01:35:05]  And I think there's lots of reasons why that happened too.
[01:35:08]  Obviously, social media had a huge impact as far as like raising the echo chamber walls and dividing people further.
[01:35:14]  But that's another example.
[01:35:16]  Like that student protest movement in the 60s was directed.
[01:35:21]  And then 50 years later, it was just chaos.
[01:35:23]  Yeah.
[01:35:24]  And, you know, all of the problems, like all of those issues with higher education that I was talking about a minute ago, they march on unnoticed.
[01:35:33]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:35:34]  And so as long as we're pitted against each other, we never end up looking up at what our common enemy ought to be.
[01:35:43]  Well, dude, listen, we're up over time.
[01:35:45]  We got another show coming into the studio.
[01:35:47]  But man, I just loved this.
[01:35:48]  We're going to have to do this again, hopefully sometime soon.
[01:35:51]  I really appreciate you coming on, Brett.
[01:35:53]  Everybody needs to go to schoolsucksproject.com.
[01:35:57]  Go check out the school sucks podcast.
[01:35:59]  It's fantastic.
[01:36:00]  If you enjoyed this conversation, there's just hours and hours and hours of really, really great stuff there, man.
[01:36:07]  So Brett, thank you so much for coming on, brother.
[01:36:08]  I appreciate it.
[01:36:10]  Thank you, Dave.
[01:36:11]  This was fantastic.
[01:36:13]  All right.
[01:36:14]  We will be, as I said, a little bit late with our Friday episode, but by Saturday, we will have a brand new episode out for you guys.
[01:36:21]  All right.
[01:36:21]  Goodbye.
[01:36:24]  Dude, thank you so much, man.
[01:36:25]  That was.