4107 Post Fact Indoctrination - Call In Show - May 23rd, 2018
Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern are coming to Australia in July 2018 with events in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane. Tickets are available now: https://axiomatic.eventsQuestion 1: [2:47] – “I'm a 27-year-old former banker/trader who has returned recently to University to undertake a PhD. I've been shocked at the change I have seen in only the last 5 or so years since I graduated, and it has made me seriously question the direction of the UK university system. Debate now is entirely group and identity based, even in debate hustings facts are secondary and arguments are subject entirely to identity politics. I recently attended my first ever competition at the ripe old age of 27 and had (what I believed to be uncontroversial arguments based on fact) cast as colonialist and borderline white supremacist. My question for Stefan is how do I navigate this new post-fact campus; I need to survive here for another 4 years do I just grit my teeth and pretend I see nothing?”Question 2: [44:33] – “I was raised Christian and I have faith that God exists (even though using that word is wrong). I've listened to as many conversations about God you've had as I can find, as well as reading your books on the subject. I fervently seek the truth and pride myself in putting logic and reason first. This puts me into a state of inner conflict pertaining to my faith. I honestly do think it is possible that because I was raised believing in God, I am unable to let go of a belief that has shaped so much of my life. Yet, even though I will admit that as a possibility, I do not think that is what it is, or at least not all of it. That leads me to a question I want to ask you. You’ve said that if one makes the argument that God doesn’t need to be created, that you can then say the same thing about the universe. Also, you say that complexity has to be proceeded by lesser complexity. Do you see any conflict between these two thoughts? From the understanding I have of science, the universe can't be infinite. I think a critical analysis of our universe puts you face to face with having to contend with that which isn't empirical and that which doesn't conform with our understanding of science and reality. Or is this a sort of confirmation bias observation of reality, a sort of "God of the gaps" argument that I've come up with? I'm interested to discuss this with you and to hear your thoughts.”Question 3: [1:35:51] – “I'm writing in because of a recent podcast I listened to involving changes to the story of the Florida School Shooting. Stefan discussed some topics I'm intimately familiar with due to my profession. I am a special education teacher working in an alternative program for students who've been expelled from their regular schools. I'm certain that my school is very similar to the one Nikolas attended for a short time before his shooting rampage. I would like to share some of the outrageous things I've seen happening in public education and the special education world as a whole. There are a lot of cases very similar to Nikolas Cruz and I think many of these, students are ticking time bombs and it's only a matter of time before we see more instances of mass violence. Due to federal laws, students can basically get away with anything. We've had students attack teachers, bring knives and even guns to school, sell drugs on school property, and much more. They have little to no lasting consequences. This is especially true if they have an Individual Education Plan. It's only a matter of time before another case like Nikolas Cruz happens again.”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern are coming to Australia in July 2018 with events in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, and Brisbane.
Tickets are available right now, including a special preview of Lauren Southern's new Farmlands documentary and rare VIP meet and greet.
Opportunities so you can catch us in Melbourne, Friday, July 20th.
In Perth, Saturday, July 22nd.
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We are dying to meet you.
Please come out.
Let's have a fantastic evening of thought, engagement, arguments, and conversation.
Just about every question you have can be answered by philosophy.
Some great callers in tonight's show.
The first caller, he was a banker and trader who's returned to university to undertake a PhD, but has been quite shocked at how things have changed just in the last five years or so, because now it is a group and identity-based, collectivist-based, social justice warrior, because now it is a group and identity-based, collectivist-based, social justice warrior, politically correct-based, and all this kind Is he supposed to just grit his teeth and push his way through, or does he try and get out?
It's a great, great question.
The second caller, raised Christian, have faith that God exists, but wants to understand some of the arguments around atheism, and we had a great conversation really about The metaphysics and epistemology of faith and I gave some very strong and I think very helpful advice to Christians on how to retain their power in a cultural context.
The third caller, wow.
So, he is a special education teacher who deals with a lot of at-risk youth, and when he began to look into what happened in the Florida school shooting in Broward County, he began to see just how much the system might be contributing to the production of crazy and evil people like Nicholas Cruz.
So, we had a very important and powerful conversation about that, so I hope you will listen with great attention to what he had to say.
Very, very important stuff.
And I want to thank you again for giving me the opportunity to have these conversations with these wonderful people and to help educate the world.
We've passed half a billion views and downloads.
It really is the most amazing thing.
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Okay, up first today we have Martin.
Martin wrote in and said, I'm a 27-year-old former banker slash trader who has recently returned to university to undertake a PhD.
I've been shocked at the change I have seen in only the last five or so years since I graduated, and it has made me seriously question the direction of the UK university system.
Debate now is entirely group and identity-based.
Facts are secondary, and arguments are subject entirely to identity politics.
I recently attended my first-ever competition at the ripe old age of 27, and had what I believe to be a fairly uncontroversial argument based on facts cast as colonialist and borderline white supremacist.
My question for Stefan is, how do I navigate this new post-fact campus?
I need to survive here for another four years.
Do I just grit my teeth and pretend I see nothing?
That's from Martin. Martin, how are you doing?
Yeah, yeah, not too bad. It's getting late here in London, but otherwise I'm fine.
It's alright. This might be a quick conversation.
Yeah, yeah. So, just to give you a bit of background on myself, so I've spent sort of the last six years working what I've described as quite a fairly masculine environment.
And I've come back into university now, and I'm not sure if it's me who's changed, but there's definitely a different sense on campus.
It's been completely, I don't know what it is, there's a real identity politics kind of environment going on.
I recently went to my first debate hosting, it's actually something I wanted to do before when I were around it.
And I had this day on competition, debate competition, right?
And won the first two debates.
I went to the third one, this debate on immigration.
And this was my bed and breath.
It's something I actually do. I had all the facts and figures in my mind and stuff.
So I went through, got my feedback in the debate afterwards, and I got told that my opinion was too colonialist, and that there's a certain subset of opinions you're allowed to have on these topics, of which my view apparently was not in line with them.
I actually think my view was very uncontroversial.
But when I spoke to one of the guys who was more of a seasoned debate, they told me that basically when you're arguing these points now at university, you can't use arguments around economics and stuff like that because apparently All arguments to be group based.
So which group is the most affected by this policy?
And you've got to gear all your arguments towards that group.
So you can't say something like, this is an unfeasible argument technically or economically, because that apparently is just, there's a line in debate that says, no, you can just walk all over that.
People go straight to the groups, like, what about the poor working class?
They're going to be fucking undercut by this, this sort of stuff.
So my sort of question is, is this me imagining this?
What's happened in the last five or six years?
Has there been an overall shift?
You know, what's going on with British universities and universities abroad?
Come on, it's an idiot invasion.
They've dropped the standards.
And now there's this tsunami of intellectual zombies wandering through the formerly hallowed halls of academia.
What the fuck are you doing trying to get a PhD?
What's the matter with you? Well, I mean...
I did about six years of work in the financial sector and, you know, I was, I suppose, a bit bored with it and decided I wanted to sort of upskill and...
But why? Why?
Why do you need a PhD?
Oh, you know, get the letters, mate.
Why? Well, to be honest, I'm intellectually curious, so I wanted to go in and try and expand my knowledge.
Actually, my undergrad was not in finance itself, it was in physics, and I've always been interested in energy, so I wanted to go and actually do a PhD and do some research in the field.
Why? I thought it was interesting.
I'm doing engineering. No, if it's interesting, it can be a hobby.
Like, I'll study engineering in my spare time.
I'll get paid to do it. It's basically like a job.
But it's not a PhD anymore.
It's an FUD. It's a FUB. It's a FUB. It's a FUB brain.
It's not a PhD anymore.
Where's your rigorous analysis?
What new stuff are you learning?
What new skills are you developing other than conformity to groupthink collectivism and identity politics retardation?
Okay, so, I mean, I'm doing an engineering PhD and I'm looking at grid infrastructure and, like, applying optimization and stuff to that.
So, that's quite different.
So, actually, there's sort of two subcultures to university, right?
The actual research side is fairly rigorous.
Then there's everything else that goes with it that is a load of shit.
I've been invited to four seminars the last couple of weeks.
two of them were actual genuine research seminars the other two were these diversity seminars we're trying to uh encourage us to uh you know i don't know what it is uh think more feminine all this sort of stuff but i do know what you mean there's definitely a diversity is very simple which is hate on for white males and anybody who's not on the left Yeah, I'd say it sounds about right.
Yeah, there's no diversity. I mean, if you go into a diversity seminar and you say, as a white male, I really feel that my position ought to be respected.
Diversity ends where the freckles begin, my friend.
Yeah, that was a subtle joke.
You know, I'm a proud black man to the black man.
I'm a proud, you know, Chinese woman to the Chinese woman.
I'm a proud white man to the racist.
That seems to be what I feel.
Yeah, no, listen, the higher academia, academia as a whole, has been almost exclusively taken over.
I mean, unless you're going to something very specific, like there's a college, and I can think of a couple of them in the US, where, you know, free market thinking is what's taught, is what's, the experts are all there, they're gathered there, it's a school, there's a Chicago school, there are a couple of other places where you can go for specifically free market economics.
Your generic university, I mean, it's turned the Western mind into a kind of rainbow tapioca.
I mean, it is not pursuing reason and evidence no matter where they lie.
So, I mean, that's my question.
So, why do you need a PhD?
Is there some, you want to become a professor of engineering?
Is that the gig? Like, what are you looking at?
I'd like to do something like an innovation manager for a grid company, something like the National Grid.
I think that'd be an interesting job. So they'd actually be looking at technologies that they want to implement into the wider grid network and actually be the guy who Do you know for a fact that this would require that?
Because it seems to me that if you were an entrepreneur who would develop these technologies then they'd be quite interested in what you had, right?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, it's a mix of backgrounds.
So I suppose if you had an opportunity where you've monetized some research before and brought it in, that would absolutely be a great way to go into that sort of line of work.
And I think you're right. The PhD is not necessary, Stephen.
It's just something I'm interested in doing and I like researching and I'm getting paid to do it, so I'm quite happy to be there.
And who's paying you? Huh?
Who's paying you? It's a European Union Research Council.
Oh, so you're taking taxpayer money to be indoctrinated into rank leftism.
More or less, yeah, exactly.
Do you feel that it's an honourable course for your life as a whole, my friend?
I don't feel, well, I'm taking taxpayer money to get trained to become an engineer.
See, but Martin, this is the crazy thing about these kinds of subsidies is they have you end up making retarded decisions.
No disrespect. I know you're a smart guy, so this is not to do with your intelligence.
This is just when incentives are skewed.
Because you're not paying for it yourself.
And what that means is you feel, or it has this feeling of being free, or like, well only a fool would not take this wonderful gift of an education and so on.
But you always have to think, if you're paying for it yourself, If you were to be paying for this yourself directly, 100%, would you get the value?
Shucking it off on the taxpayer doesn't change the fundamental value proposition.
What it does, though, is it drugs you as to the disutility of the time that you're spending.
In other words, if you had to pay for it yourself, I don't know what it would cost.
I don't know, like 20,000 quid a year or whatever it would be, right?
15,000, maybe more, maybe 25.
But then, of course, there's all of the...
You said you got, what, like five...
Years or so to go, four years to go.
Well, I disagree with that slightly.
I'm actually part industry funded as well.
So the actual grid, the companies see value in the research and they actually put money in and fund it.
And they go get a return themselves and they get basically doctoral level people looking at their engineering problems and finding solutions for them.
Wait, wait, wait. So a company is funding your education?
Yeah, it's part funded with the industry.
So it's a combination of... Do you have to go and work for that company after you graduate?
Not after I graduate, but I do work with them while I'm actually studying.
So I'll actually be paired with an industrial partner.
I'll be doing work with them to look at the issues they've got and try and help around them.
Have you ever run a business or been responsible for payroll and R&D investment?
I've been responsible for a balance sheet, a fund.
Okay, so help me understand, Martin.
What is the business case for the company funding your PhD?
So they see a problem they have.
They don't want to put one of their own engineers on it, so they assign a PhD to do some novel research on it and find their way around.
Wait, why don't they want to put one of their own engineers on it?
I'm not sure.
You have to speak to the company. But I can imagine, I can think of a few reasons why they haven't got the headcount themselves.
They don't pay for a full, they don't pay 30 grand to have me sat in their office all day doing work, right?
I'm off doing a bit of academic research and also looking at their issues.
No, but if they want jobs that are done by a PhD, why don't they just hire a PhD?
There's got to be some out there, right?
Yeah, they do have postdoctoral researchers working at these companies as well.
Okay, so what is the business case for throwing money at you rather than hiring someone to do the job that they want done?
I think it's quite a reasonable business case.
They don't pay a full level of headcount, and they do get some research, and they get a partnership with the university, so it's a bit more collaborative.
It's actually through a CDT, which is called collaborative conductive training, where you've actually got 10 engineers all training and going through four years together.
I mean, it's just weird to me.
I've run the research department of a software company, which basically was a software company, And I just can't imagine saying, well, there's a big problem I need to solve.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pay to someone to go to school for almost half a decade and then hope that they come work for me afterwards.
Like that in no way, shape or form would be a reasonable business case to consider if you were – like maybe they get tax deductions or maybe they get some kind of other favorable stuff that comes from the government, but from a raw – From pounds and pennies standpoint, it makes no sense. I've got a big problem to solve.
What I'm going to do is pay for someone to go to school for half a decade and cross my fingers, hope they can work for me in half a decade to solve the problem.
Well, I mean, I'm not there getting trained, right?
I'm there doing research work.
So, they've effectively, they've not got me on payroll, but I'm there in the university looking at their issues and applying another approach to them and doing work for them at the same time and also doing academic work for the university.
Bet you they're getting a grant. I mean, it's a combination of funding, right?
So, it's a combination of stipend funding and industrial pilot funding.
Yes, but I bet you they're getting funding or some sort of preferential treatment from the government to make this worthwhile.
Because, like you understand, from a business market standpoint, this makes no sense at all.
Yeah, yeah. They will be receiving some money from the government, no doubt about it.
So, basically, taxpayers are funding it pretty much soup to nuts, right?
Do you not think people should be funding scientific research, like genuine scientific research?
Not at the point of a gun! Do the taxpayers have any choice at the money being showered upon you?
No! You mean taxation as in the point of a gun is taxation?
Yeah. I mean, I disagree.
I think, I mean...
Wait, you disagree with what?
I think we should be sending money towards scientific research.
Good, then you should write a check and you should send your money.
But the fact that you want to do it in no way, you know, if you want to have sex with your girlfriend, that doesn't mean that everyone else can rape her, right?
I mean, if you want to do something voluntarily, it doesn't mean that you can force everyone else.
I don't really see the equivalents there, but...
Well, it's force, right?
It's the initiation force. If you feel that science is worth funding, and don't get me wrong, I think science is worth funding as well.
And it's important to support science and so on.
But not at the point of a gun, right?
I mean, because as soon as violence comes into it, as soon as the money is coerced from the population and dumped on scientists, it's no longer science.
Because science should follow what the market needs, what customers want.
It should be more engineering and less theoretical.
And you shouldn't fund an entire space program just so you get tang crystals in your water.
So, firstly, our research is quite a fly.
And also, it is partly funded by industry's partners who will see that there is value in the research being done and will want a return from it.
So, and then there's also, you know, I'm not exactly sure how the money gets allocated, but it probably is a government stipend in there.
I know, I disagree with you, possibly agree with you to a certain extent as well, that taxation, In a way, is money being taken off you at gunpoint?
But I think there's worse things that can be put towards than actual scientific research.
Oh, so you think this is the best way to use violence?
Or this is a good way to use violence?
I mean, I think it's a bit of a stretch to describe it as violence, Stephen.
What, taxation?
What do you mean? Well, taxation is violence.
Yeah. Well, what happens if you don't pay your taxes?
Yeah, yeah, you go to jail and the rest of that.
Well, what happens if you resist going to jail?
Why do you go with the people in blue?
Because they have a mandate which says, we escalate violence until you comply or die.
So, what do you think?
Is there a basis that you say we should use taxation for?
What, like military? Because we can't fund a military through charity.
What do you mean? Like, I agree to a certain extent...
I'm a free market guy and I believe in low taxation for people.
But to a certain extent you have to fund stuff like your military, you have to fund basic administration and stuff like that.
Is the money that goes towards that, is that still violence?
Is that still... Sure, taxation is forced.
So how do you pay for a military then?
You mean the UK military for instance?
Yeah, exactly. The UK military that is facilitating massive numbers of people coming into the country who are a drain on the resource, who are driving up the price of housing, who are swamping the educational and healthcare system.
Do you mean the police force that is currently threatening people with six years in jail if legislation goes through for offending people on the internet and who studiously overlook the mass rape Of young, white, working-class British girls by immigrants from Pakistan and other places.
Do you mean that wonderful stuff that is all funded by the government?
Do you think that the average British person feels well protected and secure in the bosom of their state these days?
Yeah, I mean, my point was actually...
How do you fund the basic military that you probably need?
I agree with all of that, actually, for the most part.
Well, you're an engineer.
How would you do it? I would probably use taxation.
I can't think of a way to fund to that level a military.
Okay. What level of funding do you think you need if you have, say, a nuclear deterrent?
What kind of funding do you think that you need for your military?
What percentage of the GDP do you think would be devoted to the military?
2% in GDP, I'd say.
2%? Yeah.
Okay. So, would you be willing to pay 2% of your income in return for a reasonable level of very efficient protection from invasion?
Yeah, I think that's a reasonable amount to pay.
Good. Do you think that current levels of taxation represent the will of the people in any way, shape, or form?
No, because they're more like 40-50% if you're a middle-income earner in the UK. And I agree with you, that tax is too high.
Well, that's like saying there's the right amount of coercion that should be in the foundation to run a society.
So 2%, 2%.
Now, let's say that there's a huge amount of inefficiency in government, military.
So, I mean, take a look at Iraq, right?
So, in Iraq or in Afghanistan, Afghanistan may be an even better example.
America has an ungodly amount of money that it pours into hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars a year that it pours into its military, right?
And it has been unable to reliably take vast sections of Iraq and vast sections of...
Afghanistan, just as it had trouble holding on to Korea, just as it had trouble in particular holding on to Vietnam and other places.
So if you look at a place like Afghanistan, or some of the...
Non-state actors in Iraq and so on, well, they have taken on, with a good deal of success, the largest and most powerful military because it's generally a private military force like ISIS and other places.
And generally, it is a government military that they're fighting.
And they have done quite well.
I mean, putting the morality of both sides aside for the moment, they've done quite well.
And so here you have a very small and efficient private military.
And you have a very large and inefficient government military, and they're kind of fighting to a standstill in a lot of ways.
If you look at something like 9-11, the attacks on the World Trade Center, it costs, what, $150,000, $200,000 to put together, and it has cost the U.S. taxpayer, what, $7 or $8 trillion over the past 14 or 15 years?
Do you consider that?
That's a private, quote, army, which is the hijacking of the airplanes.
Versus a government army, which is the invasion of a bunch of countries that didn't seem to have much to do with it at all.
And so here you have a response.
You have on the one side, $150,000 and the planes being hijacked and flown into buildings.
Then you have $7 or $8 trillion in response.
Which do you think is the more efficient military?
I suppose, yeah. I mean, in terms of pounds per square inch, I'm not sure what the metric would be.
You could argue that those terror militaries have been a lot more effective.
Look, again, don't get me wrong.
I mean, they're completely evil.
I mean, I'm just looking at the pure dollars and cents situation.
I understand. Do you think that a free market military would be more efficient than a government military?
Well, of course.
So if it's 2% of the GDP to fund a government military, that is not protecting British people at the moment.
I mean, in fact, I would say that the British military and police are actively endangering British people both in the short run and in the long run.
But given that free market solutions are at least, you know, two to four times as efficient at a minimum as government solutions.
So we're talking about a half a percent of GDP that you'd need.
Now, I'm pretty sure that you can find ways to fund that quite easily and quite well, just as you would find ways to fund protection services other than the government police, which seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time policing posters in the London subway, policing online staff at...
and rather than, say, you know...
Stopping terrorism, because the government now is not just allowing hundreds or sometimes thousands of jihadis to roam around in the UK, but also paying for them to come in and giving them subsidies and so on.
So actually paying for people dedicated to the destruction of your society to come in and roam the streets.
And we have Sadiq Khan at the moment, who is very upset with Beachbody-ready ads and junk food.
There's a huge amount of, rather than say, acid attacks or knife attacks or terrorism and so on.
So you may sort of have this argument, and I understand this argument, something like, well, you know, if we don't have the government protecting us, boy, what will happen?
Which is the same argument as saying, who'll pick the cotton if we free the slaves?
Well, we don't know. But the point is, it will be a voluntary peaceful solution.
It will have to respond to the needs and preferences.
I'm sure you saw this recently.
They went across the European Union and asked the citizens what their number one issues were.
And in every country that I read about except Italy, number one, immigration, number two, terrorism.
For Italy, it was number one, immigration, number two, unemployment, which I guess means there's a lot of unemployment in Italy.
So yeah, immigration, control over immigration, control over the borders is the number one issue.
None of it is being achieved.
None of it is being pursued. Quite the opposite is happening.
Merkel is now saying that the relatives of the economic migrants can now pour into Germany.
You may sort of say, well, how could this possibly happen in the absence of a government?
The first question is, it's not happening in the presence of a government.
In fact, I believe that in Europe and in other places, Because of the welfare state, because of the lack of borders, because of a wide variety of other politically correct nonsense, Europeans are being more endangered than not.
And they would be better off on their own.
I mean, without a state at all in the long run.
But how it could be provided?
Well, the whole point is that we don't know.
We don't know. Like if there was some system in the world that said, I know exactly, some government system said, I know exactly who Martin should marry.
And I, you know, I was part of that system.
And I picked some woman and then forced her to marry you and forced you to marry her.
And if someone came along and said, well, you know, I don't really think that we should force people to marry each other.
And then if the response would be, well, then how on earth would people get married and nobody would get married and there wouldn't be any children.
And I mean, it would be voluntary, it would be free, and it would be thus far, far better.
Hmm, yeah. I probably agree with that.
So, let's go back to if you were paying for it yourself, would it be a cost-benefit that would make it worthwhile?
Um, well, it depends how much it was costing me, I think.
Um, I think, uh, based on, uh, I think I'd like to think I'd still be doing it again, because, um, I'm enjoying it and I'm trying to just...
It's stuff I'm interested in and I like reading about it.
Well, what is the tuition that you're paying?
Tuition? I don't pay any tuition.
I'm effectively a staff member.
I know. What does the tuition cost, though?
Do you know? What would be the cost of the tuition cost?
I think it would be about six grand.
UK pounds. Okay.
It's about $12,000 a year for between three and four years, depending on how long it takes to PhD.
So I guess that would be...
It cost me $40,000.
It's a lot of...
It would be a big monetary outlay.
Well, no, hang on. What was your rough salary?
Just don't have to give me details.
But the last year that you were working full-time, what were you making?
All in, probably about £50,000 English.
So I guess that would...
What was that, $80,000 US? About 80,000 US, yeah.
Okay, so 80,000 US over four years, right?
Yeah, about a quarter of a million I just chucked away, right?
Yeah, yeah. And of course, you're chucking away that your salary would increase over that time, and that increase would then be present for the rest of your career, right?
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
So, yeah, in terms of lost opportunities, in terms of direct outlays and...
All of that, you know, what are we talking?
$300,000, $400,000, $500,000 or a quarter million pounds or whatever?
It's probably more than that when you think about it.
And the fact that I'm actually looking at a different career now, I probably wouldn't want to go back into finance again.
No, I understand that.
I understand that. But you are surrendering a lot of money to be where you are.
And that's my question is, Are you going to find a way to make that pay?
It's not the only reason why you would do something, you understand.
I just want to run through that math.
Well, I think, to be honest, one of the reasons is that I worked for five years.
I managed to buy my house in the sense that, you know, the bank, I've got a mortgage on it and I've got that now.
So I got myself a foot on the ladder and I was sick of the hours.
Like, I was working between 60 and 80 hours a week at that job.
So I knew that after a while, that's probably going to kill me by the age of 40.
So I thought I'll go back into academia and try another career.
So in a certain sense, I've done that classic woman thing where you go and actually try and get a bit of work-life balance, I suppose.
Right, no, and I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I don't think it's a woman thing.
It's a sensible thing if you want that kind of balance.
But why not just go travel for a year or two and then, I don't know, I mean, do you want to go work for someone else?
Do you want to start? I mean, you're certainly smart enough to start a company.
Wouldn't you prefer that to some degree?
Yeah, I was thinking about monetizing some more research when I get two or three years in, but I haven't got an idea of what I'd do for a company.
I was kind of hoping to get something out of this PhD.
Because it is an opportunity to actually, you know, work with an industry partner and get out of that way.
But, you know, I've got a few mates who think about doing just that.
They're kind of suffering that core life crisis.
They're thinking about us going and taking a year out.
It's tempting, but I just feel guilty about not doing something.
You see what I mean, Stephen? What do you mean, feel guilty?
Wait, were you raised Protestant?
I suppose it's sort of, it's Catholic.
Catholic guilt combined with first and well-Catholic.
You must work! The kingdom of heaven is only achievable through work!
You cannot sit on your butt and go, God wants you to work!
No, I understand. Well, my parents were small business owners, I think that's where I get it.
Oh, okay, so that's good.
So you have lots of entrepreneurial experience in the family if you decide to go that route, right?
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
They actually used to own a couple of hotels.
It was... I think it instills a different sense in you, right?
Because you've got this, when you see, when you grow up with some people who are hustling, it's very different.
So a Mrs., her parents are professors.
And you can see the sort of, there's no sense of, oh my God, this needs to be done right now, that I think you have with people who own businesses versus professors.
Yeah, it's a funny thing. I was just reading something this last week that said, if somebody's done this calculation, that people basically only work about 10% of their lives.
If you take all your retirement time, all your time off in school, all the way through college and so on, like the times, lunches and vacations and commutes and time you might spend scrolling through Twitter while at work.
Fortunately, that is my work. But people may only spend 10% of their actual lives working, which is – Bad news for employers.
I guess it's good news because there's room for growth.
But it's good news because all you have to do is work 20% and you'll end up running the entire planet.
And I understand that work thing.
So today, I've got a really good presentation on who supports free speech.
And I tried for...
The presentation is probably about 45 minutes, and I tried for about an hour and a half today to get it right, and I just threw everything out.
Then I'm like, okay, I have to take a break.
I can't get the right tone.
I'm stumbling over words.
My arguments are colliding.
The problem is, too, when you do a bunch of takes, You start to stitch them together in your brain, because I don't usually script, right?
So it means I've got to do it on the fly, and then they start to collide in your brain.
Anyway, so I did just a step away from it, and I went to do some reading and stuff.
But it's tough, because it's like, oh, I wanted to get this done today, but I'm not going to get it done today.
I'm behind the camera. Anyway, on the other hand, I did just finish it.
I'll certainly look forward to hearing that one.
Oh, yeah. No, it's a really great presentation.
I'll do it in the morning, hopefully.
So I understand that.
I understand that. But the problem with the PhD, though, in general, I mean, you can use the PhD to dangle in front of investors and say, give me money for a business because I got a PhD and that may help.
But the problem with the PhD, and this is true for a master's, this is true for an undergraduate degree as well, is that it only matters to people whose opinions you shouldn't care about.
Other academics, yeah. Well, no.
I mean, people who are going to hire you.
You know, I've hired lots of people in my career as an entrepreneur, and I've worked with a lot of people through Free Domain Radio.
I'm pretty good at looking across the table and figuring out if someone's intelligent.
Like, that's not brain surgery to figure out if someone's intelligent.
Now, if someone's intelligent, they're just going to do a good job.
And so, the only people who need the accreditation are people too dumb to figure out who's smart when they're sitting across the table from them.
Or too insecure, or too lacking in the ability to read social cues, or too...
I don't know what. Like, they're missing some...
It's not even, like, emotional intelligence.
It's just, you know, can you look across the table and figure out who's intelligent?
There's a fair few of those at university, Stephen.
Yeah, yeah. The kind of people that...
They won't look in the eye, mate.
I don't know what it is. It's...
Well, they don't have customers, right?
They don't have customers. They've got government funding.
And Coulter just put out this argument.
I think it was yesterday or whatever.
But the argument was, you know, forget something like this.
Forget going to university.
Save yourself $200,000 and just submit your SAT scores and your acceptance, your letter of acceptance from a university.
Because that's proven to people that you're smart.
And of course, the whole system is ridiculous because what you want to do Is you want to just give people an IQ test.
And based upon that IQ test, you hire them because that is by far the most reliable metric of whether somebody is going to succeed in a job or not, is an IQ test.
But generally, you're not allowed to give IQ tests because of gender and racial disparities in IQ tests.
And therefore, you have to have something much more manipulable than an IQ test, which is you need a college degree.
You can't really fake an IQ test, but you can promote people who didn't earn it through university.
Far too many people are going.
Oh yeah, it's way too many people going.
And they're all trying to pillage the past prestige of university back in the day.
Only 10% of people would go to university.
So you're at the top of the bell curve.
Now like 40% of people are going to university, 50% of people are going to university.
And so naturally, you have to have collective emotionally reactive bullshit concepts like identity politics.
Do you know why? Because reason is hard.
Parsing out someone's argument and assessing their evidence and going through their data.
Well, that's hard. So yeah, when Ann Coulter says, yeah, SAT tests and college acceptance letters, just go wave those in front of an employer.
And if the employer has any brains at all, then they're going to hire you based on those.
And that way, they don't have to fund your $200,000 of college debt that has taught you to do little other than resent business, free markets, and customers.
And bosses, of course, too.
I think, to be honest, some of these...
I think it's vaguely immoral some of the degrees that universities actually offer.
Hotel tourism management should not be studyable at university.
A degree that gets you a job in a hotel, you know, being a manager, that shouldn't be offered as a course.
It's a complete waste of anyone's money who takes that.
Media studies, all this stuff, it's obscene that these universities should even be allowed to actually offer these courses.
Well, I mean, it's hard to know.
I mean, they're funded and so on, like what used to be called the back of the matchbook classes, woodworking, hotel management.
You know, those things, I don't know, if there's a market for them, if people like it, then that's perfectly fine with me.
At least that's to some degree voluntary.
But my concern is that you're getting a PhD and Why?
Won't people be able to assess how smart you are without a PhD?
And do you really want to work for people who can't even do that?
I'm doing the PhD for me, Stephen.
I find this stuff interesting and I want to spend a couple of years learning about it at everyone else's expense, I suppose you'd say.
I'm basically robbing my fellow countrymen at gunpoint to pay for a couple of years on the jolly studying engineering.
No, listen, and don't get me wrong here.
I mean, I'm fully aware that when I was younger, I did a master's degree in history.
And, you know, I paid for some of it.
And of course, it's Canada.
So a large part of it or some portion of it is funded by the state.
I wasn't on any kind of bursary or anything like that.
But... I'm sort of aware that I went through this myself.
Now, back then I was not an anarchist, so that was slightly different, and I have tried to pay back society for their investment in me by doing good work philosophically.
I mean, if you don't have a problem with the ethics of it, I'm not going to particularly rail at you because everyone's got to make these kinds of decisions.
If you don't have a problem giving up a quarter million pounds to do this kind of stuff – and I'm not saying go back to being a trader or a banker because that is – As you say, 60 to 80 hours a week, I worked on a trading floor as a programmer.
Not me, but some of the people, they had to run out phones every now and then because the traders got so angry, they just smashed the phones on the tables and on the desks and threw them against the wall.
They had to quickly rush out and they had a big stack of phones to replace the ones that the traders busted up from tension and frustration.
That's a tough environment.
I don't know. If you want to study it, you don't need to be in school.
If you want to study it, you could learn on the job.
You could study while sitting on a beach if you want, if you just want the theoreticals.
I mean, all the stuff that is in college is now online and available for free.
And you could, of course, just go and write tests if you want.
You could go audit courses and so on.
And I don't know.
I just think that you're going to get a lot better return on investment from that.
And you won't have to do all of this identity politics crap.
Because at some point, and I think that this is starting to happen already, Martin, but at some point, employers are going to say, you have a college degree?
What are you, stupid? Like, why would I want to hire anyone who thought it was a great idea to go and pay for something that's available for free?
Yeah. Well, I can't come soon after this, I think.
And maybe you could be one of those.
See, the market at the moment...
Is going to be owned by people who figured out the college scam.
I'm not kidding about this.
If I wasn't doing what I'm doing, I'd be all over the place doing this.
Right now, businesses are crippled by their addiction to degrees.
Now, I get it.
You know, you got to be a doctor, a lawyer, doctor.
You need the accreditation engineer and so on.
I understand all of that. So I'm just talking more in particular where you don't like computer programming and other places where you don't need that degree.
But at the moment, businesses are crippled.
They are aging sclerotic dinosaurs crippled by their addiction.
To degrees.
And the businesses who figure out the degrees are no longer a positive but now in fact a liability.
Those are the businesses who are going to cut their payroll significantly.
They're going to be able to pay less for smarter people.
Because right now, particularly in the arts, but I think also in business to some degree, right now, Those degrees are making you less fit as an employee.
They're making you resentful.
They're making you jumpy.
They're making you cowardly.
They're making you anti-thought, anti-market, anti-customer, and particularly anti-boss.
My God, can you imagine being the boss of someone who's just gone through four straight years of quasi-Marxist indoctrination about the evils of the bourgeoisie boss ruling class?
My God.
I mean, every day you don't go down to your car and have your tires slashed and your car keyed.
It's like, woohoo, good day.
I mean, it's like a conservative hiring Antifa.
their personal security guards is...
It's just not a good idea.
And at some point, I don't think businesses, the larger businesses can't really back out of it because Well, they've got the HR departments, which is their Marxist portal into economic disintegration.
And they also have a whole bunch of hiring managers who all just want those checklists.
Like they think, oh, well, they've got this letters, they've got these letters, they've got these letters.
And they don't actually figure out if the person is intelligent or not.
And so the businesses that figure out that...
College degrees are almost exclusively a liability rather than an asset, not just because it teaches people to hate your entire business model and the free market as a whole, but also because you're the one, as the employer, you have to pay.
For the student loans. You have to pay for the loss of income.
You have to pay for the indebtedness.
Somebody comes to you and they're in debt $100,000 or $50,000.
You as the employer have to fund that.
Somebody comes to you out of high school, raring to go smart.
They study stuff on the side.
They burn through the textbooks and they're willing to write any tests that you want.
That person's not coming in $50,000 to $100,000 in debt.
So you can just pay them less and they'll be happier.
And more enthusiastic.
So I think there's a tipping point.
Now, it would be a real shame, Martin, if you went through four years and that tipping point came afterwards and it turned out that what you thought was going to be an asset was in fact a liability.
And I would just seriously question where things are going to be.
You know, you have to look down the tunnel of time when you're making these kinds of decisions.
Yeah, no, it's definitely something I'll consider.
But yeah, I appreciate the advice.
I just want to touch quickly on the HR point there that you mentioned.
So that big banks now particularly, At the analyst and associate level, directors and managers of teams are not making decisions at all on who they hire.
It's being completely vetted out by HR, who usually have some sort of diversity structure they want to put a first rung on there.
When I was working at the Bulge Bracket, I did it for about three years, it was almost impossible to actually be hired into one of the main desks now, because all the HR basically I'll say to Imagine Directors,
like, look, you have not got enough of X amount of minorities in your team, whether that's women, black, BMA, Well, no, it's not staggering.
It's exactly what the government does, is they say, we're going to have these guidelines, but trust me, they're not going to be quotas.
Boom! Now they're quotas.
Sucks to be you, we can't back out the legislation.
And this is another reason why the bigger companies are just going to go tits up.
And relatively quickly as well.
You'd be surprised at how quickly this kind of stuff can happen.
It doesn't mean they won't sort of march on Japanese bank zombie style, but as far as them actually being dominant in the market, as far as them actually growing and being exciting places to work.
No, no, no. This is all... This is all gone.
This is all garbage.
This is all going to be undermined. And so my concern is that you're going to end up incredibly frustrated if you're looking for the kind of place that wants you to have a PhD.
They're going to have diversity programs.
They're going to have all of this affirmative action hiring for women and blacks and Hispanics and so on.
And it's not going to be a meritocracy.
And the smarter you are, the more unbearable it is going to be to be in a non-meritocracy.
So the bad news is that's happening to big companies.
The good news is you can be an entrepreneur and you can grab the next market share.
You can grab the next rung of the market share.
All right. Well, thanks for your call.
Let me know what you decide.
I'm curious about that, but let's move on to the next caller.
Thanks, Stephen. Cheers. Alright, up next we have Jacob.
Jacob wrote in and said, I was raised Christian and I have faith that God exists, even though using that word is wrong.
I've listened to as many conversations about God that you've had that I can find, as well as reading your books on the subject.
I fervently seek the truth and pride myself in putting logic and reason first.
Obviously, this puts me into a state of inner conflict pertaining to my faith.
I honestly do think it is possible that because I was raised believing in God, that I am unable to let go of a belief that has shaped so much of my life.
Yet, even though I will admit that as a possibility, I do not think that is what it is, or at least not all of it.
This leads me to a question I want to ask you.
From one of your videos, you said that if one makes the argument that God doesn't need to be created, then you can say the same thing about the universe.
Also, you say that complexity has to be preceded by lesser complexity.
Do you see any conflict between these two thoughts?
From the understanding I have of science, the universe can't be infinite.
I think a critical analysis of our universe puts you face to face with having to contend with that which isn't empirical and that which doesn't conform with our understanding of science or reality.
Or Is this a sort of confirmation bias observation of reality, a sort of God of the gaps argument that I've come up with?
I'm interested to discuss this with you and hear your thoughts.
That's from Jacob. Hey, Jacob.
How are you doing tonight? I'm doing good.
How are you? I'm doing well.
Hopefully doing good, too.
Yeah, I'm doing good.
Why do you want to discuss these questions?
I'm not saying we shouldn't.
I'm curious why you do want to discuss these questions with me.
Like with you personally?
Yeah, because I mean, the reason I'm asking is if there's this big emotional attachment that you have to the idea of God, isn't that more relevant to the discussion than abstract philosophical arguments?
I mean, I guess it would be that I'm interested in the philosophical arguments and I find value in having those discussions.
But they won't change your feelings, right?
Well, there's a good chance they wouldn't, I suppose.
You're right. I'm not saying, please understand, I love the philosophical arguments.
I'm not trying to say we shouldn't have them.
I guess I'm just curious, if your major relationship to the idea of God is emotional rather than intellectual, that seems to be more fertile and interesting ground for discussion.
That having been said, you are the caller, so I will follow wherever you lead.
Well, I think that's sort of where I'm trying to figure out sort of where I'm at, because growing up and into adulthood, I tried to hold the belief that my belief in God wasn't so much belief and feelings, but that it was at least based in some logic and some rationality.
And I stumbled upon you, ironically, because I have a very left-leaning friend who hates you.
And I was like, well...
Well, you understand it's not me.
Yeah. Not me that that person hates.
They may hate the arguments, but the idea that somebody out there has an intense animosity to me as an individual who they've never met.
I mean, I understand it's nothing to do with me.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But it was appealing to me.
I was like, well, if you don't like his ideas so much, then it sounds like someone I should check out.
The trolls send as many people as the good people do, and I appreciate that.
They're part of the great work of philosophy.
Absolutely. Yeah, I agree.
So, yeah, I mean, and you've been instrumental in my journey over the past year of...
Understanding the kind of anarcho-capitalist arguments, the idea of life without the state.
I was always a conservative, but I had never considered those things realistically and genuinely before.
But then I stumbled upon all your videos about God.
I was like, okay, this is interesting.
I've always enjoyed the discussion and the The philosophical debate.
And your stuff definitely clicked in my mind better.
I don't think I'd ever completely understood atheism until I had watched all of your material.
And what made me more open to it was watching...
Before I watched your older stuff, I watched your more recent stuff where you haven't gone back on anything that you've ever said.
But you've become...
I guess, like, you know, you were apologetic, I guess, to Christians to say, like, well, I still don't believe what you believe, but I see value.
I think you've always seen value in it, but I think more recently you've come to, I guess, a...
I don't know how I would phrase it.
You just... There's more of, like, an active collaboration between you and...
And the Christian community than maybe there was in the past.
And just so people sort of understand this particular transition, which is, I think, an important one to understand.
One of the aspects that happened was, like a lot of atheists, I mean, I had given up on the idea of God before I started reading people like Ayn Rand and so on.
But what happened was the atheists that I knew were objectivists.
And objectivists do have, you know, small government.
They have an objective sense of morality.
They accept free will.
They're not a bunch of robotic lefties.
And so the atheists that I knew...
We're a small government and rational people with, you know, I share 90% of the views of, certainly I share 90% of the principles of objectivism still.
But then what happened was I began to, through this show, I began to begin to see other atheists and began to see what they were, what they were up to and what they were doing.
And the atheists, a lot of them come out of the Marxist, leftist, big government tradition, where they view Religion as an impediment to totalitarianism.
And those atheists, I really, I tell you, I didn't know a single one of them until I started doing this show, and then I began to meet them, and I began to talk with them, and I began to research them, I began to read about them.
And I realized that my view of atheism was very limited, or specific, you could say, because I knew atheists who were free market, small government, big free will advocates.
And that actually turns out to be not that many atheists.
So all the atheists I knew, gnawled.
All the atheists that I knew were one way.
And then I began to realize what atheism was in a larger context.
And it began to freak me out.
And so I began to sort of think, okay, well, if this is...
If this is atheism, then what is Christianity?
And I began to read more of the Christian arguments about morality.
I began to read more of the Christian arguments about free will.
I began to read more of the Christian arguments regarding small government and realized that when it came to practical implementation of ideas, a lot more in common with Christians than with the leftist atheists, which is to say the majority, significant majority of atheists.
So I just really wanted to How people understand that.
And that's why I did apologize because I had not only misunderstood the full context of atheism, but I had also misunderstood the full context of Christianity.
In other words, I'd had a lot of Christianity presented to me by a bunch of atheists, which is not a very fair way to evaluate a belief system.
Right, right. You know, you and also, you know, the things you say are very similar to like, you know, that of like Jordan Peterson, where, you know, and there's now like a growing number of people who call themselves like Christian atheists who go like,
well, even if we can't contend with, you know, saying that God is something that is tangible or real, we can still see value in this tradition and in sort of axiomatically, you know, setting Up this belief structure as something that we want to live out.
And that's all fine with me.
I probably could find contentment eventually in just going like, okay, maybe God isn't real or maybe my belief that God is real is just a complete feeling and there's nothing logical about it.
But I guess I'm still in that Sort of like trying to work it out in my head and I guess I think it's important because I've based so much of my life off of that feeling but also believing that that feeling was based in something rational because so much of what I do is trying to make decisions,
trying to have conversations and to look at things through the lens of objectivity and And rationality.
And so, you know, you seemed like a perfect person to try to talk to these, talk about this with, you know, it's not so much like, I'm not trying to do what other callers have done, where it's like, you're wrong, Stefan!
And come with these, like, you know, strawmans and all that.
It's just like, you know, I just wanted to present to you, I guess, like, you know, hearing your work, some of the thoughts I had about it, and to see what What your reaction to those thoughts were.
Thank you for that.
And so to run through the arguments very briefly, the argument that the universe exists, therefore the universe had to be created, suffers from the problem of infinite regression, which is you can't just take a general principle and then apply it only to a specific incidence, right? So I can't say all lizards are cold-blooded.
Except for these lizards and these lizards and these lizards, right?
That doesn't really make much sense.
And so the principle isn't if the universe exists, it had to be created.
The principle is things which exist must have been created.
Everything which exists must have been created.
Now, if the universe which exists had to be created, that is a subset of the general principle that Things which exist had to be created.
And if we claim that God exists, that falls under the same principle of that which exists had to have been created, which means God had to have been created by something else, that something else had to have been created by something else, and you end up in a kind of hall of mirrors, turtles all the way down, infinite regression problem.
And so saying that the universe had to have a creator doesn't solve the problem.
Epistemologically or fundamentally metaphysically in terms of the nature of reality.
With regards to complexity, well, we all know from basic evolution or our own lives that we are born short and grow tall.
We are born ignorant and we grow, well, we would grow wise if we were well raised and well educated, but we can become Weiser.
And a pianist, when they start, has very little muscular control and very little knowledge.
And then as they become more experienced, they can produce beautiful music.
And so complexity has to be preceded, evolutionarily speaking, by lesser complexity.
You do chopsticks before you do Nocturne, before you do Flight of the Bumblebee.
Now, if we have, in the concept of a God, we have the most complex thing that can be conceived of existing.
Omniscience, omnipotence, despite the contradiction.
Because if God knows everything, then God knows what is going to happen tomorrow.
If God knows what is going to happen tomorrow, God is not able to change what will happen tomorrow without invalidating his knowledge.
You can either be all-powerful or you can be all-knowing.
You can't be both, of course.
And so if we have the most complex conceivable entity, which is God, at the very beginning of things, then we have complexity without prior lesser complexity, which goes against everything else which we have seen in the universe, in particular with regards to life and consciousness and evolution.
So just very briefly, those are the two arguments I think that you were most interested in discussing.
Right. Like I said, I've heard you make those arguments before, and they're great arguments.
Let me interrupt you.
Great is not a philosophical concept.
They're either valid or invalid.
They're true or they're false. I'm not sure what a great argument is.
I mean, we have to evaluate the argument.
And if it's true, then we have to accept the argument or abandon philosophy.
And if it's false, we have to reject the argument or abandon philosophy.
So I don't know what great means in this context.
Well, I guess like, so...
Two and two is five.
Great answer. Two and two is four.
Great answer. It's like, well, is it or isn't it?
Right, right. I understand.
I mean, it's sometimes hard to come up with the correct answer.
Oh, I know. I'm not blaming you.
I'm just pointing it out.
I understand. I'm not trying to disagree with you.
My response to that was sort of the way I've always looked at it.
This really isn't an argument.
Maybe it is more feelings or it's too abstract to be an argument, but I'm just curious as to what your thoughts are.
The reason why, to me, The argument of saying that the universe was created by God and God doesn't need a creator wasn't a contradiction or an infinite regress was sort of compared it to like...
It's sort of like if you were to imagine if you were living in the 2D... If the second dimension was real and you were trying to explain to someone in the second dimension what UP was.
And as far as I can tell from what I know about science, it's not like pseudoscience to theorize the existence of a fourth dimension.
In fact, the scientific theories that I've read about the creation of the universe sort of You know, make mention to this that, you know, the best way they can explain the creation of the universe is to conceptualize it within the,
you know, the idea that there's this, we're in this like third dimension and there's like this void or other dimension that we're surrounded in, surrounded by, or not really surrounded by because that implies sort of third dimensional terms to like a fourth dimension.
So that's sort of how I've always constructed in my mind.
The addition of another dimension is not an argument.
So saying, well, there's another dimension wherein...
There is a god, or there is a time before the universe wherein there is a god, is not an argument.
And I understand analogies as well.
Analogies are useful to illustrate ideas, but analogies are not arguments.
So when you say, well, if you're trying to explain three-dimensional to a two-dimensional, or you're trying to explain clouds to a fish, or whatever it is, right?
These are not arguments.
And the problem with that is that if you create a realm wherein self-contradictions can exist and are valid, then you have abandoned philosophy and unfortunately you've opened up a portal to every argument that you would consider to be crazy.
To potentially gain traction.
Arguments for the existence of fairies and unicorns and invisible dragons and, you know, giant amorphous spiders and every other of the 10,000 gods that humanity exists in.
And the collective and the social good and the common good and the social contract.
And, you know, the problem is when you create this other dimensional bubble within to rescue God, Within which to rescue God, other things grow there too, which are much less pleasing to you.
Right. I mean, I guess part of it is, you know, I might be trying to rescue God.
I think the way I've always looked at it is I'm also trying to...
You know. I mean, let's be clear about this, Jacob.
You haven't done this for leprechauns, right?
It is God. It is the maintenance of God that you are trying to retain.
And I say this not as a criticism, but just we need to be very frank about what we're going on here.
It is not dryads and pixies and fairies that you are creating this other dimension for.
It is for God. And more fundamentally, it is for your emotional relationship with God.
Right, right. Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
What I was saying was like, sure, I'm trying to rescue God.
I think at the same time, I'm trying to wrestle with something that obviously is beyond most people's comprehension and more than what scientific knowledge knows right now.
I'm trying to wrestle with, well, how did the universe, you know, get here?
Or was it always here? No, no.
I'm sorry to be annoying.
You're not trying to wrestle with any of that.
Because why would you care?
Why the universe came to be unless it had an impact on your belief in God.
I mean, this is, what, 20 billion years ago?
It has absolutely no impact on the moral choices we need to make today.
It has absolutely no impact on the courage we need to fight evil in the here and now.
The only reason that you're very, very interested – I won't use the pejorative obsessed because it's kind of annoying and I understand that – but, Jacob, the only reason you're very interested in the origin of the universe is because of your relationship with God.
Why on earth would you spend time puzzling over what may or may not have happened tens of billions of years ago?
I mean, maybe I'm wrong to say this, but I feel like So, I'll agree with you that that's my reasoning, but I know, I believe that there are also scientists out there who don't believe in God who are interested in the creation of the universe, like, and trying to understand it.
Yeah, and there are people who pick garbage up along the street.
That doesn't mean that I'm going to make it my hobby to pick garbage up along the street, right?
I mean, they're getting paid for that.
That's their thing, right?
Yeah. Right, right, right.
And also, they have the tools with which to explore and understand it, which you and I don't, unless you've got a cyclotron or whatever they use in your basement, or you have advanced physics and mathematics degrees, or you have access to huge research grants and a team of experts and scholars and scientists and so on.
I mean, they have the tools with which to explore and the profit motive to explore, which you don't have.
Oh, neither do I. So, for us to do it is kind of ridiculous, right?
Right. I mean, yeah, like I said, it's beyond, obviously, our comprehension.
No. I'm so sorry.
It's not beyond our comprehension.
No, I meant like what the scientists know.
Oh, I'm sorry. You're right.
Sorry, I thought you meant the existence of God.
Yeah. It is beyond the comprehension of – I can't possibly judge many theories of advanced theories of physics.
You know, I've got the common sense test, but I've never seen – Energy be converted into mass as an object approaches the speed of light, but yeah, it doesn't really matter to me.
I assume that it's true.
I'll accept that it's true. I understand that an airplane with an atomic clock lost a little bit of time when it rocketed around the Earth, but it has no bearing.
What happens near the speed of light has absolutely no bearing on moral philosophy.
The origin of the universe has absolutely no bearing on moral philosophy unless, of course, You need God for there to be moral philosophy, in which case the origin of the universe is very, very important to you.
Well, that was actually what I was about to bring up is like, I think, you know, because a lot of my philosophy is where my My moral ethics is based in Christianity.
While I do acknowledge that there are people out there who go, I don't have to believe in God to find this useful.
You know, I guess I have more at stake in my...
You know, there's more at stake for me personally, where it's like, well, to me, if I acknowledge that God isn't real and just a feeling...
Then I guess because I'm coming at it from the perspective where he was real to me, that's like a step down and I feel like I've lost something.
And so I guess that you are correct.
Like that does push me to care about the origin of the universe in a way that, you know, there's no use for that unless like that's your job, like as a scientist to be researching it.
Well, and part of the reason why I worked so hard on and wrote The free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, is to give people the capacity to have objective morality, to argue for objective morality, to push back against evil.
Without, to me at least, getting caught in these side questions of the existence of God, which takes you out of the realm of arguing for moral philosophy.
Because of your admirable integrity and desire to say things that are true and care about saying things that are false, you are driven to work on the existence of God.
And the problem is, though, you won't be able to establish the existence of God.
But you are unavailable for moral philosophy while you're trying to do so, because you're mucking about metaphysics, which can't fundamentally be proved with regards to a god.
So you're kind of taken out of the game.
It was actually...
I thought it was an invitation more to atheists than to Christians, but I think it's also an invitation to Christians to say, we don't need to solve the problem, the existence of God, to argue for universal moral values.
In fact... Once science and evolution cracked faith, Christians have been taken out of the realm of moral philosophy and as a result, political correctness and Marxist rhetoric and the rank contradictory nature of postmodernism and the thirst to power driven by Darwinian dopamine lust has taken over.
Because Christians are like, whoa, they've got an answer to the origin of the universe, they've got an answer to the evolution of the species.
So we got to go and deal with that.
And Christians, I would argue, have spent 150 years trying to deal with that and have abandoned the field of moral philosophy to work on metaphysics and epistemology.
And as that field has been abandoned, the devils have taken over.
Yeah, you're...
I mean, like, I've heard this talked about before, but the way you said it, just, I mean, that's...
It's like, I've heard that...
I've said before, but the way you just said it really painted it in an even clear way.
You can... I mean, I would rather...
See, here's the thing. This is my message to Christians, and I appreciate you giving me the platform for this, but Jacob, this is my message to Christians.
Leave off trying to rationally prove God.
It's called faith for a reason.
As Tertullian said, I believe because it is absurd.
Do not try to bring philosophy to the realm of faith.
Because faith is belief, not just in the absence of evidence, but against the evidence, against reason.
It's called faith. Now, I'm not going to, in particular, focus on the question of the existence of God.
But the more that Christians, the more that you focus on the existence of God, the more you abandon.
The central spine of ethics that philosophy needs in the West to sustain itself and to resist incursions from those hostile to atheism to reason to philosophy to Christianity itself.
And my concern is that you're trying to figure out how to tie your shoelaces correctly while the bear is running at you.
And it's like, it's good enough.
Take off the shoes. Run.
Grab a stick. Climb a tree.
Set fire to something. I don't care.
But stop mucking about trying to put the square peg of philosophy into the round hole of faith.
Let it go. It's called faith.
Believe if you want.
But come back.
Come back from the edges of the universe where no battle is raging and none can be won.
Come back to the center of things so that we can join together to defend the West.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And I really like your book and your teachings on the universal preferable behaviors, too.
Because, I mean, and I don't even think it's like I completely agree with the argument that you don't – and I think you would agree it's useful to have the Christian philosophy.
If someone doesn't want that, what you provided I think is a good answer too.
I got a good chunk of the Ten Commandments in universally preferable behavior.
There's a lot that we can agree on.
Right. And I mean, it doesn't even – it doesn't go against someone who wants to have the belief in God because if you believe in God, you believe that we're made in God's image and that God gave man his mind, his rational thought.
Yeah. And here's what we need from Christians, Jacob, which is Christianity is universal.
Christian ethics are the closest thing to philosophy that theology has ever come up with.
Because Christian ethics are universal.
Christianity is one of the very few belief systems that holds that you have moral obligations to outsiders.
If you look at Islam, if you look at Judaism, if you look at other religions, they say that your moral obligations extend to those who share your faith, and that you have little or no or even negative moral obligations to those who do not share your faith.
And so the rank tribalism and subjectivism of other religions stands against the giant rock of Christianity, which is universality.
And without that universality, there's no West.
There's no West.
Yeah. Yeah, so you would say that To just let go of, like, to find contentment in saying that my belief in God is just a belief.
I believe. It's called faith.
Say, well, you can't prove the existence of God.
And Christians always get like, well, you can't prove the existence of this.
Or, well, I can. And it just, you know, I've got to figure out the origins of the universe.
And it's like, you can't prove the existence of God?
No, I can't. That's why it's called faith.
Do you not understand what the word means?
Boom! Done! Right.
Yeah. No, I... It's like going to a scientist and say, you're not praying for an answer.
And it's like, no, I'm not praying for an answer.
It's called science. Do you not understand what the word science means?
You believe in God is irrational.
Yes, that's why it's called faith.
Otherwise, it would be called reason or philosophy.
And then you can just take...
You can stake that claim...
And then we can save the West, and then we can have our disagreements.
Right, right. But right now, neither of us are going to make it.
Yeah, no, it's...
I agree.
I mean, it's scary.
I mean, I've had to have conversations with my wife to try to key her in into the way things are headed, because...
She's like, oh, you're living in fear and you're living and I'm like, yeah, because I see what's happening.
Funnily enough, the men who've always had to fight these battles seem to be a little bit more attuned to coming battles than women are, who can generally survive by landing on their backs.
Oh, I don't mean that about your wife, of course, but it's a different relationship, right?
We men, we had to fight for our rights.
Collectively, right? For thousands of years, we had battles, we had wars, we had tortures, we had subjugations, we had enslavement.
And then women came along and complained and men handed them all these rights that had been won by climbing up the bones of destroyed men for thousands of years.
Here you go! Strangely enough, men seem to be a little bit more concerned about hanging on to those rights, which they earned for thousands of years, than women who were just handed to them like a corsage.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, and having kids puts it in perspective, too, because it's like, you know, I don't view it as...
I mean, obviously, you need balance.
Like, I can't abandon my kids and devote all of my time to trying to fight off the, you know, what's going on in the world.
But that's certainly important in my duty as a father, I think, to...
To try to make sure that the world I am raising my kids in and eventually going to leave them with is worth living in.
Right. And we have the common enemy, which is those who break universality.
And those who break universality are very clear and very obvious and very honest about what it is that they want and what it is that they do.
And they say, well, there's white privilege.
What does that mean? Well, it means that only whites are racist.
Right? And if you say only whites can be racist, that's a racist statement.
Are you bothered by that? Nope!
Okay, so then you have no universals.
You have no rationality.
You have no objectivity. Ah, you should believe women when they accuse men.
Really? Should you believe men when they accuse women?
No! Why?
Patriarchy! Okay, so you have no universals.
Yeah, I just was watching that That video back in December that you did with Milo Yiannopoulos, which was on that subject.
It's just like, you know, it's all politics.
There's no, you know, it's not, I mean, you know, referencing the Me Too movement and all that.
It wasn't about what it said it was about.
It was just all political agenda.
So if I could reconnect you to your relationship with Universal values, divinity, the divinity of moral absolutism and universality, and drag you back from the origins of the universe because your attention, Jacob, is needed about 20 billion years further on, right? Yeah, yeah.
That makes sense.
I guess I was looking at it the wrong way.
I think I was putting too much of my The value that I hold in these beliefs and the lifestyle in wanting it to be at least a possibility of it being empirical or rational.
And I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense, which is like even if that was a possibility, which pretty clearly doesn't appear to be the case, the most important thing to be focusing on right now is not You know, what happened 20 billion years ago.
Oh, yeah. Just for those who are going to be twitchy about all of this stuff, it's 13.8 billion years.
So, just so you know.
I also know that the Iron Cross was not a specifically Nazi symbol, but I'm pretty sure the shooter didn't know any of that.
So, just pointing it out.
Yeah, they're already commenting.
Don't worry. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
No, I think that makes sense.
I mean, it's something I'll have to wrestle with because … No.
No, no. Stop wrestling.
Stop wrestling. You're needed on the front lines of the culture wars.
Stop wrestling. It's faith.
Forget about the origins of the universe.
Forget about explaining three dimensions to two-dimensional people.
Forget about all of this sort of stuff.
Forget about my arguments.
Forget about it. We've got to join hands together.
Those of us who believe in universals, whether it is philosophical or theological, we have to join together now or we're going to lose everything.
I'm not kidding you. Stop wrestling with things.
You and I both accept universals.
We accept thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not bear false witness.
There are a bunch of others that we would agree with.
We agree no rape, no assault, no theft, no murder.
We're all down for that.
I assume that there's nothing you and I would disagree with on that.
Is that right, Jacob? Yeah, absolutely.
All right. So we agree on that.
And those things are all under attack right now.
All under assault right now.
From subjectivist in-group preference ideologies and religions.
All the way from Marxism to who knows what, right?
Right. You know what.
But this is where we need to take our stand.
And, you know, if you and I are in a foxhole and you have the ammo...
We may not agree on everything, but we agree that we've kind of got to use the ammo, right?
We agree on that.
Because if we bicker about that, we're not going to make it.
You've said a lot. I mean, is there anything more that you would want either you to say directly or as me as someone who's in the church?
Because so much of the message in the church is like- Stop playing defense!
With these fucking atheists.
Stop playing defense against the left.
Stop playing defense.
They hit you with prove God, you hit them with taxation is theft.
Stop playing defense.
Or if you don't want to go to taxation is theft, just stop pulling them apart for the subjectivism and Massive amounts of splitting and self-contradiction involved in postmodern philosophy.
If they come at you with proof of the existence of God, you come at them with race and IQ. And they'll immediately start spluttering and, well, you can't talk about that or that's not true or that's not right.
It's like science denier!
Hey man, I accept evolution.
Why are you rejecting race and IQ, you science denier?
Yeah. Right? Stop playing defensive.
The position of mainstream atheism is so ridiculously self-contradictory and tenuous that it's time to stop playing defense, my Christian brothers and sisters.
Deus Vult! With the atheists.
I mean this, of course, in terms of language.
But stop playing defense.
If they hit you with prove the existence of God, you hit them with why is...
The Nazi symbol banned in every reasonable person's belief system and social circle.
But you can wear a hammer and sickle.
You can wear a picture of Che Guevara.
Che Guevara? I don't know.
I can't remember. You can have a picture of Karl Marx on a button.
When Marxism killed 100 million people, Why do you talk about the dangers of religion, oh atheists, and not about the dangers of the state?
Why do you keep bringing up, ooh, there was an Inquisition that killed a few thousand people over a long period of time?
A quarter of a billion people murdered by governments in the 20th century and you're still talking about the Spanish Inquisition?
Because you're Monty Python fans and doofuses?
Stop being defensive, Christians.
You've got the weight of history and truth and morality on your side and your enemy.
Your enemy is on shaky stilts on quicksand in an earthquake in space.
Yeah. I mean, and like, you know, the common denominator, even with the instances that you can point to in the past where religion caused wars or killings, there was always a state attached.
It wasn't like a group of Christians just, you know, on their own, went around, or a group of, you know, there was...
There was always, you know, without the state, there's no force to exert.
And also, I would say, you can hit them in personal virtues as well.
If they say to a Christian, where is your God?
Prove your God, then you can say to them, when was the last time you took on a Muslim about this?
And what are they gonna... Right?
Yeah. So it's not a principle for them.
They just have the great and grand moral courage to pick on the religion that says, turn the other cheek.
So they don't have any...
I mean, there are exceptions to this.
Please understand. There are atheists who courageously talk about Islam.
I mean, Christopher Hitchens was one.
Sam Harris is another. They stand up and they speak.
The same arguments against Islam that they would against Christians, and that has integrity to it.
But most people, most people are just picking on Christians because that's what the left tells them to do, and because Christians, they know, are not going to punch back.
And I'm saying, through your language, stop being defensive.
The position of Christianity is far more rational than most mainstream atheism.
And you can also say to them, listen, as a Christian, I take 10% of my income, I give it to the poor.
What do you do? What do you do?
Oh, well, I prefer legislation to...
Okay, so you're just turning it all over to the state.
Or you say to the religious person, how do you justify universal ethics?
There has been such a focus on the one weak spot that Christianity has, which it isn't even a weak spot if you're a true Christian.
If you're a true Christian, it's faith!
What are you mucking about with syllogisms for?
It's the wrong tool for the wrong problem.
Oh, can't prove the existence of God.
Hello! Faith, baby!
That's what the word is for.
That's why we don't call it philosophy or science.
It's faith. Yeah, I mean, ironically, that's just not the message.
I mean, I'm not saying that no one ever said that to me, but I think I was raised in the Christian community I was raised, the culture was sort of having to sort of come up with defenses against, you know, The atheist proof of no God.
The moment you let your enemy define the terms of battle, no point even showing up.
You've lost before you've even begun.
Yeah, you're right. You know, if the big hulking strongman says, we're going to solve this conflict based on how much each of us can lift, well, why bother even showing up, right?
If I'm standing next to Sofia Vergara and it's like, it's going to be a pole dancing contest, well, actually, no, I could take her.
No, I couldn't, right? So if you're trying to figure out who has the least gag reflex, you don't want to be going up against Stormy Daniels, right?
Because she's going to kind of have you beat there and beat and beat and beat.
So you don't let your enemy define the terms.
There's such a thing as white privilege.
It's like, no, there isn't.
No, there isn't. There's no such thing as white privilege.
But if you say, okay, well, you know, whites aren't doing better, and so there must be some kind of privilege, but I don't think it's bigger.
You're done. You don't let your enemies define the terms of the debate, because they know what they're doing.
And so, Christians, and I understand why, because there's a lot of science envy.
Look, Christianity had care, custody, and control of Western civilization for thousands of years, and science came along, and the free market came along, and medicine came along, and did a lot more than prayer had ever done.
Now, I've talked to Tom Woods, and I understand that there's Catholic and, to some degree, Protestant precursors to modern science and the free market and so on.
They're not unrelated. But everyone, you gotta understand that the free market and science landed in the world, not just in the West, it landed in the world like a freaking meteor, like a giant Armageddon-style, crushing Ben Affleck meteor.
And every single belief system in the world was thrown backwards by the free market, science, and its subset, medicine.
And everyone stood around this giant crater going, what the hell was that?
And those who had piloted this giant meteor, which is a terrible analogy because it's destructive and the meteor is destructive, but in terms of existing belief systems, all the promises that had been made by the priestly classes, by the theologians, by the secular rulers, all the promises that had been made, We're fulfilled by their absence.
Science fulfilled promises to make the world better and easier and more comfortable.
Medicine fulfilled that promise.
You didn't need Jesus to take the demons and cast them into a herd of pigs and run them off a cliff.
You didn't need Jesus to touch a leper and heal him with divine power.
You could get an inoculation.
You could get a cure. You could wash your hands.
You could have sanitation. All of the gifts that were promised but never delivered by the prior belief systems in charge of humanity got blown backwards.
Yeah, you know, it's a good analogy because it destroyed existing belief systems and there's been reeling ever since.
It's been reeling ever since.
And it didn't just happen in the West.
It happened all over the world.
You're some fakir in India.
And you hear about, wow, they've got a cure for this kind of disease.
They got an inoculation against this kind of disease.
They beat tuberculosis.
They beat cholera. They beat typhus.
They've got antibiotics.
Well, shit. I mean, I've been telling them to meditate.
For about 5,000 years.
And now these assholes come along with these great cures and boom!
My whole market is gone.
And this is why there are so many belief systems out there that hate the free market.
And hate science.
And hate rationality.
Because rationality produces the actual cures that they've only ever promised to people.
And never delivered. Never delivered.
Prayer doesn't work to cure people.
The double-blind experiments have been done repeatedly, where they pick sick people, they have some people pray for them, some people not pray for them.
It has no effect. No effect.
Prayer has no effect.
Now, prayer may be good for meditation, it may be good for self-knowledge, and I've talked about this before in my book Against the Gods, which has a great section on what God is, I think, for real, and why God is so compelling to humanity, but...
When science, reason, free market came along, it actually delivered the goods that everyone had only ever dangled in an illusory manner in front of humanity throughout human history.
Well, that's a hell of a thing to try and compete with, isn't it?
And so Christianity was blown backwards along with everything else.
Along with everything else.
And Christianity then didn't say, okay...
Bit of a side story coming in here, a bit of an angle.
They've thrown us through a bit of a loop here.
They didn't say, Christianity, and it would have been a lot to ask, but they didn't say, okay, as far as practical efficiency goes, as far as solving concrete, tangible, material problems in the world goes, science got us beat, medicine got us beat, as far as the efficient...
Allocation of resources, the free market's got us beat.
As far as helping the poor, as far as helping the poor, which had been a central concern of Christianity literally from the days of Christ.
Christ said, all who would follow me, sell your belongings, give the money to the poor.
Give the money to the poor. Charity, charity, charity, charity.
Help the poor, help the poor, help the poor, help the poor.
Central drive of Christianity.
And then what actually helped the poor?
Free market. The free market lifted the world out of poverty, starting in the West.
And now, just over the past 20 years, has been the single, like not even a close second, the single greatest alleviation and elimination of poverty the world has ever seen.
Ever seen. This did not happen because tithes were increased.
This did not happen because redistribution was increased.
This happened because of the free market.
And they should have said, in my humble opinion, okay, we weren't really that great at science.
Okay, all right, we accept that because science has now come along and explained a whole bunch of things that we didn't really get.
All right, so let's leave science to the scientists, right?
Okay, we weren't really that great at economics because we kept talking about we want to help the poor and funny story, it turns out that all the poor needed was freedom.
All the poor needed was freedom.
Now, we had talked about that somewhat, but we didn't really get it.
Okay, so with theologians, we're not economists.
So, okay.
We're going to put science. Okay. Now, we also had this thing where we're going to pray to make people better.
Funny story. Turns out...
Washing your hands, developing basic medicines, having indoor plumbing and sanitation.
That's kind of what it was all about.
And the prayer thing didn't really work.
Okay. So we were terrible at medicine.
We were terrible at science.
We were terrible at helping the poor.
So let's accept that.
God is giving us a big lesson in a little thing I like to call humility, which is focus on your core competences.
I don't do a lot of dental surgery in the back of my house.
Because that's not what I'm about.
You focus on your core competencies.
What are your core competencies?
Universal ethics. Universal ethics.
Now, there was no UPB, so I would have been more than happy if they'd said, okay, you know, we are humbled.
Oh, Lord, you have given us a sign that we were spreading our butter of competence too thin on the wide toast of reality.
We were stretched and thin like Bilbo with a ring.
So, you know, we got it.
Humility. Humility, humility.
Let the economists do the economy.
Let the doctors do the medicine.
Let the scientists do the science.
We're going to focus on faith and virtue.
And with that radical revaluation of the faith, great progress could have been possible.
Because if that had happened, then Christianity might have said, Thou shalt not steal.
Okay, we've been wrong about a lot.
Let's really, really reevaluate.
Thou shalt not steal.
Right. Maybe that can include taxation.
Thou shalt not kill.
Maybe that can include the draft because we've just been blown backwards.
By this giant meteor, just like everyone else, we've got to pick up the pieces with humility and say that this is a sign from God, not just that we were wrong about a bunch of things, and we let our vanity overreach what was testable, but maybe this is also a sign for us to radically reevaluate our ethics, our commitment to virtue.
What are the Ten Commandments really saying?
Thou shalt not kill, which means don't threaten people with death for non-payment of taxes.
Thou shalt not steal. Taxes are theft.
Maybe with that humility, Christianity could have consolidated and concentrated and with true humility re-evaluated the Scripture, re-evaluated the Word of God, and tried to apply it with the consistency that God actually demands.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's...
Yeah, that's really good.
I mean, I got no objections to that.
Good. All right. So stop wrestling and start fighting.
All right? Yeah.
Well, my name is Jacob. So, I mean, wrestling is sort of like, you know, that's part of the deal, but...
Okay. Don't let etymology be your personality.
But thanks very much for your call. I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it.
Alright, up next we have Jim.
Jim wrote in and said, I'm writing in because of a recent podcast I listened to involving changes to the story in the Florida school shooting.
Stefan discussed some of the topics I'm intimately familiar with due to my profession.
I'm a special education teacher working in an alternative program for students who've been expelled from their regular schools.
I'm certain that my school is very similar to the one Nicholas Cruz attended for a short time before his shooting rampage.
I'd like to share some of the outrageous things I've seen happening in public education and the special education world as a whole.
There are a lot of cases very similar to Nicholas Cruz, and I think many of these students are ticking time bombs, and it's only a matter of time before we see more instances of mass violence.
Due to federal laws, students can basically get away with anything.
We've had students attack teachers, bring knives and even guns to school, sell drugs on school property, and much more.
They have little to no lasting consequences.
This is especially true if they have an individual education plan.
The IEP essentially acts as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
It's only a matter of time before another case like Nicholas Cruz happens again.
That's from Jim. Jim, how you doing, man?
Hey, it's my first time on the show.
Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you.
Nice microphone. So, yeah, let's hear about the stuff you have seen.
All right. Well, I took a couple notes here because I wanted to come, you know, prepared.
And what I did is I basically...
You're such a teacher. Right?
I got to be prepared.
I got to get my notes. I don't want to miss anything.
Is this going to be on the test?
All right. All right.
So the first thing I wanted to talk about is kind of the incidences or like things that I've seen.
I haven't been a teacher for that long.
I don't want to go into specifics because obviously if anybody heard me on the show and they knew who I was, I probably wouldn't be working as a teacher for very long.
So we've had at my school, I've had kids threaten me.
I've had an instance where I wrote up a kid.
And then, you know, as I was teaching a class, he comes banging on my door, you know, wanting to, like, fight me, right?
And then one of the girls said it would be a good idea to open the door.
We actually keep the doors locked at our school.
And then, of course, this kid gets in my face and he's, you know, he's not very big.
But then he's pretty aggressive.
He gets in my face. He starts to yell that I lied and everything like that.
And then I actually had to turn away and I was half expecting him to jump on my back.
And then the same year, I've had another kid also get in my face and just say, Hey, do you want to fight?
Actually wanting to fight me.
And I had to walk away from him because I looked into his eyes and I was like, He's about to hit me.
I guarantee he's about to hit me.
And, like, these kids are not afraid of anybody.
Like, I watched a kid attack a cop at our school.
I mean, a cop had to, he was escorting a kid out of the, you know, out of the lunch.
And then, you know, he attacked the cop.
And, I mean, the cop was huge, too.
So, I mean, it was just shocking to see that.
These kids just, like, they have no fear of any kind of consequences at all.
And they don't have to because they don't really have any, from what I've seen.
I won't go over too many more.
Oh, I did also want to talk.
We had a kid, you know, bringing a knife and he didn't even get suspended for it.
Like I caught him with the knife and he didn't even get suspended.
And I was just like, you're not going to do anything to this kid.
Like he committed a felony by bringing that to school.
And you're not going to do anything to them.
And I'm just like blown away by it.
And then, you know, we had a kid, you know, who brought a Glock to school with a 30 round detachable magazine and pointing it at another student, right?
Not at my school, but then that's why he got sent to my school.
He spent like a month in jail, went back to my school.
We had him in our program for a little while.
He did okay. He went back to his original school.
You know, he got to finish out the school year.
I'm just like, are you kidding me with this stuff?
And a lot of this stuff, it's like they really don't want us talking about it.
They want to keep it secret.
And they don't want to tell people, but it's like some of the stuff I see.
And then I know a lot of these kids, their home environment is completely screwed up.
You hear some of the stories that they have of abuse.
I mean, it's out of control.
And it's just like these kids are such a ticking time bomb.
I had a couple other things, but I don't want to take up too much of your time.
I mean- No, no. If you've got other things you want to talk about, man, I'm interested.
Yeah. I mean, we've had kids threaten to shoot up the school, and then we expel them, and then they come back the next school year.
We've had kids...
There's a case where a kid orally raped another kid on a bus, right?
The one kid sued the school, or their parents...
Sorry, already raped, you mean forced a girl to perform oral sex upon him?
That's correct. Okay. On the bus.
And the girl's parents sued, and the kid got to go to school the next school year.
And the girl ended up getting pulled out.
Then we had another case where a kid after school, I guess, did...
Or a girl accused a boy of...
Raping her after school.
This happened this year.
The girl got a restraining order and everything, and the kid kept coming to school.
I guess the way the law sees it is that the kid has a right to an education that supersedes the restraining order, which just kind of blows my mind that a girl would be expected to sit in class.
No, no, no. It means that the school board or the school itself wants the government funding that comes from having a school in there and to hell with the rape victim.
That's kind of how it seems.
They're putting the money before the kids.
As a teacher, I wanted to go into education because I like kids.
How's that going? There are some good moments.
There are some teachable moments.
Personally, I know I'm a public education teacher, but the thing is I'm actually with you We could discuss this maybe on a different time, but I actually do believe that education would be better off if the government wasn't involved whatsoever.
Oh, absolutely. If you want to know what education would look like if the government wasn't involved, look at the computer industry.
That's kind of my thought, too.
I 100% agree.
I have a family to support.
And there's really no way to teach without having the government be involved in one way or another.
We have to have a license and everything like that.
So, I mean, there's really no way to teach without being involved with the state, unfortunately.
And... Let's see.
Other things, too, is there's some good kids at our school.
Kids that just happen to be kind of in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We had a girl that she's a good kid, and she was told by the other kids, hey, he passed drugs to this kid across the room.
And she was like, oh, okay, and passed the drugs and got caught with them.
Now she's with us, and she was so good and everything, and she really didn't deserve to be there.
You know, we have boys that got bullied and finally kind of fought back, and the school's kind of got a policy that, like, you don't have a right to defend yourself.
So basically, like, if you get attacked and then you fight back in any way, like, they just expel you both.
Right. And that's what's interesting.
And then that kind of brings me to my next point, where you have, like, in the special education world, if a student has an individual education...
they can get out of stuff.
And like, they can't be suspended more than 10 days, right?
Because there's a federal law that says if they're suspended more than 10 days, then we have to make up the time with them, right?
And then that means teachers have to stay after school.
And that means that you have to pay them, right?
Like $30 an hour to stay after school to work with a kid that got, you know, suspended more than 10 days.
So we had a kid, you know, who was at that 10-day mark and he literally punched, he was a white student and he punched a black student.
So it makes it even worse about the race thing because, of course, the mom was upset about this.
But, you know, he punched the black student and then he didn't get in trouble because he has an IEP. But then the other kid did get in trouble because he fought back.
And it was clear as day that the aggressor was, in this case, the white student.
And, of course, the parents saw that and was like, you know, that's kind of racist.
And we couldn't really disclose that the kid had an IEP because it's confidential.
So it looks really, really bad on us.
But we can't really tell her why her son got suspended by our other kid, didn't it?
Right. You know, we've got a student that throws things at other kids, you know?
He's highly aggressive.
Every time he does this stuff, he doesn't have any consequences.
He hit a kid over the head with a chair.
He has an IEP, too.
This is a different kid. He hit a kid over the head with a chair and actually caused a concussion.
It was real bad. The kid had to go to the doctor about it and everything.
He didn't even get suspended for it.
Or no, I stand correct.
I mean, I correct myself.
He did get suspended, but he didn't get expelled for it, is what I mean to say.
Right. Well, then they're not getting an education in general.
That's kind of a point I wanted to make, too.
I wanted to talk. I had it split up here.
It's a cage. It's a zoo. It is.
I feel like a zookeeper sometimes, yes.
And I don't mean that in a racial sense.
It's out of control, though.
But I had my notes kind of split up, like instances, special education, and then also there's this climate in the schools that I wanted to talk about a little bit.
Yeah, just before we get to that.
I don't know where you're located, and of course, don't tell me, but this was from November 2017.
So, they analyzed 2017 state testing data in Baltimore, Maryland, and found that one-third of the high schools have zero students proficient in math.
Zero students proficient in math.
Now, you know those math standards aren't exactly sky-high either.
13 out of 39 high schools in the city had zero students that were proficient in math.
In other words, zero of those students could figure out what the ratio was of 13 to 39.
Another six schools had only 1% of their student body who tested proficient in math.
In plain numbers, in half the high schools in Baltimore, out of the 3,800 students who took the state test, a mere 14% were proficient in math.
In 2016, six Baltimore schools had zero students test proficient in any state test which included math and English.
Now, there are charter schools, and you know, it's Baltimore, right?
So it's significantly black population.
The charter schools do better.
The charter schools do better.
So there's a Baltimore charter school for boys, no entrance exam, shorter class periods, and 60% male teachers.
The school is specifically tailored to how boys learn.
And the guy who founded this has seen math proficiency spike 60% since 2015 when the school opened its doors.
There are 440 students currently enrolled and another 300 on the waiting list.
And I, you know, maybe some of those numbers are jigged.
I doubt it. I think that they're using the same standards but they've seen math proficiency spike 60%.
When they say, well, we've got to have the school, we've got to have the kid in the school so the kid can be educated.
The kid's not being educated.
He's a captive and violence is condoned.
And we see this from the Project Veritas videos that are coming out these days.
But they're captive and they are kept there for money.
They're kept there so the funding doesn't drop.
They're kept there so the parents don't complain.
The violence, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. It's about the money.
You know, if I can interject here.
One thought I've had, though, is that I don't want anybody to feel like I'm just complaining.
I think that I do actually have a workable solution to a certain extent.
Obviously, the solution is freedom at the end of the day.
But I mean like a short-term kind of solution.
And my thought is, you have a right to an education, at least the way the court sees it, right?
And I guess what they mean by right is that you have a right to make the government pay for it at the expense of other people.
But hey, that's the way the court sees it.
But my thought is, if you take away the right of other kids' education, then I don't see how you have a right to it.
So I have a right to own a gun, but I can't point it at people, or the government can take away my right to own a gun because I'm walking around pointing it at people.
Do you see where I'm kind of going with this?
No, of course. I mean, it interferes with the education, but you understand that the system that you're in, my friend, has nothing to do with educating children.
It has to do with making money.
It has to do with not being fired.
It has to do with not having accountability.
I mean, how on earth can you teach children to be responsible and to have accountability if they know that their teachers can't be fired?
You know, on that point, that kind of depends on the state.
In my state, which I will not really reveal, it's actually fairly easy to get fired as a teacher.
Like, I've actually known quite a few teachers to get fired for just minor things.
Like, a kid would put, like, a recording device, or not a kid, but a parent would put, like, a recording device in their kid's backpack, and they might hear the teachers, like, talking in the room about a kid, like, saying, like, you know, oh, he's not gonna make it in the next school.
Right. Right. And then they'll get fired over that.
Like teachers get, or they get fired for not performing.
Like, like we get, um, ratings and everything.
And if we don't do, uh, well enough for like three years, like you can definitely be, um, fired.
And I, I have actually personally known teachers.
No, but, uh, once you, I don't know, again, your state and don't tell me, but what about when you get tenure?
As far as I know, there is none in my state.
Oh, okay. All right. All right.
So, I mean, like, one thing I want to point out, too, is, you know, of course, the charter schools are going to do better because the private industry does everything better than the state does, but they don't pay their teachers very well.
So, unfortunately, I don't think they get the best teachers.
The weird thing about, at least from my experience, is that it seems like the...
Public schools get a lot of the best teachers, but see, they get kind of the worst kids versus the charter schools where a lot of the good kids go because either their parents care or they can actually kick kids out, whereas we can't. And they still get state funds too, so it's kind of like they're not exactly private from my perspective because they're still getting paid by the state.
Yeah, and they still have to follow a lot of the same curriculum, if not the same curriculum, so...
That's nonsense, too. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
That's all I kind of had. I just wanted to kind of interject that in there and see what you thought.
No, I mean, if you look at something like homeschooling, so the question to me is, if we can return to the natural state of humanity as soon as humanly possible, I think we'll all be a lot better off.
And the natural state of humanity is, how did children develop life skills in the past?
Well, they developed life skills by hanging out with their parents.
Right? The father would be out hunting and he would take his son or maybe his daughter out hunting and the woman would be planting and the woman would be gathering and she would get the kids to do that.
And then she'd teach someone how to make pickles and pickle make jam.
This is how things go.
Teach someone how to farm. Teach someone how to milk the cows.
The kids would trail the parents and would be inculcated into valuable life skills through spending time with their parents.
That's generally how...
We evolved as a species.
The knowledge transfer went from parent to child.
And I'm a big fan of like, well, if it worked for 150,000 years, I mean, people say, well, yes, but so did no antibiotics in slavery.
I get that. I get that.
But in terms of having a relationship, certainly if you can work from home and so on, if you have those kinds of options to...
Transfer skills to your kids just by having them around.
That seems fairly important and a fairly decent way.
Just the way that things are, it's so strange.
It's so strange that the parents are forced to pay, that kids are forced to go, that there's virtually no consequences, that there is no negative feedback for bad performance.
The parents can't get a refund if things don't work.
And... I don't know.
I mean, maybe charter schools are a way to go, but the problem with charter schools is it extends government control over non-public schools, which is a big problem.
And I do have to think, like I remember watching the movie Waiting for Superman, I think it was called, about trying to get your kids into charter schools.
I mean, it's a heartbreaking movie to watch because these parents really, really care about their children's education.
And so I do sometimes wonder if Charter schools do better, like kids in charter schools do better because they come from smarter parents, and we know that IQ is 80% genetic even in the teenage years.
So maybe they've just got smarter parents who really, really want their kids to do well, and maybe that's just the higher IQ kids end up I mean, I don't know if anyone's really studied that, but that would be one of the most likely places to look as to why all the charter schools are doing better.
But I do think that it matters how you educate children.
I've had a guy on this show some years back talking about how well children responded to being taught philosophy.
A friend of mine I was talking to was reading out my book, The Art of the Argument, to his five-year-old daughter, and she was just going through the differences between deductive and inductive reasoning and some of the examples of the syllogisms and so on.
His daughter was five, and five out of the five syllogisms, she chanted out the last one, the conclusion, I don't know.
What the education of children would look like at the age of the internet and the tablet.
I have no idea what it would look like.
I have no idea what work as a whole would look like in a truly free society.
But certainly schools would be virtually...
I can't think of anything that wouldn't be enormously different.
One thing... Okay, so you're going to get a kick out of this.
So you know what they took away from us, though, is teaching kids how to type.
Yeah. They took away the typing class.
One of the few skills I actually learned and still use.
The kids still hunt and peck.
They don't type. It's shocking.
You have supposedly the most computer literate kids, but they can't type.
They hunt and peck.
They can do it quite fast, but that kind of blows my mind.
That two-finger cop typing, right?
Yeah, and then it's like some of the things they teach them, it's just like the priorities just seem so weird to me.
And then the other thing I wanted to bring up too is a point you brought up how logical kids can be.
And I think that's absolutely true, especially kids who are maybe like on the low, believe it or not, even kids that are on the lower end of the IQ. Well, they're the ones who need philosophy the most.
Yes. They're the ones who need philosophy the most because they're going to be the ones least likely to think about long-term consequences.
And they're the ones who benefit the most, I believe, from accessible, common sense, philosophical thinking.
Because smart people are going to puzzle things out fairly well to some degree, no matter what, especially sort of day-to-day stuff.
Yeah. Man, you know, it's the people who can't walk who benefit most from technology, like they benefit most from exoskeletons and wheelchairs and so on.
And the people who have the lower IQ, I believe, this is one of the reasons why I try to make what I do as accessible as humanly possible, because they're going to benefit the most.
Well, and my thought, too, is they're open to it.
Unlike adults, if you talk to kids, they will actually change their mind and be like, yeah, you're right.
Adults never do that.
But I was just talking to a kid who got into a fight, and he got suspended and got back.
And I like this kid. He's a good kid.
But he was a little confused.
So I talked to him, and he said that, well, this other kid disrespected me, so I had to hit him.
And that was his thought.
In his... Culture, if a kid says things that you don't like, you have to hit them.
You can say it. He listened to rap.
And I went through all the same arguments or I tried to go through a lot of the same arguments you would say or I would think that you would say or the things that I've gotten from this show with this kid, right?
And I explained and obviously I'm kind of preaching to the choir here.
But I explained kind of the non-aggression principle.
And I said, well, look, you know, if you kind of threw the first punch from an ethical perspective, that means that you were wrong.
And here's why. And I went over that with him.
And at the end of the conversation, he looked at me and he was like, you know what, you're right.
And I said, you know, you don't have to get all worked up about what some other kid that you don't even like thinks about you.
Like, why are you going to lose sleep over what this kid thinks when you don't even like him?
Why not just not interact with him?
And I think that's a big impact on this kid by saying that to him.
I remember very clearly, Jim, I had when I was about 11.
I don't know. I guess they're still around.
I don't know if people use them that much because there's like racing games, driving games on computers.
But I had one of these snap together tracks with the little cars that you put them in the groove and then you have this little Racing squeeze thing, like you squeeze the button down along the top and they go faster around the track and you got to get them around as fast as possible without them flying off the track.
And I was just starting in puberty, so I was out of latency and I was just starting to get the ferocious emotional storms of the abused child's teenage years.
And I had one of these tracks, and I was trying to get it together, and I was trying to get it together, and I eventually got so frustrated that I just twisted the tracks apart, and it broke.
And I was angry and frustrated because I couldn't get it to go together.
And to be fair, I had done it for, I don't know, 10 minutes or so, 15 minutes, and I was really frustrated.
Because when you're less mature, frustration is like an escalation.
Like you get more frustrated and then more frustrated.
It's like walking up a flight of stairs.
You just escalate until you do something you probably regret.
When you get older, you recognize that that escalation is not inevitable.
It's not necessary. And you have many, many other choices to disengage, to manage your own emotions and so on.
But I remember twisting this track and I broke it.
And then I looked at that track and I thought, I don't really think that's right.
I don't think that's how I'm supposed to handle frustration.
And my mom was in the next room and I went over to my mom holding these two things and I said, you know, I got so frustrated putting these together, I just twisted them and broke them.
Is that how I should, like, how should I handle frustration?
When? Begging!
For feedback, for information, for advice, for wisdom, anything.
But, well, I think we all know.
My mom wasn't going to be the person to teach me about managing frustration.
But kids, if you give them an answer, they can disengage programmed instinct and engage The cortex, they can engage the repression of impulse and instinct.
And it's like you create a path through the woods by saying, hey, look, there's a path through the woods where they saw no path before.
Now they see a path and they have a different choice to make.
But there's so few people who will actually tell children they have a choice.
And there's so many people who will just program them into bad behavior.
Yes, I mean, and then another thing I wanted to bring up that I'm sure you'll talk at great, great length about is the prevalence of single moms in the school, especially the school I work at.
Just before we do that, what are the demographics in your special education class?
I could ballpark it for you.
Okay, so here's one thing that you'll find interesting is that In our district, or, you know, I don't even want to say our district, there are certain schools that I know of where 40% of the student body have IEPs.
Like, how are you supposed to service that many, like, how are that many students special needs?
Yeah, not everyone is supposed to take up residence in the emergency bay, right?
Right. I think there's an overdiagnosis and I think that there's some incentives here in place because a lot of times the parents get social security benefits for their kids having an IEP. And I know this because they call me, the social security office, or they send me notes and I talk to them on the phone and they ask me, you know, hey, they'll ask me about the kids to determine what kind of benefits the parents will get.
And I've had a parent, you know, whose kid was smart Right.
Very smart. So, of course, he wasn't going to qualify.
And he had his kid tested three different times.
The third time, he threw the papers at the school psychologist because he was so angry because his girlfriend had a daughter from a different guy and they had an IEP. And he knew that he could get financial benefits from it.
Right. And then on the third try, the school psychologist was like, you know, I'll just qualify him.
Because he's angry and he throws papers at me and all this other stuff.
So I'll just qualify him. So she marked this kid having an IEP when he's highly intelligent.
I mean, I don't even know what to say.
This is like the idea that if you get your kid classified with some sort of condition that qualifies him for psychotropic drugs, the government will pay for those drugs and give you extra money in these kinds of benefits as well.
It's like, why are so many American kids on these kinds of drugs?
Well, because the parents get paid to put them on these kinds of drugs.
And what you know, people respond to incentives.
Well, and they push for autism because they get more money for autism.
Parents will shop around for a doctor that will diagnose their kid with autism.
And they're starting to call Asperger's, they're starting to actually just call that autism when it's really not the same thing.
They're starting to broaden that umbrella.
People are wondering, why is there a rising rate in students with autism?
Well, it's because they're broadening the definition of what a student with autism is.
I think that's a disservice.
If you pay people to see ghosts, you'll get a lot of ghost sightings.
Yes. I mean, there's some students that actually have autism, right?
And some students that get diagnosed with it who really don't have it.
So that's kind of the interesting thing.
But I did also want to bring up, too, that at my school, the demographics, if I could ballpark it, are probably about, you know, bear in mind we're an alternative school.
So it's kids that get expelled mainly for drugs and fights and that kind of thing.
So we're probably about, I want to say, like 90% Black.
We had one Asian student before, and it was one of the kids that was kind of in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But it's pretty much black, Hispanic, and a couple whites sprinkled in.
Right. And a lot of the whites are kids who have special needs.
But the prevalence of single moms is astounding because it's virtually one.
I can't think of a single student that comes from a two-parent household.
I can't think of one. Yeah, because, I mean, I did a show with the right reverend Jesse Lee Peterson a while back ago where we were talking about, I think it was like 77% of black kids being born outside of wedlock.
People think that's 77% across the classes.
It's like, no. The rich, the middle class, the upper class kids, they're a lot of times two-parent.
It's really concentrated down at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum.
100% single moms, right?
Oh, yeah. I can't think of one.
I can't think of one example where there's two parents.
I've met most of the parents because they come in and meet with us, at least the parents that will come in.
But I mean, I know one case where, you know, and this is kind of common, where the parent has like four kids with three different dads.
You know, I mean, I'm like, are you serious?
Like, the dysfunctional households that these kids grow up in, like, a lot of me wants to say, well, that's why they're all screwed up.
But it's also a lot of it, I think, genetics, too, though.
because you'll see like families of kids that come through our program right because they get expelled you'll see you'll be like oh yeah i know your brother i know your sister your cousins like your whole family's getting expelled and getting in trouble and getting into drugs or violence or you see these trends um yeah it's it's it's uh it's mind-blowing and It saddens me a lot.
I think there's some clear solutions to fix these issues, at least to a certain extent.
Like, I think, obviously, freedom's the solution at the end of the day.
But I do think there's some real workable solutions, like, that we could actually do.
Like, I think if we got about 5% of the students...
I just think that if kids are so...
If they're so disruptive to the learning environment, we need to have an ultimate consequence that they just...
You know, you're done with public education.
I'm sorry, you're done with it.
You've been expelled five times.
Like... You're disrupting the educational environment for everybody.
I think once you have that ultimate consequence, people will kind of- Yeah, come on, Jim.
That's not going to happen. I mean, the schools are not going to give up that kind of cash cow, that kind of income source, right?
And they're certainly not going to want to have those numbers revealed.
As you know, talking about the Nicholas Cruz situation, the whole point is to try and keep the numbers down because like the numbers of disruptive kids, the number of kids who are thrown out or expelled, the number of kids who are disciplined, because it's going to be because of family environment and because of IQ issues and because of employment resistant because it's going to be because of family environment and because of IQ issues and because of employment resistant personality issues and because the welfare state as it stands in a lot of places literally pays women more if, and in fact, they may
So they give money to women to kick the man out.
And this is what's just so heartbreaking for all of this is like, what...
Chance do these kids have?
Like, what real chance?
And we can say, oh, there's free will, and I accept all of that, but there's still odds.
There's free will, but there's still odds.
Yeah, a guy who's 5'4 might be an amazing basketball player, but there's still odds.
And there are kids who make it out of these kinds of situations, but man alive, the odds socially, environmentally, scholastically, genetically, this could be the third generation or fourth generation, That have never had a job.
And you kick them out of school, but because America is pursuing this leftist agenda of largely open borders, you've got people flowing in, driving down the wages and taking jobs from other people.
And let's not forget that the presence of Hispanics in the neighborhood makes a lot of the blacks unemployable.
Because the blacks maybe aren't growing up learning Spanish, but a lot of the Hispanics would be growing up learning English.
And so if you are in an environment where you need two languages to succeed at working at the local McDonald's or wherever it's a car wash, anything, when you start to get another language coming in to a sociopolitical environment, the least intelligent get the most barred from the workforce.
This is another reason why a monoculture or at least a monolanguage is so important because when you start blending languages, It's tougher, tougher for a lot of the kids, particularly the poor kids, particularly the kids who aren't so smart, who are native to the situation.
And so, what chance?
This is what's... It literally, it breaks my heart.
It's hard to even concentrate on and focus on these poor kids.
And in particular, the black kids with no dads and no guidance and all of that.
It is... It's horrifying what is going on for these kids and how much these odds are stacked against them and what kind of lives they could have had under a different kind of world.
Yeah, it's like they don't have anything.
I know the one kid that kind of wanted to get in a fight with me.
I mean, I looked into his eyes and I felt bad for him because it's like I know he's not very intelligent and I know that's not probably his fault.
He's not very intelligent.
He doesn't know how to work through things.
He's angry. He doesn't know any different way.
He doesn't know a different way.
I know that the future for this kid is going to be really bleak, probably.
It's probably going to be really bad.
What's the value for him of self-restraint?
What does he get out of self-restraint?
Is he gonna go get a job?
Well, there probably aren't any jobs available for him.
He's been really badly educated.
He's got no work ethic in the family, no history of here's how you get a job.
The jobs probably aren't available.
It's like all he knows. And mass immigration has lowered these wages or eliminated these opportunities.
Massive amounts of very high-priced union labor have caused a lot of these jobs in manufacturing and other entry-level jobs to the middle class to be automated or shipped overseas.
Tax policies, like all things beyond his control and probably beyond his understanding as they were beyond my understanding at his age as well.
In order for people to have political power, they have burnt the futures of these children on a pyre of disaster.
And it is unbearable.
I don't know how you do it, Jim.
It is horrifying to think of what kind of lives these kids are going to have and how little we care to help them.
Well, Personally, I am working on a small business.
You're doing some great stuff, I'm sure of that, and they're very lucky to have you.
As a society as a whole, we just let this stuff fester and rot because we don't want to take on the unions, and we don't want to take on the open borders advocates, and we don't want to take on the leftists, and we don't want to take on the Democrats, and we don't want to take on all the people who are exploiting these poor children and stripping their future away from them.
Well, and it's crazy, too, because the administration, they get mad at us for trying to do basic things that would help out the kids, like things that would be outside the box that would actually help the kids.
It's clear that the administration, and it's like they want to change the...
I remember from a different podcast where you were like, if the left, they'll try to change the numbers, and then they think that they change reality, when it couldn't be further from the truth.
They do that with... Racial disparity.
We constantly hear about racial disparity and why are all your referrals for kids of a certain race?
You're expected to kind of explain yourself.
There's a lot of pressure coming right up from the top to make everything even with race.
And it just doesn't happen.
And even if people don't like the IQ stuff, which I understand is difficult stuff, but let's put that aside, try normalizing by single motherhood and see how much these things will close off, right?
Right. But then the thing is, I brought that up, like I was talking to a few of the teachers, you know, and I brought that up and you wouldn't believe how much vitriol I got from teachers who see this every day firsthand.
It's funny because I think they get so mad because they know it's true.
They know it's true.
And then they, of course, like these are supposed to be people with like master's degrees and they still do the thing like, well, I know, or I, I, I'm a single mom and look at me like, like, okay, well, I know a tall Asian guy, you know, it's kind of like, Well, it's one thing to be a single mom who gets a master's.
It's another thing to be a single mom whose family's been on welfare for two or three or four generations.
That's the thing.
It's clear that they feel genuinely threatened by the fact that I would bring up that single moms is like a trend.
And then I even tried to bring up the argument.
The cognitive dissonance is amazing because I tried to bring up the argument.
I was trying to say, okay, well, our men...
You know, on average, taller than women, right?
Because where I'm going to go with this is I'm going to say, okay, well, you know, I know a woman who is married to who is taller than her spouse, right?
Like that can happen.
Like that's an exception. And I was about to bring that up.
And then she goes, you know, I actually don't think that men and women are different heights, right?
And I was like, what?
What? Like, you can't be serious.
And I'm like, okay, what about strength, right?
And she goes, you know, I think that men and women are actually the same strength.
I'm not even kidding you.
She said this. She's a teacher, right?
So she's a teacher. Yes, a teacher with a master's degree.
Well, it's the master's degree that probably gave her that radical subjectivism and just make up whatever facts you want, right?
I know. And then she'll say, well, statistics don't matter.
But then she'll say, yeah, but, you know, this disparity is a big problem.
Wait, I thought you said statistics don't matter.
Statistics don't matter if they go against nurture versus nature.
And it's like, I kind of just learned to keep my mouth shut.
Because it's like, if I bring any of this up with any of these people, they get so threatened and so aggressive.
And it's like, they will attack you.
And we had, you know, a teacher who's kind of on the right.
And, like, I'm not even kidding you.
The other teachers got together and, like, emailed, like, the head honcho for the whole district and got this guy fired.
I'm not even kidding you. That actually happened.
There was a guy who wasn't played by us.
I mean, I'm not at all shocked.
Who moved in from a different district, you know, that was more rural, right?
And he espoused openly some kind of conservative beliefs, and he was gone.
Like, real quick. Jim, why do you want to work in this environment?
It's just those moments where I can actually help kids makes me feel good.
And the pay is pretty good for now.
I do want to move out of this environment, unfortunately, but I'm trying to start my own business.
I don't want to go into too many specifics because I'm afraid people might be able to track down who I am if I do, but I am trying to start my own business.
I'm working on that currently.
It's not making any profit as of now.
Because it's very hard to fight against these odds.
And I'm not saying...
I don't want people to say just give up or anything like that.
But once you understand...
All of the odds against these kids.
I mean, this is what is so tragic is that there is no giant skyhook that can just magically get these kids to a better place.
And look, I'm not saying you're not making any difference.
And for some of those kids who have opportunity, who have the potential, you may be triggering something better in them that otherwise, like, so you've got some smart kid in there, some kid with a lot of potential and so on.
And if he doesn't meet anyone, then he may be sunk under and buried under.
If he meets someone, he might be able to...
Get out. But for the majority of kids, this is what's so terrible about the system.
Because the system is not so terrible if you can find ways to save people from its outcomes.
But a lot of times, I don't think you can.
And that's what's so heartbreaking. Yeah.
And it is. And you might get a kick out of this.
I did have one student that was exceptionally intelligent.
And he got busted for weed.
And it was funny because we were going to have the kids write essays on why they're here and why they feel like they screwed up.
And he goes, well, I don't think I did anything wrong because I think weed should be legal.
He goes, I don't really think I did it.
He's very intelligent, actually.
And I actually handed him a copy of your book, The Art of the Argument, and he read the whole thing.
And I know he read it because we talked about it.
Right, right. And he appreciated it.
And he actually, he was a socialist, right, before...
And by the time I got done talking to him, he was no longer in that frame of mind.
Well, see, that's great.
That's great. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily burn up your whole life for those opportunities.
And it is a, you know, I mean, part of you handing out the art of the argument may be a good way of saying, hey, I think I want to pursue other opportunities because, you know, even the debates that you're...
Having with these other teachers.
But yeah, if you've got an exit strategy, you know, you've done your bit.
You've helped kids. And if there's something you can do that's more self-controlled, self-directed, and you don't have to hide everything about who you are and what you think, I think that would be a better solution in the long run.
Plus, you know, one of these days you might get...
Physically aggressed against.
Or you might get someone who accuses you of something.
And it's a very risky environment on many levels.
Well, and I did learn from this whole experience.
I've only been teaching...
I don't want to go into how many years, but it hasn't been many years.
It's been less than 10, more than 5.
But I have learned a lot and I have a daughter on the way.
And because of your podcast, I am against...
I'm for peaceful parenting.
My wife has stopped working at her job.
She's going to be a stay-at-home mom.
And we're actually planning to school our daughter at home.
Fantastic. Well, that's very common.
I think it was some district, I can't remember, like 40% of the teachers homeschooled because they're like, oh yeah, we know what goes on here.
I know. I know what goes on there.
All the drugs and...
I don't want my kid in that environment.
You know, it's kind of like asking a mechanic, why do they work on their own car?
Well, you know, if you're already a teacher, you kind of can teach your own kid to a certain extent.
That's just kind of my thought on that.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, you're going to care more about your kid than a teacher will.
That's kind of all I had, though, unless you wanted to add anything.
I think I covered everything in my notes that I wanted to talk about.
I felt kind of compelled to talk about.
No, listen, I appreciate that.
And it is a hell of a thing as a society in the West as a whole that we've gotten ourselves into.
We've now had, you know, if they had stopped the welfare state early on, Oh, if they'd never started it, one thing.
If they'd stopped the welfare state early on.
But now, what's it been going for?
60 years? 50 years?
Yeah, 50 years.
And that is long enough to change genetics.
That is long enough to change personalities and the genetics of personality.
That is long enough to change culture.
And we have really got ourselves into a mess.
We have really got ourselves into a mess.
I mean, occasionally I'll just sort of play this game of Django where it's like, okay, well, we'll end this program.
Well, but the problem is then they're going to go on this program.
Okay, we'll end this program. Well, then we're going to go on this program.
It's like, okay, well, we'll end that program.
Well, they're going to try and get jobs.
Okay, well, then we have to liberalize this.
Well, then these people are going to get, like, the whole thing is stacked to the point where, what can you do?
And when the system becomes so stacked against change, when it becomes so impossible to change, like, oh, well, let's, you know, close down a bunch of government, useless government departments.
And it's like, okay, well, then, first of all, you're going to get sued and spend years in court, I'm sure.
And secondly, even if you get that way, then people, they just end up going on unemployment insurance.
Then they're just riots and you spend more money on police.
So the system has become so stacked against reform.
And this is what happens with coercive systems.
This is what happens when there's not voluntarism foundational to whatever it is you're doing.
You end up with an inability to change the system and therefore the system just has to crash and things have to be enormously unpleasant or things will be enormously unpleasant for people.
An unforeseen amount of time and the amount of human suffering will be absolutely astonishing, horrifying, and hopefully we will not do it again.
Well, and the IQ is dropping.
It is. It's clear.
I talked to a recruiter and they said even for the army, they have to pass the ASVAB. The kids aren't passing it.
They can't get kids to pass the ASVAB, which is easy.
It's pretty easy. It's not hard.
It's like an IQ test. Have you ever seen those questions?
I have. And what are they like?
They're basic IQ test questions.
A lot of them are logic-based.
I mean, they'll ask a question like, okay, if you have a cup of water, right, and it's worth $1.50, and the cup is worth, or the water is worth $1 more than the cup, right, how much is the cup worth?
Right. And the kids will say stuff like, $3?
And it's like, what? They just guess, right?
Yeah. Like, it's very logical.
Right. They don't know.
And then the funny thing is the recruiters are having to lower the standards.
Like, the Army has done this. Like, you can look this up.
And the Army has done this. They've lowered the standards on a lot of the MOSs and the jobs available to people.
And then they wonder why, like, we keep having these...
Crashes, like these planes and stuff keep crashing.
Oh yeah, I've heard some real conspiracy theories about that.
I just assume it's just the decay of competence that is happening in society as a whole.
Society is only functioning and running based upon a very few smart people, a whole bunch of automation, and the inertia of better systems and better people that they set up in the past.
So I just, for those who don't know what this, all this means, so this is the test, right?
85% of those taking the test, just test again in the army, the easy one.
85% of those taking the test in 1980 exceeded a score of 120, which was the cutoff score for officers in World War II. In 2014, only 59% exceeded that score at the upper end of the distribution.
Now, this is very important.
4.9% of those taking the test scored above 150 in 1980 compared to 0.7% in 2014.
In other words, today's marine officers scored nearly an entire standard deviation worse on average than their predecessors 34 years ago.
You know, at a time when this intelligence is dropping, college entrances are going up.
Right. It's easier to get into college than it is to join the army today.
It's actually easier to get into college, even academically.
And the army has not found any use for people who score, I think, lower than the sort of mid to high 80s in terms of IQ. Like, there's just nothing you can train them to do.
There's nothing you can do that's going to have any value.
And that's pretty terrifying.
You know, at the same time as we have increased automation, And the outsourcing of lower-skilled jobs, we are paying people who aren't that smart, knowing that intelligence is significantly genetic, to have a lot of babies.
And we're not going to get those IQ points back.
We got those over millions of years of evolution.
Maybe not that long, but thousands of years of evolution.
Tens of thousands, for sure.
So, like, and a lot of people had to die to get those IQ points.
Oh, it took tens of thousands of years of astonishing amounts of suffering to raise IQ. And we're just burning it up in decades.
The thing that scares me is, of course, it's not going to come back.
I don't know how the future is going to look, but it's not too bright if this continues, unless there's some kind of genetic engineering.
I know the Chinese are getting on that, so we'll see how that pans out.
Just world IQ as a whole.
In 1950, the average world IQ... We're sort of 91 and a half.
And as of, well, now it's collapsed by a couple of points and by 2100 or so, it's projected to be 84.
84. Yeah, we're not going to have a society anymore.
It's just going to be... No, it'll just be...
High IQ has been responsible for the growth of humanity.
And what happens when that IQ vanishes or goes galt or goes off the grid and so on?
Well, it's going to collapse back.
It's like you put a bunch of fish food in a fish tank, you get a whole bunch of fish, and then if you cut that fish food down by 90%, what happens?
It's very bad. Well, it's easier to destroy that than to build it back up.
It takes a lot longer to build back up than it is to just destroy it.
Yeah. And I'm not sure what we can do about it other than at least try to start to have discussions about this stuff.
I want the people with less IQ, I want them to have more opportunity.
That means you've got to control immigration.
You've got to liberalize immigration.
The economy, so that there's not huge barriers to entry or huge expense for labor that drives people to want to automate and outsource.
You have to try and find ways to improve their educational opportunities, which is going the exact opposite direction in a lot of Western schools.
We could not design a system that is more cruel to the least able if we tried.
A lot of the kids I work with are actually illegal immigrants.
And it's funny that they get free education, they get all these benefits, free lunch, all this stuff.
You know, they get a house.
Like, how is that even possible?
Like, it's inconceivable that I would go to a different country and demand that they pay for my education, even though I'm there illegally, like, and that they have to give me all these benefits.
Like, how is that? I don't even understand.
No, no, there's a whole mental structure that justifies all of that.
The mental structure is, this was our country.
It depends where you are, but certainly to the South, the Mexicans would say, or the Hispanics might say, well, this is our country.
These bad white people came along and kicked us out and stole all our resources.
So, hey, man, they owe us.
But it's like, how is that even legal, though, that we can somehow legally provide?
I know I listened to the podcast where you talked about judicial activism, and that was a really, really fascinating and depressing podcast as well.
Oh yeah, you try Venezuelan refugee crisis.
That's even more exciting.
Islam. Radical Islam.
It's closer than you think. But no, it is one of the situations where, I was just saying this to a friend of mine today, I would like to be...
There's nothing I'd like to be more wrong about than the stuff I'm most right about.
There's nothing I'd like to be more wrong about than the stuff I'm most right about.
Because you can see it coming.
You can see it coming clear as day.
And everyone else is sticking their heads in the sand and screaming la la la la la and calling you a sexist and a racist and a misogynist and all of this low IQ non-argument crap.
And none of it is going to budge reality one millimeter.
All right. Well, on that note, thanks very much for calling in.
Thanks everyone so much for calling in.
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