4112 Is College Worth It? | Tom Woods and Stefan Molyneux
What the value of a college education for the average individual? Stefan Molyneux and Tom Woods discuss the important considerations that people should take into consideration before going to college, the opportunity cost, student loan debt, missed work experience and others ways to demonstrate your expertise without a diploma. Dr. Tom Woods is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and the host of The Tom Woods Show. Dr. Woods is a New York Times bestselling author and has published twelve books including most recently “Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion,” “Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse” and “Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.”Website: http://www.tomwoods.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/ThomasEWoodsFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/ThomasEWoodsYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/TomWoodsTVReal Dissent: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-real-dissentRollback: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-rollbackThe Politically Incorrect Guide to American History: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-guide-to-historyMeltdown: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-meltdownNullification: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-nullification33 Questions: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-33-questionsHow the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-church-built-civilizationWe Who Dared to Say No to War: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-no-to-warThe Church and the Market: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-church-and-marketBack on the Road to Serfdom: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-serfdomThe Church Confronts Modernity: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-modernityWho Killed the Constitution: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-killed-the-constitutionYour 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
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
Hope you're doing well here with Dr.
Tom Woods, a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and the host of the appropriately named Tom Woods Show.
Dr. Woods is a New York Times bestselling author and has published 12 books, including most recently Real Dissent, A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion.
Also, Rollback, Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse and Nullification, How to Resist, Dr.
Woods, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Very glad to be here.
So the great question before us today, be it resolved that, college is a sort of plus and minus scenario because I'm getting calls all the time in my call-in shows, Tom, from young people who are like, I'm in college.
It's a socialist brain-mashing indoctrination sausage factory.
Do I grit my teeth and get through or do I get out and get on with my life?
Now, Just to start, let's sort of divvy up college into two things, right?
So one is you want to be an engineer, you want to be a doctor, you want to be a lawyer, you kind of got to jump through the hoops, right or wrong.
So from that standpoint, I think we have to put that to one side and focus more on the more nebulous kind of arts degrees, sociology degrees, humanities degrees, and so on, where, you know, if you want to be a writer, you can be a writer.
If you want to do a YouTube channel, you can do a YouTube channel and...
Let's sort of divvy it up so that we can put to one side the degree mills that you absolutely need to get into a particular profession.
I think that's a fair designation, a distinction between those two things.
And I think, in general, the hard sciences, of course, are more objective, so you're going to get an A if you really earned it.
As opposed to the disciplines I was in, it was a little bit more subjective.
I like you. Here's an A. Exactly.
I mean, who's to say?
But I mean, I think about my own kids because I have now just about 15 year old out of my five girls.
She's the oldest. And I do think, well, gee, I don't want to take all this good work we've done raising them and send them to somewhere where they can't stand the sight of them.
And they're going to be undermining every good thing I've tried to do for all these years.
So that is a major, major concern.
If they do wind up going the traditional college route, they're going to have a pretty good head on their shoulders.
They're going to know what to look out for.
I mean, my 15-year-old wants to spend the summer learning Austrian economics, so all right.
But that's an unusual case.
I mean, most young people go in without any...
Really strong feelings one way or the other.
But then when you're under this intense social pressure to conform, and if you don't conform, you're called a bad person and a hater.
And since most people don't want to be called bad people and haters, they wind up just going with the flow and accepting whatever they're told to accept.
And I just don't want to see that happen.
Now, to some degree, I bet some of those kids who outwardly conform, inwardly say, as soon as I get out of this prison, I'm not going to feel compelled to go along with this anymore.
Maybe, maybe not.
But still, we hear enough horror stories about re-education and diversity training that, on the surface of it, sounds very sweet to some people.
It sounds to them like, well, isn't this wonderful?
We're just going to include more people.
And who could be against including more people?
It's never, ever It's never about that.
It's always about excluding certain points of view.
And of course, if you are in the group or groups that they're trying to include, if you are a dissident voice within that group, they have no interest in including you, which goes to show this has nothing to do with inclusion and everything to do with an ideological programming.
And it's like you're watching a Jacobin revolution unfolding where every single inherited idea or thought has to be cast aside such that 20 years from now, progressives today will look like terrible reactionaries.
And if we ever build statues to any of them, in 20 years we'll be tearing those statues down for not being progressive enough.
Who can endure that?
When I was in college, I graduated in 94.
It was pretty bad, but it wasn't insanely bad.
We all knew there were crazy people on campus, and we would tweak them and have fun with them, and we had our own way of getting back at them with our little magazine and our little things that we did.
But I don't know about your experience, Steph, but I remember thinking, yeah, we got some kooks, but we're going to fight back.
I think today it's 10 times worse, and You know, you've got to be really, really courageous to stand up against that stuff now.
Well, yeah, of course, back in the day, Tom, the worst label that I received was capitalist.
Now, that was considered to be smokingly terrible by the leftist faction, but the idea of misogynist and racist and homophobe and all of this kind of stuff, you can kind of see it coming in the rear view, but it was not straight up.
And I, you know, this is the question.
So if you have...
You know, strong rational beliefs, then you go in well prepared to fight the insanity, but you're kind of in a losing position.
Because your professors will determine your grades to a large degree, again, if we're in the more subjective fields and so on.
And so I don't like sending people into battle when they have a pea shooter and the enemy has a tank.
And that seems to me the big problem.
So if you have strong, rational, empirical beliefs, you can go in, but you're in a weak position.
And what it does, I think, is it shows to the strong-minded people that you're likely to lose.
And it shows to everyone else that when you fight with the professor, you're likely to lose.
So it shows strong, rational opinions are likely to lose.
That way inclined or you haven't had that kind of good education or exposure, you go in somewhat plasticky in your brain, then it's going to be molded and carved by some seriously nutty people.
And that's going to do you, I think, a huge degree of damage, not just fiscally and so on, but like emotionally.
If you grow up to sort of hate your culture, to hate your race, to hate your gender, to feel bad about everything.
I mean, that's verbal abuse that wouldn't you pay to not have rather than pay to consume?
Exactly. And you'd have a completely warped view of the world and how it works.
And meanwhile, the problem is that with the ubiquity of college, partly through government subsidy and partly just through cultural acceptance, that that's just something you do, what's happened is the credential expectation has been inflated.
And this is a point that Brian Kaplan makes in his book, The Case Against Education.
The problem is, I love that cheeky title, The Case Against Education.
But the idea, of course, is that now that you have so much so-called education, now what would have taken a high school diploma now requires a bachelor's degree.
But it's not because the job has gotten that much more difficult.
He says that actually you can measure these things.
About 20% of this difference can be accounted for by some jobs have gotten a little bit more technically demanding.
80% of it is the credential inflation.
So you're not actually helping people.
You're actually making it much more difficult for people to attain their desires in terms of their occupation.
So you have that.
Then you have the fact that study after study shows that after four years in college, when it comes to basic knowledge of the way politics and government work or history, whatever, Either they have not learned anything, or in some cases, they know less than when they went in.
Whatever decent knowledge they had has been sucked out of them.
You think, that's impossible.
You're spending, who knows, 25, 30, 40 grand a year at some of these institutions?
And you come out knowing less than when you went in?
And meanwhile, people are saying, we need more funding for this institution?
If Walmart ran the colleges, and after four years, people knew less about government than they did going in, I think we'd never hear that.
Nobody would say, well, Walmart is just starved for fun.
They just need more money. They'd say, they need to be held accountable for this.
But when it's the state, of course, the state is held to the standards of a pygmy.
They'll say, well, it's because they don't have enough resources.
No matter how many resources they pour in, there's always more and more excuses.
But good grief.
When you look at the average adult in the United States, and you ask them questions about, again, basic science, I'm not talking about explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics here.
I'm talking about basic scientific concepts.
And these, by the way, these are the adults who get on Facebook and lecture you for being a science denier and you don't believe in science.
These people couldn't care less about science.
They know nothing about science.
These people who talk about we need to spend more on education and they spend all day long reading Stephen King novels.
So they learn literacy.
They apply it to PAP. They actually read nothing of significance with it.
But anyway, I'm getting aside.
The point is you ask these adults these basic questions in all these different fields.
They don't even come out as being competent.
They can answer about half the questions on a basic skills test.
And as Brian Kaplan puts it, if somebody knows half the letters of the alphabet, you don't call them half literate.
He's illiterate. He doesn't know anything.
And so likewise, that's what these institutions have to show for themselves.
But what they do accomplish is, after four years there, you darn well do know what language to use, what words to use, what joke not to tell, what groups are privileged, and what groups need to be in sackcloth and ashes 24 hours a day.
That you do learn. Right.
Well, and if we look at this whole question from an economic standpoint, and we look at the colleges as a business...
Well, they, of course, want – they have the balance, which all businesses have who are producing experts, which is that they definitely want to produce experts.
But at the same time, they want more students.
Now, these two are kind of in opposition, right?
If you're running a singing school, sure, you want to produce great singers, but you also want lots of students.
But the quality of singing voices is not equally distributed among the population.
So if you widen the net, you're going to end up with some seriously stubbed toed squawkers in your choir who you're going to graduate but dilute the quality of what it is that you're doing.
So from that standpoint, businesses like colleges, they have a big problem, which is if they have rigorous entrance exams, if they have objective exams.
Methodologies and standards and requirements and processes that some people will meet and some people won't.
Well, then they can maintain the quality of who they put out and the quality of their degree, but it reduces the number of people they can churn through their system and pillage for economic resources.
So I think like I have these sort of big philosophical movement ideas in my head, you know, things like postmodernism and subjectivism and relativism and all that kind of stuff.
But part of me, Tom, just thinks, well, these were somewhat introduced so that colleges could start pretending to teach idiots something rather than actually teaching smart people something.
Because, you know, subjectivism should mean there's no reason for college if there's no such thing as the right answer.
Then why on earth would you go to college to find out that there's no such thing as the right answer?
But if there is no such thing as the right answer, then you can hand out grades like candy.
You can favor your friends and punish your enemies, and it's all pretty subjective.
And I think a lot of it has had to do with, well, let's just lower the standards.
Let's make things more subjective so that we can just churn more people through the money machine.
Well, that's definitely a factor.
And you're right that they're trying to balance two contradictory goals there because – The more the standard goes down, also the lower the reputation of the institution, and therefore the less the value, the less value that the degree itself has that you're slaving away for four years.
Then they're also under a similar pressure with regard to getting rid of objective standards, because very often these tests have a disparate impact, let's say.
They don't produce results That breakdown in the precise proportion of race representation in the population.
So if black students disproportionately do poorly on the exam, the exam is presumed to be racist.
It's presumed to be discriminatory just on the face of it without actually looking at the content of the exam.
So there's been some movement against the LSAT for law school entrance, for example.
Because the black student results on it have not been very good.
I forget how the LSAT is scored.
It's unique to the LSAT. But you could take the entire entrance class of Georgetown University, I think, would basically contain all the black students who qualify at a reasonable level based on that test, could all fit into one law school.
So then the problem becomes, well, so what do we do?
I mean, we have to have affirmative action, which then means that people will then look at a black lawyer and say, well, I wonder.
And so then that guy then carries that stigma with him for the rest of his life.
And that's terrible for the really smart black lawyers who could do just as well as everyone else because they get lost in the mix.
Exactly. And they have no way, unfortunately, to distinguish themselves because of that type of system.
And it's even gotten to the point where they'll say that the test is culturally biased.
Not necessarily the LSAT, but whatever these tests are, a lot of them will be culturally biased, and that's why you get these different results.
But it actually turns out that if you look at a lot of the standardized tests and you pick out which of the questions that you think are the ones that are culturally loaded and therefore would be the ones that Black or other minority students would be less likely to do well on.
It's not those questions.
Those are actually not the questions that are distinguishing them.
But it doesn't matter because what they want to do is they don't like objective scoring for a variety of reasons.
This strikes them as old-fashioned and old hat that we have a meritocratic system.
So now you have...
It is these institutions where they're under tremendous pressure to chuck these tests because they're yielding these results that are not satisfactory from the point of view of egalitarianism.
So you have to get rid of the entire test, which then makes it a lot easier for them to be completely subjective or much more subjective in their admission standards.
But again, all of this is still working against presumably the academic excellence they want to encourage.
At some level, they have to believe in that.
To maintain the brand.
But on the other hand, bear in mind that to maintain the brand these days, you have to satisfy the demands for so-called inclusion and diversity, which means a quota system, which has to mean lower standards across the board.
Oh, it's terrible.
And there is this phenomenon in the modern world of pillaging the momentum of past productivity.
And it's sort of like if you're a star athlete in high school, you're lean, you're healthy and so on.
And then often when you get to college, you get that frosh 15, you put on a little weight, you don't exercise as much, but you're still pretty healthy because you were a hard exerciser and good eater for sort of many years.
So you can kind of coast for a little bit on your prior health.
There's a lot of that going on in modern society.
Like when you socialize a healthcare system, you take hardworking, responsible doctors with good relationships to their patients based on the free market.
And then you socialize it all, but you don't change the doctors fundamentally.
You don't change their commitment.
And so you get this magic sweet spot, which seems like it all works really well.
The next generation of doctors don't grow up with the same work ethic.
They don't grow up with the same relationships to their patients.
They don't grow up with the same motivation to get into medicine.
And then it all starts to slowly go out of focus.
I think of this in terms of NASA, right?
Like in the 60s, they pillaged a whole bunch of engineers from the private sector and then got everyone to the moon pretty quickly.
But then it just began to kind of go out of focus because the next generation of engineers aren't the same way.
And I think for colleges, like back in the day, when like 10% or so of the population would go to college, well, then college degree really meant a lot.
And it showed that you were in the top 10% usually of sort of intelligence and that followed you well no matter where you went.
Now you have like 40% of people going to college, sometimes even higher.
It's not like then you have 10% times 4.
You're just lowering the standards of who you bring in and college does not raise IQ. It doesn't make your brain bigger.
It doesn't multiply your neurons.
In fact, with inactivity, group projects, weed and lack of sleep, it could be going quite in the opposite direction.
And so I think there's this momentum where people say, oh, you know, people who go into college, they do really, really well economically.
So let's just stuff more people into college.
And they're in college because they're smart.
And whether they do well economically, regardless of college, is another matter.
But just stuffing more people into college.
College doesn't make them smart.
Drafting bad singers into a choir doesn't make them good singers.
But I think there's that fundamental pillaging of past reputation that is currently luring a lot of people.
Like college to me is like one of those anglerfish in the deep sea.
You know, they got that little light and, you know, they just chew you up with debt.
Well, I was jotting some things down because you said so many things that I want to comment on.
One of them would be If we say that, well, people seem to do well when they go to college, and I think the number that's been given is over the course of their working lives, they earn like an extra million U.S. dollars.
By the way, I specify U.S. dollars because I know you're in Canada, and I want to respect that to the extent that's possible.
But in terms of that, there's always been the counterargument, which is it's not so much necessarily, although in some cases it could be, but it's not necessarily that going to college is what makes you earn the extra money.
It's more that The type of person who's ambitious enough to work hard enough to earn that extra money is the type of person responsible enough to go to college and work hard.
So it may be more of a reflection of a previously existing character trait than it is a cause.
Second thing is, a lot of times we say, well, okay, maybe college isn't doing that good of a job preparing people for a career.
But That's a really mundane way to think about it.
We should think of college as this noble time when you get exposed to great ideas and people get to reckon with Aristotle and, well, okay, I'm picking the Western tradition, but so what, okay?
And they reckon with Aquinas and all these great minds and surely that's enriching and all the great works of literature and all that.
And surely, Woods, they might say, your utilitarian reckoning of the value of college is failing to account for this important expanding of the horizons that you get at college.
But the problem with that argument, as appealing to me as it is on some level, is that it just doesn't happen.
You can talk about it.
You can say that this is a great opportunity.
But if you... All you need to do is spend two days at a typical college and talk to people and observe their behavior.
And I would say it is a pretty rare specimen who says, I am so delighted that I am reading the physics of Aristotle.
I could not be more delighted.
And I'm reading the Phaedo and I'm reading the Crito from Plato.
I couldn't be happier. That's just not true.
They grit their teeth through it.
They hate every minute of it.
And they never look at it again.
So if, on the other hand, you feel like you are somebody who would really be enriched by this material, who's stopping you?
You have the internet.
You have a mouse pad to click on things.
You have your brain. You have the rest of your life.
You have the greatest lecturers in the world available right there from your computer screen.
Who says you need to spend $160,000 To be exposed to things that 99% of your peers hate every minute of and will never return to, how could that be an efficient system?
I mean, in principle, that'd be great if everybody was having a Socratic dialogue about a whole bunch of different topics.
It does not happen.
I see no prospect of it happening.
Oh, and there was one other thing.
I wanted to clarify something.
It's true that a lot of the schools that, let's say, black students go to are terrible schools.
Now, you can argue about why are they terrible schools.
Wait, do you mean like government schools pre-college?
Government schools pre-college.
These are not good institutions.
You wouldn't want to go there. You wouldn't want to spend any time there.
But the problem is that what happens is college then becomes this egalitarianism machine where they say, well, people came from this bad background.
Let's admit them anyway, even if their academic preparation might not be what it ought to be.
The problem with that, of course, is...
Well, apart from the obvious unfairness of it, for people who are not to blame for the condition of those schools, then wind up being penalized in these admissions systems.
But it's also that if there's a problem with those schools, then those schools need to be fixed to the extent that they can.
But to try to fix this problem at the college stage is way too late.
The ship has sailed.
The train has left the station.
At that point, the thing would be try to match the student up with the college for which he is most suited and go from there.
But that's a separate project from fixing the schools, let's say.
If you think that the schools can be fixed, be my guest.
Spend your time doing that. But you don't fix them retroactively by putting somebody into a college he's not prepared for.
Right. Yeah, so two sort of thoughts popped into my mind just before we were talking today, Tom, about college experiences.
Actually, no, three. So the first was, yeah, when I was going to McGill for history.
Now, I took a circuitous route.
I started at York University at Glendon Campus, did two years of English literature, then I switched to I went to the National Theatre School for almost two years.
I finished my undergrad in history at McGill and then I did a master's at the University of Toronto.
When I was at McGill, a woman asked me out on a date and I said, well, no, I've got an essay in two weeks.
I got an essay due in two weeks.
I can't go out. And she was like completely offended because the idea that I would prioritize schoolwork over dating was...
Absolutely incomprehensible to her.
But to me, it's like, you know, hey, you're pretty, nice girl, but I'm sorry, I got an essay.
Between high school and university, I spent almost a year and a half working in the bush, gold panning, prospecting, claim staking.
And to me, it was like, hey, there's no bugs.
There's no leeches. I'm not in a tent at minus 30 degrees warming myself off jet fuel in a boiler.
So this is all wonderful.
I really wanted to taste that.
The second thing was when I was doing my English degree, I remember studying John Fowles' book called The Magus, which is a pretty good book.
And he was, you know, the professor was like, well, you got to write a thesis about The Magus.
And it was like, and I was sitting there thinking, okay, well, I could write about this.
And I sat down and I was one of the few students who actually went to professors like, you know, when they have their open door policies and so on.
And I remember going to him and saying, well, I could talk about this and I could talk about that, you know, the relationship between this and that.
And he says, well, that all sounds fine to me.
And I just remember thinking, what do you mean that all sounds fine?
I can basically write whatever I want.
And if it sounds vaguely okay and is reasonably written, I just get a pass.
And that really bothered me.
And that's the problem with English literature is...
How are you wrong, exactly?
And not having the capacity to be wrong was kind of frustrating, and that was one of the reasons.
Oh, and the last thing was I had a real, real Marxist professor who I battled with continually during the entire year of him teaching me a course called The Rise of Capitalism and the Socialist Response.
And the last day there, Tom, I gave a very impassioned speech last day of class just before everyone broke for the summer about free markets and about the evils of communism and so on.
And the guy was nice enough to give me like 10 minutes in the class, which was quite a big deal.
And at the end of it, he just kind of leaned on his desk, kind of glowered at me with his proto-Marxist beard and all that.
And he was just like, well, I'm sorry that's how you feel.
I guess that's all you got out of this class.
And I was like, that's it?
I made all these arguments and he's just like, well, I guess you don't feel the Marxism, bro.
It's like, oh, what am I paying for?
So, yeah, it was nuts.
Yeah, yeah, that's these horror stories.
I think back to when I was in school.
Thankfully, I traveled in circles where I got to know students who kind of knew the lay of the land, older students, and they knew you've got to avoid Professor X and Y. Professor Z is just marking time, so go ahead and see Professor Z. Or Professor B served in the State Department.
He's going to give you the establishment view.
It's not going to be radical left, and it's just going to be the estate.
You might as well learn the establishment view at some point.
Sure beats what professors X and Y are teaching you, and you had to You had to just cope the best you could in that situation.
But in the meantime, I actually did make good use of my time because I had access to the largest private library in the world.
And all the books I wanted to read were never checked out.
No one's reading those books.
They're all sitting there collecting dust on the shelf.
But that was when I learned about the history of libertarianism.
And I read the great libertarian thinkers from the 50s on to the present.
Because their books were sitting right there.
I had access to all of them.
And so if you want to get a good education and you know what you're doing, you can get a good education.
But half the time, I had to do it in spite of the elite professors that I had.
I had to do it in spite of them. I mean, yeah, I'd get names and dates from them.
It wasn't entirely worthless.
But huge areas of history were left out or they were distorted or it was a cartoonish thing.
Heroes versus villains version of history.
Basically, if you want to get a good education, you've got to be an autodidact.
You have to guide yourself through it.
And then you can emerge—and by the way, that's why—I don't want to make this an advertisement, but that's why I produced a product, my Liberty Classroom product, because the idea there is I went to the elite schools, and I got the stuff, but I also got the stuff that the elite schools didn't want me to learn.
I got that, too. And that's the stuff that you've got to really, really search.
You've got to be practically a private detective to learn half of this stuff.
And so I thought, I can't fix these universities, but with the internet, I can create my own platform.
Where I can teach stuff, people I trust can teach stuff.
And so if you really want that education, you really want not just the credential, but you want the knowledge, Well, there are enough, it turns out, there are enough curious people out there who want the knowledge.
And so I just went and created something.
Oh, and it's well worth checking out.
I'd certainly recommend it. We'll put a link to that below.
Do you remember stuff that came out of college that you didn't bring in or wasn't part of your sort of outside reading?
I mean, I was thinking about this too, which is, I mean, I took, I remember I took, I think it was a full year course with Canada's preeminent political theorist named Charles Taylor.
Count for the life of me.
I remember. I remember the classroom.
I remember his white hair. I remember him striding around and gesticulating.
You know, pay me a million dollars to cough up one nugget of wisdom that I remember from that class.
Well, you'd get to save yourself a million bucks because I couldn't.
And I actually did have a look for my notebooks.
I couldn't find them. But I was like, because I wanted to flip through.
Like, I remember writing stuff down.
I was there a lot. Can't for the life of me remember what it is that I was taught.
I do remember instances where I pushed back, like in, you know, the inevitable Satanic Mills Dickensian class on 19th century Industrial Revolution, you know.
Well, they took all these children, you see, who were gambling and playing with butterflies in the fields and enjoying the lovely, country, rural living, much like the opening of the Princess Bride.
And they took them and they stuffed them into these satanic mills in tiny boxes where their eyes bled and they coughed up lungs of prehistory.
And, you know, I did sort of point out, you know, nutritional increase, caloric increase, longevity increases.
And that if you look at the country, you know, the reason why the kids were alive to work in the mills was because they weren't dead in the country, as was so often the case.
And I remember, you know, coming up with that stuff.
And then there's just this weird silence, you know, like, wait, this is counterfactual.
And you might as well just stand up and start speaking in full-on Baptist half-Aramaic tongues when it comes to people's comprehensibility.
Or maybe I'd get a pushback.
It's like, well, I guess you've been reading some slightly different sources than I have.
Well, you know, that kind of stuff.
Or, well, that's all just propaganda.
Yeah, yeah, because we all know exactly what the definition of propaganda is, which is everything that disagrees with your propaganda.
But I don't remember much, if anything.
I did have a great woman who taught me Aristotle.
She was fantastic. I still remember her flaying a subjectivist and relativist in her class.
But as far as, you know, I spent a long time, and I think I actually got more skills out of theater school than I did out of English and history degrees.
The thing is, it's hard to know exactly what in my general body of knowledge that comes from multiple sources was, you know, through osmosis gained from there.
Like, you know, none of it's labeled, so I don't know how much of my general knowledge comes from there.
But in terms of unique interpretations or anything that I thought was especially wise, you're right.
I was sitting here as you were talking.
I was trying to think, what do I remember from that?
And honestly, I can't say much.
And I used to teach for a while, and now I shudder to think, could anybody remember anything I said?
But I tried to make it as lively and engaging as I possibly could.
I do remember at the time feeling like I was learning a lot.
And I have a feeling that the basic structure of the way I think about a lot of things does come from that.
But I couldn't pinpoint anything, or I couldn't recall a particular lecture or anything.
And I think if I... I think probably the most of my knowledge, though, came when I prepared for the general exam, which in graduate school, before you start on the PhD, at least at Columbia, you have to take the general exam, which is an oral exam in front of four professors.
Each of whom has prepared with you a subfield of history.
And so you have a couple of hours where they can ask you anything.
And so for each of those four fields, I read 50 books.
So I read 200 books to prepare for that general exam.
It's maddening because they could ask you anything.
These are four professors from Columbia University who are going to ask you anything they want.
And they're specialists in their field that they're asking you about, but you have to be a quadrant generalist.
It was horrifying.
But I went in there and it went fine.
It went absolutely fine. And people would say, oh, don't worry, but nobody fails that test.
But even if that's true, that makes you feel even worse because you don't want to have them say someday, oh, nobody fails that test except that guy.
Yeah. First time for everything.
But the funny thing was, one of the professors in there, I'll never forget this, she made an error.
She corrected me on something where I was right and she was wrong.
We were talking about the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Philippine insurrection that occurred afterward when the US did not grant independence to the Philippines.
I said that Andrew Carnegie had been against that, that he had not been in favor of imperialism with the Philippines.
This professor, her name was Elizabeth Blackmar.
I don't know if she's still there or not, but she contradicted me.
She had no evidence. She said, oh, that's not true.
Now, the reason she knew that wasn't true is because Andrew Carnegie is a capitalist.
Therefore, he favors imperialism.
A priori, she knew I had to be wrong.
But actually, It turns out I was right.
Andrew Carnegie offered to buy the Philippines from the U.S. for $20 million so he could grant their independence.
This is general knowledge.
And she said, now, okay, it's one small thing.
It didn't make or break me.
I passed the test anyway.
But for people who aren't specialists in that area, the others might have sat there in that room thinking it was at least debatable that I was wrong.
So shut your mouth with your propaganda during my general exam.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
No, there's definitely all that kind of stuff.
I remember wandering the halls of University of Toronto trying to find an advisor for my master's thesis, which was a very ambitious thesis, which tried to tie metaphysics all the way through to politics.
And my sort of thesis was that the more subjective the metaphysics, the more tyrannical the political theory.
And I wanted to map that with a bunch of different major ideas.
And I remember, I think I went through three or four guys who, like, when I would explain what I wanted to do, they're like, well, I think you should do something more specialized.
In other words, me no good at abstractions.
Complicated. I don't know if this will have enough footnotes to satisfy my requirements.
I did end up getting a guy and...
I graduated much later than everyone else because everyone else got their results back.
I was months later. And then I finally got my thesis back.
And he says, well, I didn't really follow the argument, but, you know, it's very well written.
So, yeah, here's your A. Okay, well, can you – I mean, a pushback would be better than that.
Tell me where I'm wrong. So, I also wanted to point out this – Yeah, go ahead.
Well, the opposite of that would be some of the dissertations that I see because I follow a Twitter account.
It's real peer review, but they had to change their accounts and now it's new real peer review.
And what they do is they go through and they'll just do screenshots of crazy passages from actual published articles in the academic literature.
And sometimes it's passages from PhD dissertations.
And one of them, a woman did her whole dissertation about how she and two of her feminist friends watched The Bachelor together and took notes on what their impressions were.
So that is okay, but your question about metaphysics and its impact on politics, well, come on, I need something more specialized.
Like, can't you sit down and watch Charlie's Angels, Steph, and let us know what you think?
Or become a specialist in the inconsequential so you're never challenged because nobody cares.
That is another. Now, regarding this question, I wanted to go to some, I guess, information.
This came out in 2016.
There's a global publishing group, Penguin Random House.
They said that they were no longer going to require candidates for new jobs to have a university degree.
And the same thing happened with Ernst& Young.
And so they said, well, we want to open up opportunities to attract more diversity, right?
So again, this is trying to, I guess, correct racial imbalances and so on.
But the human resource director of Penguin Random House said that a growing evidence shows there is no simple correlation between having a degree and future professional services.
And that is quite interesting because the balance for employers, and having been an employer myself for many years, I know this very well, the balance is, of course, you want people to be well-educated if it really helps them be more productive because you have to pay for their education, because you have to give them an increased salary to pay for the opportunity cost, the debt, whatever it is that they pay.
Time they spent, right? The cost of a four-year degree, people just say, well, you know, $40,000 a year, $160,000.
It's like, no, no, no, no. Opportunity costs of what the money you would have made otherwise, which may have increased over time.
So the opportunity costs can easily be double the direct costs and sometimes more.
So I always say to people, you know, three, four hundred thousand bucks probably just for your degree.
Now, again, if you can make that back, that's one thing.
But the employer is the one who has to pay for your college education, because if you graduate $50,000 in debt, you're probably going to need some kind of salary to cover that.
And so employers have the incentive to say, okay, I'll pay.
For your college degree, but only if I'm making more money back as an employer than it costs me to pay for your college degree.
And I think that the smartest employers these days are the ones looking and saying, well, I can get this person who's 18, who's not programmed into socialism, programmed to resent bosses, programmed to resent customers, programmed to resent the free market, and maybe quite litigious if anything goes wrong.
And I get this person who's young, who's positive, and who's not, say, $50,000 in debt.
So they're not dragging themselves to work because they have a debt slave.
They're a debt slave with the burdens of the world on their shoulders.
I think the smarter employers are saying, okay, what is the ROI for me to pay for somebody's college degree?
And certainly there are a bunch of companies now who are saying that it doesn't pay off.
It doesn't pay off economically.
And if the employers aren't finding it, I'm not sure who would.
Right. And I think in this connection, it's worth noting the program Praxis.
And I think their website is discoverpraxis.com.
It's dot something, but it's discoverpraxis.something.
And their whole approach is to say, when you turn 18, let's try a different approach.
We're going to give you...
An internship at a startup somewhere, and it's not going to be you're going to be getting coffee and donuts for everybody.
You're going to be actively involved in this field.
And then after you've done it for a year, you're guaranteed a job with a starting salary of at least $40K. So by the way, there's a number figure you can put on the opportunity cost, because at the very least, So for the next three years that you would have spent in college, 40k times 3, $120,000 is part of that opportunity cost.
Well, and assuming no increase over that time period and also assuming that those little incremental additions, that's where you're going to be starting from, right?
So, I mean, to say, you know, let's say you get 10%.
I'm not going to even attempt to do the math in my head.
But, you know, maybe that gets you closer to 50.
So you're starting with 50 and building up from there rather than maybe graduating with 40 if you're lucky.
Exactly. And I know many, personally, on a personal level, many success stories from Praxis where they go, they fall in love with what they're doing, they want to stay on with that firm, the firm loves them.
And they advance, and they don't look back and say, well, because I wasn't sitting in a room full of hungover seniors who never read the book and are giving book reports, and I've got to sit and listen to their book reports, that I had a lesser experience in life.
To the contrary, I got an amazing jump on everybody.
I got a jump on all my people.
Not only did I get a jump on them, Not only do I have a job with promise and with promotions in my future, but I have no debt.
Now, I know, by the way, we should anticipate an objection.
Some people could say, well, look, Steph and Tom, it's easy for you to say, you guys have degrees, right?
And here you are saying, well, maybe people don't need to get them.
Well, what I'm actually saying is that you should consider all factors, right?
Because you may come out and say, well, the fact is, in this current system, I need this credential to get the door open for me.
And if that's what you decide, at least go in with the knowledge of what you're going to get out of it and what you're not.
I mean, if you put a lot into it and you really want to learn, you personally can get a lot out of it, but you're going to be the exception to the rule.
You're going to be surrounded by people, in many cases, who just don't care.
So don't have this phony baloney view of what college is.
It's a place for people to get drunk for four years in a lot of cases.
That's just a fact! That's just a fact.
But you should evaluate it.
So what are the opportunity costs of four years and a lifetime of incipient alcoholism and Marxism?
I mean, it's quite a bit.
My point is simply, don't just do it as a knee-jerk response because you think that's what's expected of you.
That's the key thing. Because especially in the age of the internet, you've got Praxis, which is an amazing option.
And you also have ways to learn skills that are really marketable and valuable yourself.
And you can build up your own portfolio by going on a freelancer website and building up a portfolio while somebody else is taking some inane course about nothing for four years.
You're building up a portfolio.
So by the time you're 21, You have a portfolio that some people in their mid-20s haven't got, or even 30, that you can show to people.
And there are places in this world that will say, well, let's see, we have an English major who has some design skills, but who basically followed all the rules and dutifully went for four years.
Or we have somebody who broke the rules and has incredible initiative and became really, really top-notch at this.
There are firms that will say, you know what?
We're going to take a chance on this one.
Oh, yeah. I mean, how many people said, well, I'm not going to invest in Microsoft or Apple because their founders didn't finish their college degrees.
That's ridiculous, right?
Right. Now, yeah, that's a good point.
And for those who say, well, Tom and Steph have...
There are degrees and so on.
That's fair and that's true, but that's like blaming your great-grandfather for using a horse and buggy rather than a Maserati.
It's because back in the day, I mean, I remember this so clearly that I had to grind through a lot of Immanuel Kant for my degree, for my master's thesis, and a lot of Hegel and Locke and so on.
And, you know, there are indexes, but they're not always the very, very best.
And I remember... Literally two weeks after I handed in my thesis, I saw an ad.
It's like, now available on CD-ROM, all of the great texts of Western literature and Western philosophy.
And it's like, I could have just done a keyword search.
Oh, Lord. And so back in the day, there were no course materials online.
There was no online.
And so this was the only particular path.
So you can't blame us for using coal when there was no natural gas available.
That, I think, is important.
The people I have on this show, I mean, sometimes I know what their education is.
I don't really care.
I care if they're smart, if they have good arguments, if they're eloquent, if they're concise, because otherwise I just keep going on and on.
And so, being able to measure people's quality in real time, if you want to know if somebody's eloquent, well, if you want to show that you're eloquent and have a good command of language and reasoning, Do a show.
You know, even if only, you know, 50 people or 500 people watch it, at least you can include that in your resume.
Because right now, I think college has become this big, giant, ridiculously expensive IQ test.
And the reason for that is because IQ tests are generally frowned upon, if not downright illegal, for employers to use.
But just imagine how efficient it would be.
You get one IQ test, costs you a couple of hundred bucks an hour or two of your time.
You hand that in and that's your biggest single predictor for success in the marketplace is again absent the need for very specific skills IQ tests are the way to go but of course IQ tests can't be fudged in the way that subjectivist college educations can and of course IQ tests would make money for IQ companies but they'd cost a lot of money for colleges so I think that's one of the reasons they're frowned upon or another thing is If the course materials are online,
and most of them are, why don't you just not require that you go to the college in order to take the test?
Like, I mean, if you want to be efficient, right?
Which, you know, whether you're sitting there in a class, for the most part, not asking questions, or you're watching the material online taking notes from that...
I don't see the huge difference why you have to be physically there.
I mean, you and I aren't in the same place to do this.
In the medieval universities, they would give you an oral exam afterward.
And the question was not, you know, was the professor taking the role and were you sitting there?
But did you have the knowledge?
If you had the knowledge, we'll give you the degree.
I mean, that's... That's the important thing.
And by the way, I sometimes on my show, I had a guy named Bob Bly on my show because I think a great line of work to go into if you just don't know what to do, but you're young and you want to try your hand at something that's potentially very lucrative and that you'll never be unemployed if you're any good at it.
And that is being a copywriter.
And I don't mean intellectual property copywriter.
I mean copy, C-O-P-Y-W-R-I-T-E-R.
Like you write advertising copy or you write emails for companies that sell.
And what you do is you go out and you read all the classic works on this.
You read Bob Bly, for example.
You read his works on copywriting.
And you subscribe to people's email lists and you see how they do it.
And you interiorize that and you start at it and you work at it and work at it and work at it.
Because a firm that will hire you as a freelancer to do their email copywriting or their ad copywriting, what difference does it make what college you went to?
What matters is if you bring results, that's what matters.
I hired Bob Bly to do some copywriting for me, even though I'm actually pretty good as a copywriter.
I'm not the world's expert.
Bob is, so I brought him on.
I don't even know if Bob went to high school.
I didn't even check. It never even occurred to me to ask.
Or what he got on his English course in high school.
Exactly right. It did not matter.
I don't care what he thinks about transvestites in Shakespearean literature, of which there are many.
The point is, what I care about is results.
And he just worked and worked and worked.
And he read and he honed his craft and he became good.
And when I say stuff like this, people feel like that's pie in the sky.
But that's because we're chained to this ideology that everybody's helpless in the face of forces beyond their control.
And all you can do is just go along with the system, study for four years and learn something.
You can break out of that.
And that's just one example.
There are a lot of things.
If you just go over to Skillshare or to Udemy and you look at all the different courses that are taught there, you see all the different careers you could have where you would learn the stuff yourself and then prove yourself with your own portfolio on all kinds of platforms, Upwork, Fiverr, 99designs.com, whatever it Upwork, Fiverr, 99designs.com, whatever it is.
All these sorts of things are available to you.
And like if you're 16 years old, let's say, you have the world right where you want it because you could start in on this right now.
And by the time you're 21, you'll be the king of the world.
Yeah.
No, I mean, when I would just grab a copy here.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know how you did the covers for your books, right?
We got a nice cover for The Art of the Argument.
I wasn't sitting there saying, all right, I'm going to need this design college, and I'm going to need this.
And it's like, hey, let me see your work.
Oh, that's cool. Give it a shot.
You know, I mean, now with the internet, you can display all of your skills.
I mean, even if you're an actor.
You can just do some scene studies.
You can just film it with your webcam.
It doesn't really matter. If you're good, people can...
I mean, good lord.
I mean, look at someone like Justin Bieber.
He just starts off by singing on YouTube and jamming on a street corner.
Someone's filming it in terrible audio.
And if there's talent, now we have an audition.
I would rather people focus on sharpening and honing their talents rather than following the train tracks of a fairly dismal educational system.
And also remember as well that when you and I went to college, well, I mean, we're not the same age, but let's say when I went to college, junior high schools and high schools were better.
Which means that the kids going into college were generally more literate, better read.
And part of that was just the general decay of a status system, which always seems the entropy of bureaucracy and so on.
Part of that is this, you know, wild multiculturalism where huge amounts of resources are being devoted away from teaching kids to supporting kids who don't speak the language, who don't have the same culture, who don't.
I understand how the Western system works.
But also, you know, tablets, video games have displaced reading for a lot of people.
I mean, trying to explain to my daughter how boring sometimes it could be as a child is kind of hard for her to sort of comprehend.
And so, as a whole, the people coming in to university are not as smart, I think, as a generation or two ago.
And how do universities accommodate that?
They can't suddenly make everyone smarter, so they're simply going to have to just lower their standards.
And to your point earlier, I don't know how many really great and engaged conversations you had with people.
I had one director who directed me in Macbeth.
He was a really philosophical guy.
We had some great debates. We played squash and then Go have a coffee.
And I remember there's a place called the Peel Pub in Montreal.
Back in the day, 99 cents for two eggs, toast, and all-you-can-drink coffee.
And dumping all-you-can-drink coffee on college students is a really, really bad idea.
It's like all the free cocaine at the stockbroker convention that you could ask for.
So there were a few people.
But before you go to college, go to college.
Just visit the college.
Go to the cafeteria.
Go to where the quad, wherever people are hanging out.
Hey, what are you taking? Oh, I'm taking philosophy.
Oh, what do you think of this?
So let's have a conversation about that.
Just see if they're at all interested and engaged in talking about what they're there to study.
You'll find a shockingly few number of people who are.
Well, that is the problem.
And of course, I've seen that both as a student and as a faculty member.
So again, I think people ought to listen to what we're saying, first of all, about what you're likely to encounter on a real college campus today.
That it's not a home-run absolute guarantee that it's something that's going to be good for you or that you need, although it may.
Again, you have to evaluate for your own case.
But there are options.
I gave praxis as an option.
I gave working on your own through various different ways as an option.
For example, let's suppose you wanted to be a graphic designer.
You can easily do that on your own.
I mean, yeah, obviously, you can go to a great design college, and you do very well.
You get hired by a big firm.
But you could work for yourself, never run out of work learning on your own.
But what you would do is you would work for very, very cheaply the first few years.
Like, you'd be young. Again, 16, 17, 18.
Worked for really cheap to build up the portfolio and the testimonials.
That not only did this person deliver to me a great design, but this person delivered it on time and had great communication and a good attitude and was flexible and was adaptable to our needs.
That is gold.
And you can get that through sheer elbow grease.
But a lot of people just don't have that.
I mean, I talk about this stuff a lot and either they just want it all handed to them or they'll say, Woods, this sounds like a lot of work.
What do you think? Anything's going to be a lot of work.
Anything that's worth doing is going to take you some time and effort, but eventually you stick with it and you get there.
And by the way, I'm not saying this just to brown nose with our host here, but I believe a certain Stefan Molyneux is living proof of this.
I mean, you didn't start off with a giant audience.
You didn't come out of the womb with millions of people waiting to hear what you had to say.
Well, it's been – the phrase that has always stuck with me is the 10-year overnight success, right?
I mean – Yeah, that's right. I love that expression.
Yeah. I mean, look at any band.
I looked just for funsies.
I looked up some bands I like like Huey Lewis and In Excess and Queen and all of that.
These guys all did their time in the trenches.
They all did their time in the dive bars.
They all did their time just – Huey Lewis was like in the Middle East playing harmonica on a street corner for a year.
I didn't even know the guy could sing until later.
You know, I think it was even after their first two or three albums, Queen had no money because, of course, they were being pillaged by all of the jerks in the music industry who seemed to exist as bloodsucking vampires on sucking the blood out of the throat of anyone who can sing and play.
But yeah, Freddie Mercury, a great singer and songwriter, was living in a...
Crappy apartment with mold on the wall, you know, like after their first couple of albums, because that's just the way it goes.
So like now I'm doing this speaking tour in July.
This is 2018. Just for those who want to check it out, it's in Australia.
And I think we're going to touch down in New Zealand.
It's axiomatic.events.
So it's like, okay, 11 years.
Is it 11? Could be almost 12.
11 or 12 years after I've started.
Hey, look, a speaking tour just magically falls into my lap.
Out of nowhere, with no preparation.
It's like, you got to have a whole lot of cabooses before you get over that hill.
Yeah, no kidding. And particularly, our folks, I mean, we have people following us who Follow us because we're not conventional.
And so we're not conventional in a lot of things, and one of them is the kinds of decisions you make at this point in your life.
You can follow the conventional route, and you can conventionally sit by the phone waiting for somebody to call you, or you can take the bull by the horns.
And moreover, given that we see that one errant tweet...
Can get your whole TV series canceled, right?
Now, look, I mean, she's an idiot to post that tweet, if you ask me.
But I mean, just knowing what's going to happen, what are you, not a member of American society?
You should not understand this.
But yeah, I mean, just bad taste, whatever.
But the point is, this can happen to you.
They find something you wrote two years ago that ruins you.
It's nice to have something in your back pocket for that.
It's nice to have a skill that you can always-- that you can market to the whole world.
It's nice to be thinking about that in your spare time and not thinking about it when you're scared because a robot just took your job and you just got the pink slip.
That's not the time.
When you're terrified, that's not the time.
Right now, when things are good and comfortable is when you should be thinking about this stuff.
Well, and just a reminder to people, too, you may have to budget for more than four years.
A significant proportion of students don't complete their degrees within four years.
Maybe five or six years. Well, that's another 40% or so to what you're paying.
I think it's a majority.
It's like 75% or 80% of students can switch their majors at some point.
Not all of those credits are going to transfer.
It is not a good place.
I would say if you don't really know what you want to do.
If you don't really, like, I love history, I'm going to study history, I'm going to start a Dan Carlin-style history podcast, or like, whatever it is that you're going to do, okay, well then, but if you're just like, well, I'm not sure what I want to do, so I'll go to college, that seems to me a complete recipe for disaster.
And the other thing about college, too, it sort of struck me when you were talking about, you know, How to succeed is that in college, people are still interested in you.
Like the professors are still interested in you.
They'll grade your stuff. You don't have to pay them.
You don't have to win their interest.
You know, they'll just – your hand in your paper.
They'll give you all their feedback and so on.
But I think it delays this inevitable chilling realization, Tom, that happens when you're out of college, which is the moment you step foot off that hallowed campus for the last time, no one cares about you anymore.
Yep. Outside of your family and your friends, which is all great and wonderful.
You've got your tribal loved ones.
Nobody cares.
I want to do a philosophy show.
I don't care. Tom's like, I want to publish books and be a New York Times bestseller.
I don't care. And there's this weird thing where if you've had, you know, your parents, they care.
Oh, don't fall down the stairs.
All very good stuff. Don't run into traffic.
We care. We care. The teachers in high school, the guidance counselors, they care, or at least they take in an interest.
But... After you've spent a quarter century of your life with everyone being like, hey, are you okay?
Do you need anything? Are you alright?
Hey, how can I facilitate what you want to do next?
Oh, that'd be great. Here's a train track for you to get on so you can get to the next thing.
You finally get vaulted out into the interstellar, chilling depths of space where nobody cares about what you want.
And you're going to have to get people's attention.
You can't scream at them.
You can't shake them by the collar because that's all kind of wrong.
You have to find a way to get people's attention.
And the longer you're in school...
The more that muscle either fails to develop or atrophies.
Nobody cares. Oh, I want to write songs.
No one cares. I'm going to mock a rock opera.
Nobody cares. Nobody cares about anything that you want to do.
And finding a way to make them interested and care is the great challenge.
And you're not going to get taught that in school.
Sorry for that rant, but I just really want people to get that point because it took me a little while to understand.
No argument from me.
Absolutely. So, my perspective, and this is just mine, so obviously feel free to fill in where you like.
My perspective is, default position, unless you have to, unless it's like a hoop you've got to jump through to get to your engineering dream or your doctor dream or your...
Lawyer dream or whatever, don't go.
Don't go, don't go, don't go, don't go. If you can find any way to do what you want, well, if you don't know what you do, what you want, then just live.
You know, travel and work and just figure out.
You'll meet someone, you'll find some topic, read, think, listen to a wide variety of different people.
Tom's show's great, what I do is great, and there's lots of people who are putting great stuff out there.
Something's going to trip your interest in a very foundational way.
Way. And then that's going to give you some guidance.
But if you don't know exactly what you want to do, college is a bad idea.
If there's any way that you can get what you want done without going to college, fantastic.
You say, oh, college is all for the contacts you'll make and so on.
Eh, you're out there working and freelancing.
You'll make tons of contacts.
Learn to love the free market.
Learn to respect the process that no one cares.
Like, learn to think of yourself like you've got some third cousin you meet once at a family gathering who's like, I want to become a mime.
And you sit there and say...
All right, my life mission now is now to help this guy become a mind by hook or by crook.
I'm going to devote myself 20.
You don't care. It's like, yeah, good luck with that.
And that's the way you appear to other people and learning how to love the market, to love customers, to love being productive, to love being useful, to build contacts, to build skills, to build your network, to build your reputation.
You come out of school with no reputation, but if you've worked for a couple of years, you have.
A reputation. That stuff to me is the primary goal.
And if you can't find any way to do it without college, then I'd look into it.
But boy, if you can, you'd be so far ahead.
Yeah. I mean, not only are you sparing yourself the ideological terror, you know, the ideological concentration camp, the prison camp.
And rape accusations. It's just a cornucopia of delight that you'll encounter there, that you'll miss out on.
And it's also the expense.
It's a lot of just the misplaced time.
You feel like... You know, I hope I don't sound like a Philistine, but I'm pretty sure I'm never going to use the things I'm studying right now.
And as soon as I set foot off this campus, these things will never come up in my life again.
Meanwhile, there are other people who are pursuing things they absolutely love doing, and they're getting better at them and better.
And every day that you're in that class that means nothing to you, somebody else is getting better and better and better at something that that person loves.
And we'll devote a successful life to.
So I would say, again, if you're 16 or 15 or 17, now is the time.
Because none of your peers will be that advanced.
None of them. I first started learning how to program computers when I was 12.
And that was then my...
Entrepreneurial career for like 15 years.
Just find something you love. When you're in school, you're pursuing what other people are telling you to do, which is going to eclipse what you love to do.
And once you can find what you love to do and you can monetize it, there really is no better possible life.
And by the way, I'll just close with this.
I mean, I know that a lot of times people say we're living in a particularly bad economy and it's really people are in a precarious financial situation.
And I do understand that that's true for some people.
But the other side of that coin is that To the contrary, you are living in a time of unbelievable opportunity.
Can you imagine you can train yourself to do almost anything for almost free from the comfort of your home, and you can sell that service for pretty much for free from the comfort of your home to the entire world, like on freelancer.com or Upwork or Upwork.
You could sell courses on Udemy.
You could do this all without even leaving your house.
Could you imagine people in the 50s, what they would have killed for this, and yet we're told the 50s were a great time in America when the top marginal tax rate was 90% and everybody was happy.
How many shows have you done at the moment, Tom?
Well, I ain't at no Molyneux level of shows, but I've done about 1168.
Okay, 1168, probably about what?
I know you're a little shorter than mine.
I made so many 30 to 60 minutes, depending on.
So, you know, if you ever want a fun thought exercise, so imagine you just recorded those 30 years ago.
You'd have to put them on cassette tapes.
Now, imagine... And then I'd have to mail them out.
It would be this giant crate of cassette tapes that would cost, I don't know, 500 bucks to mail to someone.
There'd be 500 bucks worth of cassette tapes.
And you'd have to sit there with a cassette copier going, you know, like, I mean, can you imagine?
Whereas now you just upload it someplace.
It's available around the world forever.
I mean, this is just an astounding time, particularly for communication.
And if you look around at that and say, well, no way I can make anything out of that, then you're not thinking hard enough.
Right, right. You're not working hard enough.
So the website is TomWoods.com.
We'll put links to Tom's books, which are fantastic.
Twitter.com forward slash Thomas E. Woods.
And if you could tell people who are just on the listening side of things, Tom, where they can go to get the Liberty Classroom, which again, I strongly urge people to look into.
Yeah, you should look into it. It's LibertyClassroom.com.
Lots of courses. And you know what I love about my...
I'll just say it, nerdy members of that site.
When I asked them, what new course would you like me to add?
The very first one they said is, we'd like a course on logic.
And I thought, heaven help you people.
That's the one you, I could, I could teach you anything.
And you want, I could find somebody for any topic and they, they picked formal logic, which I'm sure you studied in your, in your studies.
But so we put that on there, but I'll just say most of it's fun stuff.
You know, U.S. history with no political correctness, economics, all the rest of it.
There is a logic course.
And, you know, some of the nerds are going to enjoy that.
But it's mostly awesome anti-PC stuff taught by PhDs who somehow managed to get that degree, you know, without being executed or whatever.
Oh, yeah. No, you want to learn how to swim from the strongest salmon who swam against the current.
All right. Thanks, Tom. It was a great, great pleasure.
