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Aug. 20, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:15:57
THE END OF GOVERNMENT 'EDUCATION' - Stefan Molyneux and Jack Spirko of 'The Survival Podcast'
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We are live with the live.
So I'm here with Jack Spierko.
And I guess we've moved in some sort of orbit over the last couple of years.
We've been back and forth a little, but we thought it would be a great topic for us to introduce ourselves to you, the lovely audience.
Jack runs a daily podcast dealing with prepping, survivalling, and so on.
Survivaling?
I'm not even sure that's a word.
Let's just say it is for the sake of professionalism.
So Jack, I wonder if you could just, I guess, introduce yourself to our audience.
And I guess the topic we'll be chatting.
Yeah. Anyway, my name is Jack Spierka.
I'm the host of the Survival Podcast.
We've been running about 12 years, about a quarter million daily downloads of the podcast itself.
We cover all aspects of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and liberty.
Really a variety show.
We'll be talking about deep philosophical stuff like we are going to do today.
One day, next day, maybe more like bushcraft survival skills.
Maybe the next day on how to grow your own food.
Maybe the next day on guns. And we've just kind of run that for a number of years.
And of course, with COVID, that's like the Super Bowl for a survivalist, right?
I mean, that's about as global of an impacting event as you get.
So I've been deeply involved with this, but I've also been deeply involved in looking at megatrends for the last five years.
And I've been saying for five years, this decade between 2020 and 2030 would be the greatest decade of flux and change that any living person had ever seen.
I've expected that.
And what COVID's done and all of the lockdowns, which I believe are largely unnecessary, has accelerated a lot of these trends.
And the one we want to talk about today is education.
And specifically, when I reached out to you on Parler, it was about K-12 education, primary and secondary.
But I believe it's also going to impact post-secondary, so we can deal with that as well today.
I want to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Just before we get into the school stuff, let's talk a little bit about prepping, survivalling, and so on.
I guess I started about 10 or 11 years ago, and you, of course, I mean, it's not been a core of what it is that I talk about.
I've sort of mentioned it from time to time, but this is like a big thing for you.
And so I wonder if you could introduce the audience who may not be super familiar with this whole mindset, what the major principles are.
I actually come at it with 12 tenants and we won't go through all of those because we'll eat the whole show up with that.
But the primary thing that I try to teach is instead of thinking about, hey, this particular disaster, because I find that's what sends people into prepping.
Like they find out, oh, gee, we print money and then they freak out and they look at the national debt and they freak out over that.
So they think there's going to be an economic collapse.
Or, you know, they read a book on something like a pandemic and they become convinced that's the problem or what have you.
And so I usually end up with people that come into my circle coming from some particular point of fear.
That's kind of lit a fire under their butt as to everything's not so, you know, particularly well.
And I grew up in rural Pennsylvania where if you didn't have a generator in the winter and the power went off, you might freeze, right?
So you had generators.
We stored food because we were poor and we grew a garden.
And if you didn't store food, then you lost all the food from your garden.
So I kind of came from that mindset.
We didn't call it prepping. And that...
Maybe come at this from the standpoint of you don't prepare for a specific disaster.
You prepare to deal without systems of support.
So you look at all of the areas in your life where you're dependent upon outside systems, and then you either go into self-sufficiency or self-reliance with those.
So self-reliance we would measure in time.
So if you have enough backup fuel to run a generator for two weeks, you're two weeks self-reliant.
Self-sufficiency, we measure more in percentage.
So if you have enough solar to run 50% of your power needs, well, you're 50% self-sufficient almost infinitely at that point.
So you try to use those two concepts together to put as much redundancy in your life as possible, make your life as non-brittle as possible.
And, you know, you lay out a plan, you work the plan.
When you get to that point, you evaluate, you keep increasing.
That's kind of condensing 12 years of work in a nutshell, and it's kind of hard to do.
No, no, I get that. And I understand the sort of self-sufficiency argument.
For myself, I've hooked up my generator to my home gym.
The big problem, of course, being that when I work out, I'm visible from Mars.
That, of course, the giant glow, it's hugely important.
I've got birds migrating to my household.
I am a magnetic vortex.
So clearly, you have to be careful with the amount of power that you generate at home with your tidy biceps.
Okay, now, so you kind of came through it just growing up in the country, and I was sort of thinking about this just before we were chatting about this odd cycle of civilization, which is kind of part of what we're talking about today.
The cycle of civilization is, the country sucks!
Let's get into big cities!
Let's be dependent on a highly fragile chain of supply.
And then let's develop pathological altruism, which draws more and more people into the city through the welfare state.
And then let's just keep printing money so that we don't disturb this pathological altruism.
And then since the supply chain is designed on money and the acceptance of money, eventually the cities just go full ancient Rome collapse.
And then it's like, you centralize into the cities, you get pathological altruism and money printing, and then everybody scatters back out to the country.
And this has happened so many times throughout human history.
The Roman... Rome itself, when it finally collapsed, went from a couple of mil people down to 18,000 in about a year.
This kind of depopulation scenario can happen with extreme...
And I'm not trying to alarm anyone.
I'm just talking about facts of history and seeing the amount of fiat currency that's wallpapering over the giant economic crater left by COVID. It does seem like the accelerationism that some of the more end-the-system types are into seems to be hitting the gas full.
Yeah, and I don't... I think that you really have to come to this with a concept of a transformation of systems rather than end of a system.
And then when you look at transformation, you need to look at it a little bit differently.
For those that are watching the video, people think of like a system ending and a new system beginning, like your two fingertips coming together.
That's really not how systems tend to happen.
You usually end up with this overlap where you have elements of the old order and elements of a new order overlapping each other for a period of time before you completely switch over.
And the longer that is, that seems like a bad thing.
It's actually kind of a better thing because it gives people more time to deal with the transition.
So if you had the kind of transition that I've been forecasting with these mega trends happening in 10 years, that's fast.
That's why it seems so abrupt.
But what's happened with COVID is almost like So you have much less time, say what was going to happen in 10 years, the majority of it occurring in three or four.
And if you were going to have incredible disruption over a decade, imagine what it looks like over two, three, four years, because some of it will happen really fast and be over and done with it.
Some will take longer because our society is so complex.
There's so many layers in there.
Like, you know, mainly I want to talk about education today, but there's so many other things.
You're talking about the outflow from the cities.
That's actually the first megatrend.
In this series of articles that I've put out in people leaving these big cities.
And of course, the first cities are going to be left are the ones that have gone the craziest.
The ones that have people literally taking a dump in the street.
A guy owns a business.
He's paying ridiculous taxes.
He's going through all kinds of hurdles to run a business in a city like San Francisco.
There's a dude taking a dump on his stoop of his business.
The police will do nothing about it.
And if he goes out and prevents that from happening, they'll arrest him, or they'll find him.
And there's a point where that person's like, I'm not doing this anymore.
And then when you have, you know, on top of that, something like the riots we're seeing, and the police stand down and allow those businesses to be ransacked, We're good to go.
You get these people in the city, and then all of a sudden Google or whomever they work for, whatever tech company they work for, or a lot of companies aren't even tech companies, but they do a tech job, say, you know what, with this pandemic, people that don't have to be here work from home, so they work from home.
Employers always feared, if I let this guy work from home, he's going to slack off.
Turns out people tend to do their jobs because they like to keep their jobs and their money.
So the guy goes home, does his job, keeps his job and his money.
The employer goes, wait a minute, this works better.
You know what, you can just keep doing that when this is over.
Half the employees or more are gone.
Now they're looking at this giant building.
They can't sublet it because everybody's doing the same thing.
And all of a sudden, the employer's bailing out of that city or bailing out to the outskirts of that city or downsizing their facility there.
And all these people that are working now remotely are like, wait a minute, why am I paying $2,700 For a one-bedroom apartment with a guy taking a crap in the front of the apartment when I go out every day and needles up and down.
So that guy's like, well, I'm going to go out to Sheboyganville and for the same money, I'm going to get a five-bedroom house with an acre and a half of land.
I'm going to have my kids in a much better neighborhood.
And a lot of these people, they're right at the age...
We're there starting to start families.
A lot of these people that are upwardly mobile in these types of jobs that are making this adaptation, they're 25 to 35 years old, they're ready to put down roots, and they're already predisposed to move to the suburbs, and that's typical.
Now they're just moving further out.
This drives down everything. There's like 14,000 vacant apartments in Manhattan right now in August, which is usually when inventory is the lowest.
You've got U-Haul, Ryder, et cetera, breaking records on people fleeing California, Illinois.
Washington State, Oregon, New York.
And this is just going to continue.
And they're not all going to one place.
It's not like they're all going to Texas like that was going on for years.
Now they're spreading out because they can go anywhere.
And that's all cascading.
And that leads into education because all of a sudden you got people pulling your kids out of school.
Because if I'm going to have my kid at home for school anyway, why am I going to be in the state system now?
That was the main reason that held parents there.
But at the same time, people are leaving.
And if you have a city population in decline, Well, some of those people have kids.
Those kids are leaving too. You put that together, now the schools are downsizing.
Now the teachers are getting laid off.
Now the teacher can't afford to live in Los Angeles anymore because she doesn't have a job in Los Angeles anymore.
Now she's moving out. And this whole thing is a cascade of failures, one on top of the other.
And like I said, COVID's like somebody went and dumped gas because all this was happening already.
I've been watching it happen for a decade.
Well, this is the first economic crash with broadband, and I don't think people really understand what that means.
I mean, I've lived through a whole bunch of these now.
I'm past a half century, so at the 80s, the late 90s, 2007, 2008, and so on.
So I've been through a whole bunch of these, but this is the first time where the scattershot of formerly congregated worker bees can actually be sustainable, at least at the moment, with broadband and this kind of technology, the kind of technology that allows us to have this kind of conversation.
And people don't understand, I think, the domino effect that happens because most people who are not in the business world, they see the business-to-consumer economy.
Now, that's, you know, important and that's kind of the point of the business-to-business economy, but the B2B economy is vastly bigger than the business-to-consumer economy.
It's sort of like being on a cruise ship and it's like, hmm, I feel a faint humming through my feet and it's like, yes, that is the giant 12 billion horsepower engine that's getting you from Alaska to San Francisco.
You may not know it, you know, but you go down there and there's a whole lot of stuff going on that you just feel this little hum.
And this business-to-business economy is absolutely huge.
It does not require any more people to be direct, flights, hotels.
You know, when I was in the business world as an entrepreneur, man, I spent like two weeks a month sometimes, three weeks a month, Driving, flying, meetings, because these were like the old school guys who was like, you know, if I can't feel your face, I can't trust you.
You've got to be fair. I need to mingle our breath over calamari in order to be able to trust you, especially if you're kind of a new starting out business guy.
So there's so much of the commercial real estate, rental cars, airplanes, hotels, you name it, so much.
Of this economy has kind of been waiting for the new digital age generation to come along and say, yeah, we can meet over Zoom or Skype or whatever it is or, you know, here.
So yeah, we can meet that way and it's totally fine.
But the old school guys, you kind of had to wait for them to die off.
But now, as I said, the gas has really been hit because...
I mean, I remember years ago saying, you know, working from home is fine.
It's very productive and so on.
And when I had a big R&D project to do, I had the company rent me an apartment off-site.
I spent four days a week there with an R&D crew and we produced some fantastic software in between endless games of Unreal Tournament.
But anyway, so the fact, as you say, that this gas has been hit and people are decentralizing and people are working remotely.
And, you know, I believe, I genuinely believe that...
This is going to be absolutely transformative to our economy and in a lot of ways to the best.
You know, if you don't need to fly for a business meeting, that's good, right?
I mean, think of all of the gas you save, the expenses that you save, the carbon you save.
I mean, if you can work remotely, if you don't need to commute, like this is all for the best.
But of course, we've got so many people hanging on to the existing structure of the economy that disruption looks like destruction.
I agree with you that everything we're talking about long term is something that's necessary and it will be a net gain for humanity in the long term, assuming the state doesn't use it to do what the state always does, which is grow and grab power.
The technology itself, the mindset itself is better.
You know, Like you said, there's no reason to get on an airplane and fly 800 miles if I can do business with you the way that you and I are conducting this podcast right now.
I did that for years, too.
I was in remote sales management, and I had 35 people working across eight states, and I would go in with my sales reps, and we'd make deals and all.
And I'm not saying it wasn't effective, but it wasn't always necessary.
And what would inevitably happen is, okay, so I need to go to Richmond, and I need to talk to this distributor, and I need to hammer some things out.
That needs to be a face-to-face meeting.
But I'm going to Richmond from Philadelphia.
I don't want to do that for half a day.
So I'll go down there for three or four days.
So now I've got my sales rep, right?
Coming up with a bunch of monkey-do freaking meetings for me to go to so they feel like, hey, the regional guy's not going to fire me because he doesn't think I'm working.
And a lot of it was, you know, some relationship building and all.
It wasn't that it wasn't useful, but it certainly wasn't necessary.
And then when I would get home, if you did that kind of work, you know, then you get home and you spend the next, like, 72 hours with no sleep keeping all the promises you made.
When you could have done all of that instantly, and that's happening in a million ways.
Like you said, the B2B side of this, people have to think about when an entire four-story building closes because the company sends all of its workers home, maybe keeps a small core working in some little incubator somewhere else, sharing space.
How many businesses operated just to service that building?
The janitors, the people that come in and wipe the freaking plants down with soap, and the coffee vendor, and how many little restaurants that are already hurting made their living off of those employees when they took lunch?
There's entire cafeterias.
I've worked at places where there's a cafeteria that serves that complex, but that cafeteria is an independent business, or maybe multiple independent.
They're all toast. And you're just beginning to, like, peel that first layer off the onion.
This just keeps going.
And you're right. The broadband thing, it's actually been here, but now it's more available.
And then everybody got that. Again, you've got to think about that test drive.
You're convinced this new car from Ford or Chevy or Toyota sucks, but your buddy talks to you about enough.
You go down the dealership and you drive and you go, this doesn't suck.
I like this. And that's what's happening with remote work.
It's happening with remote education.
And once those things happen, there's this entire group of side effects that get drugged with it.
Like I said, it can be a net gain.
It can be a good thing.
But it's going to hurt.
And when you look at teachers in particular...
If somebody like a technical person loses their job, they have a marketable skill.
They have something they can go out to the general market with and say, here's all the ways that my skills translate.
You have a teacher with 25 years of experience teaching fourth grade.
I am not putting him or her down.
I can't do it.
I couldn't tolerate kids for that long every day.
I respect it.
But if you're coming to me back when I was managing a sales force and you want to start selling computer test equipment for me, I don't want you.
And most places don't want you.
I know people that are really good that got put out the farm at like 50.
That's one of the reasons I went and did my own thing like you did years ago, so it wouldn't happen to me.
But I know these people who are really skilled, 50, 55 years old, can't find a job now.
Well, before this.
In a booming economy because, you know what, I'd rather get the young go-getter that'll kill himself.
Even if that guy's willing to work for less than his rate, I can get the young guy who will work harder than you for less than your rate too.
Why would I hire you? Now you get people that have had a job that they thought they had to rob a post office to lose.
Buy. And it's going to happen.
You're going to see major layoffs in the public education system by winter.
It has to because the feedback I'm getting is an exodus, like I was saying it would be big.
It's way bigger than I thought.
The place that we're using for my grandson, we're homeschooling him while my kids work, is a place called the Sellers Academy.
Amazing, amazing school founded by a guy that actually invented gigabit ethernet and the hydrogen car.
Definitely doing a better job than the school system that we had him in before.
But last week, he started getting kicked out of his lessons.
He'd get to the end of a lesson and he'd get knocked out of the app.
So we called him up and they're like, we have so many people coming in that our network protocol management is now saying, once you're done, we...
We drop you until we can fix this.
They were overwhelmed with new students.
And that's just one location.
The latest report I heard off of mainstream media was about 10 million homeschoolers this year.
And those are not virtual learners.
Those are not kids that are still going to the state school.
Those are kids that their parents said, hey, if Johnny's going to be home anyway...
Let's look at the Ron Paul curriculum.
Let's look at Excel. Let's roll your own.
Let's look at unschooling. There's countless options.
And a lot of parents, I don't think, knew how many options there were.
And in some states, I know you're in Canada, but in some states in the United States, it's ridiculously easy.
In my state of Texas, my kids sent an email and said, hey, we're pulling the kids out.
Bye. And when they say something like, well, what curriculum are you using?
None of your business. You are literally required to report nothing to them.
And so as far as I'm concerned, my grandson is enrolled in a private school in California and doing distance learning with them.
Okay, so let's, you know, I've always been loathe to make predictions.
I certainly put my toe in the water from time to time, but I'm going to sort of break protocol and talk about it now.
I believe, and this is not just based on a hunch, the data is pretty solid, but I want to know what you think.
I believe that this fall is going to be a disaster.
For education, for schools.
I think kids are super spreaders in a lot of ways.
They have more COVID if they've got infections than people even in the emergency department or emergency rooms or intensive care.
And so I think that a bunch of kids are going to come together.
Yeah, they're going to try and mandate masks and social distancing and hand washing, but they're kids!
So of course they're not going to follow the rules, particularly those in the early to mid-teens where the life seems to stretch forever and consequences is just a word in a dictionary.
I think the kids are all going to come together.
It's going to spread, and they're going to bring it back to the homes, and it's going to be like wildfire.
I really, really believe that to be the case.
And then, you know, I think that schools should just be toasted for the fall, in my humble opinion, because what's going to happen is you're going to get this huge spread.
A lot of people are going to get sick, and they're going to shut them down anyway.
So I think they should just shut them down without...
However many people are going to get affected by this congregation of kids who are going to just bring it back everywhere.
So I think that for the foreseeable future, government education, the sort of centralized, you know, 30 kids in a classroom situation, it's kind of toast.
I don't think that that model is going to fundamentally survive.
And, you know, I get that that's tough for a lot of working parents, tough for a lot of single moms.
But by God, I can't imagine that it's going to be anything but beneficial to society as a whole in the long run.
So there's two different things there then, right?
So there's the future of the school system, and there's what would happen if we sent the kids back to school?
Would it be, you know, the apocalypse of the plague?
And on that one, my answer is absolutely not.
We have countries in Europe that have sent their kids back to school long ago.
They haven't had these massive breakouts.
Right? The latest data on the virus itself looks like when you get a population up to about 20 to 25 percent infection rate, it tends to burn itself out really hard.
If you look at the places that went first, like one of the mistakes we made is we judge the United States the way we judge Germany.
This is stupid. We're a massive country, 330 odd million people, totally different diverse regions.
We're a republic. We're not an individual state.
Texas has just gone through its big curve and people are like, that's because you opened up.
No, that's because it was our turn. So I think mostly when this virus comes to town, you have about a point where you have about a two-week ramp up to the peak.
And I actually looked at this like a technical analysis.
I looked at every country. In technical analysis of a stock, you call it a double-shoulders formation.
You have these two big peaks with a valley in the middle.
And you have a six-week where it just dies.
And it just dies out.
And that's why you see New York is not not blowing up because they're not opening up.
They're not blowing up.
There's plenty of contact.
If you look at some of the antibody testing in some of the neighborhoods, they've had a 75% antibody showing back up.
Most of the people that get this are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic.
Kids The odds a kid's going to die when this...
Your kid's more likely to die on the school bus.
Now, they can spread it.
They can spread it, but that's inherently limited in and of itself as well.
Now, the schools themselves, most schools in the United States are not going back.
They're doing virtual learning.
Now, once you do that, now you're putting mom and dad into a position where, well, maybe I should see what the other options are.
So the longer they keep the schools closed, The more they're signing their own death warrant as a system.
The longer they stay closed, the more likely it is that by the time you get to winter, the big black cloud you see, it's not kids spreading COVID. It's the death of the modern education system.
Because why am I going to keep my kid in the state system if I have my kid?
Like the big reason parents don't do this, when you really push a parent, they'll say, you know, like, you know, socialization.
Well, the kids are constantly screamed at for socializing anyway.
Kids are picked on. Kids are bullied.
You can put your kids in all kinds of activities.
We have homeschool groups. We have homeschool meetups where instead of like doing education together, you just do social activity.
That's not a problem. Well, you can get socialized in prison, too.
Yeah, right. You just don't necessarily want that perspective.
It's a lot like school, in a way, too.
Schools are like minimum security prisons today.
It always comes down to daycare.
Once you take away the state-mandated, monopolized, mandatory daycare service, there's no reason not to look outside.
As soon as you look outside, you start to look at your child's education the way you look at buying a pair of pants.
You might like jeans, and I might like cargo shorts.
I'm not going to buy jeans just because you like them.
We make decisions every day for ourselves based on what is the best thing at our means for what we want.
You do not want your kids in school.
You think you do, but you don't.
You want your children educated.
That's what you want. You want your children educated.
Homeschool kids complete college at 12% higher for the group than standardized education, right?
I mean, they win all the national science fairs.
No, sorry to interrupt you. I get that.
But to me, it's always a question of cause and effect, right?
Is it smarter parents who homeschool their kids and they're just getting that generic inheritance of IQ, which is like 80% genetic by our teens?
Or is it that there is a big improvement?
I certainly know that the stuff that I use from school, like the stuff that I use, particularly middle school, I mean, good Lord.
Honestly, my daughters and I were chatting about this the other day.
Like, well, what do you still use from middle school?
I'm like, uh...
You don't? Anxiety?
Isn't that a great case to not do it?
It's hard to remember, especially because the world has changed so much since we were in middle school that now everybody's got a calculator and a lookup device.
You don't need to memorize. You don't need a slide rule.
You don't need to know how to do long division, although it's useful to know how the numbers work together.
But so much has changed to the point where you have a giant computer in your pocket all the time that… You know, things just haven't kept up and I think people are going to start experimenting with these learning parts.
You know, the parents get together and they hire a teacher to teach a couple of kids.
That's really cool and the parents then have finally, by God, I hope, some control over education because, man, educational control has been yanked out of the hands of parents and handed over to radicals in unions and activists and, hey, let's experiment on your kids with some entirely new Bill Gates learning curriculum that's never been tested and never been – I mean, they're not guinea pigs.
They're human beings in the making.
So on that, first of all, let me just say then to the right, stop trying to save a dying system.
Take this opportunity, capitalize on it, get your kids out of the system.
You've been criticizing rightfully for 20 years.
I've heard it's an indoctrination center.
I completely agree, so stop sending your children into it.
On to where you started there with...
Is it just that the parents that are doing homeschooling in general are smarter?
I don't think so, because a lot of parents are using something called unschooling, and they pretty much let the kids do whatever they want.
And some of those kids go to Ivy League schools on scholarships.
So what you're really dealing with, and this was something that I interview a lot of people that do this because I'm a big advocate for it, One of the people that's on, I call my expert counsel that does questions for the audience every week, Sue said, you cannot make a child learn anything they don't want to learn.
It's like pushing spring. You can move one end, but the other end is going to not move at all.
You also cannot prevent a child from learning something they do want to learn.
Nothing you can do will ever prevent that kid from learning something once they've decided, I want to learn this.
That's why we had a nine-year-old a few years ago that caught going through the drive-thru at McDonald's with the minivan.
And they said, how did you learn to drive?
And he said, you two. Because once he decided he was going to take the mini-man to McDonald's, there was nothing going to stop that kid from doing it.
So when we take kids into a home environment, our job as parents are not to be teachers.
It's to enable education.
It's to encourage the child to learn and then to find the method that works best for the kid.
That's the difference. Once you become a homeschool parent or a homeschool grandparent like me, you bring that kid in, you try something.
If it doesn't work, instead of keeping...
Shoving it in Johnny's face.
You better learn. You better learn.
Instead of doing that, you say, okay, this doesn't work for Johnny.
We need Johnny to be able to learn how to do math.
Let's go find a math curriculum that enables Johnny to learn how to do math.
And then if what you're doing with history works, you leave that alone because he's learning history.
So why would you jack with what's working to fix with what isn't working?
And to be fair to the education system, which I don't like to do, but I try to do it anyway, if I have 30 kids sitting in rows in a classroom, I can't do that.
I can't change the curriculum for Johnny and not change it for Stephon.
And I can't have Jack, who just blasts through everything in the class, out there throwing airplanes or something because he's done with his work.
But my grandson gets his work done on average in one and a half to two hours a day.
So what the hell was the school doing with him for seven more hours a day?
And he's got a 4.0 GPA. Funding administrators, Jack.
Sure, sure, you know that. So most of what these kids are doing in school is useless.
But it's not useless for the time it was created.
It was created in the 1800s.
It was designed to program our children to go work in a factory or something similar to that.
We needed a system that would take...
Basically, what was like the equivalent of a 1600s peasant in the freest economy that ever existed, meaning I could stay on my dad's farm and I was good.
I had no need to leave the farm.
How do you get that person to go work swing shift in a textile mill?
Because when you know, also to be fair, like his job as a farmer is going to go on a decline.
We have automation in the 1800s, early 1900s coming in.
We're going to have less farmers. We need something for these people to do.
Sorry, I just wanted to point out for the audience, it was only 120 years ago, 80% of Americans were involved in farming.
Now it's like 2%.
That shift is mind-boggling.
And so we needed something, like they could see that coming.
So what's his name?
I can't think of the guy's name now.
One of the worst human beings that ever existed.
He went to Prussia and brought the Prussian system back to America.
I'm thinking Wilhelm, but that's just a scrap floating in my brain.
Kaiser, right? It's similar to that in name, though.
Anyway, he goes over there, he brings this back, they install this system, and it kind of fluxes a little bit, but by the 1920s, it's pretty much exactly what we have today, except now we have computer monitors in the classroom, but it runs the same way.
The world that that was designed to prepare a student for does not exist.
We're sitting here walking around.
We have these little computers in our pockets we call phones.
They're really pocket computers. They have more technology in them than the entire bank of computers that put a man on the moon in 1969.
And we're still teaching with an 1880s mentality.
We're teaching listen to the bell, stand up, take a break, ask to go to the bathroom.
We're teaching students how to be good workers for an industrial environment that's largely become archaic.
And if you really need somebody to work in that environment, if somebody's like, I got to take that job, there's one left and I need it, you can figure out how to do that.
We don't need 13 years of conditioning for that person to be able to know, this is when I take my break and how to punch a clock.
But all of the crap we do in schools, it's the fluff.
And then they send the kid home and the kid's got two hours of homework.
So you got a kid knocking out all his work in an hour and a half, two hours, goes to school for seven hours, comes home with two more hours of work.
This makes no sense.
And we're robbing our children.
I mean, I know you've become a father over the years, and that's changed a lot of how you think.
I've watched enough of what you've done to know that.
I look at my grandson and I think, I don't want him spending one more minute doing things he doesn't want to do that are necessary for him to do that.
I want him to learn. I want him to be able to do math.
I want him to be able to think critically, etc.
But most of what I want for him in an education, he's not going to get that in a school system anyway.
They're not going to teach him the concept of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
They're not going to teach him the trivium.
They're not going to teach him when somebody says something that doesn't make sense how to challenge it.
They're going to teach him how to obey the person because they have authority.
So what I want for him can't be acquired there.
And what I don't want for him will absolutely happen.
His precious childhood wasted to a large degree.
Because what do you think is the best thing that ever happened to you in school, Stefan?
When you look back and think, man, I wish I was back there doing that again.
Well, school introduced me to computers.
I had a math teacher who showed me an Atari 400 with 8K of RAM, and I would go in on weekends to program computers and learn.
That became a career for me for a long time.
But that, of course, was not school.
That was weekends. My very, very best experience in school was doing summer school so I could get out of that rat cage a semester early and get a head start on everybody who wanted to get a job post-school because I didn't have enough money to go to college, so I went to work.
Gold panning, prospecting, and so on.
So for me, the very best thing that happened in school was getting out of it early.
It was like, parole! I've made it!
Woohoo! Was leaving.
And that, one way or another, most people, when you push them a little bit, that's where they end up.
The best thing that ever happened to me at school was I finished.
Whatever that meant, they were out.
And people that dropped out feel the same way as people that graduated at the top of the class, right?
The best thing that ever happened was the last day that I was there.
Well, the people who do really well in school tend not to continue that arc afterwards, because if you're particularly great in that kind of controlled, coercive, restricted, oppressive hierarchy, it's like, hey, I've made it to the top of the NKVD. That doesn't tend to translate particularly well into being a great self-starter in a more free market economy.
They end up being really...
Good employees and top-level middle management types, or they go into research or something where they may end up pretty high up, but it's not really a position of authority.
It's a bureaucratic position or something like that.
They don't tend to go out and found the next great computing company.
They don't go out and create a decentralized platform for social media.
They don't do any of that. They end up in some level of conformity because that's what they excel at.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, as an entrepreneur, I need people to go to work every day.
If I don't have that, then neither do you, right?
We need consumers to sell to as entrepreneurs.
Somebody has to make my lip balm.
Yeah, somebody has to make your lip balm, somebody has to make t-shirts, somebody has to download podcasts, and somebody has to buy product out of a discount club.
If you don't have somebody to do that, you don't have anything to market or sell.
So I'm not putting down the worker bee, so to say, but we are evolving into an economy that's becoming like a gig hustle-based economy.
And you're getting to a place where a person with an average intelligence but a high hustle ethic Can easily build a really good financial life for themselves.
And if that happens to be your kid, why?
People are like, well, what if he wants to go to Harvard?
If he can get into Harvard, he'll get into Harvard if you put him in regular school.
He'll get into Harvard if you unschool him.
He'll get into Harvard if you do conventional schooling.
And he's probably not getting into Harvard.
Although he's recently found out he won't get into Harvard if he's Asian.
But as far as learning goes, sort of the philosophy that I worked with, you know, you've got to start by looking in the mirror because you're trying to prepare your kids for adulthood.
And so, Jack, what was the last skill you learned that was complex, difficult, boring, and had no purpose in your life?
I don't remember, but I'm sure it would have been in school.
I mean, did you just pick up middle English for the funsy of it?
Did you pick up Japanese or calculus with no purpose to them?
No, no, no. The whole point of knowledge is to get us somewhere.
It's to go from A to B. So, you know, my daughter has gotten into animation, which is pretty funny because when I was about her age, I was writing space opera scripts, which my friends and I would act out and we'd record and blow into the microphone for the spaceship explosions and stuff like that.
But she has, of course, you know, on tablets and in computers, there's amazing animation technology these days.
And she's like, hey dad, look how I animate.
And her hands are blurred across like she's playing some Flight of the Bumblebee on cocaine or something like that.
And I'm like, that's incredible.
Like, how did you learn this? She's like, I just figured it out.
I looked up a video or two because she wants to make the animations.
And so she has a purpose for this learning.
But if I were to sit her down before all of this mania and enthusiasm took over, if I was to sit her down and say...
Daddy's going to teach you how to animate things.
You know, because it would be like, there's no purpose.
It's like, you know, we like to climb a mountain to get to the top, but nobody lies flat and climbs horizontally on a parking lot because it's kind of stupid, right?
You need a goal.
You need a purpose. Yeah, I struggled with chemistry.
And I had an accounting teacher that found out about it.
And he said, just put number signs next to everything and then maybe you'll care about it.
Because I was very good at advanced accounting formulas and I was struggling with chemical formulas.
And the reality was I didn't care.
Since I didn't care, I wasn't going to do well at it.
And I think that that's, again, back to taking responsibility for your child's education.
There's a fundamental level of understanding of basic core subjects, and I think it makes sense, and it behooves society to make sure children have that base level education.
But in the end, we are specialist generalists.
Right? As human beings, we are a generalized species, but we specialize in what we find interesting.
And what makes us individuals is that we all have different things that we want to specialize in, and we all come at different ways of doing them.
So this idea of creating conformity in somebody that's ultimately, if they're going to be successful, be some sort of specialist, doesn't make a lot of sense.
Right? It really doesn't because a lot of what you're wasting their time with, they'll never use.
And a lot of what you're wasting their time with, you're actually impeding their progress on what they're exceptional at, if that makes sense.
No, absolutely. Yeah, everything's got an opportunity cost.
The other thing, too, is that because government teaches it's not a merit-based system, It is, and as you know, I'm sure, teachers tend to come from the lower scores when it comes to university applications and so on.
It's like they've shaved off all the really, really smart people, taken the generally below average people in those cohorts and turned them into teachers.
And I think that's a problem.
Like, I want the very smartest people teaching kids because...
That way they welcome challenges from the children.
I like my daughter's skepticism.
It's like, well, why is this important? I need to have a good answer because if I don't have a good answer, she has every reason to push back on the process.
But if you have people who are kind of not that smart, when they get challenged by kids, they tend not to react with the joyful Socratic positivity that is really going to help their minds flower.
Well, they react with authority because that's what they know and that's what they have and that's the system that they're in.
And the reason is because I said so.
And the reality is most of them are smart enough to know that a lot of times when that kid's saying, why is this important?
That the answer is it's not.
So if you know the answer is it isn't, it's really...
Because it's in the curriculum. Why isn't it in the curriculum?
Well, and I'll get fired if I say that.
You were talking about how teachers tend to come from the lower rungs academically.
The problem with that is also that we've convinced them that they're really smart and that they're heroes and we've lionized them.
I don't know if you know this, in the state of Maryland, because I called bullshit on it and then I got proven wrong, by the time you're teaching for five years, you must have a master's degree.
Or they'll take your license.
So you come out with a bachelor's, you start teaching, you get your license to teach, but then you have five years, paid for by the taxpayers, of course, to acquire enough classes to get your master's in education or, you know, master's in something anyway.
And I know you said you want the smartest people teaching our kids, but there is no need for anybody to have a master's degree to teach frickin' second grade.
That is the dumbest, dumbest, dumbest thing I've ever heard.
You know who should be able to teach second grade if they had the emotional maturity?
A third grader that got A's in second grade should be able to teach second grade if the second grade teacher did their job.
I come from a military background as well, and our training methodology was see it, do it, teach it, and then you know it.
You can see it a hundred times.
Until you do it, you haven't learned it, and you really haven't mastered it until you can teach it.
Well, that's a bit of the Waldorf School methodology where...
And this was an old...
Oh boy, this is going back a ways in a show I did probably about ten years ago.
There was a school system in the UK in the 19th century...
process where you would learn a skill, you'd master it, but you'd only know if you mastered it if you would teach it to younger kids.
Younger kids would actually pay you a penny to teach them and they would choose among the older kids who would be the best teacher for them and so on.
Even in modern dollars, the annual cost for those schools was less than $100 per child because so much of the teaching was going on between and among the kids.
Plus it also teaches empathy.
This age segregation, you know, one of the reasons why kids bully and they get so cold towards each other is age segregation.
And if you have older kids teaching younger kids, it awakens sort of the paternal and maternal aspects of people which helps them develop a better empathy.
Well, on that alone, let's say that you're a third grader, Stefan, and I'm a seventh grader teaching you, and you're being picked on because the biggest kid in third grade decided to pick on you.
He's probably not bigger than me while I'm in seventh grade, right?
So it brings in a certain level of protection, kids protecting their own.
But what you're describing is exactly how education worked in the United States before we transformed it.
And it actually took a while to stomp it out.
That was the one-room schoolhouse that had all the kids in rows.
And what they did is they put the first-graders, the second-graders, the third-graders, and they would actually tell the kids, okay, first-graders, the second-graders are going to turn around and help you with your work.
And that developed mastery of whatever it was that they were being taught.
It didn't matter what it was.
But you've done a podcast for a long time, so you are, above everything else, an educator.
That's what you're doing.
You're a teacher and you have a passion for teaching or you wouldn't do this every day.
It takes work to do this every day.
People look at it from the outside and think, man, it must be nice that you talk for a living or whatever.
It takes a ton of work and dedication and time to put together something like this and make it successful the way you have over the years to where you can earn a living from it.
It's tremendously difficult.
So you know more than anybody else.
You've learned more by doing that.
Than you've ever learned by just taking in information from somewhere else.
When you turn around, you start to teach things and you start to get challenged by your listeners and by your students.
And they start saying, hey, did you know this?
Did you know that? And then you have to retool what you said so that either it's better understood or to make it correct because you were wrong.
All of a sudden, you start to really master your subject matter.
Well, if you're not including that in your teaching of children, they're not really learning.
And that's why you don't know anything from middle school.
If you took the average person who's successful in life and gave them a final exam for ninth grade, they'd fail it.
So why the hell did they do it in the first place?
I mean, and I don't think I have it.
I don't think they have it.
Hang on a sec.
We just...
Spiked out a little bit there.
A little bit back, yeah. Well, the other thing too, so the teachers' unions as well, there's a couple of things that I think are waking people up.
The parents view school as kind of a black hole where the kids go for seven, eight hours a day and they don't really get a sense of the content.
I think one of the things that's interesting is some of the parents being rather appalled at the stuff that's coming across the virtual learning Zoom window, the kind of stuff that they're being taught.
There's some school districts who are like, hey, do not watch this live stream if you're a parent.
They don't want to know. They don't want the parents to know what's going on.
I think that's Pretty significant.
The other thing, too, is that they're getting a sense of the amount of busy work because, you know, the teachers are being paid for like, what, an hour, maybe two, maybe two and a half, maybe a little bit more of on-screen time.
And, you know, the kids seem to be completing their work in an hour or two.
And then it's like, okay, so what is the rest of the time being used for then in particular?
And the other thing, too, I think people are seeing that...
The teachers' unions are impeding the e-learning, that the government is pretty incompetent when it comes to getting technology working, and also, of course, that the teachers are more than happy to accept full-time salary for part-time work.
I mean, hey, wouldn't we all, so to speak, right?
Yeah. But the teachers who work in a couple hours at most a day, yeah, they're like full benefits, summer's off, full pay.
Because, you know, there's two tribes under COVID. There's two tribes under COVID. There's day and night in the world, and there's government workers and everyone else under COVID. Because government workers seem to be doing pretty all right.
Everyone else kind of hosed.
And I think people are having the change in their relationship to the worshipful nature of teachers in school that they may have grown up with.
Well, don't you think, though, that, I mean, I know it's hard to revolt against the state when it comes to taxes, but when you end up in a fairly high property tax district, and, you know, by next year, a report comes out that 50% or 30% of students are not in the public system at all anymore, that some of those people might just be like, well, what are we paying for?
Oh, the government should be refunding at least half of property taxes this year.
Don't you think we have to have a come-to-Jesus moment at some point with that of, hey, look, y'all don't...
And how do they defend the institutions themselves as this happens?
So you might be able to keep teacher headcount up for a while, but there's a point where you start saying, well, why do we need five schools if two of them are half empty?
And now you've got facilities closing.
Now you've got all those other jobs.
Like I'm saying, the economic impact, they are out there.
Do you still hear me, Stephan?
Yeah, you just gobbled for a sec, but sorry, keep going.
Yeah, they are starting to talk about concern for the education system itself.
They're talking about making it illegal to homeschool.
I mean, nobody's serious about it yet, but they always float that stuff first.
You mentioned the thing where they don't want you to watch your child streaming lessons from school.
The other story that came out today, there was a lady in Virginia or Maryland or somewhere.
Her kid is a Boy Scout.
He had a couple BB guns in his room.
So the teacher sees the BB guns in a rack in the room.
They're obviously BB guns, by the way.
These are not AK-47s or whatever.
She freaks out, tells the principal, the kid's got guns.
The school's stance is, because it's virtual learning, he brought a gun to school.
So the principal calls the mother back to figure out where the kid is, to use basically a network sniffer, because he's a two-household place, to figure out which house he's in.
And doesn't tell her any of this.
And sends the police to her house.
The police ask if they can come search for weapons in the house.
What's the response to that should have been go screw.
But she's a conditioned person right out of the same system and said, I've always been taught to comply.
So she says yes.
Cop turns out to be a decent guy at least.
Comes in and goes, yeah, these are BB guns.
Good way he's got them stored. He's being respectful.
Whatever. I'm sorry I had to do this.
And goes on her way.
But their viewpoint was, now that you're allowing us to virtual school your child, our rules for our building apply to your home.
We just conscripted your private residence for state property.
So get out. Like, I know I keep saying that, and people tell me it's hard, but like, I listened to a thing, you did a show about the end of Japan recently, and I listened to the guy you talked to on there, and he was talking about how he lived in a place where it was a high-crime area, and he couldn't move because of his job, and he was making all these excuses, and you were way more patient.
I'm not the patient guy you are, right?
I'm really not. Well, I don't have a military background, so I can't order people.
Yeah, I was like, move, dummy!
Like, So, in the end, though, like, if you don't want to possibly get knifed when you're on your way home from work, you probably should find a job that gives you what you're looking for someplace where that's not likely to happen.
And you told him, like, philosophy can only do so much.
I can't make that go away for you.
When it comes to your children, if I asked a parent and made it extreme and said, if there was a building on fire, would you charge through that door and grab your kid and get him out of that building?
They'll say, absolutely.
So we know there's a point at which you absolutely will do whatever it takes for your kid.
All I'm asking is figure out where that point is.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's the wild thing to me about how vivid...
As you say, the risk to kids is not super high when it comes to COVID. I am concerned about the nexus spread situation, sort of bicycle wheel hub spread.
But parents, 40% up here in Canada, I think it's in Ontario, like 40% of parents not sending their kids to school.
And because it's like, okay, this virus, which admittedly is nasty, but doesn't really hit kids too hard and so on.
It's like, well, yeah, I got to keep my kids safe.
It's like, you know, that indoctrination is really bad for your children.
And I've been making that case, as I'm sure you have for, gosh, for me, at least as a podcaster, like 15 years straight.
I've been talking about it decades before that.
Like, indoctrination is really, really terrible for your children.
It scrubs them off their personality.
It turns them into, you know, volatile, remote control, civilization detonating bots, so to speak.
And they turn them into these, you know, tripwire attack dogs for the elites.
I mean, it's really, really terrible for people.
Plus, you know, I think that, I mean, I don't think that the school should be teaching your children sex education at all.
I think that's actually really creepy, really vile, really nasty, really destructive.
And, you know, keep that shit away from kids.
That's just not what strangers should be talking about.
With your kids, there's a whole lot of creepy stuff in there.
They're going to terrify your kids about global warming.
They're going to terrify your kids about just a wide variety of bugaboos, but mostly imaginary, as the saying goes.
And parents are like, yeah, but it's a convenient black hole to put my kids in two for seven hours a day.
And suddenly it's like, wait, there's a virus?
A communist virus in there?
It's like, yeah, but it's still safer than indoctrination from communists.
But this has really made it kind of, I guess, vivid, like a jump scare rather than a slow reveal.
Yeah. Well, they've also seen what their kids look like learning outside of that environment.
And a lot of them like it.
I mean, it looks like it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 percent of parents pulling the kids fully out.
And one of the reasons I'm so big on this get out, get out thing is I know what happens with any government, entity, organization, state, whatever, when your best people start leaving.
What do they do? They close the door.
And it's going to be really hard to pull people who are already out back in.
But it's not hard to impede people from leaving.
So if you think about, I've heard you talk about this years ago, about some of these countries where they've had like the brain drain.
Your best people, if there's a way out and the state's failing, they haul ass to the west.
And then what's left is the worst.
Well, who do you think the first people to pull their kids out of school are going to be?
They're people of means.
They're people that are concerned with the kids' education.
They're all the kids that prop up those test scores.
They say, this is why you're paying $14,000 a year in property tax on a three-bedroom house.
Well, once those kids go and those test scores drop, that's another problem for the institution.
So I really think you're going to start seeing them make it harder to withdraw.
Once you're out, and I mean all the way out, you are, you know, to whatever level the state you're in will allow you to do so, it's very difficult to get the clause back into you.
Yeah, I guess like businesses, once you've adapted to people working from home, it's kind of tough to lure them back in.
Because working from home is like a giant race.
You know, the COVID has finally provided people the giant race, those who still have work, of course, the giant race that the last couple of decades has kept from them as middle class wages in particular, and the wages of poorer people have stagnated or declined.
Well, now you have a raise because now you don't have to spend as much.
You don't have to buy lunch out.
You don't have to pay for gas. You don't have to dry clean your clothes.
You get a kind of little bump in salary and it's really, really tough to get people to go back.
You know, it's like old business models are like, hey, it's like you go to the cell phone store and there's some shiny new Lamborghini cell phone that, you know...
Walks your dog and, you know, tells your wife she's pretty every day.
And then there's like, yes, but we have this lovely rotary dial for you.
You know, this is like...
I mean, this is what...
And so people, it's going to be really, really tough for people to go back.
And especially when you now have a giant experiment, what are these learning parts going to be like?
What is homeschooling going to be like?
And also, for a lot of the kids who are in rougher schools...
With the metal detectors, with the guns, with the bullying, with the danger, with the assaults.
You're much more likely as a kid to get sexually assaulted in a government school many, many times more likely than the Catholic pedophile priest scandal.
Public schools are much, much more dangerous for children than any Catholic church by many, many, many times.
And so for those kids, can you imagine like what a relief it's going to be?
I remember one of my greatest memories from childhood.
It's a little sad, but nonetheless it's true.
One of my greatest memories from childhood was getting up.
I must have been, I don't know, maybe nine years old.
Getting up and, you know, you kind of shuffle off to school like...
I don't know, like some zombie knowing he's going to meet Brad Pitt at the end or something like that, right?
But you kind of shuffle off to school.
It's like, I got to do it.
It doesn't even have the thrill and excitement of war.
You just shuffle off to school.
I remember waking up and having my breakfast and all of that.
I was going to go to school, right? And then my mom said, why are you up so early?
I'm like, huh? She said, oh, yeah, there's no school this week.
Angel wings sprouted my day.
I walked on air. It was like one of the greatest weeks of my childhood where I thought I had to go to school.
I was like, that's not how it should be.
That's not how things should be for kids.
Precious resource are the future standard bearers of our civilization.
It shouldn't be like that.
And I contrast that with now my grandson.
My wife picks him up every morning, comes in the house, grabs his iPad, fires it up, starts doing his schoolwork immediately.
Nobody says anything. He just does it.
Why? One, he likes it.
Two, the way I got him there, when we first started doing this virtual school, because that's what we did in March when they sent the kids home, it's what you had to do.
The first week was hell.
And I saw all these posts on social media.
I'm like, brother, I understand.
My wife was ready to cry dealing with him being willfully defined.
He just didn't want to do it. So I sat him down and I said, buddy, you're screwing up.
I looked at your work. I think you can probably do this in about two hours a day.
And you could have the whole rest of the day to be free.
And because right now you're taking to literally it was like he would get the last thing done the last second before it was time to take him back to his mom.
And I said, but I guess you don't want to be free.
And I let it go. And people think that's tough on a nine-year-old.
About two days later, he's in the garage with my wife and he goes, Grandma, I just want to be free.
Next day, he tore ass into that.
He's never done anything else since then.
And the first time he got a taste of, wait, I'm done for the day.
I can do whatever I want.
And here's the crazy thing.
He spends half of the rest of that time learning other things.
He's basically doing a structured schooling for an hour and a half to two hours a day and unschooling for a couple hours a day and screwing off and fighting trees with sticks and playing baseball and basketball the rest of the day.
And shouldn't a kid do that?
Shouldn't that be what it looks like when you're nine?
I mean, I think it's what it should look like.
And like you said, pods, that might work.
Other parents are doing like each parent takes one day and then, you know, five or six kids go to the different location and they might even be using different curriculums.
But you just basically have a parent to make sure nobody's bleeding to death.
Nobody's tortured anybody and the kids are actually getting their work done.
And like the program we're using, I guess, called Excellus.
We have our own login.
And like he went to his other grandparents for a day and we could log in and it would rat him out if he wasn't doing his work.
We could see what he was working on, what his grades were, what lesson he was going through right now.
So it gave us complete oversight, but it let us give him total freedom as long as he remained, you know, worthy of having it.
Yeah, and that, of course, is the goal, that we return children to the center as consumers.
Now, of course, parents in the long run, but it's a combination of parents and children.
It has been, I mean, to me, the West really began to die mid-19th century when government took over education, and it became...
I mean, why is socialism and communism spreading so rapidly?
Because we're using socialism and communism to educate our children, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, and you can't sustain a free society if your educational system is based upon coercion, any more than you can rationally lecture children to not use force to get what they want and then go on strike and hold kids hostage, so to speak, if you want...
I do like Bob Seger, by the way, for the person in the question who asked the question.
I just saw that going by. If you wanted to just tell a little bit about your podcast and your website, and if you are on the live stream here and you wanted to...
Ask a question or two.
I'm sure Jack would be happy to take it.
So I can't type directly into the comment section here.
But yeah, if you can give your vital statistics through your website, the kind of stuff you talk about, where to find you, and we'll see if a question or two comes in before we close things down.
But yeah, thanks, Jack. It was a really great convo today.
Absolutely. So again, my name is Jack Spierko, and you can find me at thesurvivalpodcast.com.
I also have a short URL, so you don't have to type it all out.
tspc.co, tspc.co.
Come on over there. I think I did episode 2718 today or something like that.
I've been doing it for 12 years.
Again, we were a two-time winner in Podcast of the Year Award, about a quarter million listeners.
We cover, like I said, a variety of things in the beginning, all aspects of self-sufficiency, self-reliance.
Independence and Liberty. Some days are just me kind of going on about a subject.
Some days we have listener feedback and calls.
And some days we have guests on.
We usually do that once a week. And then once a week we have kind of a call like the Rockstar Group.
We have an expert council.
Years of doing this. I've found some people that are really good at what they do.
So we'll have a question on solar engineering or something like that.
I give it to a solar engineer instead of trying to answer it myself.
And I'd love to have some of y'all come on over and give us a listen.
We're on iTunes, Stitcher, all of that good stuff as well.
All right. Jenny says, you were awesome, Jack.
Usually I don't like guests because I prefer to hear Stefan go off, but that was good.
Oh, that's nice to hear.
Well, thank you. Nice to hear.
Stefan, what method do you use to teach your child?
So I use conversational methods.
We do have a curriculum that we follow when we do sort of spelling and some math and that, but mostly it's just around, oh, I read this interesting thing and I ask her.
See, the thing is we kind of fire cannons of info at kids, right?
So what you want to do is, you know, if you find something interesting in the news, you find some interesting fact, don't just blurp it out at the kid like you're just a rain cloud dropping on their umbrella.
What you want to do is say, well, how would you solve it?
Or what do you think the issue would be?
Or what do you think comes next?
Or, you know, what percentage of parents do you think aren't sending their kids back to school this fall?
And just try to get them to guess, to engage, and to get those creaky brain muscles going.
So I would say whatever you're interested in, Your kid is fairly likely to be somewhat interested in, but you can't just dump information on them any more than...
Have you ever been at a party where somebody is just talking your ear off and they never ask you about yourself?
All you do after a while, you just space out.
You just go to your happy place.
I remember one woman telling me at a party once, she literally had a 20-minute monologue on her hair.
About, you know, well, when she washes it with this shampoo and then it's exposed to this kind of light, it has a slightly reddish tinge, but then, you know, blah, blah, blah, and her relationship with her hairdresser, and it's like, you know, this is back when I still had my hair and I still didn't care.
So just make sure you're not a one-way street.
We think of education because that's how we're taught, is like, you know, just the firing cannons of information at the kid and hoping they catch some, make it into a conversation, and you'll really, really find it...
Wonderful, wonderful. Can I add to that?
It tends to be interesting that way.
Sorry, Jack, go ahead. Can I add to that?
So, again, the school that we're using is called Excellus, and I really recommend people check into it.
I don't have kickbacks, or they're not a sponsor or anything like that.
We're just really impressed with them.
I looked at a lot of different curriculums.
They use a thing called Learning Accelerator, and it's actually like 6,000 different public schools are actually paying them for their lessons now.
That's how effective they are.
But like Stefan's saying, like, integrate learning into life.
Back when my son was in school, he was like eight years old in second grade, and we had the parent-teacher night, and he had told the teacher that he makes beer with Dad.
Well, of course, that, you know, she said, I'm not sure how to bring this up.
So we started talking, and I said, well, he doesn't drink it.
He helps me brew, but he's learned Mesopotamian history.
He's learned chemistry.
He's learned advanced algebra to do calculations for the alpha hop ratios against the specific gravity of work.
Have you taught him advanced algebra yet?
And he wanted to learn it because it was cool because dad was doing it.
He's like, well, you can figure all this out, and you know, yeah, yeah.
Well, when can I taste it? Well, when you're like probably 16, tell your teacher 21.
But, like, integrate that. Like, I have a little farm here.
My grandson, you know, he'll jump off his work when I go out and do my daily stuff.
He'll walk around with the chores. We'll talk about things.
And I don't look specifically for something to tie back into something that's educational.
But when it comes up, then have a conversation about that.
Kids love to have conversations.
And if you can get them talking, they'll teach themselves.
Like, again, you don't actually teach.
You encourage learning.
Those are two totally different philosophies.
And yeah, you want to teach principles, not conclusions.
How to think, not what to think.
Somebody asked me in terms of, do I build my own training materials?
Well, kind of yes and no.
So I have been a computer programmer off and on for over four decades, and there's very little that I don't know when it comes to programming.
So my daughter, like most kids, likes the odd tablet game, although she's got a whole program of restricting its usage for herself.
So I said, hey, do you want to build one?
And, you know, that gets her interest because she's going from consumer to producer, right?
That's kind of the tip that happens shortly before puberty, that instead of just receiving stuff, like instead of watching shows, which she doesn't do much, she now wants to create shows, which is the animation.
Instead of just receiving video games, she wants to create one.
And so, yeah, we fire up the programming tools and it's like, okay, let's start with something simple, a number guessing game or let's do a math quiz or something like that.
And let's time. Can you time it?
And then can we put funny messages in if people keep making mistakes?
And so she came up with the whole script of like funny error messages if people keep making mistakes where the computer gets more and more exasperated and so on.
So that's fun and that's funny.
And then I show her how the programming works in the background and what colors should we use.
I find that very enjoyable.
And so, yeah, we have a whole little computer game with a bunch of different quizzes.
We've got trivia, we've got multiplication, division, number guessing, and so on.
Pretty simple stuff, but teaching her how computers work, teaching her how...
User Interface Design works, teaching her how to bring some humor into what it is you do, and all of that has been a great deal of fun for her now.
I doubt that she'll become a computer programmer.
That's not really her bent, but it's a great way to think how to think.
I don't care about what she types.
I care about that she knows kind of how computers work and can appreciate the logic behind what you do because that's something she can continue to use whatever she designs or creates.
I think that's valuable. I know enough coding so that when I have a project I'm outsourcing, a coder can't bullshit me.
So that may pay off for her that she'll have enough of an understanding.
She may decide she wants to do something someday, and you're outsourcing work, and it's good to know the language that your work's being done in.
So when they're giving you some sort of BS about why it can't be done or why it's going to cost more, you know that you're being lied to.
Yes, that's true. That's true.
Last question. What is the most surprising thing that you have experienced as a result of 2020 or COVID? The willingness of people to be ruled.
The willingness of people to be controlled.
I always knew it was a problem.
I've railed on it for years.
But the ease of which we can control an entire population with a catchphrase.
And how we can change that catchphrase and forget about the last one.
And the new one is now the order of the day.
It started out, flattened the curve.
Two weeks to flatten the curve.
And if you said anything against that, you were evil.
And then it became, stay at home and save lives.
And now it is, wear a mask, and my mask protects you, and your mask protects me.
You can show 12 studies over 7 decades that show mass masking does not work, and it actually causes more respiratory, and I'm not talking about my opinion, I'm talking about recognized, randomized controlled testing that shows this is actually a bad idea, Well, this is Denmark.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think Denmark, the ministers of health there have said, we're not going to mandate masks because we can't find the solid scientific evidence as to their efficacy.
There isn't any. And when people say, you know, show me your sources, I'll do it.
But I also get to the point where I say, look, hold on, you're the one making the claim.
Show me one RCT, randomized controlled trial or test, that shows conclusively that mask masking the public works.
Don't show me a clinical trial inside a controlled environment with a professionally trained medical personnel who change their mask every 20 minutes.
With perfect hygiene that it reduces spread.
Show me Bubba and his brother going into the Piggly Wiggly every day with the same mask they wear all day long at work.
What I would like to see is, hey, take one of your homeschool kids.
I know some of y'all are out there doing it.
Have them put a mask on for 20 minutes.
Take a petri dish with a gel and rub the inside of that mask on that gel and put it against the control and see what it looks like.
Then think about somebody wearing that mask because you're supposed to wash your mask, replace your mask, but people don't do it.
When you mandate something for the masses, you don't base it on What should be, you base it on what is most probable.
And what is most probable is a bunch of people walking around with infected rags on their face.
And for every case of COVID you prevent, this was the reasoning of, you can go look these studies up for yourself.
The first one I read was from 1947.
The last one was in 2019.
The reasoning in the end was always, for everything we stop.
There'll be 10 more other infections, respiratory or otherwise, that are caused.
So this is actually a net negative.
So this doesn't work in masks.
That doesn't mean that if you're a nurse in a hospital, you should wear it.
And I'm not even sure that it doesn't make sense to maybe wear masks when you have like 2,700 people inside the Piggly Wiggly where they go in and out, right?
Because that way they wear the mask, they take the mask off.
This idea of people wearing masks nonstop all the time, First of all, it's dehumanizing.
Second of all, it doesn't work.
But they don't even have to enforce the law.
The mob is enforcing mob rule.
And I've always known that's a problem.
The most surprising thing is how freaking brutally effective this is and how no amount of evidence.
And I'm not talking about opinion.
I'm talking about conclusive evidence.
The same evidence that they asked for for something like hydroxychloroquine or whatever.
Here it is. This is evidence.
And there is no counter evidence to this.
And then it's just, you just want people to die.
That's the response you get.
And that has been overwhelming.
And then I guess kind of right in there with that is the absolute lack of any integrity within the scientific institutions at all.
Like I knew it was bad, but when we look at hydroxychloroquine, for instance, we can debate how effective it may or may not be.
But when you have people saying that it is a dangerous medication to take, when it's been taken since frickin' 70 years ago almost, 1967 I believe is when we first used chloroquine and then hydroxychloroquine came around later.
I took it for six months consecutively in Honduras when I was in the military.
My main side effect was I did not get malaria.
Right? Like this, this medication, VA uses, but Department of Veteran Affairs uses 67,000 doses a day on an outpatient basis.
And when you have doctors on television telling the public this is highly dangerous, it should only be used in a hospital.
The level of intellectual dishonesty there outside of the efficacy debate is absolutely preposterous.
And what I said today on social media is, I believe our modern education system is intentionally creating learning disabilities in students.
Because you have to have a learning disability.
If somebody gives you the facts about this medication to then believe that it all of a sudden became dangerous...
Outside of a hospital. You can't be thinking clearly.
And the willingness of people to embrace this, on political tribalism especially, because if Donald Trump came out and said, if you eat this hat, it'll cure COVID, there's a whole shitload of people who start eating hats.
So it's just as bad on the other side.
There's no clarity in this at all.
And, man, like, I knew that humanity was easy to enslave, but I didn't know they were this damn easy to enslave.
Oh, come on. This is the same scientific establishment that turned plant food into a planet killer.
So, you know, it's a little tricky to take some of it seriously.
I haven't read all the studies, too.
I'll just be frank. I'm probably a little bit more pro-mask than you, simply because it...
Limited basis, not all day, but it does help reduce some spread.
And there does seem to be some indication that the more viral load you get, the worse it can be.
So, you know, I think that there's some benefits to masks for sure.
But I think a lot of it is just...
Nobody can really say, you know, we've got something kind of nasty and we're just going to have to work through it.
So people are reaching for this magical thinking, which is like, okay, well, if I wear a mask, I'm fine.
But the problem is, of course, is that if the masks aren't as good, you know, the old saying, if you can smell a fart, then your mask isn't doing you a whole lot of good because fart particles are even larger than COVID particles.
But people need some way to go on back about their lives.
I see it to some degree as an anxiety management device rather than, you know, like frontline medical protection.
But, of course, what happens is if as people go about their lives, if they feel that they're more protected by masks than they are, they may put themselves in more risky situations.
But, yeah, to me, the whole mask debate kind of went out the window when all the Black Lives Matter protests were cheered on by the mainstream media.
And Fauci said, well, no, we shouldn't.
We shouldn't obviously do anything about these protests.
Where are the giant outbreaks that, you know, match up with these giant demonstrations?
They don't exist.
Well, yeah, the outdoor stuff, it's really, really, my understanding is it's really tough to get this thing outdoors.
It's pretty tough to get it from surfaces.
But we don't have...
The straight dope. We don't have critical thinking.
We don't have a lot of skepticism of those in authority.
So yeah, it very much is follow the herd.
That's why, like I'm saying, if you go into a grocery store, I think it makes sense, that limited application.
Turn that around, though.
And, you know, last weekend I took my wife out to lunch.
And so we go to Olive Garden, and we have to put our face diaper on.
We walk to our table, take our mask off, because obviously you can't eat that way, sit there for two hours, have a wonderful lunch, and put it back on to walk out the door.
There is no world in which that has any scientific basis whatsoever, and it shows what it really is.
It's virtue signal ass covering by politicians so they can at least partially open up the economy and claim to have done something.
The problem is it's whipped people into a mass hysteria.
I think encouraging masks is a great idea.
I think mandating it to the point where we're going to start arresting people and creating mobs that beat people up because the person shoots...
If the person doesn't wear a mask and you really believe masks work, stay away from them.
Try that, right? Try social distancing away from them.
Because I think you're right. You put everybody in masks and then they all think they can just get back together the way things used to be.
And then you might get some more spread.
But here's the thing.
If they would... I really believe if we did common sense social distancing and protected the most vulnerable, this thing would pass relatively quickly.
It would already be deep into the rearview mirror.
They're dragging this out.
And whether it's intentional or incompetence, you can debate that.
But we're dragging this out.
Some of the top epidemiologists, one guy out of Germany came out right in the beginning and said, I had no idea Why you would want to do this.
And it wasn't some dude like a blog on media, right?
This was like a guy that was an incredibly respected scientist until he differed from the herd.
And now we have to, you know, destroy the man's career or whatever.
But when you look at the curve, sooner or later, it comes to town.
It's about an eight week cycle and it doesn't really come back.
The whole second wave idea is always in some other place or it's in a place where it never really surged in the first place.
Well, or it's going to be one of these viruses that just sinks into our general experience.
It's going to flare up from here and there.
It's going to be, you know, flu times two or whatever it's going to be.
And we're just going to have to deal with it.
And at some point, maybe we'll get mad at China.
That seems to be something that's not really happening.
The media is more mad at me than China.
It's pretty wild.
So I think it's just going to become part of our landscape.
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
And we're going to hopefully find some way to deal with it.
But last comment from a listener.
Hard to argue. It is, sorry, let me put it here.
Masks are thrilling in the bedroom.
So yes, you can keep your Batman cosplay and enjoy that.
And just make sure it's not one of the ones with shark teeth because that can be alarming to a woman in the dark.
All right. Jack, if you wanted to just give us your vital statistics one last time, and I would strongly encourage people to go check out the podcast.
Never at the expense of mine.
No, I'm just kidding. But if you want to give us your vital statistics one last time.
Again, thesurvivalpodcast.com, thesurvivalpodcast.com.
If you're from the South, thesurvivalpodcast.com or tspc.coach.
Come check us out. Follow me on social media.
I'm on all the platforms that Stefan got kicked off of.
Wait, what? I'm on?
I haven't locked in for a while.
Isn't that what happened?
I got big warnings this week from everybody.
Twitter threatened me.
Facebook threatened me. So I'll probably be joining you soon.
Well, it's interesting out here in the hinterland.
So thanks, Jack.
A great pleasure to chat. I'm sure we'll do it again soon.
And yeah, be sure to go and check out Jack's podcast.
I will put the links in the description and talk to you guys soon.
Thanks for dropping by on the live stream today.
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