Ep 140 | We Paid for a College Cult INVASION of Society | Peter Boghossian | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Today I want to reintroduce you to one of really, truly my favorite people on earth.

He is fascinating to talk to because he's real.

Cancel culture has invaded every aspect of our lives and it's an attempt to make people and their ideas just disappear.

But not everybody gives in and not everybody goes away.

Sometimes they end up reinventing themselves like today's guest.

He was one of the first people to introduce me to the phrase cancel culture several years ago on this podcast.

He first gained praise and notoriety for the grievance studies affair.

It's a series of hoaxes of academic papers that you should check out if you haven't already.

It's amazing.

And because of that, his life went into overdrive.

He escaped academia.

He is very liberal.

I know policies we've never talked about.

I'm sure we disagree on a ton of policies.

But we agree on principles.

And

he escaped and people all over the world wanted to know how.

Professors like this guest made me believe there is hope for college campuses.

This conversation may change that a little.

Sadly, the students at the university where he taught, in Oregon, you can guess where, didn't like his devotion to intellectual curiosity and critical thinking.

He was harassed, heckled, threatened endlessly.

He and his family have been terrorized.

Last year, he resigned as an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State, where he had taught for over a decade.

He posted a letter on Barry Weiss's sub-stack where he detailed the death of ideas in the university in exchange for ideology.

But he has not backed down.

He has refused to be

disappeared.

He joined forces with powerhouse free thinkers like Ion Hersey Alli, Jonathan

Haidt, I'm sorry, and Arthur Brooks, all of them friends of mine.

He was going to reimagine the university system, and they came out together with a new university, an alternative to the social justice factories that claim to be colleges.

Today,

this is a fascinating conversation, and it includes just about everything, including should you send your kids to college and so much more.

This is a must-listen all the way through.

Please welcome Peter Bogozian.

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Welcome back.

Thank you.

So glad you're here.

Thank you.

I don't even know what we call it.

CRT is not even big enough for this.

Whatever is happening to us as a culture,

I feel as though it's pretty easy to mark what's happening in our universities especially as a cult.

Correct.

Right?

There's indoctrination, they separate you from your family or friends, anybody who disagrees.

There's rituals, they shame you.

Correct.

I just put out a series from Dr.

Lyle Asher about why colleges are becoming cults.

Wow.

But I interrupted you.

No, go ahead.

I just wanted to talk about that.

I'm sorry.

I didn't know you had.

No, so

is that what you've been thinking about?

No, I want to talk to you about something else I've said right before we went on.

Okay.

So

you cannot understand the problem that we have in our culture in this moment without understanding colleges of education and teacher training programs.

If I gave you a wand and you wave the wand and all wokeism, critical social justice, all this madness, this divisive racial CRT, everything just instantly evaporated from schools, you'd probably be thinking, oh, this is great.

We have nothing to worry about.

Well, you'd be gravely mistaken.

And the reason for that is that

I can't just go in and teach in a K through 12 school system.

You can't just go in and teach.

So you have to get credentialed through colleges of education.

Correct.

Those are all based upon Paulo Freire's Pedagogue of the Opress, which is a book which later,

the basic idea is to develop a critical consciousness, critical methods.

It's not about the truth.

It's about,

it's also not if racism took place.

It's how it took place.

And so unless we change the colleges of education, we're stuck because our school systems are just going to repopulate with people who have been indoctrinated.

I've always thought

the education that I've won, I'm a self-taught guy.

I went for one semester to college when I was 30.

I had to stop because I couldn't afford it.

That's too bad.

But

I didn't want to be taught what to think.

I wanted to be taught how to think.

Exactly.

What is critical,

you know, critical thought?

How do you question things critically to be able to find and balance everything?

And I don't think anyone has any idea of how to do that anymore.

So I've been doing this.

for well over a quarter century, writing about it, reading about it, et cetera.

And I'll just, I'll distill it down.

And if there was like a unified field theory of critical thinking, I'll tell you what I think it is.

So there's a skill set and an attitude.

The skill set's pretty easy to learn, you know, analyze, explain, make inferences, like if you see numbers, like draw conclusions from that.

But that's not

genuine critical thinking.

If you genuinely want to think critically about something, it's an attitude.

And

I would summarize it in one thing.

This is not me.

This is the, it's called the Adelphi Report from the American Philosophical Association.

It's a willingness to revise your beliefs.

Yes.

That's what it is.

Yes.

That's really frightening.

That's right.

It's terrifying.

That's what it is.

To actually live your life that way.

And in some ways, it's terrifying.

Right.

So it is scary.

And we have a culture now.

Yes, it starts in the universities, but it's ubiquitous throughout our culture in which people who have have disagreements about something shouldn't talk to each other.

Right.

And we're ashamed.

Like I put a tweet, you know, what should we talk about, Glenn Beck?

And someone's like, you know, I'm so disappointed in you or whatever.

Like,

what are you talking about?

Like,

okay, so if you want any potential to find truth in your life, you have to listen to people and talk to people with whom you disagree.

There's just simply no other.

The problem is also, if you don't, you become arrogant.

What you're saying to me is I have no value at all

for you intellectually.

Or in any way.

Or anyway.

So this idea, think about how arrogant that is, that not only does someone know, like, I know the truth,

it's like, okay, if you don't want to speak to someone, if someone doesn't want to speak, don't speak to them.

But who are you to tell me not to speak to somebody?

Right.

It's like offense by proxy, or you shouldn't talk to them.

No.

So that's the division.

But back to the critical thinking piece.

So the reason the problem in, well, there are many problems in academia, but part of the problem is that it's very easy to test kids on, you know, like A, B, C, D, E, you know, you just,

you know, if P, then Q, Q, what's P, whatever.

But it's very hard, if not impossible, to test them on whether or not they've changed their mind.

Do they have the attitude of belief revision?

Are they trustful of reason?

Like,

because

there's just no way to test that.

So we ignore that whole component and we focus on the most important part.

It is.

Look,

this is a mind blow to me.

When I figure this out,

it is actually better that you don't develop the skills of critical thinking, like analysis, inference, explanation.

It's actually better if you don't do that, if you don't have the attitude.

Here's why.

Because if you're not willing to change your beliefs and you have all these,

you develop the skills, you're just going to deepen the beliefs that you have.

So you could, it's like running down a rabbit hole where you become more convinced of something.

And that's the other thing.

It's like conviction, convinced.

Like we have this idea that, oh, he's a man of conviction.

He's, you know, well, no, I don't, I don't,

a man of conviction or a woman of conviction to me translates as there's a person who is not willing to revise their beliefs on the basis of evidence.

I want to talk to you a little bit about relief factor.

Relief factor is something that my wife was like, I'm not going to listen to you whine whine anymore.

And I'm like, with that voice, really, you won't listen to me?

She sounds exactly like that, too.

Anyway,

she said,

you know, I'm not going to listen to you

whine about pain anymore unless you try everything.

And I thought I had tried everything, but I wasn't going to do something that I'm seeing some dope like me on television or radio talking about.

That's not going to work.

So I started taking it and I went on vacation and it was over the Christmas holiday.

This about four years ago.

I've lost track of time.

Long time ago.

And I stopped taking it after three weeks because I was stubborn.

It's not working for me.

When I stopped taking it, I realized, oh no, it really was working for me.

And it has only gotten better since.

I still take it three times a day.

It's Relief Factor.

Try it for three weeks.

Because I'm not going to listen to your wine.

70% of the people who try it go on to order more.

ReliefFactor.com.

So this will bring me right to

a question that, I don't know, it may be,

you know, maybe is best left private usually, but I think a lot of people are like me and are feeling this way.

And I cannot square the circle on something.

Usually

when I first, you know, at 30, I sobered up and I realized I'm a dummy.

And I would take, I went to the bookstore in the library and I would get the people that I knew would disagree the most and I'd read them and then I'd start narrowing it in on all subjects.

And I took everything out, and when I said, Okay, I think this is true, I would put it back in me,

but then I would compare it to the other things I believe.

And when, if they were, if they were coming up against each other, I had one of them wrong, right?

Okay,

correct.

This is regarding, and I know you're an atheist,

but you're a man of reason, and

I don't think God believes in blindfolded fear.

He's the ultimate scientist.

So

right now,

I think a lot of people have this problem.

If, let's say, you have a

family member that is gay and you're deeply Christian.

Oh, okay.

Many family members are gay.

We got to add that component to you.

I have always been like, I don't care.

I don't care.

I've I've always been for gay marriage.

I just don't think the government should be involved in any way.

You marry who you want.

And you're supportive of Dave Rulin.

Yeah, big time.

I love him.

I love him.

You know, let's use him as an example.

We just had a conversation.

It was very controversial, I guess,

because people couldn't handle the fact that both of us

said, you know, I said, Dave,

I'm uncomfortable with, because I know what families are, the ultimate family, what we should be shooting for.

And I know that there's also lots of children that need to be adopted.

And now the two surrogate moms, two guys at the same time, this violates everything that I think I know.

Okay.

But I love you and I don't have the answer.

And I don't, I'm not judging you when it comes to

homosexuality.

I believe you're born that way.

Okay.

No question.

No question.

I don't know anyone.

Bruce Jenner.

He felt this way his whole life.

He felt like he was a woman.

Right.

So just the question is, when did you choose to be straight?

I didn't choose to be straight.

Nobody chooses to be straight.

Correct.

But

I will say I think that's a little bit of a red herring to a certain extent, because even if someone did choose it, I don't see what the problem is.

But then again, I'm not, I don't have like a structure that's on

yes, yeah, so that's what I wanted to talk to you about because I talk to liberal friends and they just immediately go, bigot.

Right.

I'm not bigoted.

I really am not.

I'm trying to stay true to what the things that I believe are true in my faith.

Okay.

And my faith will tell me, family is this.

Okay.

Well, I know that and I agree with that.

But I also know Christ teaches me, love everybody.

Right.

Everybody, no matter what they're doing, you love them.

I know that I love my children, right?

My children come out as whatever.

I'm not condemning them, never, never.

Wouldn't change your love for them, would not change my love for them at all.

And I hope it wouldn't change the way you treat them.

No, of course not, right?

Of course not.

Okay,

here's where I'm struggling.

I'm struggling with

if I believe this,

okay,

but I also can't, I know God doesn't make mistakes.

If you're born that way, that's his doing, not anybody else's, you know what I mean?

So who am I to say?

But he also says, this is wrong.

Okay.

I can't square that circle.

So I, okay.

So I just say,

I don't know.

I don't know.

I know I believe these things, but I also know it's my duty to love,

unconditionally love, and not treat anyone any differently.

And that's not acceptable to people who don't have faith.

They immediately say, well, you're just bigoted.

It's like, no, I'm really struggling.

Right.

And so I guess I'm curious,

why does their opinion matter to you?

If it's a family member?

Oh, okay.

So it's not not just random people on Twitter.

Oh, I don't care about those people.

So it's good.

So

I just want to make sure I understand this correctly.

So you're struggling with the idea.

I wasn't expecting this conversation.

I know, I know, I know.

I'm not struggling with the idea of where I've landed.

Right.

Okay.

I'm uncomfortable.

I can't square circles, but I can't square that circle.

I think we should talk about that squared circle, too.

So there's a family member who's upset with you because of the fact that I won't give up my faith

that I won't reject my faith that this is

that

I've come to a place where I say, I can't answer that.

I don't know.

Right.

So

why are they upset with you if the faith is

a personal thing for them?

I think it's more of a

kind of

this era thing.

You're either all in

or you're out.

And I don't find that reasonable.

No, it's not reasonable because the belief wasn't formed on the base of reason.

It's only the base of something else.

And so

does that make it less?

Does that make it invalid?

For people who

actually believe it, I can't just change.

You know,

it is a hardcore, hard-fought faith that I have, you know.

I did my, I'm not just an average person that just went, I'm this.

I was born this.

I was raised this way.

I was this.

Okay, so

let's work through this.

So let's start with the assumption, which I think is true, that you've thought about this and you've worked, you've genuinely,

you love the truth, and I know that about you.

Yeah.

And you're willing to change your mind if you think something is incorrect, even if the consequences are social shaming or stigma.

It doesn't matter.

I've said this.

I don't care what it is.

The most foundational thing of me, if you can show me that God does not exist, and it's clear.

I'm out.

Okay.

Okay.

So

I'm struggling with the fact with why I don't understand why you're so you've you can't square the circle so you're fine you're fine with that but you're not fine with a family member who doesn't accept something about you

I am I feel

uh

it's so weird yeah because no one in the family is judging the person right they're judging you oh that's fascinating that's they're judging me for saying no I still believe this I believe in the family and the nuclear family and I believe that's the fundamental building block of the universe.

That said,

I don't have a problem with that.

Why do you think sincere people should be judged like that?

I mean, if you're a sincere person, which you are, and you've really thought about your beliefs, then I don't understand why isn't it just a disagreement in our book, How to Have Impossible Conversations, but let friends be wrong.

I know.

So why don't they just let you be wrong?

There's this, I don't know.

And I think there's, and this is what bothers me, is I thought, maybe I'm missing something.

But I think the only thing that I can come up with is this is a societal norm now.

You either accept it or you're out.

Part of the cult.

You lose family members over things.

We should never have this argument.

You should never judge me

any more than I could say.

Because I've said it.

You don't have faith in this.

Okay.

You don't have faith in anything.

Okay.

So it's easy for you to change

these long-held societal beliefs because all you have to do is go, yeah, well, that makes sense.

XYZ.

But you have an overarching moral structure.

Okay.

So we've got two issues.

We've got the squaring the circle one.

And thank you for talking to me about this.

I appreciate that.

It's kind of an honor to help you think through this stuff.

You are

an honest and bright man.

And, you know, I don't know if you, I don't know why I'm getting emotional on this, but one of the first things

that I either asked you or you asked me was, would you be willing to change your belief in God or, you know, that there was no God?

Yeah.

If it could, I don't think it could be proven, but if it could be proven.

And we both answered, of course.

Absolutely.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's

it.

That's the kids call it base now.

That's based.

You know, that's.

So, okay.

So if somebody is a sincere person and they did their best to arrive at their beliefs and they considered other beliefs, it would seem to me that somebody, the person with whom you have a, or the person who has a problem with you, that's on them.

That's not on you.

I mean, it's totally on them.

So I don't know.

I understand why it bothers you from an emotional point of view because I don't even want to know who this person is.

Maybe you live with them or what have you.

But what I don't understand is if you're sincere, you're bulletproof.

You're totally bulletproof.

Yeah, I guess maybe I tie it into the overall direction.

And, you know,

knowing this person my whole life and them knowing me their whole life, it's like, really?

Did you ask them why they just can't let you be wrong?

No.

Yeah.

No, I didn't.

And I think because I was so

hurt by it, I was like,

you know me.

You know me.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

From a total outsider, it seems that this is their issue and it's not your issue.

And if you're honest and you're thought, and again, if something is wrong with you, I always say to people, this is,

if something is wrong with my reasoning, let me know.

If I've, if, if, if well, that's where it gets into it.

Well, the reasoning

stops here.

So you're not.

If you're a religious person, you're expected just to dismiss that because there's no reason.

There's a lot of thought

for that.

So in the Gorgias, Socrates says, it is better to

be refuted than it is to refute.

So going back to the first issue of

about

squaring a circle, there are different interpretations of the Bible.

There are different physical copies.

There is a kind of presumed arrogance with this person knowing, not only knowing

what the truth is,

but believing that if you're kind of out of alignment with their personal interpretation, that somehow you are, it's a moral failing on your part.

I guess the other question is, are you willing to let that relationship go?

No.

You're not willing to let it go?

No.

No.

Family is forever.

You have it.

No, no, not your gay,

the other person, the person who...

No, family is forever.

Okay, okay.

Both sides.

And you

sat down and talked to them.

Yeah.

And I am, I believe

we just have to always find our way.

Family is family.

You don't have it.

You know, as long as everyone is honest, my father used to say,

we can tolerate anything as a family except for lies.

Right.

You know what I mean?

As long as everybody is honest and really truly seeking the truth.

That's true.

There's nothing that could pull us apart.

Right.

Ever.

So

bottom line, I would say, is you have to have a conversation about them.

So I wouldn't frame it in terms of you letting them be wrong.

You have, I mean, again, this is from an outsider's point of view.

You have your relationship with God and your interpretation of scripture, et cetera.

And that's what you've come to as a thoughtful, sincere, honest person.

And so they need to let you be wrong as you're on your own journey.

And if they can't do that, well,

I would ask, is this a deal breaker for the relationship?

That's an odd deal breaker for usually like pedophilia would be a deal breaker, or like murdering someone would be a deal breaker.

We're kind of getting into this,

kind of going down this road where

you know, I hate to say the slippery slope, but we're at the slippery slope here where, okay, it's about love, it's about this, okay, now it's about my kindergartner,

and you're teaching them what?

Right.

I mean, my kindergartner's not even thinking about that stuff, and I don't want them thinking about that stuff.

Let it be a kid.

Right.

So that gets back to what we started talking about in the beginning of the conversation is what's the purpose of education.

Right.

And now the ethos, the dominant,

the dominant moral orthodoxy is you teach to overcome oppression.

You no longer teach for the truth.

So that's when you understand that frame, you understand why all the CRT stuff in school, why the gender ideology in school, it's not about truth.

Okay, so help me out.

So they think they've already found the truth, so they don't seek it.

Right?

So

they want to teach people, but I interrupted you.

Okay, so, so, so help me out on this because this goes right on that.

Um,

if you believe that people are born this way, let's talk transgenderism.

Okay, you know that, I mean, when did you decide you liked women?

Assuming you do, I do, yeah, and you didn't decide

never made a decision, and you knew it when you knew it, right?

I knew it when I knew it.

Okay,

so

if you know it when you are whatever age, yeah, um, then

if you apply hormone therapy right away, then that hormone therapy is so much better at that time.

You shut things down.

But if you do it, you can never turn it back on.

Okay, so that's

okay.

So those are two different things.

Andrew Sullivan, the author, says he doesn't even, the writer, he doesn't even know why the T is in the LGB.

And if you read Abragiral Schreier's book or Deborah So's book, there's a kind of clustering effect with transgenderism.

My daughter told me something very interesting.

She told me that people pretend to be trans to fit in.

And that just blew my mind.

That just totally blew my mind.

So the question is.

So hang on just a second.

Because I believe, you know, now it's 30% of society is one of those letters.

That's what they say.

I don't buy into that.

I do buy.

You don't either?

Well, I mean, the question is, is it because it's more acceptable?

Okay, so what can you do that?

Yeah.

So

here's, let me lay this out and then add that to it and tell me what you think.

I don't believe 30, 33% is.

I think that I don't know what the number is, but I think you can't dismiss,

especially teens

wanting to fit in, yet wanting to be special, wanting to be liked.

You know what I mean?

All that stuff that played in all of our heads when that we were that age that's going to skew you're special absolutely you're brave you know you you get a lot fighting the system you're yes you get a lot just by one of the label and that hurts the people who are truly struggling with it right so what is the truth there and how do we how do we how do we How do we grab the reins and pull this back?

Not to, you know, Iran, nobody's gay in our country.

That's ridiculous.

I don't remember that.

How do we find this

truth?

Well, you got

two issues.

One is, how do you figure out

what's the case?

And I don't think it matters at all in terms of homosexuality.

But it does matter in terms of trans, as you said.

the age at which one transitions has a huge and you cannot go back well so that's the thing that that i'd like to talk about for for a moment.

You know, that in order to do a study in a university, you need to go through this thing called the IRB.

And it's basically human subjects.

It's almost impossible anywhere to get IRB approval on people who detransition.

In other words, people who went through the transition process, decided that they made a mistake, and went back.

And the consequence of that is we are not studying those issues.

We don't have a body of knowledge.

It's just ideological and political.

No one will give you approval for that.

When's the last time you read Eisenhower's farewell speech?

I don't know if I've read Eisenhower's farewell speech.

Read it.

Really?

Because, you know, it's the industrial, you know, military-industrial complex.

He goes into the educational industrial complex and he says...

He's a huge problem that almost no one's talking about.

He says, if you don't watch this,

they're paying, the government's paying for the answers.

And so it's no longer the independent guy who's like, I don't know, would that work?

Thinks about it, does it because because he's curious, or builds something in his garage.

It's all paid for now.

Yeah, so

we have

the problem with this.

Go back.

Well, yeah, well, that's the part is the colleges of education.

That's a huge part of it.

But, you know, and

we've talked about gender ideology and school systems.

We've talked about the don't say gay bill.

We've talked about all these things.

What we're really talking about is

an ideology being taught to kids.

Now, why would an ideology need to be taught to anybody?

If you want to teach an ideology, if you want to teach a value, the only value that you should teach is don't care about it.

It's totally indifferent what your sexual preference is to me to this interview.

It's totally irrelevant.

It's like color.

We were going in the right direction for Martin Luther King.

I don't care what color you are.

Correct.

We should be indifferent to that.

Right.

And so, if you want to teach a value, that's the value that should be taught.

But every, so this is, this is something I've thought about for a a while.

Every time you teach a value to somebody or a value in a system,

it's certainly possible that you're undermining truth.

Like one of the things that we've seen in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives is if you contradict those edicts, if you question them, if you have a problem with them, if you ask for evidence about them, it's not merely that you're wrong, that you're missing a piece of information.

It's that you're a bad person.

It's that you hate trans people.

It's that you're transphobic or homophobic.

And so it's not enough to be

non-racist.

You have to be anti-racist.

That's correct.

And when you look at what Kendi himself has said is the only way to remedy past discrimination is future discrimination.

That doesn't make any sense.

That's

two rights.

Two wrongs make a

people are just tossing this word around equity, equity, equity.

So that's the other thing.

Imagine Imagine how crazy this is.

Nobody ever even, I do these events.

I say, okay, five years ago, has anybody outside of a financial context, of course, anybody ever heard the word equity?

Now, in my kids' room, we care there's important republics, equity, equity, equity.

Every time you challenge or question the idea that this should be a value, I mean,

it's truly as if it was like a blitzkrieg without a war.

I know.

It's like the whole society just adopted this value, and anybody who questions the value is a bad person.

And wasn't equity the French Revolution and we were equality?

Yeah.

That's a huge

difference.

American value is.

Here's the other question I have for all these people who advocate for equity, equity, promote equity.

Show me an inner city school of African Americans that's been fixed since the BLM movement.

Show me one.

Talking to Wilfred Riley about that in his podcast, who's fantastic.

I see nothing.

I see no practical

consequences in terms of ameliorating suffering, increasing education of

young black kids.

Of course it's gotten worse.

And here's the other thing that I was thinking about that's in the back of my mind in the conversation is virtually every person, and

I never thought that I would be in this category, that I would say this to anybody.

Virtually every middle-class person I know, like I'm in the middle class, my friends are,

they want to leave America.

Yeah.

We're just sick.

I'm sick of it.

Yeah.

I mean, I certainly want to leave Portland.

I mean, that place is just.

Are you still there?

I am.

What is wrong with you?

I am.

I know.

I am.

I don't understand why a single rational person lives there still.

Yeah.

Well.

Other than they don't want to give up on it.

No, I've totally given up on it.

Wow.

My daughter, my daughter is in school.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

So

is it possible if I say something that we could potentially edit it out later?

Or no, it's just a little bit of a double-shaped.

You would be the first.

Okay.

But

hang on.

Can I get a ruling on that?

Yes.

Both of my kids are gay.

I have two kids.

I have a biological son and I have a daughter who's adopted.

And they're both gay.

And

it hasn't changed my feelings for them.

Hasn't changed my love for them.

It is,

in fact,

it's a rather remarkable thing for me when I was raised with homophobia, when I was raised, you know, the worst thing we could be called is faggot on the playground.

I appreciated that you shook my hand.

It was lovely.

And so

when I talk to my son, or I talk to my daughter, I'll say, oh, you know, you seeing anybody?

How's it going?

And

it's just been a, it's been a lovely, it's, it, it's, it's been lovely for me.

And I'm actually incredibly grateful for that.

But the other thing is, like, I don't have any

like, like, there's no other moral structure on me.

Like, I'm kind of trying to navigate this and figuring it out myself.

And I don't, I don't consult,

you know, holy books, obviously, but

makes it easier if you don't have that.

It makes it easier and also makes it more difficult in a sense, too, because you have to kind of figure it out yourself and you have to figure out whether or not the beliefs you hold are just, because we're all myopic in terms of our own beliefs.

Like, we think that the beliefs we have are the beliefs

we should have.

But nobody.

This is why I enjoy you so much.

Thank you.

You know, you don't really, I say this to my audience all the time.

You can't live off of what I told you is true.

You can't.

You'll never be able to repeat it.

You'll never be able to argue it because you'll end up saying, oh, Glenn Beck, he was talking about it.

That means nothing.

I believe the things I believe and I share the things that I believe because I've done the work to get there.

You can't just piggyback onto somebody else's belief.

And it seems like the majority of people, and I don't know if it's always been this way, majority of people,

unless I guess it's a moment of crisis,

don't really

think about things.

So I think to a certain extent it has been this way.

I certainly know in my life, my parents used to have libertarian friends, green friends from all across the planet.

Mine too.

I don't see that anymore.

I see clustering.

Oh, yeah.

Bill Bishop calls that the big sort.

Like people are just sorting out and they're moving into categories,

which is horrible.

Which is terrible.

Horrible.

You should have friends of, if your friend's friendsphere doesn't contain people of different religions,

you need new friends.

Like, you got to find new.

And

I really understand that it gives people a source of comfort to be.

Let me speak for

me.

Being on the conservative side,

I grew up in Seattle, man.

So, I mean, I've, my whole life, I've lived around progressives and hippies and everything else.

I don't have a problem

until lately to

you are immediately judged or shut down.

And it's like, I don't, I don't want to be called a racist if I say, you know, whatever.

So here's the problem.

So this is the, this is the, and I'm going to say this, and then I'm going to get, well, what about is?

Well, what about this?

Well, yeah, yeah.

It really is true.

Sometimes certain,

and I'll give you, I'll give you one right.

Sometimes certain political ideologies are just more susceptible to more ideas, like the QAnon on the right.

Now, right now, we have an enormous problem on the left.

It is a,

as my friend Gad Saad said, it's like in the parasitic mind, it really is like a parastitization of the left.

And

they, there is a,

in fact, there's a whole body of

literature in

what I call the grievance study scholarships, you know, these ideologues who have jobs for life platforming, right?

We don't talk to this person.

We don't want to give this person a stage in which he can or she can talk about their ideas.

This problem is endemic on the left.

And it is on the left.

And that doesn't mean the right doesn't have its own problems.

Of course it does.

The right has its problems.

Of course it does.

But right now, this is a problem on the left.

Yeah, it's

simply not talking to people.

Like, let me give you an example.

So I, after I published my resignation letter from Portland State University in September,

the right, you know, Tucker Carlson, everybody was calm.

They wanted me to go on their shows.

I want to shows.

And I kept saying, like, I want to talk to the people on the left.

Like,

I genuinely want to.

And what do I want to talk about?

Well, for example, the president of Portland State University said that racial justice should be the highest priority.

It's a public institution.

I want to talk about that.

And I want to talk about that with people who believe it.

And it's not a debate.

It's a conversation.

I'll even give you the question.

Should racial justice be the highest priority of a public university?

I think that's a very reasonable question for taxpayers and people who are advocating it.

Literally, nobody would talk to me about it.

And it's nothing special about me that I have to say something.

But they weren't talking about it with anybody at all.

And there's this, this, I don't know, it's a combination maybe of arrogance or of just, of just, I'll say it, it's smug.

That's what it is.

It's smug.

It's a kind of smug certainty that anybody who questions it is morally corrupt or morally bankrupt.

Or, or mentally corrupt or an imbecile.

Correct.

Yeah.

Correct.

You know, and you're seeing this.

I was just watching, I mean,

I just wrote a book called The Great Reset.

Right.

I didn't believe it two years ago.

Okay.

I saw this and I'm like, oh, geez, what kind of craziness is that?

Right.

And so I approached that and had my team and I, we started researching and researching and researching.

And we came back like six months later.

We're like, I think this is real.

Right.

Okay.

And had all the documents and everything else.

We published a book immediately.

First dismissed, then it was a conspiracy theory.

Now you're a danger if you speak out about it, blah, blah, blah.

Yesterday, there was a meeting in Dubai, and I don't care.

It was called

the Global Government.

Summit.

Right.

Okay.

The first one, the first session was, are you ready for a new world order?

Right.

The second one was digital currency, central bank digital currency.

That's why the Bitcoin is such a threat.

Right.

But if I,

they're on stage, leaders of countries on stage talking about we're doing this, we're doing this, we're going to have digital currency.

The United States is next.

Yeah, social credit.

It will not be transparent.

We'll know every transaction.

And,

you know, I have no problem if people want that.

But what's going to happen is this group has gotten together, and I don't know.

They just have contempt for us, or they just don't think we're smart enough.

So we're not invited to the table.

You know, the American people and the people of the world are not invited to the table.

Press and others are denying these things that we can show you are true.

We know that's happening.

How is that going to work when the average person, all of a sudden their life is dramatically impacted

when they've been told none of this is happening and here it is?

That's not good.

Why aren't we invited to the table?

Arrogance.

I can't speak to that.

I know very little about it.

Well, you know about

cryptocurrency?

For sure, yeah.

Yeah, and you know that central banking, right, what they're going to be doing with central banks?

No.

Okay.

Way out of my area of expertise.

Well, it's disturbing.

There was an article in the opinion section of the New York Times today that talks about

how a Democrat from Massachusetts is trying to introduce legislation because he says we're trying to preserve some

semblance of privacy.

Because that's the real thing.

You want to do digital currency?

Great.

Blockchain, Bitcoin.

I was just going to say

The Fed and the Treasury want to do it because it goes to modern monetary theory where you can print as much money as long as you control the labor and as long as you control spending down to the smallest level.

Okay.

So this central bank currency is programmable.

So it knows who you are, it knows your spending, and it can, depending on where inflation is happening, it can curb you.

It can even disappear because they could say, there's a limited time for this

money.

We're going to put it

in your bank account, but you have to spend it in the next two weeks.

That way they can control.

I know nothing about it.

Okay.

The only reason why I thought about it is because

I think there is this

We didn't have the conversation of

really anything that now is being enforced upon us.

That's certainly true.

It was happening in the universe.

And people like me, we get up in the morning and what was okay yesterday suddenly not okay.

Yeah, it's interesting.

And we're held to the same standard.

I'm thinking about, you know, Al Franken when he did this and all the other woman and

all the chaos that ensued.

It really is a different standard that we're held to dating.

We've seen that in dating.

We've seen that in.

but

again, I guess I just keep coming back to this fact.

It's like your friend,

this is a very unforgiving time.

This is a very uncharitable time.

And I don't know how a society can sustain itself with a complete lack of compassion, with a complete lack of,

I don't know if it's besmirching or smearing or insulting somebody who's an honest broker.

I just don't think a society can sustain itself with that value.

It didn't during the Inquisition

when it was the church that was doing it.

I mean,

it burned itself out in the 50s with the communist witch hunts.

I keep thinking about what you said about your friend.

Why is that so important to your friend?

Like, why is your relationship and your attitude, why is that so?

That seems a little bit,

thou dost protest too much.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I'll go back and ask.

Yeah.

I'll go back and ask.

Let me spring back to the university here for a second.

My wife and I disagree on something.

Okay.

She still finds value in universities.

Okay.

Because

I disagree with her.

Okay.

You have to have, you know, you're going to go get a job.

Right.

I believe at this point,

apprentice, go find some school.

Totally.

Vocational school.

Yes.

100%.

Yes.

You agree with that?

1,000%.

Why would I pay for somebody to be indoctrinated?

Indoctrinate them.

And actually, not only do I believe in it, I told my daughter, I said to my daughter, I think maybe you should think about not going to college.

So here's a really weird thing.

That's bizarre for a guy who's

a professor.

It is bizarre.

My new affiliation is University of Austin, which mentioned.

I know.

I do want to talk to you about that.

Yeah, yeah.

So

it is a bizarre phenomenon.

But, okay, so think about it like this, like think about martial arts.

It is better for you to look at a wall than to engage in a practice that takes you away from reality.

Like if I came in and said, listen, next time you're in a fight, you just do this and you're going to knock the guy out.

And you spend thousands of hours doing this, tons of money, you know, you do this since you're, and then you get in a fight and someone just gives you a beat down, right?

It's similarly with education.

It is better to not learn something that is false than

you don't want to to learn things that are false.

So it's better to not do it at all.

I avoid people who have gone to broadcast schools

like the plague.

Right.

Because

whatever they taught you, and it's easier to take somebody, an apple from the tree and pull out of that barrel.

Correct.

Because

they have to relearn.

Right.

And so we have institutions now that are teaching people things that are totally untethered to reality.

They're just clearly false.

They're demonstrably false.

Like fat studies, you know, the fat reader.

My mom died from complications of type 2 diabetes.

She had struggled with her weight her whole life.

And now we have people, ideologues with jobs for life, teaching fat studies, telling people about fat acceptance, telling people, I mean, this is a horror show.

So it's far better that my daughter doesn't go, and young women are particularly susceptible to that.

It's far better that my daughter does not go into one of those environments and does something else.

She's good at carpentry.

She likes that.

I completely support that.

And she can live a vibrant and rich intellectual life far better

if she's thoughtful about it and I can help her with that than being with people.

That's the other thing.

I'm going to go around the country this month in April, and I have a reverse QA tour.

And so instead of,

yeah, and thanks.

Instead of me standing on the stage talking to people, I'm going to be students, I'm going to be in the audience, and I'm going to be asking students questions.

Students are going to be doing the talking.

And I want to know, what is your experience with social justice, wokeism, in the classroom?

Do you want that?

Has that because people outside the universities don't understand how bad it is.

They don't understand that people really are, as I said before, teaching in terms of a constant rate, like a race essentialism, teaching in terms of liberating oppression.

But liberating oppression translates, you know, ripping down statues, assaulting police officers, white supremacy everywhere.

So, so, okay, so we have a crisis.

We have people in education who,

in our university systems who are basically ideologues.

What do we do about this?

Now, the weapon that everybody is using is defunding.

You don't like something, you defund it.

You don't, and

so here is, here is my solution.

I've never agreed with that.

However, it's not like I don't like something.

I think this is dangerous to society.

Oh, it's we should not.

It's divisive.

It's poisonous.

It's poison.

Yeah.

It's poison.

It is poison.

Yeah.

And they have jobs for life and their ideologues and anybody.

And so that's the other thing.

Not only is it divisive with people who have jobs for life, and let's be blunt now.

I can even be more blunt than I usually would.

These are, by and large, petty people.

They're by and large.

Look, think about this.

My good friend Matt Thornton, who has a book coming out called The Gift of Violence.

You know, Conor McGregor, the

MMA champion for LA?

He's Conor McGregor's coach's coach.

I love jiu-jitsu.

I practice jiu-jitsu.

He's my primary teacher.

He said something to me that was just so interesting that I think is apt for this conversation.

If somebody practices a martial art

that is not tethered to reality, in other words, it just doesn't work.

Over time, you see a few things happening.

You see more rituals, bowing, using, all this stuff.

You see over time, this person becomes, and excuse the vulgarity, but they become a dick.

They just become a dick because they know that it doesn't work.

So they have to kind of make up for that somehow.

And so I think that's what we see with these, and I'm not saying that they all realize it's bankrupt.

I'm sure maybe some of them are absolute true believers.

It's hard to tell because we've created a culture of fear in our environments, in our college classrooms.

So nobody will tell you what they believe.

Even worse,

you have entire cultures in which people are pretending to believe stuff.

They're pretending to believe things they could not possibly believe.

That a man should compete in a woman's sporting event.

Like, they're pretending to believe that this is actually something that they believe.

But a Supreme Court justice cannot tell you where a woman is because she's not

a biologist.

Yeah, so that's interesting.

And how could you decide, how can you really decide make, I mean, I understand it's a game and you got to pass the game, et cetera.

But the problem is, so we have a crisis in our, we have a legitimacy crisis.

I'm throwing a lot of stuff up here, but we have a crisis of confidence in our institutions.

People don't trust their institutions.

I don't trust the institutions.

Any.

Any institutions.

And

the more venerable, in fact, the worse it is.

New York Times, SPLC, ACLU,

don't trust them at all.

Okay.

So now we have a situation in which people are teaching kids stuff

the opposite.

I would call it like anti-civics, right?

They're teaching them that the system is inherently corrupt, it has to be ripped down.

They're teaching them just values that are totally, forget about anti-American, they're like anti-freedom, they're okay.

They're anti-human.

They're anti-decency.

Okay, so

I want my daughter on a personal level as a father to not go into that system because it's almost everywhere.

And I don't want her to go to a conservative college like Hillsdale or Liberty or what have you.

And why not Hillsdale?

Because I want her to go to a college that has genuine intellectual diversity.

I want her to be taught by a communist.

I want her to be taught by a Friedmanite.

I want her to be taught by

everybody.

And so instead of just,

can I just

loved my professor in my very short time?

I had no idea where he stood on anything.

And I loved that.

I loved the fact that once I thought I had him nailed on where he was coming from, I hit him with a question and he flipped on me and he started asking me questions from the other point of view.

And I had absolutely, I didn't know who he was.

The best.

I bet you he used the Socratic method too.

Yeah, he did.

Counter-examples causing you to show you.

And I kind of felt like the people around Socrates at the time.

We don't have that.

I know.

Like we don't have that.

If you do that, you go to the diversity office.

Oh, which was the other thing I was saying.

Not only do we have ideologues who have jobs for life, but they've weaponized Title IX.

They've weaponized offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So even the threat of going there is a theft of your time.

And

those investigations, you know, people say, oh, you know,

why don't you ever say anything charitable about people who perceive you as their ideological enemy?

Okay, Okay, I'll say something charitable about what I went through.

These people are thorough.

I mean, they are the most therapy.

They interview students, faculty, colleagues, people you've had 10 years ago.

Their office is in search of tasks.

They're trying to find something on you.

You're racist.

You're bigoted.

You're a misogynist.

Okay, so take a step back.

We can talk about defunding all we want.

We'll bracket that.

But I want to build something.

Yeah.

Like, I want to make something.

I don't just want to be the guy complaining about stuff.

And that is what the University of Austin, to me, represents.

It is the shining city on a hill.

It's the possibility

that

people can go and students can learn and they can ask questions in questions that buck the moral trends that aren't morally fashionable.

Isn't that the only way we progress?

Well, how else would it be?

Right.

Okay, so

everybody, every idea that we now claim is right and true.

Okay, so this offensive

this is really important, okay?

This is so important.

So

that, what you just articulated to me is a value that you and I share.

So no matter what your belief, other belief you have, abortion, capital punishment, Muslim immigration, immigration to Mexico, it doesn't matter what it is.

You and I are closer in moral values because of that core value.

Yes.

Than the people who

are dominating.

And if you don't believe me, I know you probably bet your audience, look at the Foundation of Individual Rights and Education, nonpartisan, non-political group.

They routinely publish people's political leanings.

Overwhelmingly, it's not just leftists, although they don't refer to them as woke leftists.

They go into the classroom with a set agenda to teach people things.

And they're not teaching them the other side of the story.

They're not even allowing those diverse viewpoints.

And so the kids get out of those institutions in four years, five years, six years, they go on to become management and they take these insane ideas with them.

Trigger warning, safe speakers, microaggressions.

Not only is there no evidence for these things, there's actually evidence against them.

So I would argue that the belief that you and I have of valuing truth, the belief that you and I have of the way that, you know, let friends be wrong, engaging dialogue.

So that's why I think it's so essential for the University of Austin to succeed.

It's vital.

I agree.

It's vital because there's nothing else doing that now.

Now,

I shouldn't say nothing.

Stephen Blackwood's Rawlson College, of which Jordan Peterson is a chancellor, is coming, is online now.

Other universities are.

So it's like that, in a sense, is like a restaurant row where people can look at those schools and choose.

But we have to give kids an opportunity who are genuine inquirers to think about issues and wrestle with issues in their young lives that we're not giving them now.

So what amazes me is MIT has had classes online for free.

You can audit any class you want for free.

Right.

And most people don't know that.

And that tells me we value the certificate more than anything else.

I thought you were going somewhere else with that.

No,

I wanted to know if you guys are going to do that.

Are you going to

allow people to audit for free?

Because I think...

That I don't know.

So I'm a founding faculty member.

And so one of the things that I do is I'll go into the classroom because they're going to talk about some pretty radical, they're forbidden classes, among other things.

Like Ayan, her CLE is founding faculty.

She's going to talk about things that you just wouldn't hear in a traditional class.

Right.

We're not.

Radical Islam, female genital mutilation, child.

We don't even, you know, Dershowitz had a had a child marriage.

Dershowitz had a piece a few years ago about we're not teaching rape law anymore.

And the reason because

professors are afraid to offend students or they'll be trauma, have trauma.

But then people who are raped don't have adequate legal representation right I mean this is a huge this is a monstrous problem so that our institutions have failed us at every level and it's actually worse at the elite institutions

so we need to we we can sit and we can complain about it all day or we can build new institutions we can but but the postmodernists they have it exactly wrong it's that

People don't trust the institutions because the institutions are no longer worthy of trust.

We have to make sure those institutions are worthy of trust and they have to be robust enough to withstand

some kind of external assault like Antifa vandalizing the buildings.

So we live in a cultural moment that's, like you said, that's divided, that's inhospitable to people who have different beliefs.

And we know, for the most part, we know some of the ways out of it at a personal level.

Large scale, this is, what do we do about the New York Times?

The CNN, CNN is,

have you listened to NPR lately?

Yeah.

Okay.

NPR is like a woke machine.

The whole raison d'etre of NPR, now it's all race, it's all CRT, it's all, this is an indoctrination, this is a complete propaganda bill.

Unless anybody say, then I'm not criticizing the right, I'm more than happy to criticize Fox News.

We have broken down into our ideological camps and

we have a problem

that we need to talk about if we want to make progress as a society.

We have to.

Have you ever taken you over to my museum in vaults next door?

I don't think so.

So

I started collecting things, papers, documents, artifacts,

and I joined with another friend who He was really focused on the good side of stuff.

And I really wanted to focus on the bad things that America has done.

We now have more documents and pieces than anyone outside of the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

What kind of documents?

Anything from the Pilgrims to Jamestown to our founding documents to you name it.

Yeah, yeah, I'll give you a tour.

There's 1% next door of our stuff.

But anyway,

I started collecting it.

I started collecting my side of it because if you don't,

if you just think, and so many conservatives did for a long time, oh, America is great.

Red, white, and blue, apple pie.

No.

I wanted to be able to sit down with somebody who was critical and spend all their time bashing America and be in a position to where I could go, you're a rookie.

Right.

And I have the evidence that it's worse than you say it is.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Because

you have to have that.

You have to have that.

So how do you, okay, so that's my question to you from...

So how do you help people, and I've thought about this a lot, how do you help people value things that they may not think are important for themselves or their communities or their loved ones?

Because I think we would both admit, or not even admit, we would both agree that people value the wrong things.

And there are entire cultures valuing the wrong things.

I think the American culture has valued the wrong things.

I think I completely agree.

Yeah.

And you don't,

I mean, we're seeing it, the rate of suicide.

I mean, I was lucky enough to

have some fame and fortune in my 20s, you know,

and then just become a raging alcoholic and just a mess because I didn't really believe in anything.

And then 30 resetting.

So when real success came to me in my 40s, I knew the poison of fame and fortune.

You know what I mean?

Because that's battery acid to the soul.

And

right now, that's all we value.

You know, kids will do, you're not famous for something.

You just want to be known and seen.

you have a network in your hand.

When I got into this business, I had to work to build an audience.

Now my audience has an audience.

You know, and

we weren't prepared for that.

People were not prepared for that.

And it's just emptying us out.

You know, we don't have

real people don't have meaning anymore.

You know, they're,

nothing's real.

Nothing's real.

Nothing has.

Yeah.

Nothing,

it's so distant from you.

You could be sitting next to somebody, but you're still texting them right my son did that on the phone with his friend i said it's crazy

i said did you tell lauren to do to do something he said yeah and i said you you didn't i'm sitting right here he's like i texted her and she said

you're sitting

isn't that nuts right and so it's not you we're splitting our life from real reality re real consequence real love and then this other and it makes it easy to other people that way right because you're behind a screen it makes it easy to just

demonize.

Demonize, they're bad, they're evil, they're somehow

and that's something so I think that's something that

I mean, that's something that I learned at the height of my Fox career.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

You know,

I believe what I say, but I also have, I'm a good performer.

You know, so I know how to draw a crowd.

Right.

And, and some of the devices used to do that, to get people to the message.

Yeah.

Wait, hold it.

I didn't understand all the ramifications at the time.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Now the entire country is doing that.

Now the entire country is saying what they want or calling this person this thing.

And they're not necessarily understanding

their part

of

the nailing the coffin shot.

Yeah.

Their contribution, if you will.

We all have it.

We've all done it.

Yeah.

One last question.

Are you optimistic for the Western way of life, Western culture?

I'm struggling, but I'm just going to give you.

Don't give me the struggle.

I'm struggling.

I am beyond.

I'm way beyond concerned.

I'm way beyond worried.

Then what

does it look like?

Because I'm at the point to where

it's coming.

And I'm now looking at, for the first time, 20 years, I've been trying to piece together how is this going to come apart?

You know what I mean?

Because you could see it.

How is this going to come?

You can see it unraveling, can't you?

Yeah.

You can see it unraveling.

And so now I know

we're very close to that line.

And for the very first time, my instinct is to go, okay, forget about that.

What's on the other side?

What is life going to be like there?

And

it's interesting.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It's frightening.

In environmental ethics, you have this idea of adaptation or mitigation.

So there's a coming

ecological crisis, let's just assume.

You either adapt to it or you try to stave it off.

And so I'm still in the mitigation stage.

I tell you what I think that the issue as a country is, which I think caused your question in the first place, is that we're valuing the wrong things.

And we're not valuing the things that lead to human flourishing.

We're not valuing conversations.

We're not valuing human decency.

We're not letting friends be wrong.

We're not valuing meritocracy.

We're not allowing people who are poor, disadvantaged, independent of their skin color opportunities.

We know what the problems are, but we're not

either we're not valuing the right things or we're valuing the wrong things like equity.

Or we're afraid to look.

We're afraid to be honest about it, right?

We're afraid to be, we have a whole culture.

I think even to ourselves, we're afraid.

We have a tendency of this thing is so, this is why Superman was born because that was so ugly.

We didn't know how that was going to stop over in Europe.

We need, not us.

That's right.

We need a Superman.

Right.

You know, we have a tendency to go, somebody else will fix this, instead of focusing in and going, it's my problem.

Right.

That's, well, you know, Michael Shermer, the skeptic, has talked about that for belief in God or belief in conspiracies or belief in higher things.

But to answer your question,

I genuinely do.

I don't believe Western values are Western values.

I believe that Western values are rationally derivable.

Yes.

Freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.

We don't have Western values now.

Right.

Like, we can figure this stuff out.

And it's not particularly complicated.

But we have people who don't value

those things.

And this is the thing, Glenn, for the stupidest reasons.

That's the other thing about this whole thing.

It's so idiotic.

Like, okay, white guys came up with that.

So therefore, what?

Right.

I mean, it's just like you're going to throw away the whole society from an idiotic belief.

And all the other people, they go, oh, yeah, well, white guy.

So there are people people who participate,

there are people who participate in that madness.

And there are other people who are like, well, yeah, you know, that's their lived experience.

So

I'm not optimistic.

I'm not particularly hopeful.

But those values will endure.

I know.

We make it through.

We make it through.

And we have to teach people.

You have to give a punch and take a punch, you know, in your conversations, in the way that's...

So I don't know what's what's going to happen.

I don't know.

But I do know that there's something that, you know, the Descartes experience, we can all kind of sit in front of the fire.

Nobody wants the secret police kicking in their door at 3 a.m.

Right.

So we can kind of figure out at a level of what we already have in the Constitution of what's a good life and what our society.

Now, are there problems?

Have there been historical injustice?

Yeah, to be sure.

Nobody's denying that.

Correct.

Well, half it seems like.

So that they're historical injustice.

No one's denying that.

Yeah.

And half of the country is denying that others are not denying it.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

I agree with you.

So that's the thing.

We have to talk about...

So Douglas Murray has a new book that I'd highly recommend

coming out about that.

We have to talk about...

We have to have an honest conversation about what we are going to do right now.

We have really serious, the homeless crisis.

And Michael Schellenberger, my friend's running for governor of California,

San Francisco Sico is fantastic.

Apocalypse never.

Fantastic.

We have to transcend partisanship.

So like Schellenberger, like here's a guy who has genuinely studied the problem.

He is an evidence-based guy and he's the guy to do it.

We have to get beyond partisanship.

We have to start talking about what is the evidence for this.

And you know what?

If you have to be willing to cross the aisle.

Just tweeted about this the other day.

If you're not willing to cross the aisle, then you're an ideologue or you're on your way to becoming.

Or you're a coward.

Or you're a coward you're you're terrified

so we need but that's the other thing that's the what I said about critical thinking that's the attitude piece right so it's not just figuring out what to do it's the attitude of doing it of voting for someone who's going to do it

because

who loses let me give example you know mention Portland so I Ted Wheeler is the mayor of Portland.

He is a disgrace.

He was unmitigated disgrace.

So one of the things that he did, may I tell you this?

Yeah, yeah, please.

So one of the things he did was he found out that the gang reduction task force had a disproportionate number of contacts with young African-American men.

So he declared it racist administration, and then they did away with the gun reduction task force.

What do you think happened?

The number of murders went up, the number of young African-American men went up, so then he puts back in the gun reduction task force.

But, I mean, it's really interesting.

So the police have a disproportionate contact with men as opposed to women, but nobody says that the police hate men.

It just, I mean, some of these things are just so obvious, like that nobody is,

either they're caught up in the cultural moment of, you know, you know, racism and race essentialism, and we have to work for equity.

Or they don't believe that, and it's just, you know, it's just kind of real politic.

They're just doing something to advance their political career.

But we have to start voting for people who across the aisle who believe in evidence, who are willing to work on evidence.

That's one of the ways out of this.

We have to start

demanding that our

politician, you're going to run, that you actually

are functioning human beings that are thinking about deeper issues.

I'm so concerned.

I'd love to have you back.

I am so concerned about

the

ethical decisions that are just flying by us right now.

I couldn't agree more.

Right?

We should be having the deepest.

This is the most important time, I believe.

Completely important.

In the history of mankind.

And we're going to hit 2030 and everything will be changing because of technology.

And we're all going to go, whoa, wait a minute.

What?

Right.

So we can't disagree on basic things.

I totally agree.

So we can't agree on basic things because we don't have an infrastructure.

We don't have it modeled in colleges.

It comes back to that.

And we don't have it modeled in our educational institutions because the North Star is in truth.

When your North Star is in truth, you'll be like the horse that runs runs furiously in all directions.

Like you have to say, you have to put truth front and center, and you have to help people develop the attitudes to value those things.

That's what we need to be focusing on.

The older I get, I'm telling you, 55 now, the more I'm completely convinced

it's about an attitude and what people value and valuing the right things.

And when you lose that, when you lose

the

desire to revise your belief, the willingness to revise your belief.

When you lose a love of wisdom, you know, that's what philosophy is, or when truth becomes subordinate to whatever your

moral impulse is, you've lost a lot.

Like you've, that's a fundamental loss.

That's not a mere triviality.

We are running so late, but let me just

can I open up one more path?

Yeah, yeah, anything you want

when you look at,

as I told you

in the New York Times today,

saying

we will have absolute

record of what everyone has done and spent instantaneously.

And the question is, that's kind of a panopticon of

an economic panopticon.

That's disturbing on many, many levels.

But people are...

There's two things that are happening, and I don't know how to break this is one, it'll never happen.

Good God, we had a game show host as president.

Anything could happen.

You know what I mean?

This is so unpredictable on everything that could happen.

Totally.

So that wouldn't happen.

Or, well, I don't have anything to hide.

Okay, so the latter is important.

You know, so just we said about Al Franken and the gesture over the woman on her breast.

So

what happens,

what's morally fashionable in one generation might not be the next?

I mean, what if it comes that?

Right.

Right.

So

what if it comes that it's kind of like meat eating?

Oh my God, you ate sentient beings, like you horrible being.

So you don't know, you can't project, like you can't look at the past

and say, okay, well, you know,

this happened.

No, you don't know what the next thing is going to be.

And so the idea that then people could hold your purchasing power,

your buying habits against, oh, he bought this from Amazon.

And I often wonder what would happen if my.

That's why people go to browsers like Brave and DuckDuckGo because they don't want their.

And, you know, frankly, when I heard about that years ago, I had a buddy of mine saying, oh, he doesn't want that in his search engine.

And I thought that was crazy.

Now I'm

wildly aware of.

Now I'm.

So now we're going to be facing the question, and I think the time to think about it is right now before it happened.

If they introduce something like that,

then

I have to play ball, and I'm not speaking up against the school board because I could be deemed a terrorist and they could shut me down.

Correct.

I'm not, you know, I'm going to make sure my house is green, as green as it can be, or they'll shut me down.

Or

I have to now prepare because it's going to be when it happens, you can't make the decision then.

You have to kind of know where you stand to have a chance of standing.

You have to say, I'm willing to be a pariah.

I'm willing.

But that's the irony or an irony in this, is that the values that they want to institutionalize or forward, those themselves are morally fashionable.

You know, just like the, you know, you're green enough, right?

We now have a re-looking at nuclear power, which is morally fashionable.

I just listened to this great thing about Hunter Biden's laptop.

Like, that was the thing.

Oh, no, it's not true.

It's not true.

Turned out to be true, and they censored all people.

So, you know, again, I think it's a kind of arrogance, right?

It's a kind of arrogance that you know what's true and that you know the right moral values.

But how do you even know those moral values if many of the people who are pushing those moral values themselves haven't arrived at it from a process that they can rely upon?

They haven't engaged in serious scholastic work.

They haven't haven't talked to people across the divides.

They haven't read stuff about it.

They haven't done any of it.

But yet they have a kind of knee-jerk certainty about it.

Correct.

It's a huge problem.

And so, you know, you say, are you optimistic?

And I would love to tell you I'm very optimistic, but I'm just going to tell you the truth.

I'm not particularly optimistic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is a pleasure to talk to you.

It's a pleasure to have you.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

And

I genuinely appreciate the fact that you do listen to other sides and you do, you've been very supportive of my work, and I am profoundly appreciative of that.

Anyone who is truly seeking the truth, no matter where that leads them, I will stand by your side.

I'll watch your back.

I'll stand in front of you as a shield.

Thank you.

Whatever you need.

Ditto, same goes.

Thank you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.