Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett, joined here by Matthias C. Cott, better known to many of you on Twitter as J. Reuben Clark.
Speaker: He's a lawyer and I want to talk to him about his experiences in the law and also his experience with homeschooling his family.
Speaker: Welcome to the show, J. Reuben Clark.
Speaker: Thanks for having me on.
Speaker: Great to see you.
Speaker: So my first question kind of to all of my guests so far has been, what is your dream exit?
Speaker: Where would you like to be as far as yourself, your family, your community?
Speaker: I mean, usually when I think about the exit thing, I think about ways of supporting yourself that allow for kind of maximal freedom and flourishing.
Speaker: And you mentioned the homeschool angle.
Speaker: That's something I'm really passionate about.
Speaker: And my wife and I, kind of from the beginning, I mean, it was something that we didn't really realize about each other when we got married, although she was a schoolteacher when we got married.
Speaker: We took a trip once, a few months after we'd gotten married,
Speaker: And while we were driving across the desert or whatever, we both realized that neither one of us was very satisfied with the current American education system.
Speaker: And I kind of hadn't really realized that because, you know, she's again, she's a school teacher.
Speaker: So she was part of that system.
Speaker: But it was and she was a total opposite for me.
Speaker: So when I was a kid, I was a bad student.
Speaker: And she was, you know, of course, straight A's, very conscientious.
Speaker: And if you knew her now, to meet her is to know that she was a straight A student.
Speaker: I mean, that's kind of just her personality.
Speaker: And
Speaker: we kind of came to this realization, we started talking about all these different things that we could do.
Speaker: It's like, oh, we could start a school or, you know, create materials that people could use for homeschooling or do remote teaching or whatever, like all these different things that were, you know, kind of deconstructed the current, you know, education system of 25 to 30 kids in a classroom with a single teacher and they're sitting down all day and talking and writing.
Speaker: And so that's always been something that, you know, for both of us seemed like, well, wouldn't that just be like the greatest job in the world?
Speaker: So of course I've spent the last 12 whatever years as an attorney.
Speaker: That's nothing to do with that.
Speaker: But, you know, so that to me, you know, some kind of independent educational venture would be kind of the ideal exit, not only because
Speaker: It's something I'm really interested in, but also it's something that I could work on with my wife.
Speaker: We could work together and with our kids and it could be really an actual like kind of family affair.
Speaker: Yeah, I think one of the things about an exit sort of occupation is like the further back in history that you can go and that job is still there.
Speaker: the more robust it sort of feels in terms of what could change in our lifetimes.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: And, you know, that's actually, people always talk about how terrible the job prospects are for lawyers.
Speaker: And I don't necessarily disagree with that.
Speaker: I do think it's very hard to make it as an attorney, but there have been lawyers since the Roman empire and before, you know, so like, they're not, there's going to be lawyers down there.
Speaker: It's not, it's not something, it's not like a,
Speaker: certain programming jobs where there may be nothing like that in 10-20 years.
Speaker: I mean, it's kind of a timeless occupation and education is the same way.
Speaker: We're always going to have kids we need to educate.
Speaker: You know, we're always going to have a need to transfer knowledge to the next generation.
Speaker: Yeah, and one of the things that that sort of requires is a group of more or less like-minded parents who want
Speaker: to be taught the way that you're teaching, right?
Speaker: So how do you go about sort of finding your tribe?
Speaker: Well, as far as, I mean, I've not exited per se.
Speaker: I'm working on that right now.
Speaker: But so I don't know that I have the right answer to that.
Speaker: Although I will say just as homeschooler, because, you know, we have homeschooled our kids all the way up.
Speaker: And once you start homeschooling, you do discover, you know, a whole community of people.
Speaker: by necessity because you go out looking for it because you know the one the big criticism people always have is that well you know homeschooled kids are not socialized or whatever so while I think that that criticism is wildly overblown it is true that as a homeschooler you actually have to actively seek out opportunities for your kids to interact with other kids and so once you start doing that you discover just there's just this like whole like secret world out there of people who don't go to school during the day instead they do other things and they're hanging out together and
Speaker: It really is a great community.
Speaker: And then online, some of my most popular tweets have been about homeschool because I think that a lot of homeschool stuff is very, you know, a lot of the material that's produced online about is very earnest and wholesome.
Speaker: And it comes from kind of a motherly worldview.
Speaker: And, you know, sometimes I'll post stuff about homeschool that's sort of combative or more, a little more like incisive and, and, uh,
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And just kind of, I don't want to say edgy and not even cynical, but just kind of putting things in a certain way.
Speaker: I guess that's almost pretty much my whole way of communication is just kind of not beating around the bush.
Speaker: And so, you know, people, there's been a lot of people who were like, wow, I kind of, I never saw it this way.
Speaker: And actually I've had, you know, of all the things that have come out of me being on Twitter, probably the most rewarding thing, or one of the two or three most rewarding things has been people who DM'd me to say, hey,
Speaker: I wasn't going to homeschool my kids.
Speaker: And then I saw a thread you did on it.
Speaker: And I actually was persuaded that I should homeschool my kids.
Speaker: And it's been great.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's been my experience too, is, you know, people will say Twitter is not real life, but in my real life, people don't reach out to me every month and a half or so to say, Hey, something you said made a difference in my life.
Speaker: And I changed my behavior.
Speaker: I did something different.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Nobody gives a crap.
Speaker: what I was doing from nine to five.
Speaker: You didn't care what you said until you put on the mask.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I mean, it meant nothing to anybody, including myself, except the paycheck.
Speaker: That was it.
Speaker: And so that was a big piece of sort of the addiction of Twitter was that it was the only thing I was doing where I felt like I was reaching somebody with something.
Speaker: Yeah, as small and strange as that world is.
Speaker: So that's how you got started.
Speaker: I am terrible at teaching kids.
Speaker: That's been a ongoing struggle with me ever since I've been basically an adult and have had responsibility to teach kids.
Speaker: I've always struggled with it.
Speaker: How would you recommend someone approach teaching kids if they're intimidated by it?
Speaker: Well, I think the first thing to remember, I mean, I need to take like a step back and it's not just about like a technique for teaching kids.
Speaker: It's more about, people don't realize how hard it can be to screw up homeschooling in a way.
Speaker: You know, everybody, and I think that goes for a lot of things that, you know, people are afraid to try as they, you know, if they realized, I don't want to say it's easy, but if they realized,
Speaker: like how flawed you can be at it and still be making doing a good thing.
Speaker: You know, they wouldn't be so intimidated to start.
Speaker: You look at all these different reasons why homeschool and I there's no way I can.
Speaker: I'm not going to recapitulate them just to answer this question, but like the sheer
Speaker: Time inefficiencies of public school, the fact that kids can't move at their own pace in public school.
Speaker: And I say public school, actually, most of these criticisms apply just as much to private school.
Speaker: And it's not that people aren't trying their best.
Speaker: Nothing I say to slag on school is really about the people who do it or even how they're trying to do it.
Speaker: Probably a lot of them are doing about as good a job as you can do.
Speaker: It's just the whole format is flawed.
Speaker: And so you may not be the best teacher of kids, but you don't really have to be because it's so much more efficient.
Speaker: And it's so much, it suffers from so few of the defects compared to public school, things like, you know, kind of crushing their love of learning and stuff like that by, you
Speaker: making it so formulaic and all that, that you just don't have to be that good at it.
Speaker: Let me give you an example of something here.
Speaker: This is kind of a parable from when I was a kid.
Speaker: Okay, so we had this class, this science class, where you had to, it was basically to teach the Archimedes principle, right?
Speaker: That things float when they just place the same amount of water in.
Speaker: So, I'm probably stating that wrong, but you know, the basic idea is you have, the idea was to take a certain amount of materials and make something flow.
Speaker: And most people, you know, they just,
Speaker: cards and tape and things like that, that you had a certain amount that you were allowed to use.
Speaker: And most people just tried to do as good a job as they can of building a little boat out of those things to make it as watertight as possible.
Speaker: And the idea was you put a certain number, you know, however many pennies you could fit in before it sunk.
Speaker: You know, that was who won.
Speaker: So we look at this like we stink at making things.
Speaker: You know, like we're bad with our hands.
Speaker: Like we're not going to be the person who makes the perfectly structured, efficient boat.
Speaker: So we're like, we need to find like a loophole, you know, in the rules.
Speaker: And so we asked the teacher, like, what's like, is there any limit on how much glue you can use?
Speaker: He said, no.
Speaker: So we said, OK, so we created basically this like hollow tank.
Speaker: We used an index card.
Speaker: We rolled it up and we just caked it in hot glue.
Speaker: you know, just completely caked the thing.
Speaker: I mean, again, it was ugly, you know, but what it created was this air tank basically underneath our boat, it was unsinkable.
Speaker: It was unsinkable until like eventually it's like the tank sprung a leak and it sank.
Speaker: We crushed, we like tripled the record, you know, because just because we found this like loophole and it wasn't because we were good at making boats, we stunk, but we found like this loophole with this technique that was just so much
Speaker: it was revolutionary, right?
Speaker: Within the context of this competition.
Speaker: So it's kind of like that with like with homeschool, it's like, it's so much more efficient.
Speaker: And it's, it's like breaking the rules in a way.
Speaker: I mean, you just you're this rule that everybody you go to school for this number of hours a day, whoever tries the hardest wins, you know, you've got to have discipline to, you know, to get all these kids in line, you've got to have good classroom manners and all that.
Speaker: And all those things are true of like public school.
Speaker: But with homeschool, it's like,
Speaker: you know there's people who who do this thing called unschooling you're you're aware of it i assume or yeah yeah they just don't i mean they literally just don't teach their kids and like statistically those kids end up maybe like
Speaker: a year behind the average public school kid.
Speaker: And they never even had to go to school and parents never really told them to do anything.
Speaker: Now, that's not what we do.
Speaker: But my point is that like, you could be that laissez faire about how you're doing things and it's really still not going to screw up your kids and then they get to have a childhood, you know?
Speaker: So anyway, I guess if you wanted to talk about specific reasons why you might be intimidated to teach kids, I could probably go into that.
Speaker: But for me, I mean,
Speaker: I don't pretend to be especially good at teaching kids.
Speaker: I mean, there's certain things I feel like we teach really well, other things we struggle with.
Speaker: I think the things I think homeschools especially
Speaker: I don't know that there's a magic bullet when it comes to math, you know, because math is something that's so structured and it's so sequential.
Speaker: But even then, there's things like videos you can use.
Speaker: I mean, like my kids, we don't lecture on math.
Speaker: You know, we put on a video of some kindly math teacher and he explains it really well to kids.
Speaker: And, you know, the hard part is getting the kids to do their exercises and things like that.
Speaker: But it's not about the pedagogy.
Speaker: It's not about how you teach it, you know.
Speaker: That's just that really is like a straightforward discipline question.
Speaker: Like you just you have to actually.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Unless you're going to unschool, you do at some point have to kick your kids in the pants and say you need to do this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I feel like homeschool parents, especially like our type, tend to be the kind of people who were very frustrated by that in their own public school experience.
Speaker: And so like, yeah, trying to stay away from that.
Speaker: But yeah, I guess to learn that and it's
Speaker: you know, certain type of person, but that's good.
Speaker: Let me, let me give, to illustrate that point.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: When I was in school, you know, you sat through school for like eight hours and then, and then you go home and do your homework.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You know, for me, when I was at age, I didn't do homework.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It was just, I just didn't do it, which didn't mean I wasn't learning it.
Speaker: I mean, I was just not doing homework.
Speaker: And I always was like, why do we have to do homework?
Speaker: You know, typical lame kid thing, right?
Speaker: And the teachers would say, well, homework is when you actually learn how to do this stuff, you know?
Speaker: So it's almost like, you know how people when a plane crashes and people like, why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box?
Speaker: You know, since the black box is the only thing that survived the plane crash.
Speaker: It's like, why don't they make the whole school out of homework?
Speaker: You know, if homework is where you actually learn how to do this stuff, then why don't you just do it?
Speaker: So then it's pretty much.
Speaker: And it's because they can't keep everybody still and quiet.
Speaker: Like, yeah, the teacher has to be talking and monopolizing the attention.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: Otherwise, it's going to collapse.
Speaker: That's nothing to do with what's the best sort of teaching outcome.
Speaker: No, that's exactly right.
Speaker: And if you actually did it that way, for some kids, they would realize that they only need to do it for, you know, they only need two hours of education a day, you know, and then what do you do with them the rest of the day?
Speaker: I mean, honestly, it's true.
Speaker: I mean, like, you know, a typical, like a math lesson that in school you would spend, you know, an hour on or whatever, you know, you can watch a 10 minute video.
Speaker: The kid can do exercises for 10, 20 minutes or whatever, and they're done.
Speaker: And if they got something wrong, you know, then you sit down and you explain what they got wrong.
Speaker: And that's kind of where the parent comes in.
Speaker: I mean, really up to that point, the parent doesn't have to do much other than say, you know, watch this and then do the work and
Speaker: it's easier to help kids understand where they went wrong than to just try and explain it from first principles.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that's just math, which is kind of, to me, like the least interesting part, like for me, you know, with my kids, you know, I, I was a history major in college.
Speaker: And so if you're talking about things like teaching history, teaching culture, or even just teaching proper English, you know, a lot of that's just talking to your kids, you know, and the, and the amount of time you spend with them and,
Speaker: that kids are naturally curious.
Speaker: This is the, like, one of the worst things about school is like, you're basically just stuck with whatever people want to talk to you about, you know, kids will naturally just dive into the craziest rabbit holes of knowledge, you know, if left to their own devices, you give them the books, you give them, I realize some people hate screen time, but like my kids learn, I mean, they learn a ton from like nature documentaries and stuff like that.
Speaker: I mean, they, they watch them attentively and,
Speaker: and learn more than if they were doing, you know, like, let's learn the names of these animals and let's do a ditto on it.
Speaker: Did this still call them dittos?
Speaker: Do you remember they called them dittos?
Speaker: When I was a kid, they called worksheets dittos.
Speaker: I don't know why.
Speaker: Yeah, let's do a worksheet on it.
Speaker: It's something that could be really fun and interesting.
Speaker: Instead, they turn it into something horrifically boring.
Speaker: Yeah, it's almost like there sort of has to be
Speaker: Again, I mean, not to belabor this point, but there's just these arbitrary, like there has to be an exercise because that's how we're told that they learn.
Speaker: They learn by doing, but it's like for that, not really like you just.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: No, right.
Speaker: And the other thing is they have to measure the kids against each other.
Speaker: So if you have anywhere from, let's say, two to however many kids people have.
Speaker: And if you have that many kids, you don't need to be evaluating them constantly to know whether they're learning or not.
Speaker: School is so much about evaluation.
Speaker: I find it funny, too, because especially once you get to high school,
Speaker: it's mostly about like ranking kids for the colleges.
Speaker: It feels like the colleges have outsourced this to the high schools without like compensating them.
Speaker: You know, so much work in high school goes on to try and compare kids so that we can credibly tell Harvard or Ohio State or whatever that this person is qualified for college or whatever.
Speaker: When really should that be why people go to school exactly?
Speaker: Like shouldn't it be to just educate them?
Speaker: And then maybe if colleges want to
Speaker: evaluate who's the best, they can do it on their own, you know?
Speaker: And frankly, I think that decoupling has to do with the fear of litigation.
Speaker: And if the colleges take responsibility for like the cognitive testing or the, the, the, the qualifications, then they incur some liability that they, that they might approach that decision-making process incorrectly.
Speaker: I mean, but they have the SAT, you know, and the ACT.
Speaker: Like they know, I mean, those tests.
Speaker: They're trying to throw that out, right?
Speaker: Well, they're starting to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that's, and I don't know, it's getting to the point where I'm not sure
Speaker: A generation from now, colleges may not care how you did in high school.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, they may be based purely on, quote, unquote, equalitarian or what's the word?
Speaker: You know, based on social equity or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But anyway, so they spend so much time.
Speaker: I think a lot of the time, the reason you do homework is not to actually learn.
Speaker: It's to, like, verify that you learn.
Speaker: And if, again, that's another thing where I understand why the school has to do it, because if you're not learning, they've got to do something about it.
Speaker: But, you know, for my own kids, I can, I know if they're learning.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: You know, I see how they're developing and the way they talk and, you know, the amount of knowledge that they have about the world, you know, I can develop.
Speaker: Because you're the principal in terms of a principal agent sense.
Speaker: You're the one who wants them to learn.
Speaker: And so you are also the person teaching them.
Speaker: And so you are incentivized to make sure that that happens.
Speaker: And in a public school context, teacher is sort of vaguely incentivized to be successful, but without some way of measuring.
Speaker: It may be an incentive thing.
Speaker: I think it could just be a number.
Speaker: How do you tell?
Speaker: I mean, maybe I could see a teacher coming in and saying, even with 25 kids, we can still tell who's learning and who's not without homework.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But I will say her or his incentive is to say, oh, yes, I'm being very successful all the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I also think, you know, if you're going to put a kid in like special education or something like that, you need some kind of evidence that, you know, that they're behind or, you know, if you're going to put a kid, move a kid ahead, you know, you need some evidence that they're ahead.
Speaker: You know, with homeschool, you just follow whatever they need, you know, and so you don't you don't need to be constantly doing that.
Speaker: Now, I'm not saying.
Speaker: I'm not anti-worksheet necessarily.
Speaker: I think for math, there's no way, you know, again, math, you have to learn by doing problems and things like that.
Speaker: And I don't object to that, but you know, a lot of stuff, it's just busy work.
Speaker: It's to keep the kids busy at school.
Speaker: It's to keep, to give them something to do at home, to say that we're doing this and just kind of evidence that I taught the kids and that we're doing this stuff.
Speaker: And, you know, I don't need to prove that to anybody for myself, you know, so we don't have to do all that.
Speaker: It's much easier to know than to prove.
Speaker: And a lot of what is being established there is the proof.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I just can't even imagine doing like a worksheet about, you know, some of the things that we learn about.
Speaker: You know, we go on a trip or whatever.
Speaker: My kids are like identifying birds left and right, you know, and like, because they've just they've studied them, but they don't.
Speaker: do a test, you know, nobody's testing them on it.
Speaker: They're just learning.
Speaker: And if you think about it, that's the way it was in human history up until the Prussian education system took over.
Speaker: You just learned things, you know, and it didn't necessarily have to, you know, you didn't have to necessarily sit down and do worksheets.
Speaker: And the funny thing is like you do worksheets, they're like, you do the same ones over and over.
Speaker: Like it's the same thing, just reshuffled.
Speaker: There's so much that goes into just, just busy work that just,
Speaker: If you take all of that out, you can put all of your time into things that are really truly valuable, whether you're learning or not.
Speaker: Sometimes it's not even about things that cause you to learn more.
Speaker: Sometimes it's just things about their valuable experiences in their own right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When did your kids, so my kids are still at the stage where we're teaching them to read and write, do basic math and a nature documentary, or we'll talk about kinetic and potential energy.
Speaker: And like, it's very basic sort of conceptual teaching.
Speaker: And it sounds like your kids are getting to the point where they are able to ask kind of interesting questions about history and, and sort of where things, why things are the way they are.
Speaker: And at what point did that switch flip for you or did it, or were they always sort of like that?
Speaker: I don't think it's a switch, honestly, honestly has to do more with which kids are which because like my oldest has asked questions from the beginning and he has never stopped, you know.
Speaker: And it's like, it can get exhausting.
Speaker: And yet I know that he's learning a ton because that's kind of how I learned from my dad, even though I was in school, you know, like, I felt like I learned more about the world by asking questions.
Speaker: And I just, he has always like, I mean, he'll,
Speaker: He'll read one book and then it will lead to like another book and he'll just kind of go on and constantly ask questions and he can sit for like a half hour talking about some topic that probably most adults don't even really know about, you know.
Speaker: And sometimes he'll even ask me to like, he'll ask me a question that he already knows the answer to.
Speaker: I was like, didn't I already answer that question for you?
Speaker: He's like, yeah, but I really liked it.
Speaker: I liked talking about it.
Speaker: So I'm going to talk about it again.
Speaker: My second oldest is not like that.
Speaker: And so with her, it's different.
Speaker: But she's more into doing things.
Speaker: you know, so he likes to talk about things.
Speaker: We found one time she found like a needle and thread and she was like sewing.
Speaker: She like sewed a skirt for one of her dresses, for one of her dolls, just on her own.
Speaker: She like found scraps of fabric and found a needle and thread and she just did it on her own and it wasn't half bad, you know?
Speaker: So we bought her a sewing machine, you know, cause it's like, well, she's clearly, again, it's like, you kind of follow the, I think some people call it like following their delight or something like that.
Speaker: Like basically like,
Speaker: or not follow your bliss, because I think that's like Oprah or something.
Speaker: You know, delight led learning or something like that.
Speaker: Well, like whatever your kids delight in, that's good.
Speaker: You know, you just kind of follow that and follow it where it goes, you know.
Speaker: So, OK, this kid's not as interested in learning about, you know, post-World War II history or whatever.
Speaker: OK, fine.
Speaker: But she wants to sew, you know.
Speaker: OK, so that's like a really valuable skill.
Speaker: And it's like it teaches you hard work and it teaches you to create things.
Speaker: And it's like a fulfillment of your destiny as a human.
Speaker: Let's chase that.
Speaker: you know and and so you know that's what you're not gonna ask her you're not gonna ask her to name five fighter planes no no yeah my son could definitely do that my daughter she occasionally she occasionally will like she'll want to get into something that he's into because he's the oldest and she admires him and likes him but then like you know she'll just sit down she'll like actually this is just not for me this is okay and we should and we should you know you know we laugh but we should
Speaker: respect that.
Speaker: 100%, 100%.
Speaker: And I, you know, and it's, yeah, so she just actually sewed, with her sewing machine, she sewed her first, like, full-size skirt for herself.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Yeah, so, and, you know, she's, yeah, I mean, it's great.
Speaker: I mean, I feel like she's flourishing with what she wants to do and what interests her.
Speaker: And, you know, obviously, there are certain things you're like, okay, everybody should know this,
Speaker: she'll get to it.
Speaker: You know, people stress too much about like, what if my kid is a little bit behind on this thing?
Speaker: You know, they'll get to it.
Speaker: You know, if you're raising good people who are responsible and dutiful, they'll learn the things they need to learn.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Scott Alexander wrote a thing recently about
Speaker: how much school can kids miss?
Speaker: Cause people were freaking out about COVID and like, you know, my kids have, have missed three weeks of school.
Speaker: How am I going to catch up?
Speaker: And he was like, they could, they could lose a good decade and they'd probably catch up just fine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's the old thing that people say about how like in Finland, they don't even start school until you're like seven.
Speaker: You know, nobody has ever said like, wow, those dumb Finns, like they can't do anything.
Speaker: I missed two years of school.
Speaker: And I have to send stuff like that to my wife constantly because she's very much like, I'm anxious that my kids are falling behind and I'm failing and I'm terrible at this.
Speaker: And I just have to be like, all right, let's just, a big piece of it is, one of the things he talks about in the article is, it's just,
Speaker: cramming kids full of things that like if you were to just try to teach them this two years later when their brains have grown a little bit they'd get in like 30 seconds but you're going to spend like three weeks trying to just torture yourself over it yeah right and them and them yeah yeah i mean and you know the thing is sometimes if if
Speaker: you're focusing on things that really they should be learning like two years from now, you're not only just wasting effort, you're taking time away.
Speaker: Point me to the six year old who's learned everything a six year old can learn, at a six year old level, there isn't one.
Speaker: There's so many experiences and things they can learn
Speaker: that are within their capacity that to waste all that time on things that are beyond their capacity is just it's kind of sad you know it's like there's there's so much to being I mean you think about all the things you know six-year-olds could do you know really to kind of I worry a lot you know living in a modern society like you know you got six-year-old milking cows and stuff like that and
Speaker: And, you know, how many, like, how many skills are we really teaching to kids that age that are, that they could learn by, you know, starting at that age and not, you know, waiting where they're not like an intellectual challenge, it's something totally within their capacity.
Speaker: But instead, we've got them sitting down and doing worksheets instead.
Speaker: You've seen that video of the, there's like a Chinese, he's like a four-year-old, he can't be older than four.
Speaker: And he's making his brother like a vegetable stir fry with eggs.
Speaker: I'm just so competent with it.
Speaker: Like he's doing it just like an adult.
Speaker: He's whipping the vision.
Speaker: A hundred percent.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: Like, like, yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, kids, and it doesn't require, you know, higher reasoning skills.
Speaker: Like you just need this monkey see monkey do, but it's really valuable.
Speaker: And I almost wonder if there's so much obsession and anxiety over like IQ discourse.
Speaker: And I wonder if that principle generalizes all the way to adulthood.
Speaker: Like there are people who maybe it's not in the cards for them to learn JavaScript, but like, what is the set of things that a person at that stage can learn?
Speaker: It's enormous.
Speaker: There's tons of things they could learn how to do.
Speaker: And like, maybe we should.
Speaker: And then, you know, I'm thinking about exit and all the different hustles that I've encountered and the ways people are making money and like,
Speaker: You don't have to be a genius to get ahead in a lot of these ways.
Speaker: And it's like, if a person has, if a person's an accountant and something bad happens to them where they can't be an accountant anymore, that can like rock their whole world.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That can that can really upset the situation for them, whether it's because they get blackballed or whatever it is.
Speaker: But maybe somebody who's like whatever you want to call it, not college material can learn like five different hustles, five different trades, five different ways to make money.
Speaker: That person, I think, is better off than the than the person who could make a lot of money as an accountant, but it's a brittle situation for them.
Speaker: Yeah, and one thing that really gets in the way is that people equate intellectual ability with like personal value.
Speaker: And I feel like that's something that derives from the school system as well.
Speaker: You know, when you're in school, I mean, granted, you know, kids rank themselves based on things like looks or athletic ability or whatever.
Speaker: But ultimately, what the system says is
Speaker: It's not just the best and brightest that being brightest is the best, you know, that's the most important thing is to get straight A's because, you know, in their system, their reward system, the people, you know, like, inherently says that, like, you know, you're if you get straight A's, that's a good thing, you know, and it is, I mean, it's good.
Speaker: It's good to have intellectual ability, but there's more to life than that.
Speaker: You know, nobody's giving out A's for like,
Speaker: or intellectual honesty or anything like that.
Speaker: So there's a lot of things that get laid by the wayside and pretty much all, you know, I just, it's strange to think just how completely people equate your smarts with like how good a person you are.
Speaker: They would never put it that way.
Speaker: But, you know, I think it's just inherently feels like people who are not bookish feel like they need to make excuses for it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, whereas like, you know, I think people who are not like, I don't know, I think it's much easier to laugh off the deficiency in other areas of life.
Speaker: And maybe it shouldn't be.
Speaker: Moldbug had this point where he was saying like, in ancient Greece, physical strength was sort of valorized the same way that we valorize intelligence.
Speaker: And like it was sort of implicitly morally superior to be strong.
Speaker: And it was because those people were sort of the most useful to the tribe.
Speaker: They could carry the most weight and save people in battle and all these things.
Speaker: And now having really high cognitive function and being really good at talking to the machines is that kind of value because everything is machines now.
Speaker: And so those people, like it's not, I don't think it's just sort of this
Speaker: institutional injustice.
Speaker: I think it's also like there's something to just the structure of the society that that really is more valuable from a strictly monetary sense, or at least the value of that behavior is easier to internalize to the person who exhibits it.
Speaker: You're talking about like intellectual honesty and integrity.
Speaker: Like
Speaker: the community really benefits from having a lot of that kind of person, but it's hard for the person to sort of... Benefit individually from, as a matter of fact, it can be a deficit.
Speaker: Well, and to the point about physical strength, I mean, you know, if you look at the founding fathers, George Washington was a brilliant man, but there were, there were smarter founding fathers, probably.
Speaker: Hamilton, you know, Jefferson, maybe Franklin, you know, it was obviously a brilliant generation of men.
Speaker: There were people who might've been considered more kind of academically inclined.
Speaker: I mean, Washington didn't go to college, which he always kind of ironically felt a little deficient about, but, you know, Washington was,
Speaker: was just unanimously considered the first of all Americans.
Speaker: You know, I mean, it was just, this guy is clearly the preeminent man among us, partly because he was an absolute unit.
Speaker: You know, I mean, he was incredibly strong, incredibly brave, and just...
Speaker: He was just his whole bearing was like, this guy needs to be in charge.
Speaker: And people recognize that those qualities.
Speaker: And it wouldn't have even occurred to them that, you know, like the fact that he had less book learning than some of the other founding fathers, you know, Adams went to Harvard, that that meant that he shouldn't be in charge, you know, because they knew they could see the man like this is the guy who's in charge.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think it's a good segue into another topic that I wanted to discuss, which is the law.
Speaker: So you're a lawyer and I feel like a lot of people have been woken up in recent years as to sort of the limits of constitutional law and some realities about the way government works versus sort of the dream of the founders.
Speaker: And I want to know,
Speaker: First of all, why did you get into law and do you feel the same way about it that you did when you started?
Speaker: And if not, what's changed?
Speaker: Well, I was never much of an idealist about it.
Speaker: I mean, I got into law because it's like if you have a higher verbal than quantitative IQ, it's kind of one of the ways to make money.
Speaker: You know, I mean, I do find it very interesting, but I never try to pull rank on the fact that I'm a lawyer over overlay people, because I mean, the big secret about the law is it's really just reading things closely.
Speaker: And that's not something I mean, the law theoretically should, you know, citizens should be able to read and understand the law.
Speaker: David Larson, M.D.: Maybe they can't all the time, but, but if the law isn't something that can be comprehended by non lawyers, then it's not a good law, you know, so I never you know tell people well my understanding of this.
Speaker: you know, constitutional doctrine is superior to yours because I'm a lawyer.
Speaker: Occasionally, if I make a point, if I explain some constitutional idea and somebody's like, well, yeah, what the heck do you know about it?
Speaker: Then I might say, well, in fact, I've litigated this issue in court and actually researched this, you know.
Speaker: But generally speaking, I don't assume that lawyers have some kind of specialized knowledge
Speaker: that lay people can't access.
Speaker: Obviously, we deal with it more.
Speaker: We may have more specific knowledge about it, but especially when it comes to constitutional law, it's something that should be accessible to everyone.
Speaker: And if I can't explain it,
Speaker: in a way that, I mean, I realize some people just, there's kind of just limits on verbal reasoning or whatever, but if I can't explain it to someone like you, then I probably need to go back and do more research because you are a smart guy and you can understand what words mean.
Speaker: And that's really all it comes down to.
Speaker: What does this word mean?
Speaker: How is it applied in practice, et cetera?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think.
Speaker: It's that abstruse and you can't, well, because I mean, a lot, a lot of the job is sort of explaining it to a judge.
Speaker: David Lundman, Or a jury or you know what I mean so like it has to be 100% I mean that's the thing is what you know when you're making arguments in court it's not as though lawyers learn all the laws there are to learn.
Speaker: David Lundman, You know, there is the body of law and all the cases that interpret it they're just too much for any one person to know.
Speaker: So, you know, if you go in front of a judge, you know, oftentimes, especially since they have so many cases, this isn't their fault, but they may not really know that much about what the law is in a certain area.
Speaker: And so very, you know, really, I would say that majority of the time, I mean, sometimes they've done their own.
Speaker: Occasionally, if it's a big case, the judge has really studied it.
Speaker: And maybe they know about as much as you do.
Speaker: Even then, it was probably more their law clerk that studied it and gave them a summary, you know, but...
Speaker: When you go in and make an argument, you're kind of teaching what the law is to someone.
Speaker: You're explaining, you know, this is how it is.
Speaker: Of course, you're trying to persuade too, but, you know, teaching is persuasion in a lot of ways.
Speaker: You know, if I, to briefly just with the homeschool thing, it's like, you know, when you're teaching your kids stuff, you need to be able to explain, if you're trying to teach a worldview to your kids or, you know, a set of values, you need to explain why they're good.
Speaker: There's an element of persuasion to that.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a set of facts.
Speaker: And then there's, here's why these facts are the salient facts.
Speaker: Here's why this matters.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, so to just complete the circle, I mean, when you're explaining what the law is to people, whether it's to judges or to lay people, it's got to make sense, you know, and, and, and it's not something I would never try to tell people, well, you just wouldn't get that because you're not a lawyer.
Speaker: Maybe you won't get it because you're, because you're ideologically posed in such a way that you don't want to know it, or, or maybe you just don't have the brain power for it or whatever, but, but, you know, realistically, like,
Speaker: you know, a reasonably intelligent person should be able to understand it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you sort of were always maybe woke to the challenge of the Constitution.
Speaker: And I guess, did you have sort of a moment where you're thinking about that changed?
Speaker: Or did you sort of grow up kind of more or less believing what you believe now?
Speaker: Well, if you think about it from first principles, you know, when you start thinking about a Constitution,
Speaker: And why does the constitution matter?
Speaker: Well, it's kind of, it's the supreme law of the land, right?
Speaker: So like other laws, so that's how that works.
Speaker: Okay, so if you violate, if there's a law here that violates the constitution, the constitution wins, okay.
Speaker: Well, what happens when somebody violates the constitution?
Speaker: what happens then?
Speaker: And the thing that I think it's almost like a third rail, because when you bring this up, people get kind of uncomfortable in a way.
Speaker: The constitution is not self-reinforcing.
Speaker: It's not self-enforcing.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So like if, if, if tomorrow we all lost faith in the constitution, it would be a dead letter.
Speaker: And I actually, you know, I gave a speech on this at a naturalization ceremony in
Speaker: And I, you know, my main point was, okay, here you guys are swearing, you know, you're giving an oath of loyalty to the laws and constitution of the United States.
Speaker: The constitution ultimately is just a piece of paper if you treat it like that.
Speaker: And the only reason it matters is because we care about it.
Speaker: And it's the same thing, you know, with anything.
Speaker: I mean, you could swear an oath in your life, but if you don't care about the oath, if you don't feel like that oath carries any weight, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: It's a dead letter.
Speaker: You know, it means nothing to you.
Speaker: And it may mean something to God or to the people on the other side of it, but if it doesn't mean anything to you, to you, it's nothing.
Speaker: And I think there's so many times, like something that non-lawyers have brought up to me, they'll say, well, how can they do this?
Speaker: How can they do that?
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: Well, they just do it.
Speaker: They just do it.
Speaker: And like, if, you know, like if nobody says they can't do it, then they just do it.
Speaker: It's a bit like, I mean, I think Andrew Jackson, frankly, made one of the more important statements about constitutional law when he said, you know, the Supreme Court's made his order, now let them enforce it.
Speaker: He was pointing out an important thing, which is the only reason something like judicial review happens is because people follow the court's orders.
Speaker: If they decided not to, I mean, something people have said, well, why should the Supreme Court get the final say?
Speaker: The Supreme Court gets the final say because we let them have the final say.
Speaker: I'm not saying you shouldn't.
Speaker: I'm just saying that there's an arrangement that we've all settled on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's not necessarily – I mean the Constitution gives them the power to decide cases –
Speaker: and controversies arising under the laws of the United States.
Speaker: That's what it says.
Speaker: They decide those cases and then how we apply that, how we follow that is entirely a matter of custom.
Speaker: And the point being, the Constitution can't protect against constitutional crises.
Speaker: If the Supreme Court says, I'm just not going to follow the law, I'm just going to make up the law,
Speaker: our Constitution isn't really built to deal with that problem, which frankly is happening.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: We do have that exact problem.
Speaker: If the president says, I don't care what the Constitution says, I'm just going to do it.
Speaker: The Constitution isn't really set up to stop that.
Speaker: Congress has less ability to run off on its own, but, you know, because of the veto and because of judicial review.
Speaker: But the point being that if one of the branches of Congress goes off the rails and just says, I don't really care about the Constitution, we're just going to do it.
Speaker: The law that matters is the law that's written on your hearts, like it says in the Constitution.
Speaker: you know, the Bible.
Speaker: So whether I believe in the Constitution, but I believe that it has the principles that it enshrines have to be in you.
Speaker: They have to be in the hearts of the citizens or else it's just a piece of paper.
Speaker: So do you think we've seen a lot of sort of shocker rulings from the court where a lot of right-wing people were sort of expecting that all the
Speaker: all the good judges that we bought with Trump would have availed us something and they didn't.
Speaker: Do you think that that was strictly like, you know, a conspiracy thing?
Speaker: Or do you think that maybe they were sort of afraid that their dictate would not be obeyed and so they didn't want to push the envelope?
Speaker: I think it would depend on which case.
Speaker: I mean, I think different cases- How do you think about the election in particular?
Speaker: So-
Speaker: Do you want, I mean, I may have somewhat particular views about the election cases, but so I don't want them.
Speaker: Let's hear it.
Speaker: So I don't, you know, the theories behind how the election was stolen are just very hard to push in a judicial venue.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, you know, for me, if you were to look at how it is that the election would have been stolen,
Speaker: I think probably the fact that they did all those mail-in ballots just made it very easy for corrupt election workers to just fill in mail-in ballots, pretend that they were mailed in.
Speaker: Like, oh shoot, we need 20,000 more votes in Wisconsin or whatever, you know?
Speaker: fill it out and stuff the ballot box with it.
Speaker: And maybe you catch one guy, but then you've only caught one guy.
Speaker: You can't overturn the election on that basis.
Speaker: So what is he supposed to do?
Speaker: Like go in and get affidavits from 50,000 people saying I didn't vote in Wisconsin?
Speaker: You know, I mean, it's just very hard to push back against that.
Speaker: And that kind of goes to my point about the limits of the Constitution.
Speaker: You know, when you've got so many branches of government, state governments or federal governments,
Speaker: that are willing to just break the law, you can't always like most murders aren't solved, right?
Speaker: Yeah, most constitutional violations aren't solved.
Speaker: You know, it's a constant violent, you know, you commit a crime against the Constitution.
Speaker: It's, you know, you can have unsolved crimes, you know, you can have crimes that don't have a proper resolution.
Speaker: I think the thing that tripped people out about it
Speaker: was it's so important, it's a presidential election, but proving, you know, like the ease of getting a judicial solution is not necessarily commensurate with the importance of the case, you know?
Speaker: Like you could have a really important murder case and still never find the guy, right?
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: And I think, I do think that there was election fraud.
Speaker: I don't know if it was determined in the end of the result, but, and I do think it was an un- because there's always some election fraud.
Speaker: I think there was massive election fraud.
Speaker: I don't know if it changed the result, but I don't know.
Speaker: I always kind of felt like people who were expecting the courts to untangle it were probably hoping for too much because, you know, now that doesn't mean I agree with- By the time it got to the Supreme Court's desk,
Speaker: it was sort of the right decision to say no?
Speaker: I would say I didn't necessarily agree with the way the Supreme Court handled it.
Speaker: I thought, for example, the fact that they dismissed it su espante, which means they did it on, they dismissed it on their own without even a motion to dismiss.
Speaker: I thought that was inappropriate.
Speaker: I thought it was too important of a case not to let each side make their arguments and determine it that way.
Speaker: I do think it would have been difficult based on the precedent of Bush v. Gore for the court to overturn the election.
Speaker: The point that the opinion in Bush v. Gore made was they've been going about this recount stuff all wrong.
Speaker: The way they're doing it is very illegal.
Speaker: We could send it back with instructions to do it right, which is normally what we do, but there's no time left.
Speaker: The electors meet on this day and there's just no way they're gonna be able to do a recount by that time.
Speaker: So our order is just stop the recount.
Speaker: That was the way Bush v. Gore came out.
Speaker: I think in this case, there was actually less time remaining before the electors when the Supreme Court's order went out.
Speaker: So I just don't know based on Bush v. Gore, especially since in a weird way,
Speaker: not in a weird way, I mean, just because of the nature of the alleged fraud here, it would have been so hard to prove it all to the point where you could actually get a judicial result within the time period.
Speaker: I mean, it's one thing when you have a purely legal argument, you can resolve those pretty fast.
Speaker: But when you have factual questions that need to be dealt with, you've got discovery and you actually have to have like a trial, I mean, that takes forever.
Speaker: And so thousands and thousands of individual crimes that thousands, maybe millions, you know.
Speaker: So, yeah, I just it just never seemed very practical to me that they were going to be able to get a decision from the Supreme Court.
Speaker: I think you may remember me saying that at the time.
Speaker: Yeah, everyone who's like, oh, the Supreme Court's Republican now.
Speaker: They'll, you know, it's like, that's probably not going to happen.
Speaker: I mean, you could partly, if you're going to pin blame, I mean, again, I thought the Supreme Court was too political by dismissing the thing sui sponte.
Speaker: I think Alito and Thomas were the only ones that dissented from that.
Speaker: But I thought, you know, if you could maybe pin some blame on Trump's lawyers for taking too long, you know, I think they needed to settle on a theory really quickly just because of the time, you
Speaker: time scale, come up with something, you know, and I was, you know, when they were saying, well, these dominion machines, you know, generated X number of votes.
Speaker: I'm like, well, if you could prove that that would do it, you know, like if you, you know, cause that, that wouldn't be a matter of proving, you know, a hundred thousand different votes in one place.
Speaker: If you, if you could find one giant packet of fake votes, then maybe you've got a case, but I don't think they ever had that.
Speaker: I think that was just a weird theory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So people have asked me a lot about like the audits and stuff that's going on.
Speaker: Do you guys just a waste of time or is there anything, any value in that?
Speaker: No, I think there's value in it.
Speaker: If it shows that the election was fraudulent, that's something we ought to know.
Speaker: I have not, I will admit, I haven't been following the audits very closely, but I don't think there's anything wrong with going back and figuring it out.
Speaker: I mean, I think, you know, that we should, I will say there was a, uh,
Speaker: the one thing I really strongly objected to with the Supreme Court was, you know, basically they said that they weren't going to entertain challenges to the election because they were moot because, you know, Biden had been sworn in.
Speaker: If I recall, that was what they said.
Speaker: So it's like, OK, so on the one hand, you know, if it happens, you know, within a short period of time after the election, it's not ripe.
Speaker: But if by the time it gets resolved, you say it's moot, you know, there's exceptions to the mootness doctrine.
Speaker: There are cases that we'll hear, you know, Roe versus Wade was a moot case.
Speaker: Roe had her baby.
Speaker: That was the nature of abortion cases was if you sued for the right to have an abortion, by the time it got to the Supreme Court, you'd have your baby.
Speaker: And so the courts have ways of just hearing moot cases because it's impossible for a non-moot case to be heard.
Speaker: It seems to me like this would be a case like that.
Speaker: So it's important to know what the law is in this area.
Speaker: It's important to know, you know, for example, I think the specific case that made it up was about, you know, Pennsylvania changing the election law in the middle of the election.
Speaker: I mean, it's important to know if that's legal or not.
Speaker: We should have a case on that, even if it's already moved.
Speaker: You know, the stuff that happens after the fact, we should do it so we can fix the next election.
Speaker: I don't have any problem with that.
Speaker: And do you, and I guess what I'm trying to drive at is like, do you attribute that to sort of malice or stupidity?
Speaker: Like, do you think the Supreme Court is...
Speaker: David Lundman- Is sticking their thumb on the scale or just sort of.
Speaker: I think the liberals are just acting in their interest, I think, in a political interest, I think that the.
Speaker: conservatives on the court i mean obviously i'm accepting alito and thomas who were based and awesome yes um but you know like the the moderate conservatives on the court i think they see it as not their battle you know i think they're kind of like what difference does it make you know i'm not i'm not going to use my political capital on this or whatever um you know um you know there there are certain results like the uh
Speaker: the sex discrimination case involving a transsexual at the funeral home, the name of the case escapes me at the moment.
Speaker: But it was a Gorsuch opinion that basically said that discrimination based on sex includes discrimination against people based on trans identity.
Speaker: Which clearly it didn't.
Speaker: I mean, you know, like obviously in the 1960s when they passed this law, nobody thought it meant that.
Speaker: It's ridiculous.
Speaker: Something like that is less about personal courage than it is excessively technical application of the law that certain conservative legal doctrines have inculcated.
Speaker: Accessive technical application.
Speaker: There's probably another word we could use for that elsewhere.
Speaker: But well, I mean, so, so, for example, like, well, I'll give you there's kind of different views on this like that.
Speaker: So, like, sometimes people talk about originalist constitutional philosophy, the idea being that a
Speaker: that you should apply whatever it meant at the time.
Speaker: Okay, like whatever the original meaning was.
Speaker: Scalia didn't love the phrase originalist.
Speaker: He said, I'm actually, I would call myself a textualist, meaning I look at what the text of it says.
Speaker: But the thing is, he was ultimately an originalist because
Speaker: what the text says should be what the text meant at the time.
Speaker: So an example of this, there's a great Law Review article written by Eugene Volokh, who's this First Amendment professor at UCLA.
Speaker: He has a very popular legal blog.
Speaker: He wrote an article basically proving, I think conclusively,
Speaker: that in the Constitution, in the First Amendment, when it talks about the freedom of the press, that at the time, the press did not refer to a guild of journalists.
Speaker: The press referred to the technology of the printing press.
Speaker: So freedom of the press was like, not only, you know, there's freedom of speech, like what you say out loud, and there's freedom of the press, meaning what you publish, right?
Speaker: But that, you know, but that the First Amendment, you know, the freedom of the press does not just apply to media.
Speaker: It applies to anybody who can print something out or broadcast it or whatever.
Speaker: That's a pretty important distinction, you know, and it's informed by the history.
Speaker: So it's not just like, well, they didn't, you know, it's not just saying, well, at the time, they didn't enforce this part of the Constitution.
Speaker: It's like, you look at it, you say, well, they said freedom of the press, this is what freedom of the press meant at the time.
Speaker: That means that's what the law is, because we can't just let like evolving language change what the law is, you know.
Speaker: So, you know, so, so.
Speaker: That could potentially come to me in some sort of like slang sexual practice.
Speaker: The press.
Speaker: And then that's what it protects.
Speaker: And now, now we get to do this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's protected in the constitution.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I, so I think, you know, something like Gorsuch's opinion there, like you could look at discrimination based on sex.
Speaker: Well, so theoretically he's wearing a dress and
Speaker: They're discriminating against him because his sex is male, but his gender presentation is like, that's not what sex meant back then.
Speaker: Discrimination based on sex, on the basis of sex, did not mean that.
Speaker: Nobody thought it meant that.
Speaker: It referred to a distinction that these people would deny exists.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, it's true.
Speaker: That's a great point.
Speaker: But the point being, it clearly just meant men versus women.
Speaker: No, it wasn't even a thing back then.
Speaker: The trans thing was just not even a thing.
Speaker: So how could you say that the law prohibited discrimination on that basis?
Speaker: It's silly.
Speaker: It's a silly kind of, there's a phrase, people, they write out logic, but they write LAWGIC, meaning like it's a particularly legalistic form of reasoning that just does not take into context reality.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: So I think sometimes that stuff creeps in.
Speaker: I mean, I think the conservatives are more idealistic than the liberals.
Speaker: So sometimes, I mean, I would say Gorsuch, I don't think that in that case that reflected a lack of courage.
Speaker: I think he really believes that and he believes like, well, you know, if the law says that I got to go against my own side, I got to do it.
Speaker: And I think that's kind of admirable, but it also means that you are, in fact, fighting an asymmetric war.
Speaker: Because, you know, there's some judges on the court, like Sotomayor and Ginsburg, like they were hardcore lefties or whatever.
Speaker: Like, you know, Breyer and Kagan, they're smart lawyers.
Speaker: They know better than a lot.
Speaker: They give their votes to the most ridiculous legal decisions.
Speaker: And it's just because they're liberals and they just do that.
Speaker: But they know how non-legal the reasoning is.
Speaker: And they just go with it anyway, because that's their team, you know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I want to talk to you about sort of the thesis behind Age of Entitlement.
Speaker: Have you read Age of Entitlement, Chris Caldwell?
Speaker: I'm about halfway through it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And the thesis of the book, for those who don't know, is sort of that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the non-discrimination regime that has generated basically the modern HR department is a novel constitution that essentially displaces the
Speaker: the constitution that we were governed by before.
Speaker: And I wanted to ask you about sort of based on the way the Supreme Court is ruling and based on the electoral situation, it seems like there is a closed loop now where there's not an obvious political point of attack for us to change that apparatus in a meaningful way.
Speaker: But President Oaks in the last conference said something to the effect of, you know, don't lose faith in the political process, participate, be part of that.
Speaker: And I haven't figured out how to square that circle yet.
Speaker: And I want to know if you have any thoughts on that.
Speaker: Do you still feel like there's solutions there?
Speaker: And if so, what are they?
Speaker: Well, I would say there's a lot of, there's kind of this, in this debate, you're familiar, I assume, with like Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, this idea, I mean, he, just very briefly, he's, we're talking about competing books here now, you know, but the Benedict Option is this idea that, you know, Christians may at some point face a time when we're very much the minority in the West, it's probably already
Speaker: And that we may face persecution and that you might need to, to a certain extent, kind of be a little bit monastic in the way that you live, like the Benedictine monks of the Middle Ages.
Speaker: And that's why it's called the Benedict Option.
Speaker: But, you know, a big criticism of him that people make is that, well, you know, you run off for the hills and you're not fighting the battles that need to be fought in public square because it's not all futile.
Speaker: There's things we can win back.
Speaker: And it always seems to me, I realize there's a tension there, but it doesn't seem to me to be an insoluble tension.
Speaker: You know, like it seems to me like you can do both.
Speaker: This always kind of makes, drives me nuts as a homeschooler that like, on the one hand, I look at things happening in the public school system over critical race theory or, you know, just all of the LGBT stuff that's being pushed.
Speaker: And I say,
Speaker: On the one hand, it's not my personal battle because my kids aren't in those schools.
Speaker: And so it would be easy for me to wash my hands of it.
Speaker: But I recognize that it's still important.
Speaker: Like, it's not like everybody's going to be out of public school anytime soon.
Speaker: You know, like there's still kids that are going to be influenced by that.
Speaker: So it's still a worthy battle.
Speaker: and it should be fought on political grounds, it doesn't necessarily, I mean, you know, like if you homeschool, you should still vote in your school board, you know, and you should still, you can still support those activist efforts.
Speaker: A lot of people who are in public school, they kind of point to homeschoolers like, we're the problem.
Speaker: Like, if you guys were just standing here with us fighting, you know, then,
Speaker: you know, we'd have more force and to fight this.
Speaker: And to me, it's just kind of like you gotta, you gotta kind of do both.
Speaker: You know, you got on the one hand, you got to recognize that things are kind of bleak.
Speaker: And maybe the current political order doesn't necessarily have a whole lot of time left.
Speaker: But on the other hand,
Speaker: it might have a lot of time left and you might, there might be battles you can win.
Speaker: And so I don't, to me, it's like, do I feel super hopeful about the American political process?
Speaker: No, but I don't know that President Oaks was, you know, asking us to be that.
Speaker: I think he was just saying, you know, don't join, don't go join a revolutionary movement.
Speaker: You know, don't, don't think that, you know, the solution is, is violence at this juncture.
Speaker: Obviously, like we all know how it goes.
Speaker: Again, the Constitution is not self-enforcing at some point.
Speaker: I mean, every empire ends and America is no different.
Speaker: And at some point, you know, things are going to devolve into civil war revolution or whatever.
Speaker: And I think he's just saying we're not there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, and he's not predicting that we're going to get there anytime soon.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: And I think that that's the right move.
Speaker: I mean, I'm not getting a militia together.
Speaker: Like I'm just trying to carve out a space for my family and I, and at the same time, I'm not retreating from the political battle of the day.
Speaker: Do I think, am I super optimistic about winning the battle on a macro level?
Speaker: No, not really.
Speaker: But on the other hand, things sometimes circle back around.
Speaker: I mean, 40 years ago, if you were a communist in Eastern Europe, you probably thought things were going to be communist forever, and they weren't.
Speaker: I mean, eventually communism fell, and who knows if the current regime is going to fall at some time.
Speaker: And so I don't think there's any problem with saying it's not over yet.
Speaker: You know, there may be life in this thing yet.
Speaker: And even, I mean, things last a long time, too.
Speaker: I mean, you're raising your kids, and eventually your kids are going to raise your grandkids.
Speaker: Like, if you want a future for them,
Speaker: Yeah, maybe we'll have a big civil war in 10 years.
Speaker: I mean, that could happen.
Speaker: But it also could be that America just sort of limps along for the next 300 years.
Speaker: And if that's the case, you know, you're going to want to make it as good a country as you can.
Speaker: Even, you see, the thing is, like, even if you want to head for the hills, quote, unquote, you still got to fight for the right to head to the hills, you know, because there's people that will go out into the hills to look for you, you know, and they will stamp you out if they can.
Speaker: And so you do need to make allies.
Speaker: friends of the friends of Mammon, as it says in Doctrine and Covenants, and you gotta make, you gotta have connections, you gotta work together and work towards political solutions that at least allow you to do that.
Speaker: That's why like, there's been a lot of successful push, not to keep harping on homeschool, it's just an example,
Speaker: Yeah, there's this guy, I think his name is Corey DeAngelis.
Speaker: Yeah, who is, he's a big homeschool guy, not just homeschool, he's a big alternatives to public school guy.
Speaker: And he always talks about legislation where the money follows kids like so rather than just a kid goes to the public school and they get the money for that student, like you give money to the student and they can use it for whatever, whether it's vouchers or homeschool or whatever.
Speaker: And, you know, that's the kind of law that makes it a lot easier to live like we want to live, you know, makes it easier for our kind of people to flourish, even if we're not a majority.
Speaker: If we can persuade the majority to give us that, just to give us that kind of space, that's a real big, important thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Where do you think BYU is going with all this as far as we're watching Elder Holland sort of rhetorically crack the whip, but we haven't seen any heads rolling yet.
Speaker: Do you think BYU?
Speaker: We went from musket fire to heads rolling.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Let's just stick with musket fire.
Speaker: Metaphorical.
Speaker: Metaphorical heads rolling.
Speaker: Well, you know, my answer now is way different from my answer a month ago.
Speaker: You know, it's a bit, you know, you're right to bring it up here because it's a similar question.
Speaker: It's like, how long do you operate within the system?
Speaker: At what point does the system become so corrupting that, you know, the system has to just end?
Speaker: And, you know, BYU has very much tried to work within the system.
Speaker: But clearly at the same time, not wanting to compromise on our principles.
Speaker: And I feel like there's a lot of things that we've compromised on.
Speaker: Things are way different in certain ways than they used to be.
Speaker: And a lot of people on our side are kind of alarmed by that.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: You know, I mean, I feel I kind of have the same feeling sometimes.
Speaker: But on the other hand, there's going to be times where you got to seek an accommodation, you know.
Speaker: And so, you know, there's instances where BYU has to compromise on things.
Speaker: And it's just right now we're sorting out what we can compromise on and what we can't.
Speaker: And I mean, Elder Holland was sort of laying that out.
Speaker: For those that aren't LDS or haven't been following this, you know, at BYU, you know, Elder Holland, Jeffrey R. Holland, who's one of the
Speaker: Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, very important figure, former president of BYU, gave a talk where he basically made a point that my friends and I have been making online for a long time, which is that a lot of BYU professors
Speaker: really direct criticism at the doctrines, kind of some of the core doctrines of the faith, and that they shouldn't do that because BYU is there to help strengthen our faith and not to tear it down.
Speaker: And, you know, he, it really was a talk that set off just a firestorm, both online and in the media, because I think there's this sort of, I don't know if you want to call it Marxist history or sort of Whiggish history, that the idea that we were on this arc of history towards greater and greater liberation
Speaker: and that BYU and the church eventually were going to allow gay marriage and stuff like that.
Speaker: And it definitely disrupts that narrative because it would, you know, his talk kind of indicated that the church hasn't really moved on this at all, which is good because it's an eternal principle for us.
Speaker: But
Speaker: If you were hoping that we would just drift along with society, it's bad news for you.
Speaker: And so I think, and he laid it out in his talk, he said, look, the church, we don't have to give money to BYU.
Speaker: BYU is supported mostly with church money.
Speaker: if it ceases to serve the purposes of the church, like they'll cut it loose.
Speaker: I mean, I don't know if you'd call that a threat, but he's just saying, I think he was trying to illustrate, that's how important this is.
Speaker: You can't think that you can just keep pushing BYU
Speaker: in an apostate direction and that we'll just go along with it.
Speaker: You can't think that that's what's gonna happen.
Speaker: Like we, our principles are, we're not going back on them.
Speaker: And to show you how serious I, the former president of BYU, who was president here when they won a national championship of football and all that,
Speaker: We'll get rid of all of it.
Speaker: We'll get rid of all of it if it means we have to give up our religious principles.
Speaker: He definitely opened it with like, this is so, so important and special to me, and I believe in it so strongly, and I will light it on fire if I have to.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I mean, I think it was symbolically very important that it was him that gave the talk.
Speaker: Yeah, for a couple of reasons.
Speaker: One, because he's so closely associated with BYU and also because he is seen like, I mean, he's an extremely compassionate man.
Speaker: It comes through in all of his talks and speeches.
Speaker: It's clear how much the man empathizes with everyone who suffers.
Speaker: And yet, he's still loyal to the doctrine.
Speaker: I mean, it just to me, I don't know if that was intentional or
Speaker: but it definitely had that symbolic meaning, both for people who loved the talk like me and those who hated it.
Speaker: The symbolism of it was not lost on anyone.
Speaker: Yeah, he's sort of there.
Speaker: They seem to regard him as well.
Speaker: They past tense.
Speaker: They seemed to have regarded him as their kind of man on the inside.
Speaker: And this really blew that up.
Speaker: So, I mean, my vision, I think, is probably that
Speaker: We hang on to accreditation for a few more years tops.
Speaker: I mean, I guess it depends what you mean by shortly.
Speaker: I don't think it's going to happen the next five to 10 years.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: Just because I think it's such a big thing.
Speaker: You know, there's these changes that they could make.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I think there's so much institutional opposition to it.
Speaker: You know, it's not like, you know, Bob Jones, are you familiar with the Bob Jones University case?
Speaker: You know, Bob Jones University is this university down in South Carolina that was kind of very retrograde on racial issues.
Speaker: And back in the 80s, they had their tax exemption revoked because they didn't allow interracial dating.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The thing is, they were really isolated on that.
Speaker: They were probably the only accredited university in the country that had that kind of policy.
Speaker: BYU is not so isolated on this.
Speaker: I mean, there are so many accredited universities that at least give lip service to the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Speaker: I mean, there's tons like the South is dotted with like Bible colleges and Christian schools and stuff like that.
Speaker: And, you know, Catholic schools.
Speaker: I mean, there's so many Catholic universities.
Speaker: I think it would be hard.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, maybe I'm being too idealistic here.
Speaker: I'm thinking
Speaker: In 20 or 30 years, maybe five to 10 just seems too soon to me.
Speaker: Just because of the institutional Christianity does not seem like it's ready to cave on that completely.
Speaker: If we were the only ones, maybe.
Speaker: But I think that we have enough allies that I don't think it's going to happen right away.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But anyway, go ahead.
Speaker: Sorry, finish your thought.
Speaker: No, fair enough.
Speaker: That changes it.
Speaker: I mean, I think...
Speaker: My hope is, yeah, I'm going to do the Mitt Romney thing.
Speaker: My hope is that they'll self-deport.
Speaker: That they can make the academic environment unpleasant enough for those people that they will simply leave to greener pastures.
Speaker: Now define what you mean by those people, just to be clear.
Speaker: I mean, professors who genuinely reject
Speaker: the family proclamation and, and, you know, sort of everything we stand for as far as sexual ethics, which by the way, is such a fundamental part of our doctrine.
Speaker: It's, you know, uh, sexuality is not something that we sort of view as like, it's part of this present world and it's a little bit icky, but we tolerate it for, you know, sort of the, the, uh, the creedal view of it.
Speaker: It's fundamental to the eternal nature of humanity.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: to reject that is to kind of reject the whole project.
Speaker: So there's, there's just so many people.
Speaker: And, and part of it is just our, our feeder system.
Speaker: And we, everybody that comes into the school has to be, has to come from some other university and they're all indoctrination centers for the same ideology.
Speaker: And so it's like, you know, I just don't see how it's avoidable at this point.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: Well, you know, so an underrated part of this too is, I think one reason it's gotten worse, other than just the general awokening of all, you know, the world, we have this particular problem where,
Speaker: it's so hard to get ahead in academia these days.
Speaker: You know, back in the 50s, if you were an academic, you know, you might go like, if you're, let's say you were an LDS person who was unorthodox, you know, you kind of didn't believe in the doctrines of the church, okay?
Speaker: You're not going to go teach at BYU.
Speaker: You got to, you know, like Sterling McMurrin, who, you know, was a member of the church, but very, very unorthodox.
Speaker: I think he taught at the University of Utah, you know.
Speaker: And there were people like him, people they taught at Harvard or whatever.
Speaker: Nowadays, it's so hard for people without strong diversity credentials to get ahead in academia that if you're an active LDS person, even if you don't agree with the church on stuff, BYU is kind of the only game in town for a lot of people.
Speaker: And I think that has changed things to where you got people who are total malcontents, who hate everything BYU stands for.
Speaker: who go to BYU because it's the only way to make a decent living for them in their field.
Speaker: And so that's a problem that, so you're talking about people self-deporting.
Speaker: I think with the students that might happen, like the real proggy students might say, well, I'll just go to Utah State or whatever.
Speaker: or Wyoming or wherever they're from.
Speaker: But like, but with the professors, I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, it's, there's a related problem with the students, which is, you know, again, in the 1970s, if you wanted to go school cheaply, and you're from Arizona, you can go to BYU, or you can just go to ASU.
Speaker: Well, now ASU is like four times the price of BYU, even for in-state.
Speaker: So there's this, the thing is, BYU has like, because BYU just kind of continues to act like a university from decades ago, in terms of
Speaker: It's finances and how it hires people and stuff like that.
Speaker: A lot of people who are not, you know, who don't want to have to deal with the problems of the current system of public or higher education, they go to BYU when they don't really belong there.
Speaker: And even they would probably admit that they don't really belong there.
Speaker: Yeah, it's the same problem with the self-deporting line in the first place, which is how are you going to make it more of a hostile environment than the environment they're coming from?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's possible.
Speaker: Well, I do think, you know, there's a certain amount of like, you know, elapsed time, right?
Speaker: So like, if you were to go seven, eight years ago, I mean, I can't remember when the gay marriage case came down, but 2013, 2014, something like that.
Speaker: At the time,
Speaker: the people who were saying the church needs to change on this issue were very celebratory and they basically said like, it's just a matter of time.
Speaker: Basically, they kind of gave people who don't really believe in the church like an incentive to stick around.
Speaker: Like, come on guys, just hang in there.
Speaker: The church will come along, it'll change, don't worry.
Speaker: And that answer is increasingly less tenable.
Speaker: And I think even they are starting to realize that they're starting to say, gosh, I thought the church was moving on this and it turns out it's not, you know, and I mean, in another 10 years.
Speaker: it's going to be even harder, right.
Speaker: To make the case that, Oh yeah, any day now, you know, it's almost like a millenarian cult, you know, it's like, you know, they keep waiting.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: The judgment day is in five years, you know?
Speaker: And, and so, you know, obviously with each predicted, uh,
Speaker: they get, there's less and less credibility there.
Speaker: And so, and I, you kind of heard people say it after Elder Holland's talk, there were a lot of people, I always feel like it's a hollow threat until I actually see it happen, but there were a ton of people who were like, gosh, you know, I thought maybe that I would want to send my kids to BYU, but now I don't, you know?
Speaker: And I'm like, well, you know, if that actually happened, like if you people actually realize that the church is not going anywhere on this issue, that we're sticking to eternal principles, maybe if it dawns on you that you're not winning,
Speaker: and you're not making the change, then maybe you're going to give up.
Speaker: Maybe they'll finally leave us alone and go to some other school.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: That leads me into my final question.
Speaker: You're maybe the biggest sports fan in our little social circle.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Oh, yeah, sorry.
Speaker: I suspect that's the case.
Speaker: And we have all become aware of the phenomenon of the sports bro.
Speaker: The jazz, Utah jazz in the bio, and they're just insufferable on Twitter.
Speaker: And so I want to understand from you, what do you think the ideology of the sports bro is?
Speaker: Where does he come from?
Speaker: How can we destroy him?
Speaker: So I should mention, I am in the sports bros, but not of the sports bros.
Speaker: It's like, I feel like I am the perfect person to ask about this because I actually sort of kind of understand why they care about this stuff.
Speaker: I mean, I spent part of my life in central Ohio where Ohio State football is just the obsession.
Speaker: Everything revolves around football there.
Speaker: I think Texas is probably a similar kind of thing.
Speaker: But like, you know, so it was just kind of normal to be way into sports and following sports and stuff like that.
Speaker: There wasn't, it wasn't something that was just for, you know, kind of like, I think, I guess with people who are really online, they think it's kind of losery to follow sports teams or whatever.
Speaker: For us, it's just like, it's a form of entertainment.
Speaker: And, you know, it's like you go out.
Speaker: It's not a particular type of guy.
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: No, especially growing up, it was not a particular type of guy.
Speaker: It was just everybody.
Speaker: And maybe it's just an age thing, too.
Speaker: I'm a little bit older than a lot of the guys who are super online, you know.
Speaker: So I think maybe I grew up during the last era where it was like everybody, you know, kind of watched the World Series.
Speaker: And, you know, maybe just a little bit of an age tint to it, you know.
Speaker: But yeah, so I don't to me, it didn't take on the sports bro thing was something I wasn't even aware of till I was on Twitter, like in terms of like, this is the way the sports bro see things.
Speaker: And I think some of it is just selection bias.
Speaker: I think, so to explain what it is about the sports bros that we're criticizing here.
Speaker: So like on Twitter, it may just be a Twitter thing, but on Twitter you have kind of different groups of people who are LDS.
Speaker: You have the progmos, you know, who are progressive LDS people.
Speaker: They're the people we're talking about that want the church to have gay marriage and all that stuff.
Speaker: You have people who are kind of conservative, like very orthodox members of the church.
Speaker: You probably heard of Desnat, you know, I mean, that's us, right?
Speaker: And then in the middle, you have these guys who are, and some of these guys are just full on prognos, but you have a lot of guys who have what we call sports and bio, you know, like they built all of the things listed in their bio are sports teams, BYU, jazz, you know,
Speaker: U of U, Yankees, Red Sox.
Speaker: They always root for the outside of the sports that actually have teams in Utah.
Speaker: They just root for whatever the most popular team is.
Speaker: But these guys, they form their identity around the sports teams and they do not like
Speaker: anyone who is even remotely, let's say vociferous about defending church teachings on Twitter.
Speaker: And I think that's such a strange, like that connection is not intuitive.
Speaker: No, it's not.
Speaker: I think there's a selection bias here, which is, okay, they're on Twitter, but they didn't get on Twitter to fight about stuff.
Speaker: except about sports, right?
Speaker: This is just not something that forms a lot of their mental headspace.
Speaker: Their mental headspace is like, I go to work, I go home, I watch sports, you know, whatever.
Speaker: Like, these ideological battles is just not where they want to be.
Speaker: And so for them, like the default mental mode of LDS people is to be really nice, you know?
Speaker: And so they don't get being not nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: you know, they don't get why you would be aggressive verbally with anybody because it's just not part of their culture.
Speaker: So I think I brought that up in another conversation.
Speaker: Someone was asking me about sort of our little crew of people and how, you know, we are doctrinally orthodox, but I think outsiders may not understand the extent to which we are countercultural within our own culture as far as
Speaker: how transgressive it is to be not nice.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Or to point out uncomfortable truths.
Speaker: I mean, my wife is always like, she just shakes her head because we'll be having conversations with all these LDS people, we'll be like a dinner party or something.
Speaker: And there's this issue that everybody's talking about it and they're all just circling around the obvious elephant in the room.
Speaker: I cannot not mention the elephant.
Speaker: I'm constitutionally incapable of,
Speaker: of leaving it alone.
Speaker: And my wife is just like, why do you always have to say the thing that everyone is thinking but no one is saying?
Speaker: Because I don't like the dishonesty of it.
Speaker: I don't like just kind of leaving things unsaid that everybody's thinking.
Speaker: And so I think that's a part of it.
Speaker: So the first part of it is that just by default, they kind of have the default mental mode of what we call Mormies, Normie Mormons.
Speaker: which is that they just, they think that if you are engaging in any kind of conflict, it's inherently evil, like it's inherently bad to say anything negative about anything.
Speaker: The other side of it, I mean, I think probably to some extent, like maybe if you're that into sports, like I would never, like I would never occur to me to orient my like personal identity around it.
Speaker: Maybe when I was like, maybe when I was like 16, if somebody had said, describe yourself, I might've said, well, I'm a Mariners fan, you know,
Speaker: But, you know, I'm not 16 anymore, you know, like, I have things I care about a lot more than sports.
Speaker: And so it would just never occur to me to identify that.
Speaker: So to some extent, like, they're clearly susceptible to like, mass media, in a way, what the mass media tells them matters, they just say, Oh, that must be what matters, you know,
Speaker: And so that, you know, so if they're that kind of, I mean, it's the same thing with the Marvel bros.
Speaker: The guys that are super into Marvel, like they're all proggy, you know, they're all, or at the worst, at best they're more me, you know, like you can't be that into, you know, a mass media product like that without kind of just reflecting sort of an unreflected mindset.
Speaker: And, you know, and so there's that aspect of it too.
Speaker: I think on a very granular level,
Speaker: especially the BYU bros.
Speaker: Well, first of all, the Utah bros often have an ax to grind against the church.
Speaker: Let's just be honest.
Speaker: The guys that are Utah Utes fans, a lot of them went to Utah because they didn't want to go to BYU for the same reason that they don't like to go to church or whatever.
Speaker: But then like with the BYU guys, I think it kind of goes back to this issue that you see.
Speaker: This is, I sent a tweet the other day where I was joking about how like how great it is, BYU just is about to get invited into a major conference for the first time, the Big 12, a major athletic conference.
Speaker: This is a big step forward for the BYU athletic program, which, you know, I root for BYU's teams.
Speaker: But there were a lot of people saying for years that BYU would never get into a major conference unless it modernized on the gay thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: unless it started allowing gay students to date and that sort of thing.
Speaker: And that's not true.
Speaker: They got into the Big 12 without having to compromise on that.
Speaker: So in a way, like, you know, I know there's a lot of people who are non-sports bro types who I totally get their viewpoint.
Speaker: I won't even try to dissuade them of it, that they say, BYU should just get rid of athletics.
Speaker: It's a distraction.
Speaker: It's worldly, et cetera.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: They might be right.
Speaker: I'm not saying they're wrong.
Speaker: However, I do consider it like a good sign that BYU is able still, you know, it's a good sign like that, for example, that, you know, de-accreditation is not imminent.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because if they're still able to get into a major athletic conference without changing their position on that, then probably getting accreditation stripped is not like imminent.
Speaker: You know, I mean, that just kind of reflects the mindset of university presidents in
Speaker: So, you know, but I think there were people, I think the sports bros literally, some of them would rather see, like Elder Holland saying that they would scuttle the university, rather than compromise on religious principles.
Speaker: I think there are a lot of sports bros who like that would be like, well, why would I even go to church if BYU doesn't have football?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like what, what is the purpose of, of, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to shut down BYU and, and therefore all the athletic programs, what religious, you know, no, no religious principle matters to me as much as that, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I think, I do think there was a substantial contingent who were like, you know, quiet, be nice, be nice to everybody or else, you know, we won't get into a big conference and we won't make lots of money and we won't win lots of football games.
Speaker: And so for me, my,
Speaker: my temperament and my upbringing is 100% like I would very much like to stick it to sports bros.
Speaker: Like I, I, I, I get a lot of enjoyment out of it.
Speaker: I really like to see them fail and suffer.
Speaker: And, and so I have been resisting in myself the impulse to blame it on like, Oh, they just actually value BYU football more than they value the church.
Speaker: So to hear it from you is very vindicating.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: I mean, like, that's the thing is I am like, I, you know, every time like somebody from a minority group comes forward and like criticizes the actions of their minority group, they call them self-hating.
Speaker: Like, you know, black conservative, oh, he's a self-hating black man, a gay conservative, he's a self-hating gay.
Speaker: I am a self-hating sports bro by that definition.
Speaker: Like, I like to watch sports.
Speaker: I like to play sports.
Speaker: But I recognize that people have just gone way off the rails with it as far as their personal, you know, identifying with it as their personality and, you know, making it to where it matters more to them.
Speaker: Now, do I think that like BYU's status is the driving factor here?
Speaker: No, I really think it's the first thing that they're just, it's just the default of people who just kind of have mass media tastes, you know, they... And they're probably...
Speaker: You know, if they're dialed into like some Utah jazz message board and that's like the center of gravity for their online social universe, then the people that they're concerned about impressing and the people whose feelings they care the most about are going to be much more critical on these issues.
Speaker: And so they're going to just, you're sort of the average of your five closest friends, right?
Speaker: And so it just, it's wherever your sort of pole star is,
Speaker: that's kind of inevitably how you're going to orient yourself.
Speaker: Well, the perfect example, this is kind of like a classic sports pro controversy.
Speaker: Jonathan Tavernari was a BYU basketball player from like 12 years ago or something like that.
Speaker: He called me out on Twitter, was criticizing me directly on Twitter.
Speaker: And the origin of it, the reason he was mad at us in the first place, me and my friends, is that he had come out and said,
Speaker: He had not served a mission.
Speaker: He played basketball instead of serving a mission, which lots of guys that play for BYU do serve missions.
Speaker: So it's not like you can't go on a mission, especially if you play for BYU.
Speaker: And, you know, he was like, somebody just told me going on a mission is a commandment.
Speaker: And is that true?
Speaker: Does that mean I'm a sinner?
Speaker: Like he was acting like it was some kind of testimony issue for him.
Speaker: Like somehow he was going to have a hard time believing in things if it turned out that it's a commandment to go on a mission.
Speaker: And, you know, a lot of us were like, look, it's not a personal, like nobody's personally criticizing you on this.
Speaker: It's just like, just because you didn't go on a mission doesn't mean it's not a commandment.
Speaker: But like the sports bros just rose up in just
Speaker: like they couldn't, it's like this poor persecuted professional basketball player, like how dare you say that going on a mission is a commandment without criticizing him directly, how dare you point out something about church doctrine that he doesn't like that makes him uncomfortable, how could you do such a thing, you're making a BYU guy feel bad, you know, and it was just like, you know, it was so pathetic, you know, it's like,
Speaker: And there's a lot of, you know, kind of dumb ideas out there about it too.
Speaker: Like, they'll be like, well, he's doing more missionary work by being a basketball player.
Speaker: It's like, no more.
Speaker: No, he's not.
Speaker: No, give me a break.
Speaker: I mean, you know, nobody who's not a member of the church even knows who he is.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Maybe, maybe you could make that argument for somebody like Jimmer Fredette or Steve Young, who got, you know, real famous for a while, you know, but like, you know, come on.
Speaker: I mean, most of these guys, they're not, they're not going to be some superstar.
Speaker: They're just, they're just guys, you know, they're not exempt, you know.
Speaker: And even Jimmer Fredette or Steve Young, I wouldn't say was exempt exactly, but that doesn't mean I'm not sitting in personal judgment of them.
Speaker: You know, they make their decisions and I don't have a problem with it.
Speaker: But, you know, to say that like, because it would make some basketball player feel bad, now church doctrine has to be reread differently.
Speaker: It's like, come on, give me a break.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That to me, it's the absence of judgment.
Speaker: It's to say, I'm not going to say that you personally are- Yeah, there was no judgment involved, but-
Speaker: but I'm also not going to endorse your course of action just because you took it.
Speaker: Yeah, in a weird way, it's almost like they're using a case law analysis, right?
Speaker: They're like, well, I'm not going to judge Tavernari guilty of sins, so I guess that means nobody's on a mission.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, so it's just stupid, you know, and so that's kind of the sports bro mentality.
Speaker: It's like circle the wagons and
Speaker: I'm so upset about this and how dare you question this or how dare you say anything that makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable.
Speaker: I think it's just sort of anti-intellectual mass media and just normie stuff.
Speaker: Like I said, there's particular cases like the Tavernary thing or like with the BYU getting into a major conference thing.
Speaker: But for the most part, I think they're just super normie and they just happen to be on Twitter.
Speaker: Yeah, and they're just, it's not like,
Speaker: they're even the same type of like temperamentally the same type of person.
Speaker: Like they're, they're radically temperamentally different.
Speaker: And we just really struggle to understand each other because we're, we're on, we're not only distinct, we're like extreme edge cases of our respective sort of personality types.
Speaker: And it's just really hard to relate.
Speaker: So this has been a really fun conversation.
Speaker: And I wanted to wrap up with,
Speaker: kind of what you're working on, which is a homeschool curriculum that's maybe oriented.
Speaker: We talked about the current state of the homeschooling scene being a little bit softer, a little more maternal.
Speaker: If you could tell us about your plan to change that.
Speaker: Yeah, so I mean, and our plans are kind of in developmental stages yet, but the vision here is that there's a lot of homeschool curriculum.
Speaker: Some of it just mirrors public school curriculum.
Speaker: It's just like doing it at home instead of school.
Speaker: There's others that I think capture the vision of homeschool a little bit better where you're getting immersed in the culture of your ancestors and things like that.
Speaker: But it does, you know, moms buy most of the homeschool curriculum.
Speaker: I think to somewhat, to some extent, it's just kind of marketed to moms.
Speaker: It's things, you know, the readings they get and kind of the way they talk about them.
Speaker: It just seems a little bit more oriented toward girls, which is nothing wrong with that.
Speaker: But there's things that boys really, really like that I feel like are kind of ignored.
Speaker: You know, things that boys don't even know they like to some extent.
Speaker: They never get introduced to it.
Speaker: So first of all, like histories of wars and things like that.
Speaker: In the old days, like you would have learned the names of several, you know, Roman battles and generals and emperors and things like that all the way up.
Speaker: You know, you would have learned all the, you know, the English kings and, you know, kind of the empires that are most relevant to our own culture as Americans.
Speaker: And just a lot of that's just gone by the wayside.
Speaker: I mean, like, you know, public school is kind of a joke that way.
Speaker: It's basically like you learn about American history from...
Speaker: you know, 17, you know, well, maybe you go back to 1620 and it goes, you know, up through like World War II and then the school year is over because you didn't have time to get to anything else.
Speaker: You know, maybe you get to World War II.
Speaker: A lot of times it ends with like the Civil War because they just didn't get to all the material.
Speaker: It depends on how long you spent on sort of the defining sins.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And so, I mean, and then like, you know,
Speaker: like with you know with civil war it's like you don't learn about battles you learn about slavery right with world war ii you don't learn about battles you learn about the holocaust which you know as as as jesus said about you know paying tithing and you know this he ought to have done and not to leave the other undone you know sure like you should do you need to learn all that stuff but when all of history teaching is about you know kind of
Speaker: stories of victimhood, that's not very compelling to boys.
Speaker: It's good to learn about atrocities and things like that, but you also need to learn about... Boys just love learning facts.
Speaker: I'm not saying girls don't, but it's a special delight that boys have in trivia, learning particularities of history, how certain people looked, what they wore, all those things.
Speaker: you know, what the names of the battles were, what the strategy was, like, that's kind of the boy version of history.
Speaker: And I, I feel like it's very neglected.
Speaker: And, you know, and pretty much any history outside that kind of narrow window of American history gets ignored, too.
Speaker: So the history stuff is kind of the driving fact.
Speaker: But, you know, to me, you know, I'm kind of a three R's guy, you know, it's like,
Speaker: So really, people talk about all these different subject matters.
Speaker: I feel like if you're keeping up on math, obviously math knowledge, even if you don't think you'll ever use it, like you got to know, you got to do it for the SATs.
Speaker: So you got to keep kids on math, you know, science is good to learn.
Speaker: But like mostly, like you can learn so much just by learning history.
Speaker: you know, because it teaches you reading and writing, especially reading.
Speaker: You learn to think.
Speaker: And there's just so much that comes naturally with that.
Speaker: And maybe it's my, just my mode of thinking, because I've always been into history.
Speaker: But I think there's a lot of people like me.
Speaker: I think there's a lot of
Speaker: kids like me who are very uninspired students who that sort of thing could really reach them.
Speaker: I used to, you know, read my social studies book, like from beginning to end.
Speaker: Of course, they had to call it social studies.
Speaker: History would be too oppressive or something.
Speaker: They had to call it something Marxist, like social studies.
Speaker: But, you know, geography and they teach you geography and things like that.
Speaker: So another one is geography, like, you know.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, man.
Speaker: I used to just stare at maps.
Speaker: I used to, I loved maps as a kid.
Speaker: And maps, yeah.
Speaker: There was one that was an atlas of world history.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I don't know if you've seen this big blue book.
Speaker: And it's like the world at like every stage of the game from like ancient Sumer or whatever.
Speaker: And I must've just, I must've just torn that book up.
Speaker: I just love that book.
Speaker: And we didn't do anything even on the same planet in school.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And like, you know, and I know that there's like room for this, you know, as far as like learning, you know, the focusing on particular facts, because I'll take a lesson from like teaching in church, okay?
Speaker: You know, a normal Sunday school lesson, this is, I don't want to get too much into the religious side of this, but a normal Sunday school lesson is like, read a scripture.
Speaker: How does this apply to us in our time?
Speaker: How do you feel about this?
Speaker: Have you ever felt this way before?
Speaker: It's very like feeling focused.
Speaker: I once taught a group of like 10 and 11 year old boys.
Speaker: And we were learning, you know, it was the year that we were studying New Testament.
Speaker: We were, and we were in the book of Acts.
Speaker: Now, like a normal, you know, a normal way of teaching Sunday school would be like to read a story about like, here's Paul said this, how could you be a better missionary like Paul or whatever, like things that kind of focused on themselves.
Speaker: I started off, you know, there were these stories about like, you know, the different, you know, like he's teaching people who believe in like the Hellenistic gods, right?
Speaker: You know, they're translated as like Mercury and Jupiter or whatever in the Bible, but you know, they're probably talking about, you know, Zeus and
Speaker: and Hermes and all that.
Speaker: But the point is that like, I like put up like a picture of all the different Roman gods up on the board.
Speaker: And I was like, okay, can you guys name these?
Speaker: They were enthralled, you know, and maybe they'd read Percy Jackson or something.
Speaker: I don't know if it existed back then, but you know, they were like, okay, that one's Mercury and that one's Uranus.
Speaker: And you know, they were so engaged.
Speaker: Because it was like, this is something they've learned about in school.
Speaker: They care about Greek and Roman gods because they're cool.
Speaker: It's great stories.
Speaker: And then by the time we got that done, they were so ready to hear a story about Paul preaching to these people who actually believe in the Greek gods and stuff like that.
Speaker: To me, those particularities, they give something to hook your brain on.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Particular facts.
Speaker: It's like it's something to sink your teeth into that if you just talk about like, oh, we don't care about what the actual substantive knowledge is.
Speaker: We just care about how it makes them think or how it costs.
Speaker: Well, they're not going to feel or think anything if there's nothing to feel or think about.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Well, I can't wait to see it.
Speaker: And we will keep up with updates on that as they develop.
Speaker: In the meantime, people can follow you at at J. Ruben Clark on Twitter, but the L in Clark is an I. It's a capital I. J. Ruben C. Arc.
Speaker: And if you're interested in what we're doing as part of Exit, you can follow us at Exit underscore org or check us out on the Patreon page, patreon.com slash Exit underscore org.
Speaker: Thanks a lot.
Speaker: Thanks, man.
Speaker: This is fun.
