Shaun Newman Podcast - #726 - Caylan Ford

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

She is a documentary filmmaker, writer, researcher and a former political candidate. In 2022 she founded Canada’s first tuition-free classical charter school, “Calgary Classical Academy”. We discuss being cancelled, Tolkien’s writing mirroring society, creating a Charter School in Alberta and how to live well at the end of an Age. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Clothing Link: ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

This is Chris Sims. This is Tom Romago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Kraner. This is Daniel Smith. And welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday.

How's everybody doing today? We got lots to get to. Before we get to today's episode and on with the show, stick around. We're going to talk a little Cornerstone Forum. But before we get to all that, how about we start here? Silver Gold Bowl, my go-to for precious metals with their complete in-house solution. whether buying, selling, storing, or adding precious metals to your retirement accounts. You know, Silver Gold Bull talks about the price of gold as a measure of trust in government.

And with gold at all-time highs, trust in government is not surprisingly plumbing to all-time lows. And Silver Gold Bull has an exclusive offer just for you, the SMP listener, on quarter-ounce gold coins from the Royal Canadian Mint. For anyone looking to protect their savings with physical gold, these low-cost fractional coins are a great buy. And if you go down on the show notes, you can text or email Graham for details. You can also text me at any time and I can hook you up with the right direction if you're interested in that. If you're hopping on and buying anything off silvergoldbull.ca.com, just make sure to reference the Sean Newman podcast. It helps you, helps me, helps them. It's a win, win, win.

Cal Rock, your trusted partner in surplus oil field equipment, leading supplier of new used and reconditioned oil field production equipment here in Canada. But that's not all. Tank fabrication, new and refurbished fluid, storage tanks, trucking, pump checks, and demolition. for all your oil field needs, go to calrock. com. A, Prophet River, Clay Smiley, and Team. They got all your firearm needs. Well, they can do it.

Anywhere here in Canada, they can cover you. They got gift cards for all the hunters in your life or anyone who enjoys the outdoors. If you go to Profitriver.com, you're sitting anywhere in Canada. If you're not a hunter or you're not a sportsman and you're sitting there, I don't know, you can do the gift card thing. Otherwise, they specialize in importing firearms in the United States of America.

They have tons of used stock as well. If you're looking for maybe an option of getting a cheaper firearm from them, they can do that as well. Go to Profitriver.com. They are the major retailer of firearms, optics, accessories, and they serve all of Canada. So no matter where you're sitting, they can get that into your hands. Windsor Plywood, builders of the podcast studio table. Yes, the one and only. When it comes to wood, these are the folks.

and whether we're talking mantles, decks, windows, doors, sheds, they can get that character piece of wood to you. Stop in today and see Windsor Plywood, the team over there, Carly Clawson, here in Lloydminster, tell them I sent you. The Cornerstone Forum is returning. Mark your calendars, May 10th, 2025. We're heading to Calgary. That's right.

Expect keynote speakers, roundtable discussions that are engaging, provocative and profound exploring realms of faith, politics, and liberty, and we're going to be discussing the challenging, challenge is looming in the next year. Obviously, we've got to get there first, and hopefully we're going to have some strategies on our path forward. GROC says it's not just another event. It's a communal think tank,

and I really mean that. It's fostering both introspection and interactive engagement. I appreciate that, and I guess GROC's got, you know, that AI can figure out what I'm trying to do and put it into decent words. Some of the things that you need to know it's going to be at the Winsport, May 10th. We're working on hotels, so when you're buying your tickets,

which are early bird prices right now, so if you're looking to get the cheapest the tickets are, just head on over, it's down the show notes. But as for a hotel, we're working on getting a deal. That'll be coming out here, hopefully in the coming month. And some of the people that are confirmed, keynote speakers are including Tom Luongo, Alex Krainor, Chuck Prodnick, okay? So three of the guys that were there last year are confirmed to return.

One of the guest hosts is confirmed to return. Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation hosted a couple of the roundtable. She will be back. We got a new member of the guest host group. That's Tom Bodrovics. He's been on here once, Palisade Gold Radio. So he's going to be hosting a roundtable as well. So there's a, as you can tell, there's going to be some additions this year to the Cornerstone Forum that weren't there this past one.

we're working on changing a few of the things. Hopefully we've got some exciting things we're going to announce, once again, in the coming months. One of them is going to be a trade show. We're going to be getting some companies to put up some booths. That way, you know, when you hear all these exciting and different ideas, hopefully there's some people in the, you know, in the area that you can go and talk to afterwards and see what their products are and see what they're dealing with.

And hopefully there's some solutions to be had right on site. So that's some of the things coming there. If you want to pay attention for all the details, sign up for Substack. It is free. We do a weekly newsletter on Sundays, 5 p.m. It comes out. It's going to give you a week in review of the podcast.

There is a paid portion if you want for paid subscribers. It's some insights into the coming things on the podcast. And, yeah, I think that's what I got for you today. If you came to the last cornerstone, because I've talked to several people here over the last week and you're interested in sharing a few thoughts. Shoot me a text. I'm always interested in hearing what you guys enjoyed, didn't enjoy,

or maybe not didn't enjoy it because, you know, there's not a whole lot of negatives that came out of the last one. But if you have some questions or some thoughts, by all means, folks, I love hearing from you. And I have to say, you know, going to Calgary, I was going to have it in Lloyd. It wouldn't be possible in going to Calgary if it wasn't for, Silver Gold Bull and Bow Valley Credit Union.

Those are the two major sponsors this year. So I'm excited to be partnering, I guess, with SGB and BVCU. I'm excited to have those two companies powering this next year's event. That's May 10th. So there, that's what I got for you. And finally, November 29th, I still have four tables for the S&P Christmas show. We have dueling pianos coming to Lloyd Minster. Four tables left.

If you've been sitting, dragging your feet, drag no more. more, shoot me a text. Let's get those last four tables sold. And that's what I got for you today. Okay, let's get on to that tale of the tape. She's a documentary filmmaker, writer, researcher, and a former political candidate. In 2022, she founded Canada's first tuition-free classical charter school, Calgary Classical Academy. I'm talking about Kalan Ford. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. I'm joined by Kalin Ford. So, ma'am, it's great to have you back on this side. It has been too long. Did you just call me ma'am? Goodness. Oh my goodness. You're one of those, are you? I, you're making, you're making so many ladies laugh right now because

they give me a hard time about it. Oh, ma'am, miss, man. I'm like, where I come from, it's a term of respect. I don't know what I'm, what am I supposed to call you? Lady, woman. Good. That is a good question. I think that I'm just still trying to come to terms with my own mortality. And so I appreciate that it's a term of respect. Just not quite comfortable with the fact that I am solidly in ma'am territory here. Well, I don't know. Where I come from, you judge a guy or a man on his handshake, you call him sir or mister. And everybody always does the same little dance. And women, I'm like, I know what I call my wife, I have a list of terms of endearment, and I don't use those for any other woman. So it's like, ma'am is my way of sense. I don't know. It's respectful. But then almost, you know,

I maybe got to find a different one, but nobody can find me a different one. It's like, no, no, no, look, fair enough. I, I think you're in the right here. It's just jarring. You know, it's funny. There's a ton of women listening to this right now agreeing with you because they all say it to me, ma'am, who you call them ma'am? I'm like, I don't know. I think depending on their age, Miss might flatter them more. Miss. Yeah, I'm certainly more flattered by Miss, not that you should be a flatterer.

But, yeah. Well, there you go, folks. Welcome Kalin back to the podcast. It's great to have you. I was just saying it's been since May of 2022 since your grace podcast. And I went and listened to it. If you haven't listened to that one, like even, I have a hard time listening to myself at times. Like, especially like when you, you actually roll back the clock a few

years. It's kind of weird. It's just like, man, I'd like to punch Sean in the face sometimes in the best possible way, folks, if there is such a thing. It's just, I know there would have been no reasoning with me even where I sit now. So like one of those weird games I used to play, like, what if you could talk to yourself five years ago? What would you tell them? And then I got to the point where I'm like, I don't think it matters because I don't think I would have listened. I don't think I would have agreed with where I'm at. And so if you go back and listen to you. You know, you go back and listen to you. you though, you were fantastic. You had lots of, I was blown away. I was listening to it. I'm like, this is going to be fun, like having you back on. So it's great to have you back on there.

There's a little bit of flattery for you. Appreciate it. Now, when I was talking to you back then, you know, you'd ran for the UCP a while back. That would have been what, 2019? Yeah, 2018, 2019. I was a candidate for the UCP. And then everything exploded on your life. They basically ran you through the mud. The UCP went, maybe you shouldn't run for us. And I'll let other people fill in the blanks or go back to the story. I can like Kailen fill in the blanks as well.

Walk us through where you're at these days. Because I think I was really curious when I saw some different things come through Twitter. And I would just hazard a guess that most people don't know the full story of where you're at and what's starting to shake out. So yeah, I mean, you might have seen some news on Twitter. Twitter after my kind of de-finestration as a candidate during the 2019 election, I kind of labored

over this for the while, but eventually I decided that I would file a defamation claim against a number of the parties that were involved in that. And we can get into the reasons why, but ultimately I just sort of figured there have to be some kind of consequences and some kind of deterrent effect on people frivolously or maliciously making up career and life destroying lies about other people for their own personal advantage. So I try not to make it about vengefulness, and I have to constantly sort of check myself to make sure that I'm not going there in my heart.

But so that defamation claim is proceeding slowly. Anyone who's been through the civil court system will know that it's agonizing, that it can take a decade to seek redress for these kinds of wrongs. But that's where we are. In the interim, though, one of those parties, Progress Alberta and Duncan Kinney, its executive director, they recently settled their part of the

claim for a quarter million dollars, which is great, means my lawyer can get paid. And I don't know, a few other developments have come out of that litigation. Alberta now has a tort of civil harassment thanks to a collateral action that I initiated. So harassment is now a civil cause of action in Alberta. It's kind of unusual in Canada, and that respect. And we also discovered that the Alberta NDP doesn't legally exist, which is sort of fun and interesting. So that was a kind of protracted process, but things are finally moving forward now on that front. Could you walk me through that? How are they not illegal? I remember reading this and being like, I don't know if I fully understand this. It's so they're not a legal person. So they

cannot sue or be sued. So the Alberta NDP is not an incorporated entity. It's not a not for profit. It's not a society. It's not registered in any way. It registered in 1977 with Elections Alberta under a trustee of the Alberta New Democratic Party Foundation, which also doesn't exist. So the trustee didn't exist either. So there is no one to sue. But the Alberta NDP's Constitution says that they're a section of the federal NDP. And the federal NDP does have an incorporated association. So initially in my lawsuit, I named them. They wanted nothing to do with this. They fought very, very hard. And I won't talk about how sort of insane their billings were to try to get out of this

lawsuit by totally disavowing any connection to the provincial party. So after like four years of basically just trying to figure out who do I sue, in the place of the Alberta NDP, they finally appointed a litigation representative, promised to indemnify him. Now that's a bit risky because there's no one indemnifying him, right? So if they, ultimately, if they say, sorry, buddy, like we told you that we would indemnify you, but we don't legally exist, so we're not actually going to adhere to that commitment. This guy is going to be screwed. He's the executive director of the party. So anyway, we're reasonable, satisfied that they won't do that and that we will have recourse if they do. But yeah, after

four years, we finally have a person to discover for the Alberta NDP. So they played lots of, I think they played lots of quite sneaky games in order to try to get around and evade this litigation. They were slapped on the wrist pretty hard by Court of Appeal Justice recently. A cost award was leveled against them, so we'll see where that ends up. But in the meantime yeah that litigation is proceeding but yeah I mean you asked I'll answer your question in a kind of broader way though because you asked where things are or sort of stand now without getting again into the reasons too much why I initially ran for office one of the maybe sort of salutary effects of being

cancelled very dramatically is it's a great reminder of the sort of transient nature of all worldly affairs. Right. So it's this idea that all of your worldly accomplishments, status, wealth, the esteem in which other people hold you, your position in society, all of these things that we kind of expend our nerves worrying about day after day, these can all be taking. from you in an instant, and in my case they were. And so that's a good reminder that we ought to be kind of keeping our focus on permanent things. And when I say permanent things, I largely am referring to sort of eternity,

so to what our soul's kind of ultimate fate and destiny is. And one of the reasons I got into running for office was because I was sort of worried about the totalitarian drift in our society. I have a background studying totalitarianism, particularly the communist context. And I was sort of worried that increasingly these things that are like symptomatic of proto totalitarian states were more obvious in our own society. And so I got involved in politics thinking, well, if there's one area where these trends could maybe be at least, if not arrested, then at least sort of stalled, it would be an education. And so I've continued pursuing that outside of politics, but with a focus on, you know, how do we educate people,

A, so that they're not easily led in this world, and they're not kind of thrown amidst the madness, and are, you know, susceptible to the moral and intellectual and spiritual confusion that increasingly characterizes our world, how do you inoculate them against that? And at the same time, how do you keep them oriented toward those permanent things? To sort of keep their souls open to a possibility of transcendence and able to kind of take a little bit lightly some of the things of this world and at least keep one eye focused on eternity. So to that end, I started up a charter school network a few years ago. So we now have the fastest growing charter school system in, well, in, I'll say in Canadian history, but that's a cheat because Alberta is the only province with charter schools. So the fastest growing charter schools in Canadian history, we now have three campuses serving 1,300 students.

This is, and we just started our third year. And so that's, that's kind of the focus of our program. Okay. So you're doing it to me again. Man, I tell you, you think you've grown in three years, two years, I guess. And then I start listening and I'm like, nope, my brain's going to do this all the entire time I talked to Kowlin. When you talk about inoculating the public or people against this, I don't know, wrong path or these ideas that are pulling us this way, your solution still comes back to education. If you can get enough of the youth into a school system, charter school, and start to work that way essentially in, you know, is it five years time, is it 10 years time, you're going to have a group of human beings that can articulate what they're seeing.

in society instead of scratching their head going, what the heck is going on? Am I wrong? Am I partially right? Yeah, I think you're partially right. I mean, ideally, I'd say that it would start in the family, right? But a lot of families now face this challenge of if they're not in a position to be able to homeschool,

what do they do as it relates to the education and the sort of moral and intellectual formation of their children. So that's where the school systems become really important. You know, I think this is, not a novel revelation and other people in history have encountered the same problem. So I go back, like two great exemplars along this vein would be Plato and Confucius, who were near contemporaries in time. And both of them were encountering the problem that their societies were,

basically all of the sort of symbols of the moral order had been inverted in the Greek context. You've just come out of the Peloponnesian wars and everything is sort of upside down. In China, you're sort of headed toward the dissolution of the Zhou dynasty. And both men were interested in trying to save their civilizations. And they tried to do it through politics. And in Plato's case, you found basically there's just not a sufficient number of people who have been adequately formed spiritually, morally, intellectually, that you could even accomplish anything in politics because you can't affect that kind of change alone.

Confucius had put together. a sort of government in waiting. His students were sort of, you know, would-be ministers. And he traveled around sort of seeking for a king who would put him in charge and give him some authority to affect the changes he wanted. And it never worked out. And more often than not, his talents would arouse the jealousy of these courts and he would, you know, end up fleeing assassination attempts or whatever. So both men, interestingly then, willingly or not, ended up being, being seen as teachers. So Plato founded an academy to try to raise up the kinds of souls that you would need to kind of write the ship of state. And Confucius, he's sort of known in China as

sort of the master teacher. I don't know that he would have liked that. He wanted to go into politics, but that's where he ended up. So yeah, look, I think when, when you just don't have an adequate number of people in politics who have the courage, the sort of prudence, the capacity for discernment, You have to try to make them. Okay, I want to talk charter schools, but I also want to go, you know, under that, that thought process then, we're still in for some tough days ahead then, essentially. Like when you look realistically at the days ahead, you give me the, you gave me the Julie Panessian. You live at the end of an age, get used to it.

Well, tell me about that. Well, I think everyone, can everyone not feel that? I don't know. Explain it to me, the end of an age. What if you're, you might be one of the few that can explain it, right? Maybe I've been wrestling with the end of an age and I, and you can put it in terms that I go, Oh. I've never tried to put it in terms because I always assume that it's sort of self-evident. Never, never assume.

No? Okay. Well, I guess societies like all things in nature are cyclical and we have been living on the sort of the fumes of a civilization for a while and seem to be actively dismantling all the remaining sources of order. And so I think we're barring a kind of miracle. We're entering a period of night. And those periods are necessary in the same way that it's necessary that winter follows summer

and that we as human beings, we need sleep as well. I think civilizations need these periods too to sort of. of regroup and recalibrate. So I don't think it's necessarily a bad, well, it's not wholly a bad thing, but I think that's where we're headed. And so one of the questions becomes, you know, how do you live well at the end of an age? How do you keep your head about you? And how do you try to preserve what wisdom you can and carry it forward? And have you, that, like to me, as you're talking, I do this event, the Cornerstone Forum. And I'm like, huh, you're talking to things I've been pondering.

So how do you live at the end of an age in ways that, you know, you're, you're unmoved by things being upside down. You're unmoved by growing, you know, I was saying to before we started, you know, you asked, what do you want to talk about? I'm like, I don't know. Like, I mean, we're, like, by the time this airs, we could be, you know, bombs could be going off everywhere in the Middle East. They certainly seem like they are right now.

and where does that build to, you know? And the United States is, you know, within a month of their election, and it seems like strange things are going to go on there over and over again. You know, you've had a president, a former president, get shot in the head and still, you know, going on with that. You got parliament saying they're not going to move past a bunch of things and the liberals fighting the liberals, but they won't just have a bloody election because that would just make sense.

And the block doing what they're doing and on and on and on. I mean, it's a crazy world. probably always has been, but the longer I stare at it, more I'm like, what the heck is going on with this place? You know? I won't claim that I've totally figured out the answer of how to live well at the end of an age, but I think you kind of alluded to it, which is one, I think we need to try to keep some stillness

and peace in the depths of our own souls and not allow ourselves to be kind of driven mad by what we see around us. I was reminded, there's this line that's kind of sometimes attributed to Sophocles, but it's not quite, which is those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first must turn mad. And insofar as you believe that there are malevolent gods or deities or demons or whatever work in the world, it would certainly seem like a very convenient plot

to drive people mad as a means of destroying them. And I think there's a lot of ways to drive people mad. And we're not always sort of aware of our own susceptibility to this. But we could talk about that. So yeah, I'd say the first thing is to not be driven mad. So are you a faith-based person then? Or is that not something that enters your mind? Yeah, no, I do a Buddhist practice called Falindafa.

and it's account of many of these things. I think when Christians encounter it, they find a lot of parallels. So I think there's a sort of mutual intelligibility when we talk about, you know, powers and principalities and sort of the general movement, the kind of eschatological movement of the cosmos. Well, and I assume that's helped you with the upside-down world you've been living, in now for, you know, like, I mean, eventually people have moved on from Kalin Ford. I don't mean that in a grim way, just in the fact that, you know, the news cycle moves on and you step away and,

and you know have legal ramifications and everything else. But there's, you know, you've seen and witnessed and been a part of something that is, well, I don't know, very few people have been a part of. And then on top of that, I would say there's this naivety of like where I sit on like what facing the mob actually is and where that's going to take you in a sense of spirituality or just like your place in society. Yeah. I mean, reckoning with sort of loss of place in society is a really, it's a very interesting trial. And the fortunate thing about it is a hugely disproportionate number of the greatest philosophers, historians, poets, writers in history were themselves either exiled or wrongly accused and imprisoned or something.

And so they at least provide some kind of template for how one can endure that. And I would often think of, I think it was Seneca who described, you know, this temptation to either hate or imitate the world. We're like human beings, our social beings. We're mimetic creatures. That is, we're imitative creatures by nature. We want to fit in. We want to reconcile our own conception of things with those of the society around us.

So when you find that, for example, society is telling you that you're an awful person, that, you know, you deserve to die, you should be ignored. None of your accomplishments matter. None of your potential accomplishments matter. And you don't feel that inside. This creates a massive amount of dissonance when your own perception of yourself is just so at odds with that of the world. And it's tempting to, yeah, to either start hating the world for that.

It's tempting to try to find a way of reconciling that dissonance, either by trying to persuade others to change how they see you or by adopting their impression of you and sort of giving up. and just internalizing it. Or you can go the stoical route and say, I'm going to separate the internal from the external and navigate entirely by my own internal lights. But that takes a kind of spiritual stamina

that I think few people can consistently muster. Certainly I couldn't consistently muster it. So, yeah, like the experience of, it's a kind of, it's a strange kind of modern exile being canceled. And yeah, it will sort of drive you mad when you can't reconcile your own understanding of reality with societies. But I think the test there is like, yeah, how do you maintain a kind of equanimity? How do you maintain a capacity to forgive, to want to help others? And that's actually a great sort of self.

When you find no one's helping you, you can just sort of shift your attention to, well, how can I use this experience? How can I redeem this experience to try to do good for others? Yeah, I'll stuff there for a sec. Well, I am curious. Like, you know, to have the entire world flip you upside down and go after you. And I'm being, you know, like entire world, I think about that. And then I immediately almost chuckled because I'm like, except it wasn't an entire world. Because there'd be, you know, how many people don't pay attention to.

Alberta politics. Billions. I mean, in our own province, millions. And so there's so many people who didn't know who Kaelin Ford was. And if they'd met you on the street, they probably would have had no idea. In saying that, I was then kind of curious, like, what did it build to? You know, like, and I may have asked this the first time around, but, you know, like, okay, you build yourself up, you're this person.

Then you get attacked for being that person, and you kind of hide away. You get removed from, you know, everything you're best. building with the UCP and everything like that. But like, did everybody just go, well, can't be around you? Or is that just the way it felt? Okay. So there is a kind of a negativity bias, right? So again, this is just we're human beings generally, unless you have some kind of psychopathy, you're going to be much more sensitive to negative inputs than to positive ones. Right. So we exaggerate the negative inputs in our minds. So like, I'm aware of that. But yeah, look, the Calgary Herald, the newspaper record in the city where I live, published 16 articles libeling me.

Toronto Star 14. Four of them were front pages in the city that I live. It was, you know, regular radio broadcasts, national news, the national with Wendy Mesley on the CBC, had a segment about me. And no one would let me speak on my own behalf. So I was sort of, you know, impotent to address the falsehoods that were being told about me as no one would even give me a platform. Daniel Smith was actually one of the only, actually the only kind of mainstream person in the media who did speak to me and she took an enormous amount of heat for it. So there was a petition campaign launched against her. People threatened to go after her advertisers just for having the temerity to give me an opportunity to speak in my own defense. Eventually her producers pulled

that interview offline. So, you know, I really felt like I was, I was just sort of being buried alive repeatedly as I would try to crawl out from under it. Yeah, lots. I've lost a number of friends, not necessarily because they believed the worst about me, but because they were afraid of this social contamination of being associated with me. So they didn't want to face the kind of guilt by association of remaining friends with me. I was basically unemployed. I was told I couldn't do I couldn't sit on charitable boards because I was too much of a reputational liability I couldn't get work for years I'm the primary breadwinner for my family so that's you know a really stressful situation to be in

Eventually the only way I could get work was to start my own company hire 50 other people and then move into a staff position myself at half of my previous salary after four years of, you know, struggling to figure out how to get by. So, yeah, it's like, it's pretty harrowing. You know, I would see people on the street who I knew and they would avert my gaze, pretend they didn't know me. People in the political party were told to basically pretend I didn't exist, not to be seen in public with me, like, don't follow me on social media. So, yeah, it was totally sort of treated like a ghost. And that's just a really surreal way of being treated.

Because you actually, like I actually felt like I was stuck in this liminal realm between living and dead. And, you know, I only have so much comfort with ambiguity. Like at a certain point, you just want to resolve the ambiguity. It's like, pick one or the other. So, yeah, but that's, that was tough. But it's also, you know, I've, that's required. Well, I mean, on this, on this, on this. this on this side i'm like i've had this discussion lots with but you paint a very like bad but like a good

picture but like in a dark way um and i've had parts of that right now and obviously not to this extent i haven't been posted about in the Toronto Star and everything like when you think about that folks like that's that's pretty heavy um but i remember being the the the the the the popular person walks into a party, everybody wanted to come talk to you? And then, you know, like you get to a point where, you know, like, it's now you talk about people not, I, I waved at one person. And they were staring right at me. I'm like, I must have thought about that for like six months. Like, they must have not saw me.

And then I'm like, there's no way they didn't see me. I was waving right at them. They're looking right at me. And they acted like I wasn't there. I'm like, that's a strange thing. And I take that experience. And then I go, Sean McAlan just told you times that by like 10,000, essentially, right? Like that's a very small microcosm of what you're talking about.

Yeah. But yeah, no, like you do linger on those kind of experiences, right? Experiences of betrayal are, I think suffering can become a real affliction when it ceases to be intelligible to us. So when you can account for why you're experiencing something or why someone's treating you badly. and you can at least understand it, I find that's much easier to deal with than when someone has sort of ghosted you, they're no longer a friend, they won't talk to you, and you can't understand why, right? And you're left asking like, well, do they believe the worst of me? Are they afraid? Are they ashamed? Like what, you know, and you don't know. So it's just, it sort of stays with

you. And it's irresolvable. And at a certain point, I think I found I just, I just, I have to sort of be okay with the lack of intelligibility. There's a, I don't know if this is the intended meeting at all, but I referred earlier to how a lot of great literature and poetry is written by exiles. An obvious example of this is Dante and the Divine Comedy. And I don't read Italian. I can't speak to understand all of the intended nuance of every line, but there is a passage in the Purgatorio where are you familiar with the basic structure of the story?

Basic structure, yes, but it's been a while. Okay, so Dante and his guide Virgil are now in Purgatory, which is sort of a, it's a great mountain on which they're making this ascent. And before they really begin the ascent, they look over and there is a serpent in a tree. And there's this line about how, you know, perhaps this was even the same serpent that was in the garden. And somehow when I read it, I, the sort of the understanding that flashed to my mind was that in the state of purgatory, there is still this temptation to knowledge. And when you're suffering something, there's a real temptation to want to know if and when you're suffering, will end and exactly why you're suffering and how you will suffer. Like there's this,

there's still this real temptation to have to have this control over the situation. And this, I think, is a really, uh, it's a very dangerous temptation. And the purgatorio is my favorite of the books of the divine comedy. Because it's sort of the most earthlike, um, the people there are suffering on this ascent up the mountain. They don't know how long they'll suffer. They might not have total lucidity in terms of,

of why they're suffering or exactly what their sins were, but they know that they are being, that they are undergoing a purgation for the wrongs that they've done. And so they know that this is redemptive suffering and they rejoice in it together. And that's just so, it's such a beautiful image of people who are on this ascent,

they're going through pain, but they're enduring it with this spirit of gratitude, even though they don't necessarily know how long it will last. They don't necessarily know why they're suffering it, but they know for what end. And I think that has to be enough for us, right? We have to believe that the suffering we experience in life has some redemptive purpose

that we can turn it to the good or at least try to bear it nobly and not always try to sort of pick it apart and understand and try to control it. Is one of the ways then you're bearing what you've been put through is this, this charter school, like to have 1,300 kids third year? is that like, you know, like out of putting it, you know, like you go down to the depths, you're getting kicked around, you know, quite literally. And, you know, you, like, you find this charter school idea, or maybe you always had the charter school idea.

And to me, 1300 kids is no small feat. Maybe I'm wrong on that. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I, I'm just, I think I'm the kind of person who needs to work ceaselessly. So for me, I think the most, probably the most challenging part of this period of kind of exile was the feeling of uselessness. You know, I tend to believe that insofar as we have any capabilities or intellectual gifts or whatever, they're sort of on loan to us so that we can serve others. they're not for us to try to achieve wealth or comfort or acclaim or whatever. And so it was enormously painful for me to feel like I was sort of endowed with certain

capacities and I had absolutely no outlet for them. And so I couldn't, I was useless to everyone I cared about, to every cause I cared about. You know, I couldn't, in a sort of mundane sense, I couldn't support my kids. I couldn't be there for my family in the way that I should have. So, yeah, that was a source of tremendous perplexity. And there too, I don't know if you know John Milton's poem on his blindness. Are you familiar with that one? So I used to have it memorized, but now I'm going to be tested here.

So Milton, of course, is one of the greatest writers in the English language ever. But in the middle of his life, I think he was 43, he was struck with blindness. And he couldn't understand this. And for him, his gift was a gift from God so that he may serve and glorify God. And so he couldn't understand why at the height of his talent and his ambition and his capacity, he was suddenly sort of rendered useless. So he said, when I consider how my light is spent, or half my days in this dark world and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent to serve there with my maker and present my true account, lest he returning chide, doth God exact day labor, light denied.

So it's this feeling of like, why on earth am I given certain talents, and then my capacity to use them to serve other people is utterly destroyed. But moreover, people seem totally uninterested in having me do anything. You're right? Like no one cared. So that was really challenging. So I think perhaps selfless, maybe a little bit selfishly, I think the charter schools are a way of, it's a way of being able to serve again. and I'd like to say that my motives were more pure than that, but I think there is an element of like,

I also need to feel useful in the world. So, yeah, there might be some of that. I hope the audience, if they're not watching, can catch it. But, like, one of the things I think I admire about you is, like, you're handed, like, one of the things I said in the first interview was, like, why can't we have good politicians? And then I listen to you and I'm like, oh, you should have been a politician. Then you hear how you got railroad and you're like,

oh, that's why good people don't go into politics, kind of idea. But like, one of the things that my about you is like, you got this story that is, I don't know, very, like nobody wants to go through what you've went through. But to do it with a smile on your face, you know, reading poems and really getting to the philosophical underpinnings of some of it and trying to pull out a good

and not just focus on all the terribleness is like, I don't know, you give me hope for the world. You know, it's people like you that I'm like, maybe there is hope for the world. Maybe we can get through what is to come. And I mean, I know we will. But like, you know, you run into too many, not, I shouldn't say that you run into too many people. I feel like social media portrays too many people as this is going to be the worst, I don't know, five years, 10 years, 20 years, pick your time frame. And then I run into people like you and others on this podcast.

I'm like, I think no matter what comes, you know, when you get community. like this, right? Like people in it, like, you know, it's like, I, I don't know, you give me a lot of hope for where the world could go. Well, I hope so. I actually do think hope is very important. So we were talking about how to live well at the end of an age. Yes. Okay, so, and I asked you before an interview started, if you like Tolkien. Which I do. Good. I distrust anyone who doesn't. So I was... That's great. That should be on a shirt.

It's actually, it's a very good litmus test. Someone doesn't like Tolkien, like, something wrong here. They probably haven't read it. That's probably why. They were like, oh, yeah, the Tolkien guy with all the weird things going on and the trees talking and you're like, have you read it? No. Well, you know, like, I don't know what to tell you. So I was, I think there's some really good models in Tolkien for how do you meet with difficult times,

but also there's some really good sort of cautionary examples of how not to. And Theodin and Danithor are very, very good examples of men who under ordinary conditions would have been great men, but were sort of ill-suited for their times or not quite up for the challenge that was presented to them. I mean, Thayadin redeems himself, but they were both, yeah, they weren't up to the task of sort of confronting the evil that gathered in the world around them and the disorder. And they're sort of mirror images of each other in the sense of being opposites. So Thaedon was sort of not sufficiently, alive to the fact of, you know, the evil that was gathering on and encroaching on his borders, right?

And he wasn't alert to this, and he allowed himself to be sort of hypnotized by Wormtong, who's under the control of, it sounds, it does start sounding ridiculous when we start talking about it. But, right, Wormtong's under the control of Sauraman, and he sort of hypnotizes and exerts control over Theidan, the king of Rohan. We just to just to hop in for a second. And it does sound ridiculous until you go, folks, in the last four years, we've decided that, you know, boys can become girls, that we can literally, we're going to give maid to anyone,

that we're going to give out free drugs to anyone. We're going to on and on and on and on the insanity goes. So actually, I don't know about that anymore. I'm like, the fact that our fearless leader probably isn't our fearless leader, and he's controlled by somebody further up, I'm like, no, I think, I think Tolkien had some things bang on. I mean, but carry on with worm tongue and all the good stuff. stuff. So one of the questions that I asked myself is like, well, what what kind of deficiency

that they didn't have that he was susceptible to fall under this control? Because this doesn't just happen to people, right? And I think his problem was he he was someone who had a deep desire for peace, which again, ordinarily is is a great quality, right? To sort of to be disinclined, to be too, you know, to not be too hasty in ascribing bad motives to other, to try to, you know, keep things in perspective, to try to minimize bloodshed and needless war. Like these are actually very good qualities in a ruler, but like anything, if taken to an extreme, they can become the source of your downfall. So I think Thaeddin was someone who was deeply concerned with peace.

And because of this, even as Sauraman's forces and the wild, you know, the Hill tribes are slaughtering his people and his own son is killed and he can't be roused from this sort of sleepy stupor that he's in to decide that he needs to declare a war, right? And Gandalf rouses him from his sleep eventually. And I think the sort of the turning point for his character is when he confronts Sauramount at Eisengard. And Sauraman is trying explicitly to appeal to his desire for peace, right? Sauramund's like, enough blood has been shed. Let's be old friends again. And it's this great moment where Thaidan is basically like, no, like actually now is the time for vengeance.

And war. And so he turns it around and redeems himself. But I think that tendency to just want to assume that things are carrying on and that they're kind of okay, that sort of complacency can be a real problem. And you see this. That's where we're at in the world today. I think I think you see it across the board, right? I remember a few years ago, you know, there's this discourse about how, yeah, you know, college students have kind of gone mad, but they'll wise up when they get out of college. And I think that's reflective of the same sort of attitude because they didn't wise up. They just now they're just sort of they permeate HR departments and they're changing the culture of every institution that they work in for the worse for the most part. So yeah, so there's this sort of complacent naivete, this desire for peace that makes you downplay the magnitude of the challenges that we face as a society.

But Denethor is the opposite. And again, anyone who's an impression of Denethor is shaped by the film. you've been done at disadvantage because Denethor is a fantastic character, right? He's extremely sharp, very, very wise. He comes from a really noble house, right? Denethor though, he was too aware of the evil that was amassing on his borders. And he was obsessed with it, and he'd come into possession of a palanthier, a seeing stone, and he would use this to watch and see what was going to be.

on in the world. So he would spend many hours up in his tower, gazing into the Palantir. And the Palantir can't lie. Like, it has to show real things, but the other stone was under the control of Sauron. And so Sauron couldn't make him see things that were untrue, but he could show him only things that would lead him to despair. So there's this, Gandalf explained this. he said that Denethor was too great to be subdued to the will of the dark power. He saw nevertheless only those things which that power wanted him to see. The power which he obtained was doubtless, often of service to him, yet the vision of the great might of Mordor that was shown to him

fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind. So he was gazing too intently into the evil of the world, being allowed to see its might, and he did not see any cause for hope, and this drove him mad. So this is kind of the other side of it that I think some people may be on our side of the equation or maybe more susceptible to is you sort of see your society going mad. And in a kind of strange, almost mimetic imitation of that, it drives you mad as well. and it drives you to despair and it drives you to sort of, you know, to hate your fellow man in the way that other people might be inclined to hate you. But so, yeah, so, you know,

Denethor eventually, like he puts himself and his one living son on a pyre and intends to kill them both because he sees no hope for the world. So I don't know, I guess I think there's a lot of circumstances in which we, you know, this can happen. It was super obvious during COVID, for example, right? You had some people on one side who were driven mad in the sense that they were putting masks on toddlers for eight hours a day and, you know, trying to drive unvaccinated people out of society. And it's hard to even sort of quite conjure the madness of COVID era. But There's that form of madness, but it also drove people on the other side mad because they're watching this. They're being demonized by their neighbors, by their employers, by their government.

They know that this doesn't, a lot of these measures don't make any sense as public health care measures. And they allowed themselves to be totally consumed by it, consumed by the despair, by the anger or the resentment. And so it's, you know, the impact on the soul is basically the same. Whether you're right or wrong about the matter itself, you're losing if you're allowing your soul to get sort of darkened and corrupted by it. You know, you're, okay, the two kings, right? It's like, oh yeah, that's exactly what's happening. But then the Denethor, you know, you're talking about that.

I'm like, oh man, I've been, you know, one of the things sitting in this chair, Kaelan is one of the, you know, like, I'm talking to, people all the time, right? And at times, it's like, it's pretty troubling things, I would say. And so I had a good friend of mine call me this morning, actually, and goes, you know, how things are going? Like, you know, in one breath, I'm like shaped by two realms. One is, you know, I'm talking all these people. People get to listen to this. And that is, you know, although I don't change who I am on the podcast, they just get to listen to one part of where my brain is at, right? That's these conversations. And it can, be a pretty dark, angering world. And then, you know, on the substack, I try my best to post a few

photos or even videos from my phone so people can understand that although it's all dark and it's supposed to be hopeless and, you know, like on and on it goes, you know, just this past week, my son got sixth thing cross country as a first year and my youngest just started U7 hockey and I got to go to a barn dance that my brother's put on this will be the third stray year and you look at that and you go, you know, if you just took that darkness away, all you'd see is light.

Now in fairness, if you just do that, then you're Theodin, right? You're literally not realizing the enemy's at the gate and it's beating it down pretty hard. But if you just stick in the other realm, you miss that if you should walk out your door, see the sun's shining,

and hang out with your kids. Like, I guess that's why there's so much need for balance. Yeah. Especially in these times. Totally agree. Yeah. Well, yeah, and to try to keep.

Man, we just took, we just took Lord of the Rings book sales and threw them through the roof again. I don't think they need our help. They don't. But yeah, so the challenge for me is often like, how do you, how can you accept that, yes, you know, the things that are happening over here are actually I don't hesitate to use the word evil. That should be obvious by now.

I think these things are actually evil. But you cannot then allow yourself to be led by that into a state of hating. What do you mean by that? Finish that thought. It's tempting you into trying to be bad in order to stop it? It's tempting you to become bad and opposing it. Okay, a salient topic that seems to be, getting a lot more attention these days.

It cross the Western world and in Europe is immigration, sort of mass migration. And what are the cultural consequences of sort of largely unchecked immigration? And I think it's bad. And we can talk about the reasons why it's bad. I think it's bad for a lot of reasons, though. It's a sort of simultaneous uprooting of people on both ends of the equation. Human beings need roots and we need a kind of continuity that links us to previous generations, that links us to posterity.

And the way that a lot of countries, including Canada, have approached mass migration, I think uproots people. And it uproots people on both new immigrants as well as people who have been here a long time who see their societies undergo change at a pace that I don't think human beings are adapted for. So anyway, I think there's a lot of problems with that. I'm very concerned about sort of uprooting of cultures. But the response to that cannot then be to say, I hate immigrants or to sort of deny the obligation that we have as individuals to extend hospitality and charity to other people. So, you know, I don't know, that that's kind of one of these sources of tensions where it becomes very, I think it's becoming increasingly difficult today to honor and to reconcile all of our social obligations to each other. And increasingly, it seems like it's very difficult to honor all of our obligations without casting some to the wayside or without sort of putting them in contradiction with each other. So this is an example.

I think human beings need roots. We can affirm that. This is a good thing. It is a good thing to want to preserve and transmit a cultural inheritance to the next generation to do that. And to keep it intact and hopefully even improved. It's also a good thing to be hospitable and charitable toward people in need and toward sort of the strangers among you. And to treat your neighbors well. Like so these are sort of these are duties that were their moral duties that we have that increasingly are being set in in

Tension with each other and I think that's a really that's a very that's sort of an untenable Situation but we have to try to find a way to navigate it I don't really have the answers as to how other than to recognize that these duties exist and we have to find a way to honor all of them at the same time Don't you just come back though to the the King Theodon example? it's like you can act like there's no problems. Immigration is one. So it's just very like, you know, to even enter into the discussion, all of a sudden, people are picking sides.

They're already thinking about what they think. And it's very, there's a lot of emotion tied up in that. But to act like it doesn't exist is acting like there's no issue there. When, in fact, everyone can see there is an issue there and that it needs to be solved. And so if you go full on King Theoden, eventually you're going to have your culture, among other things, come head on into a different type of culture and there will be problems. I mean, we're already seeing it here in Canada. Like, I mean, you got, you just like just simple things, which I don't think are that simple folks, but like, you know, let's do the fishing. I don't think the fishing is that hot a topic.

But like you got you got certain things you can do. We all know the laws, certain things. And then you get this culture comes in and they just start. fishing whatever they want and then there's videos flying around and people are upset and they probably have no idea like you know i was i was riding my bike the other day with my youngest son and i'm like i wonder what coming over from some far off land and seeing all these geese in our parks and you think about it for my entire life you've never touched a goose now in fairness as a kid we used to go hunting geese but there's certain spots you can hunt geese and in a park you're not allowed to i can just

imagine that being really, really confusing. Why don't even just lop the head off and we got dinner for tonight, right? It seems almost self-explanatory, except that's not what our culture does. And if you walk into it, you can just see where you're eventually going to have problems. And that is just taking one large issue and taking one little thing and then it just explodes on you because when you say that, then they're like, well, not every immigrant does that. I'm like, well, no shit. Not every immigrant does that. But I mean, you can see the allure to it. I mean, we're seeing it with the fishing in Ontario, right? They're fishing with nets in the middle of the river. You're like, you can't do that. Like, I mean, there's laws, you know, you're going to find out, hopefully, you know,

that you can't do that. But that's one thing. And if you just ignore it, well, then it just starts coming to roost everywhere. This comes, I was, I told you this story back the first time we talked about Ocean Wiseblat skating on the rink and me being like, ah, it's in Calgary. And at first it was in Ontario. And pretty soon it's knocking on your door. in your hometown, you're like, well, I think I've waited too long. And this seems to be a problem we have in Canada. Yeah, I think it's easy to take for granted. If you've grown up in Canada or, you know, another sort of Western educated, industrialized society, it's easy to take for granted that your country actually has a culture, right? So there's a lot of people in Canada who'd say that,

who don't recognize what comprises our culture because it's like the air that you breathe. the sort of the metaphorical water that we swim in, we're not aware of it. But our culture is actually extremely unusual. And it's the cumulative result of millions of norms and inherited customs that we're sort of scarcely aware of until we encounter other cultures or other cultures encounter ours.

So anyway, I'm just, I'm sort of a conservative in the sense of believing that it is much easier to destroy things than to build them. And so along a lot of dimensions, I think change should always be pursued with a lot of deference to the past. And an awareness that, yeah, if you sort of accidentally kind of tear apart this intricate, like, I mean, yeah, culture, I can't remember who developed this analogy. But I remember reading an analogy that it's sort of like, your culture is sort of like a spider web. It's actually very delicate. It's extremely intricate.

It's built through enormous amounts of effort. In our case, it's built over many, many generations and centuries and even millennia of effort and trial and error. And once you have sort of torn it apart, you cannot reweave it. So I think I take that sort of sensibility into a lot of things with a sort of general, like you should tread very, very carefully. So I think I'm wary of like quite radical social experiments. And what we're doing now with immigration is a pretty radical social experiment. And it's an uncontrolled experiment. And it's one that if we find that we don't like the results, there's no going back on it.

At least not without doing things that we would find absolutely morally reprehensible. So yeah, it's a, you know, it's a challenging. Like Donald Trump essentially when you're saying that, like Donald Trump. and Trump's saying he's going to get deport all these immigrants they're going to go round up all the people and you're like well that like yeah I mean what what would be necessary to do that it would be right to which we I think rightly would be appalled by yeah right to do to other human beings so I don't know how we got on this thread other than to say that yes I think it is it's very it is increasingly challenging in the world to honor all of our duties at the same time but

I think that's, that is the responsibility that we have. If you wouldn't mind me, I want to talk about this charter school thing for a bit, because I can hear some different people hearing that you have, you know, three different spots, you've got all these kids, and I can hear them in the back of them. Why are you waiting so long to ask about it, Sean? We would like to hear more information on it. And so I guess I want not the sales pitch, but the Cole's notes, maybe, which probably is the sales pitch, of the chartered school.

it at? Can people join? How do they go about that? If they wanted to start up a branch of it, can they do it anywhere in Alberta? I just threw about a buckshot at you right now. You tell me, you've probably heard all these questions before. Yeah. So we have two campuses in Calgary. This year we're serving grades K to 9, and then we have a campus in Edmonton that's K to eight. Both of those are going to be growing up into full kindergarten through grade 12 programs. we're going to add a grade a year as we grow. So, I mean, our pitch, I won't say it's a sales pitch because we're actually massively oversubscribed as is.

We had about 3,000 applicants last year for a very limited number of new seats that were available. So if anything, we actually kind of try to deter people by emphasizing the things that we do that are sort of countercultural and strange. But we pitch it as classical liberal arts education. And that starts with, we just have very, fundamentally different metaphysical and I think anthropological assumptions than what you would find

in a lot of modern or progressive education. So what I mean by that is we have a more classical view of the cosmos, of reality, and of man's relationship to both of those. And starting from those first principles, you get to some very different outcomes in what our education looks like on a day-to-day basis. But in terms of sort of, yeah, what you would see if you step into the school, it's really calm, the kids are in uniform, they're very polite, they'll greet you with a good afternoon, ma'am. Oh, good afternoon, ma'am? Interesting. They will. Somehow it's less daring when the like 13-year-old boys do it than when you do it. But so it's a really environment, sort of calm, orderly environment. We believe that, you know,

structure, high expectations, order, these things are not incompatible with human freedom, they're actually preconditions for them. So we talk a lot about how we want to educate children with the habits, the virtues, and the knowledge that are required to be free citizens. And underlying that is an understanding of freedom that says that freedom isn't the same as license. It's not, you know, I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want, without any restraint. Freedom is, have you cultivated the ability to govern yourself inwardly? So do you know how to rule your passions with reason and control your appetites and place limits on them voluntarily and choose the good. And a person who can do that is a person who is free both in their own soul,

but also is qualified for the preservation of civil liberties. And when you have enough people like that, you can actually have a polity in which you have civil liberties. But if people have tyrannical souls and they can't control themselves and they just want to be unrestrained, you're going to end up with a tyranny. So yeah, so it's really well ordered. The kids follow rules. They recognize that the discipline that is enforced is actually good for them and, you know, has a sort of salubrious effect on their characters.

We teach mandatory Latin from grade five and up. We teach great books. So the kids read sort of classic works of literature that have endured usually for at least a few centuries and kind of proven their value over time. We expect the kids to read whole texts. So I don't know if some of your listeners may have caught, there was a story in the Atlantic about how a lot of elite universities, students come in never having read a book cover to cover and like incapable of doing it.

So we try very hard to cultivate a faculty of attention in students and to teach them how to engage deeply and concentrate for sustained periods of time with difficult texts. One of the ways we do that is there's no smartphones. We have a policy that if we catch a kid with a smartphone one too many times, we will load it into a trebishe and launch it across the parking lot. And we use very kind of minimal technology in the classroom. So, yeah, so it's, you know, our curriculum is like it's a lot of world history,

a lot of primary sources, great books. They memorize a lot of poems. They sing and do sort of, they have strings ensembles. And yeah, it's a very cool community. But there's a lot of demand for it. I think a lot of parents are, it's not necessarily that a lot of parents are looking for what we're doing specifically. But I think a lot of parents want to get away from what is happening in their public schools.

And so they see us as a kind of refuge from that. So they don't always know entirely what they're getting into when they enroll their kids. But I think when they do, most parents really, really like it. When you say countercultural and strange, I'm like, what do you mean by strange? Do you think the wearing of uniforms is strange? The fact they read whole text is strange. When you say strange, what do you mean by that? So we have a no pop culture rule.

They're not allowed to talk about pop culture or make pop culture references or bring like, you know, cartoon branded backpacks or whatever to school. we try to give them points of shared cultural reference points instead. And those tend to be rooted in history, philosophy, literature. So I sort of started noticing this, like, I think it's actually working because I went camping with my daughter and one of her friends from school this summer. And they were playing an impromptu game of charades. So, you know, we didn't have like cards.

So they're just sort of making up on the fly what they want to act out and seeing if the other can guess it. And our kids who like don't know who Taylor Swift is are just, you know, they're kind of insulated from the sort of the transient aspects of pop culture. One of them was in their charades game, Alfred the Great's burning tart from when Alfred the Great was briefly in exile and was tasked with overseeing the cooking of a tart and it burned. And the other got this like instantly. They could immediately, they're like, it's Alfred the Great's tart. And then another was Joan of Arc presenting herself before the Dofain. And, you know, later in the conversation, they're talking about like how messy one of their rooms is and the other's like, oh, it's like Pandora's box is it.

So these are like eight-year-old girls who, for whom these become their reference points. So, you know, tidbits from Greek mythology and from history and from literature. So yeah, we're weird in that sense. But also, you know, I think our philosophy is, It doesn't sound that unusual, but it is when you contrast it with what happens in progressive education. So one of the first things that we say in our charter under the principles that guide our approach is we say that we think truth exists, like capital T truth exists. And this itself would be a very contentious claim among a lot of public school educators today who would say, well, no, truth is relative. You know, there's your truth, there's my truth, who are we to judge? It's all sort of subjective and fungible. So we say, no, actually truth exists.

It is not fully understandable by man because we just have cognitive limitations. We're limited in our wisdom and our insight. But we nonetheless do have rational faculties, and we can apply our reason to try to apprehend and to try to orient ourselves toward what is true. We also similarly say that actually goodness exists and beauty and justice. These are also all real things. So there is a moral dimension to reality that we should likewise be attuning our souls toward

and trying to conform our souls to. And again, this is radically different from the assumptions underlying progressive education, many of which are, I know sounds silly because it sounds overused, but it's true, many of which are Marxist in origin, which basically say that there isn't this kind of moral dimension to reality. And there isn't a moral law that is transcendent that binds us. And basically, we should just sort of remake reality based on our will. So there's no truth, there's only power. And we just reject that.

So yeah, I think our approach is we're trying to tune our souls to reality rather than the other way around, rather than trying to reshape reality to fit what we want. And, yeah, like I said, from there, you end up with very, very different kind of manifestations of what our classrooms look like, how we teach things. You know, I recently gave like a guest lecture to the grade 8s on the spiritual consequences of a scientific revolution. We're trying to give them a kind of counterpoint to the Enlightenment propaganda perspective on the scientific. civic revolution. So yeah, it's an interesting place, but it's a pretty fantastic community of friendship. And the kids for the most part seem really like they're proud. They work really hard. They produce work that they're that they stand by. And they get to actually make beautiful

things and encounter beautiful things on a daily basis. So two spots in Calgary, one in Eminton, is the goal to to go further, like across Alberta? Like is there people, like can people apply to open up? I don't know a chapter. I don't know how, you know, forgive me if I'm, you know, like maybe I'm jumping ahead of the ball, but I'm like, okay, so you got three open.

What's stopping Red Deer or Lethbridge or Lloyd Minster or Grand Prairie or Fort Mac or Bonneville or I'm sure like, you know, people are gonna hear this, you know, holy crap, what the heck is this? You know, like is there ways to apply to bring in a chapter? I assume the fact you had, an overabundance of students apply and you said, oh, we're only going to accept X amount.

Where does it stand on opening up different chapters and the pace of doing such things like that? Yeah, well, we're trying to grow as fast as we can without compromising the culture and the quality of the school. So, yeah, look, for one, if people are interested in starting their own charter schools, the Alberta government has a process for doing that. They have to be their not-for-profits. and you need a certain number of families expressing interest in the school. You need some idea of where the facilities will be. But as tuition-free public schools,

charters can receive government funding for capital for facilities. So, yeah, I mean, other people who are interested in doing this can certainly do so. We're sort of interested in exploring, I think, Lethbridge, if we expand to a new market, would probably be the next place that we look at. But we're also trying to consolidate our current facilities here. So like I said, we're tuition free, so we're not allowed to charge tuition. We're not allowed to borrow money for facilities. So we're totally dependent on government helping us get school buildings.

So what that means is, like, we have one building that has no permanent walls. The walls are made of cubicle dividers. Kids change for gym class in chain link fence cages with tarps thrown over them for privacy. Their playground is a giant tree stump root system that I bought for $50 from an excavation company. And then we put in our backyard. So one of our other schools is a former military barracks. It has no gym, no green space. There's no science labs anywhere.

These are facilities that most public schools authorities would consider totally unacceptable. But the quality of what happens in the classrooms, I think, makes up. up for it, but we're still kind of in the phase of trying to make sure that we have, that we have the kind of physical amenities that we need to offer all of the programming that we want to do. Well, it's, it's, I mean, 1300 kids is nothing to, you know, just glazed by. That's, I don't know. That seems impressive to me.

Am I, am I the only one thinking that? I hope the audience, when they hear that, they go, 1300. Like, that's, that's impressive. I mean, you essentially have 400 plus. kids at each location, correct? Like, I mean, I know I'm doing my math correct. It's an average, yeah. Yeah, and two of those were not school buildings.

So there, like I said, a former military barracks, a former commercial office building that we've converted into school use. Well, this is, you know, I used to say homeschooling, or I thought, and I don't know if I said this, it might have been a guest. There was three different versions. There was, basically, you try and stay out of the current. system but essentially adopt the current system so you're you're basically going to virtual school from home there's there's your unschooling where you're you're

letting the kids do whatever they want whenever they want whenever they feel like it there's lots of people are super passionate about that and then there's a religious base background to a home school where you know there's there's more of a religious aspect to teaching the different subjects or it's implemented into the homeschooling. And I might be getting it wrong, folks. I don't homeschooling into all you lovely homeschoolers. I'm just trying to take a broad stroke, I guess, at this.

This seems like there's a fourth spot in there where it's the chartered school. And I'd heard about it, but I don't know if I've ever really sat and chatted with anyone, Kaelin, because it sounds like you're doing the same thing as public school. I mean, they're showing up to a location. They have classes. It's Monday to Friday. I assume? Yeah. So charter schools are basically we are like other public schools in the province, except for three areas of difference. One, our teachers are not generally unionized. They can unionize

if they want to, but they're not, they can be members of the Alberta Teachers Association. So the ATA consequently does not seem to like charter schools very much because we're not contributing to their their fund. Their union views, yes. A second is that we are not under the control of the big metro school boards, right? So in Calgary, it would be the Calgary Board of Education or the Calgary Catholic School District or the equivalents in Edmonton or elsewhere. So we have nothing to do with them. We have our own autonomous board of directors. Most charter boards are elected by their parent communities, so just directly by the public that they serve directly. And so that gives us some more autonomy. a lot more flexible, we're a lot more responsive to parents because, you know, as a parent, like some opponents of charter schools will say, well, you're not accountable because you don't have school board trustees that are elected in municipal elections. To which I would say, like, no one can name their school board trustee. Like these people are quadrennally, quadrenially elected

with extremely low voter participation. You would not be able to pick them out of a crowd. And if you're having an issue at your kids' school, do you really think that they're going to be responsive to your grievances? Or would you rather have a school board where it's the parent that you see every single day at pick up is on the board of directors and you can just talk to them immediately, you know their name, and they'll respond immediately. So I think it's a model that actually provides a great deal more accountability than the municipal election of school board trustees. And then a final thing is. Charter schools offer programming that is sort of unique in some ways. Philosophically, pedagogically,

some charter schools serve particular constituencies of students. So there's all girls education, for example. And it can't be programming that is already being offered by the public school boards in that area. So we kind of exist to fill a niche that the public school boards are not providing in terms of the kind of programs that we offer. offer. But otherwise, yeah, like we hire a certificated staff. We satisfy all of the requirements of the provincial curriculum. We're subject to the same public reporting and accountability metrics. So, you know, all our audited financial statements are online, all of that. Can you do, you mentioned that you can't charge tuition and you're funded by the government and the government has to find buildings for you. And can you do like fundraising and stuff like

that or is that not allowed? Yeah, we're allowed to, yeah, charter schools can fundraise. Any school can fundraise. Yeah, so that's the other possible avenue to raise some money. But other than that, like, that's, that's what you're beholden to. You can't just like have a private donor walk in with 10 billion and say, hey, Kaelin, here's 10 billion. Go pop-ups. Do you know a private donor with $10 billion? I don't know, maybe some of the listeners. This is totally allowed if you could find such a person. Well, I mean, you think about it, like, I go, I know the people that listen to the show. I'm like, they're going, I don't think they got $10 billion. I don't think Bill Gates listens to this.

And if he did, I don't think he'd love this idea. I think he wants something entirely different. But I look at it and I listen to it and I'm like, huh, you go, well, if we expand, we're going to Lethbridge. And I go, interesting. I'd be interested to see what people reach out after this. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I don't know my audience at all. Maybe there won't be any interest anywhere else in Alberta.

but I'm like, this seems to me like a little bit of money put into it and your 1300 could explode because I mean, I guess I'm probably missing a whole bunch of questions that, you know, some parent or farmer or on and on and on is driving around going, Sean, ask her about this, you know, and I forgive me, folks, I can't, I can't possibly know all your questions. But to me, like, it seems like there's a lot that is, would be desired in what you're doing. And I think the numbers show that. Oh yeah, for sure. And, you know, look, if you do have listeners who happen to have like a million dollars burning a hole in their pocket and they want a legacy and they want to contribute to the preservation and transmission of civilization, by all means, hit us up. We can do that. Well, I have no idea. But I mean, think about it. There's people with money. Guaranteed, I mean, Alberta's full of it. And are they just sitting there at burning a hole? I don't know. But they might also be going, I don't know where to put it. You know, like, I go back to what we started. to with how to live at the end of an age. We can all see what's going on. We're all sitting here listening to this. I'm sitting here doing this. I do this full time for Pete's sake.

And I'm like, I got an event coming up in May, you know, that's the cornerstone forum that's trying to bring together ideas when they smash together. Something out of it comes. You're like, oh, that's a good idea.

And one of the best ideas I've heard from so many people is just creating community, right? Like obviously you got to take care of your family, right? You got to do things. for yourself and your family to make it strong so it can withstand the things to come. The next one they all talk about is just community. You have to build a community. You're building a community.

And it sounds like, you know, whether it aligns with everybody's values, that isn't the point. It's the idea of this chartered school. It sounds like, you know, maybe it has some legs behind it, I guess is all I'm saying. And I've heard Daniel Smith, honestly, I've heard Daniel Smith talk about this. And I guess I just didn't fully comprehend what she was talking. about. Yeah. And, you know, I think you're, you're totally right about the community bit. I think, you know, back to that question at the outset of like, how do you inoculate yourself against sort of the madness of the world? And I think a big part of that is you have,

you have to have roots in things that are real so that you can't just sort of be like, you know, tossed about by every force that comes along and tries to act upon you, right? So one way to do that is, yeah, you want, you need to have roots in history, right? So you need, like you need to belong to a tradition and a place that has some continuity. You need roots in like reality. So you need to be, you need to have this capacity for intellectual discernment of what's real and what's not, what's true, what's false, what's just and unjust. And you can't make that distinction if you don't even believe that those are legitimate categories. So like you need to have that capacity.

And then yeah, you need actually, you need roots in a community and you need to be tied to other people. None of us can sort of survive alone. So I think that's a really big part of making ourselves more immune to the madness of the world is absolutely by building communities. And yeah, you know, I think what was I going to say? You said maybe there are people who have money and they don't know what to do with it. Conservative donors seem really ill-adept. I'm sorry at figuring out how to use their money well. I'm just mystified sometimes at what they'll put their money into.

But, you know, I'm like, if you care about culture, you have to start with education. And if you're not paying attention to education, you're totally missing the point. Because, you know, this is a, you know, it's a cliche and it's not entirely true. But to the extent that it is the case that politics is downstream of culture, all of it is downstream of education. So if you're not focusing on that and focusing on how we sort of fix what's happening there, then there's no point to any of the rest of it that you might be doing. I am. I've looked at sports the same way, if that makes.

But you think about it. You want to build something out. You start with the kids. You don't start with the guy who's graduating out. You're like, okay, I get him for one year. And then out he goes. And did I make any impact? And I'm talking, you know, like just take a hockey program, folks.

If you start kids at five and you work them up until they're 18, I'm not saying on average you're going to have more hockey players and the quality of hockey players is going to go way up. And what you're doing with kids and getting them into like Latin, you know how much Latin I did in school folks? That much, right? Like none. And yet when you start reading historical texts and you start discussing philosophical ideas

and you go into these realms, you run into Latin all over the, place. Like, I mean, it's, it's actually quite, um, it's in pop culture even, right? Like the Latin, uh, framework into movies and, and stories and on and on. But we never learn about it, you know, and so you're, you're exposing kids to ideas that I think, you know, like, I was very for, you know, like you bring back up Tolkien, which I, I realize is only, you know, I don't know, do the kids read Tolkien and you're still? Is that just like a fun, they do. They do. They do. Yeah. Oh, that's sweet. You might have me sold on it just for that, right? Like, I'm like, you know, I was, I was fortunate that I had older siblings and they, they hand fed me books

that they really enjoyed. And of course, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, among a whole bunch of others, right, is like those were really, really well written books. And you start fostering that with, with kids. Like, I mean, forgive me for bringing in sports. That's That's just the realm of the world that I lived in for so long. And I see that with schooling, and not everybody has to believe in your idea by any stretch, but it is certainly enticing. I think the sports analogy is not. It's not out of place, right?

Sports is one of these domains, too, where you cultivate a lot of the virtues that are needed to be a good person, right? You learn how to work hard. You learn, like, magnanimity in victory and defeat. You learn, again, getting back to this idea. of freedom, you're not actually free. You can't do everything with your body that you'd like to do unless you apply discipline and you train it over prolonged period of time with a specific goal. So it's sort of, it's one of these domains actually where you realize some of these truths about life

that actually if you want the freedom to be able to, you know, like to throw a ball really well, to run as fast as you want to do, to be able to dance really beautifully. all of these things require actually discipline and concerted effort. And I think, yeah, teaching kids that is one of the reasons why we think sports is really important at our school and we would love a gym. But, you know, just to kind of like close the circle a little bit on some aspects of this conversation, a lot of educators today, and again, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. It's not all of them. But a lot of them are basically taught that our approach to the past should be one of repudiation. It's actually very amusing to me on Twitter to see what aspects of our charter people get really upset about.

And one of them is that we say that actually our goal is to transmit and preserve our civilizational inheritance not to dismantle and repudiate it. And some people are like outraged by this. They're like, of course you need to dismantle and repudiate the past. And so leave people adrift in time without roots is my answer. But one of the reasons why we say we're not going to do that. And actually, we're going to study great books. And we're going to put our children in conversation with the greatest minds who've lived before us is because when they encounter difficult things in their life, this will be a consolation to them. they will be, they will have access to these minds and these spirits that have lived before that have endured the same trials and that have provided for them a model of how do you endure this well.

And the value that to me and my life has been incalculable. And I think that I think this generation is going to have, it's going to have a hell of a time. And we want to equip them with as many of those tools as we can to be able to say, look, when you, I'm currently designing our grade 12 curriculum. We're not offering grade 12 yet, but we will. And it's going to be a year where we meld a study of classics, mostly Greek, but some from other parts of the world, with contemporary issues, and particularly with like 20th century totalitarianism.

And these things actually go together really well, because you can see in the writings of a lot of the great resistors and opponents of totalitarianism, they are also drawing on the wisdom of the ancients. You know, the white rose in Germany who are opposed to the Nazis, like their treatises are drawing on the Dauda Jing. So like they're invoking Taoist tradition. You have like the Czech dissidents who are steeped in Christian and Platonist thought. And so there's a sort of a font of wisdom there that is inexhaustible.

And if we can connect with it, I think it can sort of, it can guide us through a lot of what we're currently going through and what I suspect this generation will have to face in their lifetimes. Well, I appreciate you giving me some time today. I say let's not wait two years to do this again. I've enjoyed the chat. I think you've got a wonderful mind to share with Albertans. And you've got a story that, you know, I hope. never to endure, but I'm glad that I have the opportunity to, you know, give you a platform where you can talk to different Albertans and they can hear your story. And I, I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I'm speaking out of turn. But when I hear what you're doing and trying to do in Alberta specifically, I'm like, you know, I'm not saying all the dark days are behind you by no stretch in the imagination. But I do think people are going to hear this and be very, very interested. And I'll be shocked if that isn't the response that comes from where we've been talking.

talking about and what you're trying to do here in Alberta. So I look forward to seeing what the future brings for Kalin Ford and your charter school and among other things, you know, your legal battles trying to pull some of the, I don't know, financials back your way and out of the hands of the moronic in our world. But appreciate you coming on and, you know, lend in some time today. Thank you so much, Sean.