The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Real Problems Destroying Education by Bryan Wetzel

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

The Real Problems Destroying Education by Bryan Wetzel Amazon.com Make no mistake, education in America is undeniably broken and careening off the tracks. This viewpoint is shared from the perspective of a father who had children navigating the education system, a husband with a wife actively contributing to the education system, and an entrepreneur who developed and sold educational resources to public schools around the country. These unique vantage points have provided an invaluable insight into the inner workings of the American education system. This book aims to offer an intimate glimpse behind the curtains, shedding light on the multitude of factors, policy decisions, and political entanglements that have contributed to the current state of our public education system. It serves as a wake-up call, revealing a myriad of issues that the majority of parents are blissfully unaware of, issues that are quietly eroding the foundations of our children's education. In addition to the author's personal experiences, we conducted interviews with 69 former teachers and administrators to gain a comprehensive understanding of how education has evolved over the years, and unfortunately, the findings indicate a negative trend. If parents were aware of these disconcerting revelations, it is safe to assume that they would have legitimate concerns. The purpose of this book is to reveal the true extent of the challenges that plague our education system in America, in the hopes of igniting a collective desire to take action and secure a brighter future for education in our nation.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Voss Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Chris Voss, Chris Voss.

Ladies and gentlemen, the air and ladies, thanks for that. It makes an official welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys. As always, the Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you. We bring on these brilliant, smart, educated people who share their wealth of knowledge, their lifetime journeys, their dichotomies, their crises they survived, to pass on to you to let you know you're not alone

and there's ways to be smarter, better, and you can constantly improve. So we appreciate you tuning in to the show. Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, LinkedIn.com, better, and you can constantly improve. So we appreciate you tuning in the show. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Today we have an amazing young man on the show. Brian Wetzel joins us. He is the author of the latest book that came out March 23, 2024, called The Real Problems Destroying Education. We'll get into it and some of the things that he

saw that i think you're going to be like having some eye-opening experiences where you're just gonna be like oh my gosh i did not know that brian is an experienced entrepreneur he has experience launching and managing successful companies over the course of his career he started multiple businesses that attracted the attention of larger enterprise, resulting in two acquisitions. For 14 years, he oversaw the operations of his production company, establishing a reputation for excellence in the industry. Welcome to the show, Brian. How are you? Thank you for having me. You're already on my good side by calling me a young man. There we go. We do that to everybody, even the 90s that come on the show. We've got a few novels that are really old,

but they have 100 billion books. So welcome to the show. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? You can go to bryanthomaswetzel.com. That's Brian with a Y, B-R-Y-A-N, thomaswetzel, W-E-T-Z-E-L.com. And you can find me on Twitter at B-T-W.

So the real problem is destroying education. We've been wondering, you know, what's going on with education. There's lots of people up in arms over education. Give us a 30,000 overview of your summation in your new book. The subtitle of it says, Everyone is to Blame. And I do believe that what there is, is there's 20 different tug of wars going on for money, for resources, for grades, for scores, and nobody seems to know or want to give in to make some common sense decisions. And a lot of the decisions that I saw were based more around

more money being brought into the top. I think the notion is that there's not enough money in education. We need more education. But most state budgets, a quarter to one third goes to education. And that's not to say that there doesn't need to be more money. It needs to be better handled. If you, I have the statistics in my book, but at the top, I'm talking districts,

the, the salaries have gone up hundreds of percentage points, whereas that teachers have only gone up maybe 10% in say the past two years. And so what's happening is you're getting a lot of that money captured at the top with bigger salaries. And some of the retiring administrators that I spoke to often said that it was, they loved it when they got more money from the state or federal government because it meant raises, but not for the teachers. The teachers actually have to wait for either the federal government, the state government or the county government to issue raises. Another thing is that my wife is a teacher. She's been a teacher now for 24 years.

You know, one of the things that is happening is we are losing good teachers. And this should be alarming to people. Experienced teachers know how to teach. Teachers, well, every single teacher I've interviewed will tell me that within the first two, three, four years, they were a decent teacher. But after that, they started to really get into the flow. They understood what the students didn't understand. They understood better how to explain those lessons. And so when you're losing teachers so fast, you're filling up these schools with people who are not as experienced. And that's a problem. And I'll give you a good example of this. A lot of them are leaving because of behavior. That was the number one thing when I surveyed teachers. Second thing was a lack of

support. Oh yeah. Everybody I interviewed, I mean, all of them said that behavior is worse and worse. And we'll come back to that in a second. One of the things, they don't feel like they're supported by the administration. The administration continues to pour more responsibilities on them. And it's just gotten to be too much. I had one teacher tell me she almost felt like a paralegal. She has to fill out so much paperwork. Anytime there's behavioral issues, anytime something is missed, anytime something happens, and there's going to be a meeting with parents. There's got to be the minutes of the meeting kept and notes afterwards,

notes before. It goes on and on. But what I was trying to get to was that in New Jersey, for instance, they're so short of teachers, the governor did away with the certification test. So you have teachers who will be getting into school to teach who haven't taken a test just to prove that they, you know, kind of get, understand it. They just decided that if you get over 850 on the SAT, then you can be a teacher. And here's where the logic in that comes in. You haven't reduced the problem. You haven't reduced the problem. You haven't reduced the stress. You haven't taken care of the issues that forced good teachers,

qualified teachers to leave the profession. How long do you think the teachers who are not as qualified are going to stay? Oh, God, yeah. Probably not as, probably no longer. With respect to behavior. What has turned out when I was young, you know, there was a three strikes rule, depending on what it was you did. If you were just being, you know, a little a little brat in class, the three strikes didn't apply. But you probably would be visiting the vice principal's office quite a bit. I've been in schools now and either witnessed and then spoken to the teachers.

You have literally second graders telling their teachers to F off and throwing things at them, hitting them in the head with shoes, being disruptive and doing things. And what happens is they go down to the vice principal's office and administration sends them back and says, you're going to have to deal with this. And then when the parents begin to complain, because now you have this tug of war between the student, the teacher cannot do anything.

There's no leverage for discipline, especially if the parents aren't going to step in and intervene, or if administration is not going to at least take the teacher's side in this issue. And this is really upsetting to a lot of teachers. You can imagine, are you married? No. Okay. If my wife had a kid throw a shoe and hit her in the head, that wouldn't be a big deal. That wouldn't be just something that happened. That would be a big deal. And for her not to be able to discipline in that instance,

that would bother her quite a bit. A lot of the kids are just getting away with too much. Most of the school systems have put in a 10 strikes rule. 10 strikes? 10 strikes. And the reason they made it 10, I was talking to an administrator who just retired about eight months ago.

He said the reason they made it 10 was they surmised in most counties that in elementary school, they would be at least moving on to middle by then and they wouldn't have to deal with it. And in middle, they'll be moving on to high school at 10 strikes. So they won't have to deal with it.

And so they're just putting the problem off down the road. It's about a time to get to high school. What do you think they're acting like? They have been able to wag the dog. Yeah. Yeah. That's the, my mom was a teacher for 20 years and she's

been retired for she's 82 so she's been tired for probably 30 years or something or so I'll have to ask her when she retired but so she's been gone a long time but she started seeing the crossover of you know she lived in Utah so it was Republicans who were constantly cutting back the budgets for the schools. And, you know, she would call me and I'd be like, she's like, I just went to the thrift store and I spent $250. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's a lot. She's like, you know, I got to educate and entertain these kids. She did elementary schools.

And I'm like, you get reimbursed for that, right? She's like, no. I'm like, you're spending $250 on your own damn money doing this thing? I couldn't believe it. I just felt for sure the first time I heard it. And then she would, I mean, she would constantly call me over the years, you know,

and she'd be like, yeah, they doubled our class size again. They doubled our class size again. To save money. Yeah, to save money. They would constantly just be cutting back all the things you know we talked about so your premise is it's largely all about money that needs to fix schools we need to pay it needs to be reallocated we need to be paying the teachers at the bottom and one of the things i i start off the book with is that i've heard

people you know complain that teachers aren't they boring, they're not good enough, whatever it is. And I always tell them, I said, first of all, you and I would be fired from that job in the first day. Because the first time a kid smarted off to me, I'd probably say something inappropriate. But I just tell people that it's not as easy a job as you think it is, number one. And people getting mad at them, that's like getting mad at going to Target and getting mad at the employee for the price of the products. They don't have any control over that. Teachers, a lot of them, when I ask them what they really, if they can wave a magic wand and get one wish, the one thing they always say is that I just want to teach. I know how to teach. Let me teach. But they're

constantly being told we're going to do this. We're going to do that. We've added five more assessment tests just in the first four months. We're going to do these. We have to do this. And they're just, they're not considering the fact that there's less teachers doing this and so now their workload and the stress level is just killing the profession it's just killing them yeah i will say this on the thing with money you're right they do we we will spend about 200 250 my wife is a elementary school she's third third right now. We'll spend about 250. Now, the Republican governor, Sonny Perdue, when he was here, he used to give out what was called Sonny money. Every teacher got $100 extra to pay for her stuff for their room. But as soon as the

next governor came in, although that was during the housing bubble, I don't know if that had anything to do with it, but that went away. In in most states it's on the teacher and that's it and this is one of the things i was i used to tell my wife i said you know if you worked for a corporation you would turn in your receipts and they would reimburse you because you're doing this for your job yeah so why is it not like that for teachers yeah why is it you know it's it's it's an interesting aspect so what I what I started to tell with my story with my mom was she started seeing that change over where parents you know when I went if I got called the principal's office my parents were coming to kick my ass yeah same here yeah I knew I was at yet F to the ninth degree oh yeah I didn't get in there

much but when I got in there I knew that this something bad was gonna happen and it was gonna happen to me and I had done whatever I had done to get in there and you know sometimes we acted out in high school. We were having a hard time with bullies, and sometimes we acted out. But we're kids. There were no anti-bullying movements back when we were growing up. Yeah. You just had to deal with it.

You just had to deal with it. The one thing about that is when we went home, we were home. Now that bully follows them around if they can't put down their phone oh yeah on social media right yeah very much the uh she saw the changeover when the parents started blaming the teachers for everything and attacking them for like how dare you give my kid an f you know how dare you do this and basically you know what she felt at the time was that they were trying to make her the parent

of their naughty kid. And that's when she really saw it. And she kind of started those changes where the admin wouldn't back her up anymore. You know, I don't know why. Why is the administration's, you know, becoming not working as a team with teachers? Why is there a chasm there? When I interviewed 69 people on that very question, and I got varying answers,

but a lot of it seems to focus on the fact that districts now are more worried about lawsuits. And what happens as a principal, so that you know this, in most cases, it's a strike against the principal if the parent reaches out to the district. They don't want that. So the principal wants to placate that parent at the school level so that they do not escalate because that looks bad on the administration at the school which is sad because it shouldn't be that way as a matter of fact i think there are times when a district should step in and say no we're not doing that or we're not allowing that kind of behavior but they just don't want to deal with it they just don't want to deal with it so they and i think there I think there is an increase in lawsuits. But what's interesting about that is because when I was researching that,

the amount of lawsuits that get won against the school district are very small. I mean, you have to come in with some pretty powerful evidence that your teacher discriminated or gave your child a bad grade because they just didn't like your child. One of the things, I don't even understand that because most teachers love their students. I'm not saying that there aren't any teachers that single out a student that maybe rubs them the wrong way but i think that's probably rare in most cases a lot of times i we all when i had my education we used to laugh that at these stories where you would see a parent who would say my son is doing terrible because the teacher it's the teacher

who's coming so they'll take them out of that class, put them in another class, and guess what? The same problems. So is it the child or was it the teacher? But nobody ever makes that connection. I'll tell you what the problem is. And by the way, when you were talking about getting in trouble, in middle school I was talking over the teacher

and I had been warned enough. I got sent to the vice principal's office and he said, tomorrow at 10 a.m. you're going to get spanked. And he sent a note home for my parents to approve the spanking. I got in trouble at home and they signed off on me getting spanked. Yeah. But you know what? I know people think that's harsh, i i shut my mouth for a little while

we need more you know i mean we do and i yeah you got rambunctious boys they need to at least fear something yeah the the you know in my neighborhood the neighbor would beat you for whatever you did to his to his thing and then he would send you home and then your mom would beat you and go wait till your dad comes here and uh you know and then they make me get on the phone my parents would do this thing where they would anytime we we did something bad we would have to call and apologize and yeah you learn a lot learning to say you're sorry to people there's a that brings humility it teaches at least that much it sure does and and i don't think enough kids have humility these days at all they totally lack having a gym for

instance and i had an incident last year sometime we are a 24-hour gym but we lock the doors when we're not staffed and we were closing up and a kid came up and said hey open the door for me nut please or can you do you mind and i said i said it's locked if you have your key cards you can get in he said i didn't bring it i said then you need to go home and get it and i was in my car talking to him i said i'm we're leaving and he literally said get out and come open the door and i said I'm not opening the door. Go get your key card. And then he said, am I allowed to cuss?

Yeah, sure. He said, who the fuck are you? This is a 16-year-old kid talking to an adult. And I stood up and I said, you know who I am? I'm the owner of this place, and you're about to lose your membership. And his friend was pulling on his arms like shut up shut up but i i came home i told my wife like i would never have spoken to an adult like that when i was 16 and if my mom had found out it would have been it would have been all over

yeah this is what emotionalism brings you we move from a logic and reason society to emotionalism brings you. We move from a logic and reason society to emotionalism. Sometimes I think psychologists, too, have kind of screwed things up by telling you that there's never a time for negative reinforcement. I think negative reinforcement, if it doesn't cross over into abuse, and I'm not even talking about spanking. I'm just talking about the, I'll tell you a story. I would be embarrassed to tell this story if it was my story. I was in Florida. Teacher tells me a story that she's a second grade teacher that she had a conference with a parent. The parent, she tells the parent, you know, your son falls asleep every day in class. He can't keep his eyes open.

And the parent said to her, I know, he just won't stay off that iPad all night playing games. I keep telling him to put it away. I'm like, this is a seven-year-old. You know what you do? You take the iPad away and you hide it and tell him he's not getting it again until he listens to mom and dad. I would be embarrassed to tell that story that a seven-year-old was able to get one over on me. Yeah. It's just hilarious. And this comes from the growth of single-parent homes, too, as well. The explosion of single-parent homes is really stressed the family and and and of course like i said my mom 30 years ago 30 40 years ago was dealing with people that were that were

want want their want their kids raised by the teachers like it's the teacher's job to raise them and of course they're never wrong there's no self-accountability once again emotionalism you know we live this we live in now this victimhood society that's been brought to us by emotionalism where everyone's a victim and it's a it's like a competition of who could be more we talked a little bit about vouchers in the in the in the green room well what's the deal on that and and how is that having an impact on the money and the thesis of your book i I think based on our conversation, you're against them. I am for them for the most part. Now, there's a lot of nuance to the voucher system

because there are negative aspects, negative consequences. Everything has, one of my favorite quotes from Thomas Sowell is, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. So it brings about other problems, but it also fixes some problems. I think in the interim, when people are serious, I've spoken to so many parents who say, I can't, I don't want my kids going to the local school. And we can't afford, we can't afford to go to a private but with a voucher they could and it just depends on the state every state has their own rules most states though so for instance in georgia i think they spend 9600 and some change per student

every year the voucher you're getting is only $6,800. So you're probably putting up another $6,000 for a lower-end private school. But if the full price was too much for you, maybe this does help. And it depends on some states have done it, in my opinion. So they'll let you use the vouchers for homeschool supplies. I think that's not a bad idea. I think that it needs to be tinkered with. But the knock on vouchers that I hear is that it's taking money

away from the school. But that's the nuance I'm talking about because it only follows the child. So there's going to be less children in that school for they don't need as many resources. And then there is some evidence that has come out of Stanford and another gentleman out of Harvard that a lot of times when the school population drops by 10 or 12 percent, the school itself is actually doing better because now the teachers don't have 24 students in their class. Yeah. And the education actually seems to get a little better. And so I don't want to throw out vouchers altogether. I think you have to tinker with some of the negatives that are valid, but I don't think that we should take

it away entirely. I think that it is a good idea. And one of the things I tell people when I'm having this debate, because I'm not going to take a hard stand as no or yes, because like I said, I think it's about even on negatives and positives. But I have met parents in very low income areas where I was doing speech for a school or whatever. And they are just disheartened that they cannot get their kid out of the school that he's getting bullied in or the the the test scores are terrible and they don't feel like they're getting a great education. And I feel for them on that. And since we cannot seem to fix the public school, by the way, I don't think all public schools are terrible. My book does not advocate getting rid of public school.

But I do think that based on where you are, there are a lot of decisions that make no common sense that are making those public schools better. I mean, worse. And to make them better seems to be a challenge because you got to get the people at the top, and that may be the district or the state, to admit what the real problems are. But that's why I think that vouchers are not necessarily a bad thing. And I've met some people in other states that benefited from them quite a bit and they weren't wealthy people. Yeah. I suppose, you know, if you've got a bad school in your area, you know, one of the, we have a lot of psychologists on the show. And from what they tell us is a lot of men have been driven from the school system.

Yes. Some of it has become, you know, I'm a moderate Democrat, but I'm very far against the far rights and left of our politics right now. All right. I think that any time you've gone to the far side of either, you've gone too far. You've gone too far. You've gone to the far side of either you've gone too far you've gone too far i try and sit in the middle as an american not as a democrat but i try and sit in the middle of american and try and understand what people are trying to accomplish with their ideals and try and figure out how we

can meet in the middle and that's what we all need to do more the middle seems to be the only sane part in this country sometimes yeah and. And so the woke agenda, the extreme emotionalism, tromping blue hair as we call them, they've really driven men to our understanding of what we talk to psychologists from the field and some of that sort of agenda. But not giving boys recess I think has been a real problem taking recess away from boys who need to expel that energy i've had psychologists on the show who wrote books 20 and

30 years ago about how we were letting boys down and from what they've wrote 30 years ago they nailed it on the head of where we would be right now one of the problems they talk about is boys being treated as dysfunctional girls and basically just abused and and demasculated because they they you know stop squirming stop sit why can't you be more like the girls they basically treat boys like defective girls yes and i'm impressed that that these people you have on have identified that because i've I've actually read some books from psychologists who think it's a good thing, but I don't see it as a good thing at all. Most psychologists are women now. I think about 70% of them are women.

So I'm not sure where that agenda comes from. My daughter is getting that degree now. And so that's a big problem, especially when enough women join the group to they could declare masculinity toxic which is my daughter my wife who is in a good public school she will tell you without recess like a couple times they've told her don't take them out for recess it's too hot or it's too cold and she says no i'm taking them out they need 15 minutes to clear their head run around she will tell you that

when they come in from running around they're a little worn out they sit down and they focus what she's talking about but if you just keep them captured all day in a four in a room with four walls that eventually, you know, they're tuning out, they're looking for other things. You've got to, you've got to get, I get,

I, I'm in front of a computer a lot. I have to get up, you know, once in a while and go outside and see what the sun looks like. So more money needs to go into education on your thesis and everything else. Why this is important. I i want to i want i actually don't advocate for more money oh okay now and i have the charts in there what i'm telling

what i'm trying to say is that the there's more than enough money coming into education it's not getting to where it needs to go oh okay i see it's getting stuck at the top you would be surprised at what district leaders are making as compared to say 10 years 20 years ago at the the salaries at the top have grown hundreds of percentage points over what the teachers who i think their salaries have gone up 6.4 percent It's sad because what they're doing is they're advocating for more money, but they're just keeping it for themselves. They're keeping it for management.

And most teachers will tell you they are micromanaged to the max. And that's where when I said that a lot of them in the interview said, I just want to teach. I know how to teach. Just let me teach. But they're being told they have to teach it this way. Math is a great example. During Common Core, a lot of parents said, wait, why am I doing the math this way? The other way worked fine. But they were being told this is how you're going to teach it. Sometimes I think too, as you talk about psychologists,

that there's people who are smarter than me, but one of the things I've noticed is that they tend to think that everybody thinks like they do. And a good example of this is, so the math portion of Common Core, which caused such a blow up in this country, that was written by math

professors who love math. I don't love math. My dad's an accountant. And if you heard our homework sessions where he's trying to help me, I was just fussing back and forth for an hour and a half. But they wrote it so that, for instance, I'll give you, this always cracks people up. So you and I learned how to, originally to add through the standard algorithm. That's the numbers stacked on top and then you do the line and you do it down. That wasn't allowed in a lot of states

until after fifth grade because they said that they don't understand what they're doing, even though they're getting the answer right. And so they said, so they're going to do we have seven different methods to add those four numbers, seven. And what every teacher I talked to said, and this is kind of predictable. They said that the students who were already good in math mastered those seven but the ones who were struggling in math are now confused by the steps from number the fifth way to do it in the seventh way in the third way and they you just confuse them more instead of simplifying it for them to get it you made it more complicated a lot of people

don't realize this i don't i have this conversation all the time what they're learning in third grade right now i didn't learn until eighth and ninth grade oh really oh yeah they're multiplying fractions in third grade in a lot of states they're doing my in third grade now you have to cite your work wow when you write something and i cracked me up because i was telling my wife i said so when you come back from summer break do they have to cite their work about what i did at disney world i don't understand like how deep are these writings from a third grader yeah we gotta have some deep stuff from them that's for sure yeah but they have they're teaching them to cite and it's you know i had a teacher phrase it to me this way she said they're

trying to stuff too much into these little heads that's too early in age and then they wonder why the scores fall and instead of backing off the rigor because that's what they call it when i was at school when i had scoops and we were selling they were rigor rigor rigor rigor you had to have really good rigor instead of backing off of that rigor and finding a point where more kids understand it, they just change how they grade it. And in California, they're not even giving grades below a D. You can't get below a D. And they've gotten rid of the clubs that, or not clubs, the gifted programs because they say it hurts the kids who can't make it and like you know

I everybody should see a bar that they want to try and reach we shouldn't take away the bar at all and say it doesn't matter yeah and now so those students who probably should be in gifted in California are now probably bored in class hmm yeah it's it's a it's a tough thing that people need to do. And, I mean, do you see anything changing? Do parents need to be the proponents for change? Do you need to demand more from legislatures and local districts? Yeah, they really do.

I don't know that they're being listened to right now, so I don't know if they're being listened to right now. So I don't know if the, you know, they need to get more vocal. You've seen videos on YouTube of parents getting arrested from school board meetings. I don't advocate for that either. I think that should be free. As long as you're respectful, your freedom to speak at the board meeting should be honored. I think that I don't really know. One of the things that I feel like is that there's going to have to just maybe be a small crash of education for people to get it. If you look at some of the inner cities like Chicago and Baltimore, they'll have less than 3% of their students graduating at grade level reading and math.

That just shouldn't be happening. I'm not saying that they should have 100%, but can we agree that it should be above 6%? So what you're doing now is you're pushing those kids out to school and they don't know how to do the basic math and English skills. How are they going to get a job? And then we wonder why they continue on with living a much poorer lifestyle. I just think that if you're not going to educate them, then you're just dooming them for doing blue-collar,

menial jobs for the rest of their life. Yeah. And it's a wild thing. Do parents need to try and do better at parenting? I mean, I'm a big advocate for holding parents responsible for stuff. I am too. I've been tired of it for 40 years. I've yelled for a long time that if you buy a gun for your kid and he takes it to school you should go to jail with the kid I'm just tired of

I just tired of shitty parents raising shitty kids phoning and I see it all the time when I go out it's lazy parenting is what it is it's lazy parenting where we're starting to prosecute the parents and we need more of that.

We need parents to go, hey, maybe you should have one less kid so you can control your life and you can control the kids and maybe raise some better kids. Maybe you should think more about parenting. I'm an advocate for putting sterilization in the water and making it so you got to go to college for two years before you can even

have kids. I don't know if I go quite that far. Yeah, it's a bit far. I will say this. I own guns. I'm not an advocate, but I believe that you should have your rights. If you buy a gun, in the shooting that took place in Georgia this last time, the father had been visited by the FBI and and the gbi said your son's making

threats terroristic threats and then what that was in march and what he buy him in december buys him a gun he buys him a gun and every one of these kids is fucked up in the head and they go maybe a gun will make things better and you're just like You know, the stupidity of that decision is hard to wrap your head around. And in that instance, I think he should go to jail. Absolutely. I think if he does. He's just as complicit in the shooting because he gave somebody who was already known to be a bit unstable. Yeah.

A weapon. Yeah. If I give somebody a gun, I'm an accessory. Yeah. You shouldn't be giving your guns away yeah because you never know yeah you never know i mean you never know what somebody's gonna do with it especially no one's ever asked me by the way if they came and said hey i need a gun real quick i'd be like wait why why do you need a gun so fast that you can't go go through the background check and do it yourself there's something i need to know about and every one of these kids is a mess like we've had people

on who've written books about the school shooters and every one of these kids is a mess and they get access to a gun a lot of them are on medication yeah they're right about that i have a whole chapter on medication and the numbers even made me gasp oh it's astounding and teachers a lot of teachers are on anti-anti-anxiety medicine maybe more than 50 percent by some estimates of the teacher population to deal with stress and other things but with respect to students it's a it's astounding how many of them are on more than one medication. And I have a problem with this. I think that medication is good and helps a lot of kids, but I don't think as many kids who are getting the medication should be on it.

And I'll give you a story. I've heard this story more than half a dozen times. A mom was telling me her kid is on ADHD medicine and anti-anxiety medicine. He's nine. Wow. How much anxiety do you have in nine? But he was still acting out in school after they had tried two different medications for ADHD. The next time they went and told the doctor he's still acting like a little brat, the doctor flipped open a book that had all the different medications in these little pockets and told the kid, let's choose which one you want to try next. It doesn't seem like there's any science behind it it's just kind of like an allergy medicine that one didn't get rid of your sniffles here try this one try one we just teach them to

be drugged yes and you're messing around with their brain chemistry that cannot be good i tell a story i don't remember telling the book i think my wife wanted me to take it out i probably left it in i i used to have a restaurant and i was astounded by how many of the young high school girls were on medication for depression anxiety but i had one girl i loved her to death we would she was 16 and we would cut up and i'd poke fun at her and whatever we had a good relationship one sunday she doesn't show up, which was unusual. So I texted her and then went back doing what I was doing. She was just going to be running food. And I got back this text. It was maybe three paragraphs long and it was hard to really follow. It was kind of sporadic about how

she'd been mistreated and she hated the job and she didn't know she'd be back and she's very angry with everyone there and we were busy and i was like i guess i'll address this later her mom comes in the next day and says oh she for her i got to take her meds for three days and so her brain she was just like out of her mind she's so embarrassed she doesn't hate working here she really wants her job back and i was like maybe maybe you should be in charge of her taking it if that's the result yeah of missing i just couldn't believe how she changed wow just getting off the meds yeah yeah i guess you kind of swing back the other way from what the meds were trying to do i mean i've had i've had friends that have gone i had a girlfriend

who got off her cancer meds for pituitary gland cancer and it was regulating the offsetting of of you know what your natural steroids are your body puts out and she went on those and I couldn't figure out why my girlfriend had changed and had no energy he was dying and she lived that way for a year before finally I'm like I can't do this anymore and when I after I moved her out I found her empty pill bottles and I was like hey you have these pill bottles here did you need them were they important oh this is my medication for the cancer I went off at three months into a relationship oh that was the thing I noticed the dates on things that was whenever that the the that was when the dates on the pill bottles mashed up to when our relationship crashed when she went off

meds so yeah it's it's there's a lot of people on meds nowadays it's crazy there's a lot of people but somes nowadays. It's crazy. There's a lot of people, but some of those are, you know, they're necessary. I'm not, I always tell people, I always, you know, you talk about being in the center politically. I think that a lot of things in life, like medicines are good, but they can also be bad. You know, we should find out where that middle ground is. With it, I think that too many things are being prescribed because it's a moneymaker. Oh, yeah. I mean, we've just turned this whole generation into pill poppers. Oh, yeah.

I just finished my wife and I just finished Dope Sick. Have you ever seen it? It's about the Purdue Pharma. I've seen that one a long time ago. Yeah, it has Michael Keaton in it yeah I don't think I've seen the Michael Keaton version I don't think I've seen that they had a Netflix version with Matthew Broderick that was very good too yeah and I mean parents need to do more home you know I think the explosion of single-parent

homes is creative problems problem kids raised without their fathers is a lot of this. There's also a lot of lazy parenting. I mean, I just, I can just tell you that most teachers will, I will say they don't even grade homework anymore, but the teacher still wants to see them do it because that way she can know whether the class understands what she's been teaching.

And a lot of the parents just don't make their kids do the homework anymore. Once they found out it wasn't being graded, they just toss it aside. And I think that that's wrong. I would still make my kids do the work. Make your kids do the work. When they get to be adults, they'll do the work. Teaching self-accountability is one of the biggest problems we have in our society because we live in this emotionalism victimhood society yeah we have a

don't judge me mentality also yeah yeah so if you you know somebody says something a little egregious and you respond they say don't judge me yeah yeah and and i teaching self-accountability to kids you know yeah being accountable for your problems you know when they see that you know you're blaming the teacher for how they were raised and stuff you know i mean people really gotta look in the mirror i mean it all comes down to i always tell people that bitch about everything i go you get the government you deserve you You voted these people in. And if you didn't vote, you still voted them in. You know, half this country doesn't even bother voting, I guess.

So, you know, if you want better schools, if you want better government, elect better people. And, you know, and so many people just don't give a shit. They phone it in. You know, there's still people just i will never understand it it seems like the people who are in the independent field you know i make my choice when i enter the booth are you fucking serious like really you can't you can't make any sort of deduction of where you are i don't know what you're learning when you get in the booth but are you going eeny meeny miny mighty mo or something with the things there like how it's kind of like the

what the what to the california a trial system has become you could be a juror to oversee whether someone murders someone else like oj simpson if you prove that you don't know about anything you don't go anywhere and you don't watch tv seriously these are the people we have making these choices and we wonder why oj gets yeah i think that in that light like when it comes to medical trials i think that that's too complicated for the average person i think the jury should be made up of people who have at least a medical background maybe a even a biology background but you asking lay people to adjudicate something that is above their head is a disaster yeah it's it's and instead of just trying to learn what that is they just you know they just work off of dunning-kruger idiot disease and i don't know i looked up on the internet and said this so so it's been fun and insightful to have you on hopefully you can

change the minds and hearts of what's going on in the business of education and return it back to its glory i i i i think public schools are important i don't they are important no matter how rich i was i mean i suppose if i was super rich there'd be to have to be a security detail but for the most part i i i love public school what i learned in public school taught me survival skills you know yeah there was bullying but i came out stronger for it you know one day i got bullied and and i just lost it started beating the shit out of them and they never pulled me again that's pretty much how I think most people end up handling it. I ended up a very, I learned a very important lesson in life. And now it bullies me.

I grew up in the country. I always tell people my bus rides were like a cage match. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I remember that. You know, the kid behind you flicking your ear, one smacking you on the top of the head. Yeah.

I threw down in a few buses, that's for sure. You know, which is an interesting environment to fight in. Yeah. You've got chairs of people. But it works every time. I wanted to throw some people out the back of the bus, but I don't know. Yeah, that might have gotten you suspended for sure. I would have.

Yeah. It's a good thing I'm not like I am now. So, Brian, thank you very much for coming to the show. It's been wonderful. Oh, you're welcome. Glad to be on here, and thanks for having me. Give us your final pitch out to people to pick up the book and any dot-coms where they can reach out to you to learn more. You can go to bryanthomaswetzel.com,

B-R-Y-A-N-T-H-O-M-A-S-W-E-T-Z-E-L.com. And it's a site that was put up for other reasons, but I have the book and a lot of information about me on there. My final synopsis is that the book is, I tried to write it down the middle. I don't go too far left or too far right, because I do actually think there are arguments that both sides make that are valid and so don't be afraid to read it if you get into it at the beginning and think that it's leaning this way or that way i kind of take everybody to task

in this book and most of it is built around things i had literally witnessed yeah yeah i mean we all it, a rising tide lifts all boats. We all need to jump in and fix this one. Yeah, and we need an educated population. You can imagine 50 years from now, even 30, if we're not educating these kids, are we just assuming AI is going to do everything for them? Yeah.

That's no way to live. We're already in a crisis situation. People are being dumber than ever. Just go on social media. I mean, even politicians, you see some of these people are just so freaking dumb. What's the old ad? George Carlin.

Think about how average the dumb person is and realize 50% of the people are dumber than that. And some of them are holding office. And some of them are breeding. the average person is and realize 50% of the people are dumber than that. Yeah. That's kind of interesting. And some of them are holding office. And some of them are breeding. So that's why I didn't have kids.

Anyway, just a joke there, folks. So thank you very much for coming on. Folks, order up Brian's book, The Real Problems Destroying Education, March 23rd, 2024. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. There you go.