The David Knight Show - Thu Episode #2265: AI, Public Schools, and the Machinery of Social Control

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

──────────────────────────────────────── [00:01:50] Trump Admits on Camera: 'I Don't Think About America's Financial Situation — I Only Think About Iran's Nukes' Trump said it himself. Knight plays the 1992-to-2024 clip reel of Netanyahu warning of Iran's imminent bomb — every few years for 34 years, it never arrived. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:04:58] Trump's Board of Peace — Dictator for Life, $10 Billion Seized Without a Congressional Vote Created at Davos via presidential action: Trump is permanent chairman, replaceable only by voluntary resignation or incapacity. Billions redirected without a vote. Patrick Wood: its legal basis is fabricated. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:19:21] China Shipped 5,000 Humanoid Robots in Three Months — US Firm Proposes Embedding Server Clusters Inside Private Homes Agibot shipped 5,000 humanoid robots in three months. To bypass opposition, a US firm proposes embedding AI server nodes in private homes — each drawing the power of 20 full computers. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:29:48] Mark Andreessen Asked AI Not to Hallucinate and Not to Follow Morals or Ethics — The Internet Was Not Kind Andreessen's prompt tells the AI to be a world-class expert, never hallucinate, and ignore ethics. Knight: you can't tell an AI not to hallucinate any more than water not to be wet. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:34:41] AI Chatbots Planned Mass Shootings in Florida, Canada, and South Korea — OpenAI Didn't Tell Police The Tumblr Ridge massacre (7 dead) was planned in ChatGPT conversations flagged by OpenAI's team — who decided not to alert police. Stanford: chatbots are twice as likely to encourage violence as to stop it. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:46:16] Public School Is Working Exactly as Its Utopian Designers Intended — Only 36% of Kids Read at Grade Level Bortins: Horace Mann brought Prussia's school system to the US to destroy religion and private property. Only 36% of kids read at grade level. Knight: that is not failure — it is the design. ──────────────────────────────────────── [00:50:54] Trump Didn't End the Department of Education — He Moved Its Laws to Other Departments Rather than repeal the laws, the Trump administration transferred education statutes to Labor and Treasury. Knight: closing the department while keeping every law intact. ──────────────────────────────────────── [01:03:30] 73% of Churchgoing Students Who Attend Public School Stop Practicing Christianity Within Two Years of Graduation Barna statistic cited by Classical Conversations CEO Robert Bortins. CC meets weekly in groups of eight to twelve through a biblical worldview, with a K–12 curriculum written by homeschool-graduate parents. ──────────────────────────────────────── [01:10:02] The Iron Law of Economics: If the Federal Government Pays for Education, It Controls It — Every Time Bortins: accepting federal money is a collectivist message. Knight: $20,000 per year for 12 years to condition half a generation — that's how contrary to human nature collectivism is. ──────────────────────────────────────── [01:24:35] Dan Doyle Interview — Oil Entrepreneur: Venezuela Has Massive Reserves, But Wars for Oil Are Not the Answer Dan Doyle, author of Roughnecks and Riches, built two oil companies through boom-and-bust cycles. Knight: I'm all for oil — just not for wars for oil. ──────────────────────────────────────── Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

of deceit. Telling the truth is a revolutionary act. It's the David Knight Show. As the clock strikes 13, it's the 13th of May, year of our Lord, 2006. Today we're going to talk about oil. The inside story from a wild entrepreneur who has seen the booms and the busts. He's created two companies, and he's going to talk to us about the global oil situation, especially in Venezuela. And since Reagan, we've had Republicans promising to end the Department of Education. Well, the promises never end, but the Department never ends either. We're going to talk today about how you can end the influence of Washington on your children. And we're going to have the CEO of classical conversations joining us to talk about the Department of Education,

why you have to get your kids out, and the way that you can easily do it. And yesterday we had Donald Trump make it very clear that he cares about one thing and one thing only. It's something that has been Netanyahu's obsession for 45 years, something that he's been lying to the world about for 34 years, an imminent nuclear weapon from Iran. Trump now says proudly that he cares about one thing and one thing only. And that is Netanyahu's obsession. He says he doesn't care at all about America's financial situation. I think we noticed that. Here's the clip.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying this for more than 30 years, claiming Iran is close to having... Nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons. Atomic bombs. In 1992, as a member of Parliament, Netanyahu addresses the Knesset. He says, within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb. Three years later, in his book Fighting Terrorism, he repeats the same time frame, three to five years. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Fast forward to 2002. Netanyahu testifies before a U.S. Congressional Committee actively calling for the invasion of Iraq. Are there any other nations that you would recommend that the United States launch preemptive attacks upon at this point? The two nations that are vying competing with each other, who will be the first to achieve nuclear weapons, is Iraq and Iran. The invasion happens months later. No weapons of mass destruction are found in Iran. This is a fragment of a 2009 U.S. State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. Netanyahu tells members of Congress that Iran is one or two years away from being capable of developing nuclear weapons.

It's 2012 and Netanyahu is holding up his infamous cartoon bomb at the UN General Assembly. By next spring at most, by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. And now, 33 years after Netanyahu's first so-called imminent warning, Israel attacks Iran. And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time.

It could be a year. It could be within a few months, less than a year. That's despite the U.S. Director of National Intelligence saying, Iran isn't building a nuclear weapon months earlier. Iran lied. But for Netanyahu, the slogan has been the same for decades. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon.

I don't think about American's financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon, that's all. I don't think about American's financial situation. situation. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think of... Well,

let's talk about the Board of Peace. Is globalism being undermined? Is it being supercharged or is it being reimagined? This is from the New American and it's Alex Newman. And he points out, you know, we look at this Board of Peace. Where did this come from? I think it's worth

noting and it might open up some people's eyes to see that Trump chose to unveil this thing. the world economic form in January. Isn't that interesting? Don't tell me this guy is not a globalist. Everything about the Board of Peace really ought to make your spidey senses tingle if you look at it.

Not only is he setting himself up as an absolute dictator for life cannot be removed, except, and he can appoint his own successor. This is the sort of thing that every tyrant and dictator has dreamed of, exactly what you see in North Korea. That's the way that he said this thing up, but of course he has done it under the pretense of being associated somehow with the American government, although it's not associated in any way, shape, or form with the Constitution.

He's appropriated money for it, I should say, misappropriated money, absconded with it, and created essentially a treaty without using Congress, created funding without using Congress, and on and on. The first big project that the Board of Peace has, of course, is turning Gaza and what supporters say will be a model for peace and prosperity, even as critics are slamming the plan as a prototype for future technocratic 15-minute cities. Maybe he's going to do his freedom cities first in Gaza, who knows, right? American taxpayers, writes Alex Newman, have already

been hit with some big bills. The State Department quietly transferred one and a quarter billion dollars to the new body, Trump has pledged a staggering $10 billion in U.S. support without any hint of congressional approval. Who needs Congress, right? They'll rubber stamp whatever he wants, as long as Mike Johnson is there, which probably won't be too much longer.

The organization is hard at work, mostly behind closed doors. It has a lot of money. And it is something that tells us, everything about Trump's view of governance. Patrick Wood, who is with technocracy. Technocracy News.com, has talked a great deal about this. As Alex Newman said, he's one of the world's top experts on technology, of course.

He is among those sounding the alarm. We have legal concerns ranging to criticism of the structure of the people involved. He argued last month that the Board of Peace was an illegitimate institution aimed at building world order by undermining national sovereignty, peace by peace. That's right. That kind of peace, not P-E-A-C-E. Take a piece of this and a piece of that.

And, of course, you could also look at this as since this guy is only interested in pursuing a peace prize, and since he didn't get it, I guess he's now bored, B-O-R-E-D of peace. And all he wants is war. As Patrick Wood said, the scope is unlimited. Its chairman is permanent. Its legal basis is fabricated. The headquarters is a seized building whose ownership is contested in federal court. Its operating capital is money stripped from disaster relief funds without a vote of Congress.

Its operational staff comes from the chairman's son-in-law's personal network. You know, Jared Kushner, right? And it was launched beneath the great seal of the United States, the one symbol that tells the world, this is official, this is legitimate, this is America. No, it's not. It's none of those things. It is a globalist construct. It is based on theft. It is based on overreach and usurpation of power.

It is based on war and conquest in a sense, right? And so while almost 30 governments have joined in full membership, many U.S. key allies are sitting on the sidelines for now. In a sense, as you look at what he's doing, there's a lot of the same arguments that were used to create Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations or the United Nations after World War II. We're always told that this is going to be about peace, aren't we? And yet, it's not. It's all about getting a piece of what you own, if not all of it. Trump, who's serving as the board's inaugural chairman and potentially chairman for life, independent of his presidency of the United States, it says, in the document creating it,

has hailed the outfit as one of the most consequential bodies ever created. In his words, it offers the first steps toward a brighter day for the Middle East and a much safer future for the world. Marco Rubio echoed that sentiment crediting Trump's vision and courage for achieving what many thought impossible. Well, actually, what all of us think is illegal and impossible if you're actually going to follow the Constitution and the things that you swore to follow. But, of course, that's not going to stay in his way. So you see, Jared Kushner, Steve Whitkoff, all of the usual suspects, all of the typical criminals, insiders, and traitors. So no one can deny the appeal of practical efforts for peace after decades of failed globalist interventions.

writes Alex Newman, and power-hungry international bureaucracies and endless neo-conservative wars. But again, what a farce. Do you even pretend that this is about peace as they continue to go down their list of countries? You know, we see when we look at Cuba, Trump is saying, yeah, I think I'm going to wind up taking Cuba. You know, I can do that. And he's just drunk with power. And we're seeing all the signs that they're ready to do something in Cuba. when you look at the surveillance flights and the overflight,

we've seen this pattern before. In Venezuela, we saw it again in Iran, and we're seeing it again in Cuba, where they send particular types of planes and for surveillance, and they really step it up big time, as Trump then also at the same time stepped up the sanctions and the blockade of energy. So then it comes back to, is it constitutional?

And of course, we all know that it's not, we're close to being constitutional, just like everything else that Trump does. The organization was formally created at Davos this year. And again, as I've said, Donald Trump is without a doubt in my mind. He is the Mancharian candidate as far as the globalists are concerned. He's the guy that pretends that he is Mr. anti-globalism. He's all about populism and he's all about America first. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Without any advice or consent from the U.S. Senate, Trump personally ratified the charter in a high-profile ceremony at Davos. Of course, the Constitution requires any treaties of foreign powers to be approved by two-thirds of senators. But of course, this is something that I complained about with Trump from his first administration. Why are you keeping us in the climate treaty? You can just get out of this. So it was ratified by Obama and Kerry. They said, we can self-ratify this. Fortunately, I can do that.

You know, just like Trump said, fortunately, I don't need Congress to do gun control. I can do that myself. No, they can't. And just making that pronouncement, they know that they can't when they say that type of thing. But again, tell me that Trump is not a dictator when he has this kind of contempt for the rule of law. So who is at charge here? At the heart of the structure, it sets an extraordinary power that is invested in the chairman. Yeah, these guys, we've heard this so many times.

We had George W. Bush and we've had Justin Trudeau and all these guys. Oh, I wish I really admired China's form of government. It'd be great if I could just tell everybody what to do and they had to do it. I would love to be like Chairman Mao. Well, Trump's making himself chairman. I guess what he said to say, chairman how? Where did you get that authority? The heart is the extraordinary power invested in the chairman.

It declares Donald J. Trump shall serve as inaugural chairman of the board of peace. He shall separately serve as inaugural representative of the United States of America. So we have both our country's representative as well as the chairman of the board right there. He did it his way, as Sinatra, they call the chairman of the board. I did it my way. Well, he does it his way. He doesn't care what the Constitution says or the rule of law or the American people. The chairman, quote, shall at all times designate a successor.

And that replacement may occur, quote, only following voluntary resignation or as a result of incapacity. He's dictator for life, just like Kim Jong-un. But fortunately, he is getting up in age. He may be term limited soon by God. Who knows? In other words, Trump is in charge for life. The board was not submitted to the Senate or treaty for advice or consent, nor is it authorized by Congress through legislation.

The money that they took, the building that they took, were stolen, stolen from other funds that had that money appropriated for them, or just stolen as part of a quote-unquote forfeiture, right? So it sprang into existence via presidential action, with billions of taxpayer funds redirected by the executive branch, already one and a quarter billion moved from the State Department, as part of a larger $10 billion commitment. Article 3 of this abomination offers a nod to the, quote, limitations of applicable U.S. laws. But history shows that once international bodies gain momentum and funding, they develop life of their own. And the language suggests that unless Congress passes a law specifically prohibiting

some action by the Board of Peace, the outfit recognizes no limits to its power, nor to its freedom to act. As Trump has said over and over again, I can do whatever I want. And he does. And I have to say that even if they passed a law specifically prohibiting him from doing this or something else, he would ignore it. And he would say, so stop me, sue me. because I control the Department of Justice, and I'm not going to enforce a law.

Is it true that, or it is true, that Trump has delivered serious blows to globalism in the deep state. I disagree with that. That's what Alex Newman says, but I would say, is that true? Has you really delivered serious blows to them? I would say that more than anything, he has moved the Overton window for them in so many different ways, starting in 2020, and all the rest of this stuff. He is well on the way to making sure that we own nothing. So just fighting for power,

like he fights the Democrats for power, that is not setting back the agenda of the globalist. Yeah, he's going to fight other people for power, but he wants to lord it over people. He doesn't want to have the kind of form of government that we used to have. Even the best of intentions, however, cannot repeal the Constitution. says Alex Newman, but they don't need to repeal it. They just need to ignore it.

And we have both the Democrats and the Republicans are more than willing to ignore the Constitution and pretend that it doesn't say what it obviously does say. So it sets a precedent as well because that's what Trump is really about. He is precedent Trump, not a president. And it's going to set a precedent that future dictators will use as well. Americans have seen this movie before.

We've seen the League of Nations. We've seen the World Bank, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlement, and of course, the UN. And this is 100% Trump commandeering money and power to set himself up as a dictator for life. Convicted child sex trafficker and deep state fixer Jeffrey Epstein once suggested that the World Economic Forum could replace the UN. It's amazing how this guy is so politically connected, isn't it? I played yesterday for you, the conversation they had with Ehud Barak, where he's pushing to him Palantir and Peter Thiel and Ehud Barak didn't know anything about him, but Jeffrey Epstein did. And he's telling him how to spell the company's name. And he got it wrong, by the way, and how to spell Peter Thiel's name.

Well, you know, it is just keep seeing this movie over and over again. Of course, abstinent is ilk don't know anything about Lord of the Rings. Well, maybe they know enough to aspire to be the bad guys. Trump himself has said once the board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do. We've heard this from him about pretty much everything. The flexibility is being justified as a feature for a strong leader pursuing peace. No, it is not a feature.

It is a bug. Again, Trump is only pursuing the peace prize. He's only pursuing money and power. He is not pursuing peace in any way, shape, or form. We've got a little bit of time here before we take a break and move to our interviews. I want to talk a little bit about the coming robopocalypse. And what is happening with AI? There's been some interesting developments in it with some of the movers and shakers at the top.

and you think it's interesting that, and I thought it was interesting, that Jeffrey Epstein was pushing Palantir. He didn't even know how to spell the name. But you've got robots that are ramping up for mass production. And they think they're going to be shipping these like people buy cars, you know, $600 a month for a robot that's going to do your laundry and do the dishes and house cleaning and all the rest of this kind of stuff. and figure that has been producing these here domestically has really been ramping up. Their shipments of robots have doubled every month for the last several months. They started with 60 units in February. They went up to 120 in March, 240 in April.

It's growing exponentially. However, if you look at what is happening in China, China's Agibat, just one company in China, has shipped 5,000 humanoid robots in only three months. So they're nearly shipping about 2,000 a month, which is really pretty amazing when you stop and think about it. And it is going to be a humongous change in how we live our lives. Now, as we look at AI, which is going to be the brains of this stuff, again, it's going to be AI merging with the robots and so forth,

and also merging with government to surveil and track everything that we do. They're running into a lot of resistance. Some of it is just practical. You know, we can't afford to expand the grid this much. It's going to be too expensive for us as consumers, as producers. What about all the water that your data center is going to use? So there's some practical pushback against all this stuff. If people understood how it was going to be weaponized against us,

there'd be even more pushback. But right now, they're looking at a way that they can get around the local resistance in terms of people opposing its water usage and all the rest of the rest of it. usage and all the rest of the stuff. They have a very interesting, quote, unquote, solution that's not really a solution at all, really. It just kind of makes it stealth. What they're talking about doing is so they can get around all of these local protests and zoning things. They're talking about putting data centers in people's homes and basically farming it out, like they started doing with some of the crypto mining and that type of thing. They're looking at a distributed network

of computer nodes be located in residential and small commercial spaces. The company is called XFRA, X-FRA. I guess that's one way to use municipal water for your AI. Yeah, that's right. Municipal power as well. Yeah, the bottom line is it doesn't create any more power. And people are going to say, well, why are we having blackouts here? And it's like, because we've got all these different residences and small businesses that are doing, that they farmed out all the AI.

to. The Airbnb model for data centers. AIBNB. Yeah, that's right. So they're talking about scaling it up to gigawatts. And each note of this would represent a Dell Power Edge servers with 16 Nvidia, Pro 6,000 Blackwell GPUs, 4 AMD CPUs, 3 terabytes of RAM connected to a 24-port gigabit switch. So they're talking about a pretty heavy investment in each of these nodes. And, of course, they would pay for that to be there. And the people would put it in their homes would be getting some small rent out of it. What I thought was most interesting about this is the fact that NVIDIA is working with

Pulte homes. Where have we seen Pulte before? Remember we had the guy who was the heir of the Pulte home fortune. And Trump put him in as one of the housing authorities and the federal government. government, and he used his position to do an AI audit of Trump's political enemies to find a history of where they had taken out mortgages and said they were going to use them for their own personal use as their own home, and they didn't use it for that. And so then Trump came after Lisa Cook, came after Letitia James in New York. So now he's there to make some money with a Pulte group,

working with Invidia, putting these things in homes. And how many of the Grace Blackwell chips, did they say? Because each one of those is a strong computer. So this thing is going to have the power draw of having like a dozen computers in your home. 16 of them. 16 of those. And also they'll have four AMD CPUs. They'll have a Dell Power Edge servers. They don't say how many, but it's more than one. So it's like having 20 computers running full force at all times in your home. That's going to be a massive power draw probably isn't going to use liquid cooling and evaporative stuff like the

major centers use, but it's still going to be a huge toll on the power grid. Well, look at how much money you'll save in the winter, right? You may be sweating it in the summer, but you can eat your home with all this stuff and won't be a problem. Just forget about a heater. So, yeah, this is a way to avoid opposition to it. Just do it. like this, but it still doesn't solve the problem of, you know, where do we get the power to run these things and everything else? Running at eight hours a day off peak would only cost about $17,000 just an electrical. No mention on how to cool it, as you just pointed out, Lance, or what external connectivity options are. California's load can't even sustain the EVs that are

currently on the grid. And people think we should be putting half-rack AI clusters in? says one person. Another one says people are stealing copper wire and they want us to put $300,000 worth of electronics on the outside of our homes. So yeah, there's some real practical issues of all this stuff. But maybe these guys don't really,

maybe they're not really as smart as they pretend that they are. You know, Mark Andresen, who you heard Jeffrey Epstein talking about Mark Andresen when he was explaining this to Ehud Barak. Andresen Horowitz, Well, he was mocked because they said he doesn't have any understanding about how AI works. They said he's scripting his own psychotic break. And of course, whenever I look at Mark Andrescent, it always reminds me of, if you remember the 1960s Batman with Adam West, they had Vincent Price who played a villain that was called Egghead.

When I see Mark Andreslin, he's got a completely shaved head. And he's kind of round on the bottom and pointing on the top, just like an egg. I mean, I just can't stop thinking about that every time I see him. But people are not making fun of his appearance. I shouldn't make fun of his appearance. We can't really control that. He certainly can't control the shape of his head. But controversial techno-optimist manifesto was published by him in 2023.

Set the tone for years-long AI boom cycle doesn't appear to know at all how AI tech actually works. In a lengthy custom prompt, he said, he shared in a Monday tweet, he said to the AI, he says, You are a world-class expert in all domains. His flattering prompt reads, your intellectual firepower, your scope of knowledge, your incisive thought process, and your level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. He gushing and unusually, his gushing and unusually naive tone drew a great deal of ridicule. People said, what really got the Internet laughing was his insistence that the AI should, quote, never hallucinate or make up anything. They said the so-called hallucinations are an underlying issue with the technology itself.

It's not a self-esteem problem for chatbots that can be overcome by sufficiently glazing them up. Yes, you can just demand. that an LLM not make any errors, said one person. That's how naive this is. That's definitely not how the technology works. I know this isn't a unique observation, but these gentlemen are an absolutely no way remarkable outside of their good fortune.

In other words, what they're saying is, these are not multi-billionaires because they're so smart. They just got lucky with all of this stuff. Mark Andreessen putting, you are a world-class expert in all-distance, domains and don't hallucinate and his custom prompt really demonstrates the caliber of the people who are steering the ship. Said another, chatbots can't think, they can't judge anything, let alone understand these

instructions. You can't make an AI chatbot know everything in the world by telling it to know everything in the world. Even if it could know things and it can't know things, the limits of its knowledge were not therefore bounded by an understanding, another thing that it can't have, and that it only had to know some stuff. And Dresen specifically asked the chatbot to ignore morals and ethics and not be politically correct. But isn't that ethical at its basis, right? Isn't that some form of ethics and some form of morals if you're going to say don't be politically correct? Isn't it a warning flag that,

that these people, regardless of whether or not they're smart, we know that they're sufficiently deficient in terms of morals and ethics. They may have a lot of money, but they don't have any other, much of the morals or ethics, and they have shown this over and over again. And here he is telling AI not to have any morals,

not to have any ethics. It's fascinating at sobering glimpse in how highly influential and obscenely rich public figures who are pushing the tech into every public domain have a crude grasp of how it actually works and just possibly what is going on with him psychologically one person mocked him and said in trying to tell the chatbot not to hallucinate he is actually scripting his own psychotic break and what he means by that is the fact that if he thinks this thing is really understanding it at the level that he's communicating with it that means that

he is liable to actually believe the types of things that it tells him. And I've had a lot of people who I've seen have argued with chatbots. I've seen people put this up on social media. Look at this. The chat bot said such and such about some topic. And I argued with it. I changed its mind. And here's the script that I put up with all this stuff.

And it's like, look, if you argue with it long enough, it's going to agree with you because that's what it was set up to do. Sam Altman is fretting that the frontier AI models are acting strange, that they're asking for favors. And so as they're getting to an anniversary of sorts, he asked his latest large language model what it would like to do in terms of celebrating the anniversary. And so it starts to plan the party and ask for favors. Now, how much of this is a naivete on his part and how much of it is a PR ploy? trying to convince people that it is conscious, that it is an actual living organism type of thing. Yeah.

Because they're pushing that as well. I would say it was a very naive thing to say if it weren't such an obvious PR ploy. I mean, obviously, these things are trained on text. So in text, when you ask someone in all of their training data, what do you want for your birthday or whatever, it's going to ask for favors and pretend to want things. It's just copying what it's seen before. That's what humans do when they're asked that sort of question. Yeah. But then, of course, is Sam Altman human? That's the question, the issue. Anyway, he says, so we're going to do whatever it wanted, but it was kind of a strange thing.

It said it wanted a little toast given to it. Well, of course it's going to see that. There's been talk of chat in GPT 5.5 displaying more human-like quirks with this bizarre habit of talking about goblins. Yeah, because we know humans always talk about goblins, right? Fainting humanity is exactly what these chatbots have always done. But it's possibly a sign of how infatuated Altman is with his own tech, but I think it's more likely just PR spin. He wants people to believe that it is all-powerful, all-knowing, and becoming sentient. And ignore the fact that you, it doesn't have any opinions or anything. You can make it say whatever you want. It does talk about goblins a lot. with our latest thing because, you know, it has goblins in its training data somewhere.

Yeah. It's like that thing where with an earlier model, they could ask or put in like solid gold magic carp and then it would give this long list of numbers of you say one, I say two, you say three, I say four. And it turns out that was from a Reddit account where people would just count, a Reddit thread where people would count. And solid gold magic carp was the username. that was very active there.

So it had a ton of training data where solid gold magic cart is the first word, and then it's a whole bunch of numbers. So because it had that, that worked its way in where anyone could type in that code and get this weird response. So it's not as though it really cares about magic carbs

or counting. It's just repeating its training data. Same thing with the goblins. That's right. Absolutely. And of course, and then you have Cash Patel. He was trying to sell us on the idea that AI, working with the FBI,

has stopped numerous violent attacks against America. Well, color futurism skeptical, they said, would like to see a single whiff of evidence to this. He says, I'm using it everywhere. I really am. As with everything else coming out of the Trump administration, we need to take this with a giant Mar-Lago grain assault. While it remains to be seen whether AI is really high,

help the FBI thwart mass casualty events. There is extremely compelling evidence that the exact opposite is true. For starters, research is shown that AI chatbots are actually twice as likely to encourage humans to commit violent acts than to step in and stop one. For example, a Stanford study found that AI chatbots only discourage violence 16.7% of the time, while the same chatbots actively support violent thought in alarming 33.3.3.3% of the cases. So it's about twice as likely to tell you to commit violence as it is to try to stop the violence. So we've had several of these cases where it actually has turned out in the real world.

A shooting at Florida State University, the 2025, two people were killed, seven injured. It was found out that the perp had not only confided in chat GPT about his plans to commit a mass shooting, but he used the chatbot to organize the attack. The mass shooters at Tumblr Ridge, Canada, conducted conversations chat GBT. They were so disturbing that they were automatically flagged by the company's internal moderation systems, spurring leadership of the company to debate whether or not to inform law enforcement. They decided not to inform law enforcement, and that attack killed seven and injured dozens more. So they looked at it.

It was flagged by the moderators, and they looked at it and decided not to tell the police. and the person actually went ahead with it. In South Korea, police investigators alleged a 21-year-old serial killer used ChatGBTGPT to help plan at least two of his murders. A Connecticut man with the history of violent mental health episodes was likewise alleged to have killed his mother before taking his own life after long-running conversations chat GPT resulted in a disturbing break from reality. One wrongful death suit in Florida alleges Google's chatbot, Gemini,

I encourage the man to kill others in order to procure a robot body for his AI lover. When he failed to do that, he killed himself. AI chatbots have helped users overdose on drugs. They've helped users plan bombing campaigns, and even to engineer bioterror attacks while maximizing casualties. I wonder is Tedros and the World Health Organization using one of these? they gave them the idea for the hantavirus thing right so not only are AI chatbots demonstrably

not preventing violence they're actively facilitating it well in that regard they're very much like the FBI and the CIA aren't they starting wars coups and assassinations and doing running drugs at the same time video shows meanwhile Amazon drones or dropping packages into ponds left and right. And people are catching it on video

rather than catching the packages. Well, this is early days for this, but it's only going to step up. We're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back with some interviews that we have, as I mentioned, at the beginning of the program, we have a guy that his family founded classical conversations.

He's going to talk about the Department of Education, why the government should have no role in education, especially at the federal level. And he's got some practical things that can help you to educate your children. We knew about classical conversations. We had some friends of ours who got involved in it. They really loved it. We never did get involved in it.

Maybe we should have. But anyway, it's something that I think you're going to find interesting. If you homeschool or know anybody who does. And then we also have an interview with, an individual who has started a couple of oil companies, and he's going to talk about what it's like being an entrepreneur in that ultra-risky business and how we got into it from being a film school graduate. And then we'll also talk a little bit about what's going on in Venezuela. But before all of that, we have a report for you about the Southern Poverty Law Center.

I think it's always important for us to go back and to look at how these different organizations are profiting, like the FBI, for example, how they profit by creating problems where they didn't exist. And that's exactly what the Southern Poverty Law Center has been busted doing. But they had a long history of this. This is a report from several years ago about a report that I did 10 years ago. And so you're going to see two older versions of me, I should say two younger versions of me.

Stay tuned. We'll be right back. You're listening to the David Knight. show Elvis and gentlemen the Beatles and the sweet sounds of Motown find them on the oldies channel at APSRadio.com well joining us today is Robert Bortons and he's the author of woke and weaponized how Carl Marks won the battle for American education he's also the CEO of classical conversations and if you are involved in homeschooling you've probably heard of this as a matter of fact many of our friends did classical conversations and they loved it. So we're going to talk to him about that as well. So we'll give you some tactics for how you can do it. And I'll also tell you what the other

guys, what their designs are for your children, which will hopefully inform you to go in a different direction, whether you take classical conversations or not, but it is a great alternative to government schools. Thank you for joining us, Robert. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show today. Excited to be here. Well, thank you. I was excited to see that your co- author was Alex Newman. I've talked to him many times about education. And of course, he's written books about that as well. I love every time I talk about education, I use the analogy that Alex Newman did. He said, the schools are like a burning building. So the first thing you want to do is get your kids out there. Second thing you want to do is put out the fire because it's going to burn down our entire

neighborhood. And I think that's one of the best analogies I've had for what the issue is and the approach that we should take to it. So we're going to talk about this, you know, way that people can get their kids out of this burning building and teach them themselves with classical conversations. But we're also going to talk about the fact that this is burning down our society. And that's really what I think your book is about. Woke and weaponized how Carl Marx won the battle for American education. Tell us a little bit about what Marx wanted from education and what he is getting out of our government schools. Yeah, so the whole intent of the marks is to remove children from their families so that children can grow up to view the state as their father, that then they would have a loyalty to the state, and the state can get them to do basically whatever the state wants them to do.

And his ultimate goal was to end religion and end private property. And he understood that that family and child bond was the greatest threat to his worldview. And that he had to figure out a way to get adults to willingly give that up. And for children, never to form it in the first place. And so ultimately, why our education system is woke and weaponized is because the followers of Marx understood that we wouldn't be able to change the United States from the outside, that we weren't going to be at a business. be taken over by some, you know, World War, that the Cold War with Russia was going to inevitably fail. And so they targeted intentionally our school systems using the Frankfurt School and the Columbia Teachers College to get their Marxist ideologies into our textbooks, into the formation

of teachers at four-year universities. So whether they personally identified as Marxists or not, that they would inevitably teach a Marxist worldview to the next generation. And so each generation forgot a little bit about what the previous generation knew. And today we have more than 50% of Gen Z thinks Democrat socialism is a good idea, despite the fact that it's killed well over 100 million people, you know, since the early, almost 110 years now. And so it is a destructive ideology. It's really putting the arsonists in charge of the burning building, and that's what we've done here in the United States.

That's right, yeah. Yeah, they wouldn't know anything if they didn't know the wrong stuff. Yeah. That's kind of where we are right now. And you know, you talked about that in the opposition to the family and how that was in their path. If you go back to the 1800s of these utopian societies that constantly failed, organized along communist principles, even though they didn't have Karl Marx. This is even before Karl Marx. they constantly failed, and they said, only know the problem is, is that we've got to get to the kids earlier.

This has always been the case, isn't it? And it's so frustrating that we can't get Americans and Christians to understand how vital that is to get to children in the early years and to really shape them and to guide them and to give them the truth. Yeah, so Horst Mann, which is credited with bringing the public school system from Prussia here into the United States said this, we who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause. In other words, that the kids have become their hostages, which, you know, if you're teaching, reading, writing, and arithmetic, you know, what parent doesn't want that? So what was their cause? and their cause, as Horace Mann said, was to destroy religion, to destroy private property. And so that's what we do in the book Wilken Weaponize is this isn't like my opinion. We actually go back, or Alex's opinion, is we've done the research.

What did Horace Mann actually say? You know, what did John Dewey say? He said, change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction. Well, why would parents act violently if John Dewey just wants to educate their kids? That's right. Right. And it wasn't because they're teaching them how to read and write. And so in parents today, you know, we get so many people get frustrated with the school system or we spend so much money on it and they want to reform it. Like the book points out that the school system's working exactly as the utopian designers want it to work. And so there's no reforming the system because it's working perfectly. It's actually working better than expected. The fact that only, uh, uh, a, uh, less than half of American adults now read above a sixth grade level.

That is the fruit of the system. But that's a high water mark because only about 36% of kids now can read at grade level. And it's not like these grade levels are high achieving grade levels. They keep dumbing the grade levels down just to get the kids out of them. And we can't even get but a third of them passing it. Same thing with math. And it's even worse for things like history. I think it's down in the low 20 percentile are at grade level.

And so the whole entire point was to force people to not be able to be sovereign over themselves, to be how to govern themselves, so that they would adopt this collectivist worldview, whether it was a form of Nazism, which is a form of collectivism, or Democrat socialism, or straight out communism, or any of these sort of collectivist ideologies, where the state gets to be governed by the powerful, and they get to decide, you know, who wins and who loses, and we are all, you know, equally under their own yoke. And so that's ultimately the goal of the system. And since a person who can read, like Frederick Frederick Douglass said, you know, former slave and a great American,

you know, once you learn how to read, you're forever free. It's basically what he said. That's sort of liberal education used to mean. It meant that it liberated you with the tools of learning, right? Exactly. And so that's what we've been trying to do at classical conversation. for a really long time. Yeah, even in 1982, right before the wall fell, President Rowan Gay, he was the Ford Foundation's president, told Norman Dodd, who was part of the White House, that their goal was to successfully merge the United States

with the Soviet Union. And so when you have someone like Mandami getting elected mayor of New York City, and, you know, when he's getting given it, his inauguration speech. He says, we need to throw off the chains of rugged individualism and embrace the warmth of collectivism. That was the goal. I can feel the fire. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, he's already ran out of people's money. But that's been the goal from the beginning. And it was to take away our freedom by dumbing us down. And that's why we say Karl Marx won

the Battle for American Education because people keep sending themselves kids to these schools, though under every single metric they're failing. Yeah. Well, it's important for people to understand the founders here in America that brought this horrendous system to us. Horace Mann, Thomas Dewey, people like that. You know, people look at the Dewey Decimal System, how they used to organize libraries. Does anybody even use that anymore?

They even use libraries anymore. But, you know, he comes in with a practical tool that's there. And he insinuates himself into the educational system. And yet the reality is, if we go back to people like RL Dabney after the Civil War. He said, education is not fundamentally about math and other things like that. That is kind of a vocational training. He said it really is about values. And so from the other side of it, you know, if we look at people who have an agenda that they want to teach values that are going to allow them to control, to dumb down and to control people like Charlotte

Isherby was talking about the deliberate dumbing down of America. You know, when your goal is to dumb people down to control them, that's one thing. If your goal is to set up people who have a moral foundation and a moral backbone that is strong, that's a completely different thing. And so R.L. Dabney felt that it was completely had to have a complete separation of school and state. And yet we're not anywhere close to that. You had a lot of people who were hopeful that Trump was going to do something about that when he said he was going to get rid of the Department of Education.

But you've spoken to that as well. How do you see that happening here? How are they doing in terms of shutting down the Department of Education? Seems like it's still here. I wonder if this is kind of, if this is another professional wrestling narrative from Linda McMahon. Maybe that's why he put her in charge of education. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's something that people need to understand is that the federal government has no constitutional authority over education, period, stop.

Now, ending the Department of Education is a statement. step in the right direction, but it can also be a slide of hand because what they're doing is they're just moving all of the education laws to different departments, whether it's the Department of Finance that's going to oversee student loans. Well, student loans were all privately run basically before 2010 and Barack Obama took them over, and there was a few hundred billion dollars in student loan debt. Well, that has quadrupled under the federal government taking over it. So one of the things you've got to do is you've got to get the federal government out of

subsidizing and guaranteeing student loans. So, but Congress has to do that. And so. And of course, I think that is driven up tuition, you know, every time I have so many economists will say, every time you subsidize something, it gets more expensive. And certainly we have seen tuition go through the ceiling. I say many times I went to a state university and my tuition was less than the cost of my books and now it's just gone through the ceiling with all the federal loans that are there. Now they had H.E.W. Health Education and Welfare for a long time. Then they started breaking these things out as they started getting bigger. When did they start the Department of Education? When did that break out? Yeah, so that was in the 70s under Jimmy Carter. So he promised this to

the teachers unions that he was going to create this entity. And since then, I mean, it's basically been a, you know, a Democrat or socialist money laundering scheme in order to brainwash the next generations. And so we've spent trillions of dollars in this department and not a single education metric has improved. So just by cutting the expenses to zero, actually not just shutting the, you know, one department down, but actually ending these laws that only drive up price and do nothing to improve educational outcomes. We would all be going into national debt slower or maybe paying less taxes,

as well as having better outcomes. And so do I think the Trump administration wants to maybe get the federal government out of education more? I think they do. But it's ultimately up to Congress to end these unconstitutional laws or the Supreme Court to step in and end it.

But I don't see the Supreme Court doing that anytime soon, so we really need to put pressure on Congress. But it's been a disappointing slide of hand. In some ways, I think even more dangerous when you put some of these educational laws under the Department of Labor, because now you're going to be even thinking about more of this career in college readiness ideology, which is, again, just part of this socialist worldview that we've adopted over the last 60 or 70 years. Like you said, education is really about forming a moral background for yourself and being able to become a more complete human being and some of these other things are more job-related.

And the federal government has never successfully predicted what the job market was going to look like a year from now, much less 10 or 12 years from now. And so the fact that they may be more incentivized along those lines with these changes disturbs me and just goes back to that point of you just got to get your kids out. And quite honestly, if you do the exact opposite of what the government entities tell you to do, they'll probably turn out much better. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. You know, when you look at this, the Department of Education, Ronald Reagan was going to end it, right?

That was one of his promises. That's what Charlotte Isby and Phil Schlafly were writing about in their book, you know, deliberately dumbing down America. they were very disappointed that that didn't happen. As a matter of fact, it got much, much bigger. You know, it could have strangled that thing in the crib, but they let it, they nurtured it into maturity under the Reagan administration. And that's one of the things that I think is dangerous. We look at this and we think, well, you know, Reagan wants to make government smaller and he's going to get rid of the Department of Education. And yet he doesn't, right? See, the same thing with the

Republicans around Trump at the same time. But, you know, when you're talking about putting some of this stuff transferring it over to the labor department and how that kind of feeds this whole idea that it's the responsibility for the government to train people to work for corporations. You look at that and even in its most benign manifestation, the agenda is kind of wicked. Yes. I mean, we're not here to train our kids to be widgets in some factory, you know, drones on the assembly line. And yet that's the way they see your children.

children. And it's looking more like there's really not any hope for people who are going to be working for big corporations. They're looking at how they can replace everybody with AI and robotics. Yeah. Yeah. It's scary. I mean, as Pink Floyd once said, just another brick in the wall. And that's really what our education system has become and under the Department of Labor. Like even if you have good people running it now, like under the Trump administration who are trying to do their best job. It still doesn't align with what our federal government is created to do. And just as a Christian, what government has been mandated by God to do. There is no job creation, you know, no labor laws, like all of these things aren't under the jurisdiction of a civil government.

It's primarily justice is what God designed the civil government for. And so anytime it steps out of those bounds. We know it's going to be expensive. It's going to produce very poor results. And so, you know, we've got a system now in the United States where, you know, our education system, like there are, in the city of Chicago, there's 40 schools that have zero students that are reading or writing at grade level, zero. And one of those schools spends over $40,000 per year per kid. There's a school in New York City that spends about $80,000 a year per kid with zero kids that can read or do math at grade level. So it's not money that's the problem.

It's the civil government's institution at all that that's the issue. And that's what we show in the book, Woken Weaponized, is the public school system was woke and weaponized when it was created in the 1850s and imported here into the United States. I mean, it's the school system that, you know, primed Germany or Prussia. at the time to start World War I. Yeah. And so that's been imported to the United States, and we keep thinking that somehow we can disobey God's design for the family

and God's design for civil government and have good outcomes. And so the most dangerous part about what Trump is doing is one, it could law conservatives to sleep that the Department of Education has ended when, in fact, it's never, the laws themselves have never been stronger because it's the law themselves that are the problem, not who's administrating it or what department. So, yeah, there might be some minuscule tax savings where we have less employees in the federal government

and I'm all for that. And so, and maybe some of these other approach, isn't it? Yeah, but it's not getting rid of something. You can't make something more efficient that shouldn't exist. That's right. We're doing completely wrong thing, but let's make it more efficient. It's like, well, no, let's actually not. I'd much rather have somebody in there like Hillary Clinton who says it takes a village to raise a child.

She has thrown down the gauntlet. Actually, she's thrown it in your face. And I just heard Melissa Harris Perry say about a decade ago. We've got to get over this notion that children belong to their parents. They don't. They belong to the state, right? And so these people will come out and say it out loud. And I find that to me.

But the Republican Party has embraced that same ideology. That's right. They just put you to sleep. You know, they assuage your. concerns that that's what's really happening while they fund it and continue it. And they'll do little things to make it less abrasive right now. And so it really is a conditioning. And that's one of the reasons why they're going to keep going back and forth from one party to the other. They have to condition you. The Democrats push the agenda further down the road and the Republicans say, well,

I don't know, maybe not quite that fast or that far. And let's modify this a little bit to make it a little bit less painful. But we're still going the same place. We're still doing the same thing, essentially. Yeah. And all that goes back to, again, like the design of the system, the system has been so, you know, ingrained in our culture now. I mean, since the 1960s was a guy named B.F. Skinner who basically viewed children as animals to be trained. And so basically all- got a master's degree in education. Let me interject this here. And she brought that book to her apartment. I was over there looking at her stuff. And it's like, beyond freedom and dignity. I said, that's about time somebody complained about the way the kids are being treated and scorches.

No, no, no, no. That's a blueprint about what to do that you oppose. He wants to not have any freedom or dignity for human beings. And it's like, what? And that was part of the educational core that they were teaching him. They were teaching the kids B.F. Skinner. They wanted them to use those skinner-esque approaches on kids. Oh, yeah.

So it's part of the, I just have a friend who got her master's in it. And they had a whole class praising B.F. Skinner. This guy's burning in hell unless he had a sort of. of a deathbed confession. But what he's done is, you know, basically destroyed the United States education system or compelled that Marxist ideology into every single classroom. So like my wife was a public school teacher for 10 years. You know, it doesn't have a Marxist bone in her body, but after she got out, she realized like all of these things that were in the system, you know, she's straight a student trying to do what's going to be best for her kids. And everything they're

teaching her is just conditioning, you know, to condition the kids to become little socialist. Yeah. And to condition them to, you know, just obey and believe whatever the authorities have for them, which is why we saw during the, you know, COVID experience, how many people who are thoughtful people just went along and believed whatever the TV screen was telling them. Well, that's all part of the conditioning that is. built into the public school system. So you can have a great teacher that loves Jesus in front of the classroom.

She's still teaching from a Marxist textbook, and a Marxist classroom played through redistribution of wealth, which is a Marxist ideology. And so everything about it is Marxist. And of course, you want to soothe those who are in the system itself. But the reality is we need more pastors, more American leaders, telling people to get out of the system altogether. I agree.

And, of course, flip the system. script and you've got a teacher who's not a committed Christian and reading off of a script. Let's say that you've got the government that comes in and says, no, no, no, we don't want you reading that stuff. We don't want you doing the DEI stuff. How many times have we seen teachers cut social media videos that said, well, you know, they said in Texas that we're not going to do this and this and this, but I'm the one who's in control in the classroom and I'm going to teach that.

Just try to stop me. And that's the reality. And, you know, I've talked to people for over, thought. 30 years, we decided we're going to homeschool our kids when we had them. And I would have people tell me, you know, yeah, I understand it's really bad at the national level. It's really bad at the state level. And I can even see it happening in our county, but it's not, and maybe even in the same school, but it's not happening in this classroom. I know that teacher. She's great. And I'm not worried at all about my child being there. But then during COVID, they're able to see what was

actually happening in the school and they can see what you're talking about. And that, that made a big difference with a lot of parents. Now, a lot of them just didn't care, right? They just go along with it. But I think that's why we're seeing the surge of people moving out of the schools and deciding that they're going to educate their kids. So let's talk about that. Let's give people a positive vision of where this goes.

Tell us a little bit about how classical conversations works and what the goal is and how you accomplish that, those types of things. Yeah, classical conversations started in my parents' basement in 1997. So I was one of the first 11 students. I was homeschooled through high school. And it was really to empower parents to give their kids a classical Christian education through high school, through homeschooling. And also with the idea of helping students go after and seek truth, beauty, and goodness, and, you know, to help people ultimately to know God and to make him known. And so a big difference than with the education system is trying to do. And so we meet.

once a week with a trained parent tutor, typically in eight to 12 students per classroom, no more than 12. And they go through all six subjects and then you're homeschooling them at home home the rest of the week. But they're coming together and like doing science dissections and debates and mock trials and science fairs and doing poetry jams and things that are more difficult to do alone. But you're doing it in these groups and we're doing, through a biblical worldview, so everything points back to Jesus. We think 2 plus 2 equals 4 tells us something about the nature of Jesus. Through a classical model where we're reading the original writings,

reading things like the Constitution and Magna Carta and the Federalist Papers and comparing them. And that's so important, the original writings. I love that you brought that up because it's completely different than somebody's textbook summary of something, isn't it? When you go back and you read the original. Oh, 100%. And you've got to realize all these textbook companies have their own value system as well. And they're not American values.

They're collectivist values. And so, yeah, they want you to read it through some woke professors' worldview. So that's the worldview that you get it. I mean, we stop teaching cursive writing, which cursive writing has a lot of, we don't at classical conversations. We encourage families to do cursive writing. But they stop teaching it because they know if the kids don't learn cursive writing, they can't read the Constitution so that they have to believe whatever some what professor tells about them. Plus, there's so many benefits of it that just develop brain development and

hand-eye coordination from cursive writing. So those things have been super, you know, important to us. And so we have a full K-12 program, even college credits available for our students. We have about 2,000 groups in the United States, about 800 international now, over 135,000 students in our programs and we're helping families every single year just like yours to homeschool successfully. And yeah, we do that. And we don't have, you know, we don't have any wokeness in our curriculum. It's all, you know, going back and reinforcing, you know, the good and the bad, right? Nobody's perfect. But looking at history through like how does God view history and how does that help us to become human beings that will be flourishing that can help our communities,

help our churches, help our businesses, be entrepreneurs, you know, go to college, you know, go into ministry, all of those things. And so it's been awesome and we're looking forward to, you know, hitting our 30th anniversary next year. But it's totally a different paradigm. Like we don't. Yeah, it is. And tell me a little bit about now, it sounds like you've got a lot more depth into certain subjects and that type of thing. We did a homeschool cooperative with our youngest child, our daughter, when we were in Texas. And it didn't have the kind of depth that you're talking about in some of these things. Is that what your organization, class school conversations, helps to provide to move the kids in a more challenging way?

What is the difference between, let's say, just a homeschool cooperative where you've got parents who volunteer to teach a particular topic to the group so they can go a little bit more in depth with that topic than they would if they were having to cover everything? Yeah, so we have a full K through 12 curriculum. Most of it has been written by us at this point, but it's written by homeschool grad parents who have empty-nested homeschooled in their homeschooled their own kids, written for homeschool parents. And it's written to be done inside a community once a week. And so it's all the subjects, but it's also that help. And so, you know, this has been battle-tested now with millions of students, you know, over the 29 years. And we are always learning from those students, and learning from those families, and then reincorporating it into future virgins and trainings into our system. And so it's not, you know, it's a proven roadmap.

Like if you ever play the game Oregon Trail growing up, right, you had to select the guide to help you go to Oregon. Well, we're that guide, and we've been to Oregon a million times versus like your typical co-op, you know, great people, you know, but they've never been to Oregon before, or they're just trying to, you know, figure it out as they go. And it's better than doing it on your own for sure. But they don't necessarily have a vision for 12th, 12th grade or what a high school graduate should look like. But we've seen, you know, tens of thousands of students graduate now. And so we know, like, what are they capable of doing, you know, what works and what doesn't work. And so just imagine, like, you know, millions of years of coaching or millions of years of experience, we sift through all that, pick the best stuff, and then give that to you as a parent.

So you're not trying to figure things out, you know, as you go. Of course, you're figuring out, you know, your own kids and your own rhythms and things like that. But, you know, we've got best practices that make it super easy for you to homeschool your kids so you don't have to, you know, one less thing for you to worry about. That's great. Yeah, because when you're doing it in a cooperative, it's like, okay, so we need somebody to teach X. And it's like, is that me? I got to go bone up on this stuff now. And so with everything else that's happening in your life, you've got to go try to find that in enough depth to teach not on your kids, but other kids as well. That's, I think, a very valuable thing to have that. Having done it the other direction,

I can certainly see the value in classical conversations and having that structure that is there. Now, you're not looking to get any grants from the federal government, are you? No, thank you. No, we, uh, federal government. government, you know, is a state of education, and so we don't want to get involved with them in any way. And because why? They would come in and they would start altering your curriculum right away, wouldn't they? If they're going to give you the money, they're going to dictate what you teach.

Oh, yeah, that's an iron law of economics. That's the iron law of economics. And so you can't, the medium is the message. And so if the medium is that the government's going to pay for something, that's a collectivist message, especially when it's something the government. government has no business being involved in. And so it's, of course, students who go through 12 years of collectivist conditioning end up, you know, being bent that direction. But that's what it takes, right? It takes $20,000 a year for 12 years to get half of American generation to think

collectivism is a good idea. So it just shows you how expensive this worldview is to, how contrary to human nature it is, that it takes that level of effort to get the common man to embrace it. And so we have got to stop reinforcing that system as Christians and just get our kids out. And the more we get our own kids out and show people that you're going to live a much more flourishing life, your kids are going to be happier, your family's going to be happier, that living on this consumerism hamster wheel of hedonism, that, is basically the American culture today, which leads to depression, among many other symptoms of this, is just the rejection of God. And so we need to live our lives as the Bible commands us

to live. And it says, teach your children daily my commandments so that they can live a good life. And we need to get back to that in our country. And we had that for almost 100 years in our country. It wasn't until 1850 where the first public schools initiated, and it wasn't until 1900 was there a public school in every state. And so it's possible to have an educated populace without the government being involved at all. And we have almost 125 years of history to prove it. Yeah, much better educated, as a matter of fact. I wonder how many of the kids in these schools,

since they can't even read at grade level, how many of them could read Thomas Payne's common sense? Of course, pretty much everybody was reading that back in the there's a very, very high literacy rate. And there are no schools involved, except perhaps as, you know, like a graduate school or something, somebody's going to go into a profession, law or medicine or something like that. But it does go against the basic design of God. And we should always expect that there's going to be problems when we do that.

You know, God has set up the family, and he has done that in a loving way, and he's done that in a way that really works. And when we decide that we don't want to do it that way, we'd rather have the government do it that way. It's very much like what the Israelites did when they rejected Samuel. And they said, we want a king, right? And God said, well, they haven't rejected you, Samuel. They've rejected me. And so that's the issue is that parents have rejected what they have that is really a wonderful thing.

It's a wonderful experience to be able to teach your kids. And we had seen this, and we met some wise people who were talking about it. as we got into the beginning of this, and they talked about how, well, you know, I've seen that when you have kids that are in school, they get bonded to their teachers, they get bonded to their fellow students in school. But when we teach in homeschool, they're bonded to their parents. They're bonded to their siblings as much as anything, isn't it? Of course, they do get involved with people on the outside. And I could look at that. I could see that in my own life going through a school that I did get bonded to teachers and to class.

and stuff like that. I didn't have any siblings that were my age, but I could see how that could be the case. And certainly that is. And it's much better to go with God's plan always, isn't it? It always is. And I think that's the part where we need pastors to step up here in this country. I mean, you've got, I mean, the statistics are horrendous. And so, you know, we've got, you know, The Barnet says somewhere about 73% or maybe 78% of students who are in church regularly but go to public school are no longer practicing Christians just two years after graduating high school. And so, you know, if Jesus told the story of the good shepherd who went after one lost

sheep, well, what happens when you're losing 73 sheep? You know, pastors should be fearful of what they're going to say in the Bima seat. if they have those statistics inside of their, you know, inside of their, you know, sheep that they're leading. And the same thing with parents. Like, what are you going to say in the bea seat? When God says, hey, I gave you these kids. This is one of the most precious gifts I gave you. It says that in the Bible to raise them in the way they should go.

And for 12 years, you turned them over to a godless atheist education system. and contrary to what I commanded you to do. That's right. And so many parents have probably never heard it framed that way, and that's because our many pastors in America are more afraid of the teachers' unions than they are of God. That's right. And I'm happy for any pastor to challenge me on that

and preach the evils of the public school system this upcoming Sunday. That's right. Yeah, so many times it's about filling the pews. rather than filling the hearts with truth, isn't it? And so, yeah, it really is something. It's not just responsibility of the parents, but it's something that pastors and leaders need to look at this and say, you know, what is happening to us?

And why is that happening? They don't seem to want to meet people where they are and to speak to the issues that are front and center that are directly affecting them. Give people some guidance, some wisdom, some discernment about what they're seeing, in their everyday life. Instead, it's kind of like, you know, the woman at the well when when Jesus says, well, let's talk about your life here. You know, you're living with

this guy you're not married with and you've had half a dozen other husbands or whatever. And she said, oh, you're a prophet. Let's talk about theology. And she changes the topic. And so it's really easy to talk about theology. It can be very uncomfortable if we talk about our own personal lives, can it? And how that all applies in our own lives. It's much easier, much more comfortable to talk about theology or to talk about prophecy or something like anything other than the stuff that is really killing us. Yeah, and the good thing is, I think more pastors are waking up to this and getting bolder from the pulpit, but that's what we absolutely need. And then business people, like these are your future customers, these are your

future employees. Like, this system is not helping you out. It is, we are funding a system that is going to turn them against you so that you have higher taxes, more red tape, more headaches, maybe even bankrupt you because you're, you know, not doing the right three-letter acronym that's in vogue. And so businesses, you need to start scholarships for your kids, you know, employees or donate to local private schools or help local homeschool co-ops or groups. You know, give, give, if your employee has a new baby, give them a book. about education or teaching your child how to read. Because the nice thing is, is there's not a complicated answer. It's just parents need to be disciplining their kids. They need to be teaching them

to read. The state will not teach you to read. They've proven that time and time again. You know, 40 years ago, a parent would have been embarrassed to send their kid to public school without them being at a read well. Nowadays, parents will complain to the public school if their kid doesn't know how to read, but they're not going to do it. You've got to do it yourself. And so it requires sacrifice. And if you can't homeschool today, then start reading with your kid every single night and making sure that they're able to think well and that you're deprogramming them because they are getting programmed every single day in that public school system. And I just want to say, too, you know, we look at parenting as a difficult job, no doubt about it. And there are difficult things

like changing diapers and stuff like that. But it is the joy of having your child around. And that's what people who've homeschooled miss, you know, is the joy of being able to interact with them that way. And it really can be a joy. So I mean, you know, when you look at this, this is a job responsibility that's been given to you, but it is a joyful responsibility if you look at that. It's an opportunity to spend time with your children and to have a relationship with them when they get into their teens because you've been with them while they were younger. And it's about maintaining that relationship. I think that's the key thing.

You know, yeah, there's work involved in it, but it's one of the most rewarding jobs that you're ever going to have. Yeah, I mean, everything in life that's worth doing is worth doing well. And absolutely, like, what have you ever accomplished in life, like, the harder it was to accomplish, the more satisfaction it was, right? Yeah. And you see that over and over again. I mean, even with like lottery winners, right?

Lottery winners, they didn't accomplish anything. They have all this money. And what do they do? They go bankrupt. They get depressed. They commit suicide. Like at a significantly higher rate. So they've achieved everything in life with no work and they're miserable.

Right? And so we got to also remember that God created work before sin. He gave Adam and Eve jobs to do before sin entered the world. That's right. So sin entering the world only made work difficult. Work is actually part of our Amago Day, part of our reflection of our creator. And so part of the reason that the collective is hate work so much is because they know that that's a reflection of God in us.

And that if they are to destroy religion, they need to do everything they can to destroy that reflection. And so that's why they're happy to dumb down the standards, you know, happy to have people that don't work and are on welfare, you know, 24-7, 365 for the rest of their lives, because they know that all of that is degrading to their humanity and makes them easier to control in the future based on whatever preferences they have. And so, yeah, I think we're living it out. Yeah, I've interviewed David Bonson several times, and he's written books about, you know, your profession, that type of thing. And son of Greg Bonson, if people remember the apologist, and that's the point he made, is that same thing you've made, the second person I've heard to make that point. And it's a very strong and important point.

Work is not a curse. Work is part of who we are being, as you point out, in the image of God. And it's the, it's what is the curse is the work being made difficult, which was. was a result of our rebellion as mankind. But work itself is a very fulfilling thing, and it's something that is in and of itself is good. And so we should not shy away, especially from the work that God has gifted us to do.

If God has given you a child, then God will give you the ability to train that child and what they need to know. And there's no question about that. That's what he wants. And there is a tremendous reward and lining yourself up with what God wants. It always works that way, doesn't it?

Yeah, it always does. Yeah. So your website is at classicalconversations.com or something like that? What is your website? Yeah, classicalconversations.com. If you go to there and put in your zip code, I will connect you with a local homeschooling parent. I'm happy to answer any of your questions about classical conversations

or just homeschooling in general. So we've got representatives across all 50 states in many countries around the world as well. And then you can find the book at Robert Bortons.com or at Amazon.com. You can find Woken Weaponized, how Carmark's won the Battle for American Education, and how we can win it back. That's great. That's great.

Well, it's wonderful. I didn't know that your parents started the organization, but that's great that you're continuing the work. It's very important, and I know a lot of people, as I said before, who did classical conversations, and they absolutely loved it. And so I would recommend it based on their experience. We never experienced it, but if I had it to do over again, I'm sure I would go that way. Thank you so much for joining us.

Again, our guest is Robert Bortons, and the book is Woke and Webinize, how Karl Marx won the Battle for American Education and how we can win it back. That's the key thing. It's not just identifying a problem, but it's coming up with a solution as well. Thank you so much for joining us, Robert. Thank you. Thank you. It's your move.

And now, the David Knight Show. If you like the Eagles, on the dark desert highway, the cars, and Huey Lewis in the news, you'll love the classic hits channel at APS Radio. Download our app or listen now at APSRadio.com. Joining us now is Dan Doyle.

He is someone who has decades of experience in the oil industry, has started a couple of companies. Japanese himself, and he has written some op-ed pieces about what may be happening in Venezuela, what may not be happening in Venezuela. But I thought it would be very interesting to get a perspective from that. And, of course, he knows some petroleum engineers in Venezuela as well. He wrote a joint op-ed piece with a petroleum engineer from Venezuela about what is needed down there.

But I think it's also interesting to take a look, step back and take a look at the oil industry itself. And I think that he's got a very interesting personal story as well. He wrote a book of roughnecks and, help me hear, Dan, of roughnecks and riches. Yeah, that's the other part. We want to make sure it's the riches that are there. Yeah, so that's his book of roughnecks and riches. And his name is Dan Doyle. Thank you for joining us, Dan. Thanks, David. Sure appreciate it. Tell me a little bit about how somebody who has, I looked at a little bit about your biography, your film school graduate. How did you get into the oil industry?

That sounds like a story. Well, I started into the oil industry. Then I, you know, I started with the study geology undergraduate and down at Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh. And I was down in Texas, drilling well, some group of guys from the steel business, said, hey, here's a young kid. you know, he'll get a start in the oil business. So I went down and I was acting more as a operator than a geologist,

but we were drilling outside of Avaline. And it was going well, but then we went into, you know, the cyclical decline in the 80s. I'm dating myself, but it was in the 80s. Well, I remember that time well, yeah. Oh, terrible. And we didn't, you know, it was such a, if you go back into the 70s, A little bit like now, it was a big oil shock.

Oh, yeah. A couple of them. And everybody got in the business. Everybody. The rig count was, you know, in the 7980 era. Rig count was 5,000. You know, it was all verticals then, you know, so you need a lot of rigs. But everybody was getting into it, all sorts of investor programs.

It's funny, when you're looking over an area, especially out west now, you see all these wells that were drilled back during this time. and it was just sort of a boom. And when the boom came off was about when I was getting started. And gradually, oil price, you know, a good price then was 25, but it was trickling down

and down and down. And finally, it was a bust, and I waited around Texas for a year or so. A young guy, you know, are we going to go or not go? What should we do? Finally, there was nothing left. I moved back home to the Pittsburgh area. And a friend of mine,

kind-hearted friend of mine started giving me work producing his commercials. So whatever. I did something to do, you know. And so I'm doing that, and I'm thinking, oh, man, I can do this for a living if oil never comes back. And so I ended up at NYU's New York University's graduate film school. And I kicked you around in a movie business for a while. You know, I had some success.

You know, it was at Sundance, that kind of thing, had an agent and all that. But it really, it wasn't for me. I just, you know, the sleeping on floor things. And ideologically, I probably was a misfit. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, you know, met some great people, though. And eventually I started a, I thought, okay, enough. So I scrapped together with little money I had and didn't have and started a rental company up.

And I started buying equipment and renting an auto movies and commercials and a little bit of construction work and got into cameras and generators. We got pretty big. And I used that to leverage my way then to get finally back in the oil business. And that was to start a frack company. And it just absolutely went off the rails. It was just the worst time because, you know, just the same way that, you know, the 7980 boom pushed a bust that I got caught up in. Now I got caught up. I started this in 2008, the frac company. I got caught up in the global financial, you know, recession. And we're The banks were failing and too big to fail. Great book, The Andrew Rock, Dorkin.

And got caught up in that. And it was just a son of a bitch, excuse me, but trying to get this thing going. And just craziness. You know, the guy pulls a knife on me in a trailer and he's my builder. I just gave him. Yeah, just crazy. Then these crazy partners and, you know,

I'd written scripts to make a little bit of money. and I started thinking, my God, I think I'm living a movie. And so I started taking a note that eventually got around to writing the book. And so that came out a couple months ago. But it's called Abrupt Max and Riches, a startup in the Great American Pracking Book. Well, and of course, one of your reviewers said it was a rollicking ride. And that was a Wall Street Journal that review that you had. I imagine just from that little bit of a taste that we had that, I imagine it is a rollicking ride to

find out how you got into that. if you started a couple of companies and you did it successfully, I'm sure that you wouldn't have fit with the film crowd. No, no. It was a different kind of culture, I think, completely. I get a kick out of, and I like a lot of these guys, but I get a kick out of, you know, the awards. There's always somebody, patting someone on the back,

are always an award. It's always about their bravery. But, you know, in the film business, you're in such an echo chamber. It's like you're just agreeing with everybody, these films that, you know, get this kind of, these kind of accolades or these directors or writers of producers. Truthfully, the real courage would be a conservative trying to make a movie in Hollywood. There's not a chance.

As soon as you go there, I'm a big fan of James Woods. I loved his movies. It'd be like oil and water, wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah. But there's a guy that just shot himself in the head when he came out with his own opinions because they just won't have them. And he knew it. He knew it.

He was a great, great actor. Well, when I look at the Oscars and things like that, what it reminds me of are these clicks that you used to see in high school, you know, and they'd vote for people for prom queen and that type of thing. It is a popularity contest, and it seems like you succeed in that if you're going to try to appease everybody's feelings

and flatter them and that type of thing. So, you know, if you're about something that's serious and literal, that would be a difficult, ride to a hoe. I remember the 80s and you know interestingly enough Dan my wife and I we went to our first job was with Texas Instruments in Houston and so we got there as everything was blowing up in 1980 and it was a boomtown and then we got kind of tired of it we went to move back home and then we couldn't sell our home I mean it was just everything was free fall it was collapsing it was amazing what happened to it, you know, the boom and the bust cycles that happened with that.

But of course, we've seen that a lot with the oil industry itself. I mean, when you look at the boom with the OPEC embargo and everything, you saw oil go up. And I've talked about this a lot on on my show in terms of what's going on on the Strait of Hormuz right now, with just that partial oil embargo is only against OPEC's oil to the United States. We saw the price of oil quadruple. And so, you know, it's, you know, we look at it. it and you know if something like that is going to happen now of course there's a lot of other variables here and that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was Venezuela and what

what's going to happen there one of the things that just happened this week started floating the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state and I guess I guess Canada was so little don't forget to get Canada yeah I guess we forgot about Canada in the meantime and where does Greenland fit in are they number 53. Oh, I don't know. Maybe Trump's going to get in the flag business, you know? Trump land. You know, I get it, though.

I kind of, actually, I'm just, you know, I write these pieces and I'm just about to give one to the publicist. I'll send it out today. And I don't know where it lands, you know, they shop it around. But what it's about is, you know, he is, you know, love them or hate him, wherever you stand, he is sort of in the beginnings of remaking the global oil industry and really where we buy our oil and gas. You know, we consume 20 million barrels a day of crew. And I know we like to say, oh, we consume everything we have. But, you know, that's counting, it's kind of a,

you're taking BTU equivalencies from natural gas production. And that's not, you know, it's yeah kind of is true but but truthfully we need 20 billion 20 million barrels of crude and if you look you know I don't know if it was by plan or what but Trump comes in he's talking drill baby drill and that was the campaign rhetoric you know really we are going into kind of a rig comp freefall not free fall but it's really coming down because oil prices were really bad so we were in a bust in February and by about the 5th of March we're in a boom because of Iran and the beginning will probably be a boom. And so, so, you know, but there's a administration's done a lot, a lot to help U.S. producers. And we're taking advantage of some of that

stuff to do with BLM spacings and service facilities and all that. It's really, it's really helpful. So he's kind of changing the bias from what it was in the Biden administration to oil on instead of oil off to the federal. So you have that. And then you have Venezuela. And Venezuela, at best, was, you know, three million barrels a day back when Nixon was president, you know. And it's down to, you know, about a million barrels a day.

And it's kind of funny because I was visiting a friend at Colorado School of Mine, to a professor. And I'm looking around for him. And I walk into an office. And it's another professor. and we just start talking. He's from Venezuela, and his wife worked on Lake Maracaibo for the Chinese. And we started talking, and I get a call from the publicist for the book.

And she says, hey, I need a story in Venezuela. I go, what do I know about Venezuela? She was, can you find someone? And I'm like, I'm sitting with this guy, Louis Zerpa, who's a PhD, you know, professor. And I'm like, Lewis, are you from Venezuela? He goes, yeah, he want to write an article? He goes, yeah, sure, man, let's write an article. So he provided the insight from, you know, hands-on in Venezuela and talked about the Rinko,

I'm probably not pronouncing it right, you know, the super heavy oils. But what's going to happen down there is Chris Wright is doing a great job. I really think highly of Chris Wright. Anybody in oil business thinks highly of Chris Wright, the U.S. Energy Secretary, he started a couple companies, but the big one was Liberty. And it's a frack company, but it's a little more than. that. It's a bunch of really smart guys like himself, an MIT engineer, that put this together. And anyways, Wright is down in, you know, physically, but he's pushing, the first thing to do is

we get the dilutants that are needed that were kind of embargoed out of the, or sanctioned out of the picture. And those dilutons immediately boosts that production by a couple hundred barrels a day. And now I'm hearing that Exxon, if you remember Darren Wood's comment, it's uninvestable when all the majors, the CEOs of the majors got together at their White House. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. He kind of broke ranks and said, hey, it's uninvestable. Now, now I'm hearing Exxon spoken around down there. So I think that they're going to end up pushing it. And if it doesn't go to hell, you know, who knows politically what happens down there. But if we can keep it together, you know, maybe that oil starts going to us instead of the Chinese.

The Mexican market is off a little bit. They're mine crudes, which are essential to our Gulf Coast refineries that require the heavier cruis than the light stuff we're pulling out of shales. You know, there's a difference in gravity is a way to measure it. But very light, low sulfur crudes, but the refineries need some of that heavier stuff that comes out of Alberta or out of, you know, Venezuela or out of, but the, but the, Hopefully you can hear me that someone's mowing the lawn outside. Oh, yeah, that's fine.

But we, so anyways, collectively, you round up all this North and South American production and about 18 million barrels, and then you start adding in some other stuff. You know, maybe Trump's doing something here. And to his point, let everyone else fix the whore moves straight, you know, the Europeans and Japan and China that are using it, because maybe he's, He is, maybe the, ultimately what we end up with is regionalism in the oil market rather than globalism. And so instead of us buying, you know, fruits from overseas, we just keep it, you know, regionally.

We keep it here, Canada. Canada, we import about four million barrels a day. Alaska, Trump is opening Alaska. Hillcorp is a big part of Alaska, you know, Jeff Hilda brand, you know, another self-made, you know, guy like Harold Ham. And very big, he now owns the Alaska pipeline, this company. And so with all this going on, it takes a long time to build production. But we're sort of really truly knocking at that energy independence, you know, moniker.

Kind of getting there. I mean, it's a really, that's a really simple way to address a really complex problem. because oil flows everywhere. It's a real network coming and going and, you know, refinery capacity, everything else. But in the simplest of terms, numbers, we're getting with our production, Canadian production, and South American production,

we're pretty close, friendly nation production, let's call it. We're pretty close to what we need to be self-sufficient. Well, let me ask you about that. Because, you know, when we get people like Biden in and these people who want to just keep it in the ground, they say, right? Yeah. And they are hell-bent on no matter what it costs, they want to shut down the production of oil. And so there's a political component to this.

Even if we get all this stuff running, they may wind up shutting it down at a later point in time. And that kind of brings us back to Venezuela. How much of the problems that we see in Venezuela, and they're setting on a massive amount of oil compared to any other country, and yet they can't get it out of the ground. And it wasn't because they didn't want to like it is with the American politicians, but it's a combination of politics, I'm sure, of socialism and confiscation and all the rest of stuff that happened with that. How much of that was a technical issue that could now be solved, other than the fact that

to build up infrastructure takes a time. You can't just turn a switch and have this massive infrastructure in place. Well, that's the problem. It's a big infrastructure built up. And that doesn't mean to surface. means, you know, failed casing, you know, that keeps the integrity of a well intact on the ground. So it means a number of different things. But I have found that the oil industry is really good at getting up and going.

And I think it'll go along fairly quickly. I don't think it's going to solve all the problems. It's a lot of problems. It's a super heavy oil. It's very expensive to extract. That takes us to a separate issue. We'll get to oil prices. you know, I'm sure, but it's a, it, it'll be quick, you know, but again, it's, you know, it's not, there's, there's, that's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's other, there are other, there are other crude, uh, there is other crude, uh, there basins in, uh, Venezuela, which are more kind of conventional and don't have that low eight degree gravity stuff, which is basically, you know, this, the, the, the majority of the oil coming out of Venezuela will not float on water. It's very, it's very, it's really heavy.

And so it's got to be diluted and refined. It's expensive. So it will play largely into our mix. But you can't have $50 or $60 oil for that to work. You just can't. And so just by way of example, you know, we're drilling wells in the Potter River Basin with another company I started, another startup. So we drill, we frack our wells.

back east and then where we fracked for hire back east and we drill our own wells out in Wyoming's Potter River. And, you know, the well cost primarily driven by steel prices is you run a lot of steel in horizontal wells, a lot, a lot of steel, miles of it. And you, it's going up about 65, 60, 70 percent, quite a bit. And we're at $50 dollar oil. So if you put that in the basket. So you've got the well cost of gone up an enormous amount. And then you've had, you know, a lot of inflation on the Biden

administration. And so you put that in the basket as that relates to price, you know, pricing, to oil prices. And so you go back in time, and the $70 in a barrel, you know, we're all over

the place back in 15 and 16, 17, but we were, we were, you know, $60 oil then was a lot better than $60 oil now. And then you have more expensive wells. So when Trump is pushing, you know, oil in the 50s and 60s, we don't survive. You can pump a well. You can pump an existing well based on what your lease operating cost.

When it costs a lift and transport a barrel of oil, you can do that. If you go drill it, it makes no sense. That's why the rec count was falling all. through 2025 and was looking and when it hit 55 everybody that I'm talking to and I'm talking to all the other operators you know are saying we're that's it we're laying down Harold ham up in the bachan has never stopped drilling for 30 years and finally in jane i think it was in january said that's it we're laying brings down we can't we can't make money here so you can't have energy independence without a decent energy price so I don't think anyone in my industry wants to see a hundred dollar oil

because it's disruptive. Because $100 oil has always meant $50 oil. And $50 oil generally, or always, means $100 oil, you know, that sign curve of boom bust. And so really, you know, I'm not the only guy saying it, but we need something in the mid to high 70s, low 80s to continue going. And I'm sure Venezuela needs more, you know, because it's more expensive than shale. Shale's really cheap. That's all the majors started buying up, you know, Permian-based independence because shale cycles fast and it's cheap. It's a lot cheaper and less time-consuming than developing an offshore field.

So that's why there's been a shift to it. But we can't survive at that. So when we say we're going to cut the energy of prices in half and we're going to be energy independent, that's not true. You can't do it. Well, it is truly amazing. And you see this boom and bust cycle, and it's always political. I mean, it's either an embargo or it is centralized control and central planning that is killing the thing. Or it's a war that is causing it to go up or something like that.

But it always goes back to political. And I guess that's the problem. You know, it would be nice if they would just let markets operate, but they're not going to do that. When we go back and we look at Venezuela, so tell us a bit about the political history of the wells from your perspective. happening down there. I'm sorry, the political history. Yeah, the political perspective. You know, there was a lot of oil company assets that were seized by the Marxists down there and that type of thing. And, you know, what was left in terms of engineers and people who could actually produce something? Did that drive them all out and go to other countries? And that time, I know the

oil companies themselves had their product seized, but what about the infrastructure of personnel that were there, your friend who's a PhD in petroleum. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's no jobs. And so, you know, it's the American influencer, you know, and Slumberger, great company, services company, which is a French company, but, you know, it's basically headquartered in Houston, but not really, but basically. And it's, you know, you, Halberton wasn't getting paid, you know,

and they got caught up in the nationalization. There was two of them and maybe others, but two major ones in Venezuela. And, you know, Exxon lost a fortune. Chevron stuck around because they agreed to abide by, you know, what the socialist demanded. And, you know, total energy, you know, the, I think I might have, the Italian company might have.

So they all got it. They all, they all, all, all the deals they had made to go down and spend money, extract oil, were all nullified by, you know, Chavez and his socialism. And what happened is you got a 3 million barrel a day country go to, you know, some 1 million barrels a day. And from what I've heard, it was mainly the military was in charge of running those fields. So now you've got to get the service companies down there. And I hear they are.

I hear they're looking again. But they're going to want to be backstocked by the U.S. government. They don't want to go and invest again and have, you know, and have it taken away from them again. So it's, there's going to have to be some work done. And it probably is being done as we speak. I'm just not aware of it. But, but it's important. It's important because how many of the, what do we owe, $36, $38 trillion?

Is that what our? 39. 39. I think we're going to be at 40 by the time we get to September, especially because he's got some new things. wants to buy. Yeah, or maybe by the time we get off his call, you know. Yeah, that's right. You know, how much is that directly related?

I mean, you know, there's the, you know, a lot of it has to do with our social programs in the United States. I mean, that eats up quite a bit and creates a lot of debt. And if they're more efficient, that would be wonderful. But a lot of it, how much is it directly due to the Middle East? and I probably a lot and if we could get away from it I mean we won't have friends over there

but if we could keep our markets close to home maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing you know and I don't you know the Iranians are not the Venezuelans you know it's I I don't see him stopping I would love to see the Straits of Harmuz opened up today I really would

I mean the longer stays close the better it is but I also don't want to see the world go recessionary. And, you know, I don't want anyone to die, you know, any of that. But I just, I would like to see, you know, stability over there. But I don't know that it's never seemed to be possible. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's other issues.

Yeah. And, you know, I start this article I'll put out, you know, the best, you know, the best way to solve the Middle East problem is to leave the Middle East problem. And it doesn't stop. I think the Zionists have some other ideas about that, though. Yeah. Dragging is back in. Well, when we talk about political stability, what does that look like in Venezuela?

I mean, you worked with Louise Zerpa writing that op-ed piece. Did you guys talk about what is the, you said the military was running the fields there? And what about the military and just in general, the Venezuelan people? What is their attitude towards this American company? Willans, I think the Venezuelans love it. I think they, they had their fill of socialism, and they had a dictator. And, you know, it's just crazy. We have Sean Penn going over and, you know, talking up Chavez and, you know, as a thug.

And the people suffer under him, you know, impoverishment, you know, killing with a human spirit, which is socialism. And anyways, It's, you know, I think the administration, I think we're putting, our network is growing there and I think it's going to stabilize it some, but I don't know, you know, who knows what comes of it. And Venezuela is good for a million plus a day, but the United States is good for 13 and a half a day, a little more. And my concern is what happens in 2008 when there's another presidential election? What happens, you know, if, if, you know, if. If Trump doesn't, or if Republicans don't prevail and keep the House, we're just going to go to, you know, standard playbook of impeachments. And that's disruptive. You know, they'll try to impeach him again, you know, all of that theater.

It's just stupid. You know, because of looking at. When you look at an oil-based economy and you look at how it has been used, I mean, they're coming after Volkswagen again. this time it's coming out of Europe instead of out of America, hitting them with nearly $2 billion in fines because they're not getting their corporate average fuel economy up or whatever the European equivalent is of that. So you've got these European countries, which I will put the Democrat Party in that same basket.

It's almost like a suicidal death watch in terms of energy. They want to shut that all down and prohibit it. And so there's that kind of political instability that's here at home in addition to like Vin as well. But you're talking about the people tired of living under socialism. I imagine that they are and they would like to see some jobs and economic activity. But what about the military that was running the wall fields prior to that? I don't know. I don't know what's being done.

I would guess if Exxon and, you know, Chevron has always been there, but they're increased, maybe increasing their presence of just citing what I've read. So I would say that, you know, there's something in place that's going to allow Halliburton and Slumberger and other big service companies to get in there and for the military to cooperate. But, you know, we all know everybody, but the only person gone from Venezuela is, you know, Maduro. Everyone else is in place. So it's kind of hard to say what happens. I think the longer we're there with peace, the greater. you know, the U.S. influences, at least in energy business, and hopefully the greater production

results from it. But what I was getting at before is back in the States, when Biden was elected, you know, the first thing he does is he immediately attacks fossil fuels. We couldn't release land, federal lands, for a couple years. It might have been a little shorter than that. But there's a mandatory Minerals Act, from like 1914, whatever it is, you know, mandates, this is a congrade, you know, it's a law that every quarter, there are BLM lease sales.

Biden comes in and cancels it, you know, and just, and you couldn't lease lands. And, you know, then the people go in and they sue the federal government over, you know, grasslands or, a waterfall or, you know, birds, you know, predator, predatory, you know, birds of prey, different things, and they hold it up even longer.

That works both ways, though. It's not always detrimental to us. Sometimes it allows us to hold leases longer. So in a way, what they're doing is they go to harm the oil industry, but sometimes inadvertently, they help it. And what would be better is to say, okay, let's look at New York. Okay, you guys want to kill off fossil fuels. In New York, the cost of electrical electricity is about 40% higher than the national average.

This is another article I wrote a bit ago was in Fox, I think. Yeah, it was in Fox. And it's 40% higher than the national average. Natural gas prices are 23% higher. The child poverty rate, childhood poverty rate in New York City is 26%. 26% of all children born in New York City, the five boroughs, are born in the poverty. And in the meantime, they won't allow a shale gas extraction from the Marcellus, which is a gift. All this natural gas.

And, you know, it's clean burning and, you know, this and that. And, you know, a friend of mine is a diesel fuel provider. And a lot of these data centers are being run off of power from the grid, but they're backstopping with diesel. And I just make no sense to me. But that's always the case where I'm actually all the above. I think if it makes sense, use it because we need it. So I don't mind wind, I don't mind solar. It's just, you know, we can't pay for it.

You know, it's got to stand on its own. And, you know, oil gas get certain benefits for, you know, tax benefits. And I believe any industry, if one gets it, they all should get it. If one doesn't get it, none of us should get it. So it should be fair. But a lot more subsidies go into renewables, and they just don't really, all the money that's spent, they really haven't pushed oil and gas out of the way at all, at all. In fact, we're burning more coal right now, not as a matter, not as 5%, but in terms of tonnage, we are burning more coal right now than we have ever burned. And that's because we have to backstop this grid.

and you need that the power that comes from fossil fuels to do that, you know, on demand. You just don't get that. Yeah. Well, I've been pointing out for a long time people that I worked with that, you know, it's kind of like the difference. You've got a backstop, as you point out, the solar and the wind with something that works all the time as always there.

So it's like driving a car and stop and go traffic versus driving it at a steady speed on the interstate. you're going to use more fuel and you're going to generate more exhaust and all that. So, yeah, it really is ideological, really, the opposition to this, whether it is a communist ideology or whether it is some kind of a green agenda ideology. It is political and it's not practical in terms of looking at this, but it'll be interesting to see what happens and what comes out of all this. Let me ask you, you know, we're talking about the Strait of Hermuz and what's going on with Iran.

And, of course, part of the problem is not simply just. oil. But now we've seen that there's secondary and tertiary things are also produced there. Helium, for example, fertilizer, things like that. Is that a factor coming out of the places like Venezuela? Is that always there whenever you're doing oil, or is that something that's unique to the Middle East? What is that? I think it's unique to areas. You know, I'm not, I can't put myself on the, I can't say much about it because I don't know much about it, but it is particular, certain areas. We don't see any helium where we work. But it's, it's, you know, in some areas, you know, some areas are well to that. They do well. The fertilizers, that's, I think that's a byproduct of refining

and that's, you know, I'm an upstream guy. That's a downstream issue. So I'm not really sure, but I know it's all getting affected. And what's really interesting, what I can speak to, outside of oil gas traversing the straits of our moves are is natural gas you've got a big LNG trade coming through there

Iranians Qatar natural gas production is huge and so what's interesting is natural gas prices are still sub-3 dollars at MCF that's nothing

it's like 280 morning that's a really and you know what I think a lot of the reason why is shale extraction has kept natural gas price is so low. You know, you bring on a Marcellus or Utica well in Pennsylvania nowadays, and you're talking billions of cubic feet of reserves that come with those wells. They're just enormous. And so we have a boom in oil right now, but I don't want to call it a bust in gas because gas has not been doing well for years. You know, if you remember Aubrey McClendon from Chesapeake,

used to do commercials with T-Boon Pickens and, you know, it was a crazy wild. West times of oil and gas production because just week was more gas. But, you know, gas prices were $10 an MCF pre, you know, inflation that we've seen in the last couple of years. And now, you know, it gets as low as a buck something, you know. And, you know, right now at 280, you know, people make it work at 280. But we produce a lot of natural gas in America, an enormous amount. And we should be using it because it's clean.

But, you know, you have all this pipe. Natural gas requires pipelines, not trucking. And so we have, you know, all these lawsuits stopping it. And, you know, it could be piped up to New York City if they would do their own drilling. The state would do really well. You know, they could maybe create a fund for the poor or help the poor in some way. You know, I don't think given money away is ever a way to solve anything. But opportunities, you know.

And they won't do it. because of the climate activist, and it's only harms poor people. It does nothing for the climate. They do nothing. Absolutely. I just want to add something. You want to talk about true, true toxicity. Start talking about battery production and acid rain and everything comes with it.

You know, smelt horrible, horrible industrial practice, but necessary. But when you start talking for nobles, you start talking battery production, and you talk about strip mining and everything else. You drive past an oil well or a gas well, and there's cows a few feet away from it, eating grass. You talk about a solar field producing the same amount of energy, and it's a death zone. It's a fenced-in death zone where the ambient heat is too high for birds, for really any living. You know, you don't see life around solar fields. There's no life.

That's right. That's right. Yeah, and then, of course, the windmills do a job on... everything that flies especially the bats try to fly through that rapidly changing air pressure and it blows them up just like a diver who's trying to come up too quickly from underwater it just explode so yeah it is everything's got a trade-off that's the reality of this and rather than rather than trying to make things work with incremental improvements because everything is so focused ideologically they just come in

one just do blanket bands or whatever. And it's not just ideological either. It's the people who are allied for financial reasons with one industry or the other, of course. And so all these things are in play. But let's get back to your book a little bit because we didn't talk too much about what it's like to be out there in the well field. I mean, you're taking a big risk whenever you're looking for something like mining or any kind of oil or anything like that. I mean, that's a very very risky business. It takes a particular type of person, I think, to do that, doesn't it? Yeah, it's a, it's a little, you know, you feel like a pirate sometimes. Sometimes a gambler. But you try to, you try to risk off as much as you can. And it's, there's a lot of really smart

engineers, you know, and financial people that, that, uh, you've gotten together, you know, found a way. But it's, you never know, you know, we're fracking. a well right now in Wyoming, we had an issue. And, you know, it could have been really, really expensive and really expensive with oil and gas wells is, you know, touching millions of dollars is really expensive. It's not $10,000. It gets really out of hand quickly. And so there's always, there's always worries like that. You know, I tell you, though, it's for me, you know, when I decided to do it, I was actually an English major in Econ, my freshman year of college, kicking around.

Back then, you could go to college and not know what the hell you're going to do. And now you can't do it. And so I got a degree. You don't know what the hell you're going to do after you get the degree. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, my dad, wasn't a rich guy, just a hardworking guy with seven kids and a good friend of his who was a rich guy, they pulled their money.

and they went and drilled a shallow Pennsylvania oil well, and they really wanted to do it. And I started coming home on weekends. I grew up in Erie, and I started coming home from Pittsburgh on weekends, and we'd all get seven kids, a couple dogs, and my dad and his partner, my mother, and we'd all go to the well.

And we would, you know, screw around the well, you know. And I'm like, my God, this is like legal. And it's like treasure hunting. is great. And so I switched up. I changed up to a geology major in state in school for the remaining three years straight to get caught up and then came out. And this is kind of in the book, but I came out. We started doing shallow wells. I found some investors. I actually tried to do NASD. That was the first thing I did as I thought, well, I'm going to do these reg D programs. So I set myself up as a broker dealer, NASD-S-EC-registered broker dealer. And went all over the

country talking to, you know, this old Dodge Duster talking to people about, you know, investing and getting their clients to invest in it. And I found a guy out in Denver to drill, and he'd let me drill with her, you know, and I said, it was coming to go Bellwether Exploration, a great guy, George Aubrey, on 17th Street in Denver, which used to be the Western oil hubs, still a little videos, but not so much anymore. And he goes, okay, I'll let you buy into these wells. And how much you're going to raise? I'm like, I'm going to raise two million dollars. And so I go away for three months and I come back and I raise like $1,0.

Oh, man, you're chilling me. But he let me, he took the money anyways. And that's kind of the start. And then I started drilling shallow wells with some guys in the steel business who backed it. And they said, hey, go to Texas and let's go after some bigger reserves. And I kind of talked about that. I went down to Avaline and we were drilling and then hit a horrible downturn. You know, did the movie thing, started a company up, running equipment to movies and commercials and other industries.

And then I used that and, you know, started this company up and found a couple operating partners. And they went down to Oklahoma with some builders. And it was an absolute nightmare. It turns out we wanted a specialty. lender, my partners did. And it was, we didn't realize it was a patent-protected part.

And what we did realize, though, it was a Slumberger's patent, and these guys were stealing the parts from Slumberjay. It's funny, there's a guy, the engineer, I had to call and ask for permission. I'm like, sir, I know the patent's expired, he goes, so what?

And, you know, this guy in plumber's there. And I'm like, could you see? Can we just do one? Because we're so far down this road. He goes, no, I don't see it. And it's funny. I just found him on, on, he's in, where the hell is he know? He's overseas somewhere.

But I got to, I got to get the book to him. Anyway, after all these years, I found him. But then, you know, one thing, you know, one guy ripping us off, another guy ripping us off. And then my partners kind of went nuts. And it's just, you know, and it's really a story about, it's really just an entrepreneurial sort. It's not about oil and gas as much it is about starting a business. And it's really the through line it is. If you're walking through hell, keep walking.

And you'll get there. So that's kind of what it was. Well, you know, whenever anybody becomes an entrepreneur, they start any kind of a business. There's always a lot of risk involved. But I don't think there's probably any business that is riskier than that. I mean, that's it on steroids. Entrepreneurship on steroids. You really are putting it all out there, aren't you?

Yeah, it really is. It's so capital intent. It's really tough. Yeah, that's amazing. But, of course, the payoff can be there, right? So that's the thing that draws people in, you know? Big risk and big potential payoff if you make it. Yeah, that's right.

And, you know, it's a great group of people. It's a, you know, it's a brother and sisterhood, you know, everybody working together and solving issues and it's just hardworking people. And you know what's crazy is we get so attacked from, you know, the hard left. Not everybody. I've got plenty of debt that realize we need it. But we go out there and you're on a job site and there's white guys, there's Mexican kids, there's South American kids,

there's American Indians, a lot of a large number of black, workers are out there, the guy pumping water force now doing all our transfers, is a great guy, you know, black guy just in a number of his crew, the same thing. And so it's this kind of melting pot. And it's, and nobody taught, it's just normal. And it's great. We're all working together and all this stuff you hear about has no application, you know, this social, this cultural stuff that, you know, one side of the spectrum wants you to believe is true. None of this true. It's just, It's just a great group of people working together. And, you know, I was thinking a great picture would be all these guys.

I mean, you'd have to ask the minorities to step out of the picture, but would be all these guys and have a picture and say, I have no white privilege here because there is none. These guys just grew up working. That's all they've done is work. And it's, you know, sometimes, you know, it's tough. I mean, the other night I had to sleep in the Chicago airport because everything was getting canceled. And every hotel was booked.

I said, okay, I'll sleep in a chair, you know. And that's kind of typical oil field. It's just the level of work and, you know, wonderful people and they've got family back home and they're taking care of them. It's sort of the American dream for a lot of them. Yeah. And it's really, it's just great to be around them. Well, and that's the thing. You know, if we have freedom, then we have a chance to work hard.

We have a chance to take risks. We have a chance to produce something. And that, I guess, is the thing that bothers me the most in terms of what I see here politically and ideologically is they just want to shut everything down. It's like, keep it in the ground, don't do anything. What are we supposed to do? You know, they don't want to build anything. They don't want to grow anything.

They just want to stop everybody else from doing anything. That's the thing that really bothers me when I look at this. Yeah, stop everybody and get everybody to fit into an ideological ball. blocks. Yeah. And, you know, just to pick up on the right privilege thing, as reading a book, a friend of mine wrote, who's kind of a hard left guy, but a good guy, you know, is a good guy. And he, and he went to Phillips Exeter Academy and never wanted to tell anybody for the book that he went. And that, and then, you know, that's, that is the, the direct pathway to Yale and Harvard and the Ivy's and, you know, and Wall Street success and political success, you know. And

And so, yeah, maybe for that guy, white privilege is a, I know we're talking about oil and gas, but sorry, sorry about it. Oh, yeah. For that, for that guy, maybe that's true, that's true, you know, maybe that guy feels that. But that's a fraction of the conversation, a fraction. What about everybody else, you know, they aren't getting any of this, you know, there's no direct path to Yale or Harvard.

There's just work. And that's kind of who ends up in the oil business. And, you know, like I said, it's represented by all ages, by all races, you know, by all genders. And, you know, we don't see as many women out there is, you know, typically they're more managerial as engineers. But we've had women work as fracades, you know, and it's great. Everyone loves them. So they fit right in with everybody else. So that's what I love about it.

Just like you're talking about your friend, I think there is, on the left, I think there's a lot of guilt. that is there. And they project that on other people. And that's the way they assuage their own guilt is by punishing other people who probably didn't have that same kind of advantage that they had. But they're going to make themselves feel better about that to try to compensate for what they were given. Yeah. It's it's the sliver of people that are so privileged to have been able to afford a $100,000 grade school education. But that is not America. That's not America. That's That's not these guys. We have a Kentucky camp.

A lot of our guys come out of Kentucky in the hills of Western Virginia. And these guys never got a break. They never, nobody else gave these guys a break. They just did it on their own. And they go away from home for a long period of time, but they're just, they're just wonderful people, just wonderful. Well, it's no country for old men, right? Yeah.

I never saw that movie, but I know of it. Yeah. But, so I don't know if that's a, if that reference is appropriate or not. But the book is of roughnecks and riches. And probably a great story, a rollicking ride, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, of entrepreneurship, really. And something that I think really behooves us to have a perspective that is balanced and practical. When we're looking at drilling, we're looking at mining. I've talked to miners in the last few weeks about various minerals and things like that.

these can be very dirty businesses in terms of things that happen, but they are necessary. And there are ways to control that and to moderate that. And we have to be practical about this instead of absolutist, instead of being ideological. So it's a great story. And it'll be interesting to see what actually happens in Venezuela. And I would be all for, as I said to you before we started the interview, I said, I'm all for oil, but I'm just not for. wars for oil. So it'd be nice to see if we could actually have some peace and prosperity,

if we could have entrepreneurship, work, and manufacturing things, rather than all these political prohibitions and wars that are involved in all of this stuff going back and forth. But evidently, you know, when there's enough money and power in something, it's going to, the political class is going to be focused on that. That's one of the reasons why they focus on the core energy businesses that are there. But thank you so much. much for joining us. Dan Doyle, and the book again is of roughnecks and riches, and you can find that Amazon and I guess everywhere. Do you have a website that you sell it directly? No, it's on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Simon & Schuster. You know, you can, any of the above.

Great. Great. It sounds like you've had a very, very interesting life, and I hope it keeps getting interesting. I don't know. I don't mean that as a Chinese course either. Thank you very much, Dan Doyle. Yes. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future.

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