TRIGGERnometry - Why Critical Thinking is Dead - Peter Boghossian

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

Peter Boghossian is an American philosopher. For ten years he was a professor of philosophy at Portland State University, but resigned following the college’s response to ‘the grievance studies affair’. This entailed Boghossian - alongside James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose - submitting bogus papers to peer-reviewed publications related to gender studies and other similar disciplines, in order to satirise the poor academic quality of such fields. More recently Boghossian has been engaging in what he calls, ‘street epistemology’ where he encourages people in public places to examine their opinions, why they hold them, and what it would take for them to change their minds. Check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@drpeterboghossian We are proud partners with GiveSendGo - a world-leading crowdfunding platform that believes in free speech. Go to givesendgo.com and raise money for anything important to you. SPONSOR: MUD\WTR. Save $20, get a free sample of creamer AND a free frother when you visit https://mudwtr.com/triggernometry Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So passive failure, we failed to teach kids critical thinking. Correct. Act of failure is when you teach them stuff that is actually wrong and makes things worse. Well, that's the situation we're in now. So if you indoctrinate the teachers, you don't need to indoctrinate the kids because the teachers will take care of it for you. When you don't learn the other side of the issue, you have an artificial confidence in the things that you believe.

The core bedrock beliefs of this ideology, there's no other way to say it. They're so fucking stupid. They're so fucking idiotic. Peter Bogostian, welcome back. It's been so long since we had you on the show. It's a pleasure. It's great to have you back.

And since we last had you on, you've been doing these amazing what you call street epistemology videos, which sounds fancy. What you do is you get a bunch of random people on the street and you get them to start thinking about the way they're thinking. Correct.

We did it earlier with you today in the street here in Westminster. Right in front of the Supreme Court. Right in front of the Supreme Court. No one in this. Supreme Court is kind of. of irrelevant in this country. It's not like in the US, yeah, so we don't give a shit. But street pestamology, very, very interesting. Some of your videos have gone super viral with it because it's fascinating to see how people respond to being made to think, being challenged on how

they think, being encouraged to change their views about things, were presented with evidence. What have you learned from doing those videos? Oh boy, we and I have gone all around the world and we've done this. We're about actually to go to Taiwan and New Zealand. We've gone to Puerto Rico. We've been to Australia here in London. We did them. One of the things we've learned is that people in London are pretty chill about it.

They're pretty relaxed. In the United States, particularly on college campuses, students are looking for a reason to be offended. They want to be offended. I've learned so we have lines. We put lines on the pavement, strongly disagree, disagree, slightly disagree, neutral, and on the other side. And one of the biggest things I've learned is that kind of reinforced what I had already

been thinking before is that people will stand on a line not based upon the evidence they have, but based upon some moral reason. So good people stand on this line, I'm standing on this line, I'm a good person. Good people should stand on this line, I should stand in this line. I am standing on this line. I'm a good person. That's something. So people kind of outsource their thinking to their tribe. Is that kind of what you're saying? Well, they find their tribe based upon a moral reason to believe in it. Oh, I see. So people will think about what it means to them to be a good person. And then they'll align their confidence in a belief. So we'll throw out a claim. Trans women should be in women's sports. The two-state

solution is the best solution and they'll stand on the line that they think a moral person should stand upon on and it's a fascinating experience so here's some of the other things that i've learned one of the things that we did it in our street epistemology exercise when you have a claim if somebody goes to the strongly disagree and someone goes to the strongly agree we will ask them to write down the reasons that they think that the other person has for holding that position. And we'll ask the person like we do with you, what's your best reason for believing that?

What do you think his best reason is for abortion to be legal in the first trimester? What is, now, Francis, you have to listen to see if she's correct. Take a guess what you think his best reason is? I think it's gonna be something about how, bodily autonomy for women. Bodily autonomy for women.

Is it bodily autonomy for women? Don't say what it is. Sort of, yeah. Kind of, yeah. Sort of, or yeah? Is it bodily autonomy? Yes, it is bodily autonomy, yeah. Okay, don't show him.

What do you think her best reason is for being against abortion in the first trimester? It's a killing of innocent life. Is he correct? To a certain extent. Yeah, I think that's... It's pretty, okay. So this is excellent. So you understand his argument. So turn around, show it to him. You not agree with it, but do you understand it? Yeah. And do you understand, not agree? Okay, I'm going to grab these.

What would it take you? Yeah. What would either she have to tell you or you have to learn to move you to the agree? I'm going to ask you the same question, but to the disagree. Okay. One, one, one, one, one. One, one. Matt, just one. I don't think I can, and because I believe, sorry, I forgot your name, Isabel, I believe Isabel's position is fundamentally an absolutist position, which is, and maybe I don't know this, but which is that it should always be, if a child, if there is, if a child, if there is a child, if there is a child in the womb or however you want to classify, it should always be brought to, you know, there should be, there is no excuse or no reason for abortion ever. So, so what is preventing you from moving to the agree? What, what piece of

information? And again, I'm going to ask you the exact same questions. So, okay, I'm going to you first. I'm going to you first. So what would you have to learn to move you to the disagree? Nothing, because I've already looked into this subject and I know human life begins at conception and I know that every human life has value. Okay. What would you say, to someone on that end who is unwilling to move? I think it would be worth looking at the impact of abortion on women because I think often that position, and I don't mean to make obviously any judgments about,

sorry, I've forgotten your name again. Francis. Francis's position, which I only know the statement is written on that board. But I know a lot of people who I have discussed abortion with who say that they support abortion, think they're doing it to help women. And I work very closely with post-abortive organisations and I realize that actually abortion doesn't really help women.

It doesn't solve the initial problems that they've got. It can actually create much larger problems. To take the life of your child doesn't solve your problems. If somebody is standing on that line and they are unwilling to move, does it strike you that the person, now we don't forget about Francis. Does it strike you that the person is an extremist? You'd have to quantify what you exactly. Unwilling to change one's mind, independent of the evidence.

I don't know that he's unwilling to change it dependent on evidence. Are you willing to change your mind on the basis of evidence to move to the degree? Yeah, there's always. If there is something new that has been presented, which I have not thought about, I have not considered, then absolutely. So you just don't know what the evidence is? Yeah, so maybe. But I have never heard a good reason why a 14-year-old who is a victim of rape and has a child should be, forced to carry that child to is should be forced to give birth to that child.

Are you willing to change your mind about abortion in the first trimester? If a new piece of evidence comes along, the challenge is a fundamental assumption you have. That would be the equivalent of asking me whether I would change my mind about killing another human, innocent human being, because that's essentially what it is. Nothing can make me think killing human beings is a way to solve our problems. What if someone could show you that life didn't begin? at conception. Would you change your mind? But I know it does. I've looked into it

long and hard, and I quite definitely know it does. Okay. When we did it in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, people couldn't guess the best reason that the... They couldn't guess any reason that the people had for it. So there's such a disconnect

that it's not even that it's incommensurable. It's that people don't even understand why someone would hold the belief. And what do you think this tells us about society more broadly? That the educational system has failed people. It's complicated because we know that there are simple mechanisms that you can use to help people think more clearly and critically.

But we're not using those methods. And they're free. I mean, anybody can access them. They're totally free and we're not using them. So I think that some of it is at least some of it is that the institutions have become ideology mills to replicate the dominant moral ideology. And do you not think as well that it might be that people simply don't think about these things in any great depth or detail because they've got lives, et cetera, et cetera?

If you don't think about something in any detail, then you should stand on the neutral line. But they don't. They go to one extreme. They'll go and strongly agree or even the agree. So they haven't appropriately calibrated the confidence in their belief to the evidence. So they've extended the confidence in the belief beyond the warrant of the evidence. Do you think as well that the more? contentious the issue, the more that you are pulled to the strongly agree or the strongly disagree.

Because the more contentious in issue, the more likely it is that you are seen to be immoral if you take the strongly agree or strongly disagree position. No, I don't think so. But what I do think is that there's intrinsic selection bias. So only certain people who hold certain beliefs will come to the line in the first place. What I would love, if I had a magic wand and could wave it is I would love to be situated in such that I could have all the people come to the lines who would normally never go. You know, we thought about giving people Starbucks cards or something, but that would... That also creates perverse incentives. Yeah, and you don't want that. But there is no way that I know of. Maybe, I think it's probably impossible to get people

to play the game, the exercise, who would not not play it. That's the real problem, is that some people won't engage with ideas. And have you found any particular differences because you talk about the education system failing. Yeah. And it can fail in different ways, can't it? One, I think what you initially were talking about is that it fails to teach people critical thinking. Is that kind of what you meant? Or did I misread that? Yeah, it fails to, so let's disambiguate that. Let's break that down. It fails to do a few things. It's kind of okay at teaching them skill sets. inference evaluation explanation it's an abject failure teaching them dispositions tell us what all those things mean because so so they're the the the the famous there's an

american philosophical associates and delphi report it's kind of like a it's not without its problems it was from 199091 it's kind of like the definition of the ideal critical thinker and yeah it's kind of written the way a committee would write it but it's the best we have today it's not perfect. It's probably revisable at some point, but it breaks critical thinking down into a skill set into an attitudinal disposition. The skill set, it's fairly easy to teach people basic skills in about 20 hours. If you really cram it through, you could probably teach it in 15, maybe, maybe 10, depending on the people, the students. But the dispositions are the hard things to cultivate. For example, being trustful of reason, being willing to revise your beliefs. I think that's the

most important one personally. Are you willing to revise your beliefs? And the problem is that if you have, it's easy to test, one of the reasons we teach the skill set in school is it's easy to test. You know, you can, it lends itself to multiple choice, but you can't really test a disposition. You can test if someone can identify a flaw in reasoning or a fallacy, but the dispositions are difficult, but here's the thing that I find absolutely fascinating. If you have the skill set, but don't have the disposition, you're actually going to make your epistemic situation or your knowledge situation worse. Yes. So the most important thing is the disposition. And there are things like the California critical thinking disposition inventory where we can kind of test

that, but people can cheat it and game it and lie about it. But you can't really test a, you can't really give someone a disposition. You can tell them why they should be willing to revise their belief. One of the ways that I always try to get around that is if someone says, if I ask them a question and they say, I don't know like we did today, I say that's a great answer. It's always a good answer. I don't know as a great answer. And when I'm asked a question, if I don't know, I will both change my mat or say I don't know. So I'll try to model those behaviors for other people. But the dispositional aspect of critical thinking is absolutely indispensable to everything, to participation in life in a civil, civic society, to having a reflective inner

life. There's literally no domain in which that does not improve. And how do you teach people critical thinking? You said in 15 hours. Is there some key concepts? It's pretty much in every textbook you can think of how to be less wrong more often. So how to identify a fallacy. So look, we have two things that we want to do. We want to believe more true things. and believe fewer false things. But often those are in conflict with one another. So what we do is one of the things you can do is teach this is a fallacy. And there are names of fallacies, ad hominem, reductive out of sermon, et cetera.

There are names of fallacies, but people will forget the names, but what I always try to do when I was teaching is give them a concept of like, can you explain in plain English what is the problem? Like, what's the problem here? And they'll remember that sometimes for a lifetime if you if that's bundled with the idea of an appeal to self-interest. Like your life will be better. Your human flourishing, your community, your relationships, everything will be better if you can be less wrong more often. Coming back to the education question that I asked you, what I was trying to get at is there's a kind of negative failure and then there's a passive failure and active failure.

So passive failure, we failed to teach kids critical thinking. Correct. Act of failure is when you teach them stuff that is actually wrong and makes things worse. Well, that's the situation we're in now. That's why I was asking. Yeah, so we're in a situation which we have wide-scale organizational capture that's in service to a moral orthodoxy, a dominant ideology. It goes by many names, Marjit Noaz, regressive leftism, successor ideology, Helen Pluckrose from the island here, critical social justice.

But the idea is that there's a suite of propositions into which, one must assert to be educated. And the goal of the educator is to help students develop what the Brazilian educator, Paolo Friere, says, a critical consciousness. So you want to develop the tools by which you can find oppression everywhere, racial oppression, gender oppression,

sexual oppression. It's swayed, moved off somewhat from economic or maybe considerably. It's bartered really identity politics for economic. Yeah. And how does that show up when you do these experiments with college students? Oh, it's completely conspicuous. So people will, so here's the one of the rubs. When your, particularly an educational institution, is held hostage to an ideology, almost invariably, though not invariably, Christian apologetics is the exception to this.

you don't learn the other side of the issue. And so when you don't learn the other side of the issue, you have an artificial confidence in the things that you believe. You inflate your confidence well beyond the warrant of the evidence. And that's coterminous with the idea that you have to make up that slack somehow. You have to be offended. You have to have a microaggression. You have to complain to an authority figure. But it's a catastrophic failure for what, for what we're doing as educators to children. We're teaching them, we're kind of giving them this critical consciousness

so that they can identify and remediate oppression, but what we're not doing is helping them value it's true. We're not telling them, well, here are other alternatives or here are other points of view. And you really have to have that component, so you can, your epistemology should always precede everything else, like why you're doing something, how you know what you know is always the first question. And then once you figure that out,

then you can go on to think about how you should, Socrates is a question, how should we live our lives? What's a moral life? There's some types of lives better than other. Can a man be unjust towards himself? That's Kant's question. But once you figure out how you know what you know, other things within that epistemological framework will follow your metaphysics. In other words, what you think is this the natural realm all there is? Or is there a supernatural, natural realm or what happens to me after I die or will I go to hell or how should I be kind or what role should compassion play in my life? So Pete, how do these kids engage with the exercise, you know, the ones who comes from these captured institutions, as you put it?

How do they engage? My first reactions is they somewhat unreflectively. Again, I do want to stress that there is a selection bias for people who come to the line. So like today, those people who are at the trans rally. Well, tell people. Tell people in more detail. Okay, so we... We might include a clip, but we might not be able to. Okay, so our friend Luke,

went out and tried to find people, and there was a trans rally around the corner, and people were in these full masks, if memory serves me correctly, and I invited them to do the exercise with us, and I said, you will get more people, correct me if I'm wrong in this, you'll get more people in 20 or 30 minutes,

it's doing this, then you would if you stood on that street corner of literally for a decade, eight hours a day. It's YouTube. It's just, it's a vehicle now we, from our combined platforms, you do that, and they were having absolutely none of it. They were having none of it. And one of the reasons, they were having none of it for multiple reasons, but one of the reasons they were having none of it is because they have not been Socratically trained. They have not been trained to defend their ideas. They've only been, it's kind of like a Catholic Catechist, or Marxist ideological training. They've been taught that certain propositions are true,

and they haven't really even been taught how to defend those. So they don't know the other side of a position, and if you don't know the other side of a position, you can't rebut the arguments that you know. It's literally not possible. That, coupled with the idea that they believe that intrinsic in dialogue itself

is some kind of hierarchical power relations which support white, white dominance or white supremacy or something that's completely insane. And do they say this when they're actually doing the exercise, when they come to their justifications or they try to rebut a particular argument? Is it as avert as that? Yeah, some people will either be explicit about it or some people will beat around the bush about it. But there's no question at all that most of these people, I would say the vast majority, and I want to specify this because this is important, of U.S. college age kids, most of whom are on college campuses, do not know the other side of the

position. They have never even heard it. So even in an educational institution as prestigious as Harvard or? No, especially in an educational institution as prestigious as Harvard. So they have never been told the other side of the argument. They've never been shown it. They've never had it explained to them. Correct. And in fact, if you look at Greg Lukianov's F-I-R-E, that Harvard has among the worst rankings for college free speech. I just wrote, I wrote the forward about a year ago to Rajiv Mahalter's book. He's an Indian public intellectual. And he really, really explains that in that book, the, if you will, to borrow a turn for it, hegemonic, the, the, the monothe thinking, the monoculture that's created.

And what, I mean, to me that is awful, because what you're essentially saying is these institutions aren't fit for purpose because the purpose of this institution is to educate, but they're not doing that, they're indoctrinating. Well, okay, so fit for purpose, they're fit for the purpose of the ideologues who run the institutions.

So for their purpose, they're discharging exactly what their mission should be. But the problem with it is that once you veer from the truth, once you stop valuing what's true, you're like the horse that rides off furiously in all directions. Any conclusion that you'd want to forward is itself arbitrary. It's the result of either some kind of capricious external force or some kind of, like my buddy, Faisal Almuttar was telling me that many countries, Qatar and other countries in the Oman are funneling and BLM propaganda and funding it and pushing it into the United States.

So you become held hostage to exogenous or external forces. And what happens when people like that do participate in these experiments? Because you're very good at being neutral, but you're also very good at pursuing the logical conclusions of what people say and presenting them with challenges and so on. And I imagine that quite quickly that worldview starts to unravel when it's challenged by someone like you. How do they react once they're forced to connect? front the side of the argument that they've never been exposed to.

Well, let's take a step back from that and say how ought a sane person to react. A sane, rational person who's self-interested, that's the other thing, self-interested, would want to align their beliefs with reality. They would want to tether the things that they believe to, they'd want to have some kind of linguistic hook that hooks to something that's react. That's not true, though, mate. That's not true at all, because if you're self-interested, you're interested in the opinion of your tribe because your self-interest is linked to how your tribe sees you, right?

Yeah. So that's, okay, so let's, okay, so we can, let's go down that. This is a rabbit hole, but let's go down it. As I wrote in my last book, how to have impossible conversations, the only thing people want more than to know what's true is to belong. Yes. So when you start questioning someone's belonging, in other words, their sense of tribe, to use that word, one of the consequences of that is that you could sever their relationship with their families, their friends, you know, Jehovah's Witnesses call it de-fellowshiping. You know, Scientologists call it, you know, they call them squirrels, people who don't agree. Actually, there's even something, the Klingons have something from structure.

But anyway, but the idea is that belonging is a hook. So they could do these street epistemological exercises and then go back into their communities and ask their, quote-unquote, church leaders, whatever leaders, whatever particular flavor or sect they happen to belong, what is the answer to this? Like, what should I say? My argument in that case would be even then they'd be better off than that they didn't participate because they would know that there's some alternative. They would know that there's something out there that may give them pause or may give them

the gift of doubt. See, I would push back again on that. I think they actually might know that. but they are so inculcated within this particular type of thinking and this group. And particularly, Pete, when you're young, your friends are everything. So you're going to be, what, a 23-year-old kid is going to stand up against his mates

and go, what, I disagree with all of you, and the way you see the world, and the way we've brought up to believe that this particular side is evil and white supremacy. That is a very rare type of person is going to do that. And I will answer that as well, Pete, that we've had people on the show where we've asked them a question and I can literally see them in their head going to where the question

is obviously going to take them and get uncomfortable and shut down the conversation. This is, I'm so happy you guys that this is so important. If we want to bring about the kind of society that leads to our flourishing, the answer, the older I get, the more completely convinced I become that the way to do that, the way to do is to not just tell people that, for example, revising your belief, when they hear it, it shuts down, not tell them that, you know, you'd be better off, but convince people that changing their mind on the basis of evidence, reason and evidence, is a good thing to do. It is a moral thing to do. It is morally responsible to change your mind when presented with something. And so there's a famous

thing from Mormons about doubting your doubt, this idea that you should doubt your doubt because it makes you a better person. So if you want to promulgate or promote certain values in the society, the best way to do that is through a moral means other than, of course, kind of create a fascist architecture or some kind of overarching institutionalization of principles. But if you want those to be based upon something ideally that has a staying power. and is sustainable, then you would link those to something moral, a moral, something that has a moral valence to it. It's a good idea to change your mind.

It's a good idea to be trustful of reason. It's a good idea to listen to people. And there's also the other element of it. And I'm going to be honest with my experience. Yeah, yeah. I loved it. It was great. It was uncomfortable.

Oh, when we did the exercise. Yeah, yeah. It is uncomfortable. You know, all of a sudden you've got a mic in your hand or you're mic'd up. And you've been asked to justify your opinion, you suddenly realize, I'm not actually sure about this. And then you're being asked to check. And then you've also got someone who's challenging your opinion.

Right. And we have brought up our kids, and you know this better than anyone, and we've taught them that discomfort is bad. Correct. And any form of discomfort should be avoided. Correct. So having your opinion challenged, being involved in a debate, is challenging, it's uncomfortable.

Yeah. Being asked to change your opinion is even more uncomfortable. Yeah. And I'm going to use everything you just said to forward the point that I just made if we can help people understand that being uncomfortable isn't necessarily an intrinsic good. But it's a byproduct of what happens when you examine your ideas and when you live an examined life. Being uncomfortable, it's okay to be uncomfortable. And there are different degrees. I mean, if you wanted to demarcate a reasonable, some reason to be uncomfortable, it would be this.

If somebody says something that attacks an immutable property of you, your height, my hair color, those, that would be off limits. But ideas, people deserve dignity, ideas don't deserve dignity. So people, we need to create these cultures in which we value dialogue, we value discourse, and we let people know it's okay to be uncomfortable if you're engaging in wrestling with ideas. Rogan said something the last time he had us on his show actually about this. He said the reason that I am willing to listen to people and debate in good faith and discuss things in good faith is, I don't conflate my ideas with my identity.

Correct. And that to me is a distinction that it feels like, has been eroded in my lifetime. A hell of a lot. Where people now are so attached to things that they believe, it's part of their identity. And then of course they can't change their opinion because then it's not ideas that are under threat.

It's you. Yeah. And I'll take that a step further. We've institutionalized that. It says, oh, you're uncomfortable. You go to the diversity office or you're uncomfortable. You call the bias response team

and file anonymous complaint. or you're uncomfortable. Like you also bypass the traditional stories. You know, we don't go to the teacher. We go to the diversity board. We go to the dean. We go to the, so we've taught people that instead of having a self-reliance and a resilience, they can, I don't know, go to, you know, there is no exculpation from this whole thing.

There's no kind of removal. Somebody has to be held guilty for the offense. And I'm glad you said we've taught people because I think, it's tempting sometimes for people like us to be like, oh, look at these stupid college kids. Oh, they're so dumb. Oh, they're so this. Oh, they're so that. But they weren't born that way. No, they're not dumb at all. They've just been indoctrinated. By our generation and yours. I'm going to be more specific than that and yours as if our generation is different.

I'm going to let it. I'm going to let that back. Okay, all right. The other thing that almost nobody talks about, which we should talk about, and I really wish we talked about it more, is how that, what's the genesis of that? Like, how does that metastasized in society? And one of the ways, again, nobody is talking about virtually nobody, is through colleges of education. So you can't just teach in a high school or a school.

You have to go through, you have to get a certificate, and these certificates are basically indoctrination mills, there are Powell-Oferrary's indoctrination mills there, ways that we've modified piggybacking off what we said before, we've modified the purpose of education from, we've actually almost done more than modified it, but

from a truth-based centered education to the alleviation of oppression, and we've taught you don't need to teach, it's kind of like the AMway of it. Do you get the reference to have AMway? Okay, forget about that. But it's kind of, it's like a multi-tier marketing scheme. Okay. Okay. So if you can teach teachers, if you can

indoctrinate teachers or teach teachers in a way to think, particularly, and we can go into this if you want, a pedagogical practice, which is not Socratic, it's not challenging, it's not questioning, it's not helping people to develop their ideas in a kind of cleaning, a clear, clean, and meaningful way. But if you can teach teachers this, then you can literally indoctrinate generations of people. And then once those kids who have been indoctrinated get to college, well, they've already been indoctrinated. Right. So if you indoctrinate the teachers, you don't need to indoctrinate the kids because the teachers will take care of it for you. Correct. And that's why one of the things that we need to do is we need to change the way that

we certify teachers, fundamentally change. But we can't change the way we certify teachers because there's educational rot in our institutions. So we're in a very difficult position. we're left with either attempting to reform the institutions, which is virtually impossible because people have tenure, they have jobs for life, or we have to build new institutions. I personally am a fan of the latter, but I'm not going to be pollyanna about it. I understand that this is not going to come overnight.

And I also understand to maintain any kind of economic competitiveness, it's probably not the best idea to rip down your institutions, your legacy, your academic institutions, maybe your media might be a good idea. But even then you have, of even then your it's the the road is dark and sinewy and fraught with danger i mean this is not something that you want to do a process by by which you just want to capriciously may i just yeah yeah yeah just to finish um this is where i'm going to start sound very

libertarian in a way that broadly i'm not but it seems to me like this is where the lack of competition and education is a massive problem because if you have to have to be a lot of had a competitive educational sector, then parents would be able to choose, number one, in a way that is more difficult now because you really have to cough up a lot of money to be able to send your kids to a different type of school. But also, the results would be borne out in the outcomes for the children. So if you go to a school where someone like you is teaching, you're going to have a very different set of life outcomes.

Correct. But we don't have that, certainly in this country, because it's like, either you you pay 50 grand a year, or chances are your child is going to, there's some exceptions, but broadly speaking, your child is going to go to school where they're going to get this shit. Correct. So we... This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart?

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to understand why our institutions are the way we are. You know, Ronald Reagan's famous quotation, freedom is only one generation away from being extinguished. So we have created a situation in which the core pillars and values of the Western tradition are under a sustained and prolonged attack. As Florence read from Unheard said, we are living through a time that is uniquely stupid.

This is a uniquely stupid time, human history. I mean, the apodictic pronouncements, or even if you don't even think about it that way, the core bedrock beliefs of this ideology are, there's no other way to say it.

They're so fucking stupid. They're so fucking idiotic. You know, every disparity in outcome is due to the system. That's just demonstrably false. Every racial disparity, for example, is due to the system. And as Helen Pluckrose says,

I just love this. I think it's amazing. You can have a conspiracy without any conspirators. Nobody can be racist, but the whole system is somehow, but yet when you parse it out, when you look at it in a more granular way, and you look at, for example, success rates of people who have historically been discriminated against, like Indians from East Asians, cold climate agents, et cetera, those disparities don't pan out. So then you have to do mental gymnastics to try to make the ideology work. And the reason that the ideology works is, as someone who used to work in the system, is because we don't train kids, like you say, to critically think.

What we do is we feed them information, they process information, they go to an exam, they regurgitate information. So actually, you're not, and the way I describe it is like this. So the way that we used to, I always thought I wasn't particularly good at maths. Yeah. But the reason was I was never taught maps. I was just taught a process and when all you do and all your talk is a process Then you don't actually understand maths because you're just doing a pattern. Okay It's only when you were taught mathematics do you actually understand it and then you are then able to apply it properly

Okay, so we have two additional components or features that are necessary to understand this The first one is that the reason that kids are taught with their taught now without going into details is because of a moral component. Right. So we teach the kids this about oppression, about systemic discrimination, about disparities, because it is a moral good. This is what we need to be a just equitable. I haven't used that word yet, equitable society.

So that's one key component of it. And I can't remember where I was going to. But there's also, and whilst you think about this, there's another component of it, which is what, in my experience, ISIL, which is schools are no longer about education. They're glorified data factories. Yeah. Which are then, kids are then shunted through, which they then do these exams. And then the government is able to justify their position and say, look, what a great job we're doing.

70 or 92% or whatever it is percentage wise of kids are good at grammar. No. But they're taught to pass a test, which is just learning and then regurgitation. They can't write better. They're not more articulate. They can't construct a sentence. Yeah. So how do we, so the problem has been analyzed to death. We all know it's a problem. We've kind of grafted these, grafted these moral values onto eggs and systems that we have. And then the question is, what do you do about it, right? Like, we know that this is a catastrophe. We know that our institutions are on a sustained attack. We know that the, that the, that, the,

We're pretty familiar with the data of the people who hold the ideology. Again, to mention Greg Leukeanoff and Ricky Schlott's book, I just finished it about a cancellation. We know that there are manifestations of this problem. What do we do about it is the question? Well, I mean, one of the things we've just discussed, which is you have to have alternative structures for education. We were just in Austin, and everyone you talk to in Austin has just moved to Austin. And one of the things they're all saying is like, well, look, the American education system is fucked. Totally.

But at least in Austin, I feel like there's 20 of us and we can pool together and do like homeschooling for all our kids together. Or, you know, there's charter schools in America. There are grammar schools here in the UK. There's other kinds of options. Catherine Berbel Singh, who's a frequent guest on our show, her school isn't teaching kids any of this crap, right? So part of it has got to be alternative education, I would say. Yeah, part of it is you have to build new things. I see no other way around it.

And in the media space, actually, I think it's one of the areas where the pushback has been the most successful. And it's maybe that's because it's the easiest place to do it. You need four cameras, a few mics and a room, and you can actually start to change the media conversation. education, obviously, much bigger project. There are a few, you know, there's Raleigh College, there's... Ralston. Stephen Blackwood, yeah. And University of Austin.

In Austin. Yeah. Is that it? Well, there are others that are emerging right now, but those are the two main competitors to the system. So slight progress in education, a bit more progress in media. Yeah, and we would really need to break down there's an architecture in place. like substack for alternative media,

there's much less so for educational systems or educational in various educational arenas. But we would also need to take a look at like what should they teach, what should their mission be, what pedagogies should they use, what forms of engagement of students? These are, I don't think they're particularly difficult questions,

but when the whole discourse has been hijacked for so long now, for a decade, they become, it just puts the conversation in hard mode. They become more difficult to answer. And look, this is me going to sound very left wing, but I think there's government intervention. There should be, there should be inspectors, and they should go and inspectors. But the inspectors themselves participate in the ideology.

The whole system is corrupt. The inspectors are there to make sure they're being told this nonsense. Correct. That's the problem. Okay, so you shoot them. Yeah, you need to, you know, there's a lot of teachers who would agree with you on that fact. But then introduce something, there may be a new type of inspector or something along those lines. But the people introducing the inspectors are also part of this world. The institution is set up to replicate the dominant ideology.

It is itself the problem. Yeah. But there are people who don't believe in this ideology who fundamentally disagree with it. And that's what you need to set up in order that they, and maybe it starts out as an investigation, just a government investigation where they go out. the government. So think about it like this. Let me just interject here. What you're saying is all true, provided we ever elected

a government that had any interest in doing that and seeing it through. And what we've seen repeatedly, by the way, certainly in this country, is there are governments that were elected and had ministers for education. Michael Goh, for example, he wanted to take on the educational blob. I don't know if he did it well. I don't know if he did it badly.

But what happened is he tried, and then he got sacked or resigned or whatever. Right? So there's also this other thing, which is, this is a bigger step back, but we're in a position where actually the democracy isn't delivering the results that the people are voting for. In this country, we've had a conservative government for 13 years now. They are not doing these things. It's amazing. Like, a government minister will write an article in the telegraph complaining about workness.

And I'm like, why don't you fucking fix it? You're elected. You're the government, but it's not working, right? So this is the conundrum, which is why we're all doing death by analysis, because we're like, we can vote for people, but they don't do anything. And so that's why I think it's like homeschooling or bust, because no institution is answerable to the people anymore. And martial arts.

I've actually thought about this a lot, because, you know, you can have all these stupid ideas, but when you're doing a martial art or you're doing a contact sport, that goes out the window. Because if you start going into your own head, you're going to get a punch on the nose, or you're going to get rolled over. There's a reason for that that I think is very profound in that in certain martial arts, there's a built-in corrective mechanism. And when you remove the corrective mechanism, crazy starts to come in. There's no way to – you have to have a corrective mechanism.

Actually, I published a paper on this, but you have to have a corrective mechanism. and what you do to make sure that your ideas align with reality. And that's the problem, like we've said before, the ideas don't align with reality. So there needs to be a constant reinforcement with these kids and young people that, look, you can have all the intellectual masturbation you want. The reality is the reality. Well, that brings us back to street epistemology. Street epistemology is a way to help people make their ideas clear.

And all of these resources are free. they're there for anybody can use them and i'd highly encourage educators to use them exactly you don't need mats like we have you can use tape or chalk and then you can just ask kids to start in the neutral line and ask them a claim how confident are you in that and then very gently question question them and see and encourage them to move you could go on the line first and then over time maybe two or three sessions you you stand on the line and you have kids do that for you but let's come back to what we were talking about, which I think your criticism is very fair, and it's one I've been making of our team, whatever our team is, which is we keep talking about what's not working.

What are we for, right? So you asked the question, how do we fix this? And then we shout at you four or five minutes with our ideas. What do you think we should do? Well, we, first, we have to build new things. Second of all, we have to move the Overton window. We have to change the the way that people think about what it means to be uncomfortable, what it means to change your mind, what it means to engage in civil dialogue. We have to start listening to people more. We have to understand why someone believes what they believe. It's one of quote-unquote rap reports rules. Before you offer any criticism, make sure that you absolutely understand. So a very quick technique that people can use for this is once you have listened to someone and you think you,

you know what they mean, say, let me put it on yourself, the burden of yourself. Let me see if I understand this correct. Is this correct? And you repeat it back to them. That one little technique would avoid so much confusion. It's a way to help people to understand each other. Oh, and the other thing is to seek not to persuade, this is Juergen-Harvimus, the German philosopher's idea, but to seek, and he writes what's called the...

theory of communicative action to seek to understand. We want to seek, so I want to try to understand why you believe this. And if I understand why you believe this, the likelihood that we could come to a solution that's agreed upon or some kind of a, maybe consensus wouldn't be exactly the right word, but some kind of agreement about how to proceed is greatly enhanced. Except what we saw today is that the ideology we are concerned. about is explicitly designed to prevent that from happening. 100% correct. It's explicitly circular and exclusionary of the precisely the thing you're saying,

which is the opportunity for discussion. Right. So if somebody doesn't adhere to, so it's not just that they don't adhere to the rules of reason and rationality, it's that they've opted out of the system altogether. And the way that they engage is to disrupt and dismantle, quote, unquote. The way that they engage is to bring bullhorn. into an auditorium. The way that they engage is to say that you're rapist or a Nazi or get all their friends to gang up on you on Twitter. So we have many, there were multiple, multiple things

I said there, and there are many ways to engage it, but first and foremost, we must not seed to lunatics. There's no reason that we should be held hostage to the demented vagaries of people with whom we have nothing. What of substance do they have to contribute to the conversation? If you want to enter the conversation, you want to say something great. If not, there's no polite or politic way to say this. We're just going to relegate you to the kitty table.

You can go in there and you can do it. Balaji has some interesting stuff on this about gray cities, blue cities. And we saw it, we listened to the Peter Thiel lecture the other night. And he linked the idea of real estate, structural inequalities, et cetera, to the replication of the ideology. To simplify that just for people listening, the idea being the housing crisis causes wokeness, basically, because young people are locked out of a future. They're locked out of having a family.

And therefore, they are nihilistic and they don't see a future. And they do see and experience a lot of inequality. And therefore, they're angry and resentful and bitter and unconstructive about that. Correct. And that was at the Roger Scruton lecture, that people can, I'm sure it will be released. So we have to stop seeding moral ground. We cannot listen to people who scream and shout. Like there's just, if you want to present your argument, present it, if not, you can go off in the corner. Like, we just cannot see to, we cannot continue

to be held hostage to the most irrational people. But this goes back to my point about discomfort, which is something I wanted to delve into. as a society, and I am just as guilty of this as anything as anyone else, we are looking to avoid discomfort. And that being the case, you're going to avoid confrontation. And then when things happen, when you get pylons, you capitulate. You couldn't achieve anything in your life without discomfort. Exactly. Literally enough, you couldn't build a business without discomfort. You couldn't build, if people are interested in social media, you couldn't build a social media. You couldn't be good at jiu-jitsu. You couldn't be good at skiing. You couldn't do anything in

which there was a corrective mechanism. You could, for example, play air guitar, right? Because there's no lawful relationship between you moving your fingers and a sound coming on. You could play air basketball. Like, you could do something in which there's no correct mechanism. The moment you attempt to tell people that it's a good thing to remove discomfort, not to go down this rabbit hole, but we attempted to do this by saying that pain, we have an almost entire generation that's susceptible to opioid addiction because we've told them it's like a fifth vital sign that we've attempted to remove all kinds of all sources of discomfort. Look, that doesn't mean when you go to the dentist, you shouldn't get Novocaine. But I think we need to, I think you're right,

Francis. I think we need to rethink the idea of discomfort and help people understand that it's a certain kind of virtue to endure a degree of discomfort in order to achieve something. And you what kind of life do you want to lead? Do you want to lead a life in which you're not striving, in which you're not achieving, in which you're not trying, in which you're either so, you find discomfort so dyspeptic or you find it so, you're so averse to discomfort, that is a barrier to any possibility that you could achieve anything. You simply cannot achieve anything that's real if you spend your life assuing discomfort. And it's also, and this is the other problem,

link to discomfort, which is going to link back to what we just spoke about a second ago. We are uncomfortable about saying to people, you are behaving like a child. If you do not want to take part in the discussion in your own words, if you want to scream and shout, then you're going to be on the kiddie table. Right. Because we experience that as confrontation. Okay. So I'm not, I'm not uncomfortable with that at all.

And I'm going to say, I'm going to suggest something to you. If you speak bluntly and honestly to people and you tell them exactly what you just said, they will respect you more and not less. They will respect you more and not less rather than, oh, sniveling or I'm sorry or forgive me or, oh, you know, you go over there and you, you know, do your own thing with your way of your flag

or wear your bandana or what have you. So the very idea that people don't engage other people or don't call people out on bullshit because they think that they're going to, I don't know, be mad at them or hurt their feelings. It's almost exactly the opposite. They will respect you more. they respect people who are forthright in their speech.

They respect people who are blunt and honest. That doesn't mean you have to be rude, but just be forthright in your speech. Pete, let me ask you this, because I think this is at the core of all of this. Can this be corrected without a catastrophe? Because this is why I've been concerned about all of this from day one. Because ideologies that are out of touch with reality cause people to do things that are impractical or dangerous and damaging, which is where I feel we are, particularly in the West. We've undermined ourselves domestically.

Correct. Foreign policy has been a disaster in terms of signaling weakness, which is why, in my opinion, we're seeing many of the things that we're now seeing happening in the world. However, people who are delusional in this way don't generally tend to self-correct unless there is something even more painful than the discomfort of having to correct their delusions. So my question to you is, do you actually think this can be corrected without a giant war or some kind of, you know, something of that nature? I guess it depends on how you define catastrophe. We've already had a catastrophe, right? We're already in a catastrophe of

the legitimation crisis, Harvost's 1973 piece. We're already in a crisis in which people don't trust their institutions. They don't trust their media. They don't trust their, the only people But that's bearable. The ordinary person, you go out there in the street and you ask people, you know, the legitimacy crisis, the breakdown of incidents, they don't know what the fuck you're talking about. That's not hitting them in the pocket. It's not hitting them in the pocket. True, but if you ask them, I can't speak to this, this content, do you trust Congress in the United States?

It's an all-time-law. The only people, if you look at survey after survey, the only people individuals trust are their own physicians. They don't trust the medical system. My point is, my point is it's not painful enough for people to care enough to actually do something. It makes you wonder, doesn't it? What would happen if something real actually happens to be people? What would happen? I mean, we have inculcated a sense of fragility in people.

And we've told them it's actually a good thing to be fragile. Yes. So can that get fixed? Of course it can get fixed. Without an actual catastrophe as in people dying on mass, starving on mass. There's no question it can, but people need to want to fix it. People need to identify it as a problem. But you're dodging my point. My point is exactly this. Can people experience the need to fix it without suffering terrible consequences first?

No, I wasn't dodging the point. I wasn't talking to. Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. No, no, you can be as rude. Anything, you can say anything you want to me. Um, no, it gets back to the point I made before about what they value. If they value not doing that, they can because it's like the, it's like leading the dog. It's like the leash, right? If they, place their values ahead of, if they value being resilient, if they value tolerating a certain amount of discomfort for achievement, if they value the right things, you can change it. The problem is, and I don't mean this to beg the question of being honest with you, how do we help people value the right things? Well, so, okay, let me refresh, because I think we're talking about the same thing, but talking past each other. That's exactly what I'm saying is, is it possible? Do we need that?

I don't, is it possible for people to, not I hate to use this term, but to wake up from the delusions into which they've been educated. Without something so uncomfortable that it overrides a discomfort of having to let go of that world. It's totally possible. Part of the problem with waiting or expecting or having some catastrophe befall people is that among the people who are already susceptible to this, they would say, look, we didn't adhere to the ideology deeply enough. I mean, they wouldn't explicitly say that. But, you know, we always knew we were victims. Look, now the system did this to us.

The system got us in this war. The system caused Hamas to do it. Whatever it is. So I don't think that the solution to the problem is to either hope or wait for or expect or anything, some kind of catastrophe because that might actually worsen the situation. I'm not hoping for a catastrophe. No, I know you're not.

I'm fearful that that's the only thing that will shake people up. I mean, it might not shake people up. That's the point. I see what you're saying. I mean, the Hamas attack on Israel, I think, woke up a lot of people on the center left in particular. Are you asking? No, I'm making a statement. I mean, I wrote an article for the free press.

I read that. It was excellent. Which is essentially my assertion is there are a lot of people who that shifted their perspective. Right. Because they saw things about their own side that was so expressed. By the way, and they were the same people screaming about microaggressions and someone asking, where you're from, you know, you've seen video after video of people openly shouting at Jews because there's nothing to do with Israel. Nothing. Zero. The same people. And now, fortunately, people who have been traditional philanthropists are removing their money. And you should not be donated. You want to know what you can do about this. One of the things is you stop donating to your alma mater. They're simply not the same schools. You can stop donating to, a process that furthers this madness. And Pete, before the interview, you made a statement about America being in the hospice or on its

way to the hospital. Marching toward hospice. Marching towards hospice. Is this what you're talking about or is there something else? I think this is a piece of it. Look, I don't like this. I'm not, I get no joy of sitting here and telling you that where the United States is marching toward hospice.

I don't see things. I'm not particularly rosy, might be one way to put it. We have $33 trillion in debt. We're printing money like it's going on in style. Evidently, the best people the system can produce are Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which I think will be nobody I know wants that. To be, again, extremely blunt with you, I'm embarrassed as an American. I'm embarrassed as a U.S. citizen that those are the two people we've produced.

independent of what you think of the particular policy positions of any one individual. One third of the taxes collected last year went to pay the interest on the debt. People aren't engaging substantive questions in any sustained way. Our institutions have suffered from wholesale ideological capture, particularly our educational institutions. The meritocracy has been undermined. Again, you could look at it if you normed out, if you looked at SAT scores, for example, at Ivy League schools, over 51% of those students should be Asians, but they're not. You want to know if there's systemic discrimination?

Yeah, there's actually systemic discrimination, and we know exactly who it's against Asians. The same people screaming for microaggressions have no problem with calling for the heads of Jews. I mean, it's just, and these people are educational administrators, their professors, the teachers. Again, I say this is kind of nucleation point for a larger nuclear catastrophe, if you will. We know that people don't trust their institutions. I just don't think that the current system as we have it is sustainable. There are too many geopolitical instabilities, hot spots in the world right now. I don't think we're have an appetite for any. I'm not saying we ought to have an appetite for foreign conflict, but I think that we need to have a serious

conversation about China and Taiwan, about Ukraine. I think we need to have a serious conversation about a lot of things that were simply we have removed the tools for people that we know what those tools are for how to have better conversations for how to speak to each other we're not doing that you cannot solve a problem unless you're willing to be honest and forthright and have an honest open dialogue and discourse about it and if you value that and we've lost that now the question is will we get it back I think we will. What damage will that have done to our institutions,

our judiciary, what damage that have done to trust our confidence in the institutions? Again, it's just so epically stupid. I mean, what are they offering? They're offering Chaz? What is the, right? I mean, it's just, it's so, you know, Hamas knows what a woman is. Everybody knows what a woman is. I mean, it's just so we went from pretending to know things we don't know

to pretending to not know things that everybody knows. I mean, there's a whole lot of pretending going on. But that's not a uniquely American phenomenon, nor is it merely in the ankle sphere. It's a neo-colonial export that spread through the world. And so we're looking at a pretty precarious, perilous, geopolitical situation. We're looking at a country in which our citizens don't know

or fundamentally question the American values. They don't think that the values of the country worth fighting for enlightenment principles prince freedom of speech freedom of press freedom of assembly we have demeaned the very principles that has made our country not just great but a shining city upon a hill and that is where we stand right now we are stand we stand with deficits that are crippling us we're standing with nobody talking about issues people being consumed by wokeness or anti-wokenness when we have substantive problems. We have substantive homeless problems. My friend Michael Schellenberger, a good friend of mine, he ran for governor, and one of the things that he was going to do,

even a simple thing. Like most people in West Coast, in East Coast cities will acknowledge that homelessness is a problem. They will acknowledge that it's, in fact, when you look at the data in California, in particular, people rank that as one of the top five problems. But we're not having an honest conversation. In San Francisco, Michael writes about shelter-first housing earned. shelter first, housing earned. We've had Michael on a couple of times. By the way, when you say that people aren't having an honest conversation, we should also make clear, it's not just the left, it's the right as well.

The right does this moronic thing where they're like, yeah, we've got money for Ukraine, but we haven't got it for the homeless. It's not a money problem. It's an ideology problem. Yeah. So if you want to talk about a criticism of the right, because I wasn't meaning any of this as a criticism, I think often this is framed as a criticism from a, the right or from the left, like the trans issue, whereas it should be just what's the evidence.

And if people on one side happen to disagree, then they need to marshal their evidence and show it. Because I don't think it's, I think casting it that way is a mistake because people will be, to borrow your word, people will be tribal and they won't actually look at what the evidence for a position is. Well, look, I don't want to finish on that low note. I think one of the ways that this can be influenced, whether they can be changed. There's a different conversation. Like I say, I think in the media space, we actually have been extraordinarily successful in

Canada. Well, you guys in particular, but I don't just mean us. There are people way bigger than us. I mean, look, our politics are different to the Daily Wise politics, but when I see a media organization of that size emerging, which challenges some of these narratives, I think that's very powerful. When I see Joe Rogan is the biggest show in the world, I think that's very powerful. And look how they come for him too, right? But the thing is, they can't get him anymore. That's the thing that's reassuring to me. Like this cancel culture stuff, it works at the lower levels, but there are certain levels at which it no longer works. I agree. And Rogan is spearheaded that, and there are other people who spearheaded that. And the fact

that, you know, two idiot comedians can build this up to the point that it is now, that to me is also a reassuring sign. And the number of people who now listen to all of those people in that ecosystem, it's quite significant and growing daily as well. The one thing I'm worried about is the young generation, the Gen Zetas, the boys, they are based, as the kids now say, the girls are going Uber woke even more. And that disparity. We know that Jonathan Heights research has talked about, particularly the dangers of TikTok and social media. So that disparity is going to be troubling. But I do think, I do think Breitbart was right that politics which is downstream of culture.

This is culture. And if more people are listening to these kind of conversations with amazing people like you who are offering a critical thinking about these issues, we're going to persuade some people.

And that may be how we start to unwind some of these things over time and offer a better alternative. So I hope that's true. And if it's not, we'll have World War III and all die. So Pete, it's been great having you back. I thought we were going to end

on a positive night. It is positive night. Either everything is great or we're all dead. Isn't that? That's very Russian. Yes, we all dead. Drink vodka. But you know what?

Yeah. A death in a nuclear Armageddon in which we all die. Be quick. It's much better than a slow, painful, you know, and loads of civil war and all of that kind of. So everybody's just everybody's dead. Everybody's happy. Anyway, on that positive note, Pete, as you know,

before we go to locals where we have questions for you from our supporters, the question we always ask at the end is, What's your favorite type of nuclear holocaust? A quick one. There we go. The question is... That wasn't as funny as you thought. No, no, it wasn't.

Just depressing. Yeah, it was. What should we be talking about tonight? Yeah, baby. I think, because I listen to your podcast, religiously, if you will, I think it's less what we should be talking about and more how we should be talking about it. And I think we need to shift the conversation instead of from a particular issue.

Don't be wrong. It's important. But how do we need to be talking about it's important. But how do we need to be talking about it's important. How do we engage people with whom we disagree? How do we listen better? How do we ask better questions so that if you actually do want to persuade somebody, you'll be more successful than screaming or not listening or not engaging?

And so what we should be talking about is how to engage people and what it actually really means to understand somebody's position. And I would say that it's maybe not something that we should be talking about and it's more something we should be modeling. And that's actually what we try to do. The way we have conversations, including recently, loads of people on the show with whom we fundamentally disagree. But we still give them the time.

We treat them with respect. We try to get to the core of what they're saying. That's what's always been our approach. And I think that's why every time we get like new exposure in terms of like a big media event or something happens where a lot of people come to our channel or come to our podcast, The first thing they all say is the one thing that distinguishes you from most other media is that you listen to your guests and you let them talk.

And that is the first step, actually, for what you're talking about. So maybe it's less about talking about and it's much more about showing, modeling and trying to be in that way. Correct. Operate in that way. Pete, awesome to have you back. Thanks, man. Everybody should be checking out your street of personology videos because they're just amazing. also teaches you had to think, like Francis said, you know, we are obviously in the space. We think

a lot. We think for a living. And yet, you know, we took something away from that. So it's really great. And I appreciate you. All the best success with that. Thank you. Head on over to locals where we ask Pete your questions. What is so appealing about woke that allowed it to take over academia? Is there a certain personality type that is susceptible? What trait about yourself conferred immunity to this way of thinking behaving? That's agree.