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EP 123 Dr. James Lindsay Interview: Pursuing the Light of Objective Truth in Subjective Darkness

What a privilege to interview Dr. James Lindsay—bestselling author, guest on shows such as Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, professional advisor on multiple court cases, and so much more!

As an expert on Critical Race Theory and modern culture, James has so much to offer our world and our moms. In this conversation we get into James’ story, how he got to where he is today, the kind of work he does, and how he helps so many understand our crazy world. With specific discussions spanning cultural dynamics, critical race theory, postmodernism, communism, and the nature of reality and truth, this interview gets a bit heavy in a few places.

But stay with us to the end where James gives some beautiful advice to parents engaged in the struggle, validating the importance of the daily work we do, and encouraging us along the path.

Please share your questions and insights with us via email at: [email protected]

And share this with a friend who needs encouragement in their parenting!

Get your 3 FREE chapters of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

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TRANSCRIPT (AI Generated)

Welcome back. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of the Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. Today is a really special treat talking to James Lindsay. He's unbelievably credentialed and popular and has done so much good to help us understand our culture. Before we get into that interview, I want you to know that if you're new to this podcast, I would recommend that you keep up with the current, episodes, but also head back to the beginning and listen to some of those first podcasts.

 

You'll get a deep dive into the 7 Laws of Life Mission, which is what everything we do here hovers around that framework and those laws and principles. And then you'll also hear a lot of mission-driven stories of great men and women who have lived those laws and had huge positive impact in the world.

 

I also wanna encourage you to go get your free copy of the audio book of the Mission-Driven Life. Discover and fulfill your unique contribution to the world over at the mission driven mom.com. You can grab that. It won't be available forever, so make sure that you head over there to get your free copy of that.

 

And if this podcast is of benefit to you, please leave a review and pass it on. That helps us share the word about truth and principles.

 

This interview with James Lindsay was incredible. We talked all about what critical race theory is, why it matters to us as parents. He gave some really good advice to parents and what they should be doing with their children right now. We talked about truth and reality and the natural law. We talked about his story and experience of becoming the man that he's become and why he does what he does.

 

So enjoy this interview with James Lindsay.

 

Alright, welcome back to the podcast. We have an incredible treat today. I don't know how it happened, but James Lindsay has graciously agreed to talk to me today and to share some of his incredible wisdom and scholarship that is so needed in the world. I'm gonna give you a little bit of his professional bio.

 

Some of my takes on who he is, why I listen to him, why I trust him, and then we'll get into some of his experiences with some questions. So first of all I know you American born Author, mathematician. You got your PhD from the University of Tennessee in mathematics. And that's incredible. So I don't even know the level of intelligence that's required to do that.

 

On his bio it says professional troublemaker, which is actually true. He's written six books spanning a range of subjects including religion, philosophy of science, postmodern theory. He's a leading expert on critical race theory, and I have learned a lot from him on that. And that leads him to reject it completely.

 

The founder of New Discourses, and we got to meet in person. When I went to his event just a few weeks ago here in Dallas, it was phenomenal. Encourage anyone and everyone to attend in in their future opportunities. And you've got a book going right now, Cynical Theories :How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity, and Why This Harms Everybody.

 

And that one's getting translated in 15 languages. Is that one already out, James? Yeah, that one came actually.

 

And that came out. That's actually, I don't know why it's worded that way. I know I just pointed you. So just mea culpa, I just told Go read the bio. That's a little bit dated on my website.

 

Yeah. 'Cause I'm very like weird about writing my own bios. Yeah. And as it turns out that the book came out in the summer of 2020 it was like, oh, okay. Kind of first major book about woke stuff and it is now in 30 languages and it's sold 500,000 copies. So it's it's the entry point, especially if I leave the country.

 

, If I leave the country, that is the book people know me for. Like I was in New Zealand. Yeah. And people were bringing it up to sign. I went to Belgium and people brought it to me and I haven't even seen most of the foreign language copies. They have different covers. They have completely different That's awesome.

 

And one people are bringing up copies of it that I've never seen, when foreign languages having me sign it and so it's all over the world. Yeah. It's exciting. But yeah's awesome. Yeah. Awesome. I think it like 30 languages now.

 

Awesome. That's awesome. I, that's the one I need to grab then.

 

I've been consuming all of that information from you via podcast and interviews and things like that. That would be great to grab. I just have the Marx notification of education is the one I've got. And then course you've been on all the podcasts. Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, all the people. I don't even know what the list is or all the people, but everybody knows you.

 

I've been like every podcast.

 

Yeah, I thi everyone so amazed and grateful for you to come today. What I can say from my own personal experience with Dr. Lindsay is that I don't even remember when I first stumbled across you. It's probably been two or three years., I don't know if it was from an interview that I saw or my sister sent it to me, but my sister and I have been exchanging another girlfriend.

 

Here's another Lindsay podcast, and we exchange 'em when we discuss 'em, which has been awesome. But one of the reasons why I was immediately like on board, I guess with what you talk about is because, I didn't even know about classical liberal education. I had no experience with ancient philosophy or any of that until I was married and had a couple kids. I found it inadvertently in a small liberal arts college that was nearby. And luckily I signed up and made it all the way through a master's degree. And so I have the very introductory rudiments of an okay. Decent education.

 

It's how I feel about it. I'm grateful for it. But what that meant was that when you used certain references and you talked about certain people, I knew what you were talking about and I feel like I feel really blessed. 'cause I feel like that gave me an edge that helped me know you knew what you were talking about because there's so many names that people could drop and if you had no frame of reference for when they lived, who they were, what their worldview was, any of that, it would be hard to know.

 

That's a real legitimate problem in the current culture. How do I even know who to listen to? Because I don't even know, but I especially had become very fascinated with communism and Marxism and had read and studied much about what went on in especially Russia, especially China.

 

And so I knew when you got in, especially the Marxist stuff, was, oh my gosh so good and really spoke to me. And I was like, and then you saw, help me see layers of it that I hadn't seen before. And so I know you do your homework. I know you know what you're talking about. Because my education luckily gave me enough information to be able to identify that.

 

So I'm really, really grateful for that. Grateful for all the things that you've taught me so far, what you've keyed me into, what I should be aware of,. How to understand the culture a little bit better. Postmodernism was just a nut I couldn't crack for so long. I would read books on it. I would try to, I would try to read the guys, try and, it's so hard.

 

So I'm so grateful for some handholding where stuff like that is concerned. I mentioned to you before we got on, we've got three levels in our academy. That third level is, a very high level introduction to just, there are these worldviews and these are some key things they teach, and postmodernism is in there. Anyway, so that's why I wanted to talk to you. That's why I wanted you on this podcast. That's why I think you're an important voice in the culture and hope that. All of the listeners to our show will get more involved in what you do. Read your books, watch your stuff.

 

Let's begin at the beginning, and talk about you before the storm began. I know you got this PhD. We were talking for a minute about some of the reasons that you didn't pursue all the way into academia and working there. But give us a little bit more about why did leave academia after that degree and why you were frustrated with what was going on in academia, and then segue into how you got started doing what you do now.

 

I know that there's article submissions. I've seen some, watched you talk about all of that stuff. And I bet a lot of our listeners don't know about that. So tell us that story.

 

This story can be very long. My, history doesn't make sense except when you've lived it and then it all makes sense.

 

It just was the natural thing to do. Yeah. Like you said, I got a PhD in math.

 

Yeah.

 

I finished that in 2010. I have a bachelor's degree in physics. My master's is in math in between. And so I introduced that. So I was in college effectively from fall of 1997 until spring of 2010. Mm-hmm. Which is a long time to be in college.

 

And all of it was either physics, which is a hard, pure science. Yeah. Or mathematics, which is like in some sense even more rarefied in some sense. And I bring that up because the timeframe ending in 20 10, 97 to 2010, and then the subject matter. I just want people to understand like I did not deal with woke in college.

 

Like I get that it was probably happening in the humanities departments. Sure. I know it was happening in the education departments and I was too busy looking down my nose at every other department regardless, because every physicist looks down at every other department, including mathematicians and every mathematician looks down at every other department, including physicists.

 

And the only people who look down on both math and physics are philosophers and possibly engineers who think nobody's practical. I had no exposure.. A lot of people go to college and so they know, you have to take all these classes, then you have your major, they don't know what grad school's like a lot of times, unless they've been, your entire school is your major.

 

There is no other class. Like, people talk to me all the time. Oh wow. When were you at ut? And I tell 'em the years and they're like, wow, did you know so and so in the history department? I'm like, that's not in the math building.

 

Yeah.

 

I literally only went to other buildings when for some reason there wasn't enough room in the math building to have the class.

 

Yeah.

 

That was a math class anyway.

 

Yeah.

 

That's the only reason I ever left the building. My entire University of Tennessee experience could really be summarized as being one building. So, I say that because it's all immersive. Woke wasn't a thing. So a lot of people think, wow, James, I get this.

 

I sometimes, I just don't try to correct people. It's just not worth it.

 

Yeah.

 

But people are like, James saw the woke coming early. No, I didn't. I just saw university bureaucracy is what I saw. Yeah. I saw the softening of standards to keep students in and paying tuition and I didn't wanna be a part of it.

 

I had the faculty meetings where they were instructing us in the classes below a certain level that are not, within a math major or a science major. Just pass people find ways, give 'em extra credit, make it easier. Do whatever you have to do. At one point they, they said that if you wanna fail more than one student, you need to be able to justify why.

 

Come bring evidence to the dean. And I was like,

 

that's no scoring little league.

 

Yeah, and I get it because it was like

 

everyone gets a trophy.

 

It was for the math class that only people who will do zero more math ever in anything they do. It's that class. Yeah. But it's so it doesn't, it's it's literally like the university just waving the white flag and saying, we know it's pointless to make you study math when you're not gonna do it.

 

But I objected to this kind of on a principled level. Like I had to learn US history, which I didn't have that much. I'm glad I learned it now, but at the time, 18, 19 years old, I'm like, I'm a physics major. Why the hell do I have to learn history? I don't wanna learn that. I had to suffer through that.

 

I had to do you can suck it up and pass math class kids. You're getting a college degree, right? Yeah. You can show some mathematical reasoning. You should be able to, it should need something, add fractions or something. Yeah. And so anyways, it was a bureaucracy and this. This tendency I didn't know the, what it was at the time, but it was before I started taking on the woke stuff that I realized it was that the guiding principle of the university had become student retention.

 

The goal was just to keep paying customers in the door, and I was. Sickened by this, and I didn't want to continue. As we were talking about before we started, my family was such that my step kids were about to start high school when I graduated, and it would've been like, Hey, kids who wants to get dragged all over the country, to go to a bunch of different high schools because I have to do postdocs.

 

Yeah. And nobody wants that. And that was a little bit more to tip me over the edge. So I left the university after I finished my PhD. I didn't look back. I, to this day, people sometimes ask me if I would consider being a teacher in a institution again. And I'm like, Nope. Absolutely not.

 

The bureaucracy's a disaster. The whole system is corrupt. I don't want, it's not corrupt in some like dirty political corruption way necessarily. It's just gross. I don't want any part of this. Yeah. Like this, if the university is not geared toward basically making like academic ninjas. Like I'm not interested like I want high level stuff here.

 

I think I have these controversial opinions that our society lied to our young people. Most people should not go to college. They should have done other things. It was not the guarantor of a good job. Yeah. We ended up with this. It sometimes, was it Peter Turchin? Is that his name? Who called it Elite Overproduction?

 

We have all these basically uppity people who got degrees who can't go work like a normal job now 'cause they're too good for that. But they're not actually skilled to fit anywhere in the economy either. The, they have a useless skill like gender studies or they have a, an oversaturated skill like veterinary medicine.

 

Which nothing wrong with veterinary medicine, especially if you wanna work on large animals, but currently, last I heard, vet schools are producing 11 times more vets than the economy can absorb.

 

Oh, wow. So

 

you can just imagine what the problem is there. Right. And there's all kinds of interesting conversations we could have about, should academic advising at university, should they be on the hook?

 

What are good ways to put them on the hook for mis advising students into bad sectors of the economy, basically. But that's a different discussion. I decided to get outta this. At any rate, yeah. So I leave the university and I had to figure out something to do. Yeah. And my wife was a massage therapist.

 

This is a weird story, James. You were a massage therapist from 2010 to 2020 of all things with a PhD in math. Yes. Yep. I was, and there are actually, it's like my story doesn't make any sense unless you lived it. I can say my wife was a massage therapist, which is true. And encouraged me to join the business with her and take some of her overflow and then build my own clientele and we'd have something going on and I could work, here with her in the studio or whatever.

 

Cool. That's a thing. But I had some lead over production there. I'm like, I have a PhD. Like what? Massage. Cool. Yeah. What?

 

Yeah.

 

But for the fact that I used to be a fighter I still can, but I used to like actually get in like rings and fight. Right? Oh, wow. I trained martial arts for a long time.

 

Uhhuh, I used to fight in like real competitions and things. And one day I was at, when I was in my early twenties, I was at, so, before the PhD? Yeah. I was at, the dojo or whatever training, and I hurt my back. Really bad. Like my back went all the way out as they say. Wow. And this sets up this cycle of like doomsday, you get it back, in alignment or whatever.

 

You start training again. Yep. You hurt it again three, four times a year.

 

Yeah.

 

Sometimes it gets in like a lot worse, whatever. So I had this long-term chronic back pain and kind of disability that actually was pulling, I was functionally able, I'm not claiming I was disabled or anything, but practicing martial arts at a high level, continuing to do competitive martial arts was out like that wasn't real anymore. And it's like I just had this stupid back pain. As it turns out, while I was doing my PhD, I happened to be out at the park, out on a walk and I ran into a guy, there's a stupid story, but he thought I was my brother.

 

They had gone to school together, blah, blah, blah. And he was a chiropractor Uhhuh. And he could tell by my posture that my back hurt. But he thought he was this, guy he was friends with in high school, even though it's mistaken identity by brother. We got talking. I'm like, no, I'm his brother. We hung out.

 

Anyway, a little bit, chatted for a bit. He's I can tell your back hurts. You want me to fix it? And he did a massage to me, not twist and crack my back. And I was like, weird. And he's you need to go buy this book. It's called the Trigger Point Therapy Workbook. By Claire and Amber Davies. It's in his third edition.

 

People ask me every time I tell the story, where's the book? Well, I told you the whole title. You can go look it up and it's on Amazon uhhuh and massage yourself according to where it says to poke. And you now know what it, you now know what it feels like, and I'll help you here and there if you have time, or we have time or whatever, and we'll straighten you out.

 

And a few months later, I'd figured it out and I'd worked out a technique and had fixed my own back. Wow. So I get outta this back pain that had been plaguing me for most of a decade. My life is vastly improved.

 

I have this skill, which I actually do, to family members and friends and things. No, no money involved.

 

'cause it is illegal. And so I already had this background in helping people and helping myself. And I had this technique that I knew was rare within the massage market because I'd been in massage therapist who couldn't do it. Yeah. And even after I learned it, there was like stuff, it's hard to reach and I'm like, can you do this?

 

And I'm like on the table telling the massage therapist how to massage me correctly to make the thing work. And I'm like, no, seriously, just put your elbow there and hold it no harder. And it's this is frustrating. Why don't I just take my wife's advice and do this? Mm-hmm. So I did that for 10 years.

 

Yeah.

 

And while I'm doing that, I'm academically bored. I have some free time. It is a busy job, but your fingers can only handle so much.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So you're not like at the desk 60 hours a week or something.

 

Right, right.

 

So I start writing and getting involved in discussion forums and. Things online.

 

People were wrong on the internet. One thing leads to another. I learned that radical feminists are a particular branch of wrong on the internet. I start fighting with them, they're terrible. I start reading their academic literature to understand what in the heck they're talking about, because I had no idea how they can just be calling everybody a sexist and saying, misogyny is the enforcer of sexism.

 

What the hell does that mean?

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

And that's Kate Mann, if you wonder who that is. She's the, she wrote a book called Down Girl. No, like weird sexual undertones there about misogyny being the enforcer of systemic sexism. And I'm like, alright, so I'm reading all this and I'm finally kinda getting my head around it.

 

I'm friends with this guy Peter Boghossian. We've written a bunch of stuff together at this point, and some of it is literally about all this kind of woke stuff at that point, which was poisoning everything we were dealing with. Killing.

 

So you're publishing articles online, you mean?

 

Yeah, just like that's what's happening.

 

Time magazine, scientific Americans.

 

I see, Uhhuh

 

here and there. We had the big ambition to get into the Atlantic or the New York Times.

 

Oh, cool.

 

I think we eventually, actually he and I put out a book together later and we actually did get an essay in the New York Times as a result of it.

 

I forgot about that. So anyways we never got the Atlantic though, and now it's whack, so that's okay. But that. We were just doing that and everything was toxic as hell because of these feminists. And Pete worked at Portland State University, which is maybe not ground zero, but ground like 0.001 or something for woke.

 

It's like really close to as bad as it can get. They got rated on the top 10 worst schools for free speech. And so Pete went to the president of the university and said, did you know that we're on the top 10 list for worse schools? And the president's reply was who wrote the list? Because sometimes those are lists you want to be on.

 

Yeah.

 

Like totally politicized, Yeah, it was crazy. Yeah. And it's a civil rights group called Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education that had made the list. It's pretty unbiased in that assessment. It's just straight civil liberties. Yeah. And so anyways we decided to take this on as you intimated.

 

What we decided to do was write a bunch of academic hoax articles. That's called the grievance studies affair. That was my big introduction into public life.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

We wrote 21, actually, if you count the trial balloon, we wrote 20 primarily articles, journal, academic, peer reviewed journal articles for

 

Were you just trying to go as far as were you just gonna keep going until you were found out, or did you have this number you were trying to get to?

 

No, we were going to write novel papers for one year. Oh, from when we started. Okay. And then we were going to see the papers that we wrote through and then that was that. Okay. And so as the, that was the original plan,

 

right

 

Which you formula formulated in August of 2017. And so the last novel paper we wrote was in June of 2018.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Then we stopped in June because number one, we hit 20 number two, things were getting complicated, papers were getting published. It was in the news, like stuff's happening. We're trying to keep up with literally like 14 papers or 12 papers or something, or are active at this point. It's getting to be outta control.

 

So we decided 20 was the number, 10 months is enough, and we stopped.

 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

But the goal was one year to write from August to August, come up with new ideas.. And then see them through, which can take another year, but. We ended up getting caught all of that attention. Some of the papers got, one of the papers in particular, which is the infamous one about dog humping at dog parks being an indicator for rape culture.

 

They're all funny as it turns out. That paper was so absurd. Eventually the Wall Street Journal started digging into it and we were caught. Basically. Yeah, it was like we had to send in. Like driver's licenses to prove that we were the fake name, that we used to write the paper.

 

And so we weren't gonna do that.

 

And so we had to just figure out how to get outta this thing, as best as possible.

 

So they know that they're fake, but they aren't sure who you are yet?

 

No, no. They thought the paper was real and then the Wall Street Journal thought the paper was fake or something's wrong like that. The identity, like nobody could find the identity of the alleged author.

 

Right. Right, right.

 

And so the academic journal in this case, which was called Gender, place and Culture, which was the leading journal in feminist geography, contacted us and said basically these right-wing trolls won't leave us alone. Please just prove your identity so we can clear this up.

 

Because that's their demanding proof of your identity and I'm not who you think I am.

 

Yeah. This isn't what you think it is.

 

Helen Wilson. So actually it's funny, I talked to the lady from the Wall Street Journal, her name's Jillian k Melcher. And so I got on the phone with her. I think she still writes there.

 

I don't know. But um. I got on the phone with her and so she hears my voice and I was like, this is Helen Wilson. And she's are you trans? I was like, no, this is a lot more interesting than that.. And off we go, having our dialogue, that thing comes out in the midst of this. So I realized this woke stuff's not stupid and it's not funny that it's actually scary.

 

Like I was like, the wheels are coming off the bus of society with this.

 

Yeah. Yeah.

 

In fact, I concluded that woke in the universities represented and I got in so much trouble for this phrasing. I still get in trouble for this phrasing, but I'm still gonna say it again because I stand by it.

 

Woke in the universities represents the seed, and I say that with emphasis, the seed. Of a genocide. And I say it with emphasis because if you say the seed of a genocide, people hear genocide. I didn't say it is a genocide. I said it is the seed, which if it finds soil and it sprouts and it's nourished and it grows and it finally bears fruit is a genocide.

 

It is the seed of a genocide. And

 

but there's no question that woke is intentionally turning people against each other. I don't think that's a,

 

there was in 2018.

 

Yeah. I don't think it's ridiculous to say that. That's where it could go., Did we not all watch Rwanda for heaven's sake.

 

Like we know.

 

Nobody believed a word of it in 2018.

 

That's you're intentionally turning people against each other. You're intentionally not intentionally creating contention. You're intentionally creating hate. Like you're the belief you want people to not like each other. You want people to distance themselves from others.

 

Like it was.

 

That's what I saw.

 

Yeah, that's what,

 

but the belief in 2018 was not that, the belief was this is a bunch of college people being college people and the real world will straighten 'em out. Leave it alone.. And I was like, no, it's not. This is a big, big, big problem coming. So I bravely.

 

The reason it can't be that is because it's coming from the leadership.

 

It can't be college people doing college stuff if the, if they believe that the authorities are with them. That's the difference is when if the authorities are with us, then this is legit and they'll bring it into their adult life and expect people to mold themselves to it.

 

Which was called the long March for the institutions.

 

And that's what they were doing. Yeah. And not in 2018, nobody believed that. Peter and I were considered quite wild.. I finally have this conversation with a guy, a doctor in 2019. Peter was there too. And we're talking to this guy who's fascinated by what we've been doing, and he's the first person we ever heard say, it finally hit me one day that you know, the belief that they're gonna go out into the real world and the real world's gonna straighten them out.

 

And it suddenly hit me, no, they're gonna go out and change the real world.

 

Yeah.

 

And that's exactly what their goal was. It's, they say their goal is. So I asked my wife in January of 2018 if I could quit my job as a massage therapist. Eventually when it got to be too much and dedicate all of my effort and resources to fighting woke by figuring the role that I selected for myself.

 

I'm not like. I'm not showing up to a lot of policy fights. I have been to school board meetings, but I'm not like the guy that's, I'm not running like a protest or, community organizing.. I decided that I have a skill in reading this, understanding it, making sense of it, and communicating that to people.

 

So I decided that I was gonna step into this, the role of Rosetta Stone for woke, and that's what I can do. I can help other people decode this. so a lot of people think that my discussions at a high level, that the podcast is hard. What I mostly do is read primary sources to people and tell 'em what they mean.. But the fact is. I always saw myself as if I'm gonna be the Rosetta Stone, I've gotta put the cookies on the fourth shelf and I've gotta put not the very top shelf, but the one right below it, and I've gotta bring a ladder. And so that's what I try to do. So I, people are like, James dumb it down.

 

I'm like, Nope. Your job, I bring the ladder, the cookies are there. You get the cookies, you distribute them. That's the way that I've envisioned my role. That's what I've sought to do. I think I do it well. When I try to dumb it down, I have to ask Grok for help. I'm not very good at it.

 

Yeah. Yeah,

 

Grok actually does an okay job with it, but then I take the thing grok gives me and then I edit it and make it harder again, so it's correct.

 

And there's just something wrong with me. The math in me, I don't know. And at any rate,

 

I think that the obstacle a lot of the time isn't so much that you can't explain the concepts. I think a big part of the barrier for most people is just the language. Like math is a different language.

 

Yeah.

 

It's a different language.

 

This is a different language.

 

And there's a lot of concepts and a lot of definitions and a lot of words that people just,

 

thousands.

 

Yeah, they just,

 

thousands

 

don't. And so they're, it's real. It's really, it can feel like, or sound like speaking a different language and you have to get in there and acquaint yourself with that and be able to and again, like I said, I had a little bit of a leg up maybe on other people to a point, simply because I was lucky enough to submerse myself in some of that education.

 

But I think that's very,

 

I'll give you a taste of this. That's very helpful.

 

And you have to use that language. You can't, not you have to use it. You have. What are you gonna do? You know?

 

So like in postmodernism, which you mentioned, which is a very mysterious and complicated thing. they focus on this kind of a thing called discourses. By the way, that's part of the reason I named my company New Discourses.

 

I didn't make that connection.

 

At any rate, the discourses what are discourses? Well, in general, it's how things are talked about, how people talk about things and what they're talking about, but they mean something more specific.

 

And I had, I'm about to do something very dangerous. I'm about to try to use words to describe a complicated picture, which never goes well. And I do not have the picture to share with you because I don't remember where I saw it. But I had watched this YouTube video some years ago, and it was describing discourses.. And it basically looked like a big, complicated mathematical graph, like a spider web graph. Okay. Except in three dimensions and big and complicated, in every dot represents a word. And every line between the dots represents how that word relates to other words. And it was all just. You know?

 

And it wasn't a real map of language.. It was just a pictorial representation of what, of an idea they were trying to communicate. Dog would have a line that goes to cat under the idea of that they're animals or whatever, right? So that it was like thousands of dots.

 

It was very complicated, spectrally looking thing.

 

Yeah.

 

And what it showed was the exact, the dots with all the lines. Then it said that set of lines is the discourses, or the discourse. That's how things are talked about. And all the things you can talk about are the words and the connections between them are the discourse.

 

Then the video, they got rid of those lines and kept all the same dots. And you could tell that's what they did. And then they just put new lines and they're like, that's a different discourse. So the point that I wanna make is,. When you say it's a different language, it's actually a different discourse.

 

They're using a lot of specialist terminology, but they're also using a lot of your regular words.

 

Yes.

 

With different connections. Yes. Between the words.

 

Yes.

 

So that when you hear the words, you don't realize they fully mean something different.

 

Yes. Yes. And you think you know what they mean and you actually don't.

 

And then when their conclusions are so confusing to you, then you feel like you're just an idiot, because why doesn't it make sense to you?

 

And so what the difference is, and it took me a long time to figure this out, and I can actually say it succinctly now, but what I did first, what I did to understand that language was, believe it or not, I just started writing a dictionary of it.

 

It's. Partly done, there's like 200 entries that I finished and like 500 that I haven't done on new discourses. I call it translations from the Wokes. And I just created in Social Justice encyclopedia where I just went through their words and tried to explain to other people what they must mean by that word.

 

And what I boiled down from this, first of all, it's how I really got my head around how they think was by decoding as many other words as possible. And so like in our normal use of language, the discourses are actually defined by something, which is that the words are supposed to refer to things in reality.

 

So the idea is that the words correspond to real things. And the relations between the words are defined by real relationships between the words.

 

Yeah.

 

That is not how they order their discourses. It took me so long to figure this out. The North Star for us is reality.

 

Yeah.

 

The North Star for them.

 

Is political power. So all of their words have to be understood in how they create relations of power between. them, if you have two dots that are connected, that dot that's connected, or the line that's connected them defines a power relationship.

 

Yeah.

 

In some way or another. So every single word has to somehow have an explanation that boils down to their convoluted ideas of systemic power.

 

And until I figured that out, it was literally, it's like trying to learn Korean where you can't read their alphabet.

 

Wow.

 

And isn't that the same reason why you make so many connections, draw so many straight lines back to Marxism for the same reason that's the same because they've got the same ultimate goal in mind.

 

That's, that connection, that political power is what's driving it, is what makes them all similar and what draws a line to them back to Marxism.

 

Yeah. That in every single possible trail of citations. the other thing that I did was I started reading this stuff, I was trying to figure out feminism, then we were trying to write the grievance papers and then I was trying to make sense of this to communicate it.

 

And it's like peeling an onion in a sense.. And it's just instead of reading the history of this particular branch of philosophy from the beginning and moving forward, oh, here's John Jacque Russo, and here's what Kant did with him, and here's what Hegel did with that. Now we get to Marx through Feuerbach.

 

Instead of that, I started on the other end, I started at the end I started in, pop articles in Cosmopolitan,

 

Uhhuh.

 

And then it's who's the feminist they referenced, what did she say? Who did she cite?. Oh, we are, now we're back to Fuko. Here's all these postmodernists.

 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

But somehow there's this other piece that I can't find and the citation trail gets a little bit wacky, but they all talk about Marx here and there, but they seem to be against Marx. And then somehow, actually my friend Michael Fallon, I was with him and I'm talking about, I was just postmodernism and postmodernism at the time.

 

 

 

Yeah.

 

Back in 2019. We were in a hotel together in Orlando and he said you need to read Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marusa. And I'm like, never heard of it. Not relevant. Is it postmodern? No. Not relevant. In fact, it's critical theory, which we had been convinced by a critical theorist that understood postmodernism, who was helping us understand it at the time that critical theory wasn't relevant, which is completely wrong.

 

, I don't know if it was a lie or just a complete distortion. I can work out arguments for both.

 

Yeah.

 

As to how he could have made this argument, honestly. Or not. But at any rate, Mike sends me a link to repressive tolerance. I end up going to my room and just sitting there a little early in the hotel, don't have anything to do, start reading It. takes about an hour and a half to read the thing all the way top to bottom for yourself. It's not easy.

 

Yeah.

 

And I'm reading it and I'm like, holy crap. This is like everything. But then we're busy for the rest of the trip, like two, three days.. And on the flight home, I read all of it. I actually get to the bottom.

 

And the bottom is where he is takes the mask off. It's this is gonna require censorship and prec censorship and violence is on the table and all. I'm like, holy moly, and I was like, we live in this guy's world. This is the world they created. And all of a sudden I knew that critical theory was relevant.

 

And the second I knew critical theory was relevant. That's neo Marxism. Yeah. Therefore marxisms on the table. And then I had this weird humiliating moment because up to that point I had been arguing against Jordan Peterson's. Characterization of it as being postmodern neo Marxism.

 

And I was like, that's a lot of words. And I was against the neo-Marxist element. Then I read Marcuse and I'm like, it's neo Marxism that's using postmodern tools. It's postmodern neo Marxism

 

crap. You know? And it's like Jordan was right.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And, but he wasn't getting through to me, but he was right.

 

So at any rate, I was able to go back and listen to Jordan again with a new set of ears and a new set of eyes and started to piece it together. But once you find them, it's a straight line to Marx.. There's no avoiding it.. And then you can start to see the marx, the postmodernists hid it better, but you can see the marx all through how they think.

 

And these newer people, it's all kinds of, all over the place there.

 

Yeah.

 

But they do this citation game where they won't cite the like really bad guy. They don't want you to know they worked with. They use all of his ideas, they just attribute it to somebody else who also used their ideas. There's this weird citation game.

 

It's like they know they're hiding their tracks sometimes.. And it takes somebody like Paulo Frady, who I, dove into heavily for education.. For me to really open my eyes and be like, this guy's sighting, like Stalin

 

wow.

 

All the way out. What's going on?

 

Wow.

 

No, these guys are just commies and, they've just changed their shirts.

 

It's otherwise, they're literally just communists. And now what we saw on the news the other day, just to draw a metaphor, that Xi Jinping changed his shirt back. So he took off his business suit and put on the frog collar Mao military suit for his meeting that he had with Putin and Kim Jong-un the other day.

 

Oh, I did not know that.

 

Mm-hmm. The world noticed.

 

Okay. Just as a sideline, as a quick question, then we'll get back to the mainline questions. This is just my own bit of curiosity. So would you say that critical race theory has developed into what we might call its own worldview? Or would you say it's like a tool set that can get layered on other approaches?

 

Both. Is it. It's both.

 

Oh, okay. Okay.

 

It's both, but, I thought you were gonna ask me a different question. I was anticipating your question. I was like, is it that or is it Marxism? And I'm like, but it's just derivative to Marxism., It's literally Marxism. Just reconceptualized.. But it is its own worldview, right? So you have a massive social system. I'm think of white supremacy that pervades everything that was created by white people.. And the point was, in order to elevate themselves as a race and to subjugate other people as a race, which gets. Codified by a woman named Cheryl Harris, for example, in 93, she wrote a paper called Whiteness as Property, and she explains that whiteness was established by white people for the purposes of white supremacy, et cetera, as a form of private property that only white people have or can extend to others like Irish or Germans or Jews or whoever they wish.

 

Yeah.

 

Or even to model minorities like Asians or so whatever, but never to black people and never to the fully indigenous.. Right?. And but she conceives of it actually as a form of what Karl Marxs in the Communist manifesto calls bourgeois private property. She even says that it's a form of bourgeois private property, which the Communist manifesto is abundantly clear that the he says communism can be summarized in a single sentence, abolished private property,

 

all private property.

 

 

 

After he says that by private property, he means bourgeois private property.

 

Yep. Yep.

 

By which he means capital.

 

Yes.

 

So it means your own private property that you are able to and allowed to go invest. In other words, you can take your pile of money to go make a bigger pile of money and, that's what's gotta go away., I was like,

 

. I was like, wow. It's just the same worldview, but instead of the evil hand of capitalism and the bourgeois values that uphold it.. We now have the evil specter of white supremacy and the, the values of whiteness, which are just western hegemonic values.

 

They're just literally the regular

 

because it's telling you what to believe and what's right and wrong and what your values need to be and how

 

that's right.

 

Life

 

and who the,

 

it's a whole

 

who the angels and who the demons are.

 

It's yes.

 

It's a fully, in the psychological terminology,

 

what the purpose of life is

 

a fully split world of view.. It's, there's anti-racist and there's racist. That's it. So there the people who are dedicated to a communist revolution against the racist regime that exists today. And then there are a racial communist revolution. And then there are the people who wish to preserve the status quo, who are all racists.

 

And so there's no in between. They explicitly tell you there's no not racist.

 

Yeah.

 

And so

 

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

 

It's a total worldview.

 

Oh yeah.

 

But it's also a package of tools that you can pick up, which is called racial critique or racial consciousness raising that you can then use in specialized circumstances layered into other things.

 

And one of the things I loved that Jordan Peterson cleared up for me too, is that when you adopt one of these other worldviews too, what you're really doing is putting yourself in this position of moral superiority and you get to look down on everybody else because you have it all figured out. I loved how you laid that out in this education book in terms of, there's, the people that know and the people that don't know. It's that same kind of

 

Yeah, no of racist versus anti-racist,

 

knower versus

 

we're the enlightened, those not allowed to know, and you're the idiots and so we need to enlighten you and we're on top.

 

And postmodernism works the same way.

 

They're the people who assign themselves the power to define what the discourses look like, what meaning actually is. And then there are all the people who have different meanings who aren't recognized because, they're kept outside of the power structure.

 

It's just language games.

 

It's the same thing. Yeah, that's right. It's just the same pattern over and over again. It's dis just disappointingly not creative.

 

That's true actually.

 

How, this is a question for you. Yeah. How savvy with your audience can I use gnostic terminology and not lose people? Because some people might get this and some people might not.

 

But if it's just gonna lose everybody, there's not a lot of point in taking this little digression. It's very short though.

 

You could try it.

 

Okay, so very brief summary of gnosticism that will satisfy nobody. Gnosticism is a ancient heretical belief that the God of the creator of the world is actually a demon that's called the demi urge, which comes from the Greek degos, which means builder.

 

And so he's not the real God. There's a real high God behind that. So we're actually trapped in a prison in our own existence in the world that was created by a demonic force called the demi urge. And we can wake up to the truth that there's a real higher God beyond the God that everybody thinks is God, the God of this world.. Okay. So that's the idea. When you get into various schools of thought within the gnostic thinking structure, you have these kind of lesser demons, under the demi urge called Archons

 

Uhhuh.

 

Okay. So what's happened with the whole Marxist philosophy as we talked about at the Dallas workshop you came to

 

is that it's all socio agnostic rather than there being a spiritual realm that's split into this, high god, that's all good versus the demon that we all perceive that builds the world that we live in. It's not spiritual any longer now. It's social. So there are social high gods that we have that are beyond our access, but then there's a social demon God that's built out the systems of power that we all live within.

 

So each of those systems of power is like an Archon. And so systemic racism is an Archon, so critical race theory is addressing one of the Archons of the gnostic.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

That's one way to think about it.

 

Yeah. Could you say within that framework that it was something like

 

that the, the misogyny or the patriarchy. Would that be, within the framework that you're talking about? That's like an Archon that's something that's controlling us.. That's the devil. God,

 

that's exactly right.

 

Okay. So that's what you mean. So that's an establishment that we can't get outside of that's controlling us.

 

That's the devil.

 

Yeah. But the Archons are like, they're like,

 

and the patriarchy is controlling everything we get to do.. We have to fight it. And so CRTs our tool, so we're gonna fight this. And it's established as the reality. The patriarchy is a real thing. Like we can prove it.

 

Here's our proofs. Let's use this really, this really terrible, but, they say helpful tool of CRT or whatever it is mm-hmm. To fight against the Archons.

 

That's right. So it, yeah. It's like the demi urge overall is like. The evil builder, god of the systems of the world..

 

 

 

But the Archons. Are like his emissaries. Yeah. They work in specific domains. There's theon that might govern the wind and there's theon that might govern the waters or whatever else. Or that governs the human heart or whatever it happens to be. And so each of these systemic power dynamics, classism, racism, sexism, patriarchy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is like one of those like lesser.

 

Beings in this. Grand gnostic prison that we all live in.. But that's why they all act like we've been imprisoned in some world., We didn't want, we don't wanna live in, and they freak out, like their rights and freedoms are being taken away from them.

 

Yeah.

 

When the, all that's happening is literally they're not being expanded into places that are not even rights or freedoms.

 

It's mind blowing to listen to because when you listen for very long, not even very long you start to realize that, that, for people who are really entrenched in this. They really believe that like somebody somewhere had the skills, the ability, the resources the forward thinking enough to have intentionally built this whole thing like that.

 

People really did sit in their dark corners and figure out how to build this patriarchy and that it's intentionally attacking them. It's crazy. And then they, one of the things that we talk about our, Academy a lot is victim mentality., When I look at any one of these I don't know, whether you frame it as woke or critical race theory or whatever, what they're trying to do is draw everyone into that drama triangle. They wanna position the world as if it's all persecutor and victims and rescuers and they wanna position all of us as victims and be the rescuers and the whole model is broken because that whole drama doesn't work.

 

It, everybody wants to be the victim. Everybody's just piling on top to be the victim.. And that's why, you do that in your home, everybody's fighting. 'cause everybody wants to be the one that doesn't have to take responsibility and doesn't have to change things. And there's the big, bad whatever out there.

 

And to me it's like it at a very personal level, it's so dangerous because it causes people to evade personal responsibility. I feel like at its root, that's a lot of, how it deconstructs the human deconstructs the family is. When you really embrace it and you really become part of it.

 

You don't. You don't have to change as a person. You don't have to own your crap. You don't have to ask people, tell 'em you're sorry. You don't have to forgive 'em. You don't have to show up different, you don't have to do your job. You just get to complain.. And moan and gripe.

 

I'll just tell you, not to make it still weird, but this is the gnostic thing, right?

 

So the gnostic thing is that the idea is that we're actually perfectly spiritual beings. In fact, we're identical with God. We're not separated from this high God, but that we're all imprisoned in this material, crappy, fallen, fake world.. And so what actually enlightens you knowing your true spiritual nature as an imprisoned creature who's been flung into the world to use the Heger term for it?

 

Yeah.

 

What awakens you to that is suffering, you're suffering, that you're not expressing yourself as you truly should be, as a fully liberated being, which means a full, integrated part of God. Again, that suffering in the world, which makes you hate the world, becomes the currency. So this is why it's the same exact mentality.

 

Everything you just described just is exactly the results of that applied to social dynamics instead of to a high spiritual, cult. Literally a spiritual cult. Yeah. And this is why it's such a profound spiritual sickness that it causes in people is because they are enacting spiritual sickness through social means, not realizing that they're engaging in this fundamental spiritual disease. Where you've now inverted

 

Yeah.

 

The order of spirituality.. In your own

 

right is wrong

 

and glorious belief that you in fact are continuous with the most high.

 

That you have the answers and that you're gonna rescue the world. And

 

They don't get it. They have false consciousness, they think everything's real, not fallen in crappy, in an image and a,

 

yeah.

 

Mundane and not spiritual. They don't get it. You have to wake 'em up. They have to be woke.

 

Yeah. It's crazy. I did a YouTube channel and I used to do book reviews and one time I did a communist manifesto book review. And, my particular copy had a really nice introduction and then that introduction, he talked about what I believe to be the truth, that you can look at Marxism as a religion and that it has many of the tenets of a traditional religion.

 

It gives you a purpose in life. It tells you who you are. It tells you what you're supposed to devote your life to. It tells you what's right and wrong. And he says it also invokes the same kind of religious fervor, the kind of fervor and passion that has been traditionally evoked with, a God relationship.

 

And I got so much crap, so many people making comments. You're such an idiot. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. Why don't you study real Marxism? Why don't all this kind of stuff. I just still blown away by the fact that did, I guess some people maybe it took and it, they agreed, but I still can't believe how many people were just so averse to that, to looking at it that way.

 

'cause that made absolute sense to me.

 

Yeah. People flip out about it, but it's. The word religion has to be used with some caution here because do you consider heretical cults religions?. But they certainly get adhered to with religious fervor and under a judicial definition of religion for like establishment clause purposes.

 

It meets the definition, which is, by the way,

 

just read wild swans.. And you'll see exactly what it felt like, what the stupid meetings and the confessions and the, anyway,

 

that's right. So I don't think that's crazy, but I don't know where it goes. But I can't look at it other than not just as religious in its orientation, but specifically as a recreation of gnostic cults, which gets me in all kinds of trouble.

 

I was getting made fun on the internet for this today. I get made fun of almost every day for this.

 

But otherwise, why eradicate all other religions in the first place? Because you are trying to tap into the same emotions that religions are and you're competing with them, so you have to.

 

That's why, they're always, as soon as communism really takes hold. Anyway, that's a whole other We're getting off. Yeah.

 

It's a whole thing, but it's a hundred percent right.

 

Okay. Let me ask you a couple, that's just for my own curiosity.. Okay. So, here's a big question.

 

You now have been at this long enough that you have gotten a lot of grief. So my question is, why do you keep doing it?

 

Yeah, one does wonder that sometimes, no, actually I'm very blessed to get to hear somebody else give the answer that you knows the right answer.

 

So then you know what the answer is and you can just say this guy said this.. And you don't have to think of your own 'cause he said it.. And so I was at an event, I don't know if you've heard of the film that I helped produce a couple years ago called Beneath Sheep's Clothing.

 

I heard you mentioned it, but I've not seen it.

 

Yeah. It's pretty good. I'll say, it's a good film. Yeah. And I think it had a pretty good. It made a pretty good splash last year when we put it out. But this would've been about a year earlier and I was out in Utah at a fundraiser to try to raise some of the initial, production cost money for the film and which turned out to be a successful fundraiser is very good.

 

Nice.

 

But, one of the other guys who was helping, who helped organize this fundraiser and, put the event on and all this had just suffered a close family friend dying. And their funeral was that day, earlier in the same day as the event.

 

So we had this event planned and then somebody dies and then he has to go to a funeral in the afternoon. And then at 5:30 we have a barbecue and an event.., I mean, he is a great guy. He wasn't on his normal emotional level, is what I would phrase this as. He wasn't like wild or weird or broken down or anything.

 

But as you can imagine, he's got a different perspective he brings to the table.. So he stands up and he ends up having this kind of like emotional moment where he says what he wants to say about the film and why it's important. But you can tell he took what would've been like 15 minutes of remarks and shrunk it to three.

 

And then he was like, my friend just died and it had me thinking all day and basically, why should you support this film? The reason you should support this film is the same thing I was thinking about. And it was a little awkward, but what he said was, I was thinking, why do I do this?

 

Yeah.

 

And he is as soon as I asked myself, he's talking about how he's driving in the car back from the funeral. Why do I do this? Why am I in this fight? Why do I get up every day? And he gets his own grief, right? Why do I do this? And so he's immediately came to my mind, my kids.

 

Right. I do it for my kids. Yeah. 'cause they're the next generation.. And then he thought, no, it can't be that. It's too selfish. It's too small, actually.. And then he was like, I do it for everybody's kids for the whole next generation. And then he thought, no, I care about that, but I don't care enough about that.

 

You know?. It's it's too abstract in a way.

 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

And so then he is I do it for my family. And he had the same kind of roadblock. I do it for my myself. And that wasn't right. And he finally said that he, I don't remember. He had this whole progression of things.

 

It went on for a little bit, but then he finally says, it finally came to me. It struck me that I do this because I know in every bit of my heart that if I didn't do this. I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror in the morning when I wake up. Every bit of my soul tells me every single day I have to do this.

 

So I get asked this question a lot. Why do you put up with the trouble? Why do you put up with the fighting? Why do you put up with the doxing, the smearing, the slander, the harassment, the bullying, the every other thing, cancellations from every which way?

 

Yeah.

 

And then just keep going. And the dumb answer is, I don't know how not to, and I don't mean that in a stupid way.

 

Yeah.

 

I don't know how to live with myself if this isn't what I'm doing.

 

Yeah.

 

I could just go get like a normal job and just enjoy my life. I've got a great place to live. I, have a comfortable life. I have a great family. Like I could just move on.. And then it's no, I couldn't because every single day I am gonna think about this stuff.. Be still working out the ideas, I'm probably gonna end up doing the reading again, and then I'm gonna get pulled back into it. 'cause I gotta tell somebody about what I read holy crap. And so I do it because I have to like, and I don't know why I have to, I just have to, I couldn't live with myself if I wasn't.

 

And when you have that feeling, trouble coming your way doesn't matter that much. It's okay, so what? It's just part of the process, it's not fun or pleasant. Like I have better and worse moments, but at no point is there time to pack up and do something else.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

The only time that I have any doubt of that kind whatsoever is when I wonder if the work that I'm doing is effective. At which point it's not should I quit, it's. Should I completely retool and figure out how to be effective and just basically not put anything out until I figure that out. And like that's just a matter of pragmatics though. That's not a, it's not a fundamental deviation from actually doing the thing. And then I realized I've got a limited set of talents here and I've got a highly refined capacity to do what I'm doing, and I don't see it anywhere else, honestly, except in a very small places and a small number of people.

 

And so I better just kinda keep going and doing what I'm doing.. And, we'll see where the chips fall.

 

Yeah. And at this point, the more that you know the better. Resource you are, the more connections you can create for people and the more you can help them make sense of, and I know you contribute, when there's been lawsuits and other things like that.

 

It's not just your books and your writing and your events, but there's a lot of that. Yeah,

 

I've done a lot of stuff.

 

Yeah. Done a lot of stuff. Before we finish up, I wanna touch on something that head a little bit different direction for a minute, because. I got turned on through Locke 20 years ago.

 

He introduced me to the natural law. I felt cheated 'cause I never got it in school.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And then I started making connections to, oh it's in our declaration and oh, it's been talked about forever. And so that's the lens through which I work with women, that there are things that are objectively true.

 

They are always true. They're true for everyone. There are things that are written on our heart. That's one way to talk about it. And the thing that you say a lot, that I quote a lot is that reality is what you bump up against when your beliefs are wrong or some variation on that theme.

 

And then when we were at this event, your ending presentation was a lot about what truth is and why it matters and how, we get back to that. Can you just talk just for a minute to whoever might. Be listening about why you believe that there's objective truth, and what you mean by this reality is what you bump up against when your belief is wrong.

 

And why? Why all of that matters. Why you, why that's part of what you champion.

 

It's just what the deepest philosophical question in the world. Okay, cool.

 

Yeah, you're welcome.

 

Yeah. No, why is reality, right? That's like the philosophical question.

 

But why do you even, we have just talked about worldviews that even reject reality.

 

I mean I'm saying I guess didn't used to be a choice to believe in it, but it is today. And so for you, why. Why do those things matter? Why do you talk about things in that way? What is truth to you? What is reality to you?

 

Sure. What I don't want to do is turn this into a long discussion about the philosophy of science, of why I think that realism is the correct philosophical position.

 

Realism being the belief that reality exists external to us and is objective to each of us.. A very simple explanation that doesn't satisfy everybody, but it satisfies a lot of people.. Is that, let's say that I set up a just a thought experiment. I set up a room and there's nothing in the room, but a chair and a table and something on the table.

 

What does something is, does not matter. Okay. And now a hundred people randomly selected from whatever walks of life you want, I don't care what walks of life.. You could even have a dog among the list to the degree that the dog is capable of doing things as a dog.

 

Sure.

 

And we put them one after another to go into the room.

 

And pretend they have a pad of paper and a pencil besides the object and it's write down what's on the table. And then they come out and the door's closed. Nobody can see inside. Nobody knows what was, we get the paper, we have all 100 people go, including we can even video how the dog interacts with the thing on the table.

 

If it doesn't, I can imagine it's set up so the dog might sniff it or whatever. Right, the thing is, every single one of them to within some range of error or tolerance would describe the same thing.

 

Yeah.

 

Right.. So they would therefore perceive the same thing?

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

And it wouldn't matter if we picked this random sample or that random sample, and it wouldn't matter if, we were using other tools like different kinds of, maybe we scan the room with light, which is photons.

 

Maybe we scan the room with electrons, maybe we scan the room with, protons or neutrons or any of these other kind of part. Doesn't matter how we do it, we're going to get a bunch of descriptions or whatever of the thing that all have consilience, they all line up in some way or another. And the simplest, in my opinion, explanation for how that's possible is that we actually live in a world where things are real and they're outside of our imaginations, they're outside of our heads.

 

We can get into complicated things like, no, we're a brain and a vat. But then you have to explain how you, your whole world is your brain and your vat. And somehow every other person who has as much will to do whatever it is that they want to or would still manages to perceive the thing the same way that you perceive it.

 

So it's just a lot easier to just cut the Bs as. Mr. T once said he gave, he made a series of funny videos back in the day. Him giving basic advice and one of them was Mr. T on public speaking and he's cut out the jibber jabber. Say what you got to say. That's all reality is real, is just cutting out the jibber jabber,.

 

It's saying what you got to say, that's all. So that does take a modicum of faith to believe that reality's real and that we're perceiving an external reality.. But because of the fact that every single external observer given a simple enough task to observe something will give conciliatory answers to one another. It's just way easier. To assume that reality's real.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And you know this, again, without getting into a long description of the philosophy of science or even possibly why human beings have sense apparatuses and why they work the way that they do, why they have fidelity, blah, blah, blah.

 

All that's a fun and exciting exploration. We could go down those roads. I have things to say, but the point is, we would all basically agree on the features of reality pretty closely, which is pretty hard to explain unless it's just actually there.

 

Yeah.

 

And okay. So once we decide that reality's actually there truth becomes this.

 

Thing that somehow represents that which is in reality. In other words, I subscribe to what philosophers call the correspondence theory of truth. Those ideas that correspond faithfully to reality are true.

 

Yeah.

 

Does that mean that we know them accurately? No. Does it mean that our ideas are not ideas, but are actually real?

 

No, our ideas are still ideas, but when they accurately describe reality to a Fair enough, degree.. I talked about these things in the workshop.. I talked about the big four operational criteria by which we can judge a model of reality,. Does it have predictive power?

 

Does have explanatory power.

 

Yeah. I love that.

 

Is it parsimonious?. No extra assumptions, blah, blah, blah.

 

Yeah.

 

Whatever they are, because, I have to write those ones down. But. Because we can then, make a judgment about the reality and say that well, probably the thing is real.

 

And what is true about the thing is that, which corresponds to what, everybody, not most people, everybody would, if their sense faculties are working.. Within reasonable tolerance would conclude about it. Including even, you know, animals and other things. If I put a plant on the table and a snail in the room, you're never gonna see the snail, flying or something.

 

It's, if it's crawling on the plant, it's always gonna be on the plant. So it's even it's sense of touch is connected to the object really physically being there.

 

Yeah.

 

It's like, it's not just floating near it or something.. So that's just the best explanation.. So for me, truth then is what corresponds to reality.

 

Yeah.

 

With reality being something that's out there.. This also takes a drop of faith, but then it's what do you do with the fact? This is a deep philosophical question. Like I said, this is an important question in the philosophy of science.. And epistemology.. But what do you do with the fact that okay, you said the thing on the table is a plant.

 

Right. But you could call it a different name. You could specify what kind of plant it is. You could play this stupid game, like tree is tree in English and it's arable in Spanish. Sure. Like you could do, why does that. Word or the idea that word represents. How do you know that's what's real?

 

It's easier to deal with that with like fundamental particles. If you look, 'cause they're not a lot going on with them, but if you have a proton and you fire it at a thing, you can describe its behavior fantastically. You can tell exactly what it's, you can guess it's momentum. You can tell how fast it's going.

 

You can do all kinds of things about it, right?. You can see how it scatters and you can be very precise. You can do a lot of stuff.. Very accurately. How do you know it's actually a proton? You don't there's some object that we agree to call or phenomenon actually. Maybe physical phenomenon.

 

We agree to call a proton.. And it definitely exhibits these behaviors that can be explained by these properties. So that's called a model. So there's an entire school of thought. It was created by Stephen Hawking and his. A colleague, Leonard Mlodinow, and he wrote about it in a book called The Grand Design, if you wanna read it for yourself, called Model Dependent Realism.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I had the good luck one time of running into Leonard Mlodinow himself. Ah. And the Caltech physicist, and I talked to him about model dependent realism.. And he was like why don't you explain to me what you think it is? And I explained to him what I think it is, and he is that's a better explanation than I would've given.

 

I think you understand it. I believe in this. This is a lot to say.. What I mean is I believe there's reality. I believe the best we can do is create models of reality. Those models have a degree of accuracy and correspondence.. And at that level, you can compare them one to the other, but it doesn't matter if the actual contents of the model are.

 

Literally true that a proton is literally a proton instead of some phenomenon that happens to exactly act the way the thing we describe in this model as a proton. That doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. And that's basically the idea. Okay? So once you get to that point, you can agree that reality exists.

 

That reality has certain principles that reality behaves in certain ways. So there's all of physical truth just falls out of that. The reality is out there, it's discernible.. It's not always easy. We can apply reason, logic, inference, deduction.. All these logical tools to try to figure out what the data are telling us.

 

When we do experiments, we can rule out certain explanations. We can posit other explanations out at the fringes. Like in cosmology there's 30 explanations 'cause nobody knows which one's. For sure. Yet. And they're competing with one another.

 

Yeah.

 

But what about things like moral truth level.

 

That's what I was gonna say. Yeah. How do you That was human experience. Yeah.

 

There are different ways to do this. One way is the natural law way, which is the direction I'm gonna take in away that you might not expect. The other way is the religious way, which in my opinion is fine, but also a shortcut.

 

Which is to say, that the law is written on every human heart.. And so in better language, honestly, what we have is general revelation to work things out in special revelation to help us do it.

 

Yeah.

 

And that's, in my opinion, a shortcut if we try to take that off the table to get the harder answer.. My answer usually starts with this very weird sentence that I end up saying to a lot of people who never seem to understand what I'm talking about. I even said it in the back of the room to a guy at the workshop in Dallas. Is that human beings are abounded set. How do I know that?

 

Because if we have our room that I was just describing and there's a person in the room

 

mm-hmm.

 

You're gonna know it's a person. If there's a chimpanzee in the room, instead, you wouldn't think it's a person.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

If there was a banana, you wouldn't think it's a person.. If it's a rock, you wouldn't think it's a person.

 

So there's only so many states in which matter, if we wanna be purely materialist about it can exist and that still be human. In other words, humanity is a bounded set.

 

Yeah.

 

Which. For whatever reasons be that evolution, be that creation, be that whatever the explanation for how we got here and how we are, whatever it is.

 

Yeah.

 

It's got ends. It only goes so far and then you're not that anymore.

 

There's something else. Okay. So we are some kind of a social species. We live not just in small bands, but in small bands that band together into larger bands.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Into communities, into even nations. And beyond, we have this very complicated, in the technical word for it is ultra sociality.

 

We are for whatever reason, an ultra social animal that has all these different properties. We have, our own brands of, we have needs, food, water, sleep, shelter, so on.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

We have. For whatever set of reasons in our sociality, a sense of fairness. We have a desire to, do well in the world.. We have actually capacity for cooperation.. Because we have the capacity for cooperation. We have the capacity to get cheated, therefore, we develop high intelligence to make sure that we can work with each other without getting cheated by each other. There are lots of reasons to believe that if you buy the evolutionary hypothesis, that's why humans are primarily so smart.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Was so that we can figure out how to work together and not get cheated by free riders. That would, that would basically be parasites on your tribe or your community.

 

Sure.

 

So you have to figure out what people's intentions are with what they're doing and why they're doing it, whatever that all, whatever the causes of all of that.. Maybe we're just created and that's the situation. Maybe we evolve this way, whatever the cause is.

 

Yeah.

 

That's defines a wide set of parameters.

 

Yeah.

 

By which we have to interact with each other and there are better and worse answers.. I'm not saying there are perfect answers. There are better and worse answers.. For how we're going to do that. We call that morality. Better answers are considered moral. And you can say moral in a local sense, like Islam has its set of values.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And then Christianity has a set of values. And western liberalism. Regardless of religion has a set of values.. But at the same time, there's still the fact that human societies, you can measure how well are they flourishing.. How productive are they can, how much are they developing?

 

You have enough information to look back,

 

can they feed everybody? Do they have to kill people they don't know how to deal with?

 

There are some pretty basic things and then there's some pretty sophisticated and complicated things where you can measure and say. Which of these sets of values actually promotes flourishing better?

 

Yeah.

 

And I know that some people are gonna recognize that this is a spinoff of Sam Harris's argument in the moral landscape.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Which people have accused of being kind of moral relativist. But what I think is that there might be multiple answers to what good morality is, but because humans are a bounded set, most of the right answers for most people, most of the time are going to overlap. Now, what does that mean for a culture that has completely different values and it's functioning, but maybe at a lower level?

 

Can you just say, take, some backwards tribe in Pakistan of, angry Muslims and transform them into liberal loving, western Christians. The answer is no, because it's really hard to change the way that people understand the world as a communist learned, you can't just change in one generation how people think about the world.

 

. How communities share and transmit knowledge, it has nothing to do with race, but has a ton to do with culture. Is that we share and transmit knowledge in different ways for different purposes. And tend to have very sticky cultural underpinnings that. It's like the weird conservative thing.

 

This is what we've done and it works and there might be something that works better, but by God, we're not messing up to find out. But the short answer is that there are moral truths because there are only so many. There might be more than one, but there are only so many good answers to these questions.

 

And it is very likely that there are actually optimal answers to these questions.. And I think the United States is one of these, this is what the point of my lecture was in some senses that the United States proves out that the principles of, voluntary exchange with safeguarded private property rights unlock abundance, prosperity, and wealth.

 

Period.. It doesn't matter who you're talking about, it doesn't matter where they're from.. This is a universal principle. So the, a value set that honors the ability to engage in voluntary exchange of secured private property. Is going to produce greater abundance, wealth and prosperity for the people who engage in it.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And it's just a fundamental. Fact, like another fact of human nature is that at the end of the day, as communal and ultra social and whatever, highfalutin and stuff, we are, we're also self-interested.

 

Yes.

 

Like number one is still number one. And you can say I'm religious. God is number one.

 

We know what we, you don't have to play word games with me. We all know what, looking out for number one means.. And it means you're taking care of yourself first.. And we're all self-interested. So what this weird system we have of, voluntary exchange and secured private property.

 

What allows me to do is to have a self-interested motive to help a stranger. If you have, I use the example of hammers. So if you have a loose nail on your house and I don't have, I don't care. It's not my problem. You need something to drive in that nail.. If I happen to be good at buying hammers, I don't have to know you.

 

I don't have to care about you. I don't have to care about your wall. I don't have to care about what you're doing about, I don't care about your problem, but you'll give me $20 for a hammer and I care about $20.. So now I am investing my time and resources to create the object that you need so that you can solve your problem without even knowing you or your problem or caring about it.

 

So all of a sudden, self-interest becomes mutual interest.

 

Yes.

 

It solves that problem. And so this kind of a system fits with our if you're Christian, you'll say, fallen human nature, where we're looking out for number one instead of number one.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Right? And so these are, again, I can, I did this in New Zealand, actually, this is very similar.

 

Talk to that portion of the presentation I gave in Dallas.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And I had the wherewithal in New Zealand, which I did not have in Dallas. After six lectures and being exhausted, but in, New Zealand, I had the wherewithal in front of this crowd to say all these principles about basically what amounts to free enterprise.

 

And why they produce wealth and abundance. And at the end was like, and obviously they have this huge issue with the racial issue with the Maori and the Pacifica and all of the different peoples. And I was like, and notice that what I just said is true for every single person. I didn't have to mention that it's more true for white people or Maori people or any race.

 

It doesn't matter.. It doesn't matter. So the fact that there are universally true things that produce greater abundance, flourishing and so on means that there must be some. Objective moral truths. The problem is that some values are socially constructed.. Sometimes for legitimate reasons, derivative to real stuff, and sometimes for completely arbitrary reasons.

 

Which is why I also think a principle of free inquiry allows you to say does that tradition that we have here really work?

 

Or is it just something we do because we do it?. Does it really work? And that requires free inquiry. 'cause otherwise, the second you say, what about this tradition, somebody cuts your head off because now you're a threat to the tribe.

 

So the second you have free inquiry, what you can do is you have, one of the big four operational criteria was optimal flexibility. Was the ability to abandon a bad idea. In favor of a better idea.

 

Yeah.

 

And if you have free inquiry, you can then say I don't know about this tradition. Then you can have a debate about it with violence not on the table, and discuss what is this real?

 

Is this actually, is there something better we could do? Can we do an experiment and find out, kind of test both of them ab test this and see what happens? And you can start to find better solutions to ways that you deal with, building the complex problem of how do you build and run and manage a society.

 

Yeah.

 

And history in some sense is this weird collection of, uncontrolled, unregulated experiments.. And how this is done. You have countries that have all these principles and they decide they're gonna have, I don't know, a great society program instituted by President Johnson.

 

Everything gets worse and you say, that was a mistake. We shouldn't do that anymore.

 

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's. So well said.

 

In other words, human nature exists that's the short version.

 

Yeah. Yeah. And we ignore it or go against it at our peril. That's really like

 

the hard part for it is that there are genuinely places for wiggle room within human nature.

 

Sure.

 

There are perfectly acceptable different ways to cut your hair. And style your hair.

 

Yes.

 

From one culture to another, and it literally doesn't matter.

 

Yeah. One of the things that I love to quote is from democracy in America. In the preface Tocqueville, it's like a letter to the French.

 

It's Hey I've written this book for you. Here's what I want you to think about., I can't give you the whole paragraph, but basically he says the idea is, what they're doing is working pretty well. And I really think we ought to follow the American model.

 

And he says, but we need to follow her principles, not the specifics of her laws, basically. And that kind of speaks to what you're saying here, that there are things, there are fundamental principles that made America work. And that's what Tocqueville recognized that France needed right at, mid 18 hundreds.

 

That's definitely what they needed. And if they were to embrace those, but do it the French way, 'cause you can do it the French Way and that's, that's what he understood. We can still be us.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

But those are objective, human, moral, societal, governmental truths, principles, however you wanna talk about them, that will just create flourishing if we'll just get behind them it, infuse them into our systems in whatever way we possibly can.

 

Yeah, it's that variation or variability on themes erected off of core universal and fundamental principles is actually at the basis for why I think things in the moral universe are true beyond obviously physical truths.. Which we had to waste time because we live in postmodernity now.

 

So somebody has to say that reality's not real. And how do you know? And what do you mean by real? What does is mean? How are we gonna rearrange our discourses so that I win The argument is what postmodernism is really about.

 

And that's for me where I feel like individual expression really comes in play.

 

Different cultures. We can have all of that individuality and we can have, culturally or individually or whatever as a society, we can be who we are, we can be the French, we can be the whatever. But we're not gonna thrive unless we accept that there are certain proper ways to bring about human flourishing and we've gotta get behind them.

 

Yeah. Human nature exists.

 

Yeah.

 

Also the physical world exists, or another way to say human.

 

And it's crazy that we have to defend that the hundred and fifty years ago. We wouldn't even have this conversation. It would've been what are you even talking about? Why are you even defending?

 

That's so common sense. Yeah. Okay, last question for you.

 

The reason is because academics didn't defend their turf properly and now we're all living in their I know their nightmare.

 

I know. There's this great, you know who Robert Hutchins and Mor Adler and all of them were University of Chicago, all that stuff.. There's this really great phrase in Robert Hutchins book he's looking back on the time when he was debating Dewey and all of that stuff was going on, and he says, at the time I really thought we were doing a good job. I really thought we were making headway. I really thought we were preserving the liberal tradition.

 

And I realize now that I was just a stopper in the bathtub. And it's a discouraging, it's sad actually, that, and it's hard not to feel that way sometimes. It's hard not to feel discouraged about where things are and to feel so small and to feel so insignificant, especially for all of us of us that aren't nearly as brilliant as you.

 

I would love to end by, and I don't know if maybe you need to think about this for a minute or whatever, but what could you say? What would you choose to say? To parents today, what is there 1, 2, 3 things that, this would be my recommendation for you. Whether it be something they could read, something they could watch, something they could do.

 

My answer is always educate yourself. Educate yourself. That's, we've got an academy. It's encourage our women to be lifelong learners. Try to point 'em to good resources. You've, you've been in this quite a lot, you have a very deep understanding of a lot of what's happening culturally.

 

So what advice would you give to the parents that are listening?

 

Without hesitation, the first thing to say is what you're doing matters. What you are doing actually matters. Especially as parents, you're raising the next generation.. So what you do for good matters and what you do for ill matters.

 

Where you decide to be lazy matters. Where you decide to be diligent matters, it makes a difference. There's this principle in the Moms for Liberty group of being joyful warriors. Not that they're the only people who ever thought of it, but obviously they've made it a big part of their brand.

 

And the one of the founders at the time who, she's moved on now is Tiffany Justice. And she said that she's a mother, right? She's I have four kids.

 

Yeah.

 

I don't wanna be angry all the time. I don't want them to lose their mother to my political advocacy. I need to be present for them. I need to be a smile on my face.

 

In a good mood, I can't be angry and miserable and frustrated all the time. So what you're doing matters. Your children are watching, your community is watching, your children are watching. So how you engage matters that you are, for you guys, lifelong learners matters. And in fact, that's related to that is, Zu and Art of War says, and I don't butcher it, but the gist is if you know your enemy and you know yourself, you don't need to fear any battle. If you only know yourself, but you don't know your enemy, for every battle you win, you'll also lose one. And then he says, if neither your enemy nor yourself. Then he basically says, you're gonna succumb in every battle.

 

You're gonna get your butt handed to you, right?. Lifelong learning, I think is actually key, but let's focus it. You need to know your enemy. And you need to know yourself. So what's your enemy? This the stuff that's coming in trying to disturb your way of life, and what is your self, it's your way of life.

 

So that means, who are we as a people that you know, politically, culturally, economically. You have to know those foundations. You have to, teach your children, those foundations. You have to increase in your understanding by teaching your children those foundations and engaging in them.

 

Who are we spiritually? If you're a person of faith, that's very important part of who you are and a very important part of who you're teaching your children to be.. The raising, educating, and discipling of children are the three kind of things that are usually brought up as the core functions of parents.

 

And so you need to be engaged in that, but that means you need to understand it. So, if you want to be on the. Avant garde of making a difference. You need to know who you are.. Politically, economically, socially. You need to understand the tenets of your country, the tenets of your faith.

 

The tenets of the long tradition in which of prosperity that we're all embedded. There's a lot to know about yourself that we've been able to take on cruise control for a lot of time. A lot of homeschool parents are not, but other parents, a lot of everybody is just taking it on cruise control.

 

Yeah. So there's a lot of fun stuff to do and know yourself and then knowing your enemy, like it depends on how you want to engage in the battle. Right. You have to prepare your kids for the road that they're going to walk one way or the other.. You can't go out and change the road.

 

Not much. You can change it a little, like your advocacy does matter. It can make a difference, but for the most part, you've gotta prepare your kids to walk the road. They're in this. Like we were just laughing about we live in this stupid postmodern world where these stupid arguments about what words mean, and if reality's real come up where everything's like race and gender all the time.

 

Yeah,

 

I know. You don't wanna engage with, that's not part of you want your kids to have a normal childhood. Sorry, that ship sailed. You have to engage them. We're very fortunate you could say, I just want my kid to have a normal childhood. Let's go back 400 years.

 

And I think there shouldn't be famines. No. You have to teach your kids to be ready for the famine when it comes. And it turns out right now what you have to teach your kids to be ready for is political warfare and brainwashing. Unfortunately.. But at least they're not as likely. Who knows what could happen if it goes bad to have to weather a famine, right?

 

So you have to prepare your kids for the road, which means you also have to learn. if All you wanna do is just tend to your own garden, your own children. You still have to learn some of the stuff.. But if you want to engage in advocacy, if you want to try to go be a part of a group that's making a difference, if you want to get involved at the local level in politics or just if you just want to have even like a Bible study that's culturally informed or a civics study,. It's, imagine the exact same thing as a Bible study, except you're doing like the Declaration of Independence.. PS by the way, a lot of people are surprised when they hear this. You can do that. It's allowed, right? It's like the idea of getting together and studying

 

called the book club goes all the way back to Benjamin Franklin.

 

Change the world with the book club..

 

 

 

All of that stuff. You have to enrich and understand if you wanna do that well, you have to be able to enrich and understand in comparison to the world that we actually live in.

 

Yeah. Which means unfortunately, you gotta learn some woke crap. So I, as you said educate. So you know, you matter. You need to get educated. A lot of kind of broad principles, like the goal of this thing is to make you despair, to make you want to quit. How do you not, you can't.

 

So how do you do? You can't quit for your kids, let 'em watch you quit. Yeah. That's great, mom.. So what do you do? Whether it's faith in your religious faith in God, whether it's faith in your country, whether it's faith in, just the principles that your family or the tradition.

 

Like you need that and you need to renew it, and you need to intentionally take measures to renew that. In other words, it's keep yourself healthy so that you can mentally, emotionally,. Physically, spiritually.. So that you can nourish others.. Is a really big thing.. There, there's lots more stuff, that could be said. I literally, I think I told you before we started, I am literally writing a book about this and there's 70 things. Oh, excited. And I don't wanna just start rattling them all off.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And I could tell you the title, but I don't have one yet, so I don't know what the title of the book is.. I can't tease you with it enough. We haven't got that far.. We're just gonna write it first.. And there's principles in there love the truth, always do the right thing, even when there's consequences actually. Especially when there's consequences,

 

I also have very practical advice if you wanna be useful in the public policy or community. In that legalist way, learn to read legislation.

 

Yeah.

 

Learn to read woke, like we said, it's another language, another set of discourses.. You can't peel apart the document your kid's school sent home, unless you can read for keywords and buzzwords and decode what they mean.

 

So learn to read it and do the reading. But yeah, mostly my advice is just general and generic. Your kids are number one, you need to take care of them, and you need to remember that what you do matters. It doesn't matter how small you are.. Right. So I give this, talk.

 

Sometimes it's this really inspiring thing I say, people cry. It's exciting. So nobody is gonna crying. But one of my favorite scenes, and this is dorky, but one of my favorite scenes in Lord are the rings. Is when the tree people just went and, spoilers are coming. So the tree people just got really mad and went and destroyed the evil fortress of Orthanc.

 

. Right. And Isengard. So they couldn't destroy Orthanc actually, but they destroyed Isengard. So the tree people just did their thing. And then the wizard Gandalf is explaining what happened. And what happened was that these two hobbit characters, Merry and Pippin get captured by the bad orcs and dragged off and they escape into the forest in a dramatic scene.

 

And then they meet the tree people and they tell the tree people what's going on in the world. The tree people get pissed off and they go to destroy this thing. And so Gandalf's trying to relate this to other people and he says, I, in his very Gandalf way, I think the coming of Merry and Pippin to Fangorn Forest was like the loosening of two stones that fell in avalanche.

 

Wow.

 

And so I tell people, you don't have to be Gandalf. You can be just somebody who's kicked a small stone that hits another stone that the next thing you know, the side of the mountain's coming down. And I could probably sit here and different times, different talks. I come up with different people and I just start rattling off everyday normal people.

 

People whose names I don't even know in a lot of cases, who were the catalysts that triggered somebody to get involved, who became a really big deal, who made a gigantic difference. So even if you don't end up being the guy going to do the thing, or the mom going to, change the world, that conversation that you have at lunch might put an idea in somebody's head.

 

I give an example, I use a lot here is Billboard Chris. And everybody thinks, okay, so he was just a dad and now he does this thing in worldwide activism. He's made a huge dent in the gender ideology and transgender thing. Helped parents all over the world, but it's not billboard. Chris, who's the small stone billboard, Chris was at lunch with somebody who told him about puberty blockers, which he had never heard about before.. So somebody just had the courage or the gall or whatever to mention puberty blockers in Vancouver in front. I think in Vancouver, that's where he lives. In front of Chris. Chris is shocked by these two words next to each other, goes home, looks 'em up, finds out what they are, freaks out, starts his advocacy.

 

So the person, the unnamed person who happened to just be talking and mention that started an avalanche.

 

Yeah.

 

That's being a small stone. And I can't encourage you to realize how important that is. The bottom line there is that you, you need to be telling the truth as much as you can all the time.

 

. 'Cause when you tell the truth, you put truth into the world. And you don't know what that truth is gonna go do now that it's loose in the world.. And a truth, as I said in Dallas has the power to level any error. That it touches. That's the power of a truth. The example I gave is a very fun example where, imagine we have three really smart people in the room up on the stage, and we say, how wide is the room?

 

And they all give their guesses and they argue and one, different guesses and why they're Right. And their big important philosophers or whatever.. And all their argument doesn't get us any closer to the truth until the janitor walks in the back with a tape measure and then all of a sudden their reputations are on the line because they've all just made an ass of themselves defending their answer that's about to get showed out by the least of these pulling the tape measure and seeing how big the room really is.. Because the fact is it doesn't matter who they are. It doesn't matter what their state or stature is. It doesn't matter how much of an expert or how wholly or how politically important or how fantastic they are, how nice a guy they are, how good an arguer they are, how many people in the room they convinced by consensus that they're right.

 

It doesn't matter any of that. Once the actual measurement comes, once the truth shows up. Everybody who's right is vindicated and everybody who's wrong is shown to be an error.

 

And so when you put a truth out into the world about anything, you don't know where that truth's gonna go. It might not go far.

 

If you put 10,000 truths in the world, one of 'em might make it a pretty good distance.. And that truth will eventually through somebody else or through you or whatever, encounter an error that it levels and now you've cleaned up some error in the world.. So tell normal people and parents, especially a lot, to realize that it doesn't matter if you think you're just a regular mom or just small character and you're never gonna play a big role.

 

It's like you don't have to. And in fact, nobody's too small.

 

To make a difference.. Just. What do you do? You take care of your kids, you raise 'em. You tell the truth. You get involved where you can,. Just very basic stuff and it actually adds up. That's the idea of the American principle of self-governance.

 

If we're all taking care of our own stuff and taking care in a way where it ends up bleeding over through trade or exchange with our neighbors, then everything rises.

 

Yeah. That's beautiful.

 

It's the same principle.

 

Yeah. That's beautiful. So well said. There's something I was thinking about that came from you and a few other sources, and I started to understand over the last couple years that it really hit me that we are all responsible for our culture.

 

Our culture is creating the future, and what you're saying is that every single person that adds positively to that culture nurtures it. We're either nurturing a good culture or a bad culture. We're either paving the way for things to be better or for things to be worse. And, that's another reason why every single person matters, because they're part of the greater culture and they're responsible to it to try to nurture it, try to make it healthier.

 

And that's why it's so important that wherever you stand.

 

That's right. And

 

You just stand for whatever that is, even when it seems so tiny because you know what's right. And so you stand there and then there's enough of a standing and before you know it, the culture isn't quite as sick as. It was

 

That's right. And your kids are watching.

 

Yes. And what you do matters way more than what you say. So walk the walk.

 

Yeah. They'll notice a mismatch. Yep. They're smarter than they let on.

 

Yep. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I've learned a lot again from you, learn from you every time I interact.

 

I'm so grateful for all the things that you shared with our audience that can go out and bless their lives. Hope everyone will pay attention to especially your newest book coming out that we don't know when it'll come out, but it'll be for us. And so we're excited. And anything else catch James at new discourses.

 

I think it's just new discourses.com, isn't it?

 

Yep.

 

And all kinds of resources. You're letting out podcasts, like just all the time and so many, the books and I don't know what other events you do, but. Check him out and we'll leave a bunch of links. Is there anything else? Is there other ways that I haven't mentioned that people can find you or engage with you or learn from you?

 

The people that wanna find me on social media it's a bit of a wild ride. I'm a wild creature on social media, but I got described as a talk one time as a knife fighter on social media...

 

Do you wanna watch the fight?

 

I try to be good, but. I'm

 

lose your patience sometimes?.

 

I have. No, not so much patience. I just, I have boundaries and, I will give as I get.. And I know that the biblical thing is, do not answer evil with evil, but bless. But man, there is nothing in there that says, do not answer a smart ass with something. Smart ass.. And so unfortunately it's a little wild.

 

It's not for everybody's taste, I hope it's for yours. But I am at Conceptual James, which is also a spelling test, by the way.. And I'm everywhere except Facebook. You can't find me on Facebook.. Facebook banned me for life and has not un banned me.. And I didn't like it anyway, so that was great.. I celebrated the day they kicked me off.

 

Okay. So at Conceptual James, we will link that as well. We'll link the website and the podcast and all the other resources. But it's been such a pleasure, such a treat. I just can't thank you enough. And thanks everyone for listening. We will see you next time.