Can you go outside and slap him real quick?

He just made you feel super old towards a city that you were born and raised in.

Not raised in Oklahoma doesn't rep the man.

Every man, every person in Oklahoma knows who Timothy McVeigh is, bro.

Wow.

We can't start a show off like that.

What's wrong with you?

I'm saying everybody knows who he is.

He doesn't, dog.

There's.

There's certain limits of lines you can't cross.

What?

I can't say his name?

I'm saying he did a terrible thing.

He whose name shall not be spoken.

You know the rules, man.

Welcome back to the number one financial literacy podcast in the world.

I'm your main man.

Do it.

I'm your main man, Steve Harvey.

No, I'm your main man, Saeed Omar.

Sitting in front of me is my partner in crime, Christopher Nahibi.

Partner in crime.

Just put monster energy drink.

Yeah.

I want you to know this.

These stains are not me.

Oh, I forgot my coaster.

My bad.

Yeah.

Look at you, ruining the mid century modern table already.

And sitting across from me is my partner in time, the one, the only, the man, the myth, the legend.

Everybody.

Thank you, my man.

And sitting behind the desk in the production suite, if you will, the Fijian himself, Rajeel.

Hey, how's everyone doing?

What's up?

My guy?

Missed you, brother.

Yeah, I did miss you.

He's honestly one of the sweetest human beings.

You said about me.

No, no, never.

Not even one.

Not even once.

Not a single person believes that to be true.

I get it.

Not even once.

So today we got a special episode.

And I know I say that a lot, but this topic in particular is very near and dear to your heart.

Yeah, I. I've written a book.

I have not finished it yet, but this is the kind of the underlying thesis of it.

And it's important to.

To me that this topic is.

Is something that people become very much aware of.

The game has been rigged against you financially, personally.

And we are the byproducts of a system that's been corrupted since the first day.

And we talk a lot about building wealth in the show and a little bit about mindset, thanks in large part to Saeed's influence.

But I went down the rabbit hole a long time ago and found that there are some really, really bad things that have been put in place to manipulate and breed the entrepreneurship out of us.

This isn't hypothetical.

This isn't tinfoil hat stuff.

This is all well documented, known, and we're going to Take you down a path.

A history lesson, if you will, on why so many of us are afraid to take the leap into entrepreneurship and business.

Business 100.

And all this, all this rests on is if you believe in psychology or not.

If you believe in psychology in the development of the brain and the, you know, the frontal lobe of the brain.

Right.

Then you'll understand why this all makes sense.

Yeah.

Particularly conditioning.

So if you, if you remember Pavlov's dog, right.

He would ring the bell, the dog would slobber.

Why?

Because he would feed the dog and then ring the bell.

And then this association came into play mentally.

And then sooner or later he removed the food and just rang the bell and he thought, I'm getting food.

So he slobbered.

Right.

Well, we as humans from very, very, very early on have been conditioned to believe that certain things are healthy for us to succeed in business and financially that aren't.

As a matter of fact, they are built to keep us raising our hands, waiting for the bell to ring.

And you're going to go down this path with us tonight where we go down a lesson.

So education is a scam as we know it today.

We've often talked about the hypocrisy that is the modern day college system.

And I'm not saying that college is bad.

I don't want that to be the takeaway here.

But I am saying that the way we educate our kids, likely every single person who went to school who's listening to the show right now has been wrong.

100 and look, there's definitely parts of the system that are needed and there's.

But it coincidentally and just happens to work out for the masses and the elites the way that it did.

And this was all learned from other cultures from hundreds of years ago and slowly passed on.

Yeah.

So let's, let's take a little trip down memory lane.

Okay.

So when I started writing this book, there was one book in particular which really hit home for me.

Okay.

Schools were designed in the industrial revolution to create obedient workers, not wealthy individuals.

Your school today is one of three prongs of that system, largely built for the 97 or 94% of the population.

Who was supposed to be that worker?

Every school, Harvard to your neighborhood school right around the corner from you.

They were all based on the same premise.

A lot of this comes from John Taylor Gatto's the Underground History of American Education, which came out in about 2001, which is when I started really diving hard into this topic.

By sheer coincidence, a lot of what we're going to talk about tonight is going to be a little bit from his book, a little bit from my own research and certainly a lot from the experience that Saeed Rajil and I have had along the way.

100 and stay tuned to the end.

This whole episode won't be doom and gloom.

We will go over ways to where you can maybe unlearn some of the things that some of the reasons why you act or behave the way that you do or maybe even some ideas on how you can help your kids right now.

Yeah.

That are currently going through it.

And I want to be honest.

So before we jump in, one of the things that I still struggle with today are these same precondition conditioned issues.

Likewise me too.

I look in the mirror and I know them.

I know why I feel the way that I do.

And yet I still struggle with them because I am so much in that headspace.

I We've all been taught the American dream.

The American dream is largely a lie.

And you're going to find out why.

Because the American dream for the most part is built to make you conform to this model.

That's what's going on here.

So Mr. Gatto was a celebrated New York public school teacher for about 30 years.

He was in the system.

He knew it and won the prestigious New York State Teacher of the Year award before quitting in protest of what he saw as a harmful system.

This is not somebody who went into the system and was unsuccessful and got really pissed off and rebuked the system and started revolting socially.

This is a man who was in the system who was lauded for his work and largely looked at as, as an outstanding person in the field and then subsequently came back and said this is wrong.

We are hurting more people than helping them.

This also in a present day example, it reminds me a lot of chamath.

Right.

Okay.

Because he, because obviously he left.

Right.

And he was openly talking about how it's gotten, it's gotten social media and technology has gotten too big and this is going to be a massive problem that unfortunately can no longer be corrected.

See, I have a great deal of respect for people who are in the space who are self aware enough to look at this and go, you know what this is?

This is what I thought it was.

I think to me that takes a whole hell of a lot more courage.

This.

So we just pulled up a picture of Jonathan Taylor Gato.

He's really a contrarian as far as I'm concerned.

But we're going to get into him born in 1935, died in October 25, 2018.

So 17 years after he wrote the book, he went to Columbia, he went to Cornell.

I mean, this is a guy who had a good pedigree that went through the education system.

And as you can see here, he wrote a number of books, Dumbing Us Down, American Education, all of which are around his concepts of.

Of really what education is and is not.

Yeah, and he did.

He did.

Clearly did.

What has all been taught to all of us.

Right?

It's go to school, get good grades, get a good job.

Yeah.

So the main thesis of this particular book, which is important, is schooling in America was never designed to educate children.

Sure, we use it to educate children, but that's not what it was designed for.

It was designed to control them, condition them for obedience, and make them predictable workers and consumers.

And of course, that is really helpful if you're in the upper 1% of America and you need good, obedient workers and predictable consumers to buy your products.

And I know that sounds really nefarious and dark, but there are a lot darker things that happen all the time.

If you want a good corollary to this in the food industry, read Salt, Sugar, Fat, where they talk about the food industry doing the exact same thing, manipulating things, using the same concepts as large tobacco and alcohol companies to make their foods more addictive by literally using salt, sugar, and fat.

These are not new concepts.

This is not unique to education.

This is nothing as revolutionary as it sounds.

So Gatto argues that modern schooling post the 1840s didn't emerge organically to improve society.

It was engineered deliberately to produce compliant workers for an industrial economy.

Again, industrial revolution.

Okay.

The system suppresses creativity, independence, and critical thinking in favor of uniformity, punctuality, and deference to authority.

Do what you're told.

Don't be creative, fall in line, listen.

Right?

And it's the same reason why we see so many people in corporate America that we look at as a CEO, and you know, that person is a type A aggressive, bullish personality.

The educational system.

There you go.

Creativity, discipline, and intelligence dumps it out.

Yeah.

And it dumps it out of these uniform workers.

I didn't know that was a thing.

Go find result.

It serves political and economic elites by keeping the masses.

And this is important.

Okay.

If you're an economic or political elite and you keep the masses manageable, distracted, and disempowered, you stay in power.

Right.

Okay.

You keep them busy.

Just keep them preoccupied.

Right?

Yeah.

And again, not theory.

This is known when they rolled the system out.

So we're going to get a bit of a history lesson and explain why.

But I talk about this at a great length of my book and I actually call the families out by name.

So elites like influential industrialists and social engineers like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and JP Morgan.

Wow.

Were promoters of public education.

Also the Vanderbilt and the Rothschilds because it created a discipline dependent workforce.

Think about what they were.

They were the leaders of the Industrial.

Revolution, but they couldn't have thought about this idea by themselves.

They had to have seen it play out somewhere else first.

And they did.

And we're going to get into that historical origins right now and for the purposes of being sensitive to what's going on in the geopolitical environment.

Yeah, really important.

I think it's important to say that we're going to give you a historical context of what's happening and it's going to cite a war.

This is not to take sides in a war or take any frankly position on it.

The coughing returns.

Yeah.

But it is to say that, that sometimes wars produce innovation and that innovation can be used in good ways and bad ways.

Well, the modern education system is an example of that.

And I'm going to go on a little bit of a tie right here, so.

Oh, please do.

Yeah.

It is not a commonly known fact that the education system used in most of the world today is based upon a Prussian public education system, usually referred to as the Prussian model.

Introduced in the early 1800s for producing obedient soldiers.

Prussia was a former state of current day Germany.

This was brought to Massachusetts by a gentleman named Horace mann in the 1840s.

Yeah, I should point out Horace Mann is going to sound like the man who implemented this and he might sound like a bad dude.

He was actually a pretty good dude.

He was against slavery.

He was really a stand up person.

He did a lot of good things as well.

Did a lot of good things.

I don't know whether he was in on this whole thing and I don't claim to have a position on it one way or the other, but he was the man who traveled over to Prussia back then, so spent his money to do it as an educator and implemented the system.

When he got back.

He pitched it and fought for it.

Right.

He pitched it and fought for it and started off in Massachusetts with the Board of Education there and had deep ties.

Sorry, I got the cough.

Still deep ties to influential people.

Obviously if when you're in that.

When you're in that like political landscape.

Yeah.

You have to be connected to, because you have to understand what is it that I can do for my constituents.

Right, yeah.

And who's to say that he might have come back in earnest believing this model was fantastic and it's so good for what we're doing here.

But there could have been senators and, you know, Democrats and Republicans that had whatever reasons they wanted to, that were pushing this for their own corporate agendas.

Yeah, Right.

So it shouldn't shock anybody that if, if you're, I guess, putting a tinfoil hat on and you're pitching the idea that big corporations and the government are in bed with one another, that they're going to work together to create a landscape to where everyone can thrive.

I mean, you could see a world where it's pitched in.

The sense of this will provide structure for everybody.

Rejeel.

13 minutes in for sexual reference in bed with one another.

Mark it down.

Eggplant emoji goes here.

Shortly after several crushing defeats by Napoleon at the beginning of the 1800s, Prussia's political and military elite came to the bizarre conclusion that the independent thinking and individualistic spirit among Prussian fighters and soldiers was in fact a root cause and major contributing factor to their defeat.

Interesting, because back then what would happen in the school system is they would pump out so much political propaganda that you were, you were led to believe as a young child that if the state ever called on you, this is a good thing because I'm here to represent my, my country.

You had a duty of loyalty to the state.

You didn't feel bad about leaving your family.

You felt like it was an honor.

And this went all the way back to ancient Roman times.

And, and this, this philosophical debate, Socrates, some of the ancient philosophers that were really, really important in, in the way we think about men and honor and duty and all these things that are seemingly outdated culture, cultural ideals now, but were huge in the central point of what it meant to be an adult in modern day culture back then.

Right.

And obviously there was a gender gap and I'm not justifying it, but that's where a lot of this came from.

So consequently the Prussian elite, again, not Prussia in general.

Hey you everyday citizen, right.

The elite, okay.

Began a program aimed at reducing the aliveness actual quote from their text.

Right.

Intelligence and independent thinking in the majority of the citizenry.

We want less alive citizens and more drone citizens out there doing what we want them to do.

And what's the best way to do that?

Where should you start?

You start with kids.

You have to.

Right from a ying ying yang From a young age.

A ying age.

I watched the six nines, like videos earlier.

So from a, From a young age.

Right.

And if, if you condition them from a young age, then there's no questions.

They don't ask, why am I learning this?

They just follow the lead.

Yeah.

And it, it's, it's crazy to me.

And I'll never forget that because that, that applies in so many different ways.

I remember when my son, when we enrolled him in the Montessori, he had a lot of energy.

Right.

As a, as a young boy.

As a young boy should.

And I remember going in and all the kids were playing with puzzles on an individual placemat and each kid had a different puzzle.

And I walked in thinking, oh, my God, I can't enroll Adam here.

He's going to destroy this whole place.

And the words out of mouth were, no, he'll learn within the first hour.

Yeah, he'll just do what everybody else is doing.

He'll be complicit within an hour.

And sure enough, he was.

Yeah, Social pressures do that too.

That's also the crazy part about this.

You can put a person who generally is, let's say, a type A independent thinker in a room full of type B non independent conformists, and guess what?

That independent thinker will be muted by his social surroundings 100%.

Yeah, I've seen that.

Where they say, what color is the sky?

Right.

And the sky's blue and some guys in the sky is green.

Yeah.

Group think, very dangerous.

Right.

And then you just continue to ask them enough questions, they'll start to second guess themselves and stop answering the questions because enough people are answering them incorrectly.

Oh, man, it's.

Yeah, carrying on.

This is straight from the text.

Again, this is not hyperbole on my part.

The goal was to make the bulk of the population compliant servants rather than free individuals who could think for themselves and create and enrich the Prussian culture.

Such a perverse goal could only be accomplished via the mechanisms of education.

American educator John Taylor Gatto provides a description of the reforms and social transformations that resulted in his book.

And I went a little farther into the history which got us to this point.

So here's where it really gets nefarious.

Dark.

Yeah.

Okay, let's go.

And this is not covered in his book.

And I think this is an important differentiation for most people to understand because it wasn't just like he took this model school system and said, hey, America, you guys, check this out.

It's pretty dope.

Yeah.

And mind you, this was mandated school System.

You had to enroll your kids in.

The school system under the auspices of standardized, free education for everyone.

Right.

Sensational.

Why wouldn't you want this?

I want this.

It's free.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're.

Someone's watching your kids all day.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm gonna go out and do, like, you know, things.

Yeah, it's amazing.

They're gonna make friends.

Good social sayings, like, they promote it.

And honestly, it's.

It's not the teacher's faults, right?

No, no, It's.

It's just.

Although there is some interesting stuff about the teachers here, which I didn't cover in.

In the show notes because it wasn't relevant.

But John and Mr. Gato came back believing that women were much more well suited to be teachers, which is why so many of the early educators were females.

It also was disarming to other men who were typically aggressive.

Having a female teach them that this is the way.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Very manipulative stuff psychologically.

Early, early, early on and done.

And so you saw so much of that in the educational system where, oh, my God, American teachers are almost all females in the beginning.

You never thought there was a reason why.

Literally yesterday, my son asked me if I ever had a male teacher.

Literally yesterday.

Yeah.

I had a handful in law school.

They were almost all males.

Right?

Yeah.

Right.

Great school.

Speaking of which.

So the familiar three tiered system of education emerged from the Napoleonic era with one private tier and two government ones.

So I want you to pay close attention to the tiers here and the percentage of people who were in them.

All right?

Okay.

We think of schools as an upper tier here.

Harvard and Yale and Princeton and the Ivies.

Right.

You go, oh, my God.

Those are.

Those are elite schools, like, you know, Skull and Bones at Yale and all these really elite groups.

And you go, oh, my God.

Well, sons of presidents go there.

Lots of presidents go to these schools.

So we're different.

Right.

But then you hear all these stories of former presidents acting very wild and aloof and cavalier.

Well, maybe the expectations of obedience aren't the same for them.

So maybe they can have some of these tiers within the school system.

But allow me to elaborate.

At the top, 1/2 of 1% of the students attended, and this is not an English word.

Akademi Scholzen.

You nailed that.

Really?

Yeah.

Thank you, Academy Scholzen.

Whereas future policymakers, Prussians learn to think strategically, contextually, in holes.

They learned complex processes and useful knowledge, studied history and wrote copious, copiously, argued often and read Deeply in mastered tasks of command.

This sounds more like ancient Greece or Rome.

People sitting around in robes and having debates in rooms because they were the future kings, right?

They were the son of royalties or you know, children of royals.

And they had purpose before they had a job.

Right?

Yeah.

I mean, you're gonna be great.

You.

Exactly.

I mean prior to these mandated schools, just think about it, you did as a kid, you didn't go to school, you ended up doing whatever your parents did and it was taught to.

And that was taught to you as your primary focus.

And eventually you just took over the family business.

Right.

1/2 of 1% of the population in Prussia, the very upper elite people who were literally connected to somebody got this opportunity in, in this ecosystem.

Then there's a second level now that was a private one.

Okay.

Everything else is government.

Okay.

So then the next level, Real Sholzen was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional pro literacy, pro literate of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require people who seemed like they were in power.

I would argue this is modern day middle class.

But you know how that old adage of you should become a doctor or lawyer, it guarantees you profits.

My parents said, yeah, that's all they wanted me to be in this system.

You were locking into the upper level of government possibility.

Yeah, government hierarchy.

But you were never going to be elite coming from this group.

Right.

It was the highest elite status you could get as a normalized citizen because you weren't in that private group.

So you start thinking about corollaries to today and where we have middle class and there is some connection to some of these things.

Absolutely.

So how many people do you think were actually attending these schools?

5 to 7.5%.

So you're talking between five and a half of 8% of the population have attended these two elite statuses of all students attended these quote, real schools learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to you ready for it?

Manage materials men and situations to be problem solvers.

Why?

Because that upper 1/2 of 1% needed people who work for them that solve problems, that managed men, that managed situations and materials for them so they could be off living life.

Yeah, that was, that was the purpose.

That was the goal.

Yeah.

Right.

And it's scary to think about this, right?

This group would also staff the various policy and policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain.

Finally, at the very bottom of the pile, a group of between 92 and 94% of the population attended Volkschulen, or people's schools, where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudimentary, rudimentary literacy and official state myths of history.

We're going to tell you what to believe in.

You need to believe in this in order to be a good citizen.

Yeah, exactly.

To fall in line.

So the universal system of compulsory schooling was up and running by 1819 and soon became the eighth wonder of the world, promising for a brief time, in spite of its exclusionary, layered structure, liberal education for all.

But this early dream was soon abandoned.

This particular utopia had a different target than human equality.

It aimed instead for frictionless efficiency.

And if you're a government policymaker looking to implement an educational system, do you want to try to improve humanity or do you want the most frictionless system?

Yeah, exactly right.

You just want everybody to fall in line so you can actually map out a future.

Right from its inception, Volksschulen, the third tier, the lowest tier, the people's school, heavily discounted reading because reading produced dissatisfaction.

It was thought reading offered too many windows onto better lives, too much familiarity with better ways of thinking.

It was a gift unwise to share with those permanently consigned to low station.

Thus was creating a standard of virtual illiteracy formally taught under the state church auspices.

So I know what people are already thinking listening to us talk about this.

They're thinking, okay, then, what's the alternative?

Do we get to where we are today without that structured system?

Yes.

Yeah, I think so too.

Yeah, the free market will eventually take care of itself.

Well, and more importantly, there are some problems with that last paragraph that have really come home to roost.

You can no longer hide beyond.

There was a period of time where, yeah, if you didn't read and you weren't part of that upper elite, you would never see it.

Social media has eliminated that.

And now the growing frustration of the younger demographic continues to be a problem because they can see it.

It's in front of them.

TMZ puts it out there all the time.

Steve Harvey or no Harvey Levin Harvey, they put it out there in front of you all the time.

You can go to social media and see how these people are living.

So you've now done away with the, oh, we can hide it through our own context.

Right.

And then you start thinking about this in the context of people will be unhappy and dissatisfied with lives they can't attain.

Well, now they know they can't attain it.

Right.

Literacy be damned.

It was always possible and especially since the introduction of the Internet, I have friends that are teachers, right?

And they told me one of the biggest draws for them was always, I create a curriculum, I perfect it over the course of the next several years.

I find, Fine tune it, and then it's just on repeat.

Yeah, that's it.

So why, why adjust?

There's no incentive to it.

There's no, no need to adjust.

But then why can't you find the best teachers in the world that create the best curriculum and have it in front of everybody, distribute it, distribute it.

This is core material, right?

I mean, look, there's a lot of universities out there that are offering free material right now.

If you want it, you can learn a lot on YouTube.

Harvard, all free classes on.

Right, YouTube.

Universities out there.

Now, I don't know that YouTube University is the same as I and Harvard, but I hear you.

No, you get my point.

But obviously from a credible source, you have to make sure you do your background right.

But you could learn a lot.

And why, why can't that be the case?

Why can't the best curriculums be put in front of everybody out there if you're willing to pay a premium for it?

The free market already took care of that.

Well, and I should point out, when this system was rolled out, it was also anchored in religion.

Right?

Religion and national pride, you know?

You ever done the pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of your class?

Yeah, I mean, these were all things that were done.

And yeah, we've, we've removed some of the elements that we used to anchor it to, which were the original selling point to make it more puritan in its interest.

Right, but we still have the same educational process.

It's still doing the exact same thing.

Right.

I mean, earlier I brought up the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, Right.

That allows you to develop things like critical thinking, problem solving, impulse control, creativity, planning and decision making.

I mean, this is studied and this is factual now.

And when it's at its most rapid development, it's within the ages of 6 to 12.

Yeah, right.

When you're required to start school and.

We'Re beating it out of them.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's, it's very hard to unlearn.

You were again.

Yeah.

What is, is it the studio is.

It's me, isn't it?

It's you.

I'm allergic to you.

I believe that.

Sorry.

I had, I told the doctor and he, he watched a couple episodes and.

He'S like, it's the guy Rail.

How do you feel about being a.

Co Host sub, substitute me and coach tag team.

There we go.

Tag team.

Yeah.

You look better with a green background.

That's true.

I don't blame you.

But so I mean that part of the brain is growing at that age.

Right.

And then from 13 to 25, it's maturing.

Yeah.

And it generally like forms into its shape and where and develops to I guess not its ultimate max, but pretty close by the age of 25, 26.

Right.

Right.

When everyone is done going to school.

I'm also going to take a moment to possibly offend a lot of people here, but I mean this in the most pure way.

We have such a wide definition of autism.

I truly don't think that all autism.

I didn't know that.

I don't, I know a little bit about autism, but I don't know that how wide of a definition it is.

I have some family members that run in the autism spectrum.

I personally believe that I have a mild level of autism.

As I've gotten older, I've realized that I just think and see things differently than some people and I don't really know what that means and I don't really care to find out either.

That being said, I do think that there are certain levels of hyper intelligence or hyper.

Just awareness or perceptiveness or a capacity.

To learn and work that we couldn't.

Breed out of cage to the system.

So we chemically castrate them.

Yeah.

And it bothers me to no end.

I, I understand there are people who need it.

I'm not, I'm not taking away from those who do need it in legitimate medicine.

But you can't have.

And I'll use testosterone as a proxy because it's less inflammatory.

You can't have a spectrum of 300 to 1200 be normal.

Right.

Yeah.

You're.

You're doing that for a reason.

You're gamifying the system.

And you can't label all of these problems autism.

If you don't understand it, say you don't understand it.

But to give kids drugs under almost all pretenses and say that there's not a better way.

To me it seems like you're chemically castrating people that don't fit the system instead of saying the system isn't for everybody.

Exactly.

The system isn't.

Do you mind pulling up that photo that I dropped in this.

I remember seeing this cartoon image back when I was in college and it basically.

You got it up.

It never gets it up for you.

Second one, 30 minutes in, baby.

It basically showcased.

It was A cartoon image of a bunch of different animals, right?

You got a monkey, a penguin, an elephant, a fishbowl, a dog, right?

And there's a gentleman sitting behind the desk.

And there you go.

And he says, for a fair selection, everybody has to take the same exam.

Please climb that tree.

Yeah, that, that's, that's, that's actually a good.

Wow, look at you.

Right?

Like, I remember seeing this and this always stuck with me.

And it's like the standardized testing, right?

It really hit me, like, you know, like, okay, there's certain standardized testings like the lsat, right, where you could learn logic games if you just practiced enough.

But to me, that bothers me.

It does?

Yeah.

You shouldn't be learning how to have a natural skill set.

Yeah, that does.

I mean, the LSAT exam, sure, maybe somewhat helps you in law school, but like, I don't know.

I don't know if it.

And I'm sure there's other exams out there too, that are equally as frustrating and equally as bad for for students.

But the standardized testing has always bothered me.

Well, Gato argues that schools don't teach the subjects they claim to.

That all of these are really patterns of behavior built to teach you something quite different.

He says they teach you, mind you, this is a man who was awarded for being a top tier educator after a 30 year career in the state of New York.

Instead, they teach these implicit lessons.

Number one, show up on time.

Number two, obey authority without question.

Number three, learn to tolerate boredom.

I do not do well with boredom.

Number four, stay in your place and depend on experts to tell you what's true.

Okay, so there's this.

Here's the thing.

There is an element to learn to be okay with boredom that I am okay with a little bit.

Right.

I mean, none of these should be sweeping generalizations, but.

But like me coming home after a long day of entertaining my kids and then being like, what are we doing next?

Like, okay, like you can go get creative and, and go do something.

The context he's talking about.

Yeah, I know.

What he's talking about is, is you sit in your office and you're bored doing work for somebody else, but you can tolerate it now, right?

Yeah.

You're okay with not doing something you love or passionate about.

And then number five, believe that your worth is measured by grades and external validation.

So this is big for us in our house.

Any one of these taken alone would not necessarily be inflammatory, but taken in total, where you show up on time.

Obey authority without question.

Learn to tolerate boredom.

Stay in your place and depend on experts to tell you what's true and then believe that your worth is measured by that external validation.

Your annual review, right?

Boom.

How many widgets can you get out?

Stuff like that means that you feel better about yourself because it's been bred into you that you've made your master employer happy.

Right?

Like in no difference.

If I'm an underwriter and I'm underwriting alone, and I submit it to the person reviewing it, if they approve it and sign it without making any corrections or additions.

Oh, yeah.

Or recommendations.

You're like.

You're like, yeah, I did good today.

And I know this is going to sound wildly left, but the movie Office Space is such, in my mind, an accurate representation of the modern workforce.

That's put in a comedic sense, but it.

It echoes.

It resonates with so many people.

Watch this.

Rejill.

Do you remember when you saw the movie Office Space?

Never seen it.

Are you shitting me?

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Tangent.

I do.

I do remember seeing it.

I.

Who?

How he's you of all people.

He's.

He's a pup dude.

He's young.

Dog.

Dog.

My guy.

I mean, it's still.

It still is funny to this.

It's 1000% relevant to this that.

You know what you're gonna do?

You're coming over the house, I'm gonna get you a Hawaiian ribeye, I'm gonna plop you down the.

In front of the television, and you and I are going to take our shirts off and watch it together.

I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday.

Yeah, no, no, we're gonna watch that together.

Do not watch it without me.

We should.

We should do it as a team.

Team bonding.

We should do a team right here.

Right here.

Yeah.

We'll order some.

Houston's in.

In to go.

Okay.

And then we'll get it here.

And then we'll have some Hawaiian rib eyes.

Yeah.

Put all of our phones on mutes.

I like it.

And tell the wives that were otherwise occupied.

Right.

And go for full Chrysler up in this place.

Shirts off, baby.

Let's do it.

All right, so let's move on a little bit to the economic and political agenda, because there is one here.

Oh, you know it.

And this, in my opinion, is where it got really dark.

Yeah.

So school became a tool for industrialists.

The Rockefeller, JP Morgan Chase, the Rothschilds of Vanderbilts, Carnegie, who needed a docile workforce, governments who wanted loyal citizens and soldiers and marketers who wanted predictable consumers by keeping people unskilled in Finance, just for point of references, a financial literacy podcast.

First and foremost, we are fighting this every single damn week.

And I mean that without sarcasm.

No, I know.

If.

If they wanted you to learn how to invest, accounting principles, taxing, anything like that, why isn't it taught in the school system?

Just ask yourself why it should.

Basic, basic literacy should be.

Here's your answer.

By keeping people unskilled in finance, entrepreneurship and self reliance, the system ensures they remain dependent on employers and the state.

And if you're dependent on employers in the state, you're willing to pay your taxes, you're willing to follow the rules.

Well, that's the other element behind this.

So we've covered on this show before that Milton Friedman introduced the income tax to generate revenue and income for the war.

That was the pitch.

Yeah.

It was supposed to be a temporary.

Thing, coincidentally implemented several years after the mandated school system was put in place.

So prior to that you.

They were only.

People were only getting taxed on commerce and properties right now, actively taking income tax from every W2 wage earner.

And because they went to the schooling system and because they were beaten down into compliance, they took it and did it.

And they did it under the auspice of we needed for the war.

Yeah.

As Regil's people would say, they took it and go and they win.

We're allowed to say that because he's here.

Yeah.

We're not doing it behind his back, Jill.

I mean, his back is turned to his ass.

What?

You get the pass.

I mean.

Yeah, I feel like you should get it more than I am because you're a hair darker than me.

I'm closer to them in proximity.

Yeah.

Does it bother you guys that I spend so much time when I edit the footage looking at your faces?

No.

I mean, I can literally describe the contours of say it's face.

My eyes closed.

I like some.

Some.

Sometimes you.

You rem the mark, sometimes you don't.

I always look out for it.

I do remove it.

Yeah.

I love it.

So the cost of all this you might be asking about right now.

Well, it's pretty obvious at this point, but there's certainly a lot more.

We've gone over the history now, but this is going to kind of lean us forward into some notable kind of roots and thoughts that are going to come out of this that it's really going to galvanize what we've talked about here.

Well, the costs, creativity, curiosity and initiative are systematically crushed out of kids starting when they're six years Old.

And the adults continue to feel guilty for having those feelings.

Man, I remember my son because when he went to kindergarten, we were getting told like, hey, he needs to control himself more in school.

And we would feel so unbelievably bad.

We would.

We're apologizing, we're trying.

We're talking to him every day.

I can't help but think, like, what did that do to him back then that I don't know about now?

Since then, obviously, we're trying to take corrective measures and just be more open and okay, yeah, pick and choose your battles.

Right.

But it's hard to not feel really bad about how, you know, we handled it when it.

We were going through it in the moment, but how we get over it and through it now is we say, well, at least we should be proud of ourselves to care enough to continue to learn and adapt.

You know, it's hard not to take a step back and think and look, this is fucked up.

Yeah.

That's what it is.

Right?

And you start thinking about how we've all just fallen in line and now generations later, no one even questions it.

No one knowing this is just what you do.

And we've gotten to this point where we've just accepted it.

And yet there are those people, those entrepreneurs who stand up and fight against us vocally.

And you look at them as eccentric and I know we're having fun with this, but it really upsets me a great deal that we have literally fucked society by doing stuff like this.

We've literally damaged generations of people and taken away the American dream, which was self sustaining.

Right.

Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

Pursuit of happiness literally meant owning a home when it was originally drafted by the original drafters of that document.

And you know what?

Housing affordability is at its absolute worst in American history right now.

They should be ashamed.

The system failed them.

They have taken it away from you and meanwhile, we've all taken it.

We've all sat around, looked at each other and watched it going, is now the time to buy?

Yeah.

Is now the time to buy?

Yeah.

No, you want to know?

The time to buy is when we fix the underlying problems, this being a huge part of it.

Yeah.

And we have the resources to be able to fix them too.

Independent thinkers and potential entrepreneurs are marginalized, if not punished by this system.

True.

We've all had somebody in high school who was hustling, doing something on the side, slanging and banging some kind of.

Product, or for us it was creating CDs.

Yeah.

Back then, who can download CDs, make CDs.

You get the playlist.

Let me put it together for you on Limewire Napster.

Right.

Like that was the thing back then.

A buddy of mine I went to high school with was Nathaniel Dawkins.

Okay.

Nathaniel Dawkins used to go to the House of Blues and rap.

African American kid living in a largely white neighborhood.

People made fun of him.

That the guy who's saying, I need a dollar?

That's right.

Alo Black.

Oh, he grew up and became Alo Black.

That's right.

Okay.

It's just not so funny now, is it?

Yeah, exactly.

Every single teacher in school was like, oh, you got talent.

That's cute.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know how many kids, we talk out of that and we try to convince them that.

That you're chasing the 1% of the 1%.

Don't chase that.

You're going to fail.

Failure is how you grow, man.

Right, exactly.

Okay, so you.

But you learn along the way and you pivot.

I mean, Adam.

Sexy Adam from Mind Pump.

My pump.

So sexy.

Yes.

Second sexual reference.

Note it.

Third.

Actually, the second one was at 30 minutes.

You just didn't catch it because you were coughing up.

He said on the show himself, on average, it takes nine attempts before you actually become a millionaire.

Right?

And it's.

Yeah, you may fail along the way, but that should be celebrated.

You know what sucks?

Like, I literally tell my son this and my daughter this all the time when they fail at something.

I'm so proud of you for trying.

You know what sucks is that most of us, through our lifetime, never make more than one attempt at becoming a millionaire.

Yeah, saving.

I'm guilty of this.

I am so guilty of saving.

That's the only attempt we make because we've been taught to avoid all of that risk because that risk is bad.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are out there risking it all the time.

True.

Not stupidly.

Intelligently, for sure.

But they're risking it.

Right.

And I'm guilty of this.

I mean, I posted on the channel today.

S&P 500 beats 80% of the fund, by the way.

Do more of that.

You like that, right?

I do like that.

Yeah.

You didn't tell me you wanted to wait for the show.

I just want you to do more that.

I want both of you to do more of that.

Because if you guys are putting out content and I keep putting out the content we're putting out, that's three times the content.

Yeah, it's true.

You know, but I mean, so, like.

But that also in and of itself is a safe bet.

Right.

And all that I'm really comfortable with.

So there needs to be a little bit of wiggle room.

And I'm not going to say money like money doesn't solve all problems.

Yeah, but it solves the money problems.

You were struggling again tonight with a throat thing.

What's going on?

It's the stress.

It's a very stressful time.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

But money solves money problems.

But here's the problem.

I can tell every single person right now how to get rich.

The problem is it takes a long ass time to get rich that way.

And for a lot of people, myself included, we're finding out when the stakes are at the highest.

I have a family and I have kids at home that are relying on me.

And there's something in the back of my mind that is telling me, just sacrifice your life for your kids because it's already too late for you.

No, I get it.

And look, I respect that entirely.

And I do the same thing, but I am not going to do that.

Yeah, no, I respect it.

And.

And I'm.

I'm just.

I can't bring myself to stomach it.

Yeah.

Because I look at my son, I say to myself, this is not a knock on you or anybody else I fully appreciate.

And I have the same fears.

I do.

And I.

And I really.

I realize what I'm recognizing what I'm risking.

And I also know that I've got a different financial position.

Right, right, right, right.

That being said, I look at it as I'd rather die trying to, then never try it all.

Because I think back to one of the oldest quotes that I can recall, like really spending some time thinking about.

And it's going to sound cliche as hell.

When people get older, the things they regret are not the things they did, it's the things they didn't do.

And I'm not going to not do things double negative because somehow it makes sense.

I was afraid.

I was afraid to take the leap out of the.

Take the leap and fail.

No, I get that.

And obviously.

And that's what I meant.

Money solves money problems and allows you the position.

Now, look, it allows you the position to take those chances.

But you're absolutely, you're absolutely right.

I mean, it shouldn't.

You shouldn't like, discredit somebody because they're.

They can afford that position.

You could have done a better job as you as in me could have done a better job to prepare myself for that situation.

Right.

So that you could take Those risks.

But look, it's.

It's still not.

It's never, never too late.

And maybe your risk.

And I'm talking to the listeners, I'm talking to myself, Rajeel, you.

Maybe our risk is applying for that job that you think you're not qualified for.

So many people don't.

Right.

Not just.

Not just going starting for starting a company.

Right.

You are.

You can learn, you can stay up, you can practice.

Right.

I'm taking on a new role right now where I'm literally doing role playing.

And in the car, while I'm talking, I'll.

I talk with my wife and I try to do role playing on the phone.

Right.

Trying.

Trying to just like, almost like character acting.

Right.

Not breaking character and just getting more.

Reps. Roleplay is really good for avoiding something that people don't think about.

Yeah.

If you're a salesperson, you want to role play because you want to get over objections, but that's not really what you're doing.

What you're really doing is trying to defeat imposter syndrome and give yourself the confidence that you're in the position that you should be to have that dialogue, whatever it might be.

That's the biggest disconnect, I think a lot of people are selling masterminds and courses around.

How do you overcome objections?

That's not really what you're doing, is you're giving yourself the authority to be in that room, to have that conversation.

And that's also what a lot of Type A aggressive CEOs have inherently.

They're like, screw that.

I deserve to be here.

Like you.

You should listen to me.

You start thinking about some of these people that.

That have built businesses.

The guy who started FedEx, who just recently passed away.

I think so anyway, he.

He got an F on that as part of his, like, master's thesis.

Wow.

They're like, why would you do this?

This doesn't make any sense to me.

And then he went outside the company, made millions.

Boom.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's having the.

The belief in yourself to push through and persevere.

We've heard.

We've heard all the stories of all the people that have dropped out of school that have been successful.

And I put down a couple of names here, and I know you got a couple in the show notes, too, that maybe you want to go over, but you got some of the key big ones that will really, like, ring a bell.

Richard Branson.

Right.

Dropped out of school at 16.

Yeah.

Right.

Start a record label.

This tower.

Tower.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Right.

There's a lot of people like that.

And I think that we.

We as in the inherent thing you do in society is you go, oh, Timothy didn't go to college.

Oh, Timothy.

And they were like, you're like, wait a minute, you know, but if Timothy were a billionaire, you'd be like, oh, my God, Timothy, tell me how you did it.

Right?

And it's like, okay, what the hell with the double standard?

Like, why is.

Why does money make it okay?

You know what I mean?

The quote that I read in the book that really struck a chord with me that put me down this path where I decided I was going to investigate further was this one.

We have been taught that to succeed, you must be docile and not cause trouble and that the world runs best when you stay in line.

If there's anything I can say about my career professionally is I have not stayed in line.

I have caused trouble, I've ruffled feathers.

I've done it under the auspices of being a good person, but I've pissed a lot of people off along the way doing it.

Because you didn't fall in line.

Right?

That's right.

Did it your way?

Schools were intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

That's the thing, right?

They want to be able to predict your behavior.

That's it.

That's the American dream that they sell you on.

They want to tie you down to this house for 30 years so you're required to be in the workforce for at least 30 years and predict your behavior.

Making debt so easily to take on, only requiring you to work even longer and harder.

Think we're work.

We've been sold this dream of taking a two week paid vacation every year, right.

And being happy with it.

If you do that nowadays, people are too afraid, myself included, because I might lose my job because I'm doing something for myself and my family.

Trying to spend time.

Yeah, Right.

And then work until you're, if you're lucky, 65 people are working till way later now to only have 5, 10, 15 years left to enjoy life then.

I mean, that's.

That's a tough sell, bro.

It's tough sell.

And it's gonna.

It's gonna sound very broish when we're like, oh, they're basically saying we're caught in the matrix.

Oh, my God, it's Andrew Tate.

No.

Okay, I'm not your.

Your favorite D D bag influencer.

No.

Respected Andrew Tate and everybody else, but I'm not that guy.

Using that as an excuse for my bad behavior.

Well, okay, yeah, I'm saying that there are parts of this that are very matrix like.

I'm not saying you're caught in some neo noir situation where it's romanticized.

I'm saying people in power use their power to do things that to this day we believe are in our best interest when they are not.

It's that simple.

It's it that.

That's not that hard to believe.

So I'm going to cover the next topic here, which is going to be a little bit of a callback to what we first talked about, but it's going to go into detail and I'm going to talk about a part that's not in here, that's also in my book that's forthcoming, which I think is really important.

The Prussian roots In the early 19th century, after being humiliated by Napoleon, Napoleon, Prussian, Prussia, modern day Germany, sought to rebuild itself into a strong industrial and military power.

They instituted this compulsory state run education system as we've described it.

It was designed to create obedient soldiers for the army, loyal, punctual, efficient workers for factories.

Bureaucrats who respected hierarchy.

And then features of this are the most important part.

Bells signaling movement between periods, mimicking shift changes in factories.

Students seated in rows facing the teacher like workers facing a foreman.

Heavy emphasis on rote memorization, resuscitation and discipline.

Standardized testing to rank and sort individuals not to foster creativity.

A Prussian official, John Gottlieb Fitch, explicitly said in 1807 about this structure.

Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.

That is the education system that we have in place today.

That's really scary, right, to think about.

And I can't remember which episode it was, but we've talked about this.

Where there are times where I go to.

I choose to buy something and I try to think to myself, where did this idea come from?

I do that all the time.

Where was I influenced for this?

Yeah, I mean I try to like take in like you can't.

I don't know if some of that is just taught behavior.

Right.

Was it an ad somewhere that I saw in passing?

Right.

I mean that I always think about that.

And that's what.

And that's what they're trying to do.

And.

But, but for Prussia, correct me if I'm wrong, what they were really trying to do is churn out soldiers.

They were trying to figure out soldiers, but Soldiers, people who respected the system.

They wanted an entire society that was going to be dominant.

And this shouldn't surprise you if you go and you follow like Germany and the weightlifting and Olympics and some of the things that happened subsequently as a result of that country.

That's been a cultural phenomenon for, for a long time.

I think it's different now, but certainly in this period of time that was part of the Zeitgeist.

When Horace Mann toured Prussia in the 1840s, he was so impressed he brought the model back to Massachusetts where it spread nationwide, ignoring the intention of its implementation, ignoring that there were supposed to be three tiers of it and we got the lowest wrong.

Ignoring what that was, or maybe not ignoring historical example here.

The Lancastrian system in the US and the uk, a forerunner was also designed to drill discipline in the children, using older students to police younger ones, further enforcing hierarchy.

So there was another system in place, but it was more hierarchy driven and less, I guess, state driven, if you will.

So we're going to spend some time here talking about schools conditioning you for corporate W2 work in breeding out entrepreneurship specifically.

I think it's important and if you stuck around this far, I think you get some value out of it.

Yeah, you better leave a review.

Damn straight.

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Do all the moist goody good stuff.

Rigil knows nothing about that.

You're going to get used to it.

You're going to hear it a lot.

He's all about being moist back there.

Moist goody good.

Yeah, he knows for Jill.

Yeah, the AC is off.

It's pretty moist back here.

Well, you can get up and turn it off, bro.

He's on camera.

Bro.

He's just in his own man.

Students were explicitly trained to follow rules, fear mistakes and seek approval.

Traits that make you a great employee, but a terrible entrepreneur.

I don't want a nation of thinkers.

I want a nation of workers.

From John D. Rockefeller, one of the men who helped implement this system.

That's power.

And that is a widely known quote.

Right?

Accepted.

What he's basically saying now that, you know what we started this show on.

I don't want people who come from that top 1/2 of 1% school.

I want people who come from that 92 to 97% school who are trained to be a nation of workers.

That's what we need.

Think about this.

Look at the date on here.

1903.

Yeah, right.

The system was implemented in 1840, right?

1840.

He said this in 1903.

You start it then.

And by the time those kids graduate from school and they're into the workforce, you start taxing them for it.

Literally one generation, literally one generation later, we were beaten into submission before we even knew we were being beaten.

I'm tapping, bro.

I'm tapping.

Get me out of this.

Yeah.

So a great example, this Thomas Edison was kicked out of school at age 12 for being, quote, difficult and taught himself science in business.

Wow.

Okay, how many autistic kids do you know are being punished for being difficult?

Right, right.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college, rebelled against authority, and famously called himself a quote, pirate, end quote, rather than a Navy man, referring to corporate culture.

Even Today, only about 9% of millennials in Gen Z express strong intent to start a business, per Harvard studies.

Incredible.

Because it's been beaten out of them.

It has me.

I mean, so we talk about, okay, you go to school and you learn the necessities.

You learn how to read.

No one, no one is arguing against that.

Everybody should learn how to read.

Okay.

And there's.

There's certain demographics that actually need this school system so that, you know, the parents can go to work.

Because I looked this up, too.

The average kid spends around one to one and a half hours a day with their parents.

Yeah.

How sad is that?

So you got an hour to an hour and a half every day to try to unlearn or teach them something else.

To be critical thinkers.

Right?

So you got.

That's all you have.

And then the point that I was going to bring up was Elon Musk.

Right.

I mean, he's popular to a lot of people.

Right.

He dropped out of his PhD program at Stanford.

When you're in school, a lot, a lot to do with being bullied.

You go to school, you learn how to read, you learn how to do maths, you learn, you learn all the other things.

All the maths.

All the maths, Right.

But you also learn things that you shouldn't be exposed to early, especially this.

These.

These days.

Right.

There's a lot going on.

There's obviously identity politics.

There's bullying, virtue signaling.

Virtue signaling.

Right?

So look, he dropped out because he was being bullied, Right?

Well, and I have a huge problem with the educational system and what I would call the collegial kind of network.

I spend a great deal of time outside of the show when I can't sleep reading about archeology.

That's right, you said.

But academia, that we know it today, is just as corrupt as politics.

Is people want you to believe a narrative.

And I'm not saying that Graham Hancock is the world's greatest archaeologist, but I'm saying he is somebody who's not conformed to the ideas that he's being pressed on.

And he's an outspoken individual.

And instead of saying, hey, this guy's got different ideas, let's discuss them, let's, let's debate the merits.

Almost all of academia is saying, no, no, no, no, no, you're a wacko.

Back off.

Right.

And that to me is crazy.

We can't openly discuss novel ideas.

If I was in that top 1/2 of 1% school, we would sit down in a giant stadium of other similarly situated individuals and we would talk about things and debate them philosophically for hours on end.

Because that was encouraged.

Yeah.

And those.

And that was considered fun.

That was considered the, the point.

Right.

That's why, that's why, that's why you go to school too, right?

Yeah, man.

It's.

It's so schools actively punish behaviors that lead to innovation.

Questioning authority, taking risks, collaborating without permission, exploring divergent paths.

Historical anecdote here I think is important.

In the early 1900s, about 60 years after this was implemented, children who showed too much imagination or defiance were sometimes diagnosed with, quote, moral insanity.

That was a thing.

Or sent to reformatory schools.

Moral insanity.

Reformatory schools.

So everybody on.

On only fans has moral insanity.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Is that what we're saying now?

The users do?

Yeah, but it's such a perspective, subjective based thing.

Imagine being a teacher.

You know, Billy, you are not conforming.

You're not, you are morally insane.

Young man, you're not listening.

Go sit in the corner and I'm.

Going to send you to a reformatory.

School and then embarrass you in front of the whole class.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Education hasn't adapted to today's world.

It's stuck in a bygone era.

That should not be a surprise to anybody.

But there's some data here which I think is important.

Okay, I can't wait to hear it.

Yeah, good, because you're gonna.

The education system still assumes some really, really wrong things.

Stable long term employment.

Most people I know have shifted jobs a great deal.

We still believe that holding on the jobs long term is the way.

But when you look at resumes that come in, most people are three to four years at most.

And they hop at most.

Yeah.

I was talking to a coworker today saying I've never stayed at a job longer than five years.

I was like Dang.

What do I do?

Linear career progression.

If I'm there long enough, I'll get promoted.

That is in no way, shape or form normal or consistent these days.

I mean, there's the whole concept of getting pigeonholed.

Yeah, yeah.

You hit that glass ceiling, can you?

Knocking.

We like you right here.

Yeah, let me in.

Yeah.

The U.S. economy as primarily industrial.

Now, this is going to be a reoccurring problem here, okay?

We are not an industrial society.

These rules, as a reminder, were put in place for the educational system during the Industrial Revolution.

What did we do?

We outsourced industry to China because we were supposed to be a nation of thinkers, yet we're not teaching our people to be thinkers.

Again, I'm going to use some explicit language here.

What the fuck, right?

Did anybody not go, wait a minute.

Our entire educational system is breeding out thinking and imagination, and we are outsourcing the technical, physics, physical skills that are still necessary.

And the irony, the sick irony about it right now is AI is going to take all the thinking jobs now.

All of them.

Yeah, people just resort to it.

It's the new Google.

Yeah, just Google it and I'll just chat it.

Yeah, just go to chat.

I do it all the time.

Right.

But we're going to get to a point where so many of those critical thinking jobs are gone because people will trust AI more than they trust a human.

So one thing that I think with the family and working full time and having the busy schedules that we have, a hobby that I wish I did more of is reading.

Right.

Because I think it promotes critical thinking.

It allows you to be in the moment and think about what it is that you're reading.

You can take a pause.

It's something that I don't do, but it's a reason why I love podcasts.

Right.

You sit there, long form, you can pause, you can hear, you can critically think about.

People might be listening to this about us and not agreeing, but at least they're critically thinking and working through it, right?

Yeah.

I'd rather you send me some message and talk some trash than I would you not hear it.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I totally get that.

So I have some examples here.

In 2025, most high schools require more hours of cursive writing and state history than digital literacy, coding, financial planning, or negotiation.

Right.

I mean, there are some things you could teach kids that are valuable today that we're just not teaching them for no other reason than we're just not teaching them.

Right?

Right.

Historical context Here in the 1950s, a factory worker in Detroit with no college degree could afford a house, car and vacation and support a family on one income.

Today, the US economy is dominated by knowledge work, the gig economy, and rapid technological change.

Yet education still trains for obedient roles.

Obedient and obsolete roles.

Might I add anecdotally here, the Socratic method, which is how you learn in law school, which someone asks you a question, so they try to force you to come up with the answer as opposed to giving you the answer.

It's just a question question.

Feedback loop of ancient Greece, which emphasized questioning, dialogue and discovery has been almost entirely replaced by memorization and test taking.

Law school is the only example that I'm aware of.

Wow.

Law school teaches method vis a vis the Socratic method.

And it is even becoming much more standardized now.

Yeah, it should be.

Yeah.

So let's move on to employers once rewarded lifelong loyalty now that social contract is broken.

We've talked about this in the show.

I'm very passionate about this.

I think that the social contract between workers and the employers has been violated in a way that, that is going to cause a revolution.

Everything is going to happen.

And the only thing that's preventing it is that educational stuff in a process, pushing people in, going, okay, I have to do this.

But that's changing.

Social media is changing this.

Yeah.

And those student loan payments, rather you come out, force you to have to work because if you don't guess what's going to happen, you don't take those wages.

Thank you very much.

But so many people are saying, why would I pay for student loans now?

Why would I pay for school?

Yeah.

Why would I do that?

Yeah.

And you, you could, you would think that, okay, if I'm, if I'm an employee applying for a job.

Why, why wouldn't, why shouldn't this be the standard?

Right.

The higher standard, if you will.

Right.

Where I think about changing the name.

Of the show, like if I'm applying for a job, but I don't know what.

Yeah.

The highest standard.

I just, I feel like we're getting high every time we do the show.

Like, are we selling marijuana here, boys?

You really think about changing the name of the show?

No, not at all.

Okay.

Think about change like that.

We haven't even talked about that yet.

I have to remove the.

We got a trademark.

Yeah.

I got to remove the back tattoo.

Oh, yeah.

The one over your tailbone.

So right there.

Yeah.

You know where it is.

But lost my train of thought.

That's okay.

I like trains.

Yeah.

It's One hour in number three.

Inappropriate.

Inappropriate timing with timing.

With everything that's been going on, that is okay.

So in post World War II America there.

There was a bit of a different paradigm.

Union membership peaked at about 35% of workers.

That's a good chunk.

Companies like IBM, GE&AT and T offered cradle to grave employment.

You could work your entire life for one company.

Cradle to grave is crazy concept.

Yeah.

An example here, General Motors assembly line worker in 1965 earned about $7,000 a year, roughly 6, $68,000 by today's standards, accounting for inflation.

With full health care pension and job security, pension being the biggest thing there.

In return, workers stayed decades.

But that's gone.

Okay.

That's gone.

Way gone.

See ya.

Union memberships today are about 10%.

Okay.

Down a great deal about 25%.

Median tenure at a job is about 4.1 years.

4.1.

Okay.

Pensions have all but disappeared.

Very rare to have one.

If you're lucky enough to have one, great.

But most people have a 401k.

Shifting risk from the employer to the employee.

It's now your job to manage these funds, and your job to do it will contribute a nominal amount.

Right.

That's on you.

That's not on us anymore.

Anecdotally, the.

The term company man, once a compliment, is now rarely heard and rarely considered to be a compliment.

It's actually kind of derogatory.

Oh, you're.

You're.

You're W2 wager.

Yikes.

Yeah.

You're not in Miami with your bugatti.

Yeah.

Right.

McLaren or Bugatti.

Yeah.

As they say.

Bugatti.

Bugatti.

So wages have not kept up and Americans are forced to hustle more than ever.

Hustle culture wasn't born out of cool factor.

It was born out of necessity.

We've talked about this in the show, too.

Used to be, husband would work, then it was husband and wife worked, then it was husband and wife worked and somebody had a side hustle.

And even then, you're barely scraping by.

And then.

Yeah.

And then if you don't want to do that, I have to consider moving my family somewhere else because I can no longer afford to live here off of one or two incomes.

You want to hear the wild part about it?

Tell me about it.

Yeah, I'm glad you asked.

Since 1979, worker productivity has increased by 70%.

Productivity has increased 70%.

Look at that.

Median real wages are only up about 6 to 10%, depending on the metric, of course.

Median home prices versus median incomes.

1970, $23,000 home, about $9.8K in income is about 2.3x of your income.

Yeah.

Right.

By 2024 standards, a $420,000 home, about $75,000.

Average income is about 5.6x your income, double, double.

So in 1960, only about 4% of workers held more than one job.

Today it's about 8 to 10% formally.

And I use that because a lot of people are hiding it.

Plus millions more in the informal gig economy.

Right.

A Pew 2024 study, about 40% of Americans have a side hustle.

60% report their wages haven't kept up with living costs.

These are meaningful numbers.

These are the majority of the.

Of the.

Of the American population.

So I think there's some historical examples here.

I'm going to use China, Britain, and the Soviet Union as some context for the fact that this is a problem.

The Imperial examination system, Kiju was one of the first standardized tests in history designed to select obedient bureaucrats loyal to the emperor.

Wow.

In China, I don't know that.

Okay.

In industrial Britain, factory schools train children as young as six to work in mills.

Literacy was secondary to teaching them to tolerate long hours in harsh discipline.

In the Soviet Union, education focused on producing engineers, factory workers, and soldiers, heavily propagandized in uniform.

This just all made me think of.

And I'm only asking you right now because you've been to Japan.

In Japan, this is not so.

Not as prevalent.

Right.

It's very common for somebody to grow up and just take over the family business.

That's just what the family has done.

Right.

Actually, Japan's going through an interesting arc right now where people are having less and less children because they've been so dedicated to their work that they put the work first and foremost.

Yeah, I know.

Their debt to GDP ratio is off the charts.

Yeah, I want to say like 200.

Yeah, it's going to maybe.

Can you look that up?

There's also homes in Japan you could buy for dirt cheap that are subsidized in some cases because they.

They're just sitting vacant and there's too many vacant homes out there.

So I think Japan's going through its own renaissance.

Excuse me, if you will.

Wow.

Japan's jet to GDP.

Debt to GDP ratio is extremely high, hovering around 263.9% in 2022 and is projected to reach 278% by 2026.

This means Japan's government debt is more than double the country's annual economic output.

While Japan's tax to GDP ratio is 34.4% comparable to the.

What the hell.

Yeah.

The average.

It's the highest level of government debt that is a major concern.

The debt is largely due to Social Security costs and a persistent primary fiscal deficit.

So not the world's greatest problem.

So we.

And we have a Social Security problem here.

It's going to happen.

We have Social Security which is due to run out in the 2035ish period.

Right.

And they're talk.

They're already talking about extending it.

Like pushing it back.

Yeah.

And I don't know how you fix that.

But let's.

Let's close the show up with a final thought which I think is important.

From the Prussian drill halls to your local high school, the purpose was never your wealth.

That was never the intent.

It was always your compliance.

You listen to the show and it's meaningful to you.

Understand that we are trying to challenge the way you think.

It might be uncomfortable.

It might cause you to look in the mirror and it may cause you to be very introspective.

That's the intention here.

We're trying to do that because all of us are byproducts of the same system where we were beaten into submission.

And that should not be the case for the next generation.

Even if it doesn't help you.

The bells you obey, the rows you sit in, the grades you chase.

They were designed to make you a cog in someone else's machine.

The tragedy is the machine doesn't even exist anymore.

At least certainly not in the way it was originally meant to be.

And you were still being trained to fit in it and punished if you don't.

It's true.

And that's the purpose of the show.

That.

That's why we do this for free.

And hopefully some people out there will listen to this and it'll change the way they think about things.

I'm not saying don't go to school and.

Yeah.

And hopefully some people are lucky enough to not maybe go through some of these experiences where they feel like they're being gatekeeped.

Right.

Yeah.

But one thing that I feel like because we did promise the listeners some ways that maybe some things that maybe you do with Carter at home, some things that I do.

Regil.

Maybe you can chime in too.

One thing that I really want would emphasize is just restructure your relationship with failure as soon as possible or for your kids.

Especially your kids.

I don't like the ideology of failure taught in schools.

Yeah.

What is why?

Why failure?

Right.

You didn't like you didn't fail.

It's not failure.

Right.

Right.

Your aptitude might be different.

I know that I have shortcomings as a friend.

I am not the world's greatest friend.

I know it, it depends.

But I make up for it in other ways.

Right.

More so.

At least I try to.

Yeah.

But if you would look at me by traditional metrics, and I have, and I'm using friendship as a proxy.

Traditional metrics is, is what, what everyone has grown to believe makes a quote unquote good.

A good friend.

Right.

And yet I don't fit into that mold.

But that doesn't make me a bad friend.

It doesn't make a kid who went to school who got an F in geometry a stupid kid or a bad kid.

That just might not be their aptitude.

And one of the pressures that we have on these, these children is that they should continue to progress.

My wife does this a lot.

Where my son has come on.

We talked on the show before and he's, he's supposed to be learning how to read and write and he's accelerated far beyond, you know, where he probably should be for the standardized system.

I don't know where he should be based on his intelligence, but he can do a lot of good things.

The kid's doing it seven days a week.

Right.

And my wife is super, super hawkish on, on watching him, ensuring that he's disciplined and gets it done.

So much so that he's probably the most disciplined in their ecosystem of that school.

And I have to stop and remind her and remind him that this is not a proxy for success.

We are not good parents.

Because he always does his homework.

Right.

No, it's true.

I mean, you know something else that could be celebrated is if I know he's still younger, maybe he's already done this where he might just get up one day and just start doing his homework.

Right.

That should be celebrated.

I look at it frankly as I'm more.

The other day he got up and got dressed on his own, brushed his teeth on his own, went to the bathroom and was downstairs waiting for us when we got up.

Wow.

That was more impressive to me than his ability to read.

Right.

He read the room, saw what needed to get done and handled it and didn't need anybody else.

Right.

And it shows that he's self sufficient.

So to me, look, I look at everybody.

Listen to this.

Whether you're a kid or not, whether you're an adult or not, it's irrelevant.

We all have the same underlying problem.

Beaten into us over time.

The only way we escape this is if people take a real look at.

At who they are and who they want to be.

And if you're okay with what you are and that's what you want to be, good for you.

Good for you.

I agree.

Yeah.

But there's nothing wrong with wanting more.

There's nothing wrong with wanting more and being okay with, okay, let me.

Let me try to grow more.

Right?

It's another.

Another item is maybe learn something that doesn't provide you credentials.

After learning it, just be curious.

Continue to learn.

That's for the actual listener, not.

Not the child.

But promote curiosity, right?

I.

If I see something and I.

We're driving and we pass it and my kids are in the car and I know that they notice it, I'll ask them, do you guys know what that was?

And they'll say, no.

Be like, why didn't you ask?

You're just going to let that go by?

You don't want to know what that is, right?

So.

And we always talk about advertisements.

We'll try to pause the advertisement because they don't deal with commercials like we did growing up, right, bro?

My son of the day saw a commercial for the first time, right?

He was like, what is this?

He was like, why?

Why?

This isn't the movie.

What is this?

He's like, why'd you change the channel?

I'm like, dad, I. I.

Wait, what?

I'm like, son, I didn't change.

So.

So my.

My kids are like, can we just use Uncle Weiss's account?

The premium YouTube?

No.

As dad.

I'm like, no, no.

And now I gamified it.

Yeah.

So I try to pause the ad mid ad and be like, what do you think they're trying to sell you before.

Before the actual product comes out.

So we kind of gamified it.

Yeah.

All right, well, Raju, you got anything?

You've been sitting quiet back there tonight.

Yeah.

He's been watching the camera go back and forth on the new rig.

Yeah.

Very, very entertaining.

It also stopped midway to the show.

Battery life not so good.

Oh, we'll work on it.

All right.

You got anything else, Jill?

Nope.

Christopher?

Wow.

Just a nope.

Just a nope.

That's it.

Very, very, like, right there.

Yeah, that was a little runish.

I'm a little worried he's transforming, bro.

Yeah, I got ph est.

See?

Posteroon stress disorder.

Nothing to add for tonight, guys.

Sweetheart, we're just trying to get you in.

Take us out.

Give us a high pitch.

You give me a high pitch.

Okay?

Don't tell me what to do.

All right.

Goodbye, Obedience.

Obedience.

Good job.