[SPEAKER_00]: Naomi, welcome to Real Talk with Zubie.

[SPEAKER_00]: How are you doing?

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing good.

[SPEAKER_01]: How are you, Zubie?

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Naomi, I know who you are and a little bit about your story, but for those who are not familiar, please introduce yourself.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a therapy student.

[SPEAKER_01]: I live in California's Bay Area and I was going to Santa Clara University.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was in my last year to become a marriage and family therapist.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what happened was I enrolled in one of the last classes I needed to graduate called Human Sexuality.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I tried to enroll in this class two different times, and I ended up walking out and writing in the Wall Street Journal about my experience.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I'll tell you a little bit about what happened.

[SPEAKER_01]: I originally enrolled in summer of twenty twenty four, and I dug into the syllabus, and I discovered, say Domesticistic Erotica for required reading, describing violent [SPEAKER_01]: gang sex punishing a wife for taking off her collar.

[SPEAKER_01]: I found pornography that we were to watch just group masturbation pornography.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was a pornographic illustration guide depicting just all sorts of sex acts and accrued in titillating way.

[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't anatomical pictures.

[SPEAKER_01]: We've all been in health class but this was one image even included in animal and it was [SPEAKER_01]: It was a comical, the way it was depicted.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the real kicker was the final paper, which was a comprehensive sexual autobiography.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I was asked to discuss things like, well, chronicle your sexual past and present.

[SPEAKER_01]: When did you start masturbating?

[SPEAKER_01]: What are your erotic goals for the future?

[SPEAKER_01]: How will you achieve those goals?

[SPEAKER_01]: And how will your sex life [SPEAKER_01]: affect your clinical work as a therapist.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was reading this just thinking no way this is actually a requirement, this is such an invasion of privacy.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I tried to get an accommodation for this course for nearly a year actually.

[SPEAKER_01]: I went to the professor, to the dean, to the chair, then the dean, [SPEAKER_01]: the provost, the president, I went, I was talking to campus ministry showing a priest pornography and he just offered me prayer.

[SPEAKER_01]: And [SPEAKER_01]: I was pretty crazy.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was pretty crazy.

[SPEAKER_01]: God forgive me.

[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, so I couldn't get in a combination.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I ended up just dropping that class at the very end because I was put into a group, not at the very end at the beginning because I was put into a group with a man and I was prompted to discuss my masturbation habits.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, no way, I'm a married woman.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is ridiculous.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I dropped the class.

[SPEAKER_01]: And when I re-enrolled in it, I requested the same accommodation that Muslim students had received, which was to take the course remotely.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I thought, OK, fine.

[SPEAKER_01]: At least I can do this by myself and the privacy of my own home.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the professor instead scheduled a Zoom meeting with me and he promised professionalism.

[SPEAKER_01]: He promised no required sexual disclosure.

[SPEAKER_01]: And frankly, I agreed to be honest.

[SPEAKER_01]: I agreed to go in person.

[SPEAKER_01]: And a couple weeks later, I was sitting in class, being prompted to write something down that I disliked about my genitals, so it could be read aloud to the class.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it just escalated from there.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was a guest speaker [SPEAKER_01]: a transgender person who said that trans women have the only p-words that can blow up the world and it was just very crap.

[SPEAKER_01]: blow up the world.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know what that means.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was a joke.

[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody laughed.

[SPEAKER_01]: But my final straw, the reason I walked out was because we were played a sex dungeon tour where a woman was flogged, gagged, wrapped in plastic, made to jump up and down, put into a guillotine.

[SPEAKER_01]: And at the end of this video, the professor smiles casually and goes, so what do you think who wants to try it?

[SPEAKER_01]: And at that point, I had just had enough.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just so beyond the pale.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is not education.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm paying for this at a Catholic school and, you know, I wouldn't stand for it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I went home.

[SPEAKER_01]: I wrote about it and the Wall Street Journal ran the story and it made a splash.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there are a lot of different directions that we can go in here, but before diving into all that, tell me a little bit about why you wanted to study therapy in the first place.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I thought that my skill set would be aligned with therapy, and it would be a great way for me to help people.

[SPEAKER_01]: I always wanted to find a profession that would have some net positive on the world, and I love listening to people.

[SPEAKER_01]: I love understanding people's diverse viewpoints, and I think I get along with people pretty well.

[SPEAKER_01]: And also my mom is a therapist.

[SPEAKER_01]: So she was inspiring as I was growing up, giving me the idea that every single person is made in the image of God.

[SPEAKER_01]: She isn't Christian, but you know, she uses that language that we all have inherent dignity and we're all deserving of care.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what I thought it would be.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I thought the program would be rooted in.

[SPEAKER_01]: Human dignity, autonomy, individual rights, but that is not what I found.

[SPEAKER_00]: So when did you first enroll in this course?

[SPEAKER_00]: Was that I'm guessing about three years ago if you were in your final year?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, in the program I enrolled in January of twenty twenty one.

[SPEAKER_01]: I originally, so I got my bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley in legal studies.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought I wanted to be a lawyer until I spoke to lawyers and they told me, don't do it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I shifted course.

[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I mean, overall the program was [SPEAKER_01]: There were some great classes and there's some great professors there.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to paint it with a broad brush, but there has been a fundamental shift in the role of the therapist in these training programs.

[SPEAKER_01]: Moving from the neutral guide that helps apply on with self-discovery and self-reflection to more of an activist position, a political activist, and that activism was woven through the program.

[SPEAKER_01]: For example, I'll tell you one story that I thought was pretty surprising.

[SPEAKER_01]: I walked into a marriage and, yeah, it was a marriage therapy class.

[SPEAKER_01]: And on the walls, I saw race, gender, religion, nationality, language, disability status, all these identity categories.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we were prompted to distribute ourselves or divide ourselves based off what we thought was most important to our own identity.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we had a group of people saying, my sex is the most important part about me.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then another group of people, my race is the most important part about me.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I felt so alone because I was the only person who stood under religion.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm a, like, probably a pretty new young Christian.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I couldn't imagine standing under and saying, yeah, what defines me is because I'm white or what defines me is because I [SPEAKER_01]: happen to be born a woman.

[SPEAKER_01]: But so we were divided and then we were we're prompted to discuss in those small groups why that identity category is so important.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I was standing there under religion in silence as everyone else was chattering and kind of shooting me these glances.

[SPEAKER_01]: And part of the political activism is dismantling the dominant hegemonic norms.

[SPEAKER_01]: That is repeated and that is a goal of therapists now.

[SPEAKER_01]: And one of those norms is Christianity.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I did feel a little bit in the hot seat identifying myself with, you know, yeah, I'm wearing a cross.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Christian faith is very important to me because that is one of the norms that is supposedly oppressive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know the thing that I wish I were more shocked by all of this than I am?

[SPEAKER_00]: Sadly, I've heard far too many of these types of stories over the past decade from people in all different sectors and from all different walks of life.

[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that does shock me is all of this happening at a supposed Catholic university.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing in my brain.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to square right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what does it even mean to be a Catholic university if you're the only student who is saying that your religion, your faith, [SPEAKER_00]: is more important to you than your race, your gender, your sexuality.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that is something that people are looking at you, a skew for.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what's going on there?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think it's by nature of where it's situated.

[SPEAKER_01]: California's Bay Area is a very secular place.

[SPEAKER_01]: And also higher education towards higher education tends to be more secular.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure when the [SPEAKER_01]: But I will say it's anti-Christian.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure when the anti-Christian ideology seaped in, but I do know that the sexuality class has been working off the same syllabus reportedly since the eighties.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this has been going on for a long time.

[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I agree.

[SPEAKER_01]: I thought that when I brought it to the priest, the head of campus ministry, that he would be surprised, but he wasn't surprised either.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, maybe.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: He was hard to read.

[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't seem to think that I had any recourse in regards to it being a Catholic university.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, I mean, it seems like there's just been a wholesale abandonment and dominant culture, especially in academia of the religious traditions.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it is pretty disappointing.

[SPEAKER_01]: I thought at least going to a Catholic university, there would be tolerance for the Christian worldview, but there wasn't even that.

[SPEAKER_00]: You'd certainly hope so.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if you can't find refuge in a Catholic university, then it says a lot.

[SPEAKER_00]: It says a lot about the course.

[SPEAKER_00]: It says a lot about the state of higher education now in the USA and in much of the West and it's crazy, you know, because I just think that, I mean, I graduated from university in two thousand and seven.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure that in some of the courses that was probably some like quote unquote weird woke stuff, you know, to use the twenty-twenties terminology, but at the time like it just [SPEAKER_00]: It just wasn't all of this stuff wasn't a thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, all of the weird racial stuff, all of the weird gender stuff, all of the weird LGBTQ XYZ stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, when I was in university, it was just LGBTQ.

[SPEAKER_00]: I remember that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I remember that clearly.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was just LGBTQ.

[SPEAKER_00]: Occasionally, there would be the T, but the Q and the A plus P to S, like, like, every year, you know, they just keep adding and adding.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I just, I think, two thousand seven, I mean, [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe for my younger listeners, that sounds like a long time ago, but I'm just kind of like the speed of the shift has just been insane.

[SPEAKER_00]: At that time, it was just like, if people were going to university, there wasn't a concern, oh my gosh, is my child going to come out being a blue-haired communist, or are they going to come out thinking that they're the other gender, or are they going to be exposed to the type of stuff you've just been talking about?

[SPEAKER_00]: None of that was a concern.

[SPEAKER_00]: I did computer science, so I'm totally insulated, but [SPEAKER_00]: Even for my, the people who studied, I don't know English or history or philosophy or politics or whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: It just, maybe they would have learned about like the Marxist worldview, just as like, hey, this is a worldview that exists and this is something that throughout history led to these different movements and so on, but not like [SPEAKER_00]: This is what the world is.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is how it is, let alone all the weird stuff with gender, all the weird stuff with race.

[SPEAKER_00]: Before we started recording, you told me that some of the racial components also got quite heavily involved.

[SPEAKER_00]: How does that play a role in such an odd question?

[SPEAKER_00]: How does that play a role in the current state of therapy and therapists?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so there is the pre-eminent textbook of multi-cultural counseling is Daryl Dwing Sue's counseling, the culturally diverse.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it is, it's Robin D.

Angela's white fragility and more academic language.

[SPEAKER_01]: So in this textbook, there is a chart describing white culture.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they include things like rational, linear thinking.

[SPEAKER_01]: the scientific method, planning for the future.

[SPEAKER_01]: And as I'm reading this, my jaw is wide open.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is indistinguishable from a white supremacist writing, but we're being taught this to have compassion for those who don't subscribe to the white culture.

[SPEAKER_00]: Being on time?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, being on time.

[SPEAKER_01]: Being on time, they said, is white dominant culture and meanwhile, [SPEAKER_01]: During this whole book is an attack on whiteness.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm reading this thinking, are we not meant to help our clients have delayed gratification and make a plan for the future?

[SPEAKER_01]: And in this class and this multicultural class, there was an exercise where we had to name our whiteness as a therapist.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it would go something like this.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, Zubi.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for coming to see me.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm really glad that you're here today.

[SPEAKER_01]: I just want to start by acknowledging that I'm white and I see that you're not.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so if I get anything wrong, just please know that you can correct me.

[SPEAKER_01]: which it's fine.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, therapists will get things wrong, but to have an unsolicited racial warning at the beginning of each therapy session with somebody of a different race, that strikes me as divisive and harmful to the therapeutic alliance.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, how would that land for you if a white, you went to a white therapist, and she said that?

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, going to a white female therapist would not be on my list of general things I would do.

[SPEAKER_00]: No offense to present company.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think the session would last very long.

[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face to be honest.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'd struggle.

[SPEAKER_00]: Especially because just like the world that I'm in, and I've been so exposed over the past decade to like the most ridiculous [SPEAKER_00]: Like the most ridiculous woke stuff that exists in the UK, in the US, in Canada, like running this podcast for six years, being connected to so many people, like I hear the stories, you know, I get the DMs, I've been in this space for a long time, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So, I don't know, maybe you could add a lot of land acknowledgement in there as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: just for extra bang.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, look, we're living in a world where I have been accused of being a white supremacist multiple times.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that's the world that we've been living in.

[SPEAKER_00]: So just, I'm aware of the absurdity is what I'm saying.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if people are telling me with a straight face, [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps it's because I follow many of the principles that you've talked about like using logic, delaying gratification, I don't know, valuing the family unit, trying to be on time.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not perfect at that one.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's my African side.

[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, the whole thing is, I have to laugh at it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think with these things, there's almost two roots you can go.

[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe you have to pass through the first one to get to the second.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the first one is disbelief, anger, and frustration.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is so annoying, upsetting, offensive, regardless of who you are.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's offensive in different ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then it's just got into a point, like a few years ago, I was just like, I have to laugh at this stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Especially because the people who promote this, whether it's from the racial angle or the gender angle or the sexuality angle, the one thing they can not handle is just being laughed at.

[SPEAKER_00]: So with it all, this is just absurd.

[SPEAKER_00]: You just have to expose the absurdity as you're talking to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Part of me is disgusted.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Part of me is like outraged.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they're putting young students through this, you know, like you're paying good money to go and be shown pornography, like what?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's no context.

[SPEAKER_00]: where that even makes sense, trying to force students to write about their sexual history and so on, doing this under the banner of, like, you're supposedly a Catholic university, that makes it even ten times worse.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I massively offended at the same time, I'm just like, this is so absurd.

[SPEAKER_00]: This sounds like a South Park episode.

[SPEAKER_00]: It does.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right, like some lecture, the teacher gets up there and is like, you know, here's today's assignment.

[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what I want you to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and you're there, I'm just like, you actually live through this.

[SPEAKER_00]: You sat there and went through this process.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, where are you now with it all?

[SPEAKER_00]: Did you finish the course?

[SPEAKER_00]: Did you leave just before?

[SPEAKER_00]: What's your current status, actually?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: So meanwhile, this is happening.

[SPEAKER_01]: I have a therapy internship that I have to do to graduate.

[SPEAKER_01]: And after the Wall Street Journal piece runs, [SPEAKER_01]: I get an email from my boss saying, hey, I need to discuss Wall Street Journal.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I immediately thought I was getting fired, but I talked to him on the phone for an hour and a half or so.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he goes, you know, you sound really reasonable.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you'll make a great therapist.

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to keep you on, but look, there's a couple people in the organization who have read your article and they're very upset.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I have told them not to distribute the article.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm hoping that you could get together with them and myself, and we could just discuss this, and if you share what you just shared with me, I think they would understand it better.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, a couple days later, I am summoned to a meeting and it got distributed to the whole organization.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, or at least a large part of the organization.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I was in a meeting with fifteen therapists who were quite angry with me myself and the director who was sympathetic to me and I actually still really like him.

[SPEAKER_01]: But in this meeting, [SPEAKER_01]: these character attacks were just lodged at me that I was unsafe.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was dangerous for people to be sitting in my presence.

[SPEAKER_01]: I would cause the marginalized BDSM community to kill themselves because I called out the sex dungeon tour.

[SPEAKER_01]: What else?

[SPEAKER_01]: That's.

[SPEAKER_00]: When I think about oppressed minorities, that's always who comes to my mind.

[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know, and okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: Some things should be on the margins.

[SPEAKER_01]: For example, they're still in chains.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're still in chains still getting worse.

[SPEAKER_01]: Some people should be on the margins.

[SPEAKER_01]: For example, like people whipping each other in public, like that should be not the center of our society, I think.

[SPEAKER_01]: But so anyway, just all of this, and I am telling them [SPEAKER_01]: personal details about why I think that we should analyze the BDSM culture critically, because I know from quote, lived experience, which is the capital in their culture, that it is not always healthy to participate in something that is legal, that you have given legal consent for, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is healthy.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I am bearing my soul in tears while balancing my philosophical concerns about critical theory, and I just get nothing from them.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still a harmful bigot, and by the end of the meeting, they couldn't really refute what I was saying, but they said, well, if you stay here, you'll be compelled to write about what?

[SPEAKER_01]: you experience, which I think is actually true, because I think that my thesis, that critical theory, has infiltrated therapy, has infiltrated the training grounds as well, is probably bears out.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's probably true, and they didn't want me to expose that.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, at the end of the meeting, the director still says, you know, we're gonna keep you on, it's fine, don't worry.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then he calls me two hours later and says, it's not tentable for you to continue at the organization because of the intolerance of my staff.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry to do this.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think your writing is important and I'm inclined to help you.

[SPEAKER_01]: But so that was just crazy to me because he sees the injustice.

[SPEAKER_01]: He thinks that I would be a good therapist, but these other therapists threaten him and made an example out of me.

[SPEAKER_01]: and he complied, which just is a testament to the culture and the social exile is part of the Marxist worldviews, part is just one of their tactics.

[SPEAKER_01]: So right now where I'm at is I didn't have a internship to graduate on time, it would push me back a whole year.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm just taking a break right now, trying to assess what I'm going to do because frankly, I don't want [SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to go back in that classroom.

[SPEAKER_01]: I feel humiliated and it is funny, but I feel like little tea traumatized from having an emotional reaction and walking out after being forced to consume, you know, bondage material.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing a lot of soul searching on what I want for my life.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if even if I complete this program, do I want to be in this community of professionals?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because I don't think that it's the same community that my mom was trained in, who she speaks so highly of.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I hear that totally.

[SPEAKER_00]: I have a few questions.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is just out of sheer curiosity.

[SPEAKER_00]: What's the, what was the approximate demographic breakdown of the fifteen, sixteen people involved in this struggle session?

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to get it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was, it was probably like, there was one male besides the director, the director's a male.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was one male and one black woman and everyone else was a white woman.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that's what I would have expected.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't want to, I don't want to be prejudiced either.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm like, I want to make sure I'm like imagining this correctly.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one thing I'll say is just a word of just a personal word of encouragement because I know so many people over the past decade in particular [SPEAKER_00]: who have been through the grinder of some type of cancellation or, you know, just actual discrimination because they don't go along with the woke ideology, whether that's at their school or university or workplace in so many different sectors.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've heard so many different flavors and variations of this type of thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: and stick to your guns.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's all I want to say.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know you will, but seriously, stick to your guns, stick to your principles and you will more than land on your feet, you will thrive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like people who are able to push through this and get through the mob justice, get through all of the character attacks and the personal attacks.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like that always, that wave moves on and the people who get through it, they always, always, always come out.

[SPEAKER_00]: better, stronger, healthier, with more opportunities, with a bigger network of people that are connected to, they'll always end up inspiring people because [SPEAKER_00]: I think something that is, that I notice in all of these stories, and a lot of people don't like naming, don't like naming the vice.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's certainly not a virtue, but cowardice, just this collective, collective moral cowardice.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what's always a play in all of these stories.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's always like you'll get one or two people who stand up and [SPEAKER_00]: do stand up for what is right and are willing to say something.

[SPEAKER_00]: Funnily enough, again, in this whole world, they're always talking about the importance of speaking up and speaking your truth.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you feel uncomfortable, or you feel unsafe, you should say something.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's just this odd juxtaposition.

[SPEAKER_00]: where you have the same people who want trigger warnings and this and this and safe spaces.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they're like, all right, we're going to sit you down and we're going to just make you as uncomfortable as possible.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to show you.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just such a, I sort of try to square it in my brain.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, how do you not see your own level of hypocrisy here because you are doing everything that you supposedly stand against?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: I somehow imagine that [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe if it had been like fifteen men on the call and one woman that you know people would maybe people would view it differently and it would be more obvious that this is like bleeding and this is like essentially an intimidation and stuff but I think somehow if it's like women and it's kind of done in this nice smiley way that can kind of get away with this very nasty [SPEAKER_00]: vicious mob behavior and it can be under the banner of like safety or like just making sure the community isn't harmed or like whatever language they use, but it's just very, very vicious.

[SPEAKER_01]: It reminds me, you know, my mom calls it a fending from the victim position.

[SPEAKER_01]: If somebody is so convinced that they are victimized, they can justify bullying, intimidation, retaliation pretty easily in their own schema.

[SPEAKER_01]: And these people did feel that they were a victim and they felt that they were standing up for the victim.

[SPEAKER_01]: One person got really mad at me because I called the transgender person a male.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because this person is a male and lived as a male for fifty years and then transitioned to become, you know, identify as a woman.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that I think it's so obvious that that is essential [SPEAKER_01]: context that changes the dynamic of somebody standing in front of the classroom and talking about female genitalia that grotesquely, that that person is a male, actually.

[SPEAKER_01]: But that saying that by virtue of that person becoming a transgender woman, they earned their victim's stand.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so the people in that meeting felt that they had to protect that person from me.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've always found it very amusing that if you are a white straight man, you can go from the bottom of the victim hierarchy and the top of the oppression one.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can flip it around simply by identifying as a woman.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then you're, and then you're now above women.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're above black people.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're above like all the minorities and so on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like you could be, you could literally be like a rich straight white guy and you just throw on a dress and slap on some lipstick and say your pronouns are she her.

[SPEAKER_00]: And now all of a sudden, everyone is supposed to not just accommodate you, but like you are the, [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, the woke, the woke mathematics, it sort of hurts my brain.

[SPEAKER_00]: But there is something, there is something comically absurd about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it is comically absurd.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it took me getting out of the bubble to realize how hilarious it actually is and horrifying.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just hilarious.

[SPEAKER_01]: But talking to people who haven't been steeped in this culture so refreshing [SPEAKER_01]: to your point earlier about like building a network of people who aren't cowards, that has been so true.

[SPEAKER_01]: In the past month since this has happened, month and a half, I have met more people who I respect, who live with integrity than I have in my seven years of higher education, which is, it's disappointing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I actually did call this out to one person in particular because [SPEAKER_01]: After I left the classroom because I didn't want to watch the bondage video, the professor suggested that I seek psychological services.

[SPEAKER_01]: So just as an experiment, but I was curious and I actually was scared that I was being pushed out of the program on purpose.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I reached out to my local [SPEAKER_01]: or the campus psychological services center.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the psychologist on the call said, oh gosh, your department is a disaster.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's so many ethical violations and people come through.

[SPEAKER_01]: Students come through our doors all of the time.

[SPEAKER_01]: from that program because of their ethical missteps.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I went, whoa.

[SPEAKER_01]: I memorized that.

[SPEAKER_01]: I followed it up.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's what he said.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then I get a call from his boss saying, hey, so we looked at your availability and we actually can't accommodate you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing's going to work.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I go, oh, okay, I actually have full availability.

[SPEAKER_01]: I can come in at any working hour.

[SPEAKER_01]: And she goes, yeah, we don't recommend that at this time.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I go, what do you not recommend it or am I not permitted to?

[SPEAKER_01]: She goes, we don't recommend it at this time.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we hung up that call and then I followed up in an email.

[SPEAKER_01]: saying what had happened, saying that I'm being denied on campus psychological services and that they are aware of ethical missteps in my program and she bold faced lied and said, he never said that you were hostile on the phone, which in my opinion was laying the groundwork for my dismissal because my character is judged as a therapy student.

[SPEAKER_01]: and I told her your moral cowardice is nauseating.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because it is, it's, it's, it's, these people in the institutions and these bureaucracies, they protect the institution more than they protect the rights of students.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's gross.

[SPEAKER_00]: I have zero respect for people like that, you know, beyond the dignity of them being human beings, which I offer to everyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I come across a lot of people.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, again, maybe people who just aren't as familiar with some of these stories, and they always want to like give the benefit of the doubt or assume they're operating with like good intentions or this, I'm like, they're not.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're not.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've had my own personal, obviously, not just online, but like real life interactions with these types of people and the woke activists types.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm like, these are not good people.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're not like, you know, maybe they're trying to fly under this banner of compassion and kindness and whatever it is.

[SPEAKER_00]: But when you really get into their behavior, it's [SPEAKER_00]: It's a very, very thin veneer.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very thin veneer.

[SPEAKER_01]: What do you make of that?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because they fancy themselves as great people.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you what I think.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've thought about this quite a lot.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in this world much longer than I ever thought I ever thought I would be like yourself.

[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of got dragged into it without intentionally necessarily wanting to be in any type of culture war or something.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was just a rapper, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a modern iteration of a multi millennia old issue, which is even talked about in the Bible, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's the Pharisee type.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's the Pharisee type, you know?

[SPEAKER_00]: So when people are, if you're gonna be, if you're gonna be a scumbag and if you're gonna treat people badly and you're gonna be a liar or you're gonna be a coward or you're just gonna do any type of bad behavior, then [SPEAKER_00]: It's easier to get away with it if you do it under the banner of some type of greater good, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So there's like, there is a religious version of this where you have people who are, you know, they pretend to be super pious and all about the law and this and that and maybe they even know scriptures, it could be, they could be orthodox Jewish, they could be Christian, they could be Muslim, they could be from whatever the religion is, [SPEAKER_00]: These are the kind of people Jesus got mad about in the New Testament, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: The people who are there, you know, they've got their robes and their garments and they're quoting the Torah and this and that, but the way they actually treat other human beings, they treat them like dirt, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think walkness is like a modern [SPEAKER_00]: secular, it's essentially a modern secular religion for all intents and purposes, but it has that same type of behavior.

[SPEAKER_00]: So this like zealotry where you're masking your wrath and your envy and your jealousy and your pride, you're masking it all under the span of, oh, well, I just care so much about people.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to go back to like original Marxism, [SPEAKER_00]: like this is very, very apparent.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's why they say eat the rich.

[SPEAKER_00]: They don't say feed the poor.

[SPEAKER_00]: Think about that.

[SPEAKER_00]: They say eat the rich.

[SPEAKER_00]: They don't say feed the poor because they're driven by envy.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're driven by covetous.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're driven by jealousy and wrath.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not predominantly compassion.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was compassion.

[SPEAKER_00]: It would be like, hey, let's really try to do our best to lift up whoever is ever disadvantaged.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like it doesn't matter.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that guy's doing well.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like we're not trying to take down the guy who's doing well.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're trying to lift these people up.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you actually see how [SPEAKER_00]: the operation goes, you know, this is whether this is people attacking whiteness and white people or people attacking the rich or the one percent or people attacking like whoever they think is, you know, representative of those in power.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of how they how they tend to tend to go about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I just think that's I think that's what's happening here with all of these different [SPEAKER_00]: you know, under like with the extreme radical type feminists, of course, you know, it's the patriarchy.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so all men, you know, they view like all men, as if all men have this power and we just want to dominate women, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, we're meeting every Tuesday, having our patriarchy meetings, and they just have these whole narratives in their heads.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's like I said, it's just, if you're just nasty to people, with no ideology or explanation, then you're just viewed as an nasty person.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you've got this ideology, which allows you to justify it and say, oh, actually, no, I'm the righteous one.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the good one.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm attacking them because, you know, XYZ, however you explain it, you know, they have, they like to use their big weird academic words.

[SPEAKER_00]: You were talking about the cultural, hegemony, and dominate.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like they've got all their weird language.

[SPEAKER_00]: But ultimately it just boils down to [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I want to find a good reason to be a jerk and to treat people badly and I'm going to do it under this banner.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some people do it under this banner.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some people tend to do it under that banner, but to me it's all just the same.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the same underlying psychology.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can just stick different ideologies.

[SPEAKER_00]: on top of it, they can be religious, they can be non-religious, they can be directly political, they can be indirectly political, but to me it's kind of the same, I don't know, same operating system, different software.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it does like you mentioned that it is sort of like a secular religion.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I, that really resonates because most of these people, we talk about our faith in class because they really encourage self-disclosure in this program.

[SPEAKER_01]: Most people don't have a faith tradition.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that human beings, not all, but I think most human beings are spiritual beings.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we will drift to an ideology, a belief system, and a group allegiance as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it seems like these people are working with a secular religion, but not identifying it as such and having the same [SPEAKER_01]: intolerance for other people that say a, you know, a fundamentalist Christian might for other people of different worldviews.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's interesting.

[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned the patriarchy a bit too.

[SPEAKER_01]: Patriarchy is so and this is what really concerns me is that something like seventy five percent of new psychologists now are women.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the American Psychological Association published a guide in twenty eighteen for its guidelines for men and treating men and boys, something like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they divide, they define traditional masculinity ideology to include things like risk taking violence, achievement, adventure.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then they publish that traditional masculinity ideology is, quote, on the whole harmful.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm looking at this and then thinking to myself, no wonder men don't want to come to therapy because when these female therapists scratch their heads, why don't men want to come talk to us?

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, maybe because you pathologize their basic nature of being.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, shocker people generally, people aren't huge fans of that.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I really think that the only way to, the only way to fix all this stuff with the universities [SPEAKER_00]: You have to be starved.

[SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, that's my viewpoint as long as people keep.

[SPEAKER_00]: signing up to give them tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars to indoctrinate themselves or their kids into all of this bizarre stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's no incentive for it to stop.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not someone who's like anti-University or like anti-high eradication or something, but there [SPEAKER_00]: So many of these universities in the UK and the US and Canada, like across the West, so many of these disciplines have just become totally captured and corrupted.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the reality of it, not all of them, but a very large chunk.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as long as people keep sending their kids into this grinder and paying for the privilege, [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's going to change because there's no incentive for it to change and I think because of their like ten year situation and you know the way it can be very hard to you know fire someone even if there is some type of misconduct or ethical issue like these people just kind of stay in place and [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: I just think the best way to force change in reality without being without an actual revolution.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have to starve them because I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've met people.

[SPEAKER_00]: I try to be empathetic and I try to [SPEAKER_00]: see things from different directions, but you know, I've met parents, particularly like when I'm in the USA and I'm speaking at conservative events or I'm just traveling around.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm one of those people who people really like to tell me their stories, because they follow me online and they have done for years and they know my general stance in my opinions and so they want to tell me like, oh, this is what happened with my son or this is what happened with my daughter or this is what happened when I was in university.

[SPEAKER_00]: So like you hear all these stories and sometimes I'm just like, [SPEAKER_00]: Why if you're aware of all this and you're so concerned about it, why keep feeding the machine?

[SPEAKER_00]: You have to, you have to starve it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I understand that that might feel a little weird because [SPEAKER_00]: for so many decades, it's been like, hey, if you have the means, you have to go to college.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have to do these steps, but it doesn't make sense to me to complain about the system and then feed the system.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because every time you give them a dollar, every time you give them another thousand, every time you give them another ten thousand, it's essentially approval.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like if this was a company, [SPEAKER_00]: And you're like, I hate this company.

[SPEAKER_00]: I hate their products.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like what they're doing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you keep buying all their stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then...

[SPEAKER_00]: That's like a positive signal, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Their stockholders are like, oh, wow, awesome.

[SPEAKER_00]: People keep buying our stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's keep doing the same thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I just think it's the same in the universities and some of the schools as well, which have been going in the same direction.

[SPEAKER_00]: Fortunately, more people are pulling their kids out and homeschooling.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a massive rise of that happening, not just in America, but even in other parts of the world where it's legal.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not legal everywhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's good.

[SPEAKER_00]: To me, that's all really, really positive.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a massive shame that it was allowed to go as far as it has been to where you're sitting down students, whether they're seven or seventeen or twenty-one and you're literally segregating them by race or trying to get them to write about their sexual history or just like, [SPEAKER_00]: It's just wrong on so many levels.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to know where to begin with explaining why this is not good.

[SPEAKER_01]: And trying to explain it to somebody who doesn't just plainly see it has been sort of crazy making.

[SPEAKER_01]: When I'm trying to explain to grown adults why it is wrong for them to require me to tell them about my sex life.

[SPEAKER_01]: for a for a to graduate.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you don't just plainly see how wrong that is, I don't think there's any way of explaining it to you.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I maybe it is because they are stuck in this academia bubble and have been for so long that they just can't see through it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you're right with starving the universities, but our society has also placed such a high value on credentials.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we live more than a classist society.

[SPEAKER_01]: We live in a credentialist society because we give more respect to the adjunct professor making a hundred K a year who has, you know, a hundred K in student debt than we do to the electrician who's making three hundred thousand a year.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a class thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I've experienced that because my family is highly credentialed and I feel an internalized sense of, oh, to become an established person, you have to have a certain level of credentials.

[SPEAKER_01]: But at this point, it's like, what do those letters mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because what I'm seeing is that those letters often signal ideological compliance over [SPEAKER_01]: Instead of over intellectual rigor or interest in diverse world views are open inquiry even.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know what my next what my next moves are as far as if I want to continue in.

[SPEAKER_01]: in higher education because a lot of people have been telling me, you know, oh, you need to get a master's, you need to get a PhD for even for credibility to speak on these topics if I want to continue to speak.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the idea of going back into the belly of the beast is nauseating.

[SPEAKER_00]: I hear that.

[SPEAKER_00]: One question I did want to ask earlier is were you the only student in your class who [SPEAKER_00]: had an issue with this stuff.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I was the only one and at the end, when I stood up and I said, this is completely inappropriate.

[SPEAKER_01]: I gave the glass my email and I said, if anybody has similar concerns, you can email me, you're not alone.

[SPEAKER_01]: And nobody emailed me one [SPEAKER_01]: male student actually one of the three male students in the class reached out to offer me sympathy though it wasn't so much in solidarity he just goes like I'm sorry that you had an emotional reaction to that video I think the way that he He displayed that lesson was inappropriate but [SPEAKER_01]: No, I mean, the echo chamber is so intense that I think probably ninety percent don't even see a problem with it.

[SPEAKER_01]: They like their own humiliation.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the ten percent who do see a problem with it, they can observe what happened to me when I spoke up about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And there is incentive to stay silent because it is scary, actually.

[SPEAKER_01]: to break from the tribe, not just in this situation, but in any situation, when you break from your tribe, you are putting yourself in risk and we're tribal social creatures and being on your own is a dangerous position to be in.

[SPEAKER_01]: So no, I think that I think it's so captured that most people don't see it and the ones that do, they know to keep their mouth shut.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that certainly does not vote well for the therapy industry and for those who are seeking therapists.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I've been skeptical about therapy forever for the most part.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's really disturbing to learn more about the machine that is churning out so many of these people by the thousands.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what you just said there about them not even thinking there's something wrong with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: That actually is quite chilling.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think I would have actually preferred it if you said, yeah, I think a lot of people had an issue with it, but they didn't want to break from the tribe and they were afraid to say something.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'd probably think that that is better as much as I hate cowardice.

[SPEAKER_00]: That would probably be better than like they're being shown all this stuff and being told to do all these activities and they don't nothing in their brain or heart goes, hmm.

[SPEAKER_00]: Is this right, this feels this feels wrong.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's pretty concerning.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and part of the what I had a problem with the curriculum is these professors are teaching us.

[SPEAKER_01]: how to treat people who are in, when you are in a position of power, because the professor is in a position of power over us.

[SPEAKER_01]: And when somebody goes to a therapist, there is inherent, especially if you're a child or an adolescent, there is an inherent power differential between somebody with this credential.

[SPEAKER_01]: And somebody going, they're asking for help.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a one-way relationship, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not mutual.

[SPEAKER_01]: disclosing of information you are vulnerable when you go to a therapist and these professors are modeling abusive power and that makes me extremely nervous for what these therapists will do when they get launched into the profession.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to actually think towards solutions.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's something you said earlier about the, about the credentialist society.

[SPEAKER_00]: I did want to make a comment on that because I agree with you that that's how it's been and that's how it still is to some degree.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I really see this changing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's changing quite rapidly.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's one of those generational things.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think that, um, [SPEAKER_00]: our children as they grew up, you know, by the time they're in their twenties, let alone their thirties, the sort of obsession with credentials and even the idea that, because I hear a lot of people saying, oh, well, you know, you need a degree to get hired by certain companies and, you know, to get certain jobs.

[SPEAKER_00]: Even that, like, that is decreasing with companies that are run by, say, millennials or even Gen Zers who are running companies, [SPEAKER_00]: They don't care.

[SPEAKER_00]: If I were hiring someone and I have hired people that I've worked with, the thought of even asking for their degree [SPEAKER_00]: or they're connected.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's never even crossed my mind.

[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't matter.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, can you do the job?

[SPEAKER_00]: Are you a good person to work with?

[SPEAKER_00]: Are you hardworking?

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have the right qualities?

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what matters.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know to the older generations, maybe some Gen X and certainly boomers.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's much more of the, well, this is the way we've done it.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the way it always is.

[SPEAKER_00]: When they think back to university, they don't think about it being as ideological [SPEAKER_00]: nor as expensive.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the equation was just very, very different.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I just think we're now living in a time.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's only been what?

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say about ten to fifteen years where we've even had the option and the availability of education online in the way that we do now, where that you can pretty much learn, you can learn almost anything for free or for cheap online.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I often tell people now, I like to say that education is cheap, university is expensive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because people conflict to people are like, oh, well, education is so expensive.

[SPEAKER_00]: My education is not expensive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Education has never ever been cheaper.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is so cheap.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to learn how to code, if you want to learn about law, if you want to learn about history, if you want to learn about how to be a music producer, whatever it is you want to learn, it has never been cheaper to learn than it is now.

[SPEAKER_00]: But university has never been as expensive.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you want to go off for three, four, five, six years, and you want to study, and you do want to get your history degree, then yeah, that's going to cost more than it's ever costed before.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're just someone who's got a passion and you want to learn something, I mean, it's quite literally at your fingertips.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now you add AI on top of it, which can even like give you some reason, make it even easier for it to be learned.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I don't expect people who are fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years old to necessarily like, [SPEAKER_00]: get all of that in the same way I don't necessarily expect them to get like many aspects of social media and many other things but I just think with us and our kids and our future kids like it's going to be a very very different ballgame by the time they're adults [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, the idea, I think it's going to seem absurd that like you need a degree.

[SPEAKER_00]: Again, outside of very specific niches, maybe like medicine, perhaps law, engineering, outside of like very specific fields, the idea that like you need to get a piece of paper from one of these specific institutions, which costs by that time.

[SPEAKER_00]: I actually saw something [SPEAKER_00]: There's a little bit of a tangent.

[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, I recently became a father.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was looking into life insurance policies.

[SPEAKER_00]: I just got a life insurance policy.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't plan on dying anytime soon, but just in case.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was doing some math for it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it was saying that by the time my son is university age, [SPEAKER_00]: that cost of a degree, because of inflation, is estimated to be between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars for a four-year degree.

[SPEAKER_00]: I just thought I was just like, bro, like, that's just, like, what, like, this is just, I don't know, like at that point.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be different.

[SPEAKER_00]: My mentality around it is already different to what my parents' mentality was around it.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's different to my mentality even when I wasn't university because it was actually a lot cheaper, even in the mid-two thousand's.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it was way less ideological and all of this nonsense that people are now going through wasn't going on in the same way.

[SPEAKER_00]: So people will come around.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I know obviously people see it for the way it is now.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's going to massively change.

[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I think the education is going to be massively massively disrupted within the next decade.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's one of my predictions in the same way that I'm a musician.

[SPEAKER_00]: So when I started making music, it was CDs.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was all CDs, physical media, then it switched down loads.

[SPEAKER_00]: When I started making music, the word streaming didn't even exist, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then I moved to downloads and then I moved to streaming.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've seen the same in my lifetime with photography, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like it used to be people take photos, you take the film, you get it printed.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then I literally remember the digital switch.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thirty-eight years old, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not like an old man, but like I've seen different industries go through these transitions.

[SPEAKER_00]: And education is one.

[SPEAKER_00]: that has just like, it hasn't yet gone through the film industry has gone through it.

[SPEAKER_00]: All of these other industries and institutions, they've gone through this like very radical change over the last couple of decades.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I just think the same is going to happen with education.

[SPEAKER_00]: The one piece that needs to be figured out actually is the accreditation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because you could do an online course, say that teaches you how to code in Python.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the accreditation you get from that is not sort of recognized in the same way as, hey, I have a computer science degree from MIT or from Oxford.

[SPEAKER_00]: But when it is, like, when that piece can be worked out where it's like, you can do a course that maybe costs like a couple hundred or a couple thousand, whether it's in plumbing or it's like becoming an electrician.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the qualification is, and it's sort of quite widely recognized that, hey, this is legit.

[SPEAKER_00]: This actually does mean the person can do the job.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think once that happens, it's a wrap.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a wrap for all of these institutions that have been overcharging for decades.

[SPEAKER_00]: If they're going to stay in the game just because of the nature of competition, they're going to need to like seriously, seriously clean up their act.

[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, I just think.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know, imagine when your child is eighteen years old and she's considering higher education or workplace, like whatever, you know, imagine you're like looking at the numbers and tuition is like, hundred, fifty-k a year, right, and you're looking at other options.

[SPEAKER_00]: like for the former to even make sense they would have to offer something that is so, so, so, so good and so outstanding and so not ideological for you to even consider that.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, you know, I give it one decade to decades and I think it's going to change.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think you're right and I think it would be awesome if since education is now so decentralized especially with AI, you can learn anything on the internet.

[SPEAKER_01]: What if we move to a testing model where you don't even need a creditors, you need just [SPEAKER_01]: blanket meritocracy, let's see what your skill set is after you, after you've learned it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it would be a great way to incentivize self-starters, people who are truly motivated, and bring back the meritocracy piece.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because that is, as we all know, that has been lost in higher education.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, as you told me all of this story, maybe this is like an entrepreneur in me, I was just thinking like, this is a massive opportunity for somebody.

[SPEAKER_01]: Same.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what I mean is, okay, you're in the world of therapy.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people in the US are in the field of therapy and how many millions are customers or clients of people in the field of therapy, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So if, say, if, say, even ten percent, I think the real number is going to be much higher.

[SPEAKER_00]: But let's say, ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent of the people who are interested in this, but are more of your position.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there are a lot of people who are problems with different aspects of therapy, whether this is there like, [SPEAKER_00]: gender affirmation or the racial stuff you were just talking about or like weird.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like the way that it doesn't serve men very well.

[SPEAKER_00]: All of this means is there is a gigantic opportunity for somebody or a group of people to create an alternative.

[SPEAKER_00]: to create some type of alternative system, alternative pathway, alternative courses, alternative education, alternative certification, that is free of all of the woke crap.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is just how it works.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever there's a problem, whenever there's an opportunity, [SPEAKER_00]: And so I would imagine the scale of this problem at this point is actually pretty big.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'd imagine this is like a [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, I'm not, I'm not in this world, but I don't know the size of the therapy market, but twenty percent of people have been in therapy in the past year.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I assume it's a multi-billion, probably a multi-billion dollar market, like overall.

[SPEAKER_00]: So even if someone can come in and like take a ten percent, take a five percent.

[SPEAKER_00]: chunk of it it would just be like you know if there's if all if all the companies are just making junk food and everyone is just making junk food and turning out junk food which a lot of them are I mean that's a huge problem but it's also an opportunity right it's like well I mean there's people who want healthy clean food where they understand the ingredients so there are entrepreneurs out there who can be like you know what I'm gonna start a food company [SPEAKER_00]: whether that's a restaurant or a snack food company or whatever it is and of course people have done this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe this is a good example because you can probably think of lots of examples of companies that have done this and are offering alternatives and are doing very well with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I just think in this entire field and some you know just wider education in general there's [SPEAKER_00]: There's going to be a lot of disruption.

[SPEAKER_00]: It hasn't happened yet.

[SPEAKER_00]: It hasn't happened yet, but I think there are enough smart people, enough wealthy philanthropic people who are think more along the ways that we do, who would be open and willing to have someone had a really good idea and could lay this out.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's going to happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I'm the right person to do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is not my field, but my entrepreneurial brain is just like worrying and kind of thinking like gosh, like someone needs to come in here and just, yeah, just just offer something better because the situation you've been put in.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like this shouldn't happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: This shouldn't happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think your one story, but if this is the case for you and if you've been saying, they've been teaching like this since the eighties.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know how many students per year are going through this sludge.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's not going to be just one university in California, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be happening all across the country.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it's happening in Canada too.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it's happening in the UK.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably happening in France and in Germany and in Sweden and in all of these different places.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, there's an opportunity for someone there.

[SPEAKER_00]: I do have another question I did want to ask you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Naomi, um, what role do you think that your faith has played or did play and you speaking up in the way that you have been?

[SPEAKER_01]: It's so integral because I I lived without faith for the first what twenty one years of my life or so.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that is a place of fear.

[SPEAKER_01]: But when I saw the injustice of what was going on, I just have such clarity that this is wrong and no fear to follow the next right path.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm putting myself in [SPEAKER_01]: a lot of risk professionally.

[SPEAKER_01]: Personally, I've buried consequences already, but my faith will get me through it, and I know that God has me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love to hear it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I always say, like, if you truly fear God, then fear of man like fades into the background.

[SPEAKER_01]: Totally does.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's so free.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is really free.

[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_00]: You might not be able to answer this, but what is next for you, Naomi?

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to keep going down this path and keep answering the call when doors open because I've met so many incredible people already and probably just keep writing about this, keep speaking about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I'll return, maybe I'll get the PhD one day, but that's a decision for another day.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right now, I'm focusing on my family and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes my way.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds wise.

[SPEAKER_00]: Naomi, thanks for coming on the show.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's been a pleasure speaking to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for sharing your story.

[SPEAKER_00]: And thank you for being courageous.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love talking to people who are willing to stand up and do and say what's right.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, you got my respect and I'm sure we will talk again.

[SPEAKER_01]: All right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much, Ruby.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me on.