529. How Trump Will Save the School System | Corey DeAngelis

Jordan Peterson sits down with bestselling author, commentator, and researcher, Dr. Corey DeAngelis. They shed light on where 50% of all state budgets are spent, the surprising stack of monopolies that strangleholds public education, the partisan lies surrounding school choice, and the truth every parent needs to know: school choice uplifts all students. Dr. Corey A. DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project and a visiting fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He has been labeled the “school choice evangelist” and called “the most effective school choice advocate since Milton Friedman.” He is a regular on Fox News and frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal. DeAngelis is also the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, an adjunct scholar at Cato Institute, a board member at Liberty Justice Center, and a senior advisor at Accuracy in Media. He holds a Ph. D. in education policy from the University of Arkansas. He is the national bestselling author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.” This episode was filmed on February 28th, 2025. | Links | For Corey DeAngelis: On X https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Read his most recent book “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools” https://amzn.to/4h3wAeK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  So there's a geographic monopoly and there's a state mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school. And then there's a teacher certification monopoly.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  And that trickles down from the university level into the K through 12 system.

• 0:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  The findings were less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing, we found a reduction in crime, but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes, which could be caused by out-of-wedlock births or teenage pregnancies. Another separate study in New York City was a charter school experiment. They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City decreased the likelihood of crime for male students by 100%.

• 0:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification. Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, is blowing in the wind.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  And if Democrats are smart, the way that we can get towards bipartisanship on school choice is through...

• 1:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today to Dr. Corey Dangelis. He has a PhD in education policy, which, under normal circumstances, wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. But he graduated from the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, and that's one of the rare schools, maybe the singular schools, that isn't terribly bloody Marxist in its fundamental orientation, with a smattering of incompetence thrown in there just for good measure. I've been following Dr. Dangelis, Corey, on X for a good, long time.

• 1:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  He's one of these one-man wrecking balls, one-person wrecking balls, like Leila Mickelway, who's fighting the good fight against Pornhub, and Robbie Starbuck, who's a complete bloody army in relationship to calling corporations out for their foolishness of their DEI policies. And Corey's been...

• 2:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Distributing the word in relationship to school choice. And school choice is a matter that's bigger than you might think, even though it has become quite a hot political issue. Because the school system, the public school system, is a failure in many ways. It's extraordinarily expensive, it's expansive, and it does an absolutely dismal job of what it should be doing, which is educating children, at least teaching them to read, let's say, a bare minimal standard of literacy. And although it turns out to be quite effective as a propaganda machine, there's a variety of reasons that it's rotten to the core. But the fact that it's a monopoly is definitely one of them.

• 3:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  And we delved into that topic in great detail. If you're a parent and you're concerned about your children's future, if you're concerned about your rights as a parent, if you want to have the option to find an educational institution of high quality so that you can give your children the start they need in life and also to protect them against a substantial amount of ideological warping, then the issue of school choice should be something that's paramount in your attention, as it has become for many people in the United States. In any case, we delved into the rationale for school choice from the free market and libertarian perspective,

• 3:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  but also from the perspective of parents' rights. I suppose a cardinal question of our time is, well, just whose children are they? And I think the right answer to that question is, children should be watched over by those who have their best interests most firmly at heart, and that's inevitably going to be parents. And so it's in the service of children that parents have the right to determine the educational pathway that they can pursue. And even though parents might not be able to do that on their own, because educating children is a difficult job, they're certainly in the best position to make intelligent choices about the direction to take if those choices are available to them.

• 4:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so Cory's been working very hard on making that possibility a reality for parents. And so that's what we talked about today. Well, Dr. Dangelis, hey, I gotta make sure I'm pronouncing that exactly right. Am I pronouncing that exactly right?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dangelis like Los Angeles, but I'm not, I'm not a real doctor. I'm more like a Jill Biden doctor. Got a PhD in education policy.

• 4:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yes. Where from?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  University of Arkansas.

• 4:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  I see. When did you get that?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Pretty recently, actually. Well, I'm getting older now. It's 2018 or so I got the PhD. And I studied school choice policy.

• 5:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Brainwashed?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I didn't. It was actually the Department of Education Reform. So 99% of education PhDs are Marxist institutions.

• 5:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  This one was housed in the College of Education, but not a lot of people liked us there because it was the Department of Education Reform. Just the very name of the department implied that we're trying to shake things up to try to improve the education.

• 5:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  You said 99% of education PhDs are Marxists? I think it's higher than that.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  99.5%.

• 5:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, definitely. The rest of them are socialists. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So how did that institution come to exist? And why does it still exist?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I think it originally was funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. And it's, it just, it still exists. There's professors there. My advisor is named Patrick Wolf. And the Journal of School Choice is actually housed in that department. And Patrick Wolf did a lot of the early evaluations of voucher programs, like in DC, for example. They were able to use random lottery to determine the different outcomes for kids in the public schools versus the private schools. Much like a medical trial. You do the placebo for the kids who lose the lottery, which is the public school system business as usual. If you win the lottery to get a voucher to go to a private school. Wolf's evaluation, for example, in 2013, found about a 30% increase in the likelihood

• 6:25Speaker 01

  of graduating from high school from getting more educational opportunities through the voucher.

• 6:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you can say it's- That was random?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, randomized control trial. So you can say with a big enough sample, a certainty, that this is not because of the family characteristics of the student, it's not because of the student's racial background or their, their income. It's because of them getting a better opportunity to go to a better school. And so I did that- Kind of research when I started, my first study was actually with Dr. Wolf. And we found that the Milwaukee voucher program that started in 1990. We found a huge reduction in crime later on in life. So

• 7:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Shouldn't be very surprising. You get a, you're more likely to graduate.

• 7:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Graduation rates?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  We didn't control for graduation, but it's probably closely linked. If you're more likely to graduate, you're probably going to be more likely to get a job, less likely to be involved with the criminal justice system.

• 7:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. Oh, well, okay, let's back up and do a big picture overview. You should perhaps let everybody know, well, two things. You've authored or co-authored two relatively recent books, right? One of these, this is the parent revolution. And that's this year's 20?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  2024.

• 7:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  2024. Wow. So essentially this year.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Pretty, pretty recent.

• 7:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. And then there is another one that you co-authored. What's the title of that?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Mediocrity, right?

• 7:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Forty Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students. And it was on the 40th anniversary of the Nation at Risk Report, uh, which came out, which basically said that, look, our, our outcomes are horrendous and things haven't gotten any better since then. In some cases, they've gotten worse and we spend a lot more money than we did back then.

• 7:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's better, at least for the people who are getting the money.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Uh, they, we spend about $20,000 per student per year now, which is about 52% higher than average private school tuition in this country. That spending in the government schools has increased by about 164% inflation adjusted since 1970. Have the outcomes gotten 164% better? No, obviously not. But it's because they're not focusing on, on math and reading. They're focusing on gender ideology and critical race theory in the schools. And if you're focusing on those things and teaching kids to hate your country, it shouldn't surprise us that the, the academic outcomes aren't getting any better.

• 8:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. So why don't you explain exactly what problem you are attempting to address? How would you characterize your, because there's? You're an interesting person because lots of people are focusing on the dismal plight of the schools, let's say, and their dreadful expensiveness. You know, 50% of US state budgets are spent on K through 12 education, right? 50%. So that means essentially that the teachers' unions have a hammerlock on 50% of the state budgets, and it's worse than that. It means that the faculties of education, and we can talk about them in some detail,

• 9:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  because they have a monopoly on teacher certification, basically have their, what would you say? Their status is subsidized by half the money that Americans spend at the state level.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And it's the only way they can survive, because I don't know if there's a more dismal faculty than the faculties of education. Social work might compete.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  They have the lowest scores on all the SATs and other academic credentials, and they also have a monopoly, a geographic monopoly, when it comes to the K through 12 government school system, where in most places in America, you live where you live, and you're assigned to a school just based on your address, which gives them no incentive to spend additional dollars wisely. I mean, just imagine if you had to shop at a government grocery store that you were assigned to based on where you live, and they had empty shelves, no food, and when they did have food, imagine if you got food poisoning or it was expired. And if you wanted to go somewhere else, they'd tell you to go complain to the grocery board, who wouldn't listen to you, and would try to cut off your mic, which is what happens with the school boards right now.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  And if you had to just move houses to get access to a better grocery store, that would make zero sense. Or if you had to pay twice, basically, once through taxes for the government grocery store you're not using, and then again, out of pocket for a grocery store that actually provided you with healthy food, that's what we have with the government school system today. You cannot go somewhere else unless you pay twice essentially. And low-income families are basically just screwed. And the worst failure factories that we call public schools today. In places like Chicago, they have like 33 public schools with 0% math proficiency rates. And they spend about $30,000 per kid. And guess what? Their teacher's union boss, Stacy Davis Gates, she sends her own kid to a private school.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  She knows better than anybody else that their schools are not working for kids. And that's the main problem that I see. And everything else trickles out from that monopoly issue. They don't have an incentive.

• 11:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  So there's a number of different monopolies operating that you just described. There's geographic monopoly, right? And that's a good analogy. So there's no competition. The problem with no competition is that when there's no choice, there's no real incentive to do the hard work that produces improvement. And there's actually no possibility even for comparison between different systems, right? So without competition, you don't have any possibility of really head-to-head evaluation, right? And no necessary incentive for innovation. So there's a geographic monopoly, which you just described. You send your kids to the school that's in your location, and that's that.

• 12:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then there's a state-mandated monopoly because you have to send your kids to school. And then there's a teacher certification monopoly. So we actually...

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And that trickles down from the university level into the K-12 system.

• 12:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. Okay, and now, so you fundamentally concentrated, and does this include your doctoral research? You fundamentally concentrated on the issue of choice, per se? And were you interested in choice as an economist might be interested in choice? Or why were you interested in the issue of choice?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did my bachelor's and master's in economics. And I had a professor there, John Merrifield was his name. He's now a retired professor. But he was probably the only free-market professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, that I knew of. And I had him, I took all of his classes. He was my advisor. He was affiliated with the Friedman Foundation at the time, which is now called Ed Choice, which is a school choice advocacy group. And he was the one who directed me or suggested to me at least three different times, "Hey, you should probably do this PhD program." And I ultimately took his advice, and I'm glad that I did. And that's how I look at the school system. I see it as one of the most socialist institutions that we have in America today, where the government operates the means of production, the schools, whether you want

• 13:14Speaker 01

  to call it the local, state, or federal government, they all have their hands into the government school system. And taxpayers have to fund it, and there's a monopoly.

• 13:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  There's also kickbacks. What's the percentage of Democrat financial support from teachers' unions across the US?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you look at-

• 13:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's in the high 90s if I remember correctly.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  99.9% of Randy Weingarten's union, she's the head of the American Federation of Teachers, she lobbied the CDC to make it more difficult to reopen schools during COVID. That's another story altogether. They knew they could hold children's education hostage to get billions of dollars in ransom payments in so-called COVID relief. It started in 2020, because they knew if they were closed, they could say, "We need more money because we're closed." It's the same story as we see with the test scores. They say, "We're failing because we need more money." It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

• 14:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  They're not doing the same thing because they keep ramping up the mounted costs.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so it's worse than the same thing.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Their same thing is always give us more money, and it never improves anything.

• 14:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Smaller classes, more money.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yes, and in every other industry, if you think about what smaller class sizes actually means, that means lower units of production output for the same inputs.

• 14:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Everywhere else, you increase your production over time with more technology.

• 14:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, in principle, you'd assume that much of the heavy lifting could have been done by computational technology. I think that's particularly true if it was applied properly for, you know, when you're teaching children basic skills, likely reading is the best example of this. So when children learn to read, contrary to the whole word theorists, who are also a product of the faculties of education and devastated literacy in their theoretical stupidity. So- English obviously is a phonetic language and the way you learn to read is that you learn to associate sounds with letters. And that's actually a rather dull process.

• 15:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  There's nothing intrinsically, not, there's little that's intrinsically interesting about that. Some kids will treat it like a puzzle. Some children can associate letters with sounds very rapidly and some take much more practice. That's IQ dependent fundamentally, although it's, there are other contributing factors. You can have high IQ kids with dyslexia, but it's basically an IQ phenomenon. But what you want to do with little kids is continual exposure and practice because they need to produce little neural circuits that recognize each letter and that use the conjunction between the visual system and the auditory system in the brain to tag each letter with a sound.

• 16:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Letters first, two letter combinations, three letters, small words, then as you develop expertise, phrases, you get in a single glance and maybe even sentences if you start to become stunningly proficient, right? Computers are unbelievably good at the first part of that, right? Because they're incredibly patient and they can give you immediate feedback. And so, at least in principle, it would be possible to augment teachers with appropriate technology and increase their efficiency and we've seen none of that, right? None of that.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  And the reason that we see so many of people in the Democratic Party fighting against things like school choice where families can take their money somewhere else other than the government-run school is because of that money laundering operation that we just addressed where the teachers' unions send almost all of their money, 99.9% to one party, the Democrat Party. And so, even though Democrat voters want a better education for their kid and they want choice as well, the teachers' unions influence those elected officials. It's special interest politics at its worst. They also influence them to close the schools as long as possible. You had the Chicago Teachers' Union tweet out during COVID that the push to reopen schools

• 17:15Speaker 01

  is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.

• 17:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, but everything is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny, you know?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  They threw every buzzword at the wall. Yeah, every buzzword.

• 17:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  And genderism, you know?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And I'm glad that that's not working anymore. And I think the unions actually stepped on a rake. They overplayed their hand during the COVID era. And that showed families what the heck was happening in the classroom. We wouldn't have known a lot of this Marxism was in the government-run schools. Maybe some families saw it here and there. But for the first time ever as a country, we were able to, at large scale, get a peek into some of the far-left lunatics who are running the government-run school system through remote learning, which, let's be real, we should have just called it remotely learning. There wasn't a lot of learning going on. But families have been mobilized more than they've ever been before. And since COVID, we've had 14 states now, all controlled by Republican legislatures, go all-in on school choice.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Arizona's one of them, one of the first, actually, to allow families to take that money that would have gone to their government school to a private or charter school or homeschool.

• 18:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let's take apart this issue of choice, because it would be easy to assume that you're an advocate of something approximating parental freedom, right? That parents have the right to choose, let's say, the value set that defines the education of their children. But it sounds to me more that your primary concern wasn't so much the freedom of parents to choose as it was your observation of the fact that in the absence of competition, so in the presence of a monopoly, particularly a government-run monopoly, the probability of low quality is 100%. Is that?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  It's both of those things. And I think it's actually more so than the outcomes. It's more so about parental rights and who gets to direct the upbringing of their children. I got into this as a libertarian, a limited government.

• 19:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you're making two arguments. One is?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  It's an outcome-based and also, yeah, values as well. And who's children are they? They're not the government's kids. They're not the teachers' unions' kids, even though they just posted recently, right before we came here, that we got to protect our kids. They always use language of ownership of us. It's a communist ideology. And I think that's what woke up so many people with recent elections, too. You look at the Trump versus Harris election. Republicans typically don't do well on education because they don't, you know, throw more money at the problem. But right before the election, there were two nationally representative surveys by Atlas Intel, which was the most accurate pollster in 2020, and they correctly predicted Trump winning all the swing states in 2024.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  They both found that Trump was beating Kamala Harris on education, and I think that's because it's changed from a conversation about who's going to throw more money at the problem to who's going to respect my right as a parent, and Trump won the parent vote by nine points, too.

• 20:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  All right, so back to the issue of, let's see, we've covered school choice on an economic grounds, we've covered school choice on a parent's right ground. The next issue might be, let's talk a little bit about the Marxist element. Okay, so I'd like to focus for a moment on the faculties of education. Okay, as I intimated earlier, I don't think there is, there is a more corrupt and intellectually bankrupt faculty than the faculties of education. My experience with faculties of education as a psychologist is that the worst of all

• 20:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  psychological theories are always picked up and amplified, magnified, publicized by educational psychologists. Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. Whole Word Learning is a good example, right? So Whole Word Learning was predicated on the idea that expert readers read words at a glance, they don't sound them out, or phrases even. And so, since the experts do it that way, it would be reasonable to teach children to do it that way right from the beginning. Now, that presumes that...

• 21:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Experts read, when they learn to read the same way they learn, they read as experts, which is a completely preposterous idea neurologically, but that didn't seem to occur to any of the people who are pushing it. And the introduction of whole word reading, if I remember correctly, into the California school system, knocked California from number one in childhood literacy to number 50, if I remember that correctly. Okay. So whole word learning's been a complete bloody disaster, but it's still often utilized. And then there's the self-esteem training. There's another terrible idea from psychology. First of all, the idea that there is such a thing as self-esteem. So you can model self-esteem with extroversion and neuroticism.

• 22:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  So people with high self-esteem are low in neuroticism. That's the primary issue. So they're, they're, they're less likely to feel negative emotion, and that's temperamental trait. Maybe there's some environmental contribution, but not a lot. And then they're more likely to be extroverted because that's positive emotion. And so if you're low in self-esteem, you tend to feel a lot of negative emotion. Particularly in women, negative emotion is self-directed. So women with high negative emotion have a lot of bodily concerns, for example. They're self-conscious, right? And that's, that's not, it's not an attitude. It's not a cognitive set. It's a temperamental feature. And the evidence that you can do something about that with something like self-esteem training,

• 22:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  well, not only is it thin, to say the least, there's reasonable evidence to presume that teaching children to concentrate on their emotional experience actually makes them worse. So the psychologists who laid out the big five personality template, using statistics to begin with, the most common measure is the neo-PIR. And its measure of neuroticism, negative emotion, has facets. One facet is literally self-consciousness. So thinking about yourself and being miserable are so tightly associated that you can't distinguish them statistically.

• 23:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  So if you get children to dwell on their negative emotional experiences, then...

• 23:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then you tend to exacerbate the problem.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, so anyways, you can't use self-esteem training to...

• 23:56Speaker 01

  So when we started seeing the videos from Libs of TikTok and other were otherwise with of critical race theory in the classroom and teachers bragging about how they were injecting gender ideology into the schools, a lot of people would ask me, "How prevalent is this stuff anyway?" And it's like, I'm seeing it all the time, and parents are complaining about it at the school boards, where they were later labeled as domestic terrorists for doing so, and they had their mics cut offs. But there was a nationally representative survey that just came out earlier this year, in January, that found that 36% of kids in high school reported that their teacher often or almost daily said that "America is a fundamentally racist country."

• 24:41Speaker 01

  And there were a lot of other findings in that survey as well as by Education Next. And that was the first that I saw, that this is actually a wide-scale phenomenon. My first reaction...

• 24:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's the norm.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, when people, like, I didn't have like a data point to point to, and I had the sense...

• 24:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  When was this? When did you figure this out?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  This survey was January this year. This just happened.

• 24:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, oh, oh, so you didn't realize how widespread it was until that survey?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Until I saw, you know, because I'd get asked this all the time, like, "Corey, is it really a big problem?" And I'd say, "Well, we're hearing about it all the time. If it's a big problem for this parent, then this is a big enough deal for us to change something, right?" If that parent is unhappy, they should have a choice to go somewhere else, even if it's only 1% of the time. Well, now we know, it's not just 1% of the time.

• 25:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's all the time.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  It's everywhere, and...

• 25:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, conceptualizing it as a problem, in some sense, is misleading, because a problem implies that there's a normal course of events and some aberrations. That's just not the case. The entire education system, and this is a consequence of the operation of the faculties of education, is radically, resentfully leftist at its core. The aberration is any learning that happens outside of that philosophy. And so, I want to tell you about a study we did, because this is relevant to the faculties of education. So, I did this study with a student of mine, Christine Brophy.

• 26:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Master's student. We were going to follow up on it, but my academic career exploded shortly thereafter. But it was a good study. The first thing we wanted to do was to assess how political beliefs clump together. You can do that statistically by looking at the path. You can say, imagine you ask a large number of people, a large number of questions. You can see across people whether answering one question predicts in a given direction predicts answering another question in the given direction. So then you can clump the questions. And so you can, you can analyze how belief statements aggregate.

• 26:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the first question we wanted to ask, answer was, was there a coherent set of politically correct political beliefs? Because back in 2015, the idea of political correctness, that there was a coherent body of beliefs, was parodied or pilloried as a right-wing conspiracy theory, which, you know, was on the face of it absurd, but it still needed to be demonstrated. We actually found that there was two forms of politically correct belief systems. One was more like classic left-wing liberalism, right? But there was a smaller group of left-wing totalitarians, authoritarians.

• 27:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so those were people who adopted progressive policies, so-called progressive policies, but were also willing to implement them with force, essentially. So there was a tyrannical aspect to it. Okay, so once you establish that these groups of beliefs exist, you can look at the correlates or the predictors, right? So, and there was a standard set of features that you would look for in a psychological study. You know this undoubtedly. If you're trying to predict behavior, one of them would be general cognitive ability, so, which is essentially IQ, which is essentially something like rate of learning. And temperament, big five temperament, and then sex, and then...

• 28:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Environmental history. And so we used those variables and we found that the best predictor of being a politically correct authoritarian, that's radical left-wing authoritarian attitude, was low verbal IQ. Right? So you can imagine that people will default to a particular kind of simple-minded worldview if they can't think critically very well. It was a very powerful predictor. It was the major predictor by a lot. It was better predictor than the relationship between general cognitive ability and grades.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  So you're less likely to tolerate others' beliefs and think of them as a person?

• 28:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, I don't think it's tolerance. No, I don't think it's that. I think what it is, is preference for a maximally simple explanation. So...

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you can't explain, well, maybe they have good motivations behind what they're thinking because they can't come up with those alternate theories.

• 29:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you also can't, you can't, like, America is a racist society. All inequalities are a consequence of systemic oppression. Well, that's one sentence. It's one sentence. And now you have an explanation for the whole world. Well, that's attractive. Like, we like belief, people like belief systems that collapse into something simple. Okay, there were other predictors. Okay, being female.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Having a feminine temperament. That was an additional predictor, over and above being female.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  That was after controlling for...

• 29:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  This is controlling for intelligence and being female. The next was having a feminine temperament, agreeableness in particular, trait agreeableness, empathy, essentially. And the next predictor was ever having taken even one politically correct course. Okay, so now, why am I telling you this? Well, partly because it's a useful thing to know. But the other reason is, is that the students in faculties of education, as you said, have the lowest SAT scores. Okay, now, the SAT purveyors don't like to describe the test as an intelligence test, but it's an intelligence test. Yeah, it's correlated at like 0.9. It's an IQ test, it's just not corrected for age.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  So I wonder, I wonder if, why there's selection into the education academia based on these predictors. Is it because... Going into the school system is seen as an easier job with pretty good benefits and so

• 30:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's a good question.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  That could be it.

• 30:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, I think first of all, the admission criteria are low to absent, right? So you can get in.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Not barriers to entry.

• 30:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and it's very frequently the case that if you don't know what you could do, that's a degree that will more or less guarantee you a job. And then the other potential problem, and I don't know of any research bearing on this specifically, is that the, the, uh, the security and the holidays, my suspicions are attracts people who are lower in conscientiousness. And one of the best predictors, by the way, of teaching ability, apart from general cognitive ability, right? Because hopefully you'd have smart teachers, is conscientiousness. Now, and conscientiousness also predicts conservative political leaning, not liberal political leaning, right? So you have kind of a perfect storm in the faculties of education is that

• 31:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  they, they educate, their academic standards are very low for admission, which really matters, right? And then they tilt radically to the left, which is also something that would be attractive to people who have decreased cognitive ability. They select against conscientiousness because of the work hours and the security. I mean, these are all things.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I had also seen a study that selection into education, you know, degrees was associated with risk aversion too. So if you know you have a union protecting you.

• 31:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  You're not gonna, you have job security, even if it's not the highest pay. You're gonna have a pension when you retire. You can't get fired if you do a bad job. Uh, you're not gonna get paid any less if you're not doing as well as the person across the hallway.

• 32:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, you said, I believe, I think it was in The Parent Revolution. I, I, um, I read your, both of your books in the last week and I don't, so I don't remember where this stat came from, but you said that the New York state dispensed with a dozen teachers over what? Do you remember the period of time? Was that a 10-year period? Was it a one-year period?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  I don't recall.

• 32:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, well, the fundamental reality is that...

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very low, very low.

• 32:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. There's virtually no assessment of teachers for effectiveness, right? You need...

• 32:42Speaker 01

  No merit pay. So the best teachers leave. The best teachers say, "To heck with this." There's a person across the hall showing videos all day and they're getting paid the same or more than me, just because they've been around the system longer. They reward years of service.

• 32:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Not much. And I mean, I mentioned earlier that spending has gone up by 164% in real terms since 1970. Teacher salaries on average have actually only increased by about 3% in real terms.

• 33:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so where's the bulk of the money going?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So I think it's also going to pensions and other benefits too, but it's going towards administrative flow.

• 33:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah. So the same thing that happened at the universities fundamentally.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Same in healthcare.

• 33:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Since 2000, we have data on this in the US. And we've seen that enrollment for students has increased in this public school system by about 5% since 2000. The number of teachers in the system has increased about twice that rate, by about 10%.

• 33:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Administrators have increased by about 95%.

• 33:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right. So it's exactly the same pattern as in higher education.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yes, become a jobs program for administrators.

• 33:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it's a weird thing. The administrative issue is a very complicated one because the problem with the managerial strata, let's say, is that it's very difficult to parameterize the demand. You know, if you're in a complex system, you can always see that more could be done, regardless of the direction you happen to be moving in. And what that implies is that there's no limit to the number of potential administrative contributions, right? And then the question is, well, what would limit the growth of the administration? And in a competitive environment, free-market principles essentially limit because you run out of money, right?

• 34:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you can only hire as many people as you can afford to hire. This isn't a problem with administrative bureaucracies that have an unlimited source of funding. So they're just gonna continue to grow at, I don't know what it is, 5% to 7% a year or something like that.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And there's actually been four studies on this. Not a lot, but it's what we have. It's a really niche area of research that the more private and charter school competition in the area, all else equal, after they control for all the usual demographic characteristics... The public school teacher salaries slightly go up. And now, a lot of people say, "Oh, that's counterintuitive because it's stealing money from the public schools," they say, "which the money doesn't belong to the schools, it's for the kids." But, all that aside, because there's also competition, they start to allocate those additional dollars, instead of towards administrators, they start to allocate them towards the classroom, towards the teachers, so the teachers who remain actually end up better off.

• 35:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Is that to stop the teachers moving into the private realm?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Stop them from going to the private sector, stop the kids from going to the private sector, because now, if you have, there's a monopsony situation and a monopoly situation. Monopsony is a monopoly in the labor market. With the government school system, if you want to be a teacher, you basically got to take what they give you. But now, if you have more competition in the labor market, too, competing for your excellence, if you're doing a good job, then the public schools have to say, "You know what? We got to treat the teachers better, too." So, some teachers are underpaid, some teachers are overpaid. Depends on, you know, we try to treat everything as one size fits all in our current system. But that's an interesting finding that actually benefits teachers.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  But also, we found, in places like Florida, there is a control group of, you mentioned earlier about how do we compare systems. In Florida, there's 11 academic studies on this topic. 10 of them find positive effects of competition on the outcomes in the public schools. It's been a rising tide that lifts all boats, and just over time, you can see it work out in Florida, too. So, a couple decades ago, they were at the bottom of the pack on what we call the nation's report card, the math and reading scores. Now, US News and World Report has ranked Florida number one on education. They're at the top of the rankings for the nation's report card, and it's not because they pump more money into the system. They spend 27% less than the national average in Florida, but they have school choice for everybody.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Same here in Arizona, they have school choice for everybody. If you like your public school, you can keep your public school, for real this time, unlike with your doctor. Thanks, Obama, for lying about that. But, the public schools, in this case, actually do get better in response to competition. And we have studies all across the nation.

• 37:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's funny that you even have to make that case. I mean, it's so absurd that we have to sit here and discuss whether having more provider of a given mandatory service is going to improve quality. Like, well, how? What else would improve quality? What, wishful thinking or more money? Well, you can, you can spend an indefinite amount of money stupidly and counter productively. So, obviously.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  I also did one more study on this issue and I haven't brought it up in a long time because I, I've done like forty peer reviewed articles on school choice, which is really tough in the, in the academia for education. The peers are your enemies, not your peers.

• 37:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's for sure. I'm amazed you managed that.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  So I mentioned that first study I did about school choice, reducing crime later on in life. It was a very good study, the first of its kind. Long-term data, student level data, very rigorous study. One of the reviewers, and one of the first places we sent it, was a journal called Urban Education. One of the reviewers said, you know, we like the methods and we buy that it's a causal relationship. But they said, you called the students urban students. You can't say that. They're, they're students in urban areas. So it was like a politically correct thing. And I looked at their About the Journal. The only reason we said that was because they said urban students in their own About the Journal. Total hypocrites on the issue. Why were they allowed to say it, but I wasn't allowed to say it? But they went further than that.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  They also said that we had to reject this because you didn't talk about how the results relate to whiteness, structural oppression and power. I mean, it's just so ridiculous. But the study I wanted to bring up about competition was actually my home state of Texas. I did a survey experiment with my co-authors. So I randomly assigned different surveys to public school leaders in Texas. And one of the, the treatment group had a randomized note that said, on one of the questions, you're going to have a new charter school that's expected to open by, nearby. And I was asking them where they were going to put their money next year. Like where were they going to allocate resources? And the treatment of having a charter school competing with you

• 39:14Speaker 01

  had the effect of reducing administrative allocations and having more of that money going to the classroom.

• 39:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Any idea why?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Well, because they know that they might have, they might have to think about where they're gonna spend money if they have a competitor, because if they waste the money, families are gonna go there.

• 39:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, but their argument usually is, is that, obviously, it's gotta be something like more administrators make for a more effective school system.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  That's what they tell you publicly, but privately, they know that's all BS, which is what that study, because they didn't know what the study was doing. They, they just thought, I'm answering a, a simple survey question.

• 39:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  And one of, you know, they didn't know whether the treatment group or not, so.

• 39:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. How did you manage to, you said 40 studies?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, peer reviewed.

• 39:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, wow.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Other ones that weren't peer reviewed, but I almost think peer review is a negative indicator at this point, because of the peers that are looking at your study.

• 40:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  We won't go there, yes. Yeah, but, but in your case, that's probably not the, the truth, because the probability that you're going to publish something that challenges the.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Counter to my views.

• 40:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Absolutely, man. So the fact that, this is exactly what I'm asking you, is like, how many, over how many years did you publish 40 studies?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  2016, I wanna say was my first, so what is this, nine, nine or so years?

• 40:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you've published four, five studies a year?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a lot of them were at the very beginning when I was in grad school, because I thought that that mattered for getting an academic job. I thought it mattered.

• 40:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  It did matter.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  But, um, and I, I wasn't very serious on the job market, but I, I applied to like three schools, and most people will apply to like 100 if they're very serious. But I knew I was probably gonna go into a think tank where I'd be rewarded for my ideas, as opposed to being punished with all the lefties.

• 40:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  You mean when you were on the job market?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  When I was on the job market, my first think tank was called the Cato Institute, it's a libertarian think tank. And I moved to DC while I was finishing my PhD, like two and a half years into the program, I ended up finishing it, and I, I've slowed down publications since then, but, you know, some of these lefty departments didn't even give me a call. But I had, like, I had like nearly a dozen peer reviewed publications a few years into my PhD program.

• 41:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, how do you do that? So just for everybody watching and listening, so. You can, you can draw a rough equivalent between number of publications and a given degree. So for example, with one publication, you, you have a master's degree essentially, although most master's students don't even have one publication. With three, you have a PhD, and you have 40.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and you said you had a dozen of them, two and a half years into your PhD?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and some of the far lefty departments wouldn't even call me, because they select based on ideology. They don't, they don't select based on productivity, or, or intelligence, or anything like that. But peer review articles are not the same thing as intelligence, I'll say that. But I found out really quickly that, and I'm glad, I had a fork in the road, I did have an offer from one academic institution. It was Kennesaw State University in, in Georgia.

• 42:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh huh.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  And I think they had like a free market center there, so they were friendly.

• 42:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  So how many publications, sorry, how many publications did you have when you entered the job market?

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Nearly a dozen.

• 42:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Does, okay, so in principle, you should have been a very hot prospect, because a dozen publications in most institutions would give you pretty serious-

• 42:37Speaker 01

  I didn't publish in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, it wasn't like the-

• 42:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, still, a dozen's a lot. You know, a dozen's a lot, and that, that would give you serious consideration for promotion to associate professor at many educational institutions. So they should have been lining up at your door.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  But I also, I also didn't do it seriously, like, three, you know, applying to three schools just to put my feet in the water to see what would happen, is not the same thing as what most people do with, you know, they're applying to 100, 100 different schools.

• 43:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  True, true.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  And so, you know-

• 43:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you didn't have a full test of whether-

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it might have not, it, it might have been, I might have gotten more of a fair shake if I actually did a real-

• 43:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay, fair enough. All right, so-

• 43:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Another mystery about you, I would say, is you've had a lot of impact. How old are you?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Thirty-three.

• 43:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay, so you're pretty early on in what would be an academic career, let's say. And you've had a lot of impact on public policy, but more on public consciousness. And so, not only have you produced a remarkable body of research, but you're very good at public communication. That's a rare combination of skills. So, I guess the first thing I'd like to know is, I mean, I know about you. I'm probably more prone to find and follow people like you. Tell me about how you understand your public influence. Like, how broad an influence do you have? How well are your books selling? And what are your other major dimensions of communication?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  So, this one hit the national bestseller list, USA Today, The New York Times. They put me on their list for some reason. But Trump endorsed the book, Vivek Ramaswamy, Pete Hegseth, Ted Cruz. My senator from Texas, he actually says on the back, "You can ruin Randy Weingarten's day by reading this book." So, there's that. But I also went to government schools all through K through 12, so I don't know how I did any of this. You can just check out my handwriting in the beginning. It's very horrible. I blame it on my government school education. It's to you, Jordan. I'm gonna give it to you right after the recording. But I think the way that I really started to change the narrative when it came to school choice was talking about it differently. You know, these days, we can just say "school choice",

• 44:58Speaker 01

  and you and I know what we're talking about. But when I first entered the think tank world, I made a deliberate shift to talk about funding students, not systems.

• 45:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, is that your phrase?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  It's my phrase I came up with.

• 45:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's good to have a phrase.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  It puts the other side on defense, because now, if you want to argue with me, you have to say why we should fund the system and not the student. So, it changes the burden of proof to be on them, whereas the school choice supporters for a long time have been trying to explain ourselves as to why families should have a choice, as opposed to the other side explaining why we shouldn't.

• 45:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, yeah, you should never let the side that you're opposing define the terms of engagement. Conservatives are very bad at that. They're always on the... I'll give you an example. So, in the last Canadian federal election...

• 45:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think there were, in the debate, the leaders debate, I think there were five topics that were debated. All five of them were picked by the left, right? So, one of them, for example, I think-

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Playing on their turf already.

• 45:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, forty percent of the debate was about climate change, right? So, as soon as you debate that, you lose, right? Because the fact that you're even talking about it means that it's one of your priorities. And so, yeah, you gotta get the question right. So, you said, tell me your phrase again.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Funding students, not systems. So, it's more transparent, people know, like, this is the concept of the money-

• 46:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and they are the consumer.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  And, the other thing that is very useful in how I changed talking about this, was that it really pointed out the hypocrisy of a lot of the Democrats. Not just because they send their own kids to private school, but also because Democrats and other people who are supported by the teachers' unions, some of the rhinos, will support programs where the money follows the individual. Think about it. When we have grocery stores, which I mentioned earlier, we have food stamps.

• 46:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  We don't say the food stamps must be spent at a signed Walmart or an assigned grocery-

• 46:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a good analogy.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And so, we also do this with higher ed. It's not just, it's not just that we do this with other industries, we do this with education, too. Higher ed, we have Pell Grants in the US. We have, um, other, the GI Bill. These are taxpayer dollars that can be used at private universities if you want, and it's, it follows the decision of the student.

• 47:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, it's the equivalent of money, essentially, although a little more narrowly targeted.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because the status quo would always say, "We need public money for public schools." And I, my quick response was, "Well, you support public taxpayer dollars for private everything else when it comes to higher ed? You support Pell Grants that go to private religious universities. You support vouchers when it comes to hospitals. We have Medicaid vouchers. You can take that to a religiously affiliated hospital if you want." We do this with pre-K. We have the Head Start programs, all the Democrats support it. It's a pre-K program where the money follows your decision to a private provider of pre-K, even a religious one.

• 47:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Has that helped Head Start? Do you know? Has it improved its quality?

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Head Start evaluations are horrible. They find that it spends a lot of money, and they don't improve outcomes. Most of the results are null results.

• 48:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  They improve some outcomes. People are more likely to graduate, and they're less likely to be thrown in prison or get pregnant. But they don't improve cognitive performance.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  I don't think that was the RCT, though. I think that was more of like a regression with controls, which is still something.

• 48:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the crucial issue is there's no evidence that Head Start improves academic performance. And that's a consequence of multiple reviews. And it's really a catastrophe that it's the case.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  And the latest pre-K evaluation statewide was in Tennessee.

• 48:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah? When was that?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  That was a few years ago. They followed them through 6th grade.

• 48:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  And it was a randomized control trial. They found that those who won the lottery were worse off academically and behaviorally by the end of 6th grade.

• 48:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, won the lottery, meaning?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  You won a lottery to get a scholarship to go to pre-K, relative to the families who lost the lottery and stayed with their parents. Maybe because their parents...

• 48:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  So they were worse behaviorally as well?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Maybe because the parents have an advantage at raising their own kids. Maybe they're better at disciplining the kids at home.

• 49:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  I did a very programmatic review of Head Start in the 80s. So that's quite a long time ago, but the programs had been operating for a very long time. And there were, I think, five major reviews. And at that time, the findings were that Head Start accelerated cognitive performance, so test scores, for a year or two following the interventions. But that by grade 6, there was no effect. But that the longer-term effects seemed to be behavioral. And so reduced crime... No, no, they were positive.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Oh, they were. Those were positive.

• 49:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  They were positive. Less pregnancy, less crime, and higher probability of graduating. So, and the relevant issue with regards to graduation in principle was that because the kids who had gone to Head Start behaved better, they were less likely to be held back. But you're saying that the more recent...

• 49:57Speaker 01

  More recent Tennessee experiment, which is the latest one, RCT, negative effects on academics and behavior through sixth grade, which is the last year of the study. And I'd also say on the teenage pregnancy thing, that's another important outcome that we looked at in our follow-up crime study that was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise.

• 50:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  We found a reduction in crime, but also a 38% reduction in paternity disputes, which could be caused by out-of-wedlock births or teenage pregnancies. And we also had a, there is an RCT.

• 50:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  That was with choice.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  That was with a voucher program in Milwaukee. That one was not an RCT. We did the best we could with, you know, we even controlled for neighborhood and like, single-parent households and religiosity. All the, all, like, as many demographics as you could get to control for. But another separate study in New York City was a charter school experiment by Roland Fryer and his co-author, published in the Journal of Political Economy, I believe in 2015. They found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in New York City decreased the likelihood of crime for male students, because we're the ones causing all the trouble, by 100%. It was a complete elimination for lottery winners through the study period. I don't remember how long they covered. It might not have lasted forever.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  But through the study period, it was like 5% were incarcerated for the control group in the public schools, lottery winners who got into the charter schools, 0%. So, all this to say, on the Head Start thing, I don't bring up these analogies to say that we should, I'm not, I'm not saying that I support Head Start or Pell Grants or food stamps. I'm saying if we're gonna spend the money, we might as well fund the people as opposed to buildings.

• 51:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, I understand. Well, I sidetracked a little bit into Head Start, because doing that review for me was actually very disheartening. Because the thing about Head Start... And this can allow us to talk about political issues more broadly, or conceptual issues. Nobody liked the fact that poverty tended to persist multigenerationally. And there were reason to assume that if you gave so-called disadvantaged kids a Head Start, that A, that might work, but B, that it might even have self-reinforcing consequences, right?

• 52:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because the idea was, we take the disadvantaged kids, you give them a bit of an academic boost when they're three or four, and the consequence of that compounds with time. And so, they're actually farther ahead of their peers by grade six because they got this Head Start. You know, and that didn't happen. And that was a catastrophe for the right and the left politically, as far as I was concerned, because it was a reasonably motivated endeavor. Now, I did some arithmetic calculations with regards to Head Start to try to figure out how many adult minutes a Head Start program actually bought a given child? And the answer is virtually none.

• 53:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  And also, the Head Start programs were also used as employment programs, so the probability that a given Head Start teacher had any qualification was extremely low. You know, when you're dealing with three and four-year-olds, let's say, it's very hard to, especially in groups, it's very hard to spend time teaching them anything because just taking care of three and four-year-olds is such a...

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Basically just a daycare program.

• 53:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, exactly, and often not a good one. Now, when I was looking at the positive results, say, in the 1980s, the hypothesis was Head Start might not have been good for most kids, and probably not good at all for kids who had decent families, but for kids in absolutely wretched conditions...

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, can't get any worse, right?

• 53:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, maybe you...

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Whereas if you're taking them away from parents that are already doing a good job, and you're kind of nudging them in that direction, they're gonna be worse off.

• 53:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so, but you were convinced, the Tennessee data, that's...

• 54:02Speaker 01

  That's the latest experiment, and it's...

• 54:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, that's really too bad.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  And the headstarts that I've seen as far as the RCTs.

• 54:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  RCT, yeah, randomized control trial, yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Um, but one more thing that I think that I added that was really important to the conversation about school choice. I mean, one thing is it's not all me, right? It was COVID that helped open the eyes of parents. I was just there with the right ideas laying around at the time, as Milton Friedman famously put it.

• 54:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  We were taking a bipartisan strategy for a long time to get school choice. And I'm sure you've heard this before, where people say like, school choice is a civil rights issue of our time. We still have elected officials saying these things, using left-leaning arguments to advance school choice, which I think they're all good arguments. It's it's true that the lowest income are in the worst schools, that they would benefit the most. School choice is an equalizer. But there's also right-leaning arguments you can make about choosing schools that align with your values. The the public schools are Marxist. We don't want gender ideology. We want schools that teach you that America is a great country, not a horrible country. And so you can make all these different types of arguments, but when you go into a red state making blue state arguments, these lefty arguments, you might alienate some of the Republican

• 55:11Speaker 01

  legislators who might say, this isn't my issue. So, you know, I'm not going to lead on it. And then the Democrats, they're controlled by the teachers unions anyway. So you're not going to make much ground with them regardless of the argument you're making. They respond to power, not logic. And then if you alienate the Republicans, we weren't really getting school choice passed in blue states or red states in a meaningful way. But now it's become more of a GOP litmus test issue. Voters have gone to the ballot box and held Republicans accountable for being against school choice. Um, in Texas, my home state, we failed on school choice last year because we had 21 Republicans join all the Democrats in the House to kill school choice. And they came up with their arguments about how they were

• 55:54Speaker 01

  in rural areas and they didn't need to vote for this. But after the primaries, now 14 of them are gone. That that was a political earthquake. And now, for the first time in Texas history, the House has 76 cosponsors to pass a school choice bill, which has never happened. And you need 76 votes to pass a school choice.

• 56:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  What did you have to do with what happened in Virginia?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Well, in Virginia, we had Mr. Terry, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach McAuliffe on the debate stage. He was the former governor of Virginia. And he said that at the final debate. He was up in the polls by a lot. It flipped right after that because parents were pissed. Virginia closed their schools just about more than any other state. They were as bad as California when it came to reopening the schools in Virginia. And Glenn Youngkin turned that into an opportunity. He laid out a blueprint for success for Republicans going forward. And Glenn Youngkin ended up winning that election by six points with education voters. And that was the number two issue in that election, which is a big deal because education is usually at the bottom. Voters, they rank,

• 56:58Speaker 01

  you know, jobs, the economy, crime at the top. Education was number two. And a Republican won on that issue.

• 57:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, given that 50% of the bloody state budgets go to K-12 education, it should be like number one or number two all the time.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  You would, you would think, but I think for a long time, people thought things were fine, right? Before they saw, I mean, if you're a high income parent and you're sending your kid to the assigned public school, and it's consistently getting A ratings, your kid's coming home with As on their report card, they get into great universities that are good on paper.

• 57:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, they're also, for a long time, like, when I went to school as a kid, like, I hated school. It bored me to death. And, but, I have to say, that my teachers didn't teach me insane things, right? And so, we don't just have a

• 57:46Speaker 01

  I don't know when that flip happened either.

• 57:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Somewhere around mid, somewhere around 2010, things really went sideways. They went sideways in the universities, too. Like, I saw that blip of political correctness in the 1990s when I was teaching in Boston. But it was mostly outliers, you know, it was the radical fringe, although a lot of them were in the educational psychology departments. But they weren't, they didn't have the upper hand. And somewhere around 2010, that flipped hard. And I think that those, that sort of thing flips partly, too. You said, you talked about good teachers leaving. Well, one of the things that does happen as an enterprise disintegrates is that it'll hit a point of no return, where it becomes so unbearable

• 58:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  for anyone competent to be in the system, they all leave, right? And then, well, then you're just left with the worst of the worst, right? And then they hire people who are even worse than they are, and the whole thing's, you know, gone off its railings. And so... I guess part of the reason that this has become an issue is because the student, the schools moved from merely like traditional incompetence, traditional socialist incompetence, let's say, to absolute bloody insanity. And then people started to notice. And it was likely the gender issue that did that.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  And I think the more that we talk about and see that there's a lot of left-leaning bias in the schools, that might attract more people to want to change other people's children's views in that direction to select into this. So it's almost like it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• 59:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, I've spoken to Republican governors about this on multiple occasions.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  I think I met you at RGA, by the way, briefly.

• 59:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, that's right, that's right. You know, and I've been beating the drum on this issue, not very successfully, I would say, is that Republicans don't have a hope in hell of ever winning the culture war if they allow faculties of education to maintain their hammerlock on teacher certification. And if they continue to spend half the state's money on K-12 education, essentially that's dominated by progressive Marxists. Like, everything else that is happening is, as far as I'm concerned, it's blowing in the wind. And so I want to challenge you on a couple of things, because I'd like your opinion. See, I can understand the rationale, the logic for your choice approach. And I can see it from the free market perspective,

• 1:00:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  so let's say the libertarian perspective. I can see it from the parents' right perspective. And I appreciate the data that you've described in terms of demonstrating that when you do open the market up to competition, you get an increment in quality, even on the public side, and a decrease in administrative spending. Great, all of that makes sense. But I am wondering if you've hit the nail squarely on the head. Because I'm, and I genuinely want your opinion on this, it seems to me that the fundamental weakness in the system is still that faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher certification. So, because, you know, I know

• 1:00:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  people who are sending their kids to private schools, but the private schools are full of woke teachers too, right? The Catholic schools are full of woke teachers. Like, it's a pervasive problem. And so...

• 1:01:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  I want to know your thoughts on the teacher certification issue because I think what the Republicans should do is just, they should just take the monopoly away from the

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we need alternative certification. So I think you're right that we have to have a multi-pronged approach. School choice isn't the silver bullet for everything and neither is alternative certification. We should fight the battle on multiple fronts. And some people do set up this false dichotomy. They'll say, "Oh, you're saying school choice will cure everything." Well, not exactly. We should also reform the public school system. You should still go to your school board and try to change things because a lot of kids are still going to go to the public schools, whether you have school choice or not. But we also need an escape valve. I mean, for example, if you only try to change the system from the top down, which is what we've done partially in my home state of Texas, some good tweaks. They've banned critical race theory. They're talking about banning DEI

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  in public schools this year as well. We have Trump with his executive orders helping out as well. But we have undercover video from a group called Accuracy in Media. They've gone into all these public school districts in red states like my home state of Texas, where they've gotten these administrators to admit on undercover video that they're still teaching things that are banned. So

• 1:02:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sure, of course they are.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  And they're proud about it. They're like, "Yeah, we're still doing CRT, but we're just going to call it something else."

• 1:02:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  How do you ban ideas? Like this is

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Behind closed doors, they continue to do what they want.

• 1:02:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you see this in the universities, too. It's like, "Well, we're going to scrap our DEI programs." It's like, they're not scrapping them, they're just renaming them. They move, they just retitle this person and they continue to do exactly the same thing. And you can camouflage what you're doing with words, no problem. It'll take people years to figure it out. And so this is another part, okay, so

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  So I'm not saying that we shouldn't try because it isn't perfect enforcement, but we should have both of the, we need top-down accountability, but also bottom-up for if you're a parent and you get a whiff of these things happening, even if you can't prove it before a judge and change the school system that way, you need to be able to say, "You know what? Screw this. I'm sending my kids somewhere else."

• 1:03:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Somewhere else, yeah.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  And I think that would give a pressure for the public schools to say, "Let's knock it off. I don't want to irritate anybody on the left or the right. I'm going to focus on the basics, math, reading, and writing." And then, you know, you're not going to have all of them. And so you might say, well, what about the private schools? Some of them, they also operate in this kind of small market right now already when you don't have choice. But when you, when you unleash the market and families can vote with their feet, you'll have a different supply of private schools pop up as well. Especially right now, we're pushing something called education savings accounts. It's kind of like a voucher where you can use it for a private school, but you can also use it for homeschooling, micro schooling. They were calling them pandemic pods during the COVID era where five to 10 children were getting together in a household, kind of like the one-room

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  schoolhouse idea. Those are more likely to sprout up and you're more likely to have a thousand flowers blooming.

• 1:04:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  If you have these low-cost options. And this has happened in Arizona, too.

• 1:04:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you think the diversity of school proliferation will eventually solve the ideological problem?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, because if you only have a couple elite private schools and they're captured by the left, it's kind of like, okay, what can I do now? I'd say that's still better than the status quo where

• 1:04:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  you have zero choices. But at least now you can take the funding, if you, hey, if you want to just homeschool your own kids and use it for the curriculum or private tutors, that's, that is a step in the right direction, even if it's not perfect.

• 1:04:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Are many or most of the school choice programs set up so that you could set up a micro school and educate your own children?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Most of them now are. And Arizona has an education savings account. They've had one for over a decade. They just went all in in 2022, making it available to everybody. They actually crashed the government website in Arizona because so many families signed up right when they opened up the floodgates.

• 1:04:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's an interesting twist on paying women to have children. Because in some sense, that's what you're setting up, right? Well, yeah, yeah, because a lot of-

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Which is what the public school system is already, right?

• 1:05:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right. It's subsidy for-

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  But it's a failing system that not a lot of people don't see it as a benefit.

• 1:05:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, if it's $20,000 a year per child and the typical family has two children, the woman has to make $40,000 a year to justify the subsidy. And so that, that's after- expenses and so that's that's a very uh it's very unlikely.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  I mean, think about a classroom of, you know, um, thirty kids at six hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:05:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  I know, I know.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Where's all the money going?

• 1:05:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's for sure.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  If the teachers are only making sixty thousand a year on average, where's the rest?

• 1:05:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, you could figure, what, sixty for overhead in terms of physical plant, something like that. So that's only a hundred and twenty thousand.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of them make more than the President of the United States. We have a less, a half a dozen or so who make over four hundred thousand dollars a year.

• 1:05:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, so where does, well, so tell me, where does the, where does the, so.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  A lot, a lot of buildings, they love building new schools and stadiums.

• 1:06:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  So, one of the school districts in Texas, La Jolla ISD, made headlines recently because they had a big, uh, like a, like a big water park at, at their campus. So maybe that improves, you know, the self-esteem of the kids or whatever the teachers are trying to do these days. But, um, it's just frivolous things. And you see this at the university level too, right? They have these extravagant water parks and, uh, tuition is going up to cover these things and also subsidies from the government too. Uh, but these microschools are really shaking things up. The whole, the whole factory model itself is, is frightened because of this.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  In, in fact, when Prenda Microschools in Arizona was reporting just huge increases in enrollment during COVID, because the government schools were closed, so families were figuring it out. And they, a lot of them went to these microschools. The NEA, which is the largest labor union in the country, the National Education Association, they also lobbied the CDC to close the schools longer. They put out an opposition research sheet on Prenda Microschools and their founder, Kelly Smith, because they were so afraid of them, of, of them basically providing something that they weren't providing to students, they knew they were going to lose funding because public schools are funded based on enrollment counts.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  And so if you lose some students, you're going to lose some money, whether you have a school choice program or not. And, um,

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  In Arizona, you can use those education savings accounts to pay for pre and micro schools and other ones too.

• 1:07:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Define micro school.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  It's a miniature school and some people, there's a lot of different definitions for it, but basically a miniature private school. And during COVID era, it was basically five to 10 children getting together in households to economize on homeschooling. And you can either do it with one of the parents, you can take turns with the parents, doing different subjects, or you can even hire a private tutor to do it.

• 1:08:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Which you could do if it's $20,000 per. So what's, what is the amount of the typical voucher? If, if student expenditure, yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  So it saves taxpayer money and most of these bills are passed at the state level.

• 1:08:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  In the US, we're funded in the public school system in every state by the federal level, which should not exist at all. The word education is not in our constitution. It's an unconstitutional waste of time and money. It's, but that's only about 8% of the total spending, 8 to 10%.

• 1:08:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  The other 45, 45 are state and local dollars. These bills are typically passed in state legislatures, so it's about half of the total that follows the student. So let's say on average 10,000 versus the 20,000 that's spent in the government schools. So.

• 1:08:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Is any of that happening locally as well to pull in the rest of that money?

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  There have been some local vouchers that have passed in, in Colorado, a blue state. There was Douglas County had at once, a couple of decades ago, passed a voucher program. It got nixed in the court by a, by a lefty judge and that program's no longer on the books. New Hampshire, which passed a state level program, also proposed a bill a year or two ago in their legislature to also allow the local, local districts to have the money follow the child if they opted in as well. That bill got tabled. That was one that was really exciting. I think that's the next step in the revolution. But at the same time, um, if the private schools are doing it for less and if the micro schools are doing a good job for less, do we want all of the dollars following the

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  student? I think it should be equal across sectors. If we're going to spend the money, I think the state and local should follow the student, not just the state. But the reality is it's mostly basically everywhere at this point.

• 1:09:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and also the reality is, as you pointed out, that there's enough money at the state level to produce economic incentive for the micro schools, for example. You know, you could imagine five kids together, that's $50,000 a year. That's a pretty good supplement for a given parent's income. So. Okay, so let's talk about, let's see, where should we go now? Yeah, okay, um, effects. So I want to talk a little bit more about your means of communication. You've been working for these think tanks, but your work has received broad public attention. Okay, so now you also said that that was in part because you were in the right place at the right time.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Right place, the right time.

• 1:10:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that makes a difference. And you've done the background research, right? So you had a message that was salable, given the state of the zeitgeist, let's say. Okay, well, that's crucially important, right? But it's also important to be able to capitalize on that. Okay, so what, how would you characterize the consequences of your work so far? What have you, what have you seen shifting that you would attribute, at least in part, to the message that you've been disseminating?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, changing the way people talk about school choice in terms of the money following the child. There's been a lot of legislators on the House floor, Senate floor, talking about funding students, not systems. So they've, they've developed my arguments, and I think a lot of them follow me on social media. And politicians, again, they want to get reelected, they want to look good. And so when they're following, you know, different influencers on social media, they want to look good in the public eye when they're debating the issue against the Democrats on the House and Senate floor. And so I think they've adopted some of, some of the language and arguments and studies that I've conducted and also cited myself.

• 1:11:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Is X your most effective?

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  It is, for sure. Yeah, I have Facebook and Instagram, but they're not nearly, I have over 200,000 followers on X. It's not like crazy, but it's ballooned in a, in a short amount of time.

• 1:11:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Who follows you? Like, do you?

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  You follow me.

• 1:11:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, I certainly do.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Um, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, a lot of the, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy, there's a lot of influential people who follow me, lives on TikTok, a lot of big accounts. Donald Trump doesn't follow me, maybe after he sees this episode, he'll, he'll, he'll jump on the wagon.

• 1:12:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, state governors, state treasurers.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Doug Ducey, who's here in Arizona, he, he was the first state to go all in on school choice. And I have a good relationship with him. He's no longer the governor. It's now Katie Hobbs in Arizona, who's a hypocrite on school choice. She went to Catholic school and now she opposes school choice for other families. But Doug Ducey was a leader and you needed one state to do it first to show the rest of the states they could do. He often uses the analogy of when the first person broke the four-minute mile. Before he, the first person did it, I don't remember his name. People thought it was impossible for a human being to run below a four-minute mile. But once the first person did it, you had just this cascade effect of tons of people breaking.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Now with school choice, no one thought that any state could do it where it's every family. Because for a long time, there was an incremental approach on the school choice front. It was decades, we're hitting our head against the wall. It was small incremental wins where maybe the lowest-income families here, maybe just in this city, they're gonna do it. Maybe just for special needs kids. But now the barometer of success is do you have a universal program, meaning for everybody regardless of income? Which, these are the types of programs I support. One, because it allows for more competition, allows for a bigger supply-side response, more of a market response. But also, we're paying for public schools for high and low-income families. They should be able to benefit from school choice as well.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  We don't discriminate based on income for the public schools. We shouldn't discriminate based on income for school choice either. And politics, again, is all about organized interest pushing for what they want. If you have a small program that not a lot of people are benefiting from, well, the problem there is if Democrats get in charge, they're gonna be more likely to be able to take it away. Because low-income families are not as politically active.

• 1:13:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, so let me ask you about that. I've discussed school choice with some of my more intelligent liberal friends, and one of their objections has been that the, I think you'll be able to address this, given what you already said, but I'm gonna lay it out anyways. Parents who are involved in their children's future, in their children's educational options...

• 1:14:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Given the vouchers are going to do the research and they're going to find the best school to suit their children. But then there'll be the children whose parents can't or won't involve themselves and they're going to default to the public school system. And if it collapses as a consequence or degenerates as a consequence of funding being distributed widely, then don't we risk setting up a group of kids who are already suffering because their parents aren't involved to fail even worse because they're going to exist within the confines of a degenerating public school system?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  You already have that inequality baked into the government school system. You have Baltimore, they have 40% of their high schools have 0% math proficiency rate. You see the same thing in places like Chicago. And so they shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good. And this just, this fear mongering hasn't happened with school choice. The public schools, if anything, have gotten better. I cited Florida, but we also have nationwide data on this. 26 of the 29 studies on this nationwide find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools. Even enemies of school choice who are in academia, who have any, any form of honesty at all, they admit that, that the studies on the competitive effects are positive.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  So the main argument that the unions put forward is the worst argument in terms of it being supported by the evidence. But a lot of people respond to fear mongering and so they do that.

• 1:15:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis, but the fact that the studies have already been done indicating that the...

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  There's, there's one other study on this topic that I think is really important. And it was done by Cornell researchers, published in 2018. And they actually found that when school choice was introduced, peer reviewed study, when school choice was introduced, the number of searches online for different private education providers spiked. Doesn't seem like a surprising finding to me, probably not, if you have choice now, you can exercise it, you're going to look... The point is, school choice increases parental involvement by definition. Yes, there will be the parents who are involved anyway. But on the margins, the parents who who just felt like they were depressed being in the school system where they didn't have any other options.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Now, all of a sudden, you give them $10,000 to seek out a better option. They're not going to be depressed by looking at the private school. So they're going to look and they're gonna exercise that choice.

• 1:16:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, I remember reviewing studies, probably about the same time I was looking at Head Start on attitudes of the underclass towards their children's education. And, look, if people are going to be motivated by anything, they're going to be motivated by the thoughts that their children might have a better future, right? So, and so, most parents, for example, regardless of their own literacy levels, would like to have children who are literate and well-educated. And they might not know how to do it, but they want it.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  They know their kids better than anybody else.

• 1:17:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, and they actually care.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:17:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, or they care as much as they care about anything, and they care far more about their kids than anyone else is likely to. Right? Okay, but the critical issue is, as you already pointed out, if these studies, and you think the studies that show a salutary effect on public school quality because of increased competition, you think those are reliable?

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're rigorous studies. There's, you can't randomly assign competition.

• 1:17:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  It's as good as you can get. And you

• 1:17:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  I've cited all the studies on that topic.

• 1:17:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay, okay. So let's end with this. Let's end this, uh, this portion of the discussion. I think what we'll do

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  I wanted to hit one more thing.

• 1:18:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's what I want to give you the opportunity to do that. So, so if there's anything else you'd like to bring up, do it, do it now. And then we'll turn to the data.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  On the issue of whether low-income families are benefiting from this, I already talked about the theoretical about how they're in the worst schools already. So they had the most to benefit, most to gain from having more options in their, their kids' education. In DC, they have a voucher program, which I think Obama was against, even though he sent his own kids to Sidwell Friends, a private school. School choice for me, but not for the hypocrisy.

• 1:18:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Strikes again, it's every, it's everywhere. But we looked at the data. Most recently in DC and the average family, their average household income was about $30,000 per year for the entire household in the District of Columbia, which is a higher cost of living area than the average in the United States. And I believe about 95% of the kids were black or Hispanic. So this goes completely counter to the narrative that the left is saying about how this is only for rich white kids using, using the program. In Florida as well, there's a really interesting story about how DeSantis actually won in 2018. He actually barely won the governor's race in 2018. And the headline in the Wall Street Journal the next day was that school choice moms

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  tipped the governor's race for DeSantis. So they looked at exit polling from CNN of all places and they found that black moms in particular came out in force for DeSantis, much higher than expected after his opponent, Andrew Gillum, who was a black Democrat, called to get rid of their private school choice program that was already benefiting over 100,000 kids at the time. And those kids were disproportionately low income and non-white kids. So this is another way that, one, Republicans can make inroads with groups that they hadn't reached out to before. And it's also, it shows you that this shouldn't be a partisan issue. And if Democrats are smart, if, if they're going to bleed votes on this issue to people like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they should come along too.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  And this is something I point out in the book, that the way that we can get towards bipartisanship on school choice is through hyper-partisanship in the short run. Because the more that the Democrats lose on the issue, like we saw with Terry McAuliffe, Andrew Gillum in Florida, the more they're going to scratch their head and you'll have some defectors and say, I'm going to join the kids' union and listen to them, the parents, as opposed to just the teachers' union.

• 1:20:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it isn't an obviously partisan issue.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  It shouldn't be.

• 1:20:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it's, it's like cost cutting in government. It isn't obvious at all why that. Default left winger would be against getting rid of fraud in the in the political system and political spending, right? Because then, at least in principle, more money could be spent on things that actually work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this seems to be, I mean, you can make a perfectly cogent case, as you have, I would say, for how broadening choice it might even preferentially benefit people who are poor and dispossessed. That seems to be highly likely to me because, as you pointed out, the worst schools are the ones that are serving the people who are trapped in the in admired in poverty, often multigenerationally.

• 1:21:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I don't see any way out of that than the multiplication of of supply. And it's also the case that the money of a poor person is just as good as the money of a rich person. And so if they have that money at hand, their children are more likely to be valued by people who would like to get paid for their efforts. Right, right, right. All right, so I think we'll turn to the Daily Wire side now. And I think I'll talk to you about a couple of things. I'd like to know about your future plans, strategic and conceptual. Where do you go next? I'd like to know what it's been like for you to deal with the new administration

• 1:21:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  federally and and particularly on the federal level. And I'd like to talk to you more about any pitfalls you see emerging on the school choice side. So we'll talk about the future. We'll talk about strategy. We'll talk about the new administration. We'll talk about potential risks that you might see, maybe in the hyper partisan approach, but also in the school choice conceptual domain per se. So we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side. Everybody watching and listening, you're more than welcome to join us for an additional half an hour behind the Daily Wire. Hey, well, thank you very much for coming in today. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, it's really good to have you here and appreciate it.

• 1:22:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, you know, you're you're spending your time educating people too and letting them know, well.

• 1:22:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Exactly how they should be thinking about the fact that their children are sent to a pathologically unproductive monopoly, right? That eats up half the resources at the state level, right? It's really something. It's really something to see. So, all right, everybody, you can join us there.