Stefan spoke with a caller who has been building an AI-assisted app for homeschooling families. It began as a basic organizer but evolved into a broader curriculum project. The software keeps track of progress through lessons, generates records that meet state requirements, and can rearrange schedules when a child falls behind or gets sick. It also offers field trip suggestions and a registry for local co-ops.
The caller had first planned to produce an animated history series focused on inventions and the people behind them. That idea proved too difficult to fund and complete on a reasonable timeline, so he shifted to software as a way to bring in money that could later support larger creative work. After several name changes, he settled on Romeschool, with the intention of eventually combining curriculum, history, and rhetoric in one place.
Their conversation spent a lot of time on the curriculum itself. It covers Roman rhetoric and grammar, American history, Greek history, and the ways Rome and Greece shaped their citizens. The material aims to build wisdom, persuasive speaking, and social skills, and the caller is considering whether to hold back the rhetoric sections until students finish earlier lessons on wisdom.
Stefan noted that homeschooling in the United States typically demands careful recordkeeping, yearly reviews, and clear proof of progress, unlike the lighter requirements in Canada. He added that AI can generate large volumes of curriculum content fairly easily, but getting the product in front of people and actually selling it remains the harder part.
On marketing, Stefan encouraged the caller to start with short videos that lay out the problems in modern public schools, such as bullying, drugs, heavy ideology, and weak socialization, instead of leading with the app itself. He said the project should speak to both religious homeschoolers and secular parents, and that boys might respond especially well to a more direct, debate-oriented style.
The caller mentioned the website romeschool.app and said he hopes to launch before the next school year.
0:00:00 - Homeschool Vision Begins
0:07:32 - Romeschool Rebrand
0:10:20 - Teaching Citizenship Through History
0:12:53 - Why Time Matters
0:15:51 - First AI Experiments
0:18:58 - Music, Video, and AI
0:24:08 - Discovering the Real Passion
0:26:55 - Marketing the Mission
0:31:19 - Wisdom, Speech, and Skepticism
0:37:56 - Respect, Manners, and Youth
0:43:17 - Curriculum and Life Skills
0:50:03 - Getting the First Users
0:51:55 - Grading and Scaling
0:56:21 - Building Homeschool Community
0:58:23 - Market Analysis
1:04:10 - Public Schools Are Failing
1:09:34 - Selling the Solution
1:14:03 - Marketing the Danger
1:21:18 - Boys and Masculinity
1:24:25 - Romeschool Launch
[0:00:00] All right. So shall I just start with a brief intro? Do you want to start with your project? What's your pleasure?
[0:00:06] Uh, yeah, no, uh, um, uh, I know I sent it to you late on a Sunday. I don't know if you got to look at this little cute little.
[0:00:15] Yeah, I read it over.
[0:00:16] Wonderful, wonderful. And, uh, and yeah, it's, um, I started developing a, uh, it's a, it's a homeschool curriculum for, uh, hopefully for good speakers, I guess. I made an app that can help people organize their homeschool, at the direction of AI tools. I've been working with various ones, you know, as everybody has, but more so Claude over the last few months. And I was working on a cartoon, which was like a history series. It was going to be like a Pixar-like history series about inventions and inventors because... I thought that uh getting some recognition for the contributions, uh uh you know basically you know western european and american inventors have had. Um this was kind of an idea I started to cultivate in 2020 with the BLM stuff and all this, uh "white people are a plague," you know, it's all this kind of stuff and I was kind of coming up with a defense um myself and uh...
[0:01:25] And anyway I I started to think that, you know, people could use a little more gratitude with regards to invention. And so I started developing that in like February, well, in earnest. I was kind of working on it for like the last year or so here and there. And then in earnest, like full-time February. And I was kind of getting up to a launch position. I could tell that it was going to be a big lift, a guy who's never created anything. Um there's technical uh advancements with AI cartoons and stuff like that that you know you're still you're still really working hard to get exactly what you want, but I could maybe get maybe get it through but it was going to be like it looked like it was going to be harder to get the funding and stuff you know with kickstarter stuff like that uh and uh I'm not, I'm not really a mark marketing I don't have like a marketing back I don't I didn't I didn't have a cartoon background or or storytelling or anything so it was it was like a lot that I was getting to.
[0:02:19] And so, as I was trying to procure some funding, somebody asked me, you know, what feedback I've gotten and, you know, what the market wants or whatever. And because they didn't really, they couldn't really see that, you know, there was a need or whatever for a cartoon that was talking about inventions. And I disagreed, but I started talking to Claude that day about, you know, what does the market want with regards to homeschool and curriculums and stuff like that. It wasn't really a curriculum, but it was going to be for homeschoolers because the family was a homeschool family and...
[0:02:58] Anyway, he started talking about tools that they don't have that he went out and poked around. I asked him for pain points and he started poking around and asking about tools that people needed. And I said, well, I did this little thing for my dad a week ago and it made this little piece of software real easily. And I said, maybe we can do that. And so I kind of shifted to like, that's going to be the fundraiser. That's going to be the way that I get the money to make a show. So I worked on that for basically all of May for about a month from like May 10th to June 10th, something like that, which doesn't sound like a lot. But I feel like, I mean, we got where I'm very close to it being a solid planner with some unique aspects where it helps people juggle if they've got, you know, if a kid's falling behind or if a kid can't is sick or whatever. And it just kind of moves minutes of their curriculum forward and makes it kind of really easy. And they could take weeks off. And I started to get some feedback from some homeschool moms and started adding some stuff in there. And I got I got a cool piece of software, I think. But it was still going to be as I started to get a little bit of feedback. It was still going to be kind of more time than I wanted to get, a subscriber base, basically.
[0:04:19] And the software is to help manage people, a kid's progress through the curriculum. Is that right?
[0:04:25] Yeah. Well, a lot of states, they need to track what they're doing in order, in case the state asks, and in some states they require it every year. And so, yeah, you feed the curriculum in, you say, you know, Billy worked on math today for this long, and then they have their full hours and they got a paper trail.
[0:04:44] And it's funny, too, because a lot of people don't know that. So just for the audience who doesn't, homeschooling in Canada is a complete, wild west. Like there's no feedback, no requirements. They never contact you. You know, they just, I guess, assume you're doing the right thing. And a friend of mine who homeschools in the United States was telling me that, you know, they have to have a review every year. They have to keep detailed notes. They have to show progress. They have to keep all of the work to show the government. And it's one of these funny places where Canada is free, so to speak, and America is less free. Obviously, it's not like Germany where you're not allowed to at all. But it is unusual in that you do have to kind of keep all of this stuff and all of these records and you can be cross-examined, they can audit and so on. So the software helps with something like that. Is that right?
[0:05:35] Yeah, and, you know, the United States in general is more, is restrictive, but state by state is, there's a lot of different restrictions, and it changes, you know, every legislative session sometimes, or it's up for debate. And also they can change a policy like a law is already in place and they're going to start enforcing it in a different way and so that was another unique thing I thought that I did was you know we we said we'd be the gold standard about uh you know we're sending out, crons three times a day to see what news has changed. We want to be the first one to let people know...
[0:06:16] I'm sorry, crons?
[0:06:16] Uh it, was a uh a new term to me but it's like a thing where your website sends out and asks the internet for something uh, uh it's like a search or something something like that but it's automated three you know a certain amount of time and for me I was doing it three times a day, and I would get you know news alerts and they uh, they would get uh that was to me I wouldn't just have them be pushed out I would have eyes on them and then say okay this is worthy of going to a person's phone or their email and, so so that was an aspect and then I made a field trip finder which was that, But, well, anyways, the software is good.
[0:06:56] But I was increasingly apprehensive about the name that I picked, which was the name of my cartoon, which was About Time. And the family was a time-traveled family. They were going to go back in time. You know, see Gutenberg and see what the Watt engine being developed and stuff like that. And, uh, and so it was, it was an okay name and I hadn't come up, you know, it was, it was sort of tentative and, uh, but I was running with it cause it was the best I had. So I, so I had about time.app and, but I was, as I was getting ready to launch, cause we're kind of aiming for a July 4th launch here in a week.
[0:07:32] And sorry, just to make, make sure I understand the launch is the app, the cartoon, the website, um, I'm not sure how that relates to the curriculum that, that you sent me and I just want to... I'm trying to get the brain cloud in a vague line.
[0:07:46] No no uh and it was it was just the app at this time. It was just the app, and it was it was gonna be July 4th, about a month ago. And I was I was feeling the need to to rebrand which I'd already done three times mostly in the very beginning of the app development but I was feeling the need I didn't like, the name didn't say enough I didn't so I was just thinking about it and I started uh thinking about, it increasingly as I'm looking for domains and asking Claude what he thinks about them was boiling down to things like like virtue and veracity and, uh it was you know a truth thing you know it was a it was a you, know good values thing and and uh and then I I stumbled on one of the ones that was available was, romeschool and not romeschool.com but at romeschool.app and and then so I had like 10 of them and I brought in my wife and she really liked Romeschool and she pointed out that it rhymes with home school which hadn't even occurred to me but I really liked the name Romeschool, and so I, doubled down right away, and like that day or the next day, it was always the next day that I would wake up and I would have a new idea, something I wanted to add to my app, but the next day after I got Romeschool, I said, what did Rome teach?
[0:08:56] What could we do maybe that would be, you know, kind of on brand for Rome in like a curriculum thing? Because that really helps get funding from different directions if you're not just a tool, but if you actually have something to teach. And uh yeah so I asked I asked the internet what what did rome teach and it was this orator uh line it was all making you good a good you could argue a law and you can be, participate as a as a citizen in rome and uh and I I'm a little bit of a history guy a little bit but I'm not it was this was new to me, and I was like wow this is a this is a lane we could own um and so we started I you know me and Claude I say we always all the time it's kind of weird but uh we started developing, a a kind of like a roman rhetoric um, uh course and uh and it started off with the with the rhetoric course and the and the Grammaticus uh which I you know in their school came before that which is where they learned uh how, how how sentences go together and how how the ancient poets, wrote and they would...
[0:10:08] I put together a lot of stuff based on a lot of stuff that I've learned about. And I need to take these courses myself. But anyway, but Grammaticus was, I guess it was before that. And I think we'll skip the one that comes before that, which is like the elementary school where you just learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic.
[0:10:20] But then it was, I wanted to do like my American history of the inventions and, and American history in general. And then we wrote a Roman history, a Greek history. And then something I really wanted to tailor and I was really happy about, which I actually did before the Roman and Greek history, was how Rome and Greece made their citizens.
[0:10:42] What changed when they were growing, when they were in power, and when they were declining as far as how they were growing their citizens, basically. And it was something which I think it feels to me like if a kid... For the first time, I'm working on something that I would want to use. The tool was cool. The cartoon was cool. I would want to show my kids the cartoon. But this is something that I want to put my kids through. My oldest turns five in about a month. It's like a no-brainer. I think that if I wanted to give everybody something, it just seems like we've lost something as far as being able to speak effectively and persuasively.
[0:11:29] Uh it's something I I have worked hard to to claw my way up to like the 20th percentile I'm not not very good at it but I'm maybe this course will probably help me I think uh but uh, with you know with Claude and it's gonna need a lot of editing but with Claude we got like a million word a million words or something like that and and the courses are about three quarters done or something like that which was pretty quick run up in 10 days, um it was a lot of steering for me in the beginning and making sure there's not like victim mentality there's uh, the u.s history was especially originally conceived uh uh with a with the spine of wrestling with the the idea of slavery and and we were built on freedom and and I said let's uh let's just go to we, were it was a self selected group of Europeans that you know came over and they you know you know built you know built a society which where they could be free and built and build you know the the whole um.
[0:12:24] I'm sorry, I'm rambling, I know, but one cool thing I thought when I was doing my invention course was that the main invention that Grok suggested was the most important as far as helping the world was the U.S. Constitution, maybe because of the private property rights and the patent system, which kind of allowed a lot of, you know, the big boom of American invention. And I thought that that was a much more important aspect of U.S. history. So.
[0:12:53] I'm trying to run to make this happen because I'm a handyman by trade and I'm spending way too much time away from home. I've really started to lament coming home when my kids are asleep on the couch, regularly and I'm trying to find a way to be useful to more people faster get some some better a better lifestyle and so that's, So that's that, I guess.
[0:13:21] Yeah, it's fascinating. And I've worked with AI, working on a UPB movie, and AI is tough to wrestle with, man. It is like a completely brilliant and wildly inconsistent employee. You know, like you either get the Sistine Chapel or you get graffiti. There doesn't seem to be much like, oh, wow, that's perfect. That's even better than what I was thinking of. Or you get something that's like, what drug trip are you on to produce something like this that makes no sense? And I'm wrestling with continuity, continuous characters and themes and so on. And so, I mean, I'm not complaining because way back in the day, I was working on a documentary. Oh, gosh, this has to be probably 12 or 14 years ago...
[0:14:09] And I had an animator and I would ask the animator to do stuff and he'd produce, you know, the sort of wireframe things and so on. Kind of inconsistent. Took him a while. And then he ended up just vanishing, you know, because artistic types, right, they get better offers or they suddenly want to go and quit and pick grapes or mime in Queensland. Or something like that. So being able to work with an actual AI video and image generator is really cool, but it does require a certain amount of patience. And it is like feeding a squirrel on cocaine, you know, like or feeding a squirrel with cocaine because they're just jumpy and all over the place. So I find it a really cool process to go through. And I, you probably have more patience than me because I will try like, you know, six or seven times to get something right. And then I'll just say, okay, I'll use captions. Like if I have a challenging piece of text that I want to do something visual with, if I'm not getting anything after six or seven prompts that's even close to usable, I'll just go to captions. And I'm sure that there are lots of voodoo tricks out there. I've got whole newsletters of people saying, here's how you do AI. Here's how you get it to do this, that, and the other. And I've never worked with Claude. I'm just working with Grok.
[0:15:22] Because Grok has no limits and it's already baked into my subscription on X. And so, yeah, I mean, how did you first start working with AI? Was it back in the day? Because I remember I just had a curiosity when I first started writing Peaceful Parenting a little over two years ago. I was like, hey, I'm curious what AI would come up with in terms of chapters. And, you know, it was fine. It was OK. It wasn't anything, you know, stunning or terrible. But how long have you been working with the technology as a whole?
[0:15:51] Yeah yeah and it is it is a pretty cool uh cool thing that, and I and I tried working with rock a little bit especially he helped me reform the american thing pry it away from the slavery, spine and bring it back into something that I thought was a little more based uh which I liked a lot uh but he really has been struggling with um making long form making making a whole, even whole lessons of any kind of length Claude has been really good with um, entire units it takes him like 15 minutes, but he'll generate an entire unit, uh, you know, 20,000 words in a go and come back for more. Um, but yeah, no, I started with AI. Um, it was about, uh, not, not that long. I mean, I was, you know, I was talking to, to Grok. Grok was my, was my favorite because, you know, I think that, uh, I talked to Claude about a year and a half ago and he, he gave me some, some pushback about why I shouldn't have the opinions that I have. And I was, I was, I was, goodbye, you know, uh, but, uh, Grok has been very good and, uh, and helped me figure out, you know, the invention, what, what inventors might be important and research those. And that was, that was interesting. And so that was what I was working with last summer, but I really got interested in working with AI in earnest in like October when, uh, when I got... I was having trouble finding some work at the time, and my wife's grandmother said, you know, you should really do music. You play piano.
[0:17:21] She thought that I knew how to sing, even though she'd never seen me not sing.
[0:17:24] Oh, so she's like the siren luring you to the rocks. I know you're a father. I know you have bills. But follow your economically-near-to-impossible passion. And, you know, hey, it does work out, but so does winning the lottery. But it's maybe not the most conservative plan in the known universe.
[0:17:43] No, not, not, no, of course not, not, not music, especially these days when everybody with a laptop and uh and a Suno subscription can make something that sounds almost as good as what's on the radio. And but uh but she she, she... she did recognize you know something in me where it was like it was one of these things that from forever ago where I you know that like everybody who's got a guitar and you know thinks that you know I could have someday if I would have if if I would have just found a drummer or something, but I'd always you know carried that with me and it was like, you know, okay, I'll give it. She says, hey, here's money for your family for three weeks. Just give it three weeks. And so that was nice. And so I wrote my first, frankly, my first like full song. And I'm 48. And so I was, and I've been playing piano since I was five and...
[0:18:31] You're 48?
[0:18:31] ... thinking about making music.48...
[0:18:33] So you see now what you need to do is sell whatever youthful serum you're taking. That's what you want to sell.
[0:18:41] Or just make one. Say that's my secret.
[0:18:43] You too can take a nibble of my jugular for only $9.99. No, that's good. You look great. So yeah, but you work with your body and that certainly helps keep the blood flowing and I think that can be quite good. But okay, so sorry, go on.
[0:18:58] Well, yeah, and maybe that's why she thought a little bit, you know, hey, there's still a chance and whatever. So I wrote a song. It was a complete song and I thought it was kind of cool. In fact, I thought it was so cool that I put just myself playing piano on Facebook, to, I'm sure, the horror of my mother and anybody else who knows me by association because I'm not much of a singer. I thought it was a pretty good song. It had a good theme. It was about a girl, who got talked into having a certain procedure when she was by her mother kind of a thing and then ended up not having kids. Now she's a cat lady kind of a thing. I thought it almost made me cry a little bit. It was a good song, I thought. And it was okay. And then I looked up AI and music or something like that after I put it out there because I was trying to figure out how to make it more... I was trying to figure out, I can't remember why I breached the subject, but I found this thing called Suno, which if you're a musician, you've probably heard of and real musicians hate it because it's, you know, AI is the, you know, really is the nail in the coffin of them trying to sell whatever kind of, it made my song like sound like a radio edit. It was, it was... It was amazing.
[0:20:11] Wait, what do you mean? You just, you feed in the thing and it just adds like bass drums and, and...
[0:20:15] Yep.
[0:20:16] Wow.
[0:20:16] It, it, yeah, it does the arrangement. and so you know it's got all the build and everything like that yeah. So it took my exact, yeah, took my exact chords and the timing of the melody. I mean, everything was important. And with it all, it sounded really good. And so I was really happy with that. And so the next thing was, you know, AI video. How do I make a music video? And then it was really a rough thing.
[0:20:44] Is that because you have trouble twerking yourself because you're pushing 50? Is that the challenge?
[0:20:49] I thought about getting a green screen. And uh
[0:20:52] I can, I can twerk maybe twice and then I need to lie down. But sorry, go ahead.
[0:20:56] That's right. Uh, I'm done! Uh, yeah yeah but you know I was like a story and it was rough it was really bad but it had elements that looked like a movie like a like a real scene and and uh and so I started kind of I was like well I could just take you know these and, I'll reproduce it reproduce it and then edit it together with my little you know with my computer and, and it was and it was decent And it took it took a month, but I was pouring like 70 hours a week. And it was no it was for the first time in my life. It was no problem to work. It was kind of revolution. It was a wonderful experience that I was, you know, I wasn't making money. But I felt like...
[0:21:34] ... that's the male. Like so for women, they sort of have this great peripheral vision. When men get focused, it's like it totally closes and everything is just this one tiny tunnel. And you're just making your way through the tunnel. And everybody else disappears. And you still care about them in an abstract fashion, but it's the task. The laser task must be completed, right? I don't know if you've seen this meme of this guy, like he's in the gym and it's like what men are thinking at the gym is like, I have to lift this or I'm gay and my whole family dies. And it's just that level of like hyper hunting focus. I must bring meat. Everything else is unimportant.
[0:22:16] Well, that was it. And like, whereas before that, you know, I was feeling bad when I wasn't around my kids and maybe, you know, and spending as much time, you know, when I wasn't working or whatever, you know, and justifying sitting on the couch and playing with, you know, the family and stuff like that. And here I was just apologizing day after day. I'm here for five minutes. Okay, guys, I'm going back upstairs. Daddy's got to make some money. And, I got, you know, I don't know how, I'd have to say with the amount of time, it was like 500 hours over, the initial month was not, but then it was, that turned in, I was like, how can I turn this? Because it was okay, but I was like, how can I turn this, can I make music videos? Uh professionally can I can I how do I get fun like crowdfunding I messaged this guy who does professional crowdfunding and he said you need to do like a series like that's the series are the ones that you know that get the money like like millions of like this series this series let's see how they crowdfunded sorry a series what do you mean, like a TV series like a web series like a like in old in the old days we'll go on TV you know like a cartoon, that kind of thing...
[0:23:28] But that's not a music video thing though, right? That would be like some sort of dramatic series?
[0:23:32] Right.
[0:23:33] Or comedy, yeah. So now you've got to be not just a songwriter and a performer and an edit music video guy with AI, but now you've got to be a writer of dialogue and you've got to figure out how to get the actors simulated. And okay, I mean, it's, hey, you know what? Here's a great way to make money. Just be good at absolutely everything and you'll be making a fortune. It's like, it's hard to argue with that. I'm going to be a stone genius at everything I touch and the money will flow. And it's like, yeah, that's a, it's a nice business plan. Uh, I couldn't fulfill it, but I suppose some people...
[0:24:08] Anyway, tell me, tell me your story. How did the series thing go?
[0:24:10] No, no, no, you're well, so, so I guess what I discovered when I was making the music video was that, um, uh, it was that it was the video itself that I was, I was really enjoying spending the time doing. Because when I was a kid, I wrote on my wall that I wanted it to be like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and Doug Barry someday. Like I wanted to be a movie maker when I was a kid. Like, you know, like, that's this guy
[0:24:36] Oh, oh, so sorry! Sorry, I was like okay is there some guy that I...
[0:24:40] Sorry...
[0:24:40] ... I'm not aware about? I was thinking is it Dave Barry, the comic writer? Okay got it. Yeah you're like the third of the Trinity. Okay, got it.
[0:24:46] Yeah yeah I just wanted to be like you know known for you know something and and I and I and I grew up in a movie watching family and and so I always had that in the back of my brain more so than music I never if I wanted to do music I would have done music in my life, but, it was never really a draw. I'm good at it, but I'm never a draw. But making stories, and I bought a nice camera over the last couple of years, a couple of them. But all of a sudden I was making videos online and sold my cameras just to keep the process going.
[0:25:18] So I decided I'm going to do that. I'm going to make a cartoon about the history thing, which I was kind of tentatively planning this all the time about a documentary or something I was going to make. I was like, let's do a cartoon. and I can make it with the AI videos. And they travel back in time and they get to show what happened and what life was like and how it changed and all that kind of stuff. And I was pouring myself into it again for about two months or a month and a half, two months. Same thing, 70 hours, 80 hours a week, enjoying it, not feeling worse for the wear, loving the process. And then, yeah, like I said in the beginning, I started to come out to the idea that it was going to be kind of, a longer process than I wanted to get it to the point where I could prove something that was fundable and corral the funding and, keep the lights on while I'm working on that.
[0:26:10] So, turned to what can I do for homeschool software and made that. And it's just about polished. And then, like I said, yeah, all of a sudden, once we add the curriculum, it's it's top. It's it's it's in there with like the big players for the homeschool apps. And it's got its own niche. And and then once I start making money with that, then I can make a show. My wife is really she's like, but you're going to make the show someday, right? I mean, she really likes the idea of this cartoon history show. She thinks it's a really cute family that we put together, a cute house that they live in and stuff. She wants to see that brought to life. So that was the last four months, and I'm trying, like the Dickens, to justify it.
[0:26:53] Well, I mean, it's justified. It's just now I've got to market. I heard you say, that's the back of my head, I heard you say, I don't know how many years ago, that... And maybe you can correct me, but I think you said something like writing the book is 10% and marketing, it is 90% or something like that.
[0:27:06] Well, certainly at the beginning. I mean, Stephen King doesn't do a lot of marketing anymore.
[0:27:09] True.
[0:27:10] But certainly at the beginning, I mean, I spent at least 80% of the time at the beginning of my podcast career, such as it is, I spent 80% of the time just promoting it, just going to websites and posting it on forums and just trying to get people interested and so on. Because I was a director of marketing. And, you know, everybody has a great thing in a drawer. You know, I remember I used to do karaoke when I was younger and the karaoke host, we would chat from time to time and he's like, yeah, I've got this whole rock opera in my drawer. And I'm like, great, you know, but why? But why? I mean, at least try, at least try to get it out. And so most people have a great idea or something half finished in their drawer or something even totally finished in their drawer. And getting it out into the world, that's the brutal part because you care about it and almost nobody, your wife cares about it, your kids care about it, you care about it, but nobody else really does. And then how do you make people care about it? How do you make people care about what you care about? That's sort of a very foundational thing in the world.
[0:28:19] And if you're not useful to the powers that be, like I think about Stephen King's first novel was Carrie and Carrie, like a lot of stuff that was pushed. I mean, he's a good writer and all of that, but it was so viciously anti-Christian, that, you know, the Bolsheviks in marketing and the Bolsheviks in publishing are like, well, great, you know, this makes Christians look terrible. It makes Christians look like they're terrible people who drive their children crazy because the mother's a religious fanatic, if I remember rightly. And so if you serve the powers that be, man, you're good to go. But if you don't serve the powers that be, then you have to find people who care about something with no high octane jet fuel from the higher ups. And that is a very, very tough thing to do.
[0:29:06] So I certainly applaud your initiative. Obviously, it's fantastic that you're so passionate about it. And of course, you know, the hope and goal is that it ends up giving you more time with your kids because, you know, a couple of months for a passion project is not the end of the world when it comes to parenting. But it is a very, very tough thing to have people care about what you care about. Because for a lot of people, sorry to ramble on, but for a lot of people, when you show up and you want something from them, which is either interest or funding, and even though you're going to say, look, it's an exchange of value, you pay me X dollars a month, and I'll give you all of this great stuff. When you show up and you want something from people, you give them power over you. And people don't do well with power as a whole. And most people will be kind of either hostile or contemptuous or sort of indifferent in a superior fashion or so on. They maybe enjoy the fact that you want something from them. It makes them feel important. It makes them feel good, pompous and all of that.
[0:30:06] So a lot of people, you know, if you go out and you say, I really care about this, people are like, oh, do you? And now they have this power over you. And most people, because of the way they're raised in schools and all this sort of stuff, They don't handle power very well. And so you've just got to grit your teeth and say, look, I know this is important. I know this is good for the world. I also know that me going out there saying those things is going to invite people to treat me badly. And they're going to treat me badly based exactly on how much I care about this. Now, this may not be true in the homeschooling community, right? I don't know much about the American homeschooling community, but I will say that that is a big challenge when it comes to marketing. It's one thing if you're just selling widgets or shoes or air conditioners or HVAC units or something like that. That's one thing. Then it's just a cost-benefit thing. But if you actually care about something that's moral or important for the world to become a better place and has some sort of ethical essence to it, which it sounds like you're working on, man, people would just put the knife in, make sure it's rusty, twist it slowly and smile at the same time. Not everyone, obviously, but that's where it starts for a lot of people.
[0:31:19] Yeah. And, uh, you know, uh, I'll, I'll be evaluating with, uh, with a bias, uh, any pushback I get as, like you said, the power structure will promote what it wants to promote and what's good for it and do the opposite for the opposite. And, uh, um, a big part of what I think is, is important about people, uh, becoming wise, cause that's kind of the prerequisite I'm going to have for for learning how to speak with persuasion, uh as far as like I can you know derive you know how can you become wise in the world in two years or whatever uh it's going to be kind of like a history and science basis but once people become wise and then they learn how to speak persuasively that is inherently dangerous.
[0:32:00] And I think, uh maybe a big part of what the power structure has been angling away from six maybe success successfully for for who knows how long, 50 years or 100 years or however, maybe whenever it could, but maybe more effectively now. And so, yeah, so I'm sure I'm going to get some vitriol that's going to be paid for and or just people seem to defend the system that, they're growing up in and sense when something is outside of it and works against it and they'll work against it too. So, yeah, I'm expecting a bunch of that. But the angle, I think, besides, appealing to people's want for their kids to have a virtue uh and uh and and live a good good life uh is going to be the social angle which I, I'm just getting into homeschooling but again I'm asking you know what are the pain points and besides you know an organizational tool big one is are my kids going to be social you know and I um, my kids are four cousins out of 13 12 or 13 right here right here in our in our town outside... uh is uh we're we're quite a bit outside... we don't have any of no no idea where that but we're we're outside... anyways we're all there's a you know 13 kids that are all like five and six and not take six six and under, my kids are gonna be the only ones that are getting homeschooled that's the that's the first thing I hear about from my mom is uh you know how how are they you know they should really be around the cousins, you know... there's a room in in you know their your cousin's class uh...
[0:33:29] And I think school had a reverse effect on me as far as, like, how my social—I clammed up for, like, 15 years and pried myself out of it starting in my mid-20s, I think, mostly, as I recall it. And so there's that, and there's a lot of reasons why homeschooling in general is not very—you know, just talk to your kids, you know? What are they going to learn from talking to another 8-year-old, you know? But uh but learn teaching them how to speak and think and uh and, uh that's going to be anyway that's my first concept for like a marketing angles you know you maybe don't care if your kid's virtuous but you'll care if your kid can be a convincing you know have a have a good conversation be you know be a good listener and and uh, be a good participant socially and uh...
[0:34:20] It's hard to do. I mean, you know, I hate to get into this old guy kids these days conversation, but, youth are addicted to rapid fire moving comic images, you know, like the Instagram stuff and all of that. And, you know, it can be funny. It can absolutely be funny. It can absolutely be enjoyable. But there's no question that it's a cheese grater for your brain. It's a cheese grater for your concentration to develop an idea, to formulate it, to communicate it effectively, to overcome objections is a process of self-knowledge, commitment to principles, patience, and empathy. And kids don't really read fiction anymore. And fiction is one of the best ways outside of loving parents, or I guess alongside loving parents to develop empathy, because you're literally looking into the brain of someone else and it teaches you empathy.
[0:35:10] And if you go to the bookstores these days, it's just absolute awful, awful stuff that's out there. It's all just, you know, semi-Marxist social programming, and it's all for a political effect. None of it is a genuine in exploration of the human condition and what it means to be alive and thoughtful in a society, nothing like that. And so the lack of fiction, the lack of long-term dialogue, the handing down of brain shredding, they literally call it brain rot. I'm sure you've heard this term, like the six servant kind of stuff, the skibidi toilet stuff and fanum tax and all of this sort of stuff. It is horrendous on concentration and patience and empathy and long-form conversations. And it is all a spiral down for a lot of young people. It's a spiral down to like the most edgelord, shocking statements to see who can outpace each other in the grim unraveling of any sacred cows. And that's really tough for long-form conversations. So what you're doing in terms of helping people build the concentration, the empathy, and the throughput to communicate effectively.
[0:36:23] Boy, that is really going to differentiate people in the workforce going forward. You know, I mean, one of the things that's tough with young people, it's just basic eye contact. They're actually not used to looking at people. They're just used to looking at screens and having eye contact, which is, you know, eye contact, firm handshake, good posture, you know, all of that kind of stuff that was sort of drilled in by the Madmen generation, which, you know, it's a lot of good stuff. They can't seem to maintain that.
[0:36:49] But at the same time, and of course, there's costs and benefits to everything, but at the same time, they also, the degree of corrosive skepticism among young people these days to all of the sacred cows, some of which they should be skeptical of and some of which they should absolutely be hostile towards, is really quite remarkable. So, you know, there's pluses and minuses for sure. Concentration, empathy, patience, throughput, communication, following a line of argument and so on. And the back and forth of conversation, you know, I'm sure you've heard this when I do call in shows, I usually spend the first 15, 20 minutes just trying to figure out when I can and can't talk because, you know, I'm not in the room with someone to just go with audio cues. So just getting the ebb and flow of conversation is tough. But at the same time, they've been exposed to a lot of information that goes against generalized narratives and things that my generation would find shocking. They just shrug and accept. So, you know, there's so if you take that skepticism and you combine it with good skills in rhetoric and conversation and debate, boy, there's be a very powerful force among the young. So that's why I think one of the things, one of the reasons I was interested in what you're doing.
[0:37:56] Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned, eye contact and it's funny because like, you know, we go for walks, you know, stroller walks with our kids and it's normal to, you know, when anybody my age or even just a little bit younger, you know, as you're walking past them, there's a certain point where you make eye contact, nod, kind of wave. And then when you get right near him, how you doing? None of that with the kids. You'll never, a 17-year-old walking down the street or sidewalk with his phone, and he'll barely look up, just right when you're getting there just to make sure you're not going to jump at him or something. And he'll never look at you in the eye and never nod at you. I mean, just kind of pretend like you're not there. That reminds me of something. There's something where it feels, like kids kind of treat the world like it's the Internet where they just they tell it what they want or they ask it what they want and they don't have to say, you know, you know, OK, thank you or whatever. Like I find myself like thanking Claude, like, like, OK, please continue or whatever.
[0:38:58] You know, the amount of water that is consumed for the sake of Gen X and elder politeness. Like I have to remind myself not to say please and thank you because it's just wasting compute cycles for the entity that doesn't care at all. Right.
[0:39:12] It doesn't care.
[0:39:14] Yeah. But that's another thing, too, is that politeness among the younger generation appears to be fairly absent. I mean, I was raised probably a little bit too much with, you know, respect your elders and please and thank you and all of that. But the young people, it's really, it's really remarkable just how little respect they have for their elders. I'm not saying that a lot of us haven't earned it, earned that lack of respect, but it's almost completely gone. The youth culture, I mean, of course they've been programmed, you know, every kid's show, the parents are idiots and doofuses and the kids are cool and wise and know everything. And that's just a way to make sure that the kids can be programmed by peer pressure in the media and bypassing any parental wisdom. I get all of that. That's just a standard control mechanism for culture. But yeah, it's really wild just how little respect there is for any kind of elder. And again, it was a bit too much for me. You'd go into a room with a mom or dad and you'd be like, oh, I've got to keep my elbows off the table and I've got to make sure I don't speak and don't slip my tea. You know, so I get that may have been a little bit over gulagged, but it's really, you know, watching that pendulum shift is a pretty wild thing.
[0:40:29] Yeah. And, you know, the stuff that your parents teach you for how you have to behave in front of them, of course, when you do that, when you're in a room full of strangers, you're at a new dinner, whatever, you know, with strangers, you don't rub people the wrong way. You learn how to, how to not rub people the wrong way.
[0:40:45] My wife had the idea that we should make, you know, it seems like every day in the last 10 days I've added some course or something like that. But she thought that, you know, like a manners and politeness course. And so I was like, I was like, Claude, what do you think about this? Like, he's like, he's like, he's like the Greek, the Greek writers and the Roman writers, they had a name for this. Like, this was a, this was a, this was a thing that they, they taught. You know, it was, you know, it was a formal, I couldn't tell you what it was or not. But anyways, it was, it has a formal foundation. It's not a stretch to have a course in, you know, usually it's a little bit younger, but to have a course in manners and politeness. And, yeah, it does seem like, like you said, that the kids seem like they've been programmed out of having respect for anybody, but especially people that are older than them. And maybe we don't, maybe we old people don't have a whole lot of perspective. Like, I have no idea what kids that are 18 do, like, on their phone or 20 or 22. Like, I have no idea what they do. So I feel like, well, I'm getting off on a tangent. I feel like, you know, there's still that draw to, you know, find purpose and meaning, however misplaced, or however it's being misused. For me, it was video game. Like, I was a very early adopter playing video games, all day. That's all I wanted. When I was 18, I almost became a priest because it seemed to me like I only had to work one day a week.
[0:42:05] And I could just play Ultima online for all the rest of the time. And that was my goal, was to find a place to be able to do that. And then I was like 35 before it stopped being fun. Thank God it did. And then I was like waking up, you know, and then I went out and, That's when I became, frankly, a handyman. I was doing a whole bunch of just little jobs, the littlest that I could do to pay the rent in a room with my computer. As long as I had my computer and a place to sleep, I thought that that was all it was going to take to make me happy for my life. And there's like a little bit of that, you know, purpose and meaning and you grow, you know, the growth that you get from leveling up and stuff like that, that I could see just kind of grabbing a kid's, you know, purpose and meaning.
[0:42:49] You mean leveling up, you mean like not in life, but in the video game.
[0:42:52] In the video game, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You get the experience, you know, the experience. And, uh, yeah, so I'm sure that these kids have that. And, and, uh, um, anyways, that's, that's the topic for another time is, is, you know, figuring out how to help them, you know, figure out what they want to do with their life. But I've, I've got one course, which I think addresses just that called, uh, the good, the good life or I forget exactly what it's called, but that's, that's the essence of it is like, what is life well lived?
[0:43:17] And, uh, hopefully that's going to help, help people. So many of these things are authored and barely edited, and I've got to look them over. But I did a lot of steering with how it was going to lay it out and stuff like that and push back, and I got a good skeleton, I thought. And hopefully it's got a good skeleton. Hopefully these are going to be really good. I'm really hoping, I don't know how long it's going to take to get these out. I would like to think that, I mean, it's going to be like a million and a half words. I think it's going to be something like a year, but hopefully...
[0:43:47] Sorry, when you say it, you're referring to the general curriculum or some specific part?
[0:43:54] Yeah, the curriculum, the curriculum. And actually the specific part, part is is uh notable because uh because I'm gating my plan, as of a few days ago, is to gate some so we're not going to let people be persuasive learn how to be a persuasive speaker until they've, taken our stuff that we think is going to... mean Claude, think are going to make you more wise or whatever um because it's funny I studied with a taekwondo master, during a chapter of my life when I was about 37. I... a grandmaster in Los Angeles uh, lived in the dojo uh like uh me and about 20 guys lived in the dojo all of them were, almost all of them one was older than me but all of them were younger than me, and uh practiced twice uh, you know three practice three times a night, or three nights a week and then in the morning like the other three mornings a week we'd get up to 6 AM, listen to him talk for an hour and then go outside and do running around like we're Rocky, doing different wind sprints and stuff like that. But anyways, he was a guy who would try to teach you about life and being a good going and getting what you want and stuff like that. He was a very interesting guy. He was like about 80 years old. But very early in his career he came over from Korea and he was in San Francisco and he taught all this stuff to Jim Jones who went off to do all that stuff with the Kool-Aid, you know what I mean? But Jim Jones was one of his guys.
[0:45:27] And ever since then, it kind of occurred to me that you've got to be careful who you give the keys to the kingdom to. You've got to make sure that their head's in the right place kind of a thing. And so that was kind of the inspiration for me doing the gating of the redder part of it. But yeah, I guess I'm probably not going to have to, in general, have to have that specific thing ready. But but yeah the kind of the first steps I guess you know I could probably have those ready in a in a month I it's it's gonna be it's gonna be a big lift I I don't uh, because this is a public hall and it feels it feels like I'm putting myself in a vulnerable spot but you know, what the heck. I guess I'm already there.
[0:46:08] Uh, I don't know to to what degree you feel like you might might be interested in working with it but I fancifully, pictured... there's this part of it where kids are arguing they have things called declamations, I'm not exactly sure what that is, but it has something, it's, it's, it's the more, it's the more freeform verbose, making an argument part of it, which I think parents are going to struggle with knowing how to grade it and something like that. And, and, and that's, that itself, it could be like a lot of time, I don't know, like watching a video and, and giving feedback or even doing it one on one. But uh um but yeah in addition to you know coming up with maybe ideas that this, because because I don't know anything about about any of this I know I know very little about this stuff of course you know 10 10 days like what did the romans do you know 10 days ago, um it seems like it makes sense that it's going to be good uh but uh you've, I mean just when I got to like the hit like I did a history I did a philosophy survey book and then I got to a like a history of philosophy book and we did the skeleton but I put, I put it to the side and didn't it didn't work on it, uh because I I sent you the email and uh I know that you particularly I mean you wrote the book you know the book on it I believe um but I'm sure that there's parts of this that you'd want to have your hands on more than, than others I don't know have you thought anything about that.
[0:47:45] Yeah, yeah. Listen, first of all, I hugely appreciate and respect the ask, right, because it's hard to ask. You know, for people who haven't gone through this entrepreneurial stuff, uh to to do the ask and to say, hey, can you help me out with this project, or, I think you could add some real value, hugely respect the ask. And and people don't know um, how tough that can be and so I I hugely respect that. I don't know as yet.
[0:48:09] I will say though that I think that the most value that I could provide to you at the moment would be how to get it out there because um, if it's out there, then it's worth more for me to contribute to. If I contribute to it, that's not going to be enough of a lever to get it out there. And if I contribute to it and it doesn't get out there, then we've wasted our time, if that makes sense. So listen, if I have thought countless times over the course of my entire life, how would I teach philosophy or debate or rhetoric to kids? I mean, I'm pretty good at it. And I think I'm not just one of these guys who's instinctively good at it. You know, like there was some actor who had this sort of famous thoughtful gaze and somebody's like, well, how do you do that? He's like, I don't know. I just, I stare at the ground. I just kind of unfocused my eyes and I can't remember which actor it was, but it's like, and people think he's thinking about life, the universe and everything. And he's just blurring his vision. He doesn't know what he's doing.
[0:49:09] Uh, so, but I actually have examined the sort of principles by which I formulate ideas, arguments, and converse. So, I wouldn't be one of these guys who's just like, well, just do what I do. I don't know why I do it. I don't know how I do it. It just kind of comes to me in a dream, and then I write it down, but I actually have some idea as to why. I am able to do what I do, so I think it would be helpful to get that across. I do certainly appreciate that you want to make sure you don't give the weapon of rhetoric to evildoers because they can use it as they do very, very powerfully to learn, the art of the argument, the art of rhetoric without a foundational moral base is a very dangerous thing, of course, because then you armed the bad guys without arming the good guys. And that's like not a very good combo at all.
[0:50:04] So the challenge, yeah, the challenge is to get people interested in it. Now, getting stuff from zero to some sort of market penetration, I've had, oh gosh, a wide variety of experience with that as a whole. And I'm not sure what things are like in the realm of modern tech, because it has been like 20 years since I started building this show up.
[0:50:31] So of course, back in the day, you would go to conferences. There are tons of homeschooling conferences. So you'd go to conferences, you'd have a booth, you'd try to become a speaker, and you would try to abstract something from what it is that you're doing to be of value to the homeschooling community as a whole. But having a booth and chatting with people the way that we used to do it in the business world is you would ask for people's contact information. I did a lot of business to business sales. So I would offer a free, I don't know, like it was free. What did we do back then? We would give a free iPod. This is way back in the day. Free iPod, right? You just put your card in and that's how you gather cards. And then you just do follow up and you do your phone slogs and you send out your emails. you try to arrange for meetings to go and present and so on. So that's B2B, but you're a business to consumer. So there are, of course, tons of conferences. You might have to leg it a little bit to get out there. And there's some fees for setting it up, but it's sort of how to raise interest as you talk about the sort of ways to raise money to do it. And it's good that you're infusing labor into the AI stuff. Because of course, if you say, oh, I built this whole thing using AI, the natural investment response is to say, well, then just about anyone can do it.
[0:51:48] I could, too.
[0:51:49] Or people can just say, "teach me rhetoric," to AI, and AI will come up with a series of...
[0:51:55] Now, so a couple of questions that pop into my mind. How would you mark the students? Because you're going to give them some sort of certification of completion and so on. And I assume some of it, because it's rhetoric, it can't be multiple choice answers, which can be marked by a computer, but you're going to have to evaluate argument and flow and content and structure and grammar and so on, and AI can do grammar but how would you have the students coursework especially if they're doing free form, let's say they submit a video of here's how I would do this argument or they have a debate and you've got to mark the participants, how would that get get graded?
[0:52:33] Uh so it came up with a a rubric uh which I haven't looked at but it's something that it tells the parent what, what to look for. Uh you know, and maybe the kid, maybe it'll probably be like... I imagine the parent would video, you know, and and look back at, and you know and be able to you know so they don't have to absorb it all and just have it you know bouncing off of their you know what you know what they have no idea about anyway but, I guess.. what do they call it here it's uh...
[0:53:01] No, so the short answer is, would it be graded by people or AI?
[0:53:06] Uh yeah, and it would be graded by people. Uh as far as yeah the complex stuff, as far as like how people make arguments kind of a thing, uh I think would have to be. I think would have to be. And so you know I'm picturing uh, uh if there's you know if there's enough money that it's something like a team of tutors who sees the videos and grades them, ultimately. That's kind of the ultimate infrastructure I would see working, you know, some team of experts who, individuals, rather, who could watch a video, give the feedback, give an indication about the marks, and be open, I guess, maybe even open to actual tutoring also.
[0:53:50] And what is the headcount of user base that would make it, economically viable?
[0:53:59] Not many. Not many because software has a notoriously large margin, if I'm saying that right.
[0:54:09] It's scalable, yeah, for sure, because you get the one product and people can just keep feeding into it. And each additional user is almost no cost.
[0:54:15] Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's a few, but I mean, there's a million, is it a million? There's four million kids. There's four million homeschool kids right now. And a year and a half ago or whenever that analysis was done and the market is expected to grow to double in the next five years by 2031. That's the money spent. I'm not exactly sure if that's scaling but it's got to be somewhat maybe proportionate because the homeschool audience is growing faster than... it's bigger than it was before, I'm sorry, at the peak. It's bigger than it was at the peak of COVID when a lot of people started homeschooling. And then it kind of took a dive and now it's on its way back up. So anyways, with there being a million homeschool families, I mean, if I had 50,000 or 10,000, it would be, a lot of money. I haven't figured out how much of that would have to go out into, the grading of the rhetoric and some other stuff. But almost everything except for that segment is kind of controlled. It could be a five-man team or something at the most or something like that. And so it has the potential to be some money.
[0:55:33] And would you require the people who do the grading to have credentials?
[0:55:39] Uh, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I guess I would want them to be as skilled, and give as much value as possible.
[0:55:47] Yeah. They wouldn't necessarily have to be teachers, but they would have to be people with some skill, obviously some skill in the subject, right? You want a math, you want somebody who's at least got a math degree to, to do the math grading if it's more complex and so on. Although math grading can be done by AI a lot more easily than analyzing an argument. Although I don't know. I mean, it would be interesting to see how good AI is as it continues to develop at grading people and providing suggestions and tips and so on. Again, the more that can be automated, the better, but the more that can be automated, the tougher it is to monopolize.
[0:56:22] Now, the other question, of course, in America, from what I understand, there are homeschooling communities where, you know, some teacher will teach, no, sorry, some parent who's good at something will, will teach it and so on. And that's how they solve the problem of socializing, right? So, um, they will get together as you pointed earlier, the sort of the road trips or the, the field days and so on field trips. And so, and, and they get together for, for games and they have their proms and dances and so on. And so with the AI, the online stuff, the course curriculum, would you have physical meetups? Would you facilitate that kind of thing? Because that's what a lot of people are looking for.
[0:57:05] So, yeah, I mean, well, part of my app was this field trip idea because there's not a real good field trip, which is not in and of itself multifamily. But, I built this thing that would – it's got like 40 – is it 40? Sorry, 24,000 field trips, whatever. And AI did an analysis pass on if it's good for science or whatever. And then it's got the ability to say, I want to do this. I'm open to doing this with other families. And let me know when a certain kind of critical mass is reached and then somebody will have the opportunity to organize it. It's sort of like, it's a slightly different thing. And I'm kind of brand new to all this stuff, okay, like a month ago. But I understand that co-ops is, I think that's what you're talking about. And we do have a co-op, I don't know, registry basically. And it's going to hopefully have where people can tell it if there's openings and stuff like that. But uh I can I haven't thought anything about this but that's that's very smart you can you can have like one parent in a co-op who's who gets good or is good at grading rhetoric and, and is able to to do that in one pass, maybe like once a month or something like that, um to uh to move the ball forward like that yeah that would be uh yeah, that's smart, I like, yeah, I like that. That's good.
[0:58:23] In in the business world I don't know if this is still considered a thing back in my day, we do something called a SWOT analysis, which is SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So the strengths you've been talking about, the weaknesses would be relative to other homeschool curricula, other homeschool approaches. And there's just a wide variety of homeschool approaches. So your strengths would be, I think, stuff you've gone through. Weakness would have to be relative to other opportunities. Of course, you talk about the doubling of people and so on. Some of those people are going to be absorbed into existing homeschool groups. So one of the ways that homeschooling grows is, you know, your neighbor that you're friends with is homeschooling. And then you're like, their kids seem happy and productive. And then your kids are being bullied or they're too woke or too anti-white or anti-male or something like that. Or they're threatening your kids with, you know, if we just give them some adjusted meth, your boys will be very, very happy with this ADHD medication or something like that.
[0:59:26] And so something happens that vaults you out of regular school. And then, you know, you talk to your friend or your neighbor who homeschools and they say, oh, yeah, well, we're part of this group and so on. And then you kind of get absorbed into that, which would be so just because the market's growing doesn't mean it's growing in a direction that's going to focus on you. Because again, there's a lot of feed-in mechanisms or, or you just, you know, you Google, you know, homeschool groups in my neighborhood, and then you go and talk to them and see if there's a good fit and so on. But some of the homeschool groups, of course, have very specific requirements, which I'm not sure would be part of what you're doing, which is, you know, you may need to be of a foundational religious belief in sort of X, Y, or Z denomination and so on, because they want to keep that mindset among the kids and so on. One could say they don't want to expose them to opposing views, but that may be uncharitable. They want to keep a consistency of belief system within the group, so that may not fit for everyone.
[1:00:28] I do think that non-fundamentalist homeschooling is a big thing, is a big thing that's coming because there are a lot of people who are conservatives, but not fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. They are somewhat Christian or agnostic or even atheist. And the homeschooling opportunities, I think, for that is not big. And of course, you would want to cover the Christian stuff. But I think if you had an approach that would be welcoming to more secular, objective, non-religious people, I think that's going to be an underserved market. And it's one of these things, there aren't that many atheists who homeschool, which means there aren't going to be many atheists who homeschool because they can't find the kind of community that they want. And I think that their atheism is one of the biggest growing belief systems.
[1:01:22] And there is a lot of dissatisfaction among atheists at the quality of education. Not all atheists are hyper leftist libtards, but I think that would be a very interesting, module to build and would be, there's no reason why I couldn't coexist with a religious module as well. But I think that kind of stuff is an opportunity. So yeah, the strengths you have, the weaknesses you have would be relative to other flows of getting people into homeschooling. The opportunities. Certainly, there's a lot of people coming in and some of those people are coming in... of course, homeschooling in America in particular grew because of increasing secular humanism in schools and people wanted to be able to maintain their religious beliefs with their kids. But now the socializing aspect of schools has diminished considerably, particularly with multiculturalism, right? Because of course, if half the kids mostly speak Spanish and half the kids are from wildly different cultures that you don't really know how your kids are going to socialize with, then the sort of socializing aspect of school becomes a little bit closer to...
[1:02:35] I mean, imagine an ad: do you really need to develop your social skills? Have you considered prison? You'll be locked in with people and you'll have a whole lot of interactions with them. There will be no escape and most of them won't be super violent, right? So that would not be a big, that could be kind of a funny ad, but that's what, it's a whole lot different. And people, you know, like your mom or your wife's mom, they're looking at school like back in the day, like back in the sixties, like, you know, 95% white and everyone's comes from the same belief system. And therefore, socializing is a plus, but it's a whole lot different now.
[1:03:09] So I think that the socializing argument is less positive. I think bullying is up, particularly the cyberbullying stuff. And of course, the peer pressure stuff, because there's a bunch of real feral kids out in schools these days who are, I mean, it's not just the people who call in to my show, but a lot of kids who are like, you know, my body count at 16 is five. And, you know, I started doing drugs and drinking at 14 or 15, and they're really trying to spread this. It's like the bad guys don't just, it's a virus, like it spreads. And so there's a lot of that stuff that's going on. Gang activity is fairly big and fairly difficult in the world of school these days. And of course, the content has just become, I mean, I was so lucky when I was a kid because it was all just boring. Like boring is way better than toxic and invasive and trying to set you against your soul, your skin, your gender, you know, like at least all I was, was bored. I wasn't constantly told I was an evil guy for breathing.
[1:04:10] So I think that there is a lot of refugees coming out of government schools, not for the reasons that American homeschooling was originally founded, which, I mean, there's, there's sort of two elements of homeschooling. One is, uh, the foundationalist, uh, foundationalist Christianity. And the other is just the hippies, right? Just the counterculture. Don't let the man tell you what to do. And you can study at your own pace and do whatever you want. You know, the, the bong indifference and, and anti-parenting, uh, unparenting stuff that's been going on, which I think is actually really bad and fairly toxic. Kids need involvement. They can't learn on their own any more than you and I can invent all the technology required to have this conversation.
[1:04:52] So I think the opportunities are... one of the things that I would do as far as marketing goes is I would dig up how dangerous, toxic, and negative schools are these days and say, my argument would be, okay, if your kid had a friend who was saying this, if your kid had a friend who was doing this, if your kid had a friend who hated him for his skin color or hated him for being male. If your kid had a friend who said you can only be my friend if you do these drugs, Well, that friend is your school, right? And because, you know, the schools are saying, hey, if you want your intelligent kid to sit like a turnip for six hours a day, he's going to have to take these psychotropic drugs.
[1:05:36] I mean, that's really, really terrible and dangerous stuff. Uh, and so, or, you know, if, if you're, you would get the average stats of like a drug use and promiscuity and alcohol use and, and so on among kids, uh, at the age of say 15 or 16, and you know, let's say it's 20%, 30%, 40%, like, would you let your kid be part of a peer group where a third of the kids were doing drugs and sleeping around? It's like, that's your classroom. That's where you're sending your kid. Right. Right. So to sort of personalize it and all of that, and then look at the trends for cyberbullying, for other kinds of bullying and say, you know, would you you're not sending your kid to the school you went to. That's another thing I would say to parents, like this is how the school looked when you went. This is how the school looks now. Do not judge. You know, it's like saying it's like going to the I would say, would you would you go to the cell phone store and say, I need a rotary dial phone? No, because they'd say, well, you don't need... Actually, you're old enough to know. No, no, you're not. Probably not even old enough to... like the rotary dial, right? Just barely, right?
[1:06:40] Yeah, I remember 'em. I remember 'em, yeah.
[1:06:41] Right, right. You know, so... you don't go to a car dealership and ask for a Model T, right? So helping parents to understand that they cannot judge what their kids are experiencing by what they experienced. There's been way too much of a change. And you can talk about the demographics, the language issues, the different belief systems, the cyberbullying, the promiscuity is way up, the drug use. I think vaping and all of that has increased in some areas.
[1:07:05] So, helping kids... so the first thing with selling a solution is helping people understand that they have a problem. And I don't think if parents say, well, you know, my school wasn't that bad. Public school is fine and it's free and blah, blah, blah. It's like, it's not free when you have to pay for rehab. It's not free when you have to pay for a psychologist to rescue your kids from toxic ideology. It's not free if your kid decides he wants to do something crazy medically, right? So I would say that part of the marketing, fear is a big motivator and fear is not something you want to misuse. Like fear is not, you know, like, are you afraid of missing out on abs? You need to drink this beer, right? So you don't want to misuse this kind of stuff, but there are legitimate concerns that parents should have, particularly as people get older as parents, like the age of parents that used to be early, mid-20s, now it's late 20s, early 30s.
[1:07:57] And that means that they're further removed from the changes in education since they were little and so on. And the changes in education are pretty wild because when I was a kid, I was being taught by people who'd been taught by people in their 30s. So it was very sort of objective, again, kind of boring, but not toxic. But now, as you get this radicalization that has occurred in teachers, colleges, and universities, now your kids are being taught by those who radicalized, you know, 40, 50 years ago. And it's a whole different education system. And you can get samples of the curriculum and say, you know, if... if your kid had a friend who was telling them this stuff, would you encourage that friendship?
[1:08:44] You know, and of course, you know, so if you personalize it and help people to educate people as to how things have changed and the dangers, and really the kids in schools these days, particularly white males, are facing existential, threats to identity and self-esteem because it is absolutely constant. Well, you don't get any points for privilege because you're a white male, but as a white female, you get a few more points. It's just this crazy Marxist hierarchy of victimization. And the purpose of programming people with victimization is to make them feel justified in violence and aggression and abuse, right? Because if you're a victim, you're a cornered rat, you fight back, right? So, constantly telling people they're victimized is ginning them up for, violence, which is now coming and is only going to escalate, unfortunately.
[1:09:34] So, helping parents understand how much things have changed and personalizing it. Like, if you had a friend who was telling your son this, this, and this, would you consider that friend toxic? Well, that's your kid's teacher. And here's your solution. You know, so you tell people of the dangers, right? And then you say, you know, here's a guy dying of smoking, you know, talking out of the hole in his throat. Here's a guy dying of smoking. Then, you know, the angels come down and here's your smoking cessation program with a 90% effectiveness rate. You can avoid this fate. So I think telling people the genuine concerns that they should have about their children and then, you know, here's the solution. And, you know, are you concerned that you're not part of this particular fundamentalist group and therefore you're not welcome in homeschooling? Ah, you know, here's our Greco-Roman enlightenment-based, rationality-based, maybe a deist-based or non-focused on particular religious issues, we teach your kids how to think, not just have faith or something like that. So while we also welcome people with faith. So this is just off the top of my head. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:10:45] No, no. I mean, I think that, There's a lot of people that we come across in our neighborhood. My wife, we're meeting people as she goes for walks, and we're meeting a lot of people that have, they're Mormons, and they've got very good arguments. They make, you know, they're decent anyway, but they make arguments, and I think that giving, this just shows me that people that have religion, they want to be able to make arguments, And, you know, there's no reason to think that people that can think and make arguments are going to be more one way or the other. And I mean.
[1:11:23] The Christians are a little bit on the defensive as well because of the sort of onset of secularism. So they have certainly honed and refined their arguments, which may have been left fallow when they were more dominant. But sorry, go ahead.
[1:11:35] Oh yeah but you know I mean I it was interesting that you said that the the fundamentalist or that the uh kind of the, the on... the ons... the the biggest maybe segment of the homeschooling thing has kind of a religious base basis. Because I never even I never even thought of that. Like I I first I guess maybe started thinking about homeschooling uh... there was two things. One, I was, I was in Los Angeles and I was poor, so I was taking the bus. And these kids would be at the bus stop going home from high school and with, purple hair and nose rings and they were just standing around. They looked like, I didn't want to get off the bus right there, you know what I mean? Just outside these high schools. And I said, I said, if I'm going to raise a family, I'm going to leave Los Angeles. And it also kind of like, you know, made me start thinking. And then, you know, then the COVID thing where all these parents were like, like you said, they're so removed from what the kids are learning. And... and then they had a front row seat, if they wanted it. And a lot of them did. And they started saying, I've got to take charge of my kids education because this I can't trust. I mean, this is this is the little bit that I'm seeing. And it's kind of like when I'm writing a program and it gives me a sample and I'm like, if this is what you're writing, like you need to fix this and this. And then, and then, uh, you know, this is not...
[1:12:56] Schools are basically a cult these days. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a vicious cult. Uh, and so, sorry, but that's what parents don't seem to understand as much as they should.
[1:13:04] Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a great opportunity to, you gotta figure out, I don't know, man. The homeschooling crowd is very cool in that these are parents who are not just watching their kids until they don't have to or they had kids because they felt like they had to. You know, they got more agency and they want better outcomes. And it's a great, you know, it's a lot of work, obviously, you know, to educate your kid. But it was interesting to me to learn, you know, like 10 days ago about how that was how the Romans did it. It was the mom in the home until the kid was, I don't know, I figured it was like 12 or 13, but, you know, the first like five years of the education, something like that, if I remember right. But it was basically homeschool. Like, Roman was like basically home. I'm like, this is amazing. Like, what a cool crossover. But, you know, you can't depend on anybody to have your kid's best interest as much as a parent does.
[1:14:03] Well, so if I were in your shoes, I would take a shift from content creation to marketing creation, because, if you can get a short, powerful video talking about the dangers of the modern curriculum and here's the lines, here's the charts, here's the bullying, here's the promiscuity. And then, you know, if you want your kids to be socialized, we all want our kids to be socialized, but not in a crime gang, right? But we don't want our kids to be socialized by dropping them off at the homeless encampment and the drug addicts den. And we want our kids to be socialized by good people. And unfortunately, there's just fewer and fewer good people in school. So we need to start looking for alternatives. Like that ship is going down and you need a lifeboat. Ah, here come the angels.
[1:14:46] So I would focus on 30 to 60 seconds of school ain't what it used to be. And here's how it's changed and here's the danger your kids are in and they're not learning they're being programmed they're being indoctrinated and they're in danger. Like they're in existential danger of thinking that they're terrible people because of ideology and you gotta do something to help them and you know our solution is you know so if you uh, even even even if all you do is don't even post your solution but just have a short video that doesn't like you just you need to bring people, to your mind space as a whole. And so even if you just did a video that was totally shareable, that didn't mention anything about your solutions, but came from your channel, then if it gets shared and debated, and if it goes viral and so on, then people come to your channel and then you have your other videos.
[1:15:43] But talking about the fundamental driver as to what it is that you're doing, I think is that good kids are in real danger. And there is an agenda to harm your children, to break your children, to turn your children, not just against themselves, but their parents, their history, their culture, their country, everything. It's really dangerous. You've got to know who you're handing your kids over to. And, you know, you don't hand your kids over to Jeffrey Dahmer for cooking classes. Okay, maybe that's a bit of a strong analogy, but if you just talk about how school has changed and the level of programming propaganda agendas and so on, and that the old argument that you send your kids for socialization is no longer valid. You send your school for, you know, reading, writing, arithmetic, and socialization. Well, they're not getting reading, writing, arithmetic. They're getting infinity genders in communism, and they're not getting socializing. They're being bullied by teachers, and any kid who stands against the agenda is going to be ostracized, attacked, and bullied, and you're throwing your children to the wolves. And so if you do a video like that—
[1:16:55] So violent. Random violence.
[1:16:56] Yeah, yeah. So if you do a video like that, which with your skills, I'm sure you could rip off fairly quickly, then I think that you're generating understanding of a problem, because again, you can't sell diet pills to a skinny guy, right? And you can't sell ice to the Eskimos. So if people don't even know that they have a problem, there isn't any demand for a solution. And the solution for homeschooling has been school is too secular. We need our kids to stay super Christian. And again, I have no particular issue with that, but that's the fact. But if you want to get a market, you have to create a market. Otherwise you're just trying to hack away at getting kids from already pre-existing groups with homeschooling groups that have been around and sorted out and settled for decades. It's really tough.
[1:17:47] So I didn't go and say I didn't go and say well I want people who would normally take, philosophy in university to come and listen to my show, that wasn't... I had to create an audience of people who didn't even know that philosophy was valuable or helpful who didn't even have a clue that philosophy could help them in their daily lives and could help them choose the right partner to get married to, help them raise their kids, help them, make more money if that's what they want to do, or at least succeed in their career. It could help them with the quality of their relationships. Philosophy has never been sold in that way before because I don't think it's ever been aimed at those kinds of particular problems or abstract esoteric problems and so on. Do we live in a simulation? I mean, that's all well and good, but I do have to choose who I'm going to marry. And that simulation argument really doesn't help me that much. So I created an audience by identifying that the reason people's lives were failing was they were not thinking clearly and didn't have a good grounding in ethics.
[1:18:49] And I say this of my own life as well. I had to figure out my own life this way. So I created an audience of people who didn't even know they needed philosophy by saying that the issues in your life stem from a lack of wisdom, as the issues in my life stemmed from a lack of wisdom and so on. And so the best way to get an audience is to make one. Like nobody knew they needed an iPad until there was an iPad and then everybody needs an iPad. And so I would say that if I were in your shoes, I would work as hard as I could, to shake people out of their hypnosis about government schools to help parents, particularly older parents, understand it ain't like it used to be. It is not at all like it used to be. Like that neighborhood you grew up in that's now surrounded by crack dens. You don't want your kids to live in that neighborhood. You just haven't noticed how much it's changed.
[1:19:42] So, make a video to help parents understand just how toxic government education has become and how it's neither serving reading, writing, arithmetic, nor socialization. And don't even provide a solution because then it just sounds like you're making a problem to sell a solution. Like if you talk about rising obesity and then say, I have this drug, you know, then people have skepticism because they get the agenda, but just putting out, here's why your kids need to be homeschooled, that isn't going to touch the Christians as much because the Christians already understand that. And of course, the Mormons, a lot of whom are very nice people, of course, the Mormons are, they already understand that the Pentecostals, the Baptists, the Lutherans, they all understand that.
[1:20:30] So I think you want to hit the parents who don't understand how bad school has become and yet may have some doubts or may even have cannot be allowed into homeschooling groups that are fundamental Christianity. I think that, because it sounds like that's the curriculum you're working on, and I would work to create that audience rather than try and capture an audience that's already flowing fairly consistently towards long-established Christian homeschooling groups.
[1:20:57] No, yeah, that's a good point, because there's turnover, and people pick different curriculums. The Facebook groups are just flooded, but people are saying, hey, we tried this, this, and this, and I need something new for my fourth grader or whatever. And yeah, you're finding an argument to be made to those people, you're gonna get this and that, but...
[1:21:18] And I'm sorry, last thing I'll say, and I don't wanna overburden you with options and we'll sort of wrap this up in a sec, but what I would say as well is that, one thing from what I've talked about over the years with people in homeschooling groups in America, is that homeschooling groups are kinda girly. In that it's the moms running things. And, you know, we love the moms and it's great, but, you know... masculinity is not in excess supply because the men are usually out there, particularly in Christian families, the men are doing the traditional breadwinner roles and the women are running stuff.
[1:21:56] And that comes with some very cool stuff and some very positive stuff, but it also comes with some negatives, in particular, for the boy... for the boy students. And homeschooling for boys is a big challenge because it is a hyper-female environment for most homeschooling. If you have more of a masculine approach to homeschooling, which if you're going to take the Roman curriculum, that's it. I would also point that out as well, that in the homeschooling groups that I, again, tangentially know about, this is one of the complaints that people I know in those homeschooling have is like, it's just so female.
[1:22:34] And again, we love the females. I wouldn't want it to be all male, but for the boys, it is not, boys learn from men and girls learn from women in general. There's some crossover and so on. And having a homeschool group that's focused on, males and masculinity is another big differentiator that is kind of tough because the homeschooling groups, by being so relentlessly female-led, female-driven, and female-focused, it doesn't click with the boys nearly as much. And then the boys end up a little bit more feminized, which makes it tougher for them to be the leaders of their households, if that's what Christianity indicates. So it's a short-term solution that creates a long-term problem, as so many of these things are. So I'd also focus on that. So sorry, I want to give you the last...
[1:23:19] And just to dovetail, and that's still another problem with the public schools. Is that it's going more and more female teachers, and so that's kind of a feminine system too. But the last thing I was going to point out or whatever was that, in addition to all the problems that which get worse every year in the public schools, my wife pointed out that, something something that parents can reflect on you know and something that's been consistent is, they never really ask you, she was pointing out, like, they never really ask you to make, well to make an argument. Like, to make it, to convince people of anything. It's always like give a presentation on, you know, butterflies or something. That's, you know, like, you have to think of 10 minutes worth of stuff and nobody really cares and you're not getting good feedback or whatever. It's never, convince people of something that, you know, maybe half the class doesn't agree with, you know, and that's...
[1:24:05] But because it's female!
[1:24:07] Yeah.
[1:24:07] Because female is about consensus and information sharing, not, you know, men butt heads and try to come up with the best solution. So having the rhetoric, the debate, the argumentation style, boys like that stuff, don't you? I mean, I spent half my teenage years arguing with my male friends about everything under the sun and it was great.
[1:24:26] And so yeah having that focus on conflict and how to, fight with words and still remain positive with people I think is something that you focus on the mail focus on uh maybe a bit more secular stuff and uh I and then help people understand how toxic public school is I think you're gonna uh, you know build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door and I think that's uh the best you can do. Now, did you want to mention... is there a website? Do you want to mention how people can find what it is that you're doing?
[1:24:56] Yeah yeah yeah please well it's rome romeschool, and don't go to romeschool.com because uh uh somebody took that over uh 15 years ago and they've got a beef with an australian mining company and it auto downloads a video and so, you don't want you want to stay away from romeschool.com we're working on that as a branding issue. But romeschool.app is uh is the, uh is the website for for our Romeschool. And uh, and yeah, the last thing I'll say is, if we get a foothold and this becomes a thing, you know, I think that you'll be able to see people that have gone through this program like in the future. In fact, one of my ads or whatever that I'm looking forward to maybe making is something like, you know, a couple of moms sitting there watching a politician giving a speech, you know, and one mom says to the other like, was he homeschooled? Like, I heard he was homeschooled. And then the other one says like, Romeschooled. You know what I mean? It was like, it's like, like, that's a, it's a, oh, you know, and then she goes home and enrolls her kids in the Romeschool.
[1:25:55] He's the one politician in a toga with a laurel wreath.
[1:25:59] Oh, that makes sense.
[1:25:59] There you go.
[1:26:00] Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, Romeschool, Romeschool.app and we're going to be up and running here... ASAP, we're trying to get this kicked off before the beginning of the next school year because that's, you know, now's when people are making their decision for the next month or so when people are making their decision. So if this gets out there in the next, who knows when, then check it out. It'll be ready to go probably by the mid late July. We'll see, at least in some form, and then it'll have its refinements. We're going to have a half-off deal for the people that sign up right away. Half-off for life, basically, to the early adopters who are willing to put up with our bumps for the next year, and then it should be golden after that, and you'll have your half-off for the rest of your life. So check that out. Thanks. I can't believe I had a real discussion with Stefan Molyneux. How fun.
[1:26:48] I really appreciate that. That's romeschool.app and keep me posted. I'd love to see the videos that you come up with next and we'll stay in touch.
[1:26:57] Thanks.
[1:26:57] All the best. Bye-bye.
[1:26:58] All right. Bye-bye.
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