Sapientia S1E1 Jeremy Hoemsen - Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology... How the Times Have Changed

The host of the show Sapientia, Trance Blackmon, welcomes his first guest, Jeremy Holmeson. They discuss various topics including their long friendship, changes in the education system, and controversial issues of today. They also mention the decline of school trips and the shift towards homeschooling. They touch on the drag queen story time phenomenon and express concern about the sexualization of toddlers. You're listening to Sapientia, a show about seeking truth and finding wisdom. I'm your host, Trance Blackmon. Thank you for joining me on this journey of discovery. Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of Sapientia. I am your host, Trance Blackmon. I'm grateful to have you here today and I hope you find some value in this discussion. Today I'm joined by my good friend, whom I've known for most of my life, Jeremy Holmeson. He lives on Vancouver Island in Canada, teaches Kung Fu. He and his wife, Tanya, have built a beautiful home together, grow a lot of their own food and keep themselves quite busy improving upon their self-reliance in the rural area of East Sook on the south end of the island. Jeremy touched on a lot of topics today and I'll have to have him back again soon to talk more about the specifics of life at the homestead, his active support of veterans and other things we didn't have time for today. We discussed the beginnings of our friendship, how life has changed throughout the decades and went into some of the perhaps controversial issues of our time, through the lenses of philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics and more. Thanks for stopping by. Let's get to it. Hello Jeremy, welcome and thank you for being my first guest. We've known each other forever, since 86 maybe, holy cow, maybe that's dating us. Since 1984. Yeah. Mr. Hawley's class. I think we were 10-ish. Mr. Hawley's class in Casorso Elementary. Right. Wow. Yeah, when you first moved there in whatever year that was, probably 86, because I think you... I think I remember Expo. Yeah, we went to Expo. Yes, that's right. It was a class trip. Yeah. Back in the day when schools provided extracurricular activity for super cheap for kids to give them something productive and useful to do, but now instead of going on a class trip, you can go to downtown Victoria and carry as many types of illegal drugs as you like because they're not illegal anymore and you can go smoke them in an alleyway in the dirt and the piss and the shit at 18 years old and say, oh yeah, no, it's totally legal now, so it's all good. Yeah. Yeah, and they provide. Yeah. At least they consider it that way. Yeah. If you need to get a box, they'll arrange it for you. I think that if you're downtown anywhere now, even Kelowna or some of the bigger towns, some of the smaller towns, unfortunately, you're going to see a lot of changes in the last 20 years and maybe even more so in the last 10 years, but definitely it started slipping. If you think about cost, I remember it cost like $85 for us to go for a week from Kelowna, a whole group of kids on a plane and a bus and we had a place to stay and we got to Expo 86, but you know, like we did these trips, there was a thing, it was like, and it cost almost nothing. We did minor fundraising, we fundraised, like we sold some fruit leather or some chocolate or something and then you just pack a bag and you get dropped off at the school, they bus you to the airport or take the, I'm pretty sure we flew down that time and then it includes admission to the frigging Expo 86, like unbelievable. It's definitely a different priority for the money, I think, because the money is still going to the schools, right? We still have a major portion of our property taxes every year goes directly to the schools and I've never had kids and I'm fine with that as long as our kids are getting educated, but if all that money is just going to bureaucracy and the latest technology of computers, you know, it's like, what do you really need the latest million dollar computer upgrade for when you could actually be just taking the kids out into the forest that the school backs on to and do some basic hiking and animal identification and stuff like this or take them on a bus to the museum and go check out the museum, you know? Yeah, well like a lot of the homeschooler groups tend to do, I think, and I think that's why there's such a big shift, especially over the last three years, there's this, I think, maybe not a mass exodus from public schooling, but certainly considerably less respect for the institution that it is and with all the ideological stuff coming into it, it's getting awfully convoluted for children being exposed to it. And I hate to be the old guy, like back in my day, you know, but... You're not that old. But at the same time, it's like, you know, you started family education, I believe they called it, when you were in high school, right, when you were 13 years old, and then started talking about, you know, drugs and sex and these sorts of things. And I remember my parents, oh, my mom was, I think she was okay with it up to a point, but my dad was like, what does a school need to be teaching this stuff for, you know? Every time we'd watch a movie in Mr. Bashawck's German class, you know, it's like, oh, you kids are just watching movies at school all day, blah, blah, blah, right? Yeah. It's like, yeah, well, friggin' some of us aced our tests and we're learning German, so I think we're... Yeah, and he gave us a reward kind of thing. He gave him a break, so... Yeah. Oh, he was an interesting character, that guy, well, it's a shame he passed so young, but... Yeah, I was telling a story about him the other day. Oh, yeah? How he got super mad about something, as he would do once in a while, and... Yeah, if you disrespected him... If you disrespected him, that's all it was, right? He would give you everything. He would be, like, the shirt off his back, basically, probably literally, and if you got disrespected, he would just, he would tolerate it up to a certain point, and then that was it. And he stormed out, all red-faced, stormed out, and we're like, man, how long is he going to be gone for? So some of us started throwing pencils into the ceiling, you know? As, you know, I may have done some things like that, the occasional spitball thing or fireworks in the hallways, but, hypothetically, but yeah, he came back way quicker than we thought, and the pencils were still in the ceiling above him. Yeah. He came in, yelled about something, you know, disrespectful, blah, blah, blah, and then stormed out again, and then a couple pencils fell right where he was standing. Oh, shit, yeah. Wow, I don't remember that. That's amazing. Yeah, well, I remember because I was one of the people throwing the pencils in the ceiling. Yeah, I think I would have lost my shit if I tried to do something like that, but... I was talking about the favorite movies of the time, too. Oh, right. And, you know, you look back at some of those movies, and it's like, man, like, I don't know, like, in some way, they just wouldn't be allowed now. They wouldn't be allowed to make them, but then they make such worse movies now, right? So it's like, you have a movie like Red Dawn, right? Yeah. Yeah, they just remade that several years ago. Yeah, they were kids, right? They were kids at the time, but, you know, Russians invading America, some small town in the U.S. Yeah. What was it called? Baron Munchausen? Yeah. Another good one? Yeah, that was a good one. And then, still a classic that nobody's remade, which is good. Yeah. First, Bueller's Day Off. Yeah. We've probably seen it a thousand times. Oh, yeah. All Quiet on Western Front. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. Forgot about that one. It's been recently redone again. Yeah. So, lots of good movies that, yeah, I don't know. Kids could definitely, I don't know, learn something or get something out of them today. Yeah, well, I mean, it's different because we could fail a class or a grade, and I don't think you can do that anymore. No? Regardless. Just, if you show up most of the time, you pass. Yeah. So, I mean, the standards, of course, have changed, but the politics have changed. And the teachers now, of course, are our age, I mean, and younger, obviously, considerably. Yeah. So, it's our generation and the generation past, or after that, that is now teaching. And, I mean, you go through that system, you live in that system, and then you become a teacher in that system. How can you be anything but that system? And the, I don't want to say degeneracy, but I don't know what other word I can think of. It's a pretty good word. Yeah, well, I mean, with all these, you know, drag time, story time, and all this stuff that's going on, it's very strange. It is very strange. And if I hadn't seen a couple articles pop up, and actually looked into it myself, I would have never even, like, I would have never known, like, just some of the, a couple chat groups I'm part of that came up at some point. It's like, what? No, that can't really be happening. Actually, you know what I saw? Yeah. I saw that first time, I saw it on Tim Pool. And I had never heard of a Tim Pool fan. And I'm still not a huge fan, but whatever. He had some interesting discussions. I heard the name, I'm not familiar. He just had a decent discussion with Russell Brandt on his show. Okay. Who I was actually following. And then I saw this Tim Pool guy, I'm like, who the hell is this? But yeah, American guy. But interesting discussions that cover all political sides, right? Right. And he said a story of something about, he was telling a Democratic friend of his, an ardent Democrat buddy of his, about this drag queen story time thing. And how these little kids were coming in to these guys dressed up as women. And they were dancing around. And his friend had never even heard of such a thing. And didn't even know what to make of it. I was like, well, no, that can't be real. And so I was like, no, it can't be real. And so I looked into it, oh no, it happens all the time. It's been happening in Canada, it's been happening in Vancouver. Yeah, it's really just suddenly a wave across North America, or probably beyond. Most westernized sort of nations, I guess there seems to be this agenda. I don't know what you'd call it. I mean, suddenly they're trying to normalize the sexualization of toddlers. And so this is an interesting thing that happened in Victoria during Gay Pride last year, I believe. Yeah, it was last year. They were going to have this family-friendly, drag family-friendly event. And some upset citizen decided that they were going to send a threatening letter saying basically that someone was going to get hurt or killed if this event went on. And he said, nothing against the Gay Pride parade, all that stuff, you want to do that, the gay dog walk, all that. But if you get my kids involved in this stuff, watch out. And instead of taking the time to educate the public and say, well, you know what, this is what it's about. It's not about sexualizing children, it's not about this or that. This is what we're actually trying to do here. Instead of saying something like that, they went on the complete offensive, friggin' derogatory, whatever insult they could hurl at people like him, these misogynist, transphobe people, and just throwing labels at this person. Now, do I think people should be threatening anyone? No. But they wasted a perfect opportunity to actually educate people a little bit who might be interested or curious. I believe that's the whole point of being out there, doing the parade, is to help educate the general public, and hey, we're people too, and we want to be equal, whatever the scenario is. I'm not going to speak on behalf of any gay or trans or anyone else. But they missed the perfect opportunity. Instead they went straight to insulting this person. Because you brought up sexualizing children, and I'm still not certain why they haven't come out and clarified why it isn't sexualizing children, or exposing children to a sex-related thing. Well, it seems a common psychological sort of inversion that's employed today quite a bit, especially in the media and entertainment, where they're not going to debate anything. They'll just default to ad hominem and worse. Because I'm linking in the whole thing with the puberty blocking, all the transgender thing. That's part of this same issue, because you're doing cross-dressing or drag or everything. It's blending and blurring the normalcy, I guess, of traditional sexual expressions. And now you're adding a whole spectrum of expression, and you can be whatever you want to be, just because you were born in this body or that. And you're right, they're not taking the opportunity to address it as any adult would in a normal conversation, to address concerns of parents and everyone that's there. They're just going full in, either you accept us, or you're a bigot, racist, or whatever else you want to call it. There's no in-between. In only the last five, maybe to ten years, it seems to be that it's just completely black or white. And I probably can't even say black or white. It's either, yes, you're for us, or you are a colonialist or whatever it is, right? And people like you, it's such a ridiculous argument, because that's not where he was coming from at all. Because the media and everything is so hypersensitized and sensationalized. Even the mayor got involved in that and dressed up. What's her name? She's not the mayor anymore. Lisa Helps. The one in Calgary has been doing that too, right? Trying to make it illegal to protest this Dragtime Story Hour at the libraries and such. But nobody asked for it. They're just suddenly shoving it down your throat and you don't have any right to complain about it. What's wrong with you? How dare you? Arresting people for protesting these types of events. And Lisa Helps, the mayor here, she doubled down on the insults. That's all she did. She got up on a podium, dressed up like a man, which I don't quite understand, because whatever, she's trying to make some political point, I guess. Isn't that kind of like a cultural appropriation? She's not trans. Why are you dressing like a trans? Like, what the fuck? She goes up on a podium with all the news, all the local news up there, and she just doubles down on the insults of people that don't accept this Drag Queen Storytime thing. So one of my thoughts that I've had recently is that because of the sexualization thing, is if an adult decides they feel like a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice versa, I've met people on both sides of that, going one way or the other. Do what you want to do, in my opinion. Whatever. If that's what you want to do, great. Go for it. If that makes you feel better, if there's a way to do this somewhat safely for yourself, if it's not perpetuating potentially a mental illness. I'm not a psychologist. I don't know how these things have evolved over time. I remember from abnormal psychology that was a category. I forget exactly what it was, but something about dysphoria, maybe. I don't know. Yeah, there is a dysphoria. It is a genuine thing, I think. I'm not 100% sure. But it's not 98% of children suffering from it. Exactly. So when they look at it and you go, well, who is actually the people dressing up to do the Storytime thing? Because they're saying, if you don't agree with this, you're transphobic. Well, what kind of trans are you talking about? Are you talking about a transsexual adult who is in the process or has already transitioned to the other gender, how they feel? Or are you talking about a man who dresses up as a woman and hasn't had any surgery, any hormonal therapy, has no real interest in being a woman other than dressing up like a woman? Well, that seems like a very different category to me. That seems like a sexual thing that would be alongside a drag show or a burlesque thing, maybe, where you're actually doing it for some sort of sexual-related thing. Yeah, and generally, adults are only invited kind of thing, right? Yes, of course. Whether it's burlesque, you're not going to have burlesque dancers come into the library and do their Storytime. You're not going to have naked women, topless women coming into the library. Why aren't they allowed? You bigot, sexist, misogynist. And honestly, you would get way more attendance at the library if you did these things, right? I guess, yeah. But the thing is, it seems to... Well, it favors the men being women. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, but where are the women represented in this? They seem to be more and more misrepresented, as usual, sexually and otherwise, you know? You have men coming in just as women to read stories to kids. Why not grandmothers come in and to read stories and do, like, is that too cheesy or corny? Why does it have to be such an extreme? To me, I guess I don't appreciate or understand that expression. I don't do it. I've never had interest, so I can't understand it, obviously, fairly. So, I mean, it's difficult to simply judge it from my perspective. But the fact that they have to just be so in your face and aggressive with it, to me, that's what it seems like. It's just shoving down the throats of the libraries, the educational institutions, all the way up to the highest forms of the academy, right? Yeah. So why is this suddenly such an important thing that has to be everywhere all at once? In your face. Accept it or you're wrong. You're broken and you're backwards. Yeah. So, I'm not sure. How do the values suddenly change so much? Yeah. Or why do they have to change so much? Well, I think you may have touched on a point there earlier on about some sort of agenda. It's, you know, I hate to simplify things in a sense. But sometimes, what is it, inference to the best explanation, right? If the explanation or the theory explains something decently accurately, you don't necessarily need to go looking for another theory. So, it's a pretty good explanation. It seems like the only real good explanation right now is that it is some sort of agenda. And not necessarily a gay, pride, trans, whatever agenda. It seems like someone else is using that as basically a weapon, an in-your-face weapon to just create more, you know, more division, more people fighting each other instead of looking at the real problems. You know, is it a religious thing? Is it a skin color thing? Is it a sex or gender thing? Yeah, whatever, you're an adult, do your thing. But the fact that it is so, so much, like you say, everywhere all the time, almost aggressive. What is a better explanation? Like, than someone's agenda. And I don't know whose it is for sure, but there's also some good theories on who that might be. Yeah, going back quite a few decades already. Well, I've read some of the, you know, when people share the headlines or whatever it might be on social media, you know, I try to, before I share it or make a comment or believe one way or the other, I try to, you know, read through some of the comments that people are leaving on these threads. Yeah. Just to see what, okay, I'm seeing it this way. Am I weird? Am I completely off base if I see it? You know, and then you'll read the first five, six comments and they'll have, you know, hundreds of thousands of likes, whatever that means. If they're real legitimate people, not bots doing it, you know, it's hard to even know. But the LGB community don't want it, they don't support it, they're not behind it and they're struggling with it, I think. I think it makes it, puts them in an awkward position because they struggled for decades and generations, really, to get acceptance and not to go to jail to have gay lovers, lesbian lovers, and just to live a normal life that way. Yeah. And in the moment, the moment they actually voice their opinions, suddenly groups like Anti-Hate Canada and all these other, like, extreme leftist government-funded agencies are calling them names. And it's like, hold on, hold on, these are actually real gay lesbian people who are against what you're doing to children. So, they don't have a say anymore, either? Are they not quite gay enough or not quite leftist enough? Like, what are the parameters that you require for people to be genuine or to have valid opinions? Right? I'd like to know what the criteria actually is. I think I have an idea. I don't want to get too much into it, but, you know, if you look at people's profiles and just be like, oh, OK, I see you've got that flag, that flag, you know, you're against this group and this group, yeah, OK, you're probably allowed to voice your opinion. And it isn't even a race thing anymore, you know, where it could have been a Black Lives Matter sort of thing, or even a gay or lesbian thing. It's way past that. You have to meet some special criteria of the extreme insanity to actually have a valid opinion or voice your opinion. It's like, really? And if you would have asked me this five years ago, I probably wouldn't have agreed with that statement at all. It's just the more this goes on, the more in your face it is. It's like, what do you expect is going to happen? And this is where I saw it a few years ago. When you push something so hard from such an extreme ideological perspective, or just in physics, what happens? There's an equal and opposite reaction. So instead of sticking kind of middle of the road, you know, at the risk of pigeonholing everyone, or pigeonholing probably has some bad connotation to it, so let's not say that. Instead of categorizing people in a certain way as good Canadians. But, you know, what's wrong with just being a decent middle of the road person, where you actually just try not to be too much of an asshole throughout your day? What happened to that? So now we're stuck with this extreme leftist sort of idea of whatever they have, this self-annihilating philosophy that isn't a real philosophy, and what do you think is going to happen? Before they implode and try and take everyone with them, you're going to have probably a somewhat extreme right reaction to that. And I don't know what the percentages are, I've seen various models of it, but it's probably leaving 60-70% of the population still just going about their business, going, what's going on? Why are people so mad? What are you talking about? But those extreme right and left, man, it's going to be bad. It's going to be really bad. We're seeing it all over, especially in the US. I think people who are paying attention see it in Canada. If you could turn off the friggin' state-funded media for five minutes and actually just think for yourself and have a decent discussion with someone without losing your mind. That is the challenge these days, to have a reasonable discussion or, heaven forbid, a debate, to try and iron out what reasonable minds can make of all this, but they don't seem to want that, whoever they is. After generations of the social engineering of red versus blue, left versus right, you have this hotbed of potentiality where which side are you on? Whose side are you on? So if they put this agenda, if we want to call it that, on the left, then you need to be on the left. And then if you're on the left, you have to accept everything to the left is purporting to be left and progressive and, I guess, collectivist, too, like Join Our Club or You're Everyone Else. But then the whole spectrum has moved left. So even the right is somewhere on the left right now. Yeah, that's the idea. If you're a centrist, you kind of see things somewhat equally on both sides, not too far right, not too far left. Or you pick some ideas from the right, some ideas from the left, like a normal human being, I think. Suddenly you're an extreme right-wing lunatic. And that's like, no, no, no, no. I'm just trying to question a few things going on here. Exactly. I've never in my life considered myself a conservative. In fact, I swore that I would never vote conservative in Canada because of how I watched it over the years. And it seemed like, man, those guys are lunatics. But the problem is, the last few years, they seem to be the only people who are at least attempting to say something that's based in reality. And if stuff isn't based in reality, then what are you doing? How are you making decisions if you haven't based them in reality? So, you know, when I hear someone like Dr. Leslie Lewis from the Conservative Party discussing things about WHO treaties and visits by European members of MPs, like Christine Anderson, recently. I think Leslie Lewis and a friend of me, probably three years ago, a friend of mine told me about Leslie Lewis and he's quite an ardent conservative. And he's like, you should see this lady. She's going to take the party place. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. A black woman in the Conservative Party. That sounds real. It sounds like a bullshit conservative right-wing token kind of thing. Like, look, we aren't all racist. But at the end of the day, I've actually watched her. I follow her on social media. She's amazing. She's amazing. And I think he was right. Like, you know, I don't know what's going to happen politically with an election, but I would love if she would become the next prime minister. The way she actually talks and actually pays attention to things and has warned people, like, you can't be letting NGOs and the WHO and all these, you know, unelected bodies run our country. It's like, yeah, that's right. You can't. You can't. Unless you are against democracy. Well, then that's the case. Admit it. You don't like democracy. You don't like people's opinions. You don't like all the things you supposedly fought for in the last 10, 20 years as a liberal, you know, more left-leaning person. Like, you'd mention the other, right? You have to belong to this group or you're the enemy. You're outside, right? I remember studying in university 15, no, what have we got, 17 years ago at UBC in Okanagan. That's exactly what they were trying to deal with, with postmodernism, was to get rid of that labeling, get rid of that other, get rid of that sort of, like, authority of, you know, this person can tell you what to do. And it's like, you guys have just gone completely full opposite, you know, exactly what you were fighting against. Yeah. Why do you think that happened? Because there weren't enough real Westerns. It's not localized, obviously. It seems like it's, you know, UK, Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, I mean, all these similar sort of structured nations. How and why? I mean, how has it eroded so quickly and shifted so far to the other side? I've had my own opinion about it, but I think it's even more so than my own opinion. My own opinion is that, as an example, in university, a bunch of us who were doing a philosophy major, which is Western philosophy, so logic, Plato, Descartes, you know, the classics, right? And getting into more interesting stuff in the upper levels. We, a bunch of us, went to sociology, mid and upper level sociology classes. And it was a nonstop argument, because we were just like, what are you talking about? None of this is logic. None of this is based in reality. You're basing it on some anecdotal thing. You know, your whole theory is based on things that we can easily find counter-examples for. Right. Right. And then in philosophy or in logic or in arguing, you're having a real argument, or debate would be another word. All you have to do is find counter-examples. If someone claims something, and you just say, well, what about this? Right? And the what-about-isms that people are like, oh, yeah, what about this? No, that's a legit thing, looking for counter-examples in an argument. Yeah. So if someone claims, well, you know, all whales are blue, right? And you go, oh, interesting. Okay, well, that's quite a claim. Is this species here a whale? And they're like, well, yeah. And you're like, well, not one of them is blue. They're all black. So your argument fails, right? And sociology doesn't do that. They go, well, you know, 60% of the time, you know, it's like 60% of people, or 54% of people, or 70%. Yeah. Cherry-pick the science. Yeah. And then they'll take, like, various... More convoluted, yeah. Yeah, they don't even bother with science. Like, maybe psychology attempts to be scientific, but sociology is a whole other thing. They'll take some extreme example where, like, 1% of the population is experiencing this. Therefore, it's a problem. Or therefore, it's a... You know, we need to find solutions for this. It's like, hold on, hold on. But 99% of the population isn't having a problem with this. So, yeah. You could probably spend some effort and try and help those people out. But don't base an entire theory of society or philosophy or the world on this 1%, right? It's such a... And I remember even a couple philosophy professors shaking their heads at some of the English post-modernism stuff and sociology stuff. And I worked with a legal philosopher for two years, a year and a half, as a research assistant. And one of his projects that he was getting paid to do was from the justice... It wasn't the Ministry of Justice, but it was a federal agency involved in the justice system. What they found, which is partly why I have my own opinion, is that they were so overrun with sociologists wanting to help these poor people who are victims, even though they're the perpetrators of all these horrific crimes, that especially within the juvenile system, it had just fallen into shambles. There was no unifying principle in our law anymore, or in our justice as much. I shouldn't say in the law, but in the actual application of the law. So they hired this guy, a fairly well-known philosophy law professor from, I won't even say what university, originally from a British university. I'm not sure which one. So I worked for him for, like I say, at least a year and a half. And I was pursuing my own project, guided by him, and then I was helping him, with that, do the research for his project, and kind of build a unified model that had some principle base to it, so that you could apply the principles to these individual situations, instead of the other way around. If you don't have principles, it's really tough to have a system. So that was partly, so what the sociologists are doing is essentially the opposite. Yeah, their base 1% has to be addressed by everyone. And all of these 1% add up to a completely, utterly ineffective government. Yeah. At all levels. Or in any system. In any system. You can't build a system based on a million variables. Right? Right. I look at that from a martial arts perspective, it's like a martial art like Hapkido. Hapkido is very interesting. I trained a few times in it, just with an instructor, a global instructor. Very talented guy. But one of the things I found amazing is that almost their bragging rights, they have it in their flyer, in their pamphlet, is Hapkido consists of 1,400 core moves. And you're like, what? Holy cow. 1,400? Day one. Yeah, those are just the core moves that you have to learn. And then there's 300 variations on each one of those. Oh, wow. And I'm like, and he was, again, kind of bragging. Yeah, for his black belt or second dan black belt, he had to demonstrate 300 variations of a wrist lock. Wow. And I'm like, your body only moves. You knew a wrist could move in so many ways. Well, that's it. Your body only moves in so many ways. Like, I could see maybe three variations, all right? Yeah. How quickly do you know 300 when you're judging that, I think? Oh, yeah. 297? Good. Yeah. Well, he's going to do it. So, when I look at a martial art like that, and there's lots of martial arts with similar things, it's like, you know, for this, you need to know this. For this, you need to know this specific thing. Yeah. First is, how do these apply to real world? You know, it's, well, again, unless you're fighting someone who's doing the same martial art. Well, and to know even a thousand, a thousand moves, is like, like, what kind of CPU do you have? What kind of RAM do you have that can actually process all that stuff so fast in the heat of the moment, in the split seconds you need it to go through, oh, this is coming from this specific angle, so I should do this specific variation of this specific, like, I don't know. It seems you don't think yourself and get hurt. You'd be injured and on the ground. So, from a martial arts perspective, I prefer something that makes much more logical sense, like what I do, which is Wing Chun, which has very basic principles and very defined body positions, arm positions specifically, that if you do something like this, you can use it against many different types of attacks, right? If you turn your body this way and move your arm this way, this will help you against about, well, an infinite number of things, right? Like, one basic principle is efficiency. Another basic principle is simultaneous defense and counterattack. Right. So, if you're doing these, if whatever you're doing falls within those principles, then you know it's probably Wing Chun or it's probably something useful. So, when you try and do it the other way. So, how would you apply that philosophy to the issues that sociologists are so mad about? I mean, how can you just give, OK, you guys are doing up Kido. We need to do a little more Wing Chun here. How do we bring it around to where reasonable and rational minds can, again, address these seemingly massive worldwide issues that suddenly, you know, every kid doesn't know what sex they're supposed to be and all the rest of it that we've been talking about. I mean, it seems like we've inflamed these tiny, I don't want to negate the issues, obviously, but the percentage of, say, the population, for an example, that have become front and center on every stage, literally, in library and schoolroom. And, I mean, that's just one aspect of society. And even on the political level, you get someone like our Prime Minister who is, you know, joining whatever that, was it RuPaul on some drag show? Again, isn't that, like, if you're not trans, like, if you're not transsexual, but you're transvestite or whatever the other terminology is to dress up like a woman. Transgender, yeah. Well, yeah, so you're transgender, transsexual is kind of one thing, but then you have transvestite or cross-dressing or something on the other side, right? Which is drag. Which is drag, right. So, why don't you define that by bringing down, as we already kind of touched on, you're bringing down a group of people who have already fought, already got to the point where they're at, by conflating it with these other things that actually are going to spark more outrage than bring any real progress or, you know, any real solutions or benefit to these other groups, you know, you're just going to drag them down. It's going to be their downfall. So, why, to work with a sociologist or someone who isn't necessarily science-based, I think you need to find something like psychology or behavioral science where they're actually attempting to quantify results or they're actually doing experiments and quantifying like real science. Right. Now, by any means, I'd still consider it a suit of science, but when you can actually see results, you can predict results, you can replicate it and say, oh, yeah, no, if you do this, this and this with this type of people or this group of people or this population, you will get a 90% response like this. Right. And they've done it. And if you look at behavioral science, 2018, West Point ex-CIA, he's a psychologist. He worked on their psyops programs and he did his presentation, it's an hour long, and he talked about how behavioral science mixed with tech is, in his mind, a great opportunity for the intelligence community to accomplish things they've never thought of accomplishing Right. So, when you start having, and if they just happen to be nefarious, this is the problem when you're talking about CIA or pretty much, you know, nothing against our American brothers and sisters down there, but, you know, as soon as the US gets involved in anything, it's probably not going to be a good thing. So, you throw in some psyops, you throw in some CIA, some special forces, and how can we use this that we've quantified, we've studied, we've thrown in actual biology with this and actual tech and tested this all out and this is what we've come up with and it works. It's pretty terrifying. It's beyond terrifying. It's beyond anything that science fiction that I would have thought was possible and they were already doing this in 2018. Dark. So, this is the thing. Yeah, that's the big question. To what end? Are you doing it for good? And what is good? What is good in your mind? Yeah, who's good? So, again, when you're missing principles, when you're missing a foundation of what is actually good, I mean, that's an age-old, thousands-of-year-old question. Yeah, what is it? They're sure pushing the boundaries nowadays, aren't they? Well, yeah. What is good and what isn't, but other times it gets a little tricky. Yeah, so one example was talking about how you can program people while they're sleeping. Right. They actually figured out a way, I believe it was in France, a military or university studied how, while people are sleeping, how you can indoctrinate them so when they wake up, they don't even know they've been indoctrinated. And then they can test them and see how much they actually got indoctrinated. Holy shit. Yeah, because when you're sleeping, your defenses are down, right? Yep. So you don't even know. Another crazy one. This is the craziest one, I think. And, man, I've got to write a book about this. Although, there's probably going to be a movie about it in the next year or two anyway, I'm sure. Because this kind of idea can't just rest forever. Maybe there is a movie about it already. There probably is. So, the idea is that, this is with rats and with people up to a point. You basically have a person in one room, they actually call this human drones. Okay? So you have a person in one room hooked up to whatever electrodes, they've measured, they know exactly what your brain activity can and can't do in different parts of your brain. So you move your hand this way, there's electrical activity in this part of your brain. So they know, if you stimulate this part of the brain, they know. So all they need is to hook electrodes up to one person in a room somewhere, right? Give them access to the internet and have someone anywhere in the world with a receiver to be controlled by the person in the room. Okay? So, I mentioned this to someone the other day after I watched it, and I was like, this is crazy. And they're like, well, the other person has to have a receiver. They're not just as complicit, right? They're just doing whatever this other guy wanted anyway. It's like, no, no, no, this is the scariest part. The receiver could be the size of a bacteria, could be the size of a cell, right? It could be a little piece of DNA size. Yeah. Right? And how do you get to something like that? How do you get that receiver without knowing about it? How would you possibly, if you're going through your day, how do you think you could possibly get this planted into you? There's any number of ways. You could ingest it or inject it, perhaps. Yep, yep. Good gracious. Breathe it in. Yeah. It could be such an innocuous thing you wouldn't even know. Like, yeah, someone's spraying something as you walk by and as you inhale it. It's such a tiny thing. And there could be a ton of receptors, too. It could be just like a whole, you know, a thousand of them. There's something with the injections over the last couple of years that I never really delved into much. But, I mean, you could put anything you want in those things and you're passing all of the body's defenses to just get right into the bloodstream where the muscle fibers and... And the scary part about this, well, that's scary enough in itself, but the scary part about it is they could actually have it programmed to go to any part of your body, right? Yeah. So if you need it to go to the brain, the tiniest little thing, it can go to the brain, sit right there as a receptor and replicate itself or use cells to replicate it, right? Yeah. Actually, they've done this. They have replicated, as we're seeing now, unfortunately. Again, that is a conspiracy thing that I've heard about over the last couple of years about these potential COVID vaccines. Yeah. And I was like, no, no, no, no. Don't put microchips or nanoparticles in there, just whatever. It's probably not a good thing to do, but don't jump that far down the rabbit hole. Well, I've got to say, I'm kind of... It is possible. I'm kind of almost there because it is possible. And they were talking about this. This is in 2018. He was talking about research they've been doing the 10 years before that. Exactly. It's not something they're just suddenly, oh, no, there's an outbreak in some blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, that's bullshit. But this is a long game. Yeah. And generations beyond that, you convince the people that they need injections to live and fend off invisible enemies. Yeah. And then you add to that what this... And again, this was from this talk from the instructor of behavioral science and psychology, psychological operations, and the results with the highest level of instructing in these specialized courses for these people, for the people that you don't know exist. Right. What are their aims? I mean, what are they so excited about? What are they trying to accomplish? Well, to... I mean, it's great to have the tools, but where are you going to apply this and use it in real life to help people? To spy on people? To control people? Yeah, there's the one side of it with the way they get funding. We need this to... Neuralink is just to help people with brain injuries. Right, sure, yeah. Here's several billion. Go ahead. Make sure you don't do anything bad with it. Exactly. Make sure you don't do anything bad with it, you suckers. We're watching. Sort of. Well, just think, like, what is the point of the American military or the CIA or... Yeah, the whole complex. They don't even know. No. I wonder, I mean, they're so compartmentalized and such, even within departments and things, do they really know what they're trying to achieve anymore? Well, no, and that's where I think you get someone like Edward Snowden, who started, according to him, anyway, he was one of those few people that actually saw all the different departments and what was coming in from all the different things and started putting it together, one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing, but he was in one of those rare positions where he was making the connections, he was seeing all the data coming in, and it's like, oh, man, this isn't good. So, you know, as far as an example of that scary technology, you have a guy in a room hooked up to electrodes with whatever kind of screens in front of him looking at different targets and probably a camera watching your drone, your human drone, right? You're watching your human drone, other people are probably watching your human drone, and suddenly, you, say you, right at this moment, get up and walk over to this cabinet on the side of a building and open it up and take out a gun and then you walk over to a window and pull a trigger and assassinate whoever you wanted to assassinate and then drop the gun and get arrested or shot. And then they're like, oh, we got the assassin, blah, blah, blah, and the assassin, you, is like, what the fuck? I have no idea what just happened. I was just standing there, like, I was taking pictures of something on this tower, right? I just went and picked up this thing, I didn't even know it was there, and it happened to be a gun, and I don't know how to shoot a gun, and suddenly, I was pulling the trigger and I saw someone in the crosshairs, I don't know who it was, right? Try and explain that, try and explain that to someone, the authorities. It's like a sleeper agent thing. Way beyond sleeper agent. You don't need to be programmed, you don't need to spend, you don't need Jason Bourne to do the technology, that's what scares the shit out of me. They could activate anyone at any time with the tiniest thing. So, I don't know where they're at as far as employing this or actually making it functional, but this is what he was excited about. Yeah. These sorts of things. That is bizarre to me. They get excited about these things and how they can influence it. Take somebody over across the planet wherever they can't get to So, when you talk about what can we do as sociologists? Well... We have tech for that. Exactly. What should we do as sociologists? How do we take care of this? There's a few things, but I think that's part of the problem is if you try to legitimize what they're doing and quantify what they're doing, it starts to become behavioral science or psychology, which can then just be twisted to whatever you want as well. And that's scarier because it is based in reality based on quantifiable results and being able to replicate those results like actual science. Yeah, when it seems that somebody somewhere is observing this whole social experiment and, yeah, that worked. Let's get him on the Jag show so that we can cause an uproar here and get these numbers up in that area for this section of society that hasn't reacted yet so that their uncles, cousins, friends, sisters can say, did you see this? Can you believe he's doing that? And then they get brought into the fold. They become part of that polarizing conversation and they're distracted from what's actually important somewhere else out of their periphery. So the game goes. It could be as obvious as basic politics, right? It could be as obvious as... There's nothing basic about postal code, you know. Down to the street, well, that guy doesn't agree with his neighbor so let's throw something in his mailbox so that they have to talk to each other and talk about this issue which is a known issue which most of them are known issues. When I mean basic politics, I mean like saving their own ass. For example, if the Chinese interfered with Canadian elections which it seems to be fairly I don't want to say obvious but they did it for years. Not just here. Australia, US, UK. But then, this is a normal modern thing. But when you get the PM backpedaling and trying to deflect and trying to deal with these accusations, what better way to keep people occupied than to distract? If I say basic politics, I mean like the basic fundamental spineless politician way of instead of dealing with something or apologizing for something or coming out and talking to people about something, it's like, no, no, no, I'm not going to do any of those things that are humanly desired based on any kind of good principles of being a decent human being. I'm going to do whatever I can to just avoid the whole thing about this. Well, they never answer a question. It's deflecting and attacking the guy across the aisle from them, right? And that's why I find it well, as you might have seen some of my posts here and there, it's frustrating and wasteful. People get into these arguments and I think I posted just the other day about this whole Banker's Manifesto, you realize that this game is well over a century old and it's just I don't know why and you're obviously my enemy because you don't believe in me and care about what I care about. So I can't trust you. So stay the hell away from me. And meanwhile, all the other issues that keep happening again and again and again in society of the inflations and the crashes and all the things that keep stealing people's wealth and property like this endless cycle, generation after generation, you're getting played. Yeah. 20, 30, 40 years. Yeah. Well, it's hard to deal with all of it sometimes, especially if you're trying to stay aware and informed and educated enough like I try to do with certain things when I'm going to write about it, I should try and understand some spectrum of issues before simply opining on something that I think I know what I'm talking about. But it is impossible with so many different angles. So I think ideally, and that's part of the technological issue and technocratic issues that we're so reliant on these data and information devices and things and influences that we don't listen to ourselves. We've shut it all down. We're all dependent on the extrinsic and external influences and machines to tell us what's right, what's true, what's happening, what's important. Yeah. That's where we live. This came up recently because I'm quite against relying on technology and apps. If I just want to pay for parking, why can I not just use some cash or even my credit card? But I happen to get an app to park downtown and they do all the little things they can to make it less appealing to use other systems even if they provide them. So this came up on one of my chats and it's titled So a concept for moving forward as a community. Canadians have been networking and building communities with people with like minds for some time. Often these communities aren't physically close but they're still a community. Through this we've connected after years of feeling alone. These feelings largely happen due to government control and overreach affecting our everyday lives. We've used technology to connect mostly because of our physical distance from each other. So we've used technology, we've connected, we've built community up to a point but then we have a time where we need to disconnect. Make some space, get out of the system a little bit, get back to looking for people in your local area who... Right, how many people I don't even know my neighbors I've lived here seven months. I don't know anybody that's in the seven buildings around me. But I know people across the world or a couple of Indian people that I comment with on Instagram. Complete and utter strangers yet. The people right next door I see people driving, what's that guy? I don't know their name. It's amazing. I was invited to a couple of different groups just in person. They were wrong. They were chat groups that I was invited to but then they're like, oh, we're meeting in person. And I was sitting beside this lady at this group. There's about 50 people there and it's kind of a prepper group. They're not like survivalist preppers in the way where they have like a compound and they have like a bunker and ammo, all the food but it's that idea of like if you know people in the community with certain skills and certain assets and you're willing to work together with them, you kind of know who to go to. Like for using a radio, this guy is really good with radios. For growing garlic, this guy is really good. Just having a network. I'm sitting beside this lady and they ask for a quick introduction. She's like, yeah, I'm in East Duke. I started a greenhouse and hunting and getting into that sort of survivalist stuff. I introduced myself, quick thing. And I said, so you're in East Duke? Whereabouts are you? She's like, oh, I'm on Lanalar. And I was like, Lanalar? That's where I am. And she's like, really? Like whereabouts? And I'm like, well, I'm actually technically off Hensborough but my property is on Lanalar. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is at the end of the driveway. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? You're my neighbor. You're physically my neighbor. Our fence is the same fence. Yeah, I've never met her. Wow, that's amazing. That's exactly the strangeness of this thing. Yeah. So she kind of meet in real life. Like, oh, I've lived by you for years. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. And on the bottom there, on that fence, I can see the roof of her house like right now. That's our neighbor. Her name's Rachel. She has a radio if I ever need it. And she works or she volunteers with our fire department here. So she has access to the building and the emergency stuff there if ever needed. So I was like, what the fuck? Well, there you go. Connect and disconnect. My name is Trance Blackmon. This is Sapientia, a podcast about seeking truth and finding wisdom. Thank you for joining me on this journey of discovery. We'll see you on the other side. Welcome to your legacy.