School Sucks Project self-knowledge, self-education, self-mastery

Staci Hill is a School Sucks listener, and an academic coach who introduced herself to me as someone who's "had too much school." Staci holds two masters degrees: one in chemistry from Yale University and one in the liberal arts (with a focus on Euclidean geometry) from St. John's College (we'll discuss this too). She recently left a Ph.D program at Yale, and her story leads us into an introductory conversation about college and career. Even though we recorded this weeks ago it references several problems with information and worldview acquisition that have certainly come more into focus with recent news developments. Our main topic is a recent nationwide survey of 21,678 U.S. high school students. Researchers from the Yale ...

CJ is the host of Dangerous History and a regular contributor to School Sucks. He joins me to discuss how to put the current crisis into a historical context, how he talks to his children about this situation, and what personal and philosophical silver linings we might find in what's happening. This new format - check-ins with people from my life who want to talk about the current situation in a manner that I think will be helpful and informative - will continue, but we will also be resuming our regular content very soon! Please Support School Sucks We do cool things! Thanks to your support. School Sucks is one of the longest running liberty-minded podcasts on the web, and ...

Paul Verge is a friend, a film maker, and one of the founding members of Tragedy and Hope. I met Paul back in 2010 when he interviewed me for a film called Believers Beware. Earlier this month Paul was put under quarantine after his wife was exposed at a conference. We talk about that experience, and how Paul coped then and since then. I hope this dialogue is helpful because many of us will probably know someone (or need to support someone close to someone) in this situation. This will be our new format for the foreseeable/unforeseeable future - check-ins with people from my life who want to talk about the current situation in a manner that I think will ...

In the middle of their dopamine fast, Andrew and Brett meet in a public park to loathe the day together. They also contemplate failed relationships and their own deaths. You'll cry so hard you'll laugh!!! No player? Click HERE

Young Alex is back in the Studio of Champ-yinz and we're talking about finding a purpose. Alex is 26 years old (or young) and he feels like his life is missing definition. But is that missing definition really a problem at this point? And how fluid will that definition be over the next five to ten years? Brett and Andrew give conflicting advice and then argue about it, Also discussed: forming habits, retreating to a comfort zone, practicing gratitude, achieving freedom, and acknowledging (and overcoming) your limitations. Don't see the player? Click HERE

Daniel McCarthy and I continue on monthly discussion on the history of Utopian visions and their consequences. In this episode: "The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of ...